The Inversion: Decks & Tips for the New Card
In their attempt to stop Red Onslaught's rampage, The Scarlet Witch and Doctor Doom accidentally unleashed a powerful spell, inverting the morality of the world's super-beings. Good is bad, evil is friendly, up is down! Chaos! Our Inversion spell, the latest stand-alone Skill card in Marvel Snap flips Power and can be used offensively or defensively! It's available through the revamped Draft mode that will run from September 28 to October 12. Here is everything I'm excited to try with The Inversion!
There are two primary ways to use The Inversion: as a Shang Chi-style lane winner, or as a way to flip your own negative cards to mitigate downsides and gain some free-ish Power!
Winning Scenarios
If your opponent has a single, giant card in a lane, you can flip the lane from a loss to a win for just 3 Energy! Of course, there are some complicating factors. First, your opponent needs to have a single large card in a vulnerable position – something that is increasingly uncommon in the era of Thanos Fractured Frontier's Soul Shot. Second, you will need to leave the lane clear, which can mean pinning all your hopes on The Inversion coming through and winning the lane. If you have priority (your cards are revealing first), you can be more certain of a good hit. This means any deck trying to play The Inversion for this kind of defensive interaction will need to be an up-tempo deck that gets good ratio bodies on the board – not something a deck relying on self-banishing Skills generally does well.
Juicy Targets
This scenario will really be more one of opportunity, as opposed to something you rely on as a consistent win condition. How big of an opposing card do you need to flip for the Inversion to feel worth it? For 3-Energy, you're really hoping to hit something of at least 6 Power, preferably higher. That won't be especially common. Some smaller targets like Captain Carter will have outsized impact, too. The release of The Inversion does mean, however, that when we next find ourselves in a future meta where there is a big card people are trying to solo lanes with, we have a powerful 3-Cost answer in our collections. Bear in mind, she'll also flip several cards of the same Power, so a lane full of Broods will be a fun sight.
Proactive Targets
Of course, putting a 3-Cost Skill in your deck just because it may have a good target once in a while isn't particularly wise. Like a lot of interactive cards, we need to bake uses for them into our deck for them to justify their inclusion game in and game out, rather than just occasionally.
The immediate targets that spring to mind are Sentry's Void and The Hood. The Inversion joins cards that can mitigate the downsides of these cards like Merlin's Polymorph and Once & Future, Sersi, Annihilus, and Valkyrie. Since we already have so many cards that interact with these, the main question about The Inversion is if it's strong enough to replace any of these or elevate the decks these cards are found in enough to be worth the effort. The Inversion can be a fun way to ensure you have a target for Viper, even in games where you don't draw your Hood or Sentry. Viper is the main shenanigans combo with The Inversion and I expect the clip-farmers and combo-lovers to come up with some fun ideas with the pair.
These clogging cards interact in a pretty fun way with The Inversion. Not only does the inversion act as a perfect defense against these cards if they ever regain prominence, it can actually work quite well alongside the cloggers. How? Part of the difficulty of playing clog is that you occasionally need to take a risk and try to squeeze a Goblin or Arrow into a lane, not knowing if your opponent will fill that turn. We could play Daredevil. Or we could play The Inversion to make those risky send-overs more risk-free. Plus, we get the other benefits of The Inversion with the Hood and Void.
Scosco’s Day One Inversion Decks
Wolf Scratch
If you pick up Scarlet Witch, Queen of Chaos tomorrow, you can build this clogging Wolf deck that has tons of options to get rid of the Void.
All Inverted
Inversion gives us a solid 3rd option to turn The Void and Hood into positive Power. Pixie allows us to be explosive and unpredictable.
Selene's Grand Plan
Goblins and the Inversion give us a few alternate win conditions – in addition to some hilarious Destroyer lines.
Is It Worth It?
I imagine most people won't have an issue playing enough Draft mode to get this card, so it will be essentially free for most of you. If you happen to hate draft or have a family vacation scheduled for the next two weeks, I wouldn't worry about it too much. The card has some uses, but it's narrow and has serious flop potential. It will be fun to play around with for those who like this style of deck, and there is a chance it could become an important tech piece in the future, but you can always happily live without it or grab it later. One thing to note is that Scarlet Witch, Queen of Chaos comes out the next day, and The Inversion is in her set of "extremely random skills." For a lot of players, she'll be available as a purchase before they unlock The Inversion in the LTGM.
Scarlet Witch comes out on Tuesday. Be sure to check back tomorrow for my extensive preview of that card with a bunch of fun decks! Plus, plenty of upcoming Draft coverage!
Once enough data accumulates, check out the best-performing homes for The Inversion over on SnapComplete. As always, special thanks to SnapComplete for card and deck art found throughout this article.
