Fuck Galactus
Delete the card
That is all
Spent all weekend dropping about 6 levels and getting closer and closer to uninstalling from my phone. I was trying to get my last seasonal mission of Win with 40* Points. My primary Darkhawk deck kept winning, but only in the mid 30s at best. So I looked and found a Lockjaw deck that supposedly allows for very high scores (or very low if shit goes wrong). But I didn’t care about losing just getting a few 40+ point wins. But either I’d get over 40 points and Galactus would drop in and fuck me. Or some other goofy play would either beat me or more often drop my points below 40 even though I’d still win.
Shit lanes that would limit playing on them were par for the course (I think Bar with No Name or another annoying “you don’t get to play” lane was the daily lane on Saturday). I saw almost no Shang Chi or Enchantress all last week when I was on my Darkhawk deck, but on Friday when I eventually moved to Lockjaw those bastard cards were constant and just fucking up my lanes/cards.
Usually, I have a few Seasonal Missions like this where I just can’t get whatever bs it’s asking for a while, but this one was the worst and damn near broke me.
So Friday I was at rank 99,5, when the featured Bar With No Name came up. And man, it seems like all the other negative locations got cranked too. So much Rickety Bridge or Lamentis there.
And I have the worst luck. Despite picking decks good for the featured locations, I just could not draw what I needed. During the featured Kamar Taj, I was running a Hazmat-Gambit deck, which was a good call because it should work well. But I just could not for the life of me ever draw my cards. While every match my opponent always did. Super frustrating. Then every other deck after that was Galactus. I dropped all the way to 91.
Galactus really sucks and I legit hate it. Even if you can read it, and have the cards to counter it, you can still just lose. Thing is it encourages you to not play the game. Actually playing makes it worse, because it feeds Knull. Because good luck having less than 2 power in any lane if you are actually playing the game. Plus even if you can read Galactus, and have the cards to counter him, stupid turn 4 Doc Ock comes out and probably pulls your counter cards. So even if you can hold your Cosmo and Shang Chi and She Hulk, knowing Galactus is up, Ock pulls them and you now have no counter, and their Knull got bigger.
It’s just a bad card. Unfun. And it’s been like 40% of my matches the last day. And even though it has counters, Doc Ock just means you don’t get to play them.
that seems nice. I have a fun Bast/Hit Monkey deck I named Bast Monkey, but still having great luck riding Sandman this season. So many current decks love to slap a ton of cards down, I get a lot of value snapping and sandman on turn 4.
So from series 4 I’m missing:
- Sauron
- Dazzler
- Sentry
- Shadow King
- Shanna
- Shuri
- Super Skrull
From series 5 I’m missing everyone currently:
- Thanos
- Master Mold
- Galactus
- Stature
- Kitty Pryde (whose been temporarily removed from the game because she didn’t work right)
- Ghost
- Kang
- Negasonic Teenage Warhead
I’ve got 5000 tokens now, so getting close to being able to afford a series 5, but who should I get?
I don’t actually want Thanos, Shuri, or Galactus, kind of on principle. I’d prefer someone who’s seems both useful and versatile like Kitty Pryde, though she’s off the table for now.
Here’s the schedule for what’s upcoming, along with the planned “series drop” schedule when cards are downgraded to a lower series.
Am I crazy for thinking Jeff the Baby Landshark might be fun to get later this month?
My highest rank has been 69, I’m at CL3660 and my last two cards before being Series 3 complete are Drax and Destroyer.
Below is who I’m missing for Series 4 and 5:
With that in mind, some random thoughts!
I haven’t run Sentry since today’s OTA, but ways to work around his big downside are:
Carnage
Deathlok
Valkyrie
Viper
Fill up your right lane before dropping him
I like running Super-Skrull in my Patriot deck and sometimes my Cerebro decks – especially if I’m in a mirror match. The main thing is to really pay attention to your opponent’s Ongoing, as Super-Skrull has them too but not their visual effects. I’ve had an opponent drop a Super-Skrull while playing Destroy and they did not realize their Super-Skrull copied my Armor to make their deck completely useless (I had dropped Armor earlier, and the third lane was Wakanda!).
I recently bought Thanos for 6K tokens, as I was leaning towards “get the three big bads because they will never drop price.” I already have Galactus. I currently have 2100 tokens and have Kitty Pryde pinned, as I’m a fan of her character in general AND I think I would have more fun with her than with Kang, but by the time I have 6K tokens again, I’ll see where things are at with those cards.
I would say Thanos fits your definition of “useful and versatile,” as I rarely run Thanos himself. I like using the Stones – a lot of my wins are “Thanos without Thanos.”
By comparison, I got Galactus free from a reserve but A) I don’t have Knull or Destroyer and B) he is so telegraphed that even when I can pull him off and get the full KNEEL BEFORE GALACTUS, it’s not that fun/fulfilling.
I feel like Galactus requires specific and braindead plays that are optimized for Galactus, and to an extent, Shuri also follows a very specific and braindead formula (Armor, Cosmo, Shuri, Red Skull, Taskmaster).
Meanwhile, I feel less that I’m running a Thanos deck, and more that I’m running an Ongoing or a Bounce or a Death Wave that happens to have Thanos in the deck.
Also, I literally got Thanos from the token shop a day after the Quinjet nerf, so I didn’t even get to abuse the Thanos Lockjaw deck.
EDIT: I also think Jeff and High Evolutionary will be hella fun cards.
