Tonight on GeekNights, we review the surprisingly elegant Marvel Snap. Released this year on phones and PCs, it's essentially a flavor of Knizia's Battle Line (2000), itself in a narrow class of similar games of a shared lineage.
In the news, Ross Chastain changed the meta in NASCAR with "Some Video Game Shit," Embracer rebranded Square Enix Montréal as Onoma before immediately shutting Onoma down, Dwarf Fotress with Graphics is coming in December, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 disabled Steam Family Sharing, a feature you should probably be using.
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Another similar game is Air, Land, & Sea by Jon Perry. It’s an 18 card game with 3 battlefields. Cards can be played face up to the battlefield matching their suit, or face down to any suit. Most cards have special effects that allow you to move them around. Control more battlefields by the end of the round to win. You can resign early and give your opponent less points, based on how early it is in the round. A PnP expansion even adds a doubling cube.
When Snap was announced, some thought it was one of the inspirations, but the team wasn’t aware of it at the time.
Get a Rusty costume going next year.
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Anyone want post their fave Snap decks? For whatever definition of favourite means to you?
I really like playing this deck that I call Low Tide:
Nightcrawler
Goose
Mojo
Domino
Rogue
Wolfsbane
Brood
Mr Fantastic
Silver Surfer
Captain America
Cosmo
Maximus
You likely want to retreat if you don’t draw Surfer, but it is very consistent, has a GREAT disruption package in Goose, Rogue and Cosmo allowing you a LOT of lane control and it is friggin hilarious when you have a full lane that includes Nightcrawler and you turn 6, move Nightcrawler out and replace him with a Mojo… 
If you are brave and have a good board setup, you can hold out until turn 6 to draw Surfer, but if playing to gain net cubes, you must retreat in almost any match without Surfer, unless you think you can snipe a Dino or Iron Man with your Rogue, or pull out the surprise Mojo.
Same trick also works with Wolfsbane, or Captan - Move Nightcrawler out, swap in the tanks.
Anyone else got some fun or cool decks?
I play mostly a KittMonSera Control,
It has Kitty, Sera, Kilmmonger, Angela, Hit Monkey, Shang Chi, Rogue, Mysterio, Luke Cage, Scarlet Witch, Sentinel, Bishop.
Bishop, Kitty, Hit Monkey and Angela are the power, Sera and Mysterio are help other cards, Scarlet witch adds chaos and Luke Cage, Killmonger, Shang Chi and Rogue are counters.
It got me to infinite this year. (that and a hela discard during a dark dimension)
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Conquest mode just dropped in the new update, and holy shit is it fun. This is what the game should’ve been all along.
Also, apparently the update is so good that it crashed their servers. So anyway, once everything is running again, get you that patch and get into the Proving Grounds.
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Against my better judgment I finally tried Marvel Snap and then
I’m jealous you get to play beginner SNAP. I have to play top tier meta snap.
Of course I end up making a deck just to beat some missions, it wins 75%, and then hides a lot of the stats from my main deck.
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Anyone wanna help me do the back math on how I got 960 power at a location here? I was just trying an auto deck for Sage and while I’m not complaining, don’t see how the right base went up to 960…I know Onslaught doubled Iron Man, and then Mystique doubled the card text of Onslaught, but still that comes out to 120 the way that I’m mathing it?
The exact math of the intersection of Iron Man, Onslaught, and Super Skrull just happens and I don’t think the interaction is calculable by players. I just gave up and rolled with it.
I’ve been running wiht an ongoing deck lately so I see numbers I can’t explain all the time…
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Literally just happened. Shit, I’m liking this auto deck haha
It has to loop around several times, and stop at a certain point. I’ve seen the screen do the static of a VCR and “fast forward” through an Odin/Wong combination at Kamartaj a couple of times now, which always means the game is lost for me haha
You have 15 base power here.
Iron Man is a single doubling.
Onslaught makes Ongoing effects happen one additional time (that’s how it’s coded), so that’s 2 doublings. Note: Onslaught’s Citadel also works this way.
Mystique copies Onslaught’s text. Now you have Onslaught (2 doublings), Mystiqueslaught (2 doublings), and also both Mystiqueslaught and Onslaught add 1 more iteration of their text to each other (because, again, “Ongoing effects here happen twice” is coded as “+1 ongoing effect”).
Hence, both Onslaught and Mystiqueslaught provide 3 Iron Man effects, for a total of 6 doublings.
15 doubled 6 times is 960.
Where it gets really fun (and I still don’t totally understand how it works) is when you get dueling Super Skrulls in play, because then the order of play also matters; there’s something in Super Skrull’s coding that has a one-time check and an order of resolution, because otherwise he would cause infinite recursion, but I still can’t reliably predict how Skrull duels will play out.
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Ah! That makes more sense. I was leaving out a couple of doublings!
Yeah based on the screenshot Rym shared, Super Skrull on top of that is bananas!
If you’re in an ongoing matchup with Super Skrulls the key to victory is to NOT play Iron Man. If the opponent plays the only Iron Man, and you have Super Skrull + Mystique + Onslaught, you will have the big numbers, and they will have the baby numbers.
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I’ve had at least one game where I did a Skrull duel, didn’t play Iron Man, they did, and somehow I still lost. I still haven’t figured out how.
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