Welcome to Marvel’s Midnight Suns best Hulk guide. In this guide you will find the best cards of the Hulk, the best decks and how to play. If you want to be a The Hulk 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 Hulk 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.
The Hulk Guide
Why is The Hulk even in this game? We’ve got plenty of beefy dudes who hit things hard. Clearly this was a token inclusion to appease green people. After all, like pimpin’, being green ain’t easy.
TL;DR – Everything Captain Marvel wishes she was, The Hulk is capable of very high damage numbers while also soaking substantial damage. He’s limited only by his lack of Quick cards.
Passive – Gains a stack of Rage every time he takes damage, to a maximum of five. Each stack of Rage increases his Offence substantially (around ~56%). The Hulk expends one stack each time he uses an Attack or Heroic (unless he doesn’t). Like Hunter, he also can’t suffer Injuries.
Combo – None. I guess you could argue that his passive lets him gain massive amounts of Offence, so his combo boost is damage… which is better than most other Combo effects, so that’s cool.
Hulk Cards
Deals [100%] damage, with another [150%] if the target is stunned. On kill, does not consume Rage.
Without Stun, this is just a fairly low-grade attack (albeit 100% Offence for The Hulk is usually more than anyone else’s standard Attacks). With Stun, it becomes a beefy hit. Regardless, treat this like a Quick card – you really don’t want to be playing it if it’s not going to kill the target. A moderate amount of damage is not worth losing a stack of Rage for. Usually this isn’t worth running – The Hulk’s deck should revolve around generating mass Rage and then throwing big AoEs around – but if you can find a copy with Quick then it suddenly starts looking a lot more enticing.
Forceful knockback on the target, Taunts and applies a stack of Weak.
If you covered the card art, you could probably convince me that this is a Captain America card – and by that I mean it’s garbage. The Hulk does not want to be wasting time Taunting targets (other than to generate Rage en-masse), Weak is a low-grade debuff, and most criminally of all, the only Offence modifier it has is the one on the knockback. Most heroes could do better, and The Hulk most certainly can.
Deals [50%] damage and Stuns the target. Also generates a stack of Rage and doesn’t consume any. If the target is at full health when played it deals an extra [100%] damage.
The must-take Attack for The Hulk, Smash would be fantastic for its on-demand Rage generation alone. The addition of Stun makes it even more tantalizing since you can then ignore whatever you hit for the rest of the turn; the bonus damage is just icing on the cake. Note that while the obvious combo is to Smash a target and then Crush it, getting both sets of bonus damage and generating a Rage stack, this is actually a poor option – it uses two card plays getting a single kill and wastes the utility of the Stun effect. Incidentally, even if this card sucked it would be obligatory to run two of them simply because of its name.
Consumes every stack of Rage to heal The Hulk for 33% of his max health per stack; any overhealing instead increases his max health. It then increases his maximum Rage by one and Exhausts.
This card is very much a mixed bag. On the one hand, it consumes all of your Rage – which is a phenomenal resource you’ll spend most of the mission trying to get hold of. On the other hand, a max Rage Always Angry puts The Hulk at over 250% of his own max health, making him extremely difficult to put down and enabling him to soak most enemies’ damage output for the rest of the mission. It’s worth running a copy of this for emergencies – effectively being a single button to convert The Hulk from nuker to tank if he looks like he might fall over – but no more than that. Don’t be seduced by the maximum Rage gain – +1 stack is not worth the effort of generating them all over again.
Taunt a target, then gain a stack of Rage for each enemy targeting The Hulk. Also adds a stack of Counter.
This right here is the juice – your one stop shop for mass Rage generation. Don’t be fooled into thinking that you need to run other Taunt cards to make use of this; by the time you unlock The Hulk, virtually every mission you go on will have at least three dogs who all target the same thing. Taunt one and you’re guaranteed a bunch of stacks immediately. Note that while Counter is usually underwhelming, The Hulk’s absurd Offence can make it surprisingly hefty.
Deals [175%] damage to a single target with forceful knockback. If the target is stunned, adds another [200%] damage.
