Who Are the Most and Least Liked Marvel Rivals Heroes?

Data gathered from millions of games shows which Marvel Rivals heroes are the most popular and the results are somewhat confusing.

New Data Reveals the Popularity of Marvel Rivals Heroes

With over 30 different playable characters upon launch, Marvel Rivals has a lot of heroes to choose from. Naturally, this would lead to some heroes being more popular than others. The reasons for these may vary and be a combination of several factors – how the hero feels gameplaywise, how strong they are, how they look etc.

Fortunately, there is already a good online source for Marvel Rivals fans who want to see this data. Rivals Codex shares the current meta for Marvel Rivals. According to the prominent leaker, Miller Ross, the data is “real and pulled directly from the client”. Of course, as developers NetEase are constantly updating the game and rebalancing heroes, thus the meta always changes.

However, we can still see a momentary view of what the game’s meta is as of December 23, 2024.

Who Are the Most Popular Marvels Rivals Heroes in Casual Games?

We should ‘first understand that the popularity board looks somewhat different depending on whether we look at casual or ranked games. In Casual games, the top 5 most popular heroes, in terms of pick rate, are as follows: Jeff The Land Shark, Cloak & Dagger, Luna Snow, Mantis, and Venom.

Perhaps it’s somewhat strange that a hero like Jeff is at the top. After all, he’s not really a very popular character in the MCU. However, he’s quite quirky and there are tons of mems about him online, which probably adds a lot to his pick rate.

However, if we rearrange the heroes in terms of win rate, then Mantis takes the top spot. With a whopping 59% win rate, she dominates the casual ladder. This is compounded by the fact she’s quite strong, averaging about 7.91 kills per death.

Meanwhile, Black Panther, Wolverine, Namor, Black Widow, and Storm round off the rankings as the lowest-picked heroes in Marvel Rivals casual games. Weirdly enough, most of them have an above 50% win rate, not too dissimilar to many other heroes. In fact, Cloak & Dagger, the second-highest average kills hero has a lower win rate than Black Panther, Wolverine, and Namor. What’s also interesting is that when viewing by average KDA, Storm climbs to the fifth overall position, despite being the least picked hero, with a 0.8% pick rate.

It goes to show that making kills in the game isn’t the sole guarantee that you will win. Like any other team-based shooter, a player must work with their team and follow goals in order to win the match.

What About Ranked Games?

When we look at the popularity of Marvel Rivals heroes in ranked games, things seem a little bit more different, yet we still see some familiar faces. In terms of pick rate, the heroes lineup is as follows:  Luna Snow, Cloak & Dagger, Mantis, Hela, and Doctor Strange. Again, Mantis has the best AVG KDA at 8.48, and she also has one of the highest win percentages at 58.4%.

Interestingly, when we arrange the heroes based on average KDA, Storm once again makes it to the top 5 with a 7.19. This is more impressive considering she has an even lower pick rate compared to her casual game stats, with only 0.2% of players deciding to use her.

What Can We Conclude?

It seems that the pick rate of Marvel Rivals heroes isn’t dictated by how strong they are. Sure, Mantis reigns supreme in most cases, with a high pick rate, win rate, and KDA. But then there are cases like Cloak & Dagger, who has a high KDA, but less than a 50% win rate. Meanwhile, Storm seems like quite a strong character, having a high chance of winning matches and doing lots of damage. But she seems rather unpopular, especially in ranked games.

Ultimately, with over 30 playable characters, Marvel Rivals is a hard game to balance, especially considering it’s rather new and players are finding more and more issues that the devs have to work on. Unfortunately, sometimes the hero balance isn’t the only problem fans encounter. Since launch, many have been complaining about different gameplay issues. Recently, NetEase announced a temporary fix for Marvel Rivals’ problematic mouse acceleration and also promised that it would be permanently fixed once Season 1 starts in January.