Battle Breakdown: June Snap.Fan Open

Hey Everyone, Torikun Here Again...

This weekend was easily one of the biggest weekends for competition in Marvel Snap history so far. We saw the successful conclusion of the June Snap.fan Open with 145 individual unique deck submissions recorded. In the end, the competition ended in a way that I’m sure many weren’t expecting - a player winning the whole event with a Move deck. That’s right, JungCAT became the first player to successfully win a global, major open decklist tournament with a Move deck, becoming the fourth Korean player to qualify for the Snap.fan World Championship, joining Johnson, Swen, and DESMOND as SFWC qualifiers.

With such an interesting tournament that took place, there’s a lot to cover in this article - from a winner’s interview with JungCAT where they broke down their Move deck, to analyzing the other incredible decklists that topped the tournament, as well as breaking down the surprising overall deck stats for this tournament - you wouldn’t believe which decks did well. But with all that out of the way, let’s get started.

Tournament Overview

Moving To The Top

Winner’s Interview with JungCAT

When choosing a deck for the tournament, JungCAT had two reasons for landing on Move - they wanted to achieve a great tournament result specifically without the use of High Evolutionary, and because they wanted to engage in “psychological warfare” with their opponents. Koreans especially love the idea of the “unseen Heimdall” (just look at the pick rate of Heimdall in Korean Draft tournaments!), and thus Heimdall is the perfect card to establish major uncertainty in opponents by forcing opponents to play around a card that often doesn’t even hit the board.

JungCAT had two considerations throughout their deckbuilding process - not to lose too much power output by including too many tech cards like Wave or Enchantress, and to build a deck that specifically targeted High Evo Lockjaw. And so, JungCAT came up with the inclusion of Stegron, Shang-Chi and Magneto in the deck, as cards which improve the HE Lockjaw matchup, because they directly disrupt the gameplans of HE Lockjaw.

Furthermore, the other deckbuilding choices in the deck maximize the amount of psychological warfare going on by expanding the deck’s range of options. Vision’s ability makes it difficult to predict where he ends up on Turn 6; Stegron was chosen over Juggernaut because he affects not only cards played that turn, but also cards already on the field; Ghost Spider not only increases the deck’s consistency by being another activator, but also increases the number of plays the opponent must account for.

Looking at JungCAT’s results - they played 11 games, faced HE Lockjaw 4 times in total, including in the Quarterfinals and Grand Finals, and won each time. JungCAT even mentioned that they were hoping to run into the HE Lockjaw matchup because that deck was so predictable and thus easy to beat. They also cited Darkhawk Goodstuff, HE Lockdown, Sandman Ramp, and Patriot as favorable matchups. On the other hand, Sera and Bounce are the hardest matchups for the deck, due to the fact that JungCAT isn’t running Wave, and because both decks are good at throwing priority on Turn 6 making Shang-Chi less effective.

Ultimately, JungCAT says that they hope this tournament will encourage people to look past HE Lockjaw and try other things, including Move.

(Besides JungCAT’s deck, Move players looking for inspiration also have semifinalist Whybona’s deck as an example of a successful Move deck, which utilizes Move cards within a Doomwave shell.)

HE Lockjaw = Too Overprepared For?

While HE Lockjaw was the most common deck by a landslide at the Snap.fan June Open, it also had an abysmal winrate that was below 50%, a surprising statistic for a deck that was touted as the best deck in the meta. Digging deeper, it appears that the rest of the meta has made adaptations against the most popular deck currently. For example, Shang-Chi was the most common card included in all submitted decklists, at 44% - a number that jumps up to 50% when you consider the inclusion of Shang-Chi in archetypes that exclude HE Lockjaw.

Beyond Shang-Chi, other deck archetypes have set gameplans for handling HE Lockjaw - Bounce decks use Kitty to go bigger than them, Sandman Ramp and Shuri Taskmaster decks simply go taller in 2 locations with Black Panther+Zola and Shuri+Taskmaster respectively, Darkhawk decks disrupt Lockjaw and Jubilee with Rocks, and so on. When a deck becomes ubiquitous for so long, other decks start to figure out ways of dealing with the dominant force. Perhaps JungCAT was in fact correct that HE Lockjaw was no longer as dominant as it once was, especially as it was so prepared for.

Nevertheless, the deck is still very strong and consistent still, and good pilots still managed to ensure that HE Lockjaw saw representation at the podium. Quiros and prepper2400 managed Runner Up and Top 8 finishes respectively with both of the common variants of HE Lockjaw - the classic version and the Dracula version, proving success is just as dependent on proper play as much as deck building is important.

Quiros

prepper2400

The Next Face of the Meta? Other Top 8 Decklists

With HE Lockjaw beginning to fall out of favor among certain players, which decks will be next to rise up? Looking at the rest of the Top 8 decks may give us an answer.

