Welcome to Marvel’s Midnight Suns best Nico guide. In this guide you will find the best cards of the Nico, the best decks and how to play. If you want to be a Nico 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 Nico 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.
Nico Guide
The obligatory FUN(TM) character, playing Nico is like firing a machine gun while falling down the stairs – someone’s getting hurt, but you don’t have much control over who. She’s also super cute.
TL;DR – A lot of damage and a lot of support, Nico is hampered only by her random effects. If you play her to minimise her variance, though, she can be extremely powerful.
Passive – 33% chance to draw a card whenever you play a Nico card. This is great – card draw is always good, and getting it for free is even better. Note – this triggers on any card Nico plays, including mission cards, so you should always open supply crates with her.
Combo – Applies one stack of a randomly chosen debuff between Marked, Stun, Vulnerable or Weak. Generally not great – Combo cards are expensive enough that you want to be killing whatever you hit with them. Stun can be situationally useful though.
Nico Cards
Deals [150%] damage to a single target and restores [200%] health to a random hero on kill.
Although it looks random (and indeed, says random), this card isn’t quite that bad – it won’t try to heal anyone who’s already at full health, so you’ll always get some benefit from a kill. The damage is lacklustre, but not completely awful; while healing usually isn’t great, it’s not bad as a side effect. If you can find a copy with Quick this becomes handy as a spot heal.
Deals [50%] damage and applies a debuff – either Stun or two stacks of Marked, Vulnerable or Weak.
A rare example of a bad Nico card, this is never worth bringing along. If it happens to land on Stun it can be situationally useful (although still not great given the low damage); anything else is a waste of a card play. Pretty much the best case you’ll get for it is applying Marked and a little damage to something that’s just outside one-shot range, but that situation arises very rarely (and even when it does, the odds of Curse landing on Marked are only 25%). At least the card art is cute.
Deals [200%] damage to a random target. If it kills, this casts again to a maximum of four total casts.
Now this is much better. [200%] damage is hefty for a multi-target Attack, and although it’s randomly-targeted it’s not too hard to play around so long as you’re packing some solid damage numbers on the rest of your team. You’ll most commonly want to play this card to clean up after a big AoE, since it can pick off both crippled enemies and any random minions that managed to avoid the explosions. It can certainly be awkward, and and there will certainly be times when this beelines straight for the only healthy enemy on the map, but it works out often enough to be worth using.
Applies two stacks of Blood Magic [i.e. innate Lifesteal], Counter, Fast or Strengthened to a hero target, then draws one of their cards.
Unfortunately, this is pretty terrible, in large part because half of its potential effects are done better by Nico’s other cards – Blood Magic by Restore, Fast by Empower. Meanwhile, Counter is pretty much garbage. The only effect you’ll consistently want out of this is Strengthened – which it will not consistently give you – and even then it’s questionable whether that would be worth a card play. The extra card draw is nice, but really not enough to salvage this card; the key to using Nico is to mitigate her randomness, and you can’t mitigate a random effect when every possibility is inherently situational.
Generates an additional copy of every Attack, Skill or Heroic card in your hand, chosen randomly.
This card has high highs and low lows; on another hero it might be worth running simply for the former case. Unfortunately, Nico already has enough random in her life without adding more. To analyse the effectiveness of this card, look at it like face-up card draw. Do you want the cards it’s giving you? Sometimes yes, sometimes no, but most of the time it’ll be giving you two or fewer cards. Drawing two cards is good, but having this sometimes be a dead draw is not. Avoid, unfortunately.
Draws a Heroic card, then makes all Heroic cards in your hand cost 0 Heroism until the end of the turn.
Muuuuuuch better. No randomness (outside of card draw), and it can give you some really chunky cards without expending resources for them. Obviously the effectiveness of this card very much depends on who your teammates are – heroes who don’t pack a lot of Heroic cards won’t like this much – but with the right pairing this can be obnoxiously strong. For best results, use this with Heroism-dump Legendaries like Crack The Sky and Annihilation – the effect will scale with Heroism, but they won’t spend any.
Heals a hero target back to full health, then Exhausts. If the target had less than 50% of their health remaining when played, returns to your hand instead.
No fuss, no muss, just fully heal someone and move on with your life. This is the single best heal in the game, but its effectiveness is still questionable – as always, more offence is usually better than throwing heals around. All the same, it’s probably a good idea to bring a copy of this along in case of emergencies – it can really turn fights around. Unfortunately Nico does not have a Magical Girl outfit available to make the animation appropriate.
