Top 5 Reasons to Buy the Rise of the Phoenix Season Pass: Is It Worth It?

Hello everyone, and welcome to Top 5! I’m Glazer of Snap Judgments: The Official Marvel Snap Zone Podcast, and every week, we’ll be counting down a different Top 5 things you need to know in, around, and about Marvel Snap! Sometimes this will be silly in nature, but we’ll always have some pearls of wisdom to help make you the best (and best adjusted!) Marvel Snap player you can be! This week? The Top 5 Reasons to Buy the Rise of the Phoenix Season Pass!

5. You Get SO Many More Variants!

Without the Season Pass, you get one free Mystery Variant from the Season Pass track. That’s it. With the Season Pass, you get two more Mystery Variants.

“So what?,” you may be asking, “I only get Pixels!” Well, In addition, there are no free planned Season Pass variants, but by buying the Season Pass you get three of those as well. That’s three exclusive variants you won’t be getting elsewhere:

The Season Pass is $10. A variant costs about $10 and an exclusive variant costs more. Here, you get 5 variants and two Mystery Variants. There is nowhere in the game you can get variants for nearly that cheap.

4. Gold is Now at a Premium

With the new patch releasing on July 11, Gold will no longer be available in Season Caches or even the brand-new Spotlight Caches. This cuts a major source of Gold off from players that the Season Pass helps replenish.

Without the Season Pass, players will still get a solid 300 Gold from the free path. However, with the Season Pass, that’s 900 more Gold for a total of 1200 – nearly enough for the new Token Tuesday or savings on your way to a huge bundle.

Heck, with the Season Pass, it’s possible to actually come out ahead of the old system thanks to Weekend Missions. By winning 15 matches per weekend, you get 150 Gold. There are 5 weekends in this season, so that’s another 750 gold, putting those who buy the Season Pass at plus 1650 as compared to those who don’t. How much is 1650 gold in the shop? More than $20.

Huge thanks to WolverThor for help with that information. Check his content out!

3. The Season Pass Can Get and Keep You Collection Complete

Our own Brilliant LaurenWhatever is spending, well, way too much of her free time working on the math for the new Spotlight Caches. Unlike me, she’s a math person, as anyone who has read Snapalytics can attest to. She assures me that if you spend Credits strategically, this new system is extremely generous. How generous? Well, you read the title of this section, right? That fundamentally means for the low price of $10 per month, players can have every, or nearly every card in the game. That’s insane. No other card game gives that value.

Lauren will have a Spotlight Cache Master Guide coming soon to Marvel Snap Zone wherein she will go over all the math, so keep your eyes on this very site for it.

2. Support Second Dinner

I know that they mess up a lot, whether it be technical issues or seeming greed, but it surely seems like Second Dinner is trying really hard. Heck if you’re reading this, you probably know that and almost certainly love the game. If the game is going to survive, let alone thrive, then it needs to be profitable. Given how great of a deal the Season Pass is, buying it is the single most affordable and economical way to support this great game.

Further, given #3, the Season Pass operates almost as a subscription system to having a very high majority, if not actually all of the cards. You can skip a month sure, but all that does is put you behind in your collection, meaning you’ll have more and more cards to get. Unless you’re extremely lucky and those start showing up in the same Spotlight Cache groupings, getting ahead of the curve with the Season Pass is a win-win.

The game is great. I want the game to live for a long time. Ten dollars on a Season Pass really does help that happen.

1. The Season Pass Card is Almost Always Worth it

Look, I’m a content creator. I make about as much content for the game as anyone and know 3/4 of the big names in the community. I tell you this as seriously as I can – we all suck at evaluating cards before release. Next to no one thought Darkhawk was any good, but we all went and immediately bought Ghost. At first, the consensus was that Howard the Duck was great, then it was that Howard was only good with Iron Lad, then it was just that he was bad – though there are still holdouts.

Variants

Howard the Duck

Ongoing: Tap this to see the top card of your deck.

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

view card details Start a deck Decks with Howard the Duck

The lesson? No one knows for sure if The Phoenix Force will be good. So why should you buy it, beyond that it’s a Series 5 card (currently worth 6,000 Collector’s Tokens) and even not counting that, the season pass is a 93% discount on all the other stuff you get?

The Season Pass cards since global release have basically all proven to be worth it:

• Miles Morales – Seemed like he’d be bad, and right at global launch, they clearly didn’t have their strategy down, but he ended up meta in the Darkhawk Stature lists, a key component to the best deck in the game.
• Black Panther – At first, Black Panther was everywhere, as people discovered the joys of Wong/Panther/Arnim Zola. This was countered relatively quickly by opponent’s going with Cosmo, Shang Chi, and Aero but had an immediate and fun impact on the meta. Panther was fringe for awhile after, but now again has a home in various ramp decks.
• Silver Surfer – He was a meta card at 3/0 giving plus 3 to everything, and for 2.5 months was one of the dominant forces in the metagame. He’s since been nerfed, but remains a really strong card that is the centerpiece to a top 10 deck in the game.

Variants

Silver Surfer

On Reveal: Give your other 3-Cost cards +2 Power.

Collection Level 486+ (Pool 3)

view card details Start a deck Decks with Silver Surfer

Variants

Zabu

On Reveal: Until the end of next turn, your 4-Cost cards cost 1 less.

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

view card details Start a deck Decks with Zabu

• Zabu – as a 3/2 who gave -2 to all 4-cost cards, he was the most busted card in the history of the game. Now, a 2/2 that gives -1 to 4s still, he’s just one of the best cards in the game, not clearly #1.
• MODOK – This card has been up and down. Upon release it was swallowed up by the overpowered cards above, then Thanos Lockjaw and Shuri Zero decks. Since then, however, the card spent several months making Apocalypse Discard one of the most consistent decks in the meta, and has made Hela a real deck that people reach Infinite with, not just a meme.
• Nimrod – The one miss. This card seemingly never really went anywhere – at least until now as a recent buff has made it appear in numerous destroy builds as a major card. Oh, and we’ll all pretend there weren’t really high win rate Turn 6 Galactus decks built around abusing Nimrod, too.
• Hit Monkey – You mean the next card to be nerfed? The Monkey is one of the key cards in Bounce, the current best deck in the game.

Variants

Nebula

Each turn your opponent doesn’t play a card here, +2 Power. (except the turn you play this)

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

view card details Start a deck Decks with Nebula

• Nebula – Only overshadowed by Kitty Pryde, likely the best card in the game right now, Nebula is a crazy strong 1-drop and basically single handedly took Lockdown decks to Tier 1 for awhile and somehow also made Guardians of the Galaxy decks, of all things, playable at a competitive ladder level.
• Ghost-Spider – This card has thus far been on the lower half of the power curve for Season Pass cards – it’s only a role player, not a build around, but it has a place in both tournament winning and meta breaking decks.

Variants

The Phoenix Force

On Reveal: Revive one of your destroyed cards and merge with it. That card can move each turn.

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

view card details Start a deck Decks with The Phoenix Force

That brings us to The Phoenix Force. Within a month of release, every single Season Pass card but Miles Morales had a home in meta decks. Every time, most notably with Hit Monkey, who rose to power at the height of Sandman play, people who didn’t buy the card complain they didn’t realize how powerful it was. Well, The Phoenix Force is likely to be that powerful.

Go buy it, and while you’re at it, try out these decklists from our other great Marvel Snap Zone articles:

• The Genius Safetyblade’s Decks
• The Legendary Den’s Decks