Table of Contents
The large majority of the current discussion in Marvel Snap revolves around the experience of those who started the game recently. As a result, the higher ranks of the game have remained fairly static.
I haven’t seen any new archetype emerge this week, but Kamar-Taj being the Hot Location on Sunday pushed a lot of players to experiment with On Reveal lists. Wong On Reveal particularly had a surge in play rate, and looked like it got much closer to an optimal build.
As for the deck atop our standings, it looks like Sera Miracle is solidly anchored in the top spot, although we can see various builds to react to the metagame. Cosmo made an appearance in the deck on Sunday, and Rogue seems to be back as Wong has become more popular. Negative Seratonin also seemed to benefit from the situation as Rogue is a natural fit in the deck.
The rest of our rankings remain similar, as most decks were refined already. The Discard synergy is an interesting one to look at, but struggles with its own draws too much to be able to compete with the best decks.
Marvel Snap Meta Tier List
| Tier | Deck Name |
|---|---|
| Tier 1 | Sera Miracle |
| Tier 1 | Patriot |
| Tier 1 | Destroyer |
| Tier 2 | Deathpool |
| Tier 2 | Wong Reveal |
| Tier 2 | Lockjaw On Reveal |
| Tier 2 | Zero |
| Tier 2 | Control |
| Tier 3 | Negative Seratonin |
| Tier 3 | Hela Sandman |
| Tier 3 | Dracula Discard |
| Tier 3 | Wongoing |
| Tier 3 | Kazoo |
| Tier 4 | Bounce |
| Tier 4 | Movement |
| Tier 4 | Mister Negative |
| Budget | Sandman Ongoing Kazoo |
| Budget | On Reveal Pool 2 |
| Budget | Dino Control Pool 2 |
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Tier 1
Sera Miracle
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Rank Justification: While it isn’t the best deck in terms of winrate, Sera Miracle has the upside of providing very easy to read situations.
As a result, your Snaps will most often lead to cubes, and you can do so as soon as you see Sera in your hand. Similarly, there are hands you know aren’t worth fighting for, and those hands make retreating an obvious choice.
This snapping simplicity makes Sera Miracle very reliable as a climbing deck. The deck is also flexible in terms of build, which allows the inclusion of tech cards. For example Rogue is currently in our build to try to punish Wong, Patriot and other popular Ongoing effects.
How To Play: As you might have guessed from the name, this deck is looking to capitalize on Sera’s ability to create a spectacular turn six.
While there are cards that can be played before Sera, such as Bishop, the deck is trying to be extremely flexible on turn six. This way, it can spread its points as efficiently as possible. This allows you to surprise the opponent, and gather a lot of information on their strategy as well.
Rogue can be played on turn 4, as a way to try to snipe an opposing Wong. Against Patriot, you can wait for turn six and simply steal Patriot’s ability to ruin your opponent’s day.
Patriot
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Rank Justification: In an ocean of decks looking to abuse locations, or counter the opposing game plan, Patriot is the quiet giant. The deck seems to have found what it is good at, and looks to routinely accomplish its game plan game after game.
In this, it is similar to Sera Miracle in a way. However, it lacks Sera Miracle’s build flexibility.
It’s possible the deck may suffer a bit from the return of Wong-based decks in the coming weeks, as more Ongoing disruption enters other decks to deal with it. We’ll monitor how the situation develops for Patriot.
How To Play: The deck revolves around making the most out of our payoff cards, which buff our whole board.
Ka-Zar and Blue Marvel can serve as decent Patriot replacements, but Patriot himself should be the go-to option if available. Supporting these Ongoing abilities are Onslaught and Mystique for duplication, and in some versions, cards like Magik and Adam Warlock for an extra draw if needed.
The rest of the deck is composed of cheap recipients for the buffs, and should be used to fill two locations before we focus on our combo in the last few turns, we need the third one for our payoffs. Ultron offers a different path to victory, as the card can fill two locations, making the deck extremely passive in the early game.
Destroyer
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Rank Justification: Destoryer is another deck that found its groove and is showing great stability overall. Destroyer couldn’t abuse Kamar-Taj but still ruined a few people’s day as Cosmo is a natural fit in the deck.
I was afraid the deck would hit a wall and wouldn’t able to keep up once other decks evolved. Despite my fears, Destroyer kept on posting solid results, and seems to have found cards that are annoying to a lot of decks, like Cosmo, to bolster its winrate.
