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Thanos decks received a heavy nerf with the change to Quinjet. Gone are the days of ripping every single card out of your deck by dumping free stones on the board. Now, you have to pay for the privilege.
Decks with Thanos
What does that mean for the archetype? What do current Thanos lists look like? What are the different ways to approach the fallen Mad Titan, and which of them is the most appealing in the current metagame, which is overrun with 26-Power Red Skulls thanks to Shuri.
Thanos has many faces. Let’s run through four of them and discuss the upsides and downsides of each list.
Thanos Lane Control
KMBest
Thanos is a great shell for Valkyrie – Spider-Man style lane denial. Builds like this have been championed in the past by Den and CoCo4, but the nerf to Quinjet breathed new life into this once-forgotten Thanos archetype.
Decks with Spider-Man
This deck fell by the wayside because it lacked power. It sacrifices the high roll potential of Thanos Lockjaw builds in order to play a reliable lane-denial gameplan. You can scam a lane with Valkyrie and Soul Stone, you scam another lane with a Turn 5 Spider-Man, and everything just comes together.
One thing this deck is very good at – at least right now while it’s a bit unexpected – is beating Shuri. The combination of control tools that we can leverage, especially Spider-Man and Valkyrie, make the matchup very plausibly favored for us.
One thing this deck is bad at is beating Killmonger. Many of your plans rely on having full boards of stones, especially in your Valkyrie lane, and stones are often the difference between winning and losing a Spider-Man lane.
This brings us to perhaps the most proven of the current Thanos archetypes: Thanos Killmonger.
Thanos Killmonger
KMBest
This style of Thanos was popular as a theoretical mirror breaker before the nerf, but never really took off until Johnson (Irimmm on Twitch), a Korean player and streamer, added Odin and Doctor Doom to what was otherwise a fairly typical Lockjaw Death Wave build.
Odin and Doctor Doom mean that Wave becomes a sort of secondary Lockjaw, a backup plan that can absolutely dominate games. Death is not always amazing, but is very good in mirrors when you can get a lot of kills with Killmonger, and Killmonger himself helps you clean up units against other matchups, including Shuri.
The list I’m highlighting here comes from Magic Turtle, who won the 616 Open Championships #1 with it. You might notice that there are absolutely no early game cards in the list, which does give me pause.
Decks with America Chavez
Here’s the math. With America Chavez in the deck, you have about a 79% chance to be able to play one of the five stones that draws you cards on Turn 1. Without her – let’s say you drop her for Magneto – that drops to 76.
If you add another early game card, and keep America Chavez, you get an 86% chance of having that card or one of the five card-drawing stones on Turn 1. If you cut America Chavez, you get about an 83.8% chance of having that card or one of the five stones. The issue is what you cut. We already wish we could fit Magneto back in – he’s really good against Shuri – and there aren’t a lot of other obvious cuts.
I’ve tried cutting Odin, but losing out on Wave + Odin has not felt worth it. I’ve tried cutting America Chavez, but it’s so difficult to justify given her impact on your early game draws, and her existence in the deck as a solid target for Lockjaw.
Beyond that, the issue is what card you even want to run. The ideal card would just be a 2-Cost card that said “Draw A Card” on it. That card doesn’t exist. I’ve tried Angela, Psylocke and Sentinel, and all of them felt off to me. I’m not sure I’m down bad enough to try Maria Hill or Cable, but the fact that I’m even considering it feels wrong.
One card that sticks out as a potentially valuable inclusion here is Kitty Pryde. She’s effectively a scaling 1-Cost card, similar to Sunspot, but she doesn’t die to Killmonger, since you can send her back to hand when you play him. I’ll definitely want to try her out in this shell.
One aspect of playing this deck that I think might be a bit unclear is that you pretty much just play the stones that draw cards whenever you can. I only find myself holding stones if I’m looking to do something specific with them, such as playing them into Lockjaw or a specific ramp play with the Time Stone. New Space Stone is so much harder to make work with Lockjaw that I don’t bother even going for it much unless it’s very free.
Thanos Ongoing
KMBest
For those of you who prefer something a bit more off-the-beaten-path, Thanos Ongoing should be an interesting space to explore. This style of deck appeals to me because it has a functional gameplan even when you are not Lockjawing, and you can play as a midrange deck with a Thanos endgame in those games.
The major issue I see with it is that you are very weak to opposing Killmongers, and if people are playing the list above, you are going to run into some issues, since many of your units are stones.
Iron Man is generally good into the Shuri matchup, but with Red Skull‘s arguable buff, he’s no longer the sure thing he used to be in that matchup. When Red Skull gave +2 to opposing units, Iron Man basically won that lane every time. Now, it’s a bit dicier.
That said, there’s definitely room to explore with this archetype. Can we fit Leech in here to punish Killmonger gamers? Can we fit Valkyrie to punish those pesky Shuris even harder? Perhaps we end up looking more like the OrdinaryHarry build of Thanos, back from the Creator Clash.
Thanos but It’s Exactly the Same
KMBest
Ok, it’s not exactly the same. There’s a Psylocke instead of Quinjet. The Psylocke lets you ramp a bit and play your 5-Cost into 5-Cost gameplan, and otherwise you pretty much just do the same stuff you did before.
Yeah. Riveting stuff.
All seriousness, this build of the deck did fall off just a bit in my opinion. It still has some of the ridiculous highroll power, but I’m no longer as confident as I was before the nerf that Shuri is a positive matchup.
In addition, we run the risk of getting out-big-guyed if we run into the Killmonger – Wave – Death version of the deck.
Conclusion
I hope you’ve enjoyed this rundown of Thanos in Marvel Snap, after the nerfs. If you forced me to pick one of these archetypes to try to master, I’d have to go with the Killmonger list, which I think has a notable advantage over other Thanos decks in mirrors, which was always hard to come by.
If you asked me to pick which one had the greatest potential for future evolution, I’d go with the Ongoing Thanos list. I think there’s something there if the metagame develops the right way. Of course, if it doesn’t, the deck might fall behind.
For more from me, you can follow me on Twitter for polished lists and jokes, YouTube for deck breakdowns and tier lists, and Twitch if you want to keep up with the Marvel Snap meta in real time. As always, you can catch my weekly columns right here at Marvel Snap Zone!
I do have one extra special mention this week – my first community subscriber tournament, Best Of The Besties I: Fools Day Fury is currently accepting registrations. The tournament features a $500 prize pool and is open to all of my subscribers on Twitch.tv. I’ll be commentating the whole thing on my channel, with some special guests! I hope to see you there!
Thanks for reading!
