Marvel Rivals Best Team Comps

The 2-2-2 Framework

Most reliable lineups are built on 2-2-2: two Vanguards, two Duelists, two Strategists. Each pair covers a failure of the others. Two Vanguards give you a front line that does not collapse when one tank is focused. Two Strategists keep healing going when a diver kills one support. Two Duelists give enough damage to actually finish fights.

You can deviate, but know what you are giving up. A third Duelist trades sustain and space for damage; it can overwhelm a slow team and then fold once the reduced healing cannot keep up. A third Vanguard trades kill pressure for durability, which stalls well but struggles to close rounds.

For most players, especially in solo queue, 2-2-2 is the safe default. Deadpool, the one Multi-Role hero, is a useful patch here: he can be picked as a Vanguard, Duelist or Strategist, so whoever plays him can fill the missing role.

Why Synergy Beats Raw Power

The most common drafting mistake is stacking six favourite heroes with no thought to how they fit. Six strong picks that each want to fight at a different range often lose to a coordinated lineup that shares one plan.

Synergy shows up in three main ways. Range: heroes that want to fight at the same distance can support each other, while a long-range sniper paired with a melee diver often leaves both alone. Ultimates: some set up others, such as a pull or crowd control followed by a burst ultimate. Protection: a Vanguard whose kit covers the backline lets the Strategists play forward more safely.

A quick test for any lineup: if removing one hero would barely change how the other five play, the synergy is weak.

Dive Comps

The wiki defines dive as using high-mobility heroes to attack a single opponent, often a Strategist, then escaping before the rest of the enemy can respond. Its example divers are Black Panther, Spider-Man, Magik and Daredevil.

A representative dive lineup pairs two of those Duelists with Vanguards who can go with them. Venom's Frenzied Arrival dives onto the backline and launches enemies up, and Thor's Storm Surge can push a Strategist out of position, which the wiki calls ideal for diving the backline. Behind them you want Strategists who can keep up and save themselves: Rocket Raccoon runs along walls, and Jeff the Land Shark's Hide and Seek gives him 60% more movement speed and crowd-control immunity.

Dive's strength is tempo: you decide when and where fights happen and punish any support caught out of position. Its weakness is discipline. A solo diver who goes in early feeds the enemy a numbers advantage, which is why the wiki lists reliance on teammates following up as Venom's main weakness.

Poke Comps

Poke wins the opposite way, through patience and range. The wiki defines it as dealing damage from a distance, usually outside the enemy's range, so the engagement carries little risk. Its example poke heroes are Hela, Phoenix, Hawkeye, Iron Man, Black Widow, Moon Knight and Squirrel Girl.

A poke lineup takes two of those Duelists and puts Vanguards in front who can block projectiles. Doctor Strange's Shield of the Seraphim and Magneto's Metallic Curtain both absorb incoming projectiles and can stop some ultimates. For support, Strategists with long-range healing fit well, such as Luna Snow, whom the wiki calls a long-range Strategist with high healing output, or Jeff, whose Joyful Splash has no range limit.

Poke's strength is control on open maps with long sightlines, where it can wear an enemy down before a real fight starts. Its weakness is mobility: many poke heroes are exposed while firing, which makes them targets for a well-timed dive. On paper, the Season 10.5 balance post on October 9, 2026 favoured poke, buffing Phoenix, Hawkeye and Cyclops and reworking Iron Man's missiles to track targets. The Season 11 balance post, published November 10, 2026 and live with the November 13 update, took part of that back for Phoenix (Spark direct damage 45 to 40) and cut Squirrel Girl's Burst Acorn damage from 110 to 95 while giving her Squirrel Blockade a new Acorn Rain field.

Brawl Comps

Brawl wins in the messy middle. The wiki defines it as using shorter-range, high-sustain heroes to fight at close range, and its examples are Iron Fist, Hulk, The Thing, Wolverine and Rogue. Three of those five are Vanguards, which tells you brawl starts at the front line.

A brawl lineup groups up behind sturdy tanks such as The Thing, who cannot be knocked back or displaced, and Hulk, who reverts to Bruce Banner when Hero Hulk is knocked down, and adds close-range Duelists such as Wolverine or Iron Fist. Strategists with strong area healing keep the group standing; Cloak & Dagger's ultimate, Eternal Bond, leaves an energy carpet that heals allies as it goes.

