High Evolutionary Is NOT As Good As You Think: Potential Builds, Impact on Meta, and Counters

For weeks now, High Evolutionary has been the topic of many conversations in the Marvel Snap community. First, it was to know if one should save their tokens for this card or spend them on one of the other high profile additions of May, particularly Iron Lad. Then, the nerf to High Evolutionary‘s power (going seven to four) started to make people doubt it a little. Nevertheless, SafetyBlade’s piece on the card received a warm welcome from the community, which seems to indicate most players are still excited about the card.

But every story needs a villain, right? Well, it’s nice to meet you. I’m den, and I will be your villain for today.

Before I embrace my dark side and start rambling about why I think High Evolutionary is not going to break Marvel Snap (it’ll probably fall closer to Kang than it will to Thanos in my opinion), let us all agree on one thing: This piece is not about High Evolutionary not being a unique card. When asked about the card, I keep repeating that it is often more deserving of your 6,000 Collector’s Tokens than a boring but strong card. This month’s Big Bad brings a unique ability to the game, which could be enough to justify its price alone.

Let my put on my villain costume now so we can get started on the card’s anticipated performance. High Evolutionary is extremely demanding from a deck building standpoint, so much so that it looks very difficult to include it alongside other synergies. Every time we draw a [4/4], it will be infuriating, especially if we don’t get the evolved cards. Evolved Abomination looks to be the best card of the evolved Vanilla crew, and now it’s just hard countered by Wave. Luke Cage can cancel your whole archetype, and Patriot is so strong right now that it will keep being the best archetype using Vanilla cards.

Wow, it feels good to be a villain.

Deck Building With High Evolutionary Is So Damn Difficult!

Every villain has a bit of an ego problem; mine is thinking that I’m pretty good at crafting decks and reviewing cards. I mean, I called Iron Lad to be broken and Howard the Duck to be a duck, so that’s two out of two right there.

When it comes to High Evolutionary, I didn’t lack ideas about which archetypes I wanted to work on. I lacked enough slots in my deck. As it stands, High Evolutionary features two different packages:

• Power Reduction with Wasp, Cyclops, The Thing, and Abomination as a reward. With High Evolutionary, this is a five card commitment already.
• Spare Energy with Sunspot, Hulk, Misty Knight, Cyclops, and Shocker as a bonus to help save energy through the cost reduction. I think this one can get away with just Hulk and Sunspot, really, so it’s three cards minimum with High Evolutionary.

I could list Shocker on its own as well, but considering you have to run High Evolutionary to get the card evolved, you will always look to include more cards. And this is precisely the problem. Considering High Evolutionary adds what is essentially a dead card to your deck, you need to gain enough value to make up for that sacrifice.

With that in mind, it should be extremely rare to see High Evolutionary in a deck with just one or two cards from the possibilities. Immediately, this means running the new Big Bad should lead to committing to four or even five cards in your build to make it worth. And, if we’re being honest, there are not that many archetypes which are able to do so.

As it stands, I think Lockjaw is probably the archetype getting away with the least adjustments needed in order to run the High Evolutionary package. It could very well end up as the best deck running the Big Bad. Even then, it felt difficult to keep Thor and Jane Foster Mighty Thor in the build.

Evolved Lockjaw

Created by den

, updated 11 months ago

1

1x Collection Level 1-14

2x Collection Level 18-214 (Pool 1)

2x Collection Level 222-474 (Pool 2)

5x Collection Level 486+ (Pool 3)

1x Series 5 Ultra Rare – Collection Level 486+ (Pool 5)

1x Starter Card

3.6

Cost

0-
1
2
3
4
5+

4

Power

0-
1
2
3
4
5+

I could remove Armor, Wave, or even Leader to keep Thor and Jane Foster in this deck, but it would open other problems:

• Killmonger is back as a popular card with Bounce dominating the popularity contest, so I need to protect Sunspot. It should also help to keep Evolved Hulk alive against Shang-Chi as that card is the reason I put this deck together in the first place. If Armor isn’t needed anymore, I think I would likely replace it with Shocker for a shot at cheating some more energy and getting a 6-cost down on Turn 5.
• Wave might be the best card in the game right now, in addition to enabling a different play pattern if I don’t draw Lockjaw. No way I remove it.
• Leader is the card I can see myself removing, although it is quite a good play behind Lockjaw on Turn 6 after Wave.

Also, Thor and Jane Foster Mighty Thor help with using our energies efficiently in this deck. Most of the time, I will play Thor on Turn 3 and Jane Foster Mighty Thor on Turn 5, and I won’t waste energy with that play pattern.

