Best Black Swan Decks to Try on Day 1 and Strategy Guide: Welcome to The Black Order

Black Swan is the Season Pass card for the February 2024 Season, Black Order. It is a 3-Cost, 5-Power card that reads: On Reveal: Until the end of next turn, your 1-Cost cards cost 0. Today, we will take a deeper look at the new card and, of course, the best decks to try it out in.

Strengths and Weaknesses

Black Swan joins Marvel Snap with a cost reduction effect, and we know cost reduction in this game rarely comes without a significant impact on the meta. This one is narrowed to only 1-drops and only for one turn, which is a significant restriction, but we do have plenty of ways to abuse 1-drops and lots of synergies to be be found. Are any of these synergies big enough to compete at the top of the meta? Let’s explore!

Reducing costs to zero is a lot; it’s a 100% reduction in cost of all your 1-Cost cards.

Hit Monkey is the first card to come to mind for many, and with good reason. The card synergizes with playing lots of cards, and 0-Cost cards let you create a big monkey. This may seem reductive, but it is really that simple here. The only concern is ensuring you can fit all the cards you want into the deck and have the space to play them all on the board. With four to five 1-drops in the deck, you can get lots of value from playing Black Swan, but you want to try to ensure you don’t run out of things to do to maximize these cards.

This is where Beast and Falcon come in. With this plan in mind, you only need to deal with the one final concern: when to play Black Swan. In the majority of situations, you will want to play it on Turn 5 because this will reduce your 1-Cost cards to be played alongside Hit Monkey on Turn 6. This card could be as simple as this. It’s another great way to get big numbers on Hit Monkey. But which 1-drops do you want in the decks for this plan?

The best 1-drops to synergize with Black Swan have great effects that can stack on the final turns and be played early on for value, such as:

• Forge
• Nico Minoru
• Human Torch

The concern is that Black Swan, with the single turn impact of its effect, may end up just feeling like a worse version of Beast in these decks. Once you Beast the cards back, they will already be free, and Beast can help with other cards as well. Black Swan may improve the overall plan here because you can play it and Falcon on Turn 5 to set yourself up for a big Turn 6, but the deck is still doing what it does now.

The other style of deck that likes to play lots of 1-drops are the Zoo/Flood decks. This synergy isn’t as strong as playing Hit Monkey, but, if you can use Black Swan to reduce all your 1-drops to zero, you can play them alongside cards like Valkyrie on the final turns to flip lanes while flooding the board. Whether this is better alongside Thanos (where you easily have a good number of 1-drops) or without may take some time to figure out, but enabling these cards alongside any big card on Turn 6 could be enough. The benefit of this direction is that you’re not “locked” into when you play Black Swan; you can play it on Turn 3 and then drop several Stones on Turn 4 to get your deck moving, too.

What about combining more counter cards with strong 1-drops that can put down power at the same time? Zabu and Black Swan may end up combining to support some packages we are already familiar with. The ability to play some 1-drops alongside cards like Shang-Chi on Turn 6 while developing power with the other three energy should not be underrated. This brings me to the conclusion that Falcon and Black Swan along with the 1-drops you want value from is the main “package” worth experimenting with in decks if you’re looking to try it in something more proven.

Some other high powered 1-drops could worth considering for pure stats in some more complex Black Swan strategies (such as Titania and Martyr). Black Swan acts as universal cost reduction, so if you are playing with restricted energy (like if you played a card like Havok) you may be able to use Black Swan to drop your hand on Turn 6. Combining this with some other powerful cards may be hard to balance, but it could be another way to use Black Swan.

Killmonger is clearly very bad for this card, which is where Caiera may make an appearance to support a lot of these decks. It will allow you to play a little more freely and defend your final plays. Mobius M. Mobius can also be a hindrance for the all-in plans with this card that rely on the reduction, such as Hit Monkey.

The Verdict

Cost reduction is good, and 1-drops can be very helpful – even on the final turn of some games. The synergy with cards that already have Beast and Falcon to support multiple plays on them could also combine to bring back a crowd favorite in Hit Monkey. This alone could be enough to give the card a high score, and we have seen in the past just how strong this strategy can be. However, it also enables more 1-drop heavy decks that may not even rely on bouncing the cards back, such as Thanos Zoo and maybe even some movement decks. The potential is high here, but the meta has to be in a state that allows these types of strategies to compete. Black Swan may come up against its biggest counter in the other new card this week, Supergiant. You may find more success with small packages using Black Swan and Falcon than going all in.

Overall, the ease of play for the card and wide range of potential homes makes it hard to imagine this card not finding a home. It could take a few days for builds to start being figured out since there’s a lot to experiment with here, but the potential is high. Also, the cards coming out this month all seem to have some synergies with Black Swan, so we may only be seeing version one of many of the lists below.

Potential Score:

Hit Monkey

Here you want to use the Hit Monkey synergy hard. You want multiple free 1-drops either through Beast or Black Swan so you can play them out with Hit Monkey on Turn 6, which buffs Bishop and plays from behind to (hopefully) avoid counter cards. It may seem simple, but this is likely to be effective because you can suddenly play a lot of cards on Turn 6. This potentially makes your Hit Monkey lane an auto-win and leaves you with only one lane you have to compete for.

Thanos

Thanos has had Ongoing builds for some time that have fluctuated with success. The problem is often being able to put enough cards down and drawing the cards you need. This deck aims to fix this by including Lockjaw. Lockjaw in a Zoo deck may seem counter intuitive, but the ability to pull out key cards like Iron Man for one energy is good, and you can play Black Swan early to draw with the Infinity Stones if you have a lot of them early on. Lockjaw will also play a role similar to that of Beast and Falcon in other decks by allowing your Stones to get more value.

Unless something changes, this deck might be what evolves throughout the month with almost all the new cards. Black Swan can come down whenever and is likely to reduce something for you to play next turn. Supergiant might even be a consideration for this list since it will be disruption for your opponent while being unlikely to impact yourself negatively too often.

Zoo

Here you can play Black Swan on the turn you can get the most cards down. You want to flood the board and use Caiera to defend all of your cards. Then you can buff them with the Ongoing cards, and you can even use Valkyrie as a counter card. This is a simple deck that can be adjusted to your collection level and offers consistent amounts of power.

Zabu

Zabu is once again the king of the meta, and, although Black Swan is not a 4-Cost card, it could potentially be included within some Zabu decks as a way of creating extra value. The important part here is that the 1-drops can be played alongside your other plays on later turns, which allows you to allocate more cards on the last turn than the usual two 4-drops from Zabu‘s cost reduction. The key play here is Falcon into Black Swan, no Beast required.

Which leads to this Movement deck that uses Zabu to reduce counter cards and Werewolf By Night. You can play the 1-drop movement cards multiple times, and then you want to play them on the final turn once again while bouncing the Werewolf around. Making Iron Fist and Human Torch cost zero on the last turn without having to stack them in one lane for Beast is pretty huge. For this build, I went with Kitty Pryde and Bishop over another movement target to try playing as many cards as possible on Turn 6.

Havok

If you’re feeling adventurous, try some Moon Girl action. You can easily brick here, but when it works you will see some big Hit Monkeys and a full board. Your aim is to play some cards early, Moon Girl on Turn 4, and then either skip into She-Hulk or play Black Swan on Turn 5 to reduce all your 1-drops.

Variants

Closing Thoughts

Black Swan enables and supports several styles of play, and it should be a powerful card in at least a few of these decks. It is easy to play and simple to extract value from, and it allows for some significant cost reduction. All these factors usually add up to a good Marvel Snap card.

Good Luck, Have Fun, and Stay Safe!