Welcome to Marvel’s Midnight Suns best Magik guide. In this guide you will find the best cards of the Magik, the best decks and how to play. If you want to be a Magik 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 Magik 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.
Magik Guide
If you force Magik to wear this bubblegum pink armour it triggers a secret event where she calls you a bellend and drops your friendship to zero. That’s why she looks so pissed off in the screenshot.
TL;DR – A powerful hero with a big bag of repositioning tools and some hefty stacking damage. Unfortunately lacks big hits until she’s spent a few rounds setting up.
Passive – 25% chance to generate a Limbo Portal card after an enemy passes through a Portal. Pretty useful for giving Magik some more reliable damage output.
Combo – +1 move when playing the Combo card. Not great, but it does at least give you an actual Move since you’ll probably be using the default one slapping something through a portal.
Magik Cards
Deals [150%] damage and knocks back.
Like a lot of Magik cards, in isolation this is pretty terrible; [150%] damage is underwhelming, and all it has alongside that is a knockback effect. Taken in context, however, this is one of the deck’s better cards – its damage can be inflated heavily, and assuming you only ever play it with a Portal around it’s guaranteed to have impact damage too. Still isn’t great, unless you can find a copy with Quick. Incidentally, only in a comic book game would a kick deal more damage than hitting something with a big sword.
Knocks back with Quick. Also provides +1 Moves.
Similarly, this is one of the worse Quick attacks on paper, lacking as it does any intrinsic damage and with only a Move for utility. All it takes is a single Limbo’s Grasp for this to start outperforming Quick Slash, though, and it can very quickly start putting out some real numbers. Even if you didn’t have a way to power it up you’d still be running it for Quick, so always take two. Note that it’s a ‘soul’slash despite Magik not really having anything to do with souls because they already had a Quick Slash and couldn’t be bothered coming up with a new name for the Hunter card.
Forceful knockback. If it kills, Magik gains a stack of Counter.
Unlike the previous two cards, even knockback can’t save this one. No innate damage, and making the knockback forceful isn’t worth much when Limbo’s Grasp is doing the heavy lifting. I have no idea why Magik would want Counter, either; I can only assume it’s for people who haven’t yet found a second copy of Darkchylde to upgrade it. Avoid like the plague.
Deals [150%] damage and then moves the target to anywhere on the map that they could move to normally.
It’s kind of a cool premise – moving the enemy wherever you want to set up AoEs and Environmental effects – but unfortunately that’s also what the rest of Magik’s deck does. This doesn’t use a player-created Portal (despite clearly involving portals), so it doesn’t get any benefit from Limbo’s Grasp either. Realistically Magik only wants to pair her Grasp with two things – knockbacks and Portals – and this is neither. If you could move enemies onto drops then this would be much cooler, but as it stands I have to say pass.
Free card that creates a Portal. When redrawn, gives an additional Move.
Although Magik’s signature card, this becomes borderline obsolete once you have a couple of Limbo’s Grasp cards unlocked. It’s still not terrible – after all, it’s usable in the early game just to set up good Quick kills – but after a while it starts to feel like a dead draw a lot more often than you’ll be happy about. The bright side is that if you bring a natural copy you can at least mod it to do something useful like generate Heroism for Free.
For the rest of the mission, any enemy knocked through a Portal takes [150%] damage. Also creates a Portal.
This right here is the card that makes Magik work; without it, she’d probably be in D tier with Blade and Cap. That’s right – a single card is enough to go from D to A, and if it worked with the cards that aren’t portals but clearly are (like Gather) she’d probably be S tier. This adds a decent chunk of damage onto all your other Portal-combos, but more importantly, it stacks. It stacks a lot. I’ve never actually checked what the maximum stack count is on it, but that’s because things don’t tend to live very long once it passes three or four. If you can find a copy with Free then even better, but without that you’ll want card draw to help with Magik’s reliability issues. Remember that in two-part story missions the buff carries over – I abused this in most supervillain fights by showing up with 4+ stacks already loaded, then slapping the villain around the map with comical ease. Even The Hulk can’t stand up to that.
Replaces an enemy or ally with a Drop until the start of your next turn.
