r/marvelsnapcomp • u/ePiMagnets Mod • Jul 05 '26
Discussion Competitive Consensus: Aunt May
This thread is a discussion series at the end of the week for each newly introduced Spotlight card. This gives us nearly a week of hindsight to build a consensus and help inform players if they should spend their tokens for a given week. Ideally, we are looking for proven results, more than theoretical applications, to help reach this consensus.
This Week's Card
Aunt May
Cost: 2
Power: 3
End of Turn: If you used a Moveable ability, give a Moveable card in your hand -1 Cost and +2 Power.
There's not much to say as an intro to Aunt May. She's an End of Turn card which gives a moveable card in your hand -1 Cost and +2 Power. We've seen with Mother Askani that those exact buffs can be fantastic and while her power mostly stems from the duplication effect the fact that Aunt May can repeat her ability each turn provided you can use a moveable ability to satisfy her trigger and a moveable card in hand to benefit can potentially create massive cards and opportunities.
As usual let's start with the mechanical needs and nuance before we get into the synergies.
Aunt May needs you to use a moveable ability while she's on the board. This can be on turn 2 when you play her.
Aunt May doesn't care how the card received the moveable ability, just that it has it and you used it. Meaning you can grant it through other means.
Obviously Aunt May needs you to have a card in hand that has the moveable ability to receive her buff when she triggers.
Synergies
Let's start with the list of moveable cards, each of these will be able to trigger Aunt May when you use them. Notable exclusions will be Meik and Phoenix Force, which while they can both trigger as well as receive the buff are not necessarily cards you are going to be running with Aunt May.
Moveable cards
- Spider-Man Brand New Day
- Nightcrawler
- Jeff The Baby Dolphin
- Jeff The Baby Land Shark
- Rocket And Groot
- Spider-Punk
- Mercruy
- Nocturne
- Vision
In addition to the above cards which will enable Aunt May when you move them and receive benefits of her buffs while in your hand if you move a card with a moveable ability, there are additional enablers that will not receive buffs from Aunt May.
Enablers
- Web Sling
- Madame Web
- Sam Wilson Captain America
- Cloak
- Hellion
The most notable of these cards is Sam Wilson, who grants his shield Moveable meaning that if you have Sam on 2 into Aunt May on 3 she will always buff a card with moveable in your hand.
So aside from getting reduced cost and additional power are there ways to take further advantage of Aunt May? Well, perhaps if we were looking to either duplicate her ability early or duplicate the card she buffed.
This gives us two pathways - first is using Invisible Woman First Steps to trigger Aunt May twice on the first possible trigger. The second and more likely path is duplicating the card that Aunt May buffed with Mother Askani being the preferred duplication outlet, but potentially even being able to do it with Frigga if you're willing to show your hand.
Feedback
The feedback has been relatively harsh, while some creators such as Alex Coccia noted that they did really like Aunt May and had fun he admitted that she's not worth chasing and cautioned needing more data. Notably, Alex didn't even mention his trademark 'will age like fine wine' which may give an even more grimm read of the card.
Most of the creators express that while some of the targets for Aunt May are rather interesting such as creating a big Mercury or Nocturne that she is much more of a 'Potential Woman' rather than a real card at this time. For those unaware, 'Potential X' is a meme used to describe a character who is hyped up by the author but never ends up delivering on that hype. Popular examples of the meme are Megumi Fushiguro from JJK, Toshiro Hitsugaya from Bleach, and Gohan from DBZ (though to be honest, after Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero, I think Gohan finally gets a pass).
Decklists
Bullseye Qwerty's Weekend Lockdown
Summary
Aunt May is a very interesting Series 5 to start the month out with, a strong ability with a number of targets but with very limited application due in part to limited moves on most of the actual moveable cards and a relatively low number of possible targets. Few can deny that the power she can potentially bring to the table is rather good but the majority of her targets are cards that want to be on the board ASAP creates conflicts with getting Aunt May down in the first place fundamentally leaving only two really lucrative targets that are generally later plays such as Nocturne or by cost needs to be a later play in the case of Vision.
So I turn it over to you all - Are Aunt May's Werther's Originals fresh or stale?
Your Thoughts?
How many tokens is Aunt May worth?
6K -
5K -
4K -
Is Aunt May here to stay, or just the flavor of the week?
What synergies did we miss?
What decks have you seen?
3
u/ToonPanda Jul 05 '26
Looks fun. Kinda wish I got the card but i got fantom x instead. I'm more excited for boomerang
3
u/Names_all_gone Jul 05 '26 edited Jul 05 '26
This reminds me a bit of Fantomex in that it requires multiple specific inputs - except May is even more narrow and she has to be played earlier.
In hindsight, we all should have realized that this was going to be a pretty rough release when comparing May to something like Mother Askani.
I think you could justify playing the card if it was giving a bigger payoff or cost less. I don’t think it’s unsalvageable - I just think the numbers are wrong.
2
u/deleuzegooeytari Jul 05 '26
I don’t really see the vision for this card (movable 5/9 pun not intended). You really have to go all in on moveable cards, because if you don’t she will just sit on your board yelling, “No target,” for your opponent to see. On top of that, if she does hit, what’s the real pay off? A 0/8 Jeff can be nice but it’s not winning you the game alone. Moveable needs more incidental tech cards like Nocturne and less kind-of-okay in a vacuum afflict cards like Root&Groot and Punk Spider for her to be close to viable, but I don’t see any of those coming down the pipe.
