10 Tips & Tricks for Marvel's Midnight Suns

Early on in the game, you'll unlock the ability to Research; one of the many pop-up dumps that the game will throw at you explains how to level up your Research level and research items, but you might have a hard time retaining that information, so use this as your official reminder: don't neglect Artifacts!

Plainly put, you'll need to raise your Research level for numerous things, including unlocking essential facilities in the Abbey alongside some main quests demanding a high level. Since I was overwhelmed, scared, and too excited to talk to Steve Rogers, I may not have paid a lot of attention and suffered at my own hand — don't make the same mistake.

Your cards are only some of the many ways you can defeat your foes. Whether you're beating up Hydra, Lilin, or the Soulless, you'll need to use everything to your advantage to go on a superhero rampage!

Knock enemies against each other, use environmental hazards, and do not underestimate the Quick cards — these are imperative for dealing with waves of enemies, even if they deal small amounts of damage; you don't want to have 10 enemies standing by the time you click "End Turn".

So, you remember how I said I was obsessed with Steve Rogers? Well, in many runs, I may have taken Captain America, The Hunter, and Blade too much... until everyone else was way too low-level to help me out, and then one of them got injured.

Although every low-level hero levels up with The Hunter (usually a couple of levels behind), this disparity can be deadly on the wrong quest, leading to your characters not having the abilities or HP to survive it and causing a lot of injuries. Injuries aren't a bad thing, but being stuck without your main team can be detrimental. To keep everyone at a similar level, you'll want to...

The T.H.R.E.A.T is a fighting facility in your training grounds that takes place in Magik's Limbo. In it, you'll fight hordes of Soulless with one character at a time. This is daunting, a bit scary, and very exciting to do, but you'll mostly want to do it for the XP benefits, especially early.

In the T.H.R.E.A.T, you'll need to take one hero to survive three waves of the Soulless. Each kill replenishes a Card play, and dealing with the bigger ones will net you extra cards to play. You'll need to plan out your attacks to make sure you survive, as each card you use and each enemy you defeat levels up your heroes. Better yet, this place is perfect for practising decks for your heroes. Even if you fail and your hero falls in combat, you don't suffer injuries — what happens in Limbo stays in Limbo, I guess!

Nothing can be more detrimental to your battlefield capabilities than having too many Heroic abilities. Having too many Heroics in your deck can lead to turns where you can't punch back your enemies, even when you can hold more than six cards per turn.

Why? Well, you need to use random attacks or support cards to build Heroic, and very often, you'll have extra attacks given to you in missions that you need to use. Between cards like "Apprehend Agent", friendship-bonus cards, and other cards meant to help you fend off enemies, you'll easily reach the six-card threshold. Once you have six cards, you won't draw any more and be stuck with the cards you have in hand until you go below six and can draw again. I recommend having two (MAYBE three) Heroics per hero, but any more can be highly detrimental. Whenever you are stuck, though...

Cards come and go, and there are no cards that permanently go away when you redraw them; they just go back to your deck, waiting to be pulled again. With this in mind, I advise you to redraw freely; it's helpful to be able to change an attack that you can't use at the moment in exchange of something that'll save you hurt. Yes, even Heroic cards.

This tip is particularly true whenever you have Iron Man; since his cards can get stronger if you redraw them, don't be afraid to use your two free redraws to ensure you dish out more hurt than you're receiving. Sometimes, you can't feasibly use a powerful card, and that's okay — Quick attacks are great at building Heroic and sometimes, you need to use Heroic to use your environment to your advantage.

Everyone falls into one of two categories: either they get excited because the Abbey is a large estate filled with secrets to explore and side quests to finish, or they dread it the moment they find out there is more than just turn-based battles. Either way, you'll want to explore part of the Abbey — the structure, at least — to get some very useful items.

Whether you decide to help out Agatha Harkness, snoop on Wanda's diaries, or explore against the Caretaker's best advice, you'll want to look around the Abbey for floating orbs around the world. These can be one of five things: three different types of materials to upgrade abilities, currency to upgrade your cosmetics (like a costume for Captain America), and Credits. Credits are the reason you'll want to explore the Abbey, as these can be a bit scarce and can be used for a lot of essential facilities in the Abbey. If you're short on credits...

Here's another stupid thing about me: I didn't realise training used Credits until several hours into my playthrough. Yes, hours. I kind of skimmed over the "cost" section and skipped straight to the "reward", until, one fateful day, I couldn't train with Steve Rogers because I "didn't have enough resources". Sure, it was irksome I couldn't use credits to buy the Forge that I'd been farming Artifacts for, but more importantly: no one stops me from training with Cap.

Jokes aside, and surprisingly enough, I really did find out I needed to use credits to train when I tried to train with Captain America before a major quest and was too poor to. 25 Credits is quite a hefty amount, but, at the same time, training is very important. Do so carefully, but make sure you always have around 125 Credits to create any facilities you might want to.

Spongebob said it best: the first letter of F.U.N. is F! You'll want to make a lot of friends throughout the Abbey because these will unlock rewards that'll help you both at making new friends as well as on the battlefield. I know it’s easy to want to spend time only with Captain America, but you’ll want to spend time with others, too!

Making friends with the heroes throughout the Abbey gives you access to Combo cards with them, dealing massive amounts of damage that'll help you take out stronger opponents and — most notably — villains and bosses. These cards may cost 4 Heroic, but being able to deal over 100 damage with only one Card Play saved me more times than I care to admit.

You're about done; in fact, you might as well boot the game, run to the Mirror table, and start a quest. But wait... did you forget something?

Never forget to do Hero Ops. Sure, they cost Intelligence, and you'll need to get an Intel Cache from random quests to make sure you can do them, but since your party is limited to three characters, sending heroes on one-day Hero Ops ensures they can continue getting cards, even when they don't fit in your party for some reason. This way, even if I was taking Steve Rogers everywhere, I could still lie to Captain Marvel and make her think she'd be my main tank one day...