To be honest, I really like the look of this Lockjaw deck. I believe it could be among the archetypes benefiting the most from High Evolutionary joining the game because it doesn’t need a lot of cards to make it work. And now we can already see how just three cards can be a pain to work around.

Let’s look at another example with Nebula Control:

Control your energy

Created by den

, updated 11 months ago

1

1x Collection Level 18-214 (Pool 1)

3x Collection Level 222-474 (Pool 2)

2x Collection Level 486+ (Pool 3)

2x Series 5 Ultra Rare – Collection Level 486+ (Pool 5)

4x Starter Card

2.8

Cost

0-
1
2
3
4
5+

4.1

Power

0-
1
2
3
4
5+

In this one, I have much more room to include cards as reactive archetypes tend to be more permissive. I was able to include both the Hulk and Abomination packages in there for high scoring potential. Still, we can once again see how including High Evolutionary limits my ability to include other cards in the deck. I couldn’t find space for Professor X, Daredevil, or Jeff the Baby Land Shark, all of which are staples in most Control archetypes.

In order to include them in the deck, I would have to remove all the Abomination package and take the risk of drawing High Evolutionary and not Hulk or Cyclops. At this point, one might wonder if the price of the card is worth it to get two new cards in your deck when the Guardians of the Galaxy and Doctor Doom already work well in the archetype.

Energy Control

Created by den

, updated 11 months ago

1

3x Collection Level 18-214 (Pool 1)

2x Collection Level 222-474 (Pool 2)

2x Collection Level 486+ (Pool 3)

3x Series 5 Ultra Rare – Collection Level 486+ (Pool 5)

2x Starter Card

2.8

Cost

0-
1
2
3
4
5+

3.3

Power

0-
1
2
3
4
5+

Up until this point, Marvel Snap’s best packages have always revolved around strong cards that bring in synergies to complement your deck. Sera, Zabu, Galactus, Lockjaw… All these cards are incredible in their own right, alerting every deck builder to look for the best way to surround them. High Evolutionary is the exact opposite of this; it requires you to start with a terrible card you never want to play and gives you access to the good stuff afterward. In that sense, building around the new Big Bad pushes you to limit what your deck can do so you can make sure it is reliable enough.

I have already seen countless builds being shared around the community. In a truly villainous way, I think a lot of them are clunky. It looks like they will be forced to Retreat whenever they don’t draw into the precise cards they imagined, all because they had to include bad cards in their build and impair the deck’s flexibility in the process.

In particular, all those decks revolved around the Evolved Abomination, which already has two established counters that are ready to crush your dreams.

Luke Cage And Wave Will Be The Gatekeepers

Playing She-Hulk Combo High

Created by den

, updated 11 months ago

0

3x Collection Level 18-214 (Pool 1)

2x Collection Level 222-474 (Pool 2)

2x Collection Level 486+ (Pool 3)

2x Series 5 Ultra Rare – Collection Level 486+ (Pool 5)

3x Starter Card

2.6

Cost

0-
1
2
3
4
5+

3.6

Power

0-
1
2
3
4
5+

This deck is one that legitimately got me excited about High Evolutionary. I mean, look at this beauty!

You have early game cards to manage your hand, plenty of rewards for not actively spending energy, and an insane Turn 6 potential with double Abomination plus double She-Hulk. What is there not to like? This could really be the future way to build the She-Hulk combo archetypes currently known as InSheNaut or Hit-Nebula.

Except there are two problems.

First, High Evolutionary will once again be very annoying when drawn as it will clog our hand. Indeed, it is both a card we do not want to spend energy on and a card we need to get out of our hand for Moon Girl to hit our best cards. We already touched this issue in the section above: the new card will be a pain to build around. Moving on.

The second concern is probably is the bigger one: counters already exist. They are called Wave, and, to a lesser extent, Luke Cage (although, both cards present a different puzzle).

Wave is already a super popular card due to Kitty Pryde pushing Bounce’s play rate. Wave is also part of the strongest rising decks in Marvel Snap right now. This means that, unless an upcoming balance patch nerfs Wave or several of Wave‘s decks (Patriot and Darkhawk at the very least), there is no chance Wave will not be a card you have to account for.

Still, Wave could be handled with a simple fix. Do not keep Abomination in hand when you can play it. I know it’s tempting to keep the card for Turn 6, but you will regret it more often than not. Even better, you could use Abomination alongside Wave on Turn 5 as most of the cards to afflict opposing cards with negative power can be used before then.