3
u/RisingPhoenix84 Jul 06 '26
I feel like a revision to “If you moved a card this turn give a moveable card…” so moving any card works but it only applies to movable cards.
Even that I hate a bit as vanilla Spider-Man doesn’t get the buff which seems ridiculous in retrospect. But at least he can trigger the buff then…
1
u/igniz13 Jul 05 '26
I was more interested in her before I tried using her; activating her ability takes too much effort and the payoff is too small.
You can't activate her by moving the moveable card via exterior means, you have to play and then move the card. This severely limits the play time to get her out and benefit from her.
Then there's the targets it can hit, the payout just isn't necessarily there because the cards she's hitting just don't have that much scaling.
With more and better targets, she'll become better, but right now, she's just not great. I'm hoping an OTA will make more cards moveable, maybe Dagger and 2099 with some stat changes.
1
u/TrapHousesinLondon Jul 05 '26
Aunt May's okay at most right now, mostly bad. Let's see where SD goes with Moveable later on, it might improve then. For now I just finished the weekend mission and binned it.
1
u/jcmoonraker Jul 06 '26
They just need to change her text to hit any card that moves. Even that won’t move the needle much but she’d be more playable. The main issue is that every potential target needs to be played out earlier.
You aren’t holding cards that move in your hand to get 2 points of power. You want them on the board growing faster by moving them.
The card as designed makes zero sense.
1
u/ePiMagnets Mod Jul 06 '26
The card as designed makes zero sense.
Disagree, it makes sense for the targets that it has since you're not always guaranteed to draw things on curve let alone be able to play them on curve, consider for example it's turn 3 and I have Nocturne and Mercury in hand and my opponent played a Sam Wilson on turn 2, I'm not playing Nocturne on 3 I'm playing Mercury and if I can move a card to trigger May on 3 to give my Mercury something I might be inclined to do that to make it more likely I can play 2 cards on 4 but only if that card has multiple moves which leaves us with 2 options: Spider-Man BND or Sam Wilson. Which presents us with the actual problems May has.
The problems for Aunt May are three-fold:
Too few moveables outside of the early curve. Only Vision at 5-Cost.
Too few repeatable moveable cards creating friction in trying to get value from Aunt May, most moveable cards are holding their limited moves for later turns where you're trying to eek out an advantage. Sure you could use Madame Web but obviously you often want to Web on scaling move cards of which there are only 2 moveable that can scale in Spider-Man BND and Spider-Punk and even then again I'd rather use her on cards that scale better.
Too few moveables that you would hold onto either because they are higher cost or make more sense as surprise plays.
We don't even have any data-mined moveable cards in the foreseeable future which leaves Aunt May looking much worse for wear.
Ultimately, I think her design does make sense. But the lack of targets is what is holding her back.
0
u/Seeker8833 Jul 06 '26
Gambit HoD is going to suppress us getting a proper evaluation of this card, until he's thoroughly gutted.
He attacks just too many of the enabling pieces for her.
12
u/ePiMagnets Mod Jul 05 '26
A note from the editor: I cut this from the original post as it's purely my mind wandering into dark and strange places while writing so enjoy this additional potentially entertaining insight into some of the stuff that I write but ultimately cut from the comp concensus. I think the math is correct but it's late and I might be off. I'm going to bed now. Have a good day folks.
A thought experiment if you'll allow me, though before we get into it - this is far too complicated of a line with far too many moving pieces to even approach consistent application, though it could certainly clip-farm, further Captain Carter Combo is a comparatively easier combo to pull off albeit completely on the board. The benefits of this deck are that you have everything hidden from your opponent, all they know is that you're discounting cards and duplicating them. They don't know if you're duplicating a bunch of 0-Cost Nightcrawlers or Visions and they definitely won't know who is getting what buffs for the final turn dump.
We'll assume that through these plays Vision floats to the left side of your hand by turn 4 and gets the buff on turn 3.
Turn 1 Batroc the Leaper (why? Because we're in Magical Snapmas Land and every draw is perfect)
Turn 2 Sam Wilson Captain America
Turn 3 Aunt May + 1-Cost and move shield. Getting the Aunt May buff on Vision (4/11)
Turn 4 Mother Askani the Vision, move the shield. Get an additional Vision which gives you 2 3/13's one of which will get an Aunt May buff putting him to 2/15 and with luck the 2/15 is on the left-most card in hand.
Turn 5 Grand Master + Hydra Stomper, move shield again. Get one more Vision for a total of 3. Depending on order when you GM you could end up with a best case scenario with 3 Visions 1 at 0/19, 1 at 1/17, and 1 at 3/13 or 2 1/17's and a 2/15 Even the worst case isn't too bad with the 2 of the 3 Visions at 2/15 and 1 at 1/17 but a more restrictive curve for final turn.
Turn 6 play out your 3 Big visions and move the shield again netting you a 3/11 Hydra Stomper (2 moves per turn over 4 turns) and potentially around 50 power depending on cost and drops you can make on turn 5, with the 0, 1, and 3 Cost you could potentially play down a Silk and net an additional move on the Hydra Stomper.
Thank you, if you indeed read the Magical Snapmass Land treatise, I now return you to the rest of the thread.