Yesterday we’ve got another card reveal this time for the second incarnation of Gwen Stacy in Gwenom:
Gwenom looks extremely interesting to me. She has the classic Venom statline of 4/2/3 but 6/7 health is very welcome (though the other way around would of course be even better) and she is also a 4 threat. But Gwen remembers how to be fast even with a (if a recall correctly synthetic) symbiote and keeps her L movement and also adds Wall Crawler to it. Speed is really where she shines here but brings a pretty good builder with fantastic triggers on it at a nice range 3 which means noone is safe from at least one attack of her per activation. She mirrors Eddy Brock in having a throw and a counter attack but lacks what makes her classic 3 threat version so good in long ranged displacement for both the opponent as well as your own team. Spider-Sense on a Symbiote is really interesting too as it makes her at least a bit more resilient against Energy attacks. But she misses any offensive bonus that the other three symbiote characters sport.
Overall she is going to be a very mobile and deceptively tanky brawler. She’ll probably excell in a spread out attrition stlye of game plan.
I assume she will be only affiliated in Web Warriors and this is ultimately where I think her “downfall” will lie. She seems like a pretty good character but not enough so to make up for the loss of her 3 threat version who is carrying so much of the typical run wide and grab while refusing to die style of play, which classic WW love. Now that said with her, Venom, AV and Ben Riley you could lean into a more attrition focused Web Warriors team but since all of them are 4 threats it’s far easier said than done.
So do I expect to see her on the table at all: realistically not very much in WW but I think she’s gonna be awesome in Midnight Sons (at least until the Halloween Monsters come out) where she has a surefire way to proc the L advance on the builder and absolutely zoom around the board. If she Bumps before the first attack she can essentially use 4 actions in 2 while only spending a single power (and if all goes well actually adding some power too).
Outside of MS I’m not sure anything sticks particularly out but she feels like just an overall good if not super special 4 threat. Long Move and Wall Crawler with good defenses and a spender that can heal is what you invest that threat for. If that’s what your looking for and/or you like the character I think you won’t ever feel too bad for including her. The sculpt is also dope.
I’m still very much looking forward to what Electro will bring to the table so stay tuned for those hot takes once we’ve seen the cards.
Cheers from Germany 🍻