An interesting card which pulls double duty – it can either stun (effectively) an enemy or save an ally. It also creates a Drop – unfortunately not one with any kind of buff on it like Hellmouth, but can still be handy. Unfortunately it’s completely outclassed by Darkchylde, and Magik’s deck just can’t afford to run much utility without running into consistency issues, so you’ll probably have to leave this at home. On the bright side, it has some absolutely gorgeous card art.
Magik gains Invulnerable and a stack of Counter, then Taunts all enemies. This card then Exhausts.
Phenomenally powerful and one of the few Legendary cards that provide utility rather than damage, Darkchylde is dirty, dirty, dirty. Even without the upgrade it renders the entire enemy team useless for a turn, meaning you can spend your other two card plays doing whatever you like (though I recommend using them to generate some Heroism to cover the cost of this card).
Upgraded, Magik gains Counter alongside it – and while Counter damage isn’t particularly impressive, it’s still free damage which if nothing else can clear up any minions you can’t be bothered to kill. It’s not recommended, but you can use this card to cover for heroes that need a lot of card plays to set up, like Blade/Captain Marvel/The Hulk, by giving them a functionally free turn. Be warned however, invulnerable isn’t foolproof. It won’t stop debuffs (Wounded, Bleed and Corrupted are all nasty), and it also doesn’t stop the damage from a lot of Supervillains.
Deals [100%] damage to enemies in a wide area and moves them closer together.
Visually very impressive, Gather is extremely helpful on paper – it has a generous AoE on it, and the grouping effect can facilitate your more stingy ones (or just a nearby explosive barrel). In practice, though, the grouping effect can be very awkward at times – particularly with Environmental effects, which the game seems to like to avoid. Its damage is also pretty lacklustre considering it doesn’t get boosted by Limbo’s Grasp. The sheer size of the AoE and occasional utility makes this a decent bring if you don’t have Darkchylde yet and need to fill the slot, but otherwise it’s not worth it.
Summons a hero you didn’t bring along for two turns and draws two of their cards, then Exhausts.
Possibly the most disappointing card in the game, this could have been so much more. It could have placed new heroes for knockbacks, it could have let you choose a specific hero and so tailor heroes to counter specific enemy types, it could have had some kind of built-in Combo effect. Instead, we get this – random positioning, random hero, and a wasted card play. Much like Summon Charlie, all this really does is spend four Heroism drawing two cards, and this one has even more randomness behind it. The best you’ll get out of this is someone with Taunt to soak damage for a few turns to protect your real team, and you can’t even guarantee that. Avoid even harder than Soul Blast, somehow.
Best Magik Builds
Once again only one deck to recommend, as Magik’s build isn’t very flexible. The difficulty with her is she needs to stack damage with Limbo’s grasp, and then needs to pair Portals with knockbacks to get anything done – it’s easy to find yourself with a hand full of one and none of the other. You can get around this to an extent by using your Move for a knockback, and her Relay passive can bridge some of the gap in the other direction, but even with these stopgaps Magik winds up being less reliable than most heroes.
Recommended Teammates: Magik is pretty self-contained, so there aren’t any really strong synergies available. Strong card draw effects from Doctor Strange can help to reduce her inherent variance, and she will appreciate big hitters like Hunter or Iron Man around to deal with the particularly big targets that she’d otherwise have to chip away at. You could argue that a tank like Wolverine could soak for a while until she’s set up, but that would entail running a tank, and you really don’t want to do that.
Magik Portal Power Build
You’re always taking two copies of Limbo’s Grasp, so immediately your space for deckbuilding becomes limited; a copy of Darkchylde is also more or less guaranteed, as are a pair of Quick Soulslashes. The only flexibility you have, then, is the balance between Portal cards and knockback effects – while it would be nice to fit in Gather or Banish for the utility, there just isn’t room without making her even less reliable than she already is. Personally I opt for two copies of Kick and a single Limbo Portal, as I’m actively looking for Limbo’s Grasp (which has a Portal built in) and Relay can feed you more.
For card mods, you want Free or Magik-specific card draw on Limbo’s Grasp, and Heroism or Magik cards on Limbo Portal. Everything else you can be fairly open with – I would however recommend beneficial Redraw effects more than usual, since if you wind up with too many Portals or knockbacks that you can’t pair up you’re going to want to throw them back.
