While a lot of us are making our way through the hidden pool system in Marvel Snap, I’m willing to bet many new players haven’t yet reached the third and final tier, which unlocks the last set of cards in Second Dinner’s popular new deck-building game. So likely, you haven’t yet encountered the Agatha Harkness card, which might harbour the single most entertaining gameplay mechanic I’ve seen in this game yet.
Get this: Agatha will play all your cards for you. She just takes over and you have to watch her do it. It’s a particularly funny prospect, not just because suddenly you have to let fate decide if you’re going to win the match, but also because of how often people playing Marvel Snap are paranoid about the idea that they might be fighting against bots. What if the reality was, you were competing against both a bot and a human at once? Dun dun dun.
As YouTuber MegaMogwai goes over in his video below, Agatha has a variety of quirks that aren’t listed in her description. Not only will she always start in your hand, but she will also always be an extra card on top of what you initially pull. Most of the time this quality might seem useless, considering that Agatha costs five energy — that’s usually late-game stuff. Recently, though, Marvel Snap’s had a 40 per cent extra chance of featuring zones that gave you five extra energy upon revealing themselves, so an Agatha deck’s been viable lately.
Another thing the game doesn’t tell you is that Agatha is also egotistical. Not only will she prioritise herself and try to play her own card the moment she can, she seems to always pull the energy rewards that are normally awarded to a random card given at the end of a match. Downsides. But the moment Agatha hits the board, you retain control again. With some smart deck-building, you could potentially make some plays that take advantage of her enormous 14 power without being hurt too badly while her bot AI’s in control.
You would still be playing with fire, of course. Hilariously, the Agatha deck featured on Marvelsnap.io is aptly called “Chaos Deck.” MegaMogwai doesn’t quite run the same exact deck, but there are a few similarities between them. The big things worth noting in Mega’s particular deck is that he has cards like Lady Sif to try and get rid of Agatha early, should that be possible, but also cards like Ghost Rider, which bring back discarded cards to any given location, potentially granting you that 14 power boost without risking Agatha actually taking over. It’s a dense high-energy deck which doesn’t let you play too many cards at once. But that’s ok, because he also runs Devil Dinosaur, which powers up +2 for every card in your hand.
Read More: Marvel Snap Ignored A Card Game Staple, And It Worked
In theory it’s an immensely clever deck. But the crunchy thing about Marvel Snap, beyond the bite-sized matches, is that you never, ever know what’s going to happen next. Snap is a game in which the only deities are tricksters laughing at your silly little mortal plans, blowing them up just to see the reaction on your face. You feel like a god when it goes your way. And when it doesn’t, you can just tell yourself it was bullshit, the cards were literally stacked against you.
Once I was playing a game that I was winning at the very start, only to have a zone called “Ego” come up. Get this: Ego makes the AI play for both players, not just one. Know what this bot did? It played Mantis and Sentinel on my sixth turn, two low-energy cards that are typically reserved for the very start of the game. I lost. Then I queued up for another game. Madness, video games.
tell my why the computer took over just to play the worst cards on earth I swear to GOD 😭 WHY ALL THE SENTINELS AND MANTIS ON TURN 6 pic.twitter.com/JEZfbNkyRp
— Patricia Hernandez (@xpatriciah) October 30, 2022
So, yes, MegaMogwai’s deck is great on paper, but things go wrong from the very moment he starts showing it off on-camera. In the first game, the initial zone immediately discards Agatha. The centrepiece of the deck is gone. lol. lmao. He does go on to win, because the deck was built around the idea of discarding her, but I’m eternally amused by how quickly Marvel Snap will just look you in the eye and say no. The fun bit is figuring out how to make things work after everything goes wrong.
The second game in the video didn’t go much better, spiritually. MegaMogwai gets to play Agatha, which is great, until a cloning vat is revealed, and suddenly Agatha decides actually, he’s not getting rid of her at all like he’d planned. Immediately, he retreats to save himself from losing too many cubes, the game’s currency.
I won’t spoil the rest of the video, which is nearly an hour long, but it’s a great look at one of the more unusual ways to play Marvel Snap. Funny, too, because despite all this uncertainty and chaos? I wanna go build an Agatha deck ASAP. Then again, I am a known round-one Marvel Snap snapper.
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