Welcome to Marvel’s Midnight Suns best Doctor Strange guide. In this guide you will find the best cards of the Doctor Strange, the best decks and how to play. If you want to be a Doctor Strange 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 Doctor Strange 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.
Doctor Strange Guide
Arrogant, pedantic, verbose, annoying… He’s essentially me but with magic. I’m a little jealous.
TL;DR – The only character in the game that succeeds at being a support, primarily because he gives you two things you want – damage and card draw – rather than trying in vain to soak hits.
Passive – 50% chance to generate 2 Heroism per turn. A great passive, free Heroism is never a bad thing.
Combo – Gives all cards in your hand a damage bonus (provided they can hit enemies – sadly no damage boost on self-buffs). Also pretty great, simply adding more damage (albeit indirectly) to a card that deals a chunk of damage.
Doctor Strange Cards
Deals [100%] damage, with an additional [75%] at 4 and 6 Heroism.
A pretty solid damage card once it’s fully juiced, but although [250%] damage is pretty good, it’s not really what you’re bringing the good Doctor to do. Putting copies of this card in your deck is simply taking away slots that could be used on his fantastic utility; the fact that you need 6 banked Heroism to reach those numbers just serves to underline that this card should be avoided.
No inherent damage, but has Quick and Knockback which becomes Forceful at 3 Heroism.
The lack of damage makes this a less than stellar Quick card – there are occasions when you’ll be unable to kill anything with it because there’s nothing to knock them into – but if you can hit the fairly easy Heroism threshold then those occasions will become very rare. Either way, it’s a Quick card, so you probably want it, even if it is going into a deck that generates an impressive amount of Heroism on its own.
Draws the last two Attack cards played and gives them [50%] damage until they leave your hand. Also gives you four card plays on your following turn.
The first of Strange’s fantastic support cards, this card does a lot of great things. Firstly, the card draw is far better than normal card draw because you know exactly what you’ll be getting, as well as being able to curate it to give exactly what you want. It also gives you an additional card play on your next turn – making this functionally free over two turns – and provides a (usually redundant) damage boost to your drawn cards.
The fact that a card this good can struggle to find a spot in your deck really goes to show just how good Doctor Strange’s support cards are. Note that it specifies ‘four’ card plays, not +1, so playing multiple copies of this in one turn won’t let you play a million cards on your following turn.
Restores two Combat Items you’ve used on this mission, and provides 2 Redraws.
Another great card, but this one’s effectiveness is entirely determined by how good the Combat Items you brought along are. So long as you picked some solid ones, though, this is pretty strong. If you’re the sort of person who farms resources to always have exactly the items you want on hand then you’ll get less value out of this than most people would; personally I simply treat the text of this card as being the text of two Combat Items plus some Redraws. Would you play a card that draws four cards and gives your primary damage dealer +100% Offence? I sure as hell would.
Gives all cards in hand [50%] damage for the rest of the mission.
The effectiveness of this card is primarily determined by how you’ve built your heroes’ decks. If you’ve built the way Firaxis seems to have intended, with an eclectic mix of utility and damage, it’s pretty weak. If, on the other hand, you’ve built them the way I suggest – with an endless supply of Quick effects, card draw and big AoEs – then this becomes absurdly powerful. Quick cards simply have their thresholds raised, allowing them to be used against more enemies; meanwhile, the more card draw you have, the more cards this will hit and the more often you’ll draw the already-buffed cards to play them again. Look for card draw modifiers for this above all else, because it draws cards before activating its effect, giving you more bonuses.
Gives a specified hero Concealed and heals them for [200%].
Fairly weak, but they can’t all be winners. This is essentially an emergency button used to protect a critically injured (or heavily focussed) teammate; however, as always, the better strategy is usually to just kill the enemies that are threatening them. You can pull off some pretty nasty tricks with this card because Concealed doesn’t change enemy targeting – so you can throw out a big taunt with a tank and then Conceal them to leave those enemies standing around doing nothing on their turn. Trouble is, that’s two card plays you’re not using to kill things.
Deals [150%] damage and applies two stacks of Weak. At 4 and 6 Heroism, costs +2 and deals another [150%] damage.
Like Strange’s other damage cards, this one isn’t great. It can do some decent damage when fully stacked up, but unfortunately that also increases its cost – [450%] damage may be strong, but spending six Heroism to do it definitely is not. The Weak status, meanwhile, doesn’t do much for you since you’re still leaving that enemy alive to hit you (and also apply debuffs), just mitigating half the damage. Don’t bother with this one – if you want to mitigate damage, look to Strange’s other Heroic cards, and if you want to kill things look to a different hero.
Applies Bind and a stack of Vulnerable to a single target.
This is much better than Axe of Angarruumus for taking care of a single target – Bind prevents its attack altogether rather than merely mitigating some damage, while the Vulnerable status will probably contribute more actual damage than Axe would deal once your teammates get involved. The problem with this card, however, is that the main reason to Bind something is because you can’t deal with it that turn – so you stun it while you kill everything else, making the Vulnerable redundant. It does have some limited benefit against Supervillains, but note that Bind will only stop one of their actions, not two.
Spends 3 Heroism to deal [100%] damage in an AoE. At 4, 6 and 8 Heroism, spends that much Heroism to deal another [100%] damage.
Probably the least powerful Heroism dump in the game (aside from Rain of Blows, which doesn’t exist as far as I’m concerned). It’s still pretty powerful despite that, however – when properly empowered it can chunk a good number of enemies all at once. It’s no Annihilation, but it’s still worth bringing – after all, you’ve got to find something to do with all that Heroism, haven’t you?
Gives all allies 1 Resist and Cures them. At 6 Heroism it spends an additional 3 to give a second stack of Resist.
Another solid support card, this is a very nice way of protecting your entire team if there are multiple enemies you can’t deal with (say, because you spent your turn throwing out damage boosts instead). Try to avoid playing it Enhanced though – 6 Heroism is a lot to spend on a few stacks of Resist.
Best Doctor Strange Builds
I only have one recommended build for Doctor Strange, but that isn’t to say his builds don’t have flexibility – rather, it’s because you start with two copies of Winds and one of Seven Suns, then throw in your choice of utility cards and you’ll probably have a good deck. Just avoid Bolt and Axe – both are weak compared to his utility cards and serve only to shift Strange from being a strong support to being a mediocre damage dealer.
Recommended Teammates: Really anyone will work with him – he’s there to support and enable others, after all. That said, anyone with Chain loves his damage boosts, and anyone with a lot of Heroic cards (i.e. Iron Man and Ghost Rider) love his Heroism generation.
Doctor Strange Utility Build
Personally I favour double Blessing, since it can provide handy damage boosts to whatever Quick cards I happen to draw and unlike Gaze its boost lasts all mission. I only run a single copy of Astral Meditation, as one free set of Combat Items is usually enough. I would run two Agamotto’s Gaze as well, but since we’re limited to four cards of any one type, that slot is instead taken by Shield of the Seraphim in case of emergency.
Modifiers for Strange cards should usually focus on card draw – he likes to accrue a lot of cards in hand to land Blessings on – and also Draw Last Attack because it lets you get the benefit from the damage boost multiple times. Aside from Free, there isn’t much else Strange wants – extra heroism is nice, but really not necessary given how many Skill cards he plays.
