How did the former and current Season Pass Card perform this season?
So, did you decide what team you ended up on at the end of the season? As we start a new season, let's take a quick look back at the previous season, continue looking at the value or lack of value the season pass cards have given us throughout the season, and share some general thoughts on how the season went overall.
Season Pass Cards
Hope Summers
Currently, Hope is the #2 most-seen card besides Shang-chi in the last 30 days, and if that isn’t an indication of how useful and good this card is, I am not sure what will convince you. Starting the X-men on the best foot, Hope is one of the best new cards to be introduced into the game and one that doesn’t always seem that obvious from the start just because she can seem slow. There were a lot of Hope deniers at the start of the season because they were not convinced that she would make a big impact on the game. While her impact might not be as apparent, she is a good card to have in your arsenal, and she is not as needed as other cards. Her usage rate most likely comes from being included in the best deck in the current format, and while that is great, I think that has limited her during this season because a lot fewer people are willing to use and experiment with her in different ideas. However, she probably can fit in most decks since she has little downside.
Here are a couple of decks that feature her and can be used at the start of this next season with some great success.
Thanos
Loki
Overall, she is worth the resources if you have them.
Black Swan
This is a rarely-seen card. Anecdotally I don’t think I saw her one time outside of playing a triskelion game or some other game with randomly generated cards. That doesn’t mean she is bad, but currently, the format is not correct for her to be played, and her effect isn’t as good as one would hope, even though it seems powerful. This is now the second month with her released and she hasn’t made that big of an impact. Even with the slight buff to some of the one-cost cards, she isn’t thought of as something useful. She is in a bad spot, especially with most of the other cards released in her season being able to see a lot of use and being essential in several different decks. Hopefully, this will change as more cards are introduced, but as of right now, she was not the best investment.
However, if you do want to give her a shot, here is a Dracula Dump-type deck that has shown decent results, as well as a bounce deck with a good win rate and cube rate over the last 30 days.
Dracula Dump
Bounce
Skaar
Skaar's usage has dwindled a bit with the addition of some bigger threats or easier-to-play threats over the last couple of seasons. However, this hasn’t dwindled his usefulness since he is still in the top 10 of cards' win rate when played or when drawn. He still is good value, and as long as there are big-bodied cards in the game, he will continue to have a use. Interestingly enough, because he is a season pass card and not one that needed to be bought with tokens or caches, he is a decent budget option for some of the other cards that took his spot. For example, just like Hope, his best deck is Thanos, but he is the card that would probably be the first to switch out if you had access to Mockingbird.
Skaar Thanos
This deck has slightly different play patterns, relying more on putting down multiple high-powered cards, but it is still effective and has an above 60% win rate throughout the season. This is a great place to start if you are missing cards from the other Thanos deck above.
Sebastian Shaw
I contemplated just copying my statement about Shaw from last season's article and pasting it here. Sadly, I don't think I saw this card once in the entire month. Wait, that's what I said last month. Hope Summers did not have the effect that I was hoping to push Shaw into a place where he was as useful as I would hope. However, he isn’t in the same spot as last season because fewer decks go over the top of your typical surfer 3-cost card type decks, which has helped him increase in usage. I hope that after this week's spotlights, more people have access to him, and he can see more play because he is pretty low on the last cards seen in a game.
This is the best-performing deck featuring Sebastion Shaw from this season, although this is more a combo deck than a Shaw deck.
Toxic Combo
Ms. Marvel
Ms. Marvel saw a little more usage, probably because she was in spotlights at the start of the season, which is great. While she still is a really good card, going wide has not been the best plan as of late. However, I think she is a relative sleeper because she still has one of the best cost-to-stat ratios in the game and will always be able to find a place as long as that is true.
