Cards

What to do with Red Onslaught

Onslaught is a mix of the darkest urges and aspects of the psyches of Charles Xavier and Magneto. So what happens when the villainous Red Skull unleashes this combo in his own brain? Red Onslaught is here and he is truly evil. Here is everything I'm looking forward to trying with this volatile new card!

The Big Question

Is he good? Before release, the main thing everyone wants to know is if getting three random Ongoings is even good. My initial instinct was that there are an awful lot of useless Ongoings (Colossus), detrimental ones (Lizard), and straight up potentially game-losing ones (Red Skull, Tribunal). But don’t take my word for it. For whatever reason Red Onslaught led to a community quest to find the answer: is this good?

Marvel Snap Red Onslaught Simulator & Calculator

Simulate Red Onslaught rolls in Marvel Snap. See which Ongoing abilities he can copy from the datamined pool and share your results with friends.

SnapComplete

SnapComplete has made a Red Onslaught simulator. Take a look at my first ten rolls:

Pretty Underwhelming. When you hit Sera, you'll be dancing. When you hit Electro you just lose. The variable we're not yet certain about is how curated Red Onslaught's hit list is. Perhaps the devs took out some of the worst hits and seeded him with extra upside. Given Rama-Tut's ability to troll with a Destroyer, I wouldn't bet on it.

Extra Synergy

A lot of those hits are reliant on having particular synergy. Are you always going to play RO with some 1-Costs so you get value when you hit Ka-Zar? You may really need to pack Luke Cage to limit the damage Red Onslaught can self-inflict. Here are some of the cards that have natural synergy with Red Onslaught.

Spectrum is the obvious finisher with Red Onslaught, but Aurora decks will also generally be happy to play with his potential upside. Onslaught will be a fun way to amplify RO, while Mystique can give you a soft re-roll.

Scosco’s Day One Red Onslaught Decks

So, do we build a Red Onslaught deck with particular Ongoings in mind? He could act as a redundancy card in a Living Tribunal deck where we pray he hits some of the Ongoings we need. Or, we could just pop him in something like Doom 2099 or Aurora/Thanos and hope he high-rolls.

Sera-Spectrum

Deck image — click/tap to copy deck code — ClickTap image to copy deck code.

Sera and Ravonna allow us to have more explosive final turns, with or without Spectrum.

Red Aurora

Red Frontier

Whether it's with Thanos FF or just Aurora Red Onslaught can provide some fun high-roll potential. Perhaps we could even make decks greedier because of the Sera potential. Try playing him alone in a lane to copy with Thanos! That should be fun! Cage feels like a must, though.

Scorpslaught

Look maybe we just throw him into the best deck currently using the Ancient One. If we roll a busted combo, we can multiply it with Tao Mandala or Prodigy. If not, we can just swap him out with Blink. And I'm a firm believer that Luke Cage is unnecessary in this type of deck outside the mirror match.

This concept could be applied to any number of Ongoing heavy decks and represents the true use-case I see for Red Onslaught: at high-roll potential redundancy in Ongoing combo decks. We could do this with Living Tribunal, Doom 2099, Affliction, Zoo, Carter stack decks, or even Cerebro. Hey, you can always retreat when he trolls you!

Is He Worth It?

Red Onslaught's variance isn't his only issue. It's also that there just aren't that many generically good Ongoing hits that work well outside of planned synergistic packages. Rama-Tut on Wong can provide a lot board-wide more value than Onslaught on Red Onslaught. He may be less chaotic than Rama-Tut, but he's not more powerful, especially at 4/4. He's appealing to a certain type of chaos-lover, but not much beyond that.