Speaker #0Hello! Can you understand me? Hello everyone, Kier here, and welcome to the InfiNOT Podcast. I'm focused on the casual nature of the game, and each week I discuss the new patch, the new card, and my feelings on the game. I am also a part of the Snap Judgements podcasting network, and I'm going to talk about... Snap on this, with two exclamation points. This is hosted by Lauren Whatevs, Ben Roller, and Rhi, and it is a fantastic podcast. Sorry if I sound a little disoriented, but genuinely, they are a very good listen. They talk a lot about the game and their experiences and what they're playing. They also have a lot of things to spice up the show, make it unique. They don't just talk about the news, they also talk about a lot of fun stuff. So definitely check that out if you're interested. Now, let's hop into it. Okay, so normally this week would be pretty boring. The only card to talk about is Elixir, and we don't have any updates or anything, but... There's going to be a segment at the end here where I'm going to talk about the Golden Gauntlet, my experiences watching it, and just the whole shebang. It is currently 11.06pm. I just finished hanging out in the Pulse Glazer watch party with Prashan, which was super fun. Let's get into the new card first, and then we'll talk about the Spotlight Variance returning, which... I'm not too happy about it. And then we'll talk about the Golden Goblet. I want to save the best for last. Okay, so let's talk Elixir. Elixir is a 2-3 that says, on reveal, one of your cards destroyed last turn gets revived here. So this card was datamined to be a 1-1 that was activated to revive the last card you destroyed. And apparently that was way too strong, and this is where they landed with it. and despite really liking the animation i like the character i think you know the effect is cool i'm gonna be skipping this card just because it's so so niche i do think that there's a use case for elixir um in like misery decks and i think there's also something to be said about um big card decks like starter decks using elixir as like a way to bring back something that's been shang chi'd That does have legitimate use. But. And like, it's just really restrictive right now on Snapfan. He's running a 44% win rate, which is really bad for a card. And obviously this is like a go big or go home sort of card. So that would be fine if he was getting a lot of cubes, but it doesn't seem like he's doing that either. So like this might be one of the big misses that they've had in a while. the saving grace of Elixir is that he's a 2-3 if he was anything less than a 2-3 i think putting him in a deck would be genuinely a bad use of your slot but i think because he is a 2-3 that's probably allowing him to go into decks that he wouldn't normally see um so for me i i don't know man i this might be like uh this might be the first one out of five that i give a card um in a very long time And I'm not even saying that he doesn't have use cases. It's just they're so niche. They're so rare. It's like, I don't know if it's worth spending your currency on it. And again, I like the character. And sometimes I can look past the way that the card is doing in order to invest in that. But I just can't do that with Elixir. Especially because he doesn't appeal to my type of gameplay, right? So yeah, that's what I got to say about Elixir. Just mediocre. Not the biggest fan of the card. Let me know, though, if you come up with something creative. The things that I'm seeing him in is, like, Misery. I have seen him in, like, a Sauron deck before, which was really funny. But, like, I'm not super convinced that he's the best. So, yeah, that's where I am. Okay, next thing to talk about is daily... Or, yeah, spotlight cards are returning. So, usually, when a card comes out... Right? The idea is they come with a spotlight card and, um, or a spotlight variant, rather, that adds some extra flair to it, makes you feel a little bit more exclusive. Um, and I thought that they would be returning with, uh, like, a new shop for it? Like, a specific section for the card of the week? And I also thought that it would be with tokens, right? Maybe like... 3,000 tokens for a spotlight variant. What we got instead was not great, in my opinion. They're just going to throw it into the shop for 2,400 gold, which is rough, dude. I don't love that personally. Like, let's not beat around the bush. 1200 gold is expensive, right? That's already expensive. You're already paying. You're already paying like close to 20 bucks if you just wanted to buy the gold for that. And if you wanted to buy the gold to get a spotlight variant, you would be paying $35, which is insane. That is like, can I justify? $10 to get 700 gold. Maybe. Right? Maybe if I really enjoy that card, I play it a lot, and the variant is cool. Sure. But that is so, so expensive for the massive majority of people. I can buy several games on Steam for the same price that this is asking me to pay for a spotlight variant, which is, it's rough. I don't know if I love that. Now, maybe that's the idea, right? It's just for whales, which is fine. That's not what it used to be, right? Like, I don't get gold by using my collection track. And I've purposely sacrificed some cards in return for spotlight variants. Because it's something that I enjoy, right? I can't do that now, which is a bit of a shame. I really hope that they end up changing this. Another thing