Marvel Rivals Team Comp Builder

Lock the Role Skeleton Before Anyone Picks a Hero

The first decision in a draft is not which hero you want. It is how the six slots divide across the three roles, because that division decides what your team is physically capable of before a single portrait is locked. Two Vanguards, two Duelists and two Strategists is the default skeleton for a reason: it guarantees somebody is holding ground, somebody is converting that ground into kills, and two people are keeping the other four alive. Almost every functional comp in Marvel Rivals is either that shape or a deliberate departure from it.

The deliberate departures are real options, not mistakes. A 1-3-2 split trades a body on the frontline for a third damage threat, which pays off when your team wins fights fast and can punish an enemy that commits slowly. A 3-1-2 split stacks bodies for a grinding fight over a narrow piece of ground where space matters more than raw damage. The one part of the skeleton I almost never bend is the pair of Strategists. One healer covering five other players is where comps quietly fall apart, because the moment that player is dived, your entire team is on its own health bar.

Settle the skeleton in the first seconds of hero select, out loud if anyone is listening, or silently by claiming whichever slot nobody has taken. Slots are cheap to trade before lock-in and expensive afterwards, when someone has already committed to a hero and treats the pick as identity rather than a role assignment. Decide the shape, then fill it.

Anchor the Frontline First

Once the skeleton exists, fill the Vanguard slots before anything else, because the frontline decides where fights happen and every other pick is a response to that. A Vanguard who pushes forward drags your damage with them and stretches your supports; a Vanguard who holds ground and body-blocks keeps the fight near your Strategists, which is a completely different match for the four heroes behind them. Neither is wrong, but the rest of the comp has to agree with the choice.

With two Vanguards, give them different jobs rather than doubling up on the same one. A common pairing is one who applies pressure and forces the enemy to react, such as Venom or Thor, alongside one who is strongest defending a fixed position, such as Groot, Peni Parker, Magneto, Doctor Strange, Emma Frost or Season 9.5's newcomer The Hood. Two aggressive Vanguards who both want to be deep in enemy territory leave nothing between the enemy and your backline; two defensive ones can hold a point forever and never take one. Running a single Vanguard is playable too, but it changes the contract for everyone else: your Duelists have to create their own space and your Strategists have to expect to be reached, so say it out loud before the support players pick. A frontline decided late is the most common reason a comp looks fine on the loading screen and falls apart in the first fight.

Choose Damage That Fits the Ground, Not Your Comfort Pick

Duelists are the largest role at 26 heroes and the easiest slot to fill badly, because most players already know who they want before the map loads. The useful question is not who you play best in the abstract, but what the fight geometry rewards. Long sightlines and open approaches reward heroes built around ranged fire like Hawkeye, The Punisher or Hela. Tight interiors, verticality and short flanking routes reward mobile close-range threats like Spider-Man, Magik or Psylocke. Mid-range picks such as Star-Lord or Cyclops sit between the two and are the safer answer when you genuinely cannot read the map yet.

Your two Duelists should not answer the same question. If both win only at distance, a diving enemy gets on top of you and neither of them has an out. If both are flankers who spend the fight behind enemy lines, nobody is holding the line while they are away, and your Vanguards end up fighting a six-on-four. The pairing that survives contact with a real enemy team is usually one anchor who holds an angle and one threat who goes and creates a problem somewhere else.

A third Duelist is only justified when the other four slots genuinely cover space and sustain — which in practice means two Strategists plus a Vanguard who can hold ground alone. Three Duelists on top of a single Vanguard and a single Strategist is not an aggressive comp; it is a comp with no frontline and no healing that happens to have a lot of damage nobody can stay alive long enough to deal.

Pick Supports Who Can Survive What Is Hunting Them

Strategists are the smallest role at 12 heroes and the one where the selection question is most often asked backwards. It is not who heals the most. It is who is still alive to heal at the thirty-second mark of a fight, given what the enemy has picked. That is why I fill these slots late in the draft, after the enemy has shown at least a couple of their threats.

Against a team full of mobile heroes who will collapse on your backline, weight the pair towards supports who can look after themselves and towards a frontline that will actually turn around and help. Against a team that wins from range and never commits, you can afford supports who plant themselves and pump output. Luna Snow, Mantis, Rocket Raccoon, Invisible Woman, Cloak & Dagger and Season 9's addition Jubilee cover meaningfully different situations, and the strongest support pairing is usually two who cover different ones — one keeping steady pressure off the frontline, one able to react when someone eats a burst of damage.

If the second Strategist slot is still empty when the timer is running out, take it. A team with one support and three Duelists loses to a team with two supports and two Duelists far more often than the damage numbers suggest, because every fight in Marvel Rivals is decided by who runs out of bodies first, not by who dealt more damage on the scoreboard.

