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Merlin is starting to see more of its nemesis, Gorgon, which is a sign that it’s a strong and popular card. Plus, not only is the Season Pass card part of some iconic archetypes like Good Cards, Merlin also managed to make some underused synergies, such as Clog, gain momentum. Overall, the 2-Cost is a great card, both for playing flexibly and for playing specific archetypes.
Unfortunately for the new card, The Ancient One had the opposite trajectory over the past two days. The few players who were excited about its release failed to transmit the excitement to anyone else, and the stats seem to back up that feeling as well. The Ancient One is one of the worst performing cards at the moment.
Winning four games with the card won’t be a problem, but I doubt the 200 Tokens you get for the missions will make The Ancient One more worthy of a purchase. Go for it if you anticipate a buff in the future.
| Mission | # | Reward |
|---|---|---|
| Play Ongoing Cards | 15 | 150 Credits |
| Win with The Ancient One starting in your Deck | 4 | 200 Collector’s Tokens |
| Win with Merlin starting in your Deck | 8 | 150 Gold |
The Ancient One Performance
It’s as bad of a start you could imagine for The Ancient One. The card failed to perform regardless of the rank you look at. The Win and Cube rates are abysmal, and the popularity indicates most people didn’t even bother to get it, or at least quickly stopped playing the new 3-Cost.
This is where the Snap Pack system is annoying; The Ancient One will be part of the most expensive one, the Series 5 Seasonal Snap Pack, until early August. Hopefully Second Dinner buffs the card, or the meta changes so drastically that there’s a reason to build around it again.
Post-Release Score:
For more information about The Ancient One, make sure to check out our strategy guide:
Merlin Performance
Although Gorgon has been gaining momentum, Merlin continues to be a great Marvel Snap card. Either as a 2-Cost flexible standalone or the core of a deck based around Polymorphing your cards or growing Nicholas Scratch‘s power, the current Season Pass has proven its worth.
Arguably, Surge remains the best 2-Cost card in the game. However, Merlin is certainly part of the conversation, and it’s a great complement to Surge when you want to pack multiple high impact 2-Cost cards in your deck.
Post-Release Score:
For more information about Merlin, make sure to check out our strategy guide:
Bonus Challenge Decks
If you want to complete both cards’ missions at once, the only way to do that is to find a slot for Merlin in a deck that already uses The Ancient One. Indeed, the new card doesn’t have many decks with a decent record, on top of being very synergistic. Fortunately, the Season Pass card is quite flexible, so it shouldn’t hurt most decks if included.
Here’s a deck with both cards included that has decent results. There are only 55 games recorded so it is hard to know whether the deck is real or just hit a good streak, but it could be worth a shot.
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These two are part of the rare few decks that have a positive Cube and Win rate over more than 100 games using The Ancient One. If you just want to knock out the missions and be done with it, this is what I would recommend. You can also probably throw The Ancient One into an Arishem or Mister Negative deck and call it a day.
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When it comes to the Season Pass card, there are many more decks available for you to complete the missions. Most of the best ones gravitate around the same concept of strong flexible cards you can recycle with the incantations if needed, but are just as able to function if Merlin doesn’t show up in time. Synergy wise, Clog is great alongside Merlin, although playing against Merlin can limits its impact quite a lot. Gorgon can help with that.
Here are the top three performers at the moment:
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