The Marvel Rivals Roster in Season 10

The Numbers, Plainly

Fifty-three heroes. Fourteen Vanguards, twenty-seven Duelists, twelve Strategists, and Deadpool as a multi-role pick. Those four figures are the whole roster, and they have a few consequences that are worth stating before anything else.

The first is that the Duelist pool is not merely the largest — it is larger than the Vanguard and Strategist pools combined, with two heroes to spare. Twenty-seven versus twenty-seven. If you play only Duelists you have roughly half the roster available to you and a near-infinite amount of variety; if you play only Strategists, twelve heroes is your entire world, and you will meet the same faces in almost every match.

The second consequence is about queue times and lobby behaviour, and it follows directly from the first. A role that half the roster belongs to is the role most people learn first, because it is the role they see most of. That is why the instinctive complaint in a losing lobby is almost never "we have too many tanks."

The third is subtler. Every new Duelist added to the game is a marginal addition to a pool of twenty-seven. Every new Vanguard is a meaningful addition to a pool of fourteen. When The Hood arrived as a Vanguard rather than the Duelist most people expected, that single decision moved the front-line options by around seven percent in one patch. The same hero released as a Duelist would have moved that pool by under four percent.

Vanguards — Fourteen Front Lines

Vanguards are the game's tanks, and at fourteen they are the second-smallest pool. That scarcity is the reason Vanguard players tend to get their pick: in a six-stack of strangers, the number of people who actively want to tank is usually one, sometimes zero.

The pool is less uniform than the role name suggests. Some Vanguards hold ground and create a protected pocket their team fires from. Some walk into the enemy team and force a fight by being impossible to ignore. Some select a single target and remove it. And since Season 9.5, at least one fights meaningfully at range — The Hood's twin pistols make him a gunner in a role built almost entirely around proximity, which is the most unusual thing about him and the reason he is worth learning even if tanking is not your habit.

One roster note that trips people up constantly: **Rogue is a Vanguard**, not a Duelist. The comic-book instinct says damage dealer. The game says front line. If you are building a composition from memory rather than from the hero select screen, that is the single most common mistake to make.

For where each Vanguard currently sits in the pecking order, the marvel rivals vanguard tier list page ranks them; this page is only concerned with how many there are and what that scarcity does to your games.

There is a practical scheduling consequence to fourteen as well. Because the Vanguard pool is small enough to hold in your head, it is the only role where you can realistically prepare for what you are about to face. Before a match you can reason about which of fourteen front lines the enemy is likely to field. You cannot do that with twenty-seven Duelists — the list is too long for the exercise to mean anything — and you barely need to with twelve Strategists, because the answer is usually the same two or three. Fourteen sits in the narrow band where preparation is both possible and worth the effort.

Duelists — Twenty-Six Ways to Deal Damage

Twenty-seven Duelists is a lot of heroes to hold in your head, and nobody really does. Most players have three or four they trust and a vague sense of the rest.

The practical effect of a pool this size is that Duelist is the role where randomising your pick is genuinely useful rather than a gimmick. With fourteen Vanguards you can reasonably know all of them. With twenty-seven Duelists, the tail of the pool — the eight or ten you have never played a full match on — stays permanently unexplored unless something forces you into it. That is the actual argument for a randomiser: not novelty, but coverage of a pool too large to explore deliberately.

It is also why Duelist is the role most affected by the meta. When a pool is this deep, small balance changes reshuffle which five or six heroes are worth picking, and the other twenty wait. The marvel rivals duelist tier list page tracks that ordering.

A second roster gotcha lives here by omission: **Gambit is a Strategist**, despite an entire generation of comic readers filing him under damage. He is not in this pool at all.

One more thing the size of this pool changes: what "filling in" means. On a twelve-hero role, being asked to play something outside your comfort zone means one of eleven alternatives, most of which you have at least seen. On a twenty-seven-hero role, the same request can land you on a hero you have genuinely never loaded into a match. That gap is the reason Duelist mains often feel like specialists rather than generalists — the pool is simply too big to be a generalist in.

Strategists — Twelve, and Why That Number Hurts

Twelve Strategists. That is the smallest pool in the game, and it is less than half the Duelist pool.

Every frustration people express about support in this game traces back to that number. Twelve heroes means the support meta is narrow by construction — when two or three of the twelve are clearly strongest, you are not choosing from twelve, you are choosing from three, and everyone in the lobby knows which three. It also means a single balance patch touching one Strategist is proportionally about twice as disruptive as the same patch touching one Duelist.

Season 9 added Jubilee to this pool as a Strategist on July 10, 2026, which was a deliberate correction to exactly this scarcity. One hero in twelve is a meaningful percentage.

If you have never committed to the role, the smallness is actually an argument in its favour: twelve heroes is a pool you can genuinely learn end to end in a few weeks, which is not true of the Duelists. The marvel rivals strategist tier list page covers the current ordering.

Deadpool, and Why He Is Counted Separately

Deadpool is the fifty-fourth slot's odd companion — a multi-role hero who does not sit cleanly in any of the three buckets, which is why the breakdown above reads 14 + 27 + 12 + 1 rather than three numbers adding to 54.

This is worth understanding rather than glossing over, because it is where roster counts published elsewhere start to disagree with each other. A site that files Deadpool as a Duelist reports twenty-eight Duelists. A site that omits him reports fifty-three heroes. Neither is dishonest; they are counting differently. This page counts 14 Vanguards, 27 Duelists, 12 Strategists and Deadpool separately, which is how the roster is structured in game.

When you see a hero count that does not match 54, check how the source handled Deadpool before assuming one of you is out of date.

There is a second reason he is listed on his own rather than folded in. Counting him inside a role implies his pick competes with that role's other options, and in practice it does not behave that way in a draft. A composition discussion that treats him as the twenty-seventh Duelist reaches different conclusions than one that treats him as a separate lever, and the second framing matches how lobbies actually use him.

How the Roster Reached 54

Three recent additions brought the roster to its current shape, and all are recent enough to still be shifting how games play out.

**Jubilee** joined in Season 9 on July 10, 2026, as a Strategist — an addition to the smallest and most strained pool in the game.

**The Hood** — Parker Robbins — arrived with the Season 9.5 mid-season update on August 7, 2026, as the 53rd hero, and was revealed as a **Vanguard**. He wields dual pistols and a magical spherical shield, which is the gunner-tank hybrid described above. Because he landed in a mid-season patch, he arrived alongside Vanguard balance work in the same update — so he entered a role that was being tuned around him.

**Gorr the God Butcher** arrived with **Season 10, "Butcher's Blasphemy"**, as the **54th hero** and the **27th Duelist**, wielding the All-Black the Necrosword. The official site gives the season's start as September 9, 2026; some outlets reported September 11. His role is corroborated by the Marvel Rivals Wiki and multiple outlets rather than stated on the official season page, so treat the details of his kit as provisional.

One hero into each role across roughly two months. For a fuller account of the current patch see marvel rivals season 9 5, and for the running list of arrivals see /new-marvel-rivals-characters. To roll from the full 54 rather than choosing, the marvel rivals hero randomizer tool draws from this exact roster.