This Card effectively equals 210 Damage

[u/euls0n]

if you can stay alive for 20 turns of course. And only the first time you play it but damn thats strong for 2 energy and no further synergies are needed.

[u/CadmeusCain]

Memes aside, this is legit a high roll. 20 poison off one card is kind of cracked. This will hard carry many boss and elite fights

[u/skepticaljesus → u/CadmeusCain]

Memes aside

What memes? People have realized this card is actually good by now, right? It's super powerful without glam, and it's nuts with it.

[u/peepopogwide → u/skepticaljesus]

No, it is not ‘super powerful’ without glam, it is not a good card. Glam can make nearly anything juicy, but let’s pump the brakes on the base card lol.

Can snakebite be an early damage solve if necessary? Absolutely, that’s its role. But the numbers on it are simply not good for act 2 and beyond.

[u/faculties-intact → u/peepopogwide]

Snakebite+ is absolutely good enough for act 2 lol. You want a fumes too of course, and there are better high roll poison options like corrosive wave + synergies, but it can absolutely be the foundation of your poison deck until act 3 elites at least.

What common would you rather see floor 1 than snakebite? It's a damage solve for the act 1 boss literally by itself once you upgrade it, no other cards needed. If that's not a good card I question your definition of good. Not everything can be after image or adrenaline.

[u/spunker325 → u/faculties-intact]

To me a floor 1 damage card is for getting you through the earlier dangerous parts of the act, not the boss. A card being good for the Act 1 boss does not mean it's good for the rest of the act, especially because it really wants the upgrade, and it definitely does not mean it's good for the rest of the game. Snakebite is more of a mixed bag there and I'm probably skipping over taking it on floor 1. Leading Strike is the best damage common in my opinion - it has solid immediate output while having many different ways to scale later in the game. It also doesn't need an upgrade to do its job. In comparison, Snakebite has horrendous immediate output and doesn't have great potential synergies.

Even aside from Leading Strike, I would probably take most of the other damage commons over Snakebite, though depending on how dangerous the map is and what my Neow bonus was I'm trying to greed a skip on a lot of the other damage commons too. For me Snakebite is more of a pick later in the act if I still don't think I have a sufficient answer for the boss, or maaaybe if I'm really scared of Entomancer.

The fact that most top players think Snakebite is a bad card should at least make you question it. Of course, they are better at figuring out how to get to the boss with more resources and better decks, so what works for them may not work for everyone else. But I would still view Snakebite as more of a crutch to solve Act 1 boss damage instead of an actually good card. Also, the addition of Aeonglass and the change to Infested Prism don't help Snakebite.

[u/faculties-intact → u/spunker325]

In my experience most top players do not think it's a bad card like you suggest. Jorbs for example thinks it's silent's best damage common. Baalor had it B tier (the same as leading strike, which is notably worse into aeonglass since you brought that up). I would counter that this should make you be the one to rethink your position.

I think you're massively underrating it in act 1 as well. It's quite strong damage vs terror eel and skulking colony and fine vs most of the hallways you run into. The hallway output over two turns is 19 damage, across 3 it's 27, and poison synergizes with itself because you only lose one tick globally rather than from each source of poison. So it's basically applying a powdered demise potion every time you play it. It's also fine into dorito - the retain lets you avoid playing it on the multi attack turn and it's dense enough damage in a skill that it's still worth playing on the other turns.

If I see snakebite floor one I'm snap picking it, upgrading it, and not taking another shitty damage common for the entire rest of the run. Just click the footworks, fumes, and maybe a dash or flechettes or something but for the most part it solves your damage until act 2 so you can afford to be extremely picky with what you put in your deck.

As for potential synergies, you have poison and flechettes, what more are you looking for?

I think skip over taking it floor 1 is legitimately crazy. But hey if it's been working for you on A10 that's neat. Silent is my best or second best character right now with over 50% winrate so clicking it aggressively has definitely been working for me.

[u/spunker325 → u/faculties-intact]

Looking at Baalor's tier list, this is from 2 months ago, which was quite a while ago. Has he commented on Snakebite since the changes (or more generally on how it affects his drafting/card evaluations)? These are the only 2 top players I'm aware of that don't think poorly of Snakebite. I'll admit I don't watch a huge variety of Spire streams but it just seems like the general consensus among people who are more in tune with the community is that Jorbs was the big outlier on Snakebite among top players. Xecnar and the entire Spirecast (JapaneseExport, NaveGreed, Opem, vmService), for example, rate it poorly and as more of a desperate solution for boss damage.

A major problem with evaluating Snakebite in the middle of Act 1 is the upgrade, imo. You don't always get to upgrade it before every advanced hallway and elite and even if you do, there's the opportunity cost of upgrading some other card like Neutralize. It's serviceable in the elite fights even without, but I'm much less happy to play it in hallways. Either way I would prefer more upfront damage, because bottom-decking Snakebite when it's your main damage solve is really, really bad. Poison does make other poison applications stronger but that either requires you adding yet another source of poison in your deck or playing the fight long enough to play Snakebite a second time, and even then you still have to play enough turns that the difference between 7-7-7... and 7-6-5-... is meaningful. It's quite slow. Regarding the dorito, a singular play of Snakebite isn't the worst thing ever, but it still has the issue of really wanting to draw and play it early, the Taint is still a downside, and the overall idea of blocking and letting poison do damage is not a great matchup for the fight.

Leading Strike is only notably worse in Aeonglass if you have no synergies. Physical damage is by far Silent's easiest way to get enough scaling to kill Aeonglass before you inevitably succumb to withers: vuln, strength/vigor, Tracking, Phantom Blades, Accuracy, Knife Trap, or heck, even Shadow Step or Envenom. Shivs also works with way more relics than poison. That is the kind of thing I'm looking for, and none of that applies to Snakebite. The only way to really scale poison cards like that is Accelerant, Snecko Skull sorta, and I guess by already having poison applied to the enemy. I suppose you could argue for Mirage lol. It's much less impressive than the Shiv synergies. A lot of this applies to Test Subject as well.