The Marvel snap meta is shaking up a lot right now. First, the addition of MODOK That likely means you’ll see a ton more discard decks that take advantage of the card’s ability to destroy your entire hand. Before, Marvel snap‘s beloved leader card, which copies your opponent’s entire turn, became less useful. And now a small hotfix Marvel snap knocked out two of the most common cards.
Zabu, the star of the previous season of Card Battlers, will now reduce the cost of 4-energy cards by one instead of two. And Silver Surfer now boosts 3 energy cards by two instead of boosting them by three like it used to. According to Marvel Snap Zone, the two most popular decks in the meta right now are geared towards Zabu, with Silver Surfer making a few appearances in the top ten. And indeed, Second Dinner confirmed in its patch notes that three different Zabu decks featured prominently in the rankings when it came to winrate, dice win, and population.
“Breaking down these two Season Pass cards wasn’t an easy decision,” reads a blog post announcing the changes.
“These changes aren’t intended to ‘erase’ Zabu or Silver Surfer – just give other maps more space,” it continues.
Why did Marvel Snap nerf Silver Surfer and Zabu?
Here are the changes to the second dinner on the Zabu:
Moving Zabu’s cost reduction from 2 to 1 reduces the cat’s potential energy reduction, making it harder to hide game-winning amounts of power until turn 6 or empty your hand for Dracula. It also resolves the Spider-Man/Absorbing Man combo, which was stronger than we thought it would be. Pushing it down to 2-cost cards will hopefully return enough haste to keep building around various 4-cost cards fun. We expect Zabu decks to look a little different but still have competitive builds.
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Silver Surfer, according to Second Dinner, has been in the top 5 cards since its inception. More than that, “gonna surf‘, which boasts a win rate of over 55% for Marvel Snap Zone, was literally the best overall deck! The developers feared that the card could become “too dominant”.
The blog post says:
This change aims to keep the same Surfer decks functional, just weaker. We’re particularly excited to carry Power on Surfer himself because it’s more interesting for both players to find out where he’s being played and we can fine-tune his strength. Unfortunately, those gains come at the cost of some cool Mister Negative decks, which we’ve enjoyed seeing.
I doubt this will kill either card; they are still useful. But my gut is that Sera Surfer decks will soon be replaced by Hela Discard decks, which may bring back the hand that destroys MODOK.
