Darkhawk 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 Darkhawk.
Five Best Synergies for Darkhawk
Ongoing: +2 Power for each card in your opponent's deck.
The ability on Darkhawk is interesting, and it's certainly unique because no other card cares so much about what the opponent has in their deck. There aren't that many cards in MARVEL SNAP who work well with it, but we've soldiered on and found five different ways to make the most of Darkhawk.
Venom
On Reveal: Destroy your other cards at this location. Add their Power to this card.
When Venom destroys a card he uses their current Power, which could be a real boon with Darkhawk, whose Power generally gets lower the longer the game goes on. If you can feed Darkhawk to Venom on turn 5 (when he has 9 Power on average), you'll get to keep that Power on Venom instead of watching it go down when your opponent draws their last pathetic card.
Bast
On Reveal: Set the Power of all cards in your hand to 3.
Bast can boost Darkhawk's base Power to 3, giving him a a higher floor and making him an above-rate 4-Drop on turn 6, even with all the Power he loses each turn.
Black Widow
On Reveal: Add a Widow’s Bite to your opponent’s hand.
If we want to keep Darkhawk's Power up, one thing we can do is stop our opponent from drawing cards with the Widow's Bite from Black Widow. Blanking just one draw step is huge; that's an extra 2 Power for Darkhawk at game's end.
Rockslide
On Reveal: Shuffle 2 Rocks into your opponent’s deck.
Korg and Rockslide, as the only cards currently in the game that add cards to the opponent's deck, seem like the best fits for a Darkhawk deck (and yet, they're only at number two). Each Rock that goes into the deck represents 2 more Power for Darkhawk; maybe we'll talk ourselves into running Wong so we can dump the whole mine in there (who are we kidding, we already talked ourselves into this).
Mister Negative
On Reveal: Swap the Power and Cost of all cards in your deck.
The card that looks like it will work best with Darkhawk is that friend to high Energy, low Power cards everywhere, Mister Negative. Thanks to the Negative swap, Darkhawk becomes a 1 Energy 4 Power baseline who only gets bigger. Our calculations put this as a 10 Power card at game's end (assuming that no extra cards were drawn or added to the deck). That's pretty good.
Theorycrafting Darkhawk
To go with our synergy picks, we've theorycrafted three decks that might do powerful things with Darkhawk. This comes with a caveat: as a Series 5 card, Darkhawk 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. That being said, let's look at these decks.
Junk Control
We'll get right to the good stuff, which is a deck all about giving our opponent an overabundance of bad stuff. We junk up their locations with Hobgoblin, we junk up their hand with Black Widow, we junk up their deck with Rockslide and Korg. Bast will add extra power to Darkhawk and, if all goes well, we can use Mystique to copy Darkhawk's Ongoing ability.
Negatives
Mister Negative is a problem, y'all. Darkhawk isn't the most powerful card whose stats you can reverse, but we reckon he'll be up there. If you haven't had the pleasure of making huge late-game swings with a Mister Negative deck, it's never too late to start.
Destroy
This deck sees Darkhawk less as a good card on his own, and more as feed for Venom and Knull, turning his slowly dwindling Power into a source of static strength for its most powerful finishers. You will notice Black Widow is also in this deck; an attempt to make that Power just a little higher.
Who is Darkhawk?
We tentatively approached the comics history of Darkhawk in our Who's Who article for The Power Cosmic Season; now let's get a bit more in-depth on the origins of Darkhawk.
Teenager Christopher Powell was exploring an abandoned amusement park when he discovered an amulet that let him transfer his consciousness into an android with the ability to fly and shoot energy blasts. Vowing to use his powers as an edge against crime, Christopher took the name Darkhawk.
After some initial combats and team-ups with Spider-Man, Captain America and the West Coast Avengers, Darkhawk joined a teenage group of supers called the Loners, who were hired by Rick Jones to track down the Runaways. After the Civil War, the Loners decided in favor of the Registration Act and became a superhero support group for young supers coming to terms with their powers.
During the Secret Invasion, Darkhawk was assigned to be head of security at Project Pegasus, where he defended it from a Skrull attack with the help of Nova.
During the War of Kings storyline, Powell met Talon, another wearer of the Darkhawk armor and member of the Fraternity of Raptors, who offered to help Powell control his own Darkhawk amulet. Powell eventually learned that the Fraternity have a history of wet ops - kidnappings and assassinations chief among their crimes - and turned against Talon and the rest of the Fraternity. As his ongoing mission, Powell committed to destroying the other Darkhawk amulets and thwarting the Fraternity's designs.
How do you feel about Darkhawk? Share your thoughts on the new card in the comments!
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