Welcome to Marvel’s Midnight Suns best Ghost Rider guide. In this guide you will find the best cards of the Ghost Rider, the best decks and how to play. If you want to be a Ghost Rider 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 Ghost Rider 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.
Ghost Rider Guide
He’s not a ghost, nor does he ride. And in fact, he also doesn’t ride ghosts. Which is a shame, because that would be really cool, now I think about it.
TL;DR – A pretty solid hero with impressive damage output, but falls short of greatness because it’s easy for him to become crippled and unable to really contribute.
Passive – Adds a Drain Soul card to your hand after killing three enemies, and doing so also increases his max health by 15% (up to twice per mission).
Combo – If the target is killed, it explodes for a small amount of damage. Pretty useless, overall.
Ghost Rider Cards
Forceful knockback in any direction and has Quick. Playing this causes Ghost Rider to deal himself [100%] damage.
An unfortunately poor Quick card – the free-targeted knock is nice and all, but it’s not worth slapping yourself for the same damage the target is taking. If it had some damage to the primary target this would be much better, but nope. Even so, you have to take at least one attack, and Quick is Quick.
Deals [150%] damage with Knockback and gains Ghost Rider two Souls, but also causes you to discard a random card.
Although Firaxis seem to think the discard effect here is a drawback, it can often actually be a benefit – if you play it towards the end of the turn, at worst it’s discarding a card you didn’t think was good enough to play that turn. More often, though, it’ll discard a card you didn’t actually want at all – meaning you draw an additional card on your next turn, functionally acting as a delayed redraw. Despite this, however, this card isn’t really worth playing due to its awkwardness and lack of Quick – and if you do find one with a Quick modifier on it, that discard effect really does become a drawback.
Creates a Drop on the map with a higher kill rate which lasts for two turns. Also gives Ghost Rider a stack of Strengthened.
Definitely an interesting effect, and one which can be extremely useful; it can turn your move-slap into a lethal blow, after all. Try not to gamble on it with Quick effects if you can help it, though, since RNG is the enemy of clean clears. The Strengthened effect is also very welcome considering how hard Ghost Rider hits already. This does wind up being a pretty situational card, and can easily be a dead draw in a lot of situations – when it’s good, though, it’s very good. Note – when playing this, there’s a small chance that Sarah Michelle Gellar will appear and kick your teeth in. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
For the next two turns, enemies killed by Ghost Rider will explode for [50%] damage.
Laughably bad skill. Even if the damage was impressive this would be poor due to the tremendous awkwardness involved and the fact that it can damage teammates; as it is, [50%] damage is wholly ignorable by any non-minion enemy. There is no reason to ever put this in your deck.
Replaces Ghost Rider with a drop for a turn, similar to Hellmouth plus Concealed. Also heals him for 33% of his max health. Ghost Rider can’t do anything after playing this for obvious reasons.
A curious card, it’s essentially an emergency button for Ghost Rider to save him from imminent doom. The built-in heal is very welcome, allowing him to claw back some of the health his cards have cost him; the drop is less useful, however, usually requiring a move to position it before use. On the whole (ha) this is inferior to Hellmouth, as there are far more efficient ways of healing (e.g. Nico’s Restore, Combat Items) and they don’t require you to lose a character for a turn – and as I’ve stated repeatedly throughout this guide, defensive options are rarely the way to go in this game.
Deals [50%] damage with Chain 2 and Lifesteal. Each time this card is played, all subsequent Drain Souls (whether generated or not) have +1 Chain and +1 Heroism cost.
Considering this is effectively Ghost Rider’s signature card, you’d think it’d be less… well, terrible. While he definitely welcomes a Lifesteal option, [50%] damage per chain is garbage, and gaining +1 Heroism cost per Chain added eradicates any use this might have had. You may occasionally find yourself playing this, primarily because you don’t have anything better to do, but that should only ever be via generated copies. Ghost Rider has far, far better Heroic options than this.
Deals [350%] damage in a wide AoE, then discards your hand.
Speaking of better Heroic options, here’s one now. It hits like a truck (okay, fine, like a car), and it has a pretty good width on it too. Discarding your hand can seem scary, but so long as you hold this until the end of your turn it’s not really a big problem – the only challenging aspect is playing your turn around the knowledge that you’ll be playing it. If you can find one with a card draw modifier on it then all the better, as this almost entirely mitigates the drawback.
Deals [200%] damage to a single target; gains an additional [50%] damage each time Ghost Rider takes damage from enemies or himself while it’s in hand.
Although it’s a little bit ‘meh’ – dealing moderate single target damage with no secondary effects – Hell’s Fury occupies one very important niche in Ghost Rider’s deck – it’s the only damage he has which is both reliable and without drawback. Even when sat at 1% health with critical (i.e. non-discardable) cards in hand, he can still play this to contribute something so long as he can scrounge up a single point of Heroism, and that justifies inclusion in his deck. That said, don’t try to play around this by repeatedly damaging yourself to juice it – it’s not worth that. Just keep it on hand for emergencies.
Consumes 25% of Ghost Rider’s current health to deal twice that amount to a single target and every other nearby enemy.
Another strong Heroic for Ghost Rider, this card is capable of some chunky damage numbers. The inclusion of AoE is what pushes it from ‘decent’ to ‘strong’, so it’s definitely worth keeping a copy on hand to blast a big target with. That said, you should be conscious that it very quickly loses its sting as Ghost Rider takes damage, so if you’re going to play it, play it early. Incidentally, while finding one with a Lifesteal modifier might seem good, it’s actually not – since the damage (and therefore healing) is tiny when he’s at low health, all Lifesteal does is mitigate the drawback when he’s already healthy.
Consumes 50% of Ghost Rider’s current health to deal four times that amount to a single target, then Exhausts. Also fills the Souls meter.
The final Ghost Rider card is arguably the most impressive – this card is capable of being the third highest single-target damage cards in the game (#2 and #1 are a stun-primed 7-rage Hulk Mighty Blow and an infinitely-redrawn Hellfire Beam, if you’re curious). It shares the same issues as Judgment – low health renders it effectively useless – but the absurd potential of the card makes it invaluable nonetheless. Note that it always fills the Souls meter when played, so you can expect a little bit of health returned from his passive if you’ve not already exhausted it. Plus a copy of Drain Soul to immediately redraw.
Best Ghost Rider Builds
Again only one recommended build for Ghost Rider, this time because he has a mix of good and godawful cards so there’s really not a lot of choice involved. No matter what you do with him, though, Ghost Rider is going to play like a gun – he’ll do a lot of damage to whatever you point him at, but sooner or later he’s going to run dry and stop being effective. Use him as a problem solver and he’ll serve you well; alternatively, bring along a few healing Combat Items (or a Nico) to ‘reload’ him.
Recommended Teammates: Nico or Light Hunter to provide healing to stay at full capacity.
Ghost Rider Generalist Build
Most of this list writes itself – you’ll always want two copies of Lash for Quick, a copy of Hellmouth for Strengthened, and four of the good Heroic cards. I’ve opted for one of each Heroic on the basis that each one is situational; you may prefer to run two Judgments, but I find you can run out of health very quickly, making them useless. The main debate is on the last slot – I personally opt for a second copy of Hellmouth, but you may prefer to replace this with a copy of Straight To Hell for self-sufficiency.
For card mods, aside from the usual suspects (i.e. Quick/Free), the most valuable things you can find are health restore on redraw (or on kill, for Lash). These will let you top off Ghost Rider periodically, keeping him loaded for longer without having to resort to Combat Items. Alternatively, a Lifesteal Hell Ride will usually be a full heal in most circumstances.
