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This week’s Marvel Snap Featured Location is Orchis Forge: After you play a card here, add a Sentinel to your hand. This is a brand new location for Marvel Snap’s March 2023 season, Days of Future Past, now added to the Location pool. For the next 24 hours, it will now have a 50% chance of showing up in games. Let’s find out what the best strategies, cards, and decks are!
Decks with Orchis Forge
What is the Orchis Forge?
The
Strategy
This location allows us to continuously activate the Sentinel card effect, adding a 2-cost, three power card to our hand each time we play into the location. Thankfully, there are already strategies that exist to take advantage of these Sentinels. There are two ways to consider these cards: we can see them as free ways to keep our hand full, or we can see them as ways to gain some additional power.
Decks with Devil Dinosaur
Devil Dinosaur decks can take advantage of the additional cards by guaranteeing they can maintain a full hand for the final turns. With this synergy, however, we have to be careful not to overfill our hand. Playing your pay off cards into the location later on will likely be the best way to use the effect to refill your hand.
Decks with Ronan the Accuser
Ronan the Accuser may be a possibility to help counter opposing Devil Dinosaur type builds, although it could just be a flex card during the location. We can slot this into decks if we see players switching to Devil Dinosaur decks for the location.
Fortunately, this “tech” option can also have utility into Thanos decks. Even if you don’t run into this style of deck, when your opponent does play into the location they will maintain a large hand so Ronan will maintain his strength.
Cerebro-3 is another clear archetype that could be stronger during the location. The effectiveness of it is questionable, but if you’re a Cerebro enjoyer then the deck will have slightly more gas due to the ability to fill the curve with 2-cost cards.
Decks with Spider-Man
Decks with Professor X
Players sometimes avoid these locations as they have anti-synergy with many game plans, so another option is to construct your deck to take advantage of this. With cards like Spider-Man and Professor X we can try to set ourselves up to steal the lane before the opponent commits to it.
Final note, Sentinel is a surprisingly good card, and activating the location with a deck that holds three to four cards in hand is OK. But remember, once you have a Sentinel in hand it will not be going away. You have to be very careful playing into this location too early because you could end up bricking your hand with Sentinels.
Decks with Master Mold
Master Mold is also out, but due to the limited availability of the card I skipped including the builds here. See the theorycraft article if you have the card and are looking for some decks to try!
Card and Deck Ideas
Devil Dinosaur
SafetyBlade
More often than not, you will only need to activate the effect of the Orchis Forge once or twice to get the benefit. Be careful activating before you have your key cards in hand since you’ll be risking bricking your hand by missing important draws. With multiple good targets for Mystique, this should return to the deck to copy either Devil Dinosaur or Ronan the Accuser.
SafetyBlade
This can be enhanced even further if you also own Darkhawk, bringing us to three excellent Mystique targets and making sure she is rarely a dead card on Turn 6.
Cerebro
SafetyBlade
Cerebro-3, and its many variations, could have a slight bump during the location. The deck is regularly outpaced due to not being able to play enough cards or missing key cards at specific times. Orchis Forge will help you continue to play three power cards.
We can then try to lock down one lane with Professor X and win another with Shang-Chi or Valkyrie. Since we are playing toward Valkyrie, we can add Blade and Zero back into the build. This gives us flexibility on Turn 6 to play either of these alongside Valkyrie to fill any lane, if required.
Ronan the Accuser
SafetyBlade
This deck aims to combine good midrange control tools such as Storm and Spider-Man with a package focused on filling your opponent’s hand. Knowing your opponent may not be able to clear their hand as often, we can use Ronan as a solid finisher.
And, since we have no 6-costs in the deck, a card that synergizes surprisingly well with a lot of the deck is Titania. Titania can be your Storm or Spider-Man follow up, or just played on Turn 6 with Ronan the Accuser.
What You Should Play
Devil Dinosaur is the safest way to play into the location, and it has consistently been a top performer anyway. Versions with and without Darkhawk and Ronan the Accuser should perform well and still benefit when the location shows up.
SafetyBlade
Series 1
SafetyBlade
Series 2
SafetyBlade
Closing Thoughts
Remember, at the time of writing these decks are untested. These are theorycraft ideas to get you going, and I’m looking forward to seeing what everyone comes up with for Orchis Forge. Make sure to leave a comment below, share your ideas on our Deck Builder, and discuss with the community on our Discord!
Good Luck, Have Fun, and Stay Safe!
Orchis Forge – Handsize aka Demon DinOrchis