Welcome to Marvel’s Midnight Suns best Captain Marvel guide. In this guide you will find the best cards of the Captain Marvel, the best decks and how to play. If you want to be a Captain Marvel in Marvel’s Midnight Suns, our guide is waiting for you.
Many of the effects in Midnight Suns calculate damage as a percentage of a hero’s Offence stat, commonly 50% or 100%. As a shorthand, I will write this as [X%]. Note that all modifiers to this stat apply, such as from Strengthened or mission cards.
Marvel’s Midnight Suns Best Captain Marvel Builds & Cards
My analysis of each character follows. I have applied the following template to each:
Name: The character’s name. If you needed me to explain this to you, you may be beyond help as far as the guide goes.
TL;DR: A simple summary of the hero’s effectiveness. For those of you who don’t want to read my endless text, and yet are still willing to take my word as gold for some reason.
Passive: The hero’s passive effect. Note that I’ll only be including the max friendship effect, as I have been reliably informed that friendship is magic.
Combo: The character’s effect when they lead a combo.
Cards: The character’s cards listed in order Attacks-Skills-Heroics, then in alphabetical order. Note that every character bar Hunter has ten cards total – four common cards available from the start, three rares, two epics, and one legendary unlockable through their challenge once they hit max friendship. I will only be running analysis of the upgraded version of each card, because really, who cares what the un-upgraded version does? Note that I have described the card in each entry – this isn’t because I assume people can’t read cards, but rather because damage is usually based on a hero’s Offence stat, so their actual damage isn’t necessarily obvious from a screenshot.
Recommended Builds: The set of cards I recommend you run as standard in a character’s deck. If you really want to be sweaty about it you can tailor each character’s deck for each mission – drafting in Stun effects for missions you need to bypass Protect and so on – but realistically this is far from necessary. Most characters have clear winners and losers as far as cards go, and the game really isn’t hard enough to need this amount of min/maxing. That said, if it makes you feel good, go for it.
Where appropriate I’ve provided multiple sets of options for heroes (because I’m nice like that), but this isn’t possible for every hero, either because they’re very one-dimensional in what they do or just because a lot of their cards are kinda bad. For heroes with only one build listed, their alternate build should be considered to be the ‘Hardcore’ build. This entails opening the deck-builder, closing your eyes, and clicking cards at random while screaming at the top of your lungs.
Captain Marvel Guide
One of Marvel’s most powerful heroes, she can fly through space and punch holes through spacecraft, and yet her most noteworthy contribution to this game was her romance subplot with Blade. Which was adorable, by the way.
TL;DR – In theory, a tank who can become a damage dealer via her passive. In practice, useless until she goes Binary, then becomes mediocre.
Passive – Goes Binary after playing three Captain Marvel cards, gaining 50% of her max health as Block and doubling her damage until all Block is gone. Also has a 20% chance to generate Counter when killing an enemy (but can only get one stack per turn).
Combo – Both heroes gain Counter, rendering her passive redundant. Unfortunately wholly unimpressive since Counter damage is low and you have to take hits to trigger it.
Captain Marvel Cards
Deals [50%] damage, with another [75%] if the enemy is targeting Captain Marvel.
As with all Captain Marvel cards, without Binary this is awful. With Binary, however, it deals a reasonably impressive [250%] provided the enemy is targeting Captain Marvel. Still not amazing – Dark Hunter laughs at numbers like those – but it’s about the best you’re going to get out of her. It’s sure as hell better than most of her cards.
Deals [75%] damage, Taunts, and gain Block based on the damage dealt.
Awful, awful card. Without Binary it deals laughable damage, making it a complete waste of a card play. With Binary its damage still isn’t worth a card play, and isn’t going to give you as much Block as the enemy will deal to you in damage – so you’re spending a card play to make it less likely you’ll maintain Binary. Never play this.
Deals [50%] damage with Taunt and Quick. If Binary, also has Knockback.
Much like Captain America’s version, this card inexplicably has both Quick and Taunt on it, so you’ll only ever be able to trigger one effect per play (hint: it should never be Taunt). On the bright side, if Captain Marvel is Binary it deals [100%] and knocks back, making it functionally identical to Hunter’s Quick Slash – in other words, it becomes a good card.
Taunts all enemies in an area and gains one Counter. If Binary, also gains two Resist.
Here is where Captain Marvel starts to really hit the same wall Captain America has – you can either act as a tank or deal damage, but you can’t do both because soaking hits removes your block and thus your ability to hurt things. Unlike Cap, though, Carol stands a chance of actually dealing noticeable damage to things, so you will pretty much never want to play this without already being Binary. You probably won’t want to play it even with it, because it’s a pretty bad card overall – the only real reason to do so is if you’re already targeted and want the Resist to keep your Block intact, in which case you should taunt a random patch of empty space.