How To Play: With Warpath in the list, Destroyer is one of the few decks out there that will focus mostly on two locations. It can contest the third one through playing cards for its opponent with Green Goblin and in some lists, even Hobgoblin, although it does not have to.
With Destroyer’s effect, we can play cards onto the third location, we just shouldn’t expect them to contribute to the points total as they will be destroyed. This can be a useful juke with Warpath on the board.
For the locations we look to compete on, we will usually try to play Armor and any card we don’t want to see destroyed on one. Warpath and Demon are often our highest point scorers we are looking to protect.
On the other location, we should be playing Bucky Barnes, Nova, or the Goblins, as a way to have cards other than Destroyer contributing to the point total.
If we can’t find any of the cards we want to destroy, we can also use Cosmo as a way to deny Destroyer’s effect and just have him as a 16-point card.
Tier 2
DeathPool
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Rank Justification: Being explosive in the later turns and being able to disrupt opposing plays are the two most important aspects of Marvel Snap’s current metagame. Deathpool seems to be able to do both quite efficiently.
The deck puts Deadpool, Death, and Taskmaster in charge of developing the points total. The destroy synergy helps a lot against board disruption cards, and Wave negates Sera big turn six. This means that the deck seems well positioned and is able to compete in most match ups.
How To Play: The deck is based around trying to destroy Deadpool as many times as possible to grow its power, reducing Death’s cost in the process. Then, you can copy Deadpool’s power with Taskmaster, alongside playing Death thanks to Wave’s ability. The deck has the nice upside of naturally playing around most board disruptions like Goblins or Rocks.
Outside these four key cards, the rest of the deck is solely cards that either help Deadpool grow (Carnage, Venom, Hulkbuster) or benefit from being destroyed themselves (Bucky Barnes, Nova, The Hood).
Venom is the flexible card in the deck, either being used as another destroy tool or as a big target for Taskmaster.
Wong Reveal
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Rank Justification: Probably the most played deck this week, largely thanks to Kamar-Taj being the featured location on Sunday, Wong On Reveal saw a lot of players share their take on the deck. In addition to showing how good the deck really was, this also helped progress the deck much faster than other developing builds.
Wong is starting to see some counters be included in decks, such as Cosmo and Enchantress. This is both a testimony of how scary the card can be, but also a sign that the deck could lose some strength in the near future.
How To Play: The deck obviously revolves around Wong and Odin to maximize our On-reveal effects. The two biggest challenges when playing the deck are figuring out which effects are the strongest for the match ups, alongside how to curve them during the game.
Most of the time, turn four and six are locked for Wong and Odin, although Psylocke can help to get Wong out a turn early, which opens a curve with Rescue on turn four. This makes turn five the most important, and flexible, in the entire curve :
- Ideally, we would play Hazmat and Ironheart, demolishing our opponent’s board while building ours.
- If we don’t have Odin but Doctor Doom, playing Rescue on five should secure the location while Doctor Doom help fighting on the other two.
- If we don’t have Ironheart, we can play Green Goblin or Wave instead. The former helps adding more units for Hazmat, the latter makes turn six awkward for the opponent while still allowing us to play Odin.
The second most important turn for the deck is turn three, as it usually is the last one before we start playing for Wong, unless we use Psylocke to directly play Wong :
- Green Goblin is our simple, go-to option.
- Wave is great if we don’t have Wong, or Doctor Doom plus Odin in hand. If you have Black Widow in play, you can curveWave and Odin on the same location to force the opponent to play the Widow's Bite for four energy the following turn.
- It is important to know if we are playing for Hazmat or not. If we are, refrain from playing too many cards. If we aren’t, then dropping a target for Ironheart later on can be good.
Zero
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Rank Justification: It feels like Zero is competing with Deathpool in terms of metagame space, and the Deathpool gaining some leverage thanks to Wave made Zero be a little less popular overall.
Strength wise, there might be cases where the deck is more expected than it was after the patch, and this naturally lowers its power level a bit. However, thanks to Enchantress being a staple in the deck, Zero could make a comeback as a solid deck to punish Wong.
How To Play: Built around negating the ability of Typhoid Mary and Red Skull, the deck mixes several synergies. The big ones are the ability to destroy cards (Carnage, Venom) and the ability to remove the negative impact of Typhoid Mary and Red Skull (Zero, Enchantress). The last card included in order to get the points without the downside from Red Skull is Taskmaster, which can be Arnim Zola in some lists.