that annoys me right now is the shop has only 8 spots. And it's not 9 spots, right? Because that premium mystery variant, which who's buying that by the way? That's already taking up a slot like I don't know man I think they need to redo that whole thing, but not my favorite change. Let's Finally talk about the golden gauntlet. Okay, so this tournament is huge hundreds of players in it tons of content creators and I just finished watching it with um the snap judgments league discord and let me tell you dude this whole tournament was wild the first thing to note is like over 50 i think of decks were thanos which was sort of be expected but again it leads to the idea hey maybe this card is a problem in the top eight half of the top eight were Thanos, again. That's a problem, and it went up until the very last game, which I'll talk about momentarily. But Thanos, man, I just, I'm praying that next OTA, which is coming at the end of this month, will finally just get rid of this thing. Part of me has been reconciling with, like, why I hate it so much, why I really just don't like playing against it, and I'll ad- admit right here i i've basically stopped playing ladder um i'm doing a lot of conquests right now and a large part of that is a lot of the the decks that i make for fun just they can't do anything against thanos um having the reality stone at one cost means that a lot of location variants can change on a whim uh because they have things like mockingbird and thanos in the deck They don't need to throw a lot of big cards in there, so they have lots of room for tech. And I think we need to get over the idea that having the stones is a downside. They're all upside. All of it is upside, right? And it's even further progressed by the idea that they give you draw. Part of the reason that Agamotto is not running over the meta right now is because his spells don't draw more cards, right? Thanos' stones do. So... Beyond just like how the tournament experience was, seeing this much Thanos has just cemented in my mind that it's a problem and he needs to go. He needs to be axed. I don't care. I've heard some people say that Thanos is good for the game and they'd much rather see this than other decks. I can understand that perspective, just not for me. It just completely squashes all of the things that I like playing and they have tech for everything. Like, trying to attack a Thanos deck is so, so hard. Even with Dark Hawk, you lose because of Shang-Chi or Enchantress or, um, Alioth or whatever. They can just fit it all in, um, without a lot of consequence. So, that's where I'm at right now with Thanos. How was the extra tournament experience? It was great. I didn't get to watch the whole thing. It ran for, um, I want to say close to, like, 11 or 12 hours. Um. But I did get to watch about four hours of it. I watched a little bit of the beginning and then I stuck around for top eight and above. It was really exciting. I really, really enjoyed it. And I'll talk about the top four in a moment here, but you should know something about me. I'm not, like, a tournament analysis guy, right? I would actually highly recommend, if you want to get the deets on this kind of stuff, to check out Pulse Glazer with Snap Judgments. I'm sure he's going to post a million videos about it. Also, shoutout to KM Best. I'm sure he's also going to talk a lot about it. But uh, but yeah, so with the whole tournament was was really really fun to watch and i i'm i'm like i'm so blown away because this seems so natural for snap like the feeling i'm i have right now of like getting rallied together with the community to watch some people play snap um under some high pressure it's like it's so invigorating i i love it i love this feeling um especially in that watch party uh where i was you know i got to chat with some other people And, you know, we were all watching it at the same time and seeing the big reactions and stuff. Just super, super fun. I'm like, I have to know why they don't do this that often. I really, really hope that this tournament showed them that there is interest. At the very least, I hope that it showed them that people do want to see an officially supported Snap tournament. And the best part is, it doesn't really cost them that much. They don't have to shell out cash, right? The top prizes for this were currency in-game with some exclusive titles, a bunch of tokens. First place got 30,000 tokens to be exact, which is insane. But they're losing some virtual money. Maybe those people were going to buy that stuff, but it really doesn't come out of their pockets, right? It's not like an out-of-pocket expense. So I would really, really hope that this happens some more on the official Marvel Snap Twitch channel. um huge shout out by the way to uh the guys that set this up it was a collaboration between um quite a few content creators um and some people who have been in the community for a while like gunny t super tech god km best it's guest gaming and if i'm forgetting anyone i apologize but those guys coming together to make this tournament happen is um genuinely a joy so a huge shout out to those guys it was it genuinely super, super fun. If I seem all over the place, it's because again, I, it is late. I have just got off of watching a lot of snap. It, I hope that I get to feel this again. Let's, let's get down to brass tacks though. What were the decks being used? Who was in the top of the