Welcome to Marvel’s Midnight Suns best Iron Man guide. In this guide you will find the best cards of the Iron Man, the best decks and how to play. If you want to be a Iron Man 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 Iron Man 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.
Iron Man Guide
He may be a genius, he may have an armoured combat suit, but his real super power is being a rich white man. It sounds facetious, but that’s far more power than any of the rest of the cast has.
TL;DR – The only side-character to make S tier alongside Hunter, Iron Man has a truckload of damage and the utility to bring it to bear. When you bring him on a mission it’s all about him – and despite what the tutorial tries to make out, that’s a good thing.
Passive – Generates one Redraw the first time you play two Iron Man cards each turn. It sounds underwhelming, but the Redraws are never a bad thing, and unlike most other passives it’s reliable.
Combo – Allows you to spend a Redraw to reduce the Heroism cost of the Combo card by one. In most circumstances this is actually a hindrance, as both Iron Man and Hunter cards tend to be better than Combo cards, so you want to redraw Combos, not make them cheaper.
Iron Man Cards
Deals [100%] damage and knocks back a single target. If redrawn, gains forceful knockback.
A very weak Attack card, it offers low grade damage and a very poor Redraw effect. This is actually an inside joke by the dev team – Blast is terrible and Quick Blast is great, representing how Tony Stark is so prone to overthinking things. Not actually true, but it would make a lot of sense.
Deals [50%] damage with Quick and draws an Iron Man card. If redrawn, gains knockback.
Heavily contrasting with Blast, Quick Blast is a great card and an auto-include. Sure you have to burn a Redraw to get knockback, but that aside, this is everything you want in an Attack – it’s Quick, it deals damage, it has knockback, and it draws a card. If you can find a copy modded to give a Redraw, it becomes the poster child of Quick attacks.
Gives [200%] Block to the targeted hero and generates two Redraws.
This is a really peculiar card – every other card in Iron Man’s deck is entirely selfish, then we have this thing thrown in as an afterthought. Maybe that’s why it sucks so hard – his heart’s not really in it. Regardless, give this one a miss, as moderate amounts of Block really aren’t worth a card play, Redraws or no Redraws. Incidentally, I have encountered at least one person who has suggested running this card to enable Captain America’s Shield Bash, which is entirely the reverse of what should be happening.
Draws two Iron Man cards, grants two Redraws, and gives Iron Man two stacks of Fast.
Again heavy contrast with the previous card – where Heads Up is out-of-character and garbage, this card is both fantastic and very much on-brand. For a lot of heroes, drawing character-specific cards might be a hindrance; for Iron Man it’s nothing but positive, as not only are his cards great, they juice up Surgical Strike. Added Redraws help to fuel his various card effects, and to cap it all off, it has Fast built in too. Normally Fast is rather underwhelming as a buff, but so much of Iron Man’s kit is built around Heroics that it winds up being extremely effective. I highly recommend this card.
Applies two stacks of Marked and Vulnerable to a single target. If redrawn, also adds two Marked stacks to all nearby enemies.
This card sits on the cusp of greatness. Marked is a very valuable status, certainly, but even with Vulnerable this is essentially just spending a card play to save a card play. If Redrawn it becomes much more useful, but only if you can position it to land Marked on multiple non-minion targets – which, it should be noted, usually means Vulnerable isn’t going to go on the target you want it on. At the end of the day, whether you use this card entirely depends on whether you managed to get a properly modded Air Superiority or not.
Doubles your current Heroism, then draws a Heroic card.
This is a feast-or-famine card. Obviously when you have enough Heroism to make it generate three or more, it’s very effective; less than that and it’s very much a poor man’s Leave It To Me. Furthermore, its usefulness very much depends on whether you’ve got things to spend that Heroism on (although given how hungry Tony is for Heroism, you probably do). You’ll probably wind up running this card simply because of a lack of better options, but it’s a close call between this and Mark Target.
