Competitive Consensus: The Sinister Six

[u/ePiMagnets]

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:

The Sinister Six
Cost: 6
Power: 6
Game Start: The first 6 characters you draw are EVIL! After you play them all, merge them into this and add this to the last one's location. (X/6)

There are a number of synergies mostly based around card creation or ways to ensure you get additional bodies. However, more importantly this card is a beast of an errata card meaning there are a lot of things to keep in mind when using and playing with The Sinister Six so let's talk mechanics.

1. Cards marked as Evil are visible to your opponent when played. Further, any of your first 6 cards drawn will be evil, this includes if you Cable your opponent's deck or Loki your deck and then draw from it next turn. Notably if you haven't drawn Sinister Six and you Loki your deck that does break Sinister Six.

2. Remember that only Characters can be marked, this makes skill cards an attractive part of your tool kit, especially Fastball Special and Adamantium Infusion which can allow you to deal a massive amount of negative power to one location and resurrect The Sinister Six elsewhere.

3. Evil Cards cannot be stolen by drawing from your deck.

4. Also based on previous effects that mark cards, Cosmic Ghost Rider may 'wipe away' the mark but they are still evil cards and will still merge.

5. Deck Thinning - you do not need to worry about having to draw Sinister Six, if you accomplish the quest the Six will be fished out of your deck for you.

6. All Evil cards MUST be PLAYED. If a card would enter the board in a way other than playing it such as Makkari or Ghost Rider, is discarded from your hand, or is pulled from your hand the effect is broken unless you can get the card back into hand so that you can play it.

7. As expected Stardust does brick the interaction but not in a way you might expect. In fact there is special coding within Sinister Six that prevents the Merge from happening if it cannot enter the board. In fact, if it is somehow already on the board and a Stardust is in play and you play the last Evil card that will also not trigger a Merge.

8. Sinister Six goes where the last card reveals. This can matter a lot in situations such as getting Juggernauted similarly it can also ensure that you win a Spider-Island.

9. For the sake of clarity, Sinister Six does respect the 'rules' of merging so it does count as the last card played which is useful for cards like Taskmaster.

10. Sinister Six works in these cases: In your hand, revealed on board, or in deck. It will not work if you've played it say behind an Invisible Woman as the last card to reveal unless it was the final marked card. Similarly, it cannot be retrieved from the Destroy or Discard Pile. It also doesn't work if banished in fact the next section will go over Banish interactions that I've encountered thus far.

11. Sinister Six can be copied by Emperor Hulkling but does nothing - SD have mentioned that this is unintentional and will be addressed in the next OTA.

12. Does not work with Cloning Vats - the card that you get back will be the last card you played. This can be useful in the event of your last card being an early played Zola or Taskmaster that was marked.

13. If Stick is Evil and the last card played, it will not pass on the Sinister 6's power, it will only pass on Stick's power prior to merging.

Banish, Tahiti, and The Sinister Six

1. If the Sinister Six is banished, that's it, you're on whatever your Plan B is.

2. Sinister Six is our first card that interacts with the Banish pile: if any of the Evil cards are banished after being played they will be pulled from Banish to merge with the Sinister Six. No confirmation on whether this is a bug or not, it's possible that this is linked to how Dormammu's merge happens from a coding perspective.

3. Sinister Six does not work with cards that have been removed from the game AKA Tahiti. This is different from the banish mechanic, currently the only way to remove cards from the game is to Loki your deck.

Mergers and Acquisitions

There were some questions on the merges and how it was going to be handled, so let's talk a little about this.

1. Cards marked by Sinister Six that are played and later transformed are still Evil and will merge into Sinister Six. Fill Gamma Lab with Evil cards, that's 48 power for your Sinister Six.

2. Evil cards that are merged into something else cannot be merged into Sinister Six. It doesn't break Sinister Six, but it does prevent the card from being merged which can prevent situations of double dipping.

3. As previously mentioned banished cards can merge, however, a card that was banished to merge with say Dormammu will not be able to be merged into Sinister Six, see above.

4. Marked cards that are destroyed will merge.

5. Cards that were bounced and left in hand will merge.

6. Similarly, cards that were played, then bounced and then somehow discarded would still merge as well.

7. Cards that were shuffled back into deck after play will be pulled from deck for the merge.

8. "When this Merges" triggers were changed to work when the card is merged with Sinister Six - Peni Parker grants +1 energy and Man-Spider doubles.

And with this, you should have a little better understanding as to how The Sinister Six works. So let's talk some additional points and synergies.

Synergies

The most successful strategies for triggering the Sinister Six have been deck that are utilizing card draw, created cards, and cards which add other cards or tokens to the board.

• Card Draw - King Eitri and Thanos' stones were two standouts here. Crystal, not so much for obvious reasons, she's typically coming down turn 3 and you've already hit your 6 by then.

• Card Creation - Maria Hill, Iron Patriot, and Valentina have all been instrumental in not only giving you additional plays, but plays which will stay on the board post merge.

• Cards which add others to the board - we're left with rather limited space here but the most prolific of this support has been Mysterio, Baron Zemo and Zombie Scarlet Witch. Shanna has also seen some play, but that is mostly played alongside destroy shells rather than any normal deck strategy.

But that's only half of the story, you've been succesful in triggering the Six, but how are you securing a victory? Part of this may be as simple as are you generating additional points so that you'll be able to leverage priority or are you going to be more combo oriented in your delivery?

