The Sentry is one of two new cards coming to Series 5 of MARVEL SNAP on December 20. In honor of this occasion, we've broken down his comics history, looked at the card's best potential synergies, and theorycrafted some decks that feature The Sentry.
Five Best Synergies for The Sentry
Cannot be played at the right location. On Reveal: Add a -10 Power Void to the right location.
The Sentry is an interesting card: he has 8 Power, which is a lot for a 4- Cost in MARVEL SNAP, but the downside is that he brings with him the -8 Power The Void (we'll talk more about the relationship between these characters in the Lore section). While you can allay this downside by filling the right location before playing The Sentry (so The Void has nowhere to go), we've found five other cards that will take The Sentry's downside and either neutralize it or turn it into a benefit.
Five
Ongoing: On Reveal Abilities won’t happen at this location.
The simplest way to negate The Sentry's downside is to... negate it. Playing The Sentry to a location with Cosmo ensures that The Void won't be coming with him. Cosmo, in case you didn't know this, is a very good boy.
Four
On Reveal: Destroy your other cards.
If we want to outright get rid of The Void, Destroy abilities can be extremely effective in doing that. To represent the entire slate of Destroy cards we could feature, we've chosen Destroyer, a finisher who'll wipe out the -8 Power Void while The Sentry sits protected in an Armor location.
Three
On Reveal: Set ALL cards at this location to 3 Power.
If we can't destroy The Void or keep it from being summoned, the next best thing we can do is change its Power. Valkyrie is one of the few cards in the game that can do that, and changing -8 to 3 Power is an 11 Power swing.
Two
On Reveal: Remove the abilities on the next card you play.
The simplest answer might be the most useful: take away The Void altogether by blanking The Sentry's textbox with Zero and turning him into a vanilla 8 Power 4-Drop (who still has an aversion to being played on the right).
One
On Reveal: Your opponent gains control of one of your other cards at this location.
Our last and most favorite synergy is using Viper to get rid of The Void by giving it to our opponent, swinging the Power at the rightmost location by a bunch and filling one of their location slots with a -8 Power albatross. It's like Hobgoblin, but with more steps.
Theorycrafting The Sentry
To go with our synergy picks, we've theorycrafted three decks that try to tap the full power of The Sentry. This comes with a caveat: as a Series 5 card, The Sentry is going to be a very, very rare drop from Collector's Reserves and, unless you're ready to drop 6000 Collector's Tokens on an unproven card, he's unlikely to become a part of your (or our) collection any time soon. Anyway, let's get to the decks.
Zero
To start, we've got a Zero deck that can use either Zero or Cosmo to turn off The Sentry's On Reveal effect and let us play an 8 Power card with no drawback. While there are bigger targets for her effect, Shuri can make The Sentry twice as big as The Void's negativity if we need an infusion of Power and have given up on the rightmost location.
Viper Control
This Control deck uses the -8 Power The Void as one of the many targets for Viper to send across to our opponent's side of the location. To add to that nastiness, we've got something even nastier: once it's on their side, we can move The Void (a 4-Cost card) to the location of our choosing with Magneto. That's a pretty big swing, if we can pull it off.
Destroyer
The Destroyer shell is a pretty tight one, but we think it's got enough wiggle room to add in an 8 Power 4-Drop whose downside (the -8 Power Void) can be summarily dismissed by a turn 6 Destroyer. Our guess is that this is a much higher variance deck than the current, reliable Destroyer strategy, but one worth trying anyway.
Who is The Sentry?
We glanced across the comics history of The Sentry in our Who's Who article for The Power Cosmic Season; now let's get a bit more in-depth on the origin of this unique comics character.
Middle-aged and overweight, Robert Reynolds wakes one morning to mysterious memories of a superhero alter-ego: The Sentry, who harnesses the power of a thousand exploding suns to protect humanity. This revelation comes with the news that his arch-nemesis, the supervillain The Void, has returned and is wreaking havoc across the planet. Reynolds seeks out the Avengers, none of whom remember a hero called The Sentry or a villain called The Void.
Reynolds is eventually able to jog the memories of some Supers, including Mister Fantastic and Billy Turner, The Sentry's former sidekick Scout - now older and scarred by The Void. Together, they take on the villain, but the too-powerful Void stymies their counterattack. The hopelessness of their situation triggers Mister Fantastic's memory further, and he relays a troubling story to Reynolds.
One night, maladjusted teen and drug addict Robert Reynolds broke into a secret lab looking for a quick high and ingested a serum that turned him into a super-powered being with unmatched strength. But Reynold's troubled psychology was no match for this influx of power, which split itself into two forms: the righteous Sentry and the megalomaniacal Void.
Because The Sentry and The Void were birthed from the same mind, one cannot exist apart from the other and the only way to rid the world of The Void was to rid it of The Sentry. Reynolds' friend Mister Fantastic developed a device to wipe every mind on Earth of all memories of either being. This explained why no one could initially remember The Sentry and why The Void returned only once Reynolds recovered some of his memories.
To save the world, Robert must once again forget that he was ever the being known as The Sentry. With some help from Doctor Strange, Mister Fantastic once again wipes The Sentry from his memory, doing so for everyone on Earth as well.
Yet, as Reynolds once remembered his previous life, there is no guarantee that The Sentry (and The Void) will forever remained buried in the dark recesses of his consciousness.
How do you feel about The Sentry? Share your thoughts on the new card in the comments!
Comments
If the font on Viper looks familiar to anyone, you may know it as the font that Godsmack uses (Abaddon).
Well, filling the right location first is also an option.