As a result, the deck plays similarly to a destroy archetype until turn 4, looking to set up cards to eat later on like Nova, Bucky Barnes, Sabretooth or Mysterio clones. Once in the late game, we should plan around the big point-scorers, and look for play patterns that can maximize our points while minimizing the downsides of our big point-scorers.
While Zero needs to be played before Typhoid Mary or Red Skull, Enchantress, Venom and Taskmaster will come afterwards. This means we will usually plan to use those on turn six, as a surprise to our opponent.
Lockjaw On Reveal
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Rank Justification: As Wong On Reveal gained popularity, Lockjaw lost some, as both share similar synergies.
The deck is still viable, but it looks like the On Reveal mechanic has a more reliable deck for now.
How To Play: Plan A is a very straightforward game plan of abusing Lockjaw with cheap cards in order to get the bigger ones. Plan B is to abuse the On Reveal synergy to try to compete even without Lockjaw.
Through Thor, Jubilee and Odin, it is still possible to develop a decent amount of points and not be forced to retreat whenever we aren’t drawing into Lockjaw. The deck will be weaker, but can still find some play patterns to compete, like using Psylocke in order to go Doctor Doom into Odin for example.
With Wave now added to the mix, the deck can also take a disruptive route, playing Wave on turn four, and Odin on turn five into Wave’s location. This locks both players out of playing multiple cards for the last two turns of the game, as every card is set to four energy.
Control
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Rank Justification: Locking the opponent out of potential plays is very good in the current metagame, especially as Wong gains in popularity. For example, simply playing Spider-Man on Wong’s location can ruin your opponent’s game plan and win you the match.
The reason this deck doesn’t rank higher on the list is because it relies on playing close to perfectly in order to counter your opponent’s game plan. Compared to other decks, which are trying to develop their own strategy, this deck takes much more time to learn, resulting in a lower win rate or cube average.
How To Play: The deck wants to play cards every turn, but always in the spirit of “how is it going to annoy my opponent the most?”. The core of the deck is centered around limiting what the opponent can do, so we won’t need 50 or more points in order to win.
Storm, Spider-Man, Blue Marvel and Doctor Doom are at the core of our strategy. The first two are in charge of disrupting the locations, while the second duo impact locations that can’t be played on.
With the latter turns taken care of, what this deck is aiming to do is not fall too far behind early on, so Storm and Spider-Man really feel punishing for the opponent. In that regard,
Debrii and Jessica Jones directly compete with some of our core cards in terms of the mana curve. Usually we would want to play Storm on turn three, as a way to lock the location down as early as possible. As such, Debrii can be played alongside a cheap card on turn four or five in order to limit the opponent’s development once they start committing more cards.
As for Jessica Jones, she usually represents Storm‘s best follow up, and Spider-Man doesn’t mind being played on turn five. The decision only becomes difficult if you have both Blue Marvel and Doctor Doom in hand in addition to Jessica Jones and Spider-Man. Otherwise, you should be able to work out a curve to play three out of these four.
Tier 3
Negative Seratonin
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Rank Justification: While Mister Negative nerf to a -1 power card definitely made the deck worse, it is incredible how resilient Negative Seratonin can be as a deck.
Although its win rate is far from stellar, the deck’s ability to surprise its opponent and make them believe they can get away with the win helps a lot to play a Snap aggressive game plan. If the deck wasn’t so unreliable compared to Sera Miracle, one could believe this archetype could still compete for a Tier 1 status.
How To Play: Functionally, this list plays the same as it always has. Magik could be a consideration to cut from the list, but that seems unlikely given how valuable cards drawn from Mister Negative are. The deck is all about high rolling now that one of its core cards provides negative points.
The big difference compared to its glory days is the go-to curve, which was formerly Mister Negative on four, Sera on five and Magik on six alongside other cards. Now, Magik must be played on turn five and Sera needs to wait a turn if both are in hand.
Also, with Mister Negative now at minus one power, he isn’t an autoplay anymore now, especially if you have your best targets in hand, like Iron Man.
A bit more discipline is required in order to get the best out of Negative Seratonin, and with better options available, it seems like many players have switched to other archetypes.
Hela Sandman
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Rank Justification: Another deck that loves to Snap and punish their opponent for believing it was a bluff, Hela looks to be the better Discard archetype as time passes.
As the more unpredictable deck – not to mention the one with the higher ceiling – it only feels natural that it represents the best chance for the struggling discard synergy.
