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Welcome back to our new weekly series Cache-ing In! Each week, we break down what cards will be available in the new Spotlight Caches, as well as the Spotlight Variants! The goal is to help you determine if you should “Cache in” for the content, or hoard for a better week.
Spotlight Cache Week of December 13, 2023
This week, the featured cards will be the new Series 5 card Blob, as well as Ravonna Renslayer and The Living Tribunal!
Blob
Decks with Blob
our first new Spotlight card of the season is Blob! He is a 6-Cost, 4-Power card with the ability “—-“. Blob will also be launching as a Series 5 card. Blob’s ability is one that has incredibly high potential, but only in specific decks. Since a typical game will play Blob on turn 6, that means you will often only merge with 3 cards. That means you wouldn’t want to play him in decks that have lots of low power cards, since you could easily low roll and have only 3 low power cards in your deck.
To capitalize on his ability, you can use him in a Shuri deck. This deck minimizes low power cards, and prioritizes your big cards. Just like a typical Shuri deck, you can use Shuri + Red Skull or Typhoid Mary into Task Master for a massive power output. Blob allows you to have an alternate play line that can absorb those large started cards in your deck. Your worse merges are of course Shuri and Task Master, but otherwise you have a max potential of a Blob with a 38 power!
CanadianAlfredo
For an alternate way to play Blob, try a Hela deck! Hela already leverages high powered cards to dump power onto the board. Blob can simply increase your power potential by both emptying your deck to gain any power you didn’t discard. You can play Invisible Woman to hide your
CanadianAlfredo
Overall, Blob looks like a simple, yet very fun card. Aside from these decks, he has interesting potential with other cards like Arnim Zola and decks like Electro / ramp. It’s hard to say how meta this card will become, but it at least looks like a blast to play. It also serves as a hard counter to Darkhawk decks, which in itself may make it meta defining.
Ravonna Renslayer
Decks with Ravonna Renslayer
Joining Blob this week is Ravonna Renslayer! After seeing a significant buff in last week’s patch, Ravonna finally gets a solid stat line of 2/3. Since she doesn’t have such low stats, she is much more exciting to test with. Before this buff, she also recieved a second buff that lowered her cost down to a 2 instead of the original 3 cost she launched with. With these buffs, Ravonna has found herself 2 fairly strong homes to slot into:
Mister Negative has definitely fallen from his Throne of top card in the game. With that said, Ravonna is helping him make a comeback. Players often used Zabu and Psylock to ramp out Mister Negative early. Now that Ravonna only costs 2 energy, she makes a great replacement for Psylock. She replaces him since she not only ramps out Negative, but also many of your low power cards that didn’t get inverted, like Iron Man, Mystique, and Arnim Zola.
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Ravonna’s other big deck is in Cerebro 3. Ravonna can lower the cost of Cerebro, Mystique, and Iron Man to better manage your energy. You can combine this with Valkyrie to flip a lane in your favor, and buff your cheap cards. Valkyrie can basically act as a Bast that doesn’t turn off Ravonna’s ability. The Cerebro 3 list is very flexible, so you can sub out lots of different cards if you want. Using Ravonna, you can also run Green Goblin or Hobgoblin as alternate picks since they won’t break Cerebro and will get a cost discount.
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Second Dinner clearly thinks this card deserves more attention with 2 buffs since her release. She has good stats now and good decks, so will her second Spotlight release bring her into the top of the meta? It will be exciting to see this week.
The Living Tribunal
Decks with The Living Tribunal
Seeing his second Spotlight release after being featured in the first Spotlight Cache ever, The Living Tribunal joins as the final card this week. When I first reviewed this card in the first cache, I said this was one of the worst cards in the game, and only Hela was a possible deck for him. After Tribunal got a buff to 9 power, Hela Tribunal got the final boost it needed to work its way into the meta.
The Hela Tribunal deck is the only deck Tribunal sees play in to this day, but it is a solid deck. You basically get 2 lines of play: Option 1,
PulseGlazer
While this deck does get hard countered by Enchantress and Alioth, it still is a very strong deck. Especially in Conquest, this deck can show how much potential it has in stealing a match that looked impossible to win.
Spotlight Variants
If you already own the card the Spotlight Cache offers, one of these variants will take it’s place! If you own none of the cards, the variants will appear after you open all 4 caches. Spotlight variants are time exclusive to their release week, with no estimated time on when they will be available again. So if any of these Spotlight variants feel like a must have for you, make sure to Cache In if you have enough caches saved to guarantee the pull.
Mateus Manhanini is the name of the artist for this Blob variants. You will see this name quite often this season, as he is responsible for many of the Hellfire Gala variants.
This artistic wator color style Living Tribunal variant comes from artist Kai Lun Qu. If the style is starting to look familiar, you might recognize it from the Alioth Spotlight or the recent Doctor Strange and Human Torche bundle.
This unique “terminatrix” variants comes from Snap’s regular artist Eduardo Mello and Ryan Kinnard as the colorist.
Should I Cache In?
This week, 2 of the 3 cards are Series 5 cards. None of the cards have planned Spotlights again until at least after February. All of the cards have a lot of fun potential, but don’t currently have strong control in the meta.
My recommendation this week is to Cache In. Blob has the potential to really push up Hela into a meta position. Tribunal has been a solid conquest option for a while now, and Ravonna is a much more interesting option with her latest buffs. Many people missed out on Tribunal since it was during Spotlight’s launch week, and I recommended readers to skip on Ravonna during her initial release. With Blob looking like a fun card, I find this week to be a solid value week worth some caches.
If the archetypes these cards belong to don’t interest you, I would Hoard Your Caches. These aren’t top tier cards like High Evolutionary or Nico Minoru, so I don’t think you will be missing a top tier deck opportunity by passing on these cards. If you have the caches ready, though, this week is a fun one to cache in on.
Wrap Up
Do you think Blob will be a good card? Will you be Cache-ing In this week? Let us know in the comments!
For the full schedule, check out our guide below:
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