Draw Captain Marvel cards until you have four of them in your hand.
For most other heroes this would be a fantastic card – four card draw before mods is a lot, and being tied to a specific hero makes it more reliable for drawing the tools you’re looking for. Unfortunately, it’s a Captain Marvel card, and most of her cards are pretty underwhelming. Nonetheless, this does serve a purpose – you’ll often want to play it on your first turn to draw Quick Jabs in order to get Binary online quickly. Note that this card has a warping effect on Captain Marvel’s modifier preferences – you should avoid modifiers that draw her cards specifically, and will get even more benefit from Quick and Free modifiers than other heroes do.
Captain Marvel gains 25% of her max health as Block and 33% max health as healing.
With this card Captain Marvel manages a rare feat – having a card which is worse than a Captain America card. Healing is usually less useful than Block because it doesn’t maintain Binary and is much more prone to overhealing, and the card has no other secondary effects on it at all. This card straight up sucks; the only reason to ever use it is if you’re trying to build Captain Marvel as a tank for some reason.
Deals [150%] damage and knocks back. On kill, draw a Captain Marvel card.
Not a completely awful card, but really isn’t worth 2 Heroism. Even [300%] damage is lacklustre compared to a lot of other heroes’ abilities, and the card draw is Captain Marvel-specific and so has anti-synergy with One Step Ahead. Even Carol has better cards than this available to her.
Deals [125%] damage and Taunts in a line AoE.
And here is an example of a better card. Photon Beam hits almost as hard as Fists of Radiance (albeit without knockback), but does so in a fairly generously sized line AoE. It’s still not dealing incredible damage by any stretch of imagination, but nonetheless can be worth playing to pick off a weakened target while also softening up a bunch of others. Obviously, without Binary you don’t want to play this, and with Binary you need to be careful about how many enemies you leave alive for fear of losing Binary.
Consumes all Heroism, dealing [60%] damage per Heroism expended to a single target. Also consumes all Block.
A godawful card. Even disregarding the last line, [120%] damage per Heroism is terrible for a Heroism dump; it’s also restricted to a single target and so would be very prone to wasting Heroism on overkills if it wasn’t so low damage in general. Then you factor in the Block removal and realise it’s also going to break your Binary and render Captain Marvel useless for a while. The nicest thing I can say about this card is that it’s epic and so you can shred it for a decent chunk of Heroic Essence.
Deals [100%] damage in a circular AoE.
Saving the best for last, right guys? R-right? Well, sadly, no. Carol’s Legendary card somehow hits for less damage than Photon Beam does; it also carries no secondary effects. To make matters worse, like most Legendary AoEs it destroys most Environmental objects in the radius – which is a real problem, because some of them probably deal more damage than this does. If you can find a version modded with some kind of debuff on it this is worth playing, particularly if you find Marked. Otherwise the most damage it deals is to your hopes and dreams.
Best Captain Marvel Builds
Captain Marvel seems to be Firaxis’ attempt at a Bruiser character – someone who can take some hits while also dealing respectable damage. Unfortunately they fell down at the ‘while also’ part – like Captain America she’s very much capable of doing only one or the other. Unlike Captain America, though, she lacks the tools to even make a respectable stab at being a tank.
As a result I have only one Captain Marvel build to offer.
Recommended Teammates: She’s fairly self-contained, so no really strong synergies with anyone. A tank teammate can help to taunt enemies off her to ensure Binary stays intact, but this can leave your damage output unacceptably low; alternatively, Doctor Strange’s damage boosts are also doubled by Binary and can leave her capable of dealing sizeable hits.
Captain Marvel Binary Damage Build
I’ve avoided Utility cards with this build because Captain Marvel’s utility pretty much exclusively focusses on buffing herself, which really isn’t worth a card play. One Step Ahead is included for the purposes of getting Binary online; your ideal first turn when playing her should involve playing it and two copies of Quick Jab (in whatever order they show up in), going Binary, and then treating her like any other hero.
You might think that you should prioritise keeping enemies off her to maintain Binary, but in practice this just isn’t worth doing – if you’re having to make that choice then somebody’s taking damage one way or the other, and it’s probably going to be better making Captain Marvel useless than having a much better hero be downed.
Note: That if you find any cards with Quick or Free on them, you should slot those in (removing Cosmic Ray or Photon Beam if necessary), as they’ll help get Binary online faster and can be dumped to enable One Step Ahead.