Brawl's strength is resilience: when everyone fights close together, peeling is easy and divers get punished by the whole team. Its weakness is initiative, since a disciplined poke team can kite it on an open map. It is also the most forgiving archetype for uncoordinated groups, because staying together is simpler than timing a dive.

How Team-Ups Work Since Season 9

Team-Ups are the biggest reason a lineup can punch above its tier-list weight. Per the wiki, the system was overhauled in Season 9: every hero now has two Team-Up loadouts, each tied to a specific partner hero. A loadout has a Base Effect that is always active once selected and an Enhanced Effect that only switches on if the partner is on your team. You choose loadouts in Hero Select and can change them at any point in a match while in a spawn room.

The Season 10.5 balance post shows how much of the current tuning lives here. Hulk's Team-Up with Wolverine now raises his attack and movement speed in Furious state by 25% instead of 20% and cuts its Unstoppable cooldown from 60s to 45s. Magneto with Emma Frost gets a stronger, longer magnetic projection from Magnetic Resonance. The Thing with Invisible Woman has Unbreakable Forces on a 15s cooldown instead of 20s. Cyclops's Kinetic Kin with Gambit lasts 8s instead of 6s, and Jubilee's Team-Up with Blade gained a new effect that heals nearby allies for 15 per second for 6 seconds during Vampiric Kin.

The Season 11 balance post, published November 10, 2026 and live from the Season 11 update on November 13, kept going. Rogue and Gambit's Mr. & Mrs. X now has a 15s cooldown instead of 30s, but its kinetic explosion fell from 5 plus 1% to 3 plus 1% of maximum health and its ally healing from 15 to 10; the post says the base and enhanced versions had been too far apart. Luna Snow's Team-Up with White Fox lost the Spirit Fox's Charm. Groot's Wild Wall with Mantis now triggers the Flora Colossus passive, Cloak & Dagger's veils with The Hood now launch back enemies hit along the path, and Loki's Regeneration Domain with Mantis no longer gives allies a Damage Boost. The new hero, Nightcrawler, brings two Team-Ups of his own, per the Marvel Rivals Wiki: Protective Siblings with Rogue and Demon Disciple with Magik, whose Enhanced Effect gives him 25 Bonus Health on every warp.

The practical rule: before you lock a lineup, check which of your heroes' loadouts name each other. The wiki's own count is that, as of Season 9.5, only 247 team compositions let every hero use an Enhanced Effect at once, so you will rarely get all six. One or two strong pairings are usually enough.

Reading the Enemy and Flexing

No lineup is best in a vacuum. Because dive, poke and brawl form a rough rock-paper-scissors, the strongest drafting skill is reading what the enemy is doing and answering it. If they set up a stationary poke line, dive them. If they commit hard to dive, a grouped brawl turns the fight. If they brawl, poke can kite and chip them.

That is why a flexible hero pool matters more than mastering one character. A player who can play two or three heroes within an archetype lets the whole team adapt between fights, and you can switch heroes from the spawn room when the first plan is not working. In Competitive the ban phase shapes this too: once everyone in the lobby is Gold III or higher, each team bans three heroes, so your first-choice lineup may not be available at all. marvel rivals hero counters covers individual matchups.

Building Around Your Best Hero

In solo queue you rarely control all six picks, so a practical approach is to build outward from the hero you play best. If your strongest pick is a diver, nudge teammates toward the mobile tanks and self-sufficient Strategists that make dive work. If your comfort pick is a poke Duelist, you want projectile-blocking Vanguards in front of you.

The goal is to avoid the worst case: a strong individual hero stranded in a lineup that cannot support their plan. A diver with no follow-up dives alone and dies alone; a poke Duelist with no front line gets run down. A short message in chat saying which archetype you are aiming for is often enough for the pieces to point the same way.

Practising Comps With the Team Randomizer

The gap between reading about compositions and executing them is large, and the fastest way to close it is practice on unfamiliar lineups. Our fan-made team randomizer builds a full squad for you, with a role-balanced option that rolls two Vanguards, two Duelists and two Strategists, and lets you lock heroes you want to keep and re-roll the rest.

Use it with a group in Quick Match or a custom game to force yourselves onto a random dive, poke or brawl lineup and learn how the pieces feel together. You will find ultimate combinations and peel patterns that no written guide covers, and you will build the flexibility to switch archetypes when the enemy team calls for it. For which heroes are strongest in each role right now, see marvel rivals tier list and marvel rivals meta.