Makaron

Of all the decks with a >10% appearance rate, Bounce had the highest win rate amongst the field. Top 8 finisher Makaron ended up bringing a list widely accepted as standard, which features the newly released Spider-Ham, which fits well into the Bounce archetype as a generally strong disruption tool made uniquely strong by the fact that Bounce deck can deploy Spider-Ham multiple times in a game. Other variations on the “tech bounce” list include swapping in Jeff for something like Shang-Chi, adding different tech cards like Elektra or Valkyrie, or different point slamming options such as The Hood or Falcon. If you aren’t teching hard to beat Bounce by including cards such as Wave or Killmonger, expect to be rolled over, and Turn 5 Waves aren’t even a complete death sentence either if the Bounce player plays around that option properly. In my opinion, I think Bounce is positioned to become the next “Best Deck” in Marvel Snap as the meta continues to shift.

Stryker

The Zabu/Darkhawk Doomwave decks, which I’ve taken to categorizing them as Darkhawk Goodstuff, were also quite successful in the tournament. Stryker achieved a respectable Top 8 finish, going undefeated in the Swiss rounds, using a Darkhawk Goodstuff deck, with a few unique editions - Medusa is often a 2/5 that isn’t a bad hit with Iron Lad, and Sunspot smoothes out the power output of the deck and isn’t bad with Wave, although this choice is likely inferior to Nebula. Regardless, I believe this archetype is quite flexible, with a gameplan into every single matchup - you can change some of the cards to beat certain matchups harder, such as by including Cosmo, Enchantress, or Killmonger in the deck. However, the deck does suffer from a lower average power output than the high rolls of the other meta decks, and thus Darkhawk Goodstuff does feel like a “Jack of all trades, master of none” type of deck.

DrAnansi

Sera Control, which falls under the Sera Miracle deck archetypes in the classification, is a deck that has largely struggled to replicate its Ranked successes in the longer format Conquest Mode, largely due to having a relatively weak power output, being weak to Wave, and being largely dependent on your opponent having priority on Turn 6. It hasn’t stopped DrAnansi though from reaching the Semi Finals and qualifying for the SFWC with the classic Sera Control deck, which features the full suite of tech cards and Kitty and Hit Monkey for some power, showing the importance of good play in securing Top Cut qualification.

Meowcat

Finally, Meowcat once again brought their Surfer deck into another SFWC event right after the Snap Clash Open, and again reached the Top Cut, ending in the Top 8. It’s possible that Surfer decks are slightly underrated by the community, with possible combinations like Spider-Ham+Shadow King being underexplored in a tournament setting. Still Meowcat proves that good piloting can bring even the classical Surfer build to success.

Other Meta Trends

OTA Trends: Doctor Doom Still Popular. Nick Fury & Red Skull = Rising

By far the biggest impact of the recent OTA patch was the nerf of Doctor Doom’s Doombots. Even still, the Latvian leader was still the second most played card and was seen in 43% of decks. There’s simply no card that fills Doom’s role of being a 6-Drop that affects all 3 locations at once, and as such the decks that used Doom before still were forced to include him. The nerf’s effect can instead be seen in the drop in Doom’s win rate which fell from a 53.5% WR in the Battle Arena 2 weeks ago, to a 50.8% WR at the Snap.fan June Open. -1 power is a lot, and that change gets compounded if Doctor Doom is triggered more than once per game. Perhaps the shift will be seen in people choosing other decks not as dependent on Doctor Doom instead, such as Bounce.

The OTA buffs also had noticeable effects on the tournament meta. Nick Fury received an energy cost buff that enabled him to slot into Dino decks alongside Zabu, and we saw some of those decks in the tournament. Besides Nick Fury, Red Skull was also returned to his old 5/14 statline, which ushered in the return of Shuri Skull decks in the tournament. Neither archetype was too successful in this outing, but it’s potentially another space to innovate in.

Sandman Still Unoptimized?

The deck archetype that won at the last SFWC event, Sandman Ramp, struggled in this tournament. Sandman Ramp is a deck that mainly targets combo and dump decks like Bounce, and it’s possible that the amount of Bounce seen in the tourney (10%) was not enough for Sandman to succeed, especially given how the deck is quite difficult to pilot well. Besides that, none of the 9 players who brought Sandman Ramp brought the same decklist. Potentially, this means that Sandman isn’t yet optimized to the same degree as other archetypes.

I’ll share the most successful Sandman deck in the Swiss as a starting point, which was piloted by OKJK, who went 6-2.

Closing

Once again, congratulations to JungCAT for winning the $600 Snap.fan June Open and taking the $225 first prize and a spot at the Snap.fan World Championship. Congratulations as well to Quiros, Whybona, and DrAnansi for also qualifying to the SFWC from the same tournament. We are almost halfway through the year but there is still much more to come in the SFWC circuit. A full breakdown of the upcoming Snap.fan World Championship Series is coming soon to the site, so stay tuned.

The next major event on the SFWC’s calendar is the Season 13 Battle Arena #2 this coming Saturday. As always, expect me to continue the tournament coverage for that event - and stay tuned for my debut on the casting desk at that tournament on the SnapBattleArena Twitch channel. Anyways, this is Torikun signing off.

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