Highron Lad

Created by den

, updated 11 months ago

1

1x Collection Level 18-214 (Pool 1)

2x Collection Level 222-474 (Pool 2)

3x Collection Level 486+ (Pool 3)

2x Series 4 Rare – Collection Level 486+ (Pool 4)

2x Series 5 Ultra Rare – Collection Level 486+ (Pool 5)

2x Starter Card

3

Cost

0-
1
2
3
4
5+

3.8

Power

0-
1
2
3
4
5+

This build kind of solves the Wave problem by playing it ourselves and building around the card. It might run into another issue, though, which is being compared with one of the best decks in the game: DoomWave, or Good Cards Wave. That is a build with Darkhawk, Jeff the Baby Land Shark, and Nebula, basically most of the strongest cards in the game. Villain honesty? I’m not sure High Evolutionary can hold its own in comparison, even if the deck looks quite nice (if you have all the cards released in May, that is).

We could imagine running the High Evolutionary package in the Good Cards Stature deck instead of this Wave variant, though.

Good Cards High Evo

Created by den

, updated 11 months ago

0

1x Collection Level 18-214 (Pool 1)

1x Collection Level 222-474 (Pool 2)

5x Collection Level 486+ (Pool 3)

2x Series 4 Rare – Collection Level 486+ (Pool 4)

1x Series 5 Ultra Rare – Collection Level 486+ (Pool 5)

2x Starter Card

3.5

Cost

0-
1
2
3
4
5+

4.4

Power

0-
1
2
3
4
5+

We still run into the Wave problem, but this one looks to have more room to work with from a0 deck building perspective at least. Still, one of my biggest issues with the card is this: are we even sure these decks are better with High Evolutionary than without? Are you willing to pay 6,000 tokens to find out?

Moving on to the second known counter, Luke Cage.

Right now, the card barely sees play. It only exists in the niche archetype of Cerebro 2. However, if High Evolutionary becomes popular enough to deserve to be countered, Luke Cage isn’t such a bad 2-cost to run in your deck. One could imagine including it in a Shuri deck with Lizard and Typhoid Mary to increase its value. Or bring back the old Toxic Sera deck with Hazmat and Luke Cage at the core of the game plan.

It’s a bit of a shame, really. I believe the Power Affliction package to be really strong and perfect for rekindling the Junk archetype.

High Evo is Junk ?

Created by den

, updated 11 months ago

1

3x Collection Level 18-214 (Pool 1)

5x Collection Level 486+ (Pool 3)

2x Series 5 Ultra Rare – Collection Level 486+ (Pool 5)

2x Starter Card

2.7

Cost

0-
1
2
3
4
5+

3.6

Power

0-
1
2
3
4
5+

I think this is a great High Evolutionary deck, and it might be the most improved archetype with the card joining the game. Compared with the decks I shared so far, I see a deck legitimately better with High Evolutionary in the game rather than good decks trying out the card. Junk has always been a borderline competitive archetype, but it always lacked enough points to really close out games and constantly gave its opponents a way out. With a 0-cost Abomination to play alongside America Chavez on Turn 6, this problem is solved. Now I can see how my 6,000 Collector’s Tokens might be worth spending.

Lock a lane early on with Viper, Debrii, or Polaris. Afflict negative power with Wasp, The Thing, and Spider-Woman in the mid-game. Profit off your free nine power card to make sure your opponent cannot come back with some shenanigans on the last turn of play. This sounds so good, it can’t be true. And, as it turns out, it isn’t as long as Luke Cage is around.

I have already seen the answer to this problem thrown around in the community: Enchantress. That makes total sense! Use Enchantress to disable Luke Cage and this issue disappears, right? In this particular Junk deck, one could swap Carnage with Enchantress and probably not throw the deck completely off balance.

My question regarding Enchantress is: When can we play it?

In order for Abomination to be a 0-cost, we have to play Wasp (which we can do at any point), as well as either Cyclops, The Thing, or Spider-Woman. Cyclops could be considered a 4-cost if we add the unspent energy we need to trigger it. The Thing is a 4-cost, and Spider-Woman is a 5-cost. Also, if we want to get Abomination back to being discounted in time, Enchantress cannot be played on Turn 6.

This means we only have Turn 4 or Turn 5 in order to both disable our opponent’s Luke Cage and get enough afflicted enemy units so Abomination can be played the next turn. It’s doable, but we are far from “I’m running Enchantress as the end-all solution to the Luke Cage problem”.