Run Three Checks Before You Lock In

The first check is peel. Someone on your team has to be able to turn around when a diving hero lands on your Strategists. This is usually a Vanguard who plays closer to the backline than the front, or a Duelist who accepts the job explicitly. If nobody has it, your supports will die first in every fight, and every other strength in the comp stops mattering the moment your healing does.

The second check is sustain against burst. A comp built entirely around chip damage grinds enemies down but struggles to finish anyone before healing catches up. A comp built entirely around burst empties everything in the opening seconds and then has nothing while cooldowns come back. Mixing the two means you have a way to open a fight and a way to keep winning it after the opening trade.

The third check is shared weaknesses, and it is the one people skip. Look at your six picks and ask what single enemy answer beats all of them at once: everyone grounded against a comp that fights from above, everyone close-range against a team that refuses to close, everyone fragile against one big engage. Deadpool is worth remembering here — he is the only multi-role hero on the roster, so he is a genuine floating slot when the comp needs a body somewhere unexpected. Team-Up abilities are the final tiebreaker rather than the foundation: certain hero pairings unlock Team-Up bonuses, and those were reworked in Season 9, so when two candidates are otherwise equal, take the one that combines with a teammate already locked in. Do not distort a working comp to chase one.

Treat Round One as Data, Then Change One Thing

A comp is a draft, not a contract. Heroes can be swapped between rounds and on respawn, which means the squad you built in the first ten seconds is a hypothesis you get to test and revise. The teams that climb are not the ones that draft perfectly; they are the ones that notice what went wrong quickly and make a specific change rather than a panicked one.

Losses sort into three buckets, and each has a different fix. You could not reach them, which means they were winning at range and you need something that closes distance or matches it. You could not survive them, which means they were reaching your backline and you need peel, a tougher support pairing, or a Vanguard who plays closer to home. Or you could not out-heal them, which means the fight was a sustained brawl and the answer is more healing or a way to end fights faster instead of longer. Naming the bucket out loud is half the work, because it stops five people from making five unrelated changes.

Then change one slot. Five simultaneous swaps produce a team of people playing heroes they have not warmed up on, which is usually worse than the comp that just lost. And be honest about your own pool: swapping to a theoretically correct hero you have twenty minutes on is nearly always worse than staying on a slightly wrong hero you actually know.

Two Different Builders: Solo Queue and Full Stack

In solo queue you are not really drafting a comp, you are patching one. Watch the first two or three locks, find the hole in the skeleton, and fill it. That usually means being the person who takes the second Strategist or the second Vanguard when four teammates have gone straight to Duelists. Favour heroes who are self-sufficient over ones that need a specific teammate to function, because the coordination you would need may never arrive. If you communicate one thing all game, make it specific — naming the enemy hero that keeps killing your supports is worth more than any general instruction about grouping up.

With a full stack the builder gets to be ambitious. You can commit to an identity that needs everyone to buy in, pre-assign who is responsible for peeling the supports, and decide in advance who flexes when the enemy adapts. A dive comp only works when all six players collapse together and leave together, which is exactly the coordination a stack has and a solo queue lobby does not. Stacks can also practise particular pairings until the timing is automatic instead of hopeful. What both versions of the builder share is one constraint that no amount of theory beats: a comp is only as good as the heroes your five teammates can actually play. Keeping two or three heroes per role in your own pocket is what turns this checklist from something you read into something you can execute, because it means you can fill whichever slot the draft leaves open instead of hoping someone else does.

Using the Randomizers as a Drafting Aid

Practising the method matters more than memorising comps, and the fastest way to practise is to have somebody else hand you a squad you did not choose. Our team randomizer at marvel rivals team randomizer builds a full six-hero lineup on demand, which makes an excellent drafting drill: generate a squad, then run this page's checks on it — where is the peel, what is the shared weakness, which single swap would fix it? Doing that ten times teaches diagnosis far faster than reading about it, and it forces you into role combinations you would never pick voluntarily.

For a single slot, the hero randomizer at marvel rivals hero randomizer is the quicker tool. It is genuinely useful for settling a stalemate with friends when two people want the same role, for running random-hero nights in custom lobbies, and for expanding a hero pool that has quietly narrowed to three comfort picks. Both tools are fan-made practice aids, not in-game features, so use them in custom matches and warm-ups rather than expecting them to change anything inside a ranked lobby.

When you want ready-made answers instead of a method, the companion page at marvel rivals best team comps collects squads that already work, and marvel rivals roles explained covers what each role is responsible for in more depth. Think of it as a menu and a recipe: that page tells you what to cook tonight, this Marvel Rivals team comp builder tells you how to cook when the ingredients change next patch.