A Free card causing the next Iron Man card played to return to your hand. Can be redrawn to reduce its Heroism cost by one until it hits zero.
A much easier card to analyse, this is flat out bad. Effectively you’re spending Heroism (or Redraws) to turn this into a copy of a card in your hand. You have to stop and ask yourself – are there any Iron Man cards I want to play twice on a turn? Maybe Surgical Strike, maybe, and Quick Blast provided you’ve got enough targets for it. Neither is worth spending Heroism to duplicate, certainly, because if you weren’t running this card you’d have drawn something much better instead. I wouldn’t recommend this card even if it were a Skill.
Deals [100%] to every enemy on the map. Can be redrawn to add [50%] up to two times.
In isolation, this card is actually kind of mediocre. Its damage is low and can be boosted up to mediocre; it hits every enemy, but without some punch behind it all you’re really doing is getting rid of your Quick targets. It’s even fairly expensive. Despite these drawbacks, however, I strongly recommend running this card. Why? Because if you can find a copy with the +1 Marked modifier, it becomes an absurdly overpowered card and your ticket to clearing missions before the enemy gets a turn. This is literally the only card in the game that I would recommend grinding resources to get a specific mod on, because +1 Marked on this is so undeniably broken. Do it and don’t look back.
Deals [100%] in a line AoE, then grants +1 Redraw for each kill. Can be redrawn as many times as you like, gaining [50%] each time.
To be honest, this is a bit of a sad duck Legendary. Its damage is identical to Air Superiority, but it trades reliably hitting every target for instead being a line AoE and giving a few Redraws. Its only real strength is that it can be Redrawn infinitely, but while Iron Man can generate a lot of Redraws, he also needs to spend a lot of them to activate his effects – he certainly doesn’t generate enough of them to really need a Redraw dump, and even if he did, he’d want to be spending them on finding more Iron Man cards to power up Surgical Strike. It does, at least, look pretty cool.
Deals [125%] damage with Chain X, where X is the number of Iron Man cards in your hand when played.
This is the real Iron Man Legendary card. It is the apex, the pinnacle, the Chain card that all other Chain cards hope to be when they grow up. Unlike other Chain cards, Surgical Strike actually deals good damage on each hit; it can also reach higher Chain values than any other card in the game. Not even Chain Hex can reach the Chain levels this can. And to really rub salt into the wound, it’s also the cheapest Chain Heroic card in the game (okay, tied with Eviscerate, but who counts that?). This card is why Iron Man card draw is so strong.
Best Iron Man Builds
There isn’t a lot of flexibility available in Iron Man builds. You’re really looking to follow one specific game plan – use Air Superiority to shell the entire enemy force, Surgical Strike to pick off the survivors, and maybe throw in a few nukes from Hunter to pick off the harder targets. Everything else is just card draw and Heroism generation, along with a few Redraws along the way to juice your cards.
Recommended Teammates: As noted, Hunter tends to work well with Iron Man (particularly Dark Hunter) due to her ability to straight up murder single targets. He also greatly appreciates Doctor Strange (as do most heroes) for his card draw, Heroism, and the fact that adding damage to Surgical Strike makes it even more filthy.
Iron Man One Turn Missions Build
This is your cookie-cutter build, with not a lot of room for modifications – you’re not looking to do much except draw a lot of Iron Man cards and then blast everything to pieces. There are two main changes that you might make, however. If you don’t have a copy of Air Superiority with Marked on it, you’ll probably want to run a copy of Mark Target in place of Hellfire Beam (or better yet, go get Marked). Hellfire Beam itself, meanwhile, is probably objectively worse than Air Superiority; I run Hellfire Beam mostly because I don’t want to grind for a second Marked Air Superiority, and drawing the wrong one would just make me sad.
Aside from Marked, your card mods are mostly going to be card draw (particularly hero-specific card draw) and bonus Redraws, both of which are useful for fuelling the rest of your arsenal. Bonus damage on Surgical Strike also goes a long way thanks to its extremely high Chain potential.