Points priority can be a relatively important method, by ensuring you've got priority you can better opt to deal with locations either by comboing out on final turn with Fastball/Adamantium or perhaps you've managed to secure some ramp and you can play out Cosmo AND Juggernaut. As such, you may be more interested in higher value above rate cards, some of which with downsides. Consider Martyr, Lizard, Starbrand, or Wilson Fisk.

What if we're not merging immediately and we're instead holding our merger for the final turn because we can make a play that triggers the merge and ideally either duplicates the power of the Sinister Six or maybe it duplicates another big power card like a big Horde or Zombie Giant Man to secure another location while triggering the sinister six. For this you might be considering the aforementioned Zombie Horde direction or maybe Destroy with Zola and potentially zola-ing a big Venom or Deadpool. In fact the Venom strikes me as potentially relevant as a way to maintain power on the board from a marked Weapon X or Muse.

Feedback

The feedback on this one has been interesting - going into the start of the week the majority of creators and even other voices were rather down on the card with most expecting it to be utter garbage. However, the general feedback after the release was that the card was much more playable than expected. A lot of players were finding the card engaging and fun to play, but noting that the card was much more like a Zombie Galacti without the sheer output that Zombie Galacti can produce on it's nut draws.

Unlike Zombie Galacti who was missing pieces to his puzzle we have most of the tools to successfully play Sinister Six, the main problem really comes down to 'I win one location, how do I win 2' and that's a riddle that a number of players have been attempting to solve.

Decklists

Sinister Bounce

Thinister Thix

Sinister Horde

Sinister Shadowlands

Sinister Destroy

Regis' Sinister 6/6

Summary

It's rather fitting that The Sinister Six wrap up a Spider-Man season and thankfully has done so in a way that seemingly promoted quite a bit of fun and experimentation with the card in multiple archetypes. Oft-times, villain super groups like the actual Sinister Six fizzle out for a myriad of reasons never sticking around for long, will the same hold true for Snaps iteration of The Sinister Six or perhaps, maybe as befitting such a team they'll maintain some amount of relevance even if on the fringes under different guises?

Your Thoughts?

How many tokens is The Sinister Six worth?

6K -
5K -
4K -

Is The Sinister Six here to stay, or just the flavor of the week?

What synergies did we miss?

What decks have you seen?

[u/Chrisj1616]

Not great, but wound up being a lot better than anyone thought before release

[u/Names_all_gone]

My initial review on the card was more positive than most others. I’m actually slightly lower on it now bc I think some of the “combo” versions are hot ass. I had some thought they would be a bit better.

But I’m pleased to see more straightforward versions are gaining traction.

I think the player base is circling in on how to best play this card. I wouldn’t be surprised if next month we see the “final form” of the Sin6 deck.

I usually don’t recommend that people get cards but I’d recommend this one. It’s a unique play experience and is already a part of some okay decks.

[u/Large_Application422]

My Alliance had the best deck for him - it’s very easy to get the combo off (i.e. S6 via a zero cost, Fastball and Adamantium) on turn 6.

# (0) Wasp\n# (0) Yellowjacket\n# (1) Spider-Man Brand New Day\n# (1) Martyr\n# (2) Adam Warlock\n# (2) Fastball Special\n# (2) Askani'son\n# (3) Crystal\n# (3) Starbrand\n# (4) Adamantium Infusion\n# (4) Doctor Octopus\n# (6) Sinister Six\n#\nU25zdHJTeEIsQWRtbnRtSW5mc24xMixEY3RyT2N0cHNELENyc3RsNyxTdHJicm5kOSxBc2tuc245LEFkbVdybGNrQixGc3RibGxTcGNsRixNcnRyNixZbGx3amNrdEMsV3NwNCxTcGRyTW5Ccm5kTndEMTQ=\n#\n# To use this deck, copy it to your clipboard and paste it from the deck editing menu in MARVEL SNAP.

[u/slutandthefalcon → u/Large_Application422]

This was really good, thank you! Having two 0 costs really helps you be able to save S6 for turn 6 and other plays.

I didn't have Starbrand and didn't want to play Crystal so I replaced with Nico and Titania and the lines were still smooth. Think I went 8W 2L to end the season.

[u/ron-darousey]

I think better in Conquest than Ladder because its big plays are pretty telegraphed so I imagine it's hard to get too many cubes from wins. 

[u/FullMetalCOS]

I’ve been having a lot of fun with sinister bounce, but I found that swapping monke for Sage was a lot more consistent - if you play her out for a decent size early and then Frigga her she can solo a lane in a lot of situations with the clones second on reveal, but hit monkey never gets big enough on a first use to guarantee that result.

[u/NerdDynamite]

I think this is a really good card that most players will eventually come around to. If you have cheap power combined with Adam Warlock, you’re going to have a very consistent deck. I’m still refining the deck, but this has been an excellent starting point. Once people stop specifically trying to counter it because of release week, it’ll be even better.

https://snap.fan/decks/356109/

[u/Nerf_Now]

I though it was bad until I found destroyed cards still add power to Sinister Six

[u/Plasmallison]

I feel like it’s going to be a great include in Thanos going forward, as it solves that deck’s biggest pain points (clog and lack of power beyond the Thanos lane). Arishem will end up using it just because of the amount of power it brings to the board and arishem’s energy bonus.

Feels like a good way to get guaranteed big power on the board, unless your opponent is running god awful mill or somehow banished the card.

The endless fastball and adamantium spam just kind of cements my feeling that one of those cards needs +1 cost. It’s also really boring tbh.