Here is her best deck for the season:
Asgardians
Elsa Bloodstone
Crickets…
No, I am just kidding, she finally got her change at the start of the season and that has been great for her usage rate. However, with the lack of her friends having any of their previous changes reverted, she is not as potent as she once was, which is ok. I think in this current state, she is pretty balanced. Although, at 3 cost, she shares a lot of space with cards that you also want to be playing on turn three, and because she requires you to also have some specific cards in your hand/deck to be the most useful she can get pushed out by the other options she still provides a lot of use now rather than before. The added benefit is that she, along with Hope, also helped Kitty Pryde come back into the mix.
Here is her best deck:
Loki
Hopefully, they will make more cards that help enable her more often, increasing her viability even more.
Loki
Ever since Loki's release 8 months ago, he has been in the metagame in one form or the other. In his current state, he is a good card that exists in a good deck that doesn’t always show it because it is a skill difference type of deck. Unlike other decks with natural play lines and simple turn choices, Loki requires much more metagame knowledge and potential deck knowledge to pilot correctly. This doesn’t mean that you have to be a good player to play Loki well. It just means that playing him optimally requires much more game knowledge than other decks in the format. There are very few free wins that naturally fall in your lap with a Loki deck. That being said, he hasn’t received a lot of change in recent months, but he is in a good spot right now. He is always there lurking to possibly get out of hand as a God of Mischief should. I expect him to stay in this position.
Loki
Avengers vs Xmen
The second version of the game's Imnalances patches featured a fight between cards that were either a part of the X-Men or the Avengers. Depending on which side you used, there was a different in-game effect. For the Avengers, if you had 3 or more at one location, that location received 3 extra power. For the X-men, once you played 4 total X-men in a game, each X-men card received a buff of one extra power. This event was pretty well received but was a little awkward due to the amount of cards that it affected since not everyone who plays has vast Marvel Universe knowledge and you would sometimes forget which cards were X-men or Avengers. Also, the buffs were not exactly balanced. The X-men buff was easier to accomplish overall since you were not restricted to one lane and provided much more power overall.
This was one of the best-performing decks during the event:
X-Men
Unlike last season, this imbalance patch did not take up one of the scheduled OTAs, which is a positive since the last time the imbalance took an OTA, it left the meta stagnant for longer than most wanted.
OTA/Patch
Speaking of balance changes. This season, we saw a total of 18 cards getting buffed or nerfed, which is 7 more than last season but 2 less than the previous season. This season saw the first batch of buff/nerfs with changes to the Guardian of the Galaxy characters. However, within this season, due to a delay in the Patch that usually happens at the start, we only had two balance changes rather than the typical three we had seen before the February season. This is frustrating to some and not frustrating to other people. The main issue here is that most of the changes this season didn’t exactly bring change to the state of the game, and they haven’t been bringing much change to the game overall the last few. However, I will say that the current state of the meta is pretty decent, with multiple decks that could be put in the top tiers and many that are viable outside of that top tier. That might seem odd since the general player consensus is that this meta is broken and lacking. However, these 5 decks have relatively the same cube and win rate, which is a decent amount of decks to hold that same top spot.
HE Cannonball
Destroy
Discard
Thanos
PF Nimrod
After that, several decks are still competitively viable and have close win and cube rates. Also, just looking at these 5 decks, a wide range of play styles and strategies are within these 5 decks. That is pretty good. Now, does that excuse that there is still a big bad in the room that is running rampant and has been for many months now? No, but they have tried multiple times this month to reign it in, and instead of the same 2 decks being at the top the last couple of months, we now have a little bit more diversity. However, there is still a problem, and I hope that next season, they can get things fixed even more.
Conclusion
Overall, this was a decent season. However, there was a lot of frustration due to the new cards that were released and how much the meta was either perceived to be made worse or was just worse. Frankly, without the looming Thanos issue that clouds the way that a lot of players perceived and viewed the game, this would have been a fantastic season that included several great cards to be released and had a season pass card that was viable in a variety of ways. However, with the common perception being negative because of the release of Mockingbird at the start and the lack of overall change to the top-performing deck, the season might have been fun. Still, the changes will leave a sour taste overall.
Let me know what you think of the Avengers vs X-Men season below.