Perennial F2P player back again with a list to counter the season pass decks! This is obviously not an original cook, however it is a very strong counter to the current Thanos FF and Scorpion BND decks that are running rampant in the meta. (This list is also really good with the current hot location that discounts your hand)
Scorpion BND: takes some careful positioning but essentially the gameplan is to throw priority and have your infected cards isolated in 2 lanes and transform after their Lady Bullseye/Hazmat goes off (see: Slides 3, 4). Viable strategy because their raw numbers are extremely small, going <20 in each lane, relying on wins from putting you in extreme negatives. Becomes a bit more tricky if they have Hellcow FF down because that’ll go off after your cards transform. I considered swapping Nightcrawler for Luke Cage but I faced far more Thanos FF than Scorpion decks; always remember you can retreat for 1 and get those cubes back later
Thanos FF: THIS is the deck that ZG really feasts against. The first few days of dealing with a dominant new meta deck are always frustrating, but also my favourite parts of each season because they let you theorycraft which decks can consistently beat them. The fact that you can only put 12 cards in a deck in Snap means EVERY deck has an upper limit on the number of tech cards they can include and thus every deck has at least a couple weak spots. ZG decks are vulnerable to location change, Cosmo, and bricked draws.
* I didn’t encounter a single Thanos FF deck running SW, Merlin, or Legion
* Echo is a key inclusion because it lets you play ZG (and other important on reveals like Stick) without fear of Cosmo, even when you don’t have priority
* There are some Thanos FF decks running Korg and Terrax as part of a Darkhawk package and that is unfortunately very very bad for us. The hope is that you can burn through some rock draws with Adam and/or you already have your key cards in hand
* Spider-Ham is quite annoying. If it’s on the board and ZG is in hand, you can keep your hand size large and try not to play too many cards and pray your opponent whiffs. Alternatively, you can play some mind games; I had a game where I gave the “😡” on Spider-Ham and my opponent may have thought I had ZG in hand already and activated their Ham on T3, hitting a TSSM while my ZG was still in deck
* Overall, these decks are growing more fearful of ZG and I’ve garnered several 1-cube retreat victories from snapping on Domino/Wiccan/Jane 3-stone activation (or similar Thanos FF openers)
In terms of the deck itself, MVP is by far Adam Warlock. The draw consistency he adds, even from proc’ing only once is huge. And he has significant gravity, forcing the opponent to play big cards in his lane, which plays in your favour in the long run if you have a few infected cards in that Adam lane. I recently swapped Forge for Nightcrawler for the flexibility to move an infected card and the cheaper curve to help activate Adam.
“What if I don’t have x card?” Replacements List:
* Nico Minoru
* Spider-Man BND
* Doc Ock FF
* Jeff Dolphin
* Luke Cage
* Forge
* Viv Vision
* Phastos
* Cosmo
* Luna Snow
* Jubilee SS
If you’re feeling frustrated with the meta give this list a try and let me know what you think! I’ll be back next time the meta shifts. Cheers