Consumes all Heroism, then deals [150%] damage for each Heroism expended and generates one point of Heroism for each kill. It then Exhausts.
A hefty, hefty card and one of the best Heroism dumps in the game, Crack The Sky deals a lot of damage (still not as much as Annihilation though, sorry Nics). [150%] damage per Heroism really underlines why Captain Marvel’s Rain of Blows is so garbage – with those kinds of damage numbers, the random targeting barely matters. Note that it’s not entirely random – it’ll stop hitting a target once it’s dead, so you don’t have to worry about throwing all ten shots at a minion. For obvious reasons this pairs best with Empower – no cost for a big nuke, then fills your Heroism up if you weren’t full before casting it. Also has the single best animation of any card in the game.
Deals [100%], [200%], [250%] or [300%] damage to a single target, chosen randomly when drawn.
A pretty poor card, it has a decent ceiling (but not great) and a terrible floor. Single-target Heroics are pretty bad at the best of times, and randomly determined damage with no secondary effects does not equal the best of times, particularly when Empower is a thing. It’s cheap, but that’s the best you can say for it. Incidentally, for those who aren’t great at maths, the average damage is [212.5%], which is only barely higher than you’d get out of Witchfire.
Targets an enemy, then deals four sets of [75%] damage, with each one thrown randomly at them or a nearby enemy.
Like Crack The Sky, this won’t throw completely wasted shots; unlike Crack The Sky, this is pretty underwhelming. You’ll want to cast this in two situations – either isolated on a single target (making it a max damage Swarm), or to pick off a group of weakened enemies. Not bad, but not great either.
Best Nico Builds
You’ve got two options when it comes to building Nico – you can either play her as a full support, or you can make her a support-damage hybrid. I usually lean towards the latter, but honestly either works – full support tends to work better for shorter missions, though. The one thing you don’t want to do is build Nico as a debuffer, because then Nico will be weak-o (okay, that one I’m sorry for).
Whichever way you play her, you should definitely play her because aside from being the most pleasant character in the game to talk to, she also has the coolest animations in the entire game. Crack The Sky, Witchfire, Witchstorm, even Blood For Blood is kinda badass. If you haven’t used her much, I strongly recommend doing so just for the visuals.
Recommended Teammates: If you’re playing her as a hybrid, you’ll get a lot of use out of Doctor Strange’s damage buffs due to all her damage cards (at least the ones worth bringing) being multi-hit. She also works pretty well with tanks (shock horror) thanks to packing multiple heals in her utility. If you’re running as full support, meanwhile, you want teammates with big, chunky Heroics to make the most of her Empower.
Nico Nuke-o Build
This is your standard Hybrid build, running Empower and Blood For Blood to provide utility and filling the rest of the deck with good old fashioned nukes. Note that Blood For Blood is used here because I have a Quick copy and find that enemies rarely live long enough to hit me; feel free to swap for a copy of Restore if you’d get more mileage out of it.
Your best card mods are mostly going to be bonus damage on your nukes to take advantage of their multiple hits; support cards should either have card draw or Redraw effects, because Nico probably doesn’t need more Heroism.
Good Girl Nico Support Build
Nico’s support build comes out looking very similar to her hybrid build – but the real difference is how you mod and play it. This deck functions best as a complete cheese build. To play this way, you’ll want to curate her teammates’ decks to only run the really big hard-hitting AoE Heroic cards – we’re talking Annihilation, Seven Suns of Cinnibus, Worldbreaker, Midnight Special. If you’re the nervous sort, you might want to throw in a copy or two of the strongest non-Exhaust Heroics like Surgical Strike and Seismic Slam.
You then mod Nico’s cards for a lot of card draw. You’re specifically looking to draw a copy of Double Up duplicating Heroic cards (you may want to swap the Restore for a second Double Up for this purpose). Once you have one you can Empower – guaranteeing that you draw either a Combo card or a really strong Heroic, while also making them cost 0 – and then Double Up to get around the Exhaust issue. Burning Combo cards early can help with reliability, and if you really want to be cheeky, burn all your Exhaust Legendaries except the one you want to play every turn. Empower will then be drawing it by default, allowing you to spam it over and over again with Double Up, all for zero cost. It’s unreliable, it’s cheesy, and it sometimes goes horribly wrong – but when it works, it’s pretty damn funny.
