Best Esme Cuckoo Decks In Marvel Snap

The Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters opens its doors for the latest season of Marvel Snap as gifted young students begin to fill the hallowed halls of this established academy. This also sees a few of its remarkable students finding extra time between classes to test their skills outside the Danger Room by joining the battlefield of Marvel Snap, in which one Stepford Cuckoo sibling makes her in-game debut.

The New X-Men season for Marvel Snap welcomes Esme Cuckoo to the game, whose cloning capabilities may allow Snappers to outwit and outplay their opponents. This guide details everything about Esme Cuckoo, including her card abilities, key synergies, top counters, and three unique decks that spotlight this card in Marvel Snap!

Marvel Snap Esme Cuckoo Card Abilities Explained

Throughout the pages of Marvel Comics over the decades, the Stepford Cuckoos have had quite the comic history due to the infighting amongst the identical siblings, but together, they formed the hive-mind, thus becoming one of the most powerful collectives. However, among Sophie, Phoebe, Irma, Celeste, and Esme, the latter sibling is touted as being "most conniving" of the Stepford Cuckoos and has grown out of interest in being molded after their mother, Emma Frost, the White Queen.

As such, this Stepford Cuckoo sibling will join the forces of the New X-Men in the latest Marvel Snap season as a Series 5 card with her base stats as a three-Cost and four Power card. Esme Cuckoo has an On Reveal ability which copies a random card from the deck into their hand and sets its card stats to three-Cost and four Power.

Esme Cuckoo synergizes with multiple deck archetypes, including buff-style decks, Silver Surfer, Ongoing, and Living Tribunal decks, and with specific key cards like Silver Sable, Cassandra Nova, Mystique, Sage, Grandmaster, Mister Negative, Absorbing Man, and Iron Man. However, as Esme Cuckoo is an On Reveal card, Cosmo is the best counter against her, and so is Red Guardian (if she's alone at a location), while Man-Thing can reduce her Power.

As for card acquisition, the Esme Cuckoo base card is available as the current Season Pass reward card, along with her variant card. Once the next season begins, Snappers can get the card from the Seasonal Series 5 (for a limited time) and the Collector's Series 5 Snap Packs, which cost 5,000 and 4,000 Collector's Tokens, respectively.

Best Marvel Snap Esme Cuckoo Decks: Cuckoo Lashing Out

Esme Cuckoo's card ability may have been slightly written off as many Snappers felt her unpredictability may target high Powered cards and as such reduce their Power significantly. However, by building a deck around her ability, especially with specific cards that can benefit from either a low Cost or a higher Power value, she can be quite a valuable card within certain deck archetypes.

The first spotlighted deck from Marvel Snap content creator ReZ Snapper follows this premise, featuring a majority of significantly low-powered cards. The main objective is to use Bast and Agent Venom to set the powers of cards in their hand and deck while using Esme Cuckoo to cheat out and copy a higher value card to play it early.

The opening turns could see multiple playlines explored with Bast, Silver Sable, Thena, Lasher, Mister Sinister, and Agent Venom playing onto the board before Esme Cuckoo joins the game. From there, if they're sticking to Thena's condition of playing two cards per turn, a combination of either Sage, Brood, and Iron Man can be played out before Gorr the God Butcher as the final turn card before activating Lasher's ability to end the game.

Best Marvel Snap Esme Cuckoo Decks: Negative Cuckoo

As mentioned earlier, Esme Cuckoo could provide a power buff to low-powered cards that can assist in gaining priority in the early turns. This is the case when pairing Esme Cuckoo with another great synergistic card in Mister Negative, especially if Cuckoo targets the card for a cheaper cost and higher power value.

This negatively bonkers deck from Marvel Snap content creator Bynx Plays features other great targets for Cuckoo like Cassandra Nova, Mystique, Sage, Magik, Rogue, Iron Man, Gorr the God Butcher, and Taskmaster, who are all targets to be flipped by Mister Negative. Ravonna Renslayer should be their opening card on Turn 2, and depending on locations, either Cassandra Nova or Magik can be played on the next turn.

Mister Negative should be played on Turn 4 or 5 before Jane Foster gets onto the board on the following turn to draw all 0-cost cards to their hand. This should make the final turn play see a combo of Sage, Iron Man, Mystique (top copy Iron Man), Gorr the God Butcher, and Taskmaster for the victory! 

Best Marvel Snap Esme Cuckoo Decks: Snappin' Surfin' Cuckoo

While upon first glance, Esme Cuckoo may not appear to be a card worth acquiring, some deep deckbuilding around this card reveals her best synergistic archetype, Silver Surfer. This is primarily attributed to Cuckoo being yet another three-Cost card, making her a great target for Surfer to hit and give it a power buff, especially when paired with another new card release in Surge.

As there are plenty of great "natural interactions" within this deck archetype, this new variation of the Silver Surfer deck from Marvel Snap content creator DenHearthstone swaps out some mainstays with new synergies. This includes Captain Carter, who buffs the back row of its location, and Esme Cuckoo, who could potentially target Galacta, Gwenpool, and Sera by copying the card, allowing Snappers to play them the following turn.

Nevertheless, the traditional playline for this deck is to get Sam Wilson / Captain America and Surge out as early as possible before playing Esme Cuckoo, while Captain Carter and Brood can be played together at an adjacent location. At some point, Makkari will jump to a random location as Galacta or Gwenpool can get onto the board, especially if Sebastian Shaw is already in the hand, which the last turn could see Sage and Silver Surfer being played.

For more Marvel Snap news, be sure to check out our dedicated section or take a look at some of our Guides & Tutorials just below: