Marvel Rivals Team Comp Builder

What does a six-hero skeleton need?

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 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 part of the skeleton we would bend last 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 whole team is living on its own health bars.

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 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 keeps the fight near your Strategists, which is a 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. The wiki's descriptions sort the role fairly cleanly. Pressure Vanguards: Venom, described as a bruiser who "excels at diving in the enemy backline"; Thor, whose Storm Surge lunge can carry an enemy with it and who the wiki says "functions more as a melee Duelist than a Vanguard"; and The Hood, a "hitscan off-tank" who builds Demonic Energy into a half-demon form. Holding Vanguards: Groot, whose Ironwood and Thornlash walls block enemy fire; Peni Parker, "exceptional in defensive play to protect the backline"; Magneto and Doctor Strange, whose Metallic Curtain and Shield of the Seraphim absorb incoming projectiles; and Emma Frost, whose Mind's Aegis is a 400-health placeable shield. One of each is the pairing we would reach for first.

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 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 should expect to be reached, so say it before the support players pick. A frontline decided late is a common reason a comp looks fine on the loading screen and falls apart in the first fight.

Damage that fits the ground

Duelists are the largest role at 27 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 ranged heroes: Hawkeye, whose charged arrows the wiki says can eliminate most non-Vanguards in one critical hit; Hela, whose primary fire is a high-damage hitscan attack; and The Punisher, whose Adjudication rifle covers long range while his Deliverance shotgun covers close range. Tight interiors and short flanking routes reward close-range threats: Spider-Man, Magik, Psylocke, and Season 10's Gorr, whom the wiki calls a "deadly melee assassin". Star-Lord ("mid-range flanker") and Cyclops ("medium/long-ranged") sit between the two and are the safer answer when you 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 has an out; the wiki lists dive vulnerability as a weakness for Hawkeye, Hela and The Punisher alike. If both are flankers who spend the fight behind enemy lines, nobody is holding an angle while they are away, and your Vanguards end up fighting a six-on-four. The pairing that survives contact 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 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 one Vanguard and one Strategist is not an aggressive comp; it is a comp with a thin frontline and thin healing that happens to have a lot of damage nobody can stay alive long enough to deal.

Which supports survive what is hunting them?

Strategists are the smallest role at 12 heroes, and the selection question is often asked backwards. It is not who heals the most. It is who is still alive to heal half a minute into a fight, given what the enemy has picked. That is why these slots are worth filling late in the draft, after the enemy has shown at least a couple of their threats.

Against a team full of divers, weight the pair towards supports with an answer of their own. The wiki calls wall-running Rocket Raccoon's "best escape tool against dives", gives Invisible Woman a passive that turns her invisible after 5.5 seconds without attacking or taking damage, and lets Luna Snow freeze an attacker for 2.7 seconds with Absolute Zero. Cloak & Dagger's Dark Teleportation briefly makes Cloak and nearby allies immune to damage and crowd control. Against a team that wins from range and never commits, you can afford supports who plant themselves and pump output, such as Mantis, whose wiki page notes "very limited mobility tools" but high sustained healing, or Jubilee, whose Energy Plasmoids reach "even across the map".

The strongest pairing is usually two supports who cover different situations — 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 is betting that it can end every fight before the enemy finds that one healer, and that is a bet the enemy gets to decide.

3 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 — the wiki notes Thor's Storm Surge can push away divers attacking his own backline — or a hero with a stopping tool such as Peni Parker's Cyber-Web Snare, which immobilizes. 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 can be played as a Vanguard, Duelist or Strategist, so he is a genuine floating slot when the comp needs a body somewhere unexpected.

Team-Ups are the final tiebreaker rather than the foundation. Since the Season 9 overhaul, the wiki explains, every hero has two Team-Up loadouts, each tied to a specific partner. A loadout's Base Effect is active whenever you select it, and its Enhanced Effect only switches on if that partner is on your team. So when two candidates are otherwise equal, take the one whose loadout is enhanced by a teammate already locked in. Do not distort a working comp to chase one.

Round one is data: change one thing

A comp is a draft, not a contract. Heroes can be changed during the match, which means the squad you built in the first seconds is a hypothesis you get to test and revise. Swaps do carry a cost the wiki spells out: a hero switch keeps at most 50% of your ultimate charge. Team-Up loadouts, by contrast, can be changed at any point while you are in a spawn room.

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. 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 on heroes they have not warmed up on, each having just thrown away half their ultimate charge, which is usually worse than the comp that lost. And be honest about your own pool: swapping to a theoretically correct hero you have barely played is often worse than staying on a slightly wrong hero you know.

Solo queue, full stacks, and a randomizer drill

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 — with 27 of the 54 heroes being Duelists, that is the role most likely to be over-filled. Favour heroes who are self-sufficient over ones that need a specific teammate to function, because the coordination may never arrive. If you communicate one thing, make it specific: naming the enemy hero that keeps killing your supports is worth more than a general instruction to group 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 peels for the supports, decide who flexes when the enemy adapts, and pick Team-Up loadouts around partners you know will be there. Note the queue limits on the wiki's Competitive page: before placements are complete, parties are capped at three; from Bronze to Grandmaster any party size except a five-stack is allowed, so a full six-stack can queue; and at Celestial and above only solo or duo queue is allowed. Above Grandmaster, full-team drafting moves to custom games, where the wiki's Custom Game page notes a host can swap players between teams and even fill slots with bots. What both versions share is one constraint no theory beats: a comp is only as good as the heroes your teammates can actually play, so keep two or three heroes per role in your own pocket.

Practising the method matters more than memorising comps, and the fastest practice is having somebody else hand you a squad. Our team randomizer at marvel rivals team randomizer builds a lineup of three to six heroes. With its role-balanced option on (the default), a six-hero roll is two Vanguards, two Strategists and two Duelists, and you can click any hero to lock them before rerolling the rest. That makes a good drill: roll a squad, run this page's checks on it — where is the peel, what is the shared weakness, which single swap would fix it? — then lock the five you would keep and reroll the sixth. For a single slot, the hero randomizer at marvel rivals hero randomizer is quicker. Both are fan-made practice aids, not in-game features. For ready-made squads, see marvel rivals best team comps; for what each role is responsible for, see marvel rivals roles explained. 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.