Jeff looks a blast. The other one I have tabs on is High Evolutionary, which looks crazy.
But for me I have 7k tokens and am waiting for Kitty to come back. That is as soon as I see it buy, especially since I got the Hit Monkey season pass.
Kang would be the obvous fit for your criteria. It’s certainly versatile due to fitting anywhere, has a powerful ability that’s useful in a high proportion of games, and is an efficient purchase due to “never” going down in price.
But honestly, I can’t recommend it in practice. It’s just not a very fun card to play, and it had a much lower impact on my cube gains than I expected. Turns out I’m now good enough at figuring out if I’m beat that it wasn’t avoiding me that many losses, and in the games I feel good about, knowing the opponent’s best plan turned out to just not be that big a deal. So the gains were mostly from being able to bluff snap one round 6 for +1 instead of -1 cubes.
My personal thinking is to wait to see what the Shuri nerf actually looks like, and then decide between Kitty Pryde and Negasonic. If Shuri no longer needs countering, then Negasonic is a lot less appealing.
There are ways of playing Galactus that don’t feel as one-dimensional. I had a good time with this last season:
Doesn’t depend on cheating Galactus out early (in fact, you don’t want to), and can finish with etiher Galactus or Destroyer depending on the opponent and the locations. Kang is totally optional, could see Adam Warlock, Armor or Dr. Octopus working in that slot and giving very different flavors to the deck.
Missing Kang and Shuri. I think Doc Ock is too obvious, so maybe Adam Warlock and Armor as the two subs? Or Armor plus a ramp option (Electro, Psylocke, Wave), but ramping to play Nimrod and/or Destroyer.
Doc Ock may be super obvious, but he’s also so obvious because he works so well. It can completely remove any agency from your opponent. It’s one of the reasons I hate Galactus. It is completely possible to read it correctly, have the correct cards in hand to negate or beat Galactus, and Doc Ock says ‘fuck you, lose anyhow’.
It is such a boring and annoying deck to face, and face so frequently. Any deck that punishes you for playing the game (by powering up Knull for example) or prevents you from playing at all (Wave 3, Galactus 4, Doc Ock 5, look free turn 6!) sucks and is bad and shouldn’t exist.
Fuck Galactus
I’m pretty sure this is a genre of slashfic.
I’m still slowly crawling out of the 30s this season so it’s not like every match is against the game’s finest, but this was a fun 8 cubes. I snapped around turn three, I think. I bounced a lot back into my hand from Beast in the left lane. Starting turn 5, I only had Beast in the left lane and a 5-power Bishop in middle, they had their Wave, Jubilee, and Chavez in left. I don’t know why they snapped back, during turn 5 locking down the left lane was hardly reason to be confident.
But it was just fun to see how much this ostensibly Hit-Monkey based deck can dump out in one turn, even without the titular monkey. I guess this sort of thing was always an option with bounce decks, I just never played one.
So okay, my turn 5 was a 5/3 Iron Man in left (thanks to Bast) which lost me the lane to Professor X, but still kept it close. And with 8 cubes on the line and one lane lost maybe I would’ve played more carefully (retreating) against someone who seemed to have a plan, but hey, this guy Waves on turn 2 thanks to Tinkerer’s Workshop which just wasted turn three for both of us with 3 energy and all our cards costing 4. So I figured I’d play it out. I’d suspect it was a bot (with that boneheaded Wave play) except their snap-back didn’t feel right for a bot, but it certainly could have been.
Throwing 13 more mid and 14 left on one turn was fun. Not a battle of wits, just fun learning the strengths of a new deck type.
I swear to god I have the worst RNG luck possible. In the last two days I’ve had Scarlet Witch change a location to Rickety Bridge 3 times, Mindscape, Dream Dimension, Necrosha, and Murderworld twice.
Do you know how many times I got a positive location? None. And almost every single game has had two negative locations. So much Rickety Bridge, Plunder Castle, and Death Domain. I swear it feels like they have been turned up lately.
I haven’t played Scarlet Witch in months because of luck. I use Rhino or Storm instead
I just had Scarlet Witch change a location to [on reveal doesn’t work here] right as the opposition played Hazmat on Wong, so I enjoyed that rng.
When I run Scarlet Witch, it’s to change something later (like after turn 4) and with the intent of changing the location to just anything else (usually to change out like Limbo or Bar Sinister or something). Though, my location change card lately has usually been Storm, Rhino or the Reality Stone (SW but cheaper).
Yeah she’s in my Sera Monkey deck, and usually the plan is change a Likes Bar or Bar with no Name on turn 6, unless it’s something like Dream Dimension or Mindscape.
It’s just I literally had 3 games in a row yesterday where it changed it to literally the only possible location that would lose me the game. The worst was a game I played her on turn 6, was winning 2 lanes, and I played her for curve. I just needed her 3 power to guarantee a win there.
It changed it to the -3 location and I lost. Literally had it been Necrosha I still win there. But no.
Similar thing 3 games in a row. There were 1 or 2 possible locations that could lose for me, and invariably it chose those.
Based on the intense Galactus hate, I thought some might be amused at how I spotted the Galactus play while running my Patriot-Ultron deck that happened to have Debrii in it.
Note that after Debrii negated their badly telegraphed Galactus, they tried Doc Ock in a lane where I already had 3 cards in it, and the one card they grabbed was… Shang Chi.
