What to do with Sinister Six
Every season has a card that captures the imagination of the player-base the most. It doesn’t have to be the most obviously powerful card, just the one with the most promise of doing something new and unique. That card this month is decidedly Sinister Six! Here is everything I’m looking forward to trying with this outrageous new card!
How Does It Actually Work?
While there are some mysteries around this card's function that we won't know for sure until release day, data miners have found some important info. First, the card cannot mark itself as evil. This is critical and the card would be unplayably bad if it could mark itself. I'm assuming the card will perform exactly as written and how a casual mobile gamer would expect. Second Dinner is usually quite good at making their cards work this way, rather than in the TCG-gamer-brained way some hardcore players might occasionally prefer. So I expect Quicksilver will always be marked evil. I'm less sure about Domino, but expect she will be as well. Even if you shuffle something new it, as long as it's one of the first 6 cards you draw, I would expect it to get marked. The cards will also truly need to be played (unlike the poorly worded Power Stone), so cheating cards out won't be helpful and locations like Sakaar will ruin your day in addition to anything that messes with your ability to play the evil cards out like Sokovia. Merging a Man-Spider into your S6 could be a cheeky, but costly, way to double your Power.
How Does This Card Actually Win?
The immediate problem with Sinister Six is that sucking up all of your Power into one lane doesn’t work very well when the point of the game is to win two out of three lanes? How in the heck are we going to win another?
Option A: Make a Big Stack, Copy It
Taskmaster and Arnim Zola can both put our Sinister Six pile into two lanes. Arnim Zola will destroy it and make two big copies, while Tasky will copy the Power of the last card you played, which has now been merged into the Sinister Six if you've planned things appropriately.
There are, of course, issues with this plan. First and foremost, these are both 6-Cost cards. The game has 6 Turns. In order to follow Sinister Six up with either, you’ll need to complete your nefarious plan by the end of Turn 5. The second, and harder to solve issue, is that these cards themselves can be marked as Evil, meaning you won’t be able to merge your Sinister Six and then play Zola in the game in which Zola is Evil. You could just play both and cross your fingers and hope both of them don’t get marked. This seems like a meme-y strategy, but hardly a winning one.
Option B: Make a Big Stack, Cheese a Second Lane
Maybe we don’t need to copy our Sinister. We just need to get it out, preferably protect it, and then find some way to squeak out a second lane. Fortunately, there are a lot of cards that can steal a win in this game! First and foremost is Juggernaut. I’m putting all my chips on Sinsister Six/Jugg, so I hope he doesn’t get nerfed anytime soon (it could definitely happen, he's kinda messed up)!
Pictured: Just the cheesiest cards in the game.
Option C: Make New Cards
Of course, Sinister Six is only going to absorb cards you've actually played. That means tokens and other created cards are safe to stay on board! Could we build a deck around spreading just enough power in tokens around to win one lane, while slamming the door on another with a big s6?
Just a few of the tokens that can leave Power safely on board
Created Cards, preferably inexpensive ones, could pair well with S6
What Does a Sinister Six Deck Look Like?
What kinds of cards do we need to put into a S6 deck? We need to be able to play all of the cards that get marked as evil out, so that means we need low-cost cards. Do we go with disruptive, annoying cards to sting our opponent on the way to making out S6? Do we play high Cost/Power ratio cards, knowing S6 will absorb them and get rid of their downsides? Or do we play cards with useful abilities like location mitigation or protective abilities? One of the keys to the deck is having evil cards you can hold till the last turn if you need to. We don’t yet know the exact shape the best Sinister Six decks will take, but the fact that we have multiple strategies to try gives me faith that whatever S6 build rises to the top will end up being quite powerful.
Sinister Six is yet another way to play 'downside' cards!
Examples of cards that do their job and can then be happily absorbed.
Other Key Synergy Cards
Scosco’s Day One Sinister Six Decks
Zola/Task Prayer
Ju66ernaut GC
Fastball Scam
Is He Worth It?
I’ve seen some suggestion that this card is unplayably bad, just a meme, can’t possibly be solved, etc. I don’t believe that for a second. While Sinister Six might not take over the metagame, getting an extra 12 Power onto the board for free is Powerful and there are ways to abuse that. This card reminds me so much of Zombie Galacti, which proved a bit hard to crack at first, but the best decks eventually emerged. Whether the best S6 decks are A Tier or C Tier, something made with this card will assuredly fall within the playable range. There are going to be people for whom this is their favorite card, just like with other finicky build arounds like Tribunal, Galacti, and Dormammu.
Below, paid supporters will find a few more cheeky S6 decks to try that are of a bit different shape to those above. If you love ad free, written Marvel Snap content, help us out by joining today!