With Cosmo seeing more play to counter On Reveal, the deck can sometimes have the very unpleasant surprise of seeing their Hela countered. Not ideal.
How To Play: Sandman doesn’t change the way Hela discard plays, it simply is another alternative for turn four against certain decks.
As such, the core of the strategy is unchanged, and revolves around using Invisible Woman to safely play our discard effects and Hela onto her location. At the end of the game, all the effects will trigger in their order of play and summon everything we have discarded.
Dracula Discard
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Rank Justification: The Invisible Woman experiment feels like a success for Dracula Discard, which gained a bit of unpredictability with the new inclusion, and might get away with a few more Snaps here and there.
It is still far from enough to make it a contender in the current metagame, but at least the deck is looking slightly better.
How To Play: With Invisible Woman in the mix, the deck can now play its discard effects a bit more carelessly, even with Dracula in hand. Also, it allows playing discard effects while Apocalypse isn’t in the hand.
This deck’s play patterns really depend on our hand and turn two play:
- Morbius is the least committal play, and simply pushes for discards down the line. He usually benefits a ton from Wong duplicating our discards later in the game.
- Angela pushes for a tempo oriented curve, aiming to play cards on her location.
- Invisible Woman is the bad hand savior, allowing us play discards on her location even without Apocalypse in hand, or with cards we can’t afford to discard.
Based on how we start the game, the only really rigid turn is turn 4, where we will look to play Dracula if we have it.
Wongoing
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Rank Justification: Compared to Wong On reveal or Lockjaw On Reveal, Wong Ongoing’s capacity to function if Wong is shut down is very limited. As a result, the deck suffered a lot from the return of Enchantress, Rogue, and Cosmo in the past week, especially during Sunday, when Kamar-Taj was the Hot Location.
How To Play: The deck aims to play Wong on turn four, Mystique to copy its ability on turn five, and Spectrum to buff our entire side of the board on turn six.
Apart from those key cards, the rest of the deck is filled with cheap Ongoing cards, ready to receive Spectrum’s blessing when she hits the board.
If this happens, and the opponent doesn’t recognize their incoming demise with a retreat, you should be almost guaranteed to get some cubes.
Kazoo
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Rank Justification: While the deck is slowly becoming the most talked about archetype in Marvel Snap, as the best beginner-friendly build, Kazoo is decent even in Pool 3.
While it can’t do much against the decks in Tier 1 or 2, the deck seems to be able to old its own, and still punishes any opponent with a bad hand, as Kazoo is extremely stable as a deck.
As such, Kazoo should be played with an aggressive mindset, aiming at finding the sweet spot to Snap on an doubtful opponent who is working with incomplete information.
How To Play: Kazoo is the textbook proactive deck, looking to make a smart use of its energy and play cards when possible.
The big emphasis when playing this deck should be on if you have the payoff cards, such as Angela, Ka-Zar and Blue Marvel. If you do, maximize their impact on the game, as they represent our main win condition.
The disruption gives this deck a different dimension, looking to limit what the opponent can do while we develop our side of the locations. Most of the time, our go-to curve in the late game will be Ka-Zar into Blue Marvel into Onslaught. Drawing into this trio means we don’t need much space on the board, and can afford to play cards like Debrii and all our cheap card in the earlier turns.
Otherwise, we can be more flexible with our curve, but still focus on being energy efficient.
Closing Words
For the first week in a while, Sera didn’t feel like it was ruling Marvel Snap. Instead, Wong has been the focus of the metagame, mostly due to the Kamar-Taj Hot Location.
The best part of this Hot Location was that the community reacted in different ways, with some abusing Wong, and some using the likes of Cosmo or Enchantress to counter the Wong abusers. This provided a nice shake-up on Sunday.
I have started to see talks about a potential patch to shake things up. For now, I suspect that the team is focused on welcoming the millions of players who download the game and have been trying it for the past week, which may mean we should settle into this metagame.
On that note: welcome everyone to Marvel Snap! Hopefully this Tier List can help a few of you out there. To comment or discuss this article with the team, feel free to join our community Discord. You can also find me directly on Twitter.
Good Game Everyone.
Sources
Thanks to all the sources of information I use to create this Tier List:
- https://marvelsnap.pro/
- https://snap.fan/
- Snap.fan Community Server on Discord
- https://twitter.com/SnapDecks
- https://marvelsnap.io/
- All the players offering their insight and time to chat