This card hits very, very hard. Two copies of Smash makes Stun fairly easy to come by, making this a [375%] hit with forceful knockback from a hero who’ll probably have twice as much Offence as anyone else on the team as minimum. And yet, this card generally isn’t worth running. Why? Because The Hulk has access to some huge AoEs. It’s really not worth spending a card play (and a stack of Rage) slapping a single target when you can do almost as much damage to lots of them. If you can find one with Quick, run it; otherwise, ignore.
Deals [80%] damage with Chain 3 and Taunt. If every hit is aimed at the same target, gain one Heroism.
Sadly, like almost all Chain cards in the game, this is just underwhelming. Sure it hits a lot harder than most of them ([80%] for The Hulk is like [200%] for Wolverine), and sure it refunds a Heroism if it’s thrown at a single target… but Seismic Smash deals more damage to each target it hits, while being capable of hitting more targets. Never, ever run this; even Mighty Blow is a better use of a deck slot.
Deals [250%] damage and applies Taunt in a large AoE.
Much more like it. This card hits like a truck made of lead razor blades, and it does so in a generous area. Instead of the obvious combo of Smash-Crush, the real Hulk combo is Challenging Roar-Seismic Slam. More Rage, more targets, more destruction. Never leave home without it.
Deals [33%] damage, knocks back and applies Stun in a line AoE.
A very polarizing card. On the one hand, this is the only source of AoE Stun in the game – the only source of AoE CC, in fact – and being able to shut down an entire group of enemies for the turn is an ability matched only by Magik’s Darkchylde. On the other hand, you could be spending that Heroism on using Seismic Slam to kill them all, and as League of Legends players like to say, death is the best CC. As should be obvious to any attentive reader by now, I side with the latter group – you don’t need to stun an enemy that’s been crushed into a fine paste under big green fists.
Deals [150%] damage and forcefully knocks back every enemy on the map, then gains a stack of Rage for each kill and Exhausts.
An extremely satisfying card, the aptly named Worldbreaker hits everything on the map for a respectable chunk of damage, throws them around like paper dolls, and obliterates most of the Environmental objects around the place too. If we’re being entirely honest with ourselves, this isn’t actually that good of a card – sure it hits everything, but the damage is middling and it’s very expensive for what it does. Nonetheless, it’s the only source of mass Rage outside of Challenging Roar… and frankly it’s just too cool to not run.
Best Hulk Builds
As I’ve explained in the cards analysis above, there’s two ways to build The Hulk – there’s the obvious way, and there’s the correct way.
The obvious way is to run around throwing Smash and Crush at single targets, slowly building up Rage over time, then using Always Angry to turn that Rage into health, increase your Rage limit and build it up all over again.
The correct way, on the other hand, is to throw out a single Challenging Roar at a nearby dog, hit max Rage instantly, then smash every enemy to pieces with Seismic Slam and Worldbreaker. Not only is this much, much more efficient, it’s also much more entertaining.
Recommended Teammates: The Hulk doesn’t really need anything in particular from his teammates, but while he doesn’t care about Doctor Strange’s damage boosts, he does like his card draw and Heroism. He also appreciates Hunter and Iron Man for their ability to kill single large targets that might survive the AoE onslaught.
The Hulk AoE Rage Build
As noted above, the crux of this build is to play Challenging Roar on an enemy with linked targeting to gain a lot of Rage from a single card play, then start throwing Seismic Slam and Worldbreaker around until everything’s dead. Two copies of Smash are included because the on-demand Stun (not to mention Rage) is extremely useful and as close to utility as The Hulk gets; if you habitually run Nico and/or Doctor Strange, and so have more Heroism than you know what to do with, you can replace one with a copy of Thunderclap. Always Angry is a debatable inclusion, but I feel it’s worth a slot as a panic button; if such cowardly tactics infuriate you, replace it with a Mighty Blow for maximum smash.
For card mods, you’ll usually want Heroism generation or card draw on Challenging Roar (to ensure you have the wherewithal to follow it up), and some kind of on-kill effect for Seismic Slam (because it will). Smash can be useful with Quick, but remember that it’s primarily there for the Stun; a Redraw effect may be preferable for those occasions when you don’t need to use it.
