Hi and welcome back. In this article, after we have gone through the mechanics part, I am going to write about the technical tools that you will need in order to start your climb toward Infinity Rank. Without a proper Deck, you can’t compete, and there’s something else in the store as well.
How to Reach Infinite Rank in Marvel Snap – Which Decks and Tools to Use?
Before we go on, here’s the Table of Contents again, for all parts of this strategy guide:
- Grasping the Game and Card Mechanics
- Obtaining the Necessary Cards and Tools
- Understanding the Meta – Know Thy Enemy
- How and When to Snap or Retreat
- How to Improve your Mental Game
Which Marvel Snap Companion App Should I Use?
Since Marvel Snap is pretty much a numbers game, you ought to know your statistics, and you ought to know which cards remain in your deck, which cards were discarded, and which cards were destroyed because Marvel Snap does not include that information during the match in the Early Access phase of the game. You will need this tool for various reasons (to see what Ghost Rider and Hela can bring back from Discard, to see how many cards were destroyed for Death, and to see which cards were destroyed, for Knull). See what I’m talking about below:
Related: Is there a Marvel Snap Collection and Statistics Tracker? – Answered
I recommend that you should play this game on your PC, but keep your phone next to you, in case you have a power cut, connection loss, client crash, or anything so that you can switch to your phone just to finish your match. There is enough time to switch, no worries. The linked tools are unofficial and third-party, but they helped me, and they will help you.
Checking out statistics of your deck, such as win rates, cube win/loss, and replaying matches can be a great learning experience.
- You realize the actual consistency of your deck and see how well it performs (honestly, everything above 50% is more than enough if you Snap and Retreat properly).
- You realize how many Cubes your Deck is winning or losing.
Related: How to See Discarded, Destroyed, and Remaining Deck Cards in Marvel Snap Matches
In the past two weeks (sadly, stats are not complete because the tracker wasn’t on the entire time and I played some games on my phone) I had a 58.78% Win Rate (on some days it peaked at 70%), I lost 26.1% of the games by Retreating, 45% of my wins were my opponents’ retreats, and I won 71.5% of the times after I snapped! From these numbers, I understand that I should have retreated more, for example. I will write about Retreating and Snapping in a later article.
The deck tracker allows you to stop thinking about what cards remain in your deck (and other game-state stuff) and allows you to focus on moving the game-state to your favor. Yeah, sure, there are 12 cards in your deck, and 12 cards in your opponent’s deck, people count 52 card decks in Black Jack for a living (or any other card game for that matter), so let’s use these crutches when they are available, you’ll thank me later, and *ahem* “What? Everyone’s using them!”. Exercising your brain and your memory is fine and should be done for the betterment of your health, but let’s focus on more important parts of your Marvel Snap matches if possible, there’s a lot of thinking and calculating to be done, trust me.
How to Get Best Decks for Infinite Rank in Marvel Snap
Oh boy, we’ve reached the infamous netdecking part of this guide. It’s inevitable, like Thanos, in every popular card game. You have a vicious meta cycle that goes something like this:
- New Cards, New Locations, Buffs, Nerfs, or any other relevant change that derails the current meta.
- Creative players find new ways to win and fine-tune their decks to provide the maximum consistency (best results).
- The community hears about these creative pioneers and clones their decks because if it works for them… why wouldn’t it work for everyone else?
- Some adaptations are made (tech cards, deck variants, etc.) and people start developing anti-meta decks to deal with the same old repetitive decks that everyone is becoming pissed off at slowly but surely.
- Meta is stale and “resolved” and people want changes. The developer adheres to the request and drops the hammer.
- Repeat from 1.
Marvel Snap Zone has probably one of the best Tier Lists, and it gets frequent updates enough to be deemed relevant. As far as I am concerned, I do not have Thanos yet, which is the only Tier S deck (he’s pinned in my Token Shop, but I fear they’ll nerf him by the time I gather enough Tokens) but my climb from 30 to 95 was done with a Shuri Deck (one of the two Tier 1 decks) and for my climb from 90 to 105 I used the Sera Control variant (the other Tier 1 deck at the moment).
Prima Games also makes frequent reports on the popular decks, with deck codes inserted for easy imports on your end and of course some tips related to it, so once again, I invite you to bookmark our Marvel Snap game tag located under this article.
But these cards are all expensive and I don’t have them, what can I do?
Related: When Did Spending Thousands of Dollars in Video Games Become the New Normal?
