Welcome to Marvel’s Midnight Suns best Spider-Man guide. In this guide you will find the best cards of the Spider-Man, the best decks and how to play. If you want to be a Spider-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 Spider-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.
Spider-Man Guide
He talks a lot, he’s really awkward… but the real reason a lot of the other heroes don’t like him is he’s the only one of them to have a solo movie in the last decade that didn’t suck.
Important Note: I am aware that the hero’s name is Spider-Man. However, the hyphen is a pain to type, so I refer to him as Spiderman throughout this guide. I promise you that this is done out of laziness, not ignorance.
TL;DR – He’s quick, he’s cool, but his cards suck so he’s bad. Saved from D tier entirely on the strength of his Legendary card.
Passive – The first Environment attack Spiderman uses each mission costs no Heroism; thereafter, each time he uses one he has a 15% chance to refund the Heroism cost. The former is okay for some free damage, but the rest of this Passive is trash – Environment attacks don’t scale very well as the game progresses, and it’s horribly unreliable.
Combo – Gives both heroes a stack of Fast. This isn’t too bad as a small added bonus – free Heroism is nice and all – but having to drop four Heroism to get it makes it a bit contradictory.
Spider-Man Cards
Deals [100%] damage. If this would kill the target, you can Chain it to something else, to a maximum of four targets.
This card is essentially what you’d get if you took Nico’s Witchfire and made it reliable in exchange for giving it garbage damage. [100%] is basically only ever going to kill minions and the occasional crippled enemy, so it’s easy for this to be stuck in your hand doing nothing for the entire mission. The main reason to play it is running dry of Quick attacks with minions still around, in which case you can give something else a love tap while you clean them up.
Knocks back a target with Quick. If the target was already damaged this turn it also deals [100%] damage.
This is really, really not good. To get the damage bonus, you’re not only going to need to find a non-minion you can set up to knock into a minion, but you’re also going to need to burn resources damaging the former first. It has some situational use for cleaning up crippled enemies after a big AoE, but nine times out of ten this is just going to be a Winds of Watoomb without the enhanced effect. Note that since Spiderman gets a free Environmental attack each turn, you can at least use it to set this up (though be conscious of where you’ll be after using it, since it would be embarassing to ruin your line-up).
Forceful knockback, but towards Spiderman rather than away from. If it kills a target, gain a Move.
Just… wow. Even for a Spiderman card, this is bad. It’s an entire card play just to perform a forceful knockback, and even if you manage to kill something with it, all you get in return is a move. There is no world in which you would ever want this card in your deck, or even close to it. Incidentally, the inverted knock direction does at least make it slightly more reliable for knocking into friendly heroes, which can at least draw you a card. Yay.
The next two Environmental attacks Spiderman uses will cost no Heroism and deal [50%] additional damage. Also provides two Moves.
Surprisingly, this card isn’t actually too bad. Admittedly Environmental attacks have poor damage scaling (as I’ve said several times already in this section), but Opportunist gives them some additional damage scaling (okay, only [50%], but it’s something), as well as making them entirely free. It even gives you the Moves you’ll need to position them properly! Between the Environmental damage and the damage bonus, you’re probably looking at [300%] – [400%] damage out of this card, which isn’t too shabby despite having limited targeting. Of course, once you run out of Environmental effects it’s just two Heroism.
Note: Make sure you use the free Environmental attack from your Passive before playing this, because otherwise it’ll be wasted.
Draw two Spiderman cards. Spiderman gains a stack of Fast and a stack of Resist.
Also not terrible – Resist is good, card draw is good, and Fast is… well, it’d be better on someone else, but it’s better than nothing. If only this drew general cards instead of Spiderman ones (i.e. bad ones), this could actually be a strong card. As it is, the main use for this is to combine with Infernal Spider to ensure you have enough Spiderman cards to play for Free.
Spiderman gains Strengthened. Free.
Continuing with our running theme, this card would be great if it belonged to somebody else. For Spidey, though, it really doesn’t do much – he simply doesn’t have enough damage on his cards for Strengthened to matter all that much. It does boost Environmental damage as well, but not by much. It’s still worth playing, mostly because it’s Free, but even then it’s a close run thing because you could have drawn a different card instead.