Currently, Enchantress helps against Patriot and Darkhawk, both of which are decks where Enchantress can be game winning (Patriot) or counters a card of similar cost (both Enchantress and Darkhawk are 4-cost cards). In the Luke Cage situation, we have to pay four energy to solve a two energy problem, and we have to do this during turns where our other key cards want to be played.

This doesn’t mean Enchantress isn’t the best card to deal with the Luke Cage situation, or that we shouldn’t run it. It just pushes us to rework the deck quite a bit to be able to fit Enchantress into our game plan.

Enchantress

Created by den

, updated 11 months ago

0

3x Collection Level 18-214 (Pool 1)

2x Collection Level 222-474 (Pool 2)

2x Collection Level 486+ (Pool 3)

1x Series 4 Rare – Collection Level 486+ (Pool 4)

2x Series 5 Ultra Rare – Collection Level 486+ (Pool 5)

2x Starter Card

3.1

Cost

0-
1
2
3
4
5+

4

Power

0-
1
2
3
4
5+

Alright, we managed to fix the two biggest problems (or, at least, the two most often mentioned ahead of the card releasing). Still, I feel like I have not been as villainous as I could be about all this. I’m even giving you solutions to these issues! I’m sorry about that, let me go back to my original role and raise you a real problem. One we cannot fix.

Bounce Will Counter Evolved Abomination

I do think Wave and Luke Cage are a legitimate problem the archetype will have to account for. But there are ways to work around those difficulties. I still believe it might lead to decks that are worse than their current iterations, but it at least shows how High Evolutionary is able to adapt and fit various strategies.

Let’s tackle the Bounce problem now. How do we afflict negative power to an opponent with no cards on the board? Let me explain.

This is Evolved Abomination – [5/9]: Costs 1 less for each enemy card in play that’s afflicted with negative Power.

The important part is “for each enemy card”, meaning your opponent needs to have at least five cards in play for Abomination to cost 0. Ever heard of Beast or Kitty Pryde?

Yes, Marvel Snap’s most popular deck is a legitimate counter to High Evolutionary‘s plan to discount Abomination because there likely will be fewer than five cards on their side of the board at any point. So to think there will be five with their power reduced…

In reality, I think it will be difficult to reduce Abomination enough to make the negative power package worth running outside of the Junk archetype. Even ignoring Bounce, most decks don’t play that many cards by Turn 4 and will spread them around multiple lanes, forcing you to have several cards inflicting negative power for Abomination to be a consideration.

In the end, Evolved Hulk feels like a much safer bet as a card to build around in the High Evolutionary toolkit. The success of that game plan relies on us instead of the opponent. The negative power package, on the other hand, seems to have a lot of issues to fix in order to be able to exist in the current metagame.

Closing Words

I took a little detour to get to my evil conclusion, but I think you got the point by now. High Evolutionary only feels like a good card if you want to build around the unspent energy package. At least in the current state of things or until Wave and Bounce stop being the two most popular entities in Marvel Snap. Even the Junk archetype, which honestly looks great with the Power reduction package, might be disappointing in the current environment.

As we saw in the first part, it is hard to build a new archetype solely around Evolved Hulk. Instead, it feels like we will be forced to work with already strong, popular archetypes, such as Lockjaw, Lockdown, or the usual Good Cards build. Through these synergies (and this seems obvious), High Evolutionary will find a home in a few decks. But my doubts are not whether the card is playable or not; my concern is whether one should invest 6,000 Collector’s Tokens in order to play the same decks with a few different cards.

Best Deck ?

Created by den

, updated 11 months ago

1

2x Collection Level 18-214 (Pool 1)

1x Collection Level 222-474 (Pool 2)

3x Collection Level 486+ (Pool 3)

2x Series 4 Rare – Collection Level 486+ (Pool 4)

2x Series 5 Ultra Rare – Collection Level 486+ (Pool 5)

2x Starter Card

3.2

Cost

0-
1
2
3
4
5+

4.1

Power

0-
1
2
3
4
5+

So, what do you think? Was I a good villain?

To let me know, find me on the Marvel Snap Zone community Discord or follow my Twitter page where I share decks and biased opinions about the game.

Good Game Everyone.

Upcoming events you might be interested in:

• May 27th: Qualifiers #3 and #4 of the TYB 616 Open. Anyone can join and try to qualify for their share of a $1,000 prize pool.

• May 28th: Coaching seminar alongside Freshlobster about the fundamentals of deck building, game planning, Snapping, and Retreating.