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Wiccan is the next series 5 card to join Marvel Snap in the Young Avengers Season. It is a 4-Cost, 7-Power card that reads: On Reveal: If you’ve spent all your Energy on previous turns, +2 Max Energy. Today, we will take a deeper look at the new card and, of course, the best decks to try it out in.
Decks with Wiccan
Wiccan has received a small update prior its release:
Happy Monday, everyone. Before our friend Wiccan arrives this week, we’ve made a small text-only change to the card.
Wiccan’s On Reveal effect triggers if you’ve spent all your Energy on the PREVIOUS turns, not the one on which you play Wiccan. We want it to be very clear how the ability works so we hope this change clarifies things. This change may not be ready right at release but it should follow soon after.
OLD – On Reveal: If you’ve spent all your Energy this game, +2 Max Energy.
NEW – On Reveal: If you’ve spent all your Energy on previous turns, +2 Max Energy.
Spotlight Cache
Series 5 cards can be purchased for 6,000 Collector’s Tokens from the Token Shop initially as a Weekly Spotlight card, or opened as one of the featured cards in the Spotlight Caches that are found every 120 Levels on the Collection Level Track after Collection Level 500 (until the next new card releases the following week).
Strengths and Weaknesses
Wiccan is an interesting question to answer. The card is set at seven power, but he requires that you spend every energy available before you play him out. For completing this quest, you get +2 energy on every following turn. This could mean that just playing the game on curve gets extra energy, but is the requirement too restrictive on deckbuilding to be worth the effort?
The strength of this card is easy to see. An extra two energy on Turn 4 means you have four extra energy across Turns 5 and 6. If you can play Wiccan out on turn 3, you can play a 6 drop on turn 4. This opens up lots of possibilities that we have not even tried to consider before since, unlike Electro, you’re not limited in what can be played after the Wiccan turn.
The effect itself is actually relatively simple to activate if you’re willing to make deckbuilding sacrifices like Quicksilver and Domino. These two cards get you almost all the way to a Turn 4 activation, but with a huge cost: you don’t draw other cards. You will often be left with extra energy and nothing to do with it as your Turn 1 and Turn 2 draws were Quicksilver and Domino.
This highlights the one major glaring weakness Wiccan has. Spending all your energy does not synergize with how Ramp decks have traditionally operated (i.e. ramping into combinations). This is a huge weakness because you must have enough 1-, 2-, and 3-Cost cards to activate Wiccan (as well as draw Wiccan). Another issue could be what do you do after you have done all this work to ramp with Wiccan? What do the final turns look like if you have built your deck to meet the requirement here? Warping the deck to meet the requirement will not leave much room for big payoffs, and you will also need to draw those cards after playing Wiccan.
It appears that what we have is a card that can do flashy things, but, given the requirements, doing those flashy things consistently would be unlikely at best. As such, the questions we have to answer are can you get the effect while playing a deck that can do something consistently, and what do you do after activating the effect?
Decks with Darkhawk
Decks with Kitty Pryde
One option is to not even try to use the extra energy in any specific way. If you can build a deck with enough 1- and 2-drops, you can likely make it all the way to Turn 4 without wasting energy. Cards like Kitty Pryde and Thena have real synergy with Wiccan because they allow this to occur while building power. Then you open up Turns 5 and 6 to include some bigger cards. For example, playing Darkhawk alongside Mystique without having to set it up the turn prior is an impressive finisher. The benefit here is that you are not warping the deck with cards like Quicksilver just to achieve the goal, but you have clear benefits from playing Wiccan on Turn 4.
The turbo Wiccan plan may also be better than trying to meet the requirement with Quicksilver into Domino. Planning around a Turn 2 Zabu or Psylocke into Wiccan is an easier requirement to fulfill and a smaller package to include. That can open up more options for later turns, but you still need to ensure that you have some Turn 1 plays worth making. You should also look to have some redundancy in the support cards.
Decks with Taskmaster
Decks with Sage
While many will want this to ramp into 6-Cost cards, the key is likely the supporting card package. It needs to be cards that benefit from the ramp as well as from playing 6-Cost cards. Wong and Iron Lad could have excellent synergy with Wiccan since they can add extra value to Psylocke and also replay effects from your big 6-drops. Taskmaster is another card that can benefit from early 6-drop plays. It could be a big winner from the extra energy since it lets you copy one big play with ease rather than setting up multiple plays.
The Verdict
Wiccan has a lot more hoops to jump through than it seems on the surface. The biggest one is figuring out what to do with the extra energy once you have played Wiccan. This usually leads to convoluted and complicated combinations emerging as the Day 1 recommendations, but Wiccan is more likely a payoff for playing efficient early turns rather than a combo enabler. If you look at it in this light, the card becomes simpler to activate (although the end game is not as flashy). However, extra energy on Turns 5 and 6, even if it only allows two extra cards to be played, could be strong enough by itself. If Wiccan is going to be a success, it is more likely to be just a good card to play on Turn 4 than a build-around card.
The greedier strategies are likely to bring down Wiccan on release since the way to achieving the extra energy isn’t hard, but it requires either a large amount of your deck to get it consistently or to run cards that are actively bad for the rest of your game plan.
Pre-Release Score:
Thena
SafetyBlade
One package that is excellent on curve is Darkhawk, which makes it a perfect fit with the Wiccan on Turn 4 game plan. Here Wiccan is just a way to turbo accelerate Turns 5 and 6 and give you more ways to play out Darkhawk and Mystique. Iron Man acts as the secondary Ongoing target along with Darkhawk. Cassandra Nova could be in the Loki slot, but Loki has been an interesting answer to decks lately, and he may synergize well with Wiccan. Playing Loki on Turn 3 will mean you draw four of your opponent’s cards, so following with Wiccan on Turn 4 means you’re more likely to get all the power out of your hand and onto the board.
Iron Lad
SafetyBlade
My first Zabu into Wiccan deck focuses on hitting Wong + Black Panther + Arnim Zola. This allows for the deck to fill the board with big cards in a few ways, but more importantly you can have six energy on Turn 4 to play your first Doctor Doom (as an example). This gets you on board quicker and you can follow this up with plenty of ways to reactivate the effects.
Taskmaster and Sage
SafetyBlade
This deck aims to play Quicksilver into Psylocke or Zabu, then on Turn 3 you play Wiccan. You have Iron Lad and Wong as “backup” ramp targets to keep the curve going as well. Once you have this down, you have two or three turns to use the extra energy to set up a Wong combination. These are the three main lines to look for:
- Ironheart into Odin
- White Tiger Into Odin
- Sage and copy with Taskmaster
Taskmaster is potentially too greedy, so you could try Arnim Zola, Absorbing Man, or Mystique as replacements.
Variants
Closing Thoughts
Wiccan can enable some absurd things on Turns 5 and 6, but the deckbuilding requirement is bigger than it seems. Plus, you not only need to draw the curve, but also Wiccan and the payoffs. This makes the new card more likely to find success in decks that want to play every turn as another way to ensure that they get all the cards they need down. Even then, it could just be that building and playing towards Wiccan doesn’t do enough to justify him over other cards.
Good Luck, Have Fun, and Stay Safe!
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