Save currency and spend it wisely. I advocate against becoming a paid user. Welcome Bundle is great, buy that, sure, perhaps a Season Pass when you feel you need that card right now. Please be aware that there are popular content creators that have spent literally thousands of U.S. Dollars on this game and they still do not have every card in existence. You can play the game as a free-to-play user pretty normally. You can have a semi-viable competitive deck with Pool 3 cards. There are a lot of Devil Dino success stories and there’s this Ongoing deck you can try. One of my best friends has a decent Collection and he didn’t even buy the Welcome Bundle, and he has all cards for a Tier 1 deck. And that’s for 160 hours of game time (I am at just under 500 now for the record).
Related: A Player Has Somehow Reached The Current Maximum Collection Level in Marvel Snap
Log in daily for your 50 Credits (oh no, FOMO mechanic) and do your Daily Quests (oh no, more FOMO mechanics). I recommend you save your Gold for bundles that provide Collector’s Tokens. You do not need Variants, Avatars, Titles and that other filler CRAP to win matches. Save your Collector’s Tokens for the most important cards. The shop is unique and random for every player, so you need to keep checking every 8 hours (oh WHEN will the FOMO mechanics stop???) to see what it offers to you (Second Dinner, please change this, it’s way out of line, and people are getting fed up with the terrible pace of getting new cards). Of course, when you see a card you need, pin it and wait patiently until you get enough Collector’s Tokens.
Be careful when investing in cards that seem just a bit too overpowered to be true. Nerf might be coming to them. Remember… No refunds! Just roam around the community a bit and see how the community feels about some stuff. That’s how Leader, Zabu, and Silver Surfer got nerfed. They were objectively way too powerful, and the community wreaked havoc online, demanding changes. In the current season, Thanos and Shuri are frowned upon, and they might get nerfed very fast!
Related: Zabu and Silver Surfer Have Finally Been Nerfed – How do I feel about this?
One more important thing about your deck choice is its consistency.
For example, you have decks that I would call monotonous. They do their thing consistently, and they reach their objective by the end of the match fairly easily, but they are predictable as hell. With Ultron decks, for example, you have the same match, over and over again. Drop random effect-less garbage filler, Drop Patriot. Drop Mystique elsewhere to clone Patriot. Drop Ka-Zar / Blue Marvel. Make it so that one Location has just one slot empty, and that one Location has a maximum of one card. Drop Ultron or Onslaught. Ta-da!
Good, now enjoy Enchantress, Cosmo, and Killmonger, and thank you for the free cubes mate.
Some Arnim Zola variants that win by cloning Black Panther or Devil Dinosaur on two other Locations are also predictable as hell and they sometimes get locked down by Professor X, Cosmo, and Armor… Those same cards can derail a Destroy deck and close out Deadpool, Nova, Venom, Carnage, Bucky Barnes, and Deathlok for example.
If you see your opponent playing Wave on Turn 3, it’s possible that they want to drop Galactus on an empty Location, or any other significant 5 or 6-Drop. If you can counter them there and then, you probably won the game. Most of these decks try to win one 4-Cube or 8-Cube match and then retreat or play a 2-Cube match in the next 5 matches.
Other decks are chaotic and unpredictable, but still fairly consistent. They are referred to as “High Roll” decks, where you sometimes get an absurd amount of Power, but most of the time, their performance is pretty average. You may bluff your way to victory by clicking the Snap button, but don’t get angry if your bluff gets called.
Opponents that do not know what this “chaotic” deck does do not know what to expect and you can get cubes from them on that count, perhaps. I lost one game to a random Cosmo on Turn 6 against a deck that has no business having Cosmo in there, but the opponent decided to be tech smart and he reaped his Cubes from me. Cosmo was the only thing that could stop my victory basically, and it was dropped on me.
Opponents that DO know what the deck does may play the odds game against you and count that you just simply won’t nail the “nuts” hand in their match, or will try to predict what you want to do, try to counter you… which oftentimes leads to hilarious results (like for example, random Gambit snipes that have less than 40% or even 20% of winning you the match).
So, to summarize: Consistent decks = Predictable, Inconsistent decks = Unpredictable. It’s all up to you and your style. I play both, depending on the mood. I even had a crazy and convoluted deck that not many players were aware of, which included Lady Sif, Ghost Rider, Giganto + Infinaut for discard fodder, and Zabu with some support cards such as Spider-Man, Shang-Chi, Dracula. That was, if I may add, controlled chaos with pretty much-known results from my perspective, and with this element of surprise I climbed to rank 94 during the Zabu season. Then, sadly some failures got into my head and I tilted down to 74 and never came back up, or else these guides would already be live. Marvel Snap is a mental game and I will dedicate an entire sub-article to it because obviously, having the right deck and knowing the game mechanics is not even remotely a sufficient skillset to reach the Infinite rank in Marvel Snap. Now that we’ve set your goals for the deck to build and that we’ve equipped you with companion apps: See you in the next article.
Published: Mar 20, 2023 11:48 am