The next three Spiderman cards you play are Free. Also draws a Spiderman card, then Exhausts.
An incredibly potent card, it’s just a shame the cards you’re getting to play with it are pretty weak. Still, bad cards are still good when they’re Free. That said, you need to be very careful to ensure that you have the right cards in your hand before playing this – both Webslinger and Quick Kick are a complete waste of Free, so make sure you either have some other cards to play or else that you’ve already got them and have a Spider Sense in hand.
Binds a targeted enemy. For the rest of the turn, Environmental attacks deal 50% more damage to them.
Not great. Bind is a good status effect and all, removing a single enemy from the equation for a turn – but the rest of the card text is pretty worthless. Environmental attacks (say it with me) don’t scale well – but more to the point, the whole reason you want to Stun/Bind something is so you don’t have to attack it this turn. Even if this was an Attack this would be underwhelming due to the lack of damage or useful secondary effects on it; as a Heroic it’s trash. Points for onomatopoeia at least.
Deals [200%] damage to a single target and applies two stacks of Weak. Also deals [50%] damage to nearby enemies.
What’s this? Can it be? A Spiderman card with decent damage on it? Okay, [200%] damage still isn’t particularly good – Hunter puts out more than that with a regular Attack – but it’s the best Spidey’s got access to, and with Webslinger’s buff it starts to approach some real numbers. The AoE and Weak effects are both pretty much irrelevant, the former because the numbers are so low and the latter because Weak kinda sucks… but you’ll still probably run this just for want of better options.
Forcefully knocks back an enemy in any direction. All enemies near to where the target lands take [100%] damage.
Once again, a terrible card. Zero damage to your target beyond a possible collision, and just [100%] damage from the AoE. I will remind you that Scarlet Witch gets [100%] damage AoE from a basic Attack and doesn’t even want to use it – so effectively you’re paying four Heroism here for a forceful knockback. In fact it’s even worse – it hits fewer targets because it doesn’t hurt the primary target. This is traaaaaaash.
Best Spider-Man Builds
I only have one build suggestion for Spiderman – well, two, but the second one is ‘don’t play him because he sucks’. It’s a shame, because I really like him as a character – one of my Marvel favourites, in fact – but his lack of damage is just too hard to work around. Infernal Spider is his only redeeming feature, and it’s unfortunate that his entire deck seems to have been designed on the assumption that you’d have its effect permanently and at all times.
Recommended Teammates: There really aren’t any; while he has some in-built synergies with Hunter and Magik for working around Environmental effects, these really aren’t good enough to be worth building for. You also shouldn’t bring him with anyone who Marks (i.e. Scarlet Witch and, if you’re lucky, Iron Man) because Infernal Spider is just going to waste the Mark effects. Your best bet is probably The Hulk, because he packs a lot of damage and Chain Strike can be used to clean up the survivors of his AoEs. Alternatively, bring Iron Man, because his abundance of hero-specific card draw means you can avoid drawing Spiderman cards.
Spiderman Generalist Build
As much as it pains me as a card games player to recommend a list with this many one-ofs, this is probably the best you’re going to get. Quick Kick is necessary to provide some form of damage support, albeit only for minion clearing. Webslinger is useful for the damage boost, but Spiderman’s damage isn’t important enough to justify bringing two of them. Similarly, Opportunist is nice so long as Environmental effects are around, but bring two and you’ll run out of things to use pretty quickly. Your best bet is to use Spider Sense to find some cards, play Infernal Spider, then use it to play Chain Strike/Opportunist/Up Here! because they’re not good enough to be worth spending a card play on.
For card mods, really there isn’t much specific advice available – I am not known for my skill in turd polishing. You’re mostly just looking for card draw to find better cards and some Redraw effects to get some value when you throw these ones in the trash where they belong. Note that Quick and Free aren’t even particularly good for Spiderman, unlike every other hero, because his cards are still unimpressive and they give you less value from Infernal Spider.