top? I'll probably just talk about the top four. Um, just because I think it has some of my favorites in there. Okay. So I have the list of, uh, top contenders here and, uh, In the top four, after a ton of games, again, shout out to everybody who participated. There were some legitimately really cool decks that I saw, especially on the earlier pools. But we have Derek Naka, a Japanese player, but which is a crowd favorite, and Sizer, a really good player. So watching the top four was genuinely really, really, really fun. I think there were a lot of um like nail biter decisions they were really good at at snapping um i want to talk about but for a moment here because he was my champ okay but was running a an emperor hulkling pixie deck and you know what's crazy is this is the deck that i've been playing in conquest um not this deck exactly i think his is actually much better than mine but but it's the same idea Which is super, super cool. I mean, you guys know I'm a huge fan of Hulkling. I've been really championing the card for a while. I think Butt showed off the best of Emperor Hulkling in this tournament. Really, really fun to watch. Again, I won't be reading the full list or anything like that. But the idea was that you had some top end with Emperor Hulkling and Magneto. He had Uncle Ben in here with Killmonger, which is smart. because if you're going against a lot of Thanos, especially the ongoing kind, having Killmonger with a payoff with Uncle Ben is actually a really good idea. And then you had some just sort of regular good cards in here, some tech, that kind of thing. So really, really fun to watch. I really enjoyed watching that. Sizer was also in the top four, and he was running a move bounce list, and watching him play that deck makes me feel so, so dumb, but genuinely really fun. You had, you know, Frigga and Beast at the highest cost to copy and bounce stuff. You also had Toxin, of course, and a bunch of different move cards. I was happy to see Iron Fist in here. I've seen Iron Fist getting cut from a lot of lists, but... In this deck, I think he was used to a really great effect. So yeah, you get your Dagger and your Vulture very big. He also had Sage in here, which came in clutch quite a few times, because even just doing something as simple as Sage into Frigga can get two lanes to a pretty big number. So that was a really enjoyable watch. Now, the villain of the top four was Naka, who was running your very stock standard tech. uh thanos list so they had thanos they had mockingbird uh they had a bunch of tech cards red guardian change the enchantress and then you had the strange supreme the only like spicy thing in this list was loki um which they really had a tendency to play at the wrong time um i've noticed but uh as a player i think that they they proved themselves without you know necessarily leaning on the deck all that much. Um, but it, you know, it's hard to deny, like a lot of the games where they won, they just like bullied out with big numbers, right? Again, you have that Thanos and Mockingbird at the top end, and then you have so much tech to take, take care of a lot of other decks. Um, so that was, uh, the, the big bad guy of the tournament and, uh, the ultimate winner of the tournament and undefeated, by the way, didn't drop a single one of his games throughout the entire tournament. was Derek, who was running a regular old bounce list. You have things like Hood, Rocket Raccoon, Silver Sable. You bounce those with Beast and Falcon. And then you have an Iron Man in here to really push over the top of certain lanes. He also had Bishop in here, which is like, again, this is like classic bounce. It's kind of crazy. You would expect with all these new cards coming out that he might opt for something a little more explosive, but it really paid off in this tournament. He did a really great job, and watching him play again makes me feel super dumb. He's a very smart, very good player. So all of these guys duked it out in the top four. Ultimately, what we ended up with is Derek at first, Naka second. Butt at three, and Sizer at four. And I think they all did incredible, but Derek has clearly proven himself to be an extremely, extremely smart player, so kudos to him. This whole tournament was a joy to watch, and I genuinely hope that we get to see more of this. If you have not checked it out, please, please, go support the people who are a part of the tournament. Go check out the stream. The VOD is still up. I have no idea if they're going to make a YouTube video on the tournament or not. But if they do, if we can prove to Second Dinner this is something that we want to watch, we can have more tournaments, we can have more hype, we can bring people into this community that haven't been here before. It makes me really hopeful for things. I genuinely get to feel a lot of excitement when tournaments are happening. In totality, that's everything. I know that was a bit of a rambly one, but... I'm just like I'm so hopped up I'm not I feel like I just drank you know 14 sodas I'm just like so jittery um this is this is a lot of fun as a little reminder uh I am posting on YouTube again some Marvel Snap content and I stream once a week on Wednesdays at 7 or 7 30 p.m EST uh if you have not checked me out there please do uh I'd appreciate a like or a comment on those videos um and if there's one thing that you can remember It's that I'm Infinite. Thanks for listening.
