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Welcome to this week's Spotlight Cache Showcase! In this article series, we review the contents of Marvel SNAP’s upcoming Spotlight Caches and decide if this is a week worth your precious resources.
The new Series 5 card Araña will be released this week, alongside Series 5 Sage and Series 5 Ms. Marvel.
ARAÑA – Mi Corazón
Araña joins Marvel SNAP as part of the Amazing Spider-Season. It is a 1-Cost, 1-Power card Activate: Give the next card you play +2 Power and move it to the right. It's unique ability to move cards to the right resembles other cards you may be familiar with, such as Ghost-Spider, Doctor Strange and Nico Minoru.
Araña appears to be yet another strong auto-include for the Move Archetype, bringing a sorely needed ability to the package: moving cards to the right. While the archetype does have a few options to do so already, its signature finisher Heimdall is a extremely telegraphed one-trick pony, allowing opponent's to predict, calculate and counter a board that shifts entirely to the left. As a 1-Cost card, Araña is easily weaved into turns or used as a fake-out finisher in lieu of Heimdall. Better yet, the card's Activate ability serves as a save-for-later surprise attack, giving you the flexibility to wait for the perfect draw or opportune moment to utilize it. With Madame Web releasing recently, Move is becoming less and less reliant on a singular game plan and is slowly becoming capable of out powering some of the strongest decks with the right combos.
As a 1-Cost, Araña won't just see play in Move, and may find a home in decks that simply use the Dagger package for bonus power output, like recent variations of the Clog Archetype.
PROJECTED RANKING:
SAGE – The Mutant Supercomputer
Sage is currently in Tier B of our Card Tier List, having both a positive cube rate and winrate, while being played in 2.8% of decks at Rank 70 and above. Sage is most commonly played in the Bounce Archetype, but has also become popular in the Negative Archetype, where it synergizes well with Ravonna Renslayer, Iron Man and Taskmaster.
When used correctly, Sage is an incredibly powerful card. Unfortunately, the decks that utilize her effectively are often high-skill cap decks with small margins for error. Bounce is notoriously held back by its difficulty to play and Negative is a low win rate, high cube rate deck, which means retreating often. Regardless, Sage is a great tool to add to your arsenal and is often an irreplaceable card in the lists its used in.
RANKING:
Ms. Marvel – She Fights for her Friends
Ms. Marvel is the final Spotlight card for the third week of the Amazing Spider-Season and is currently sitting at Tier B on our Card Tier List. Ms. Marvel was once a must-have card, but the changes to Professor X, the way Move functions in game and her nerf to requiring two cards in a lane to proc all contributed to the much weaker version we have today. With War Machine bringing lockdown back, however, it may be a good time to revisit and even pickup Ms. Marvel.
Although Ms. Marvel's time in the sun has faded, the return of lockdown and cards that help you move cards from any lane to another may bring Ms. Marvel back into the meta. Cards like Madame Web, Arańa and War Machine may provide the support Ms. Marvel needs to be popular again.
RANKING:
Spotlight Variants
Each week, there's a chance you open exclusive Spotlight Cache Variants for the featured cards. These variants only appear once you own all three featured cards, so you’ll need plenty of Spotlight Keys if you want one. Spotlight Cache exclusive variants will not be available in-game again until one full year has passed following their release.
The featured artist for the Amazing Spider-Season is In-Hyuk Lee, so we should expect all Spotlight Variants for new cards, such as Araña, to get In-Hyuk Lee depictions. Sage receives a portrayal by Kai Lun Qu and Ms. Marvel receives a new variant from Eduard Petrovich!
Final Thoughts
This week’s Spotlight Caches include solid building blocks and have good value. A week with three Series 5 cards is already great, but three Tier B (one projected) cards make it a no-brainer if you're missing two or more. Araña is extremely flexible as a 1-Cost and Sage and Ms. Marvel are often irreplaceable in their respective decks.
The other factor to consider is the upcoming Spotlight Caches. Next week we’ll see Scarlet Spider added to the game alongside Skaar and White Widow.
What do you think? Are you using Spotlight Keys to get Araña or is it a pass? Let us know your thoughts over at @UntappedSNAP on Twitter/X. Alternatively, come and chat with the wider Marvel SNAP Community on our Discord Server!
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