What Beats the Season 9.5 Meta in Marvel Rivals
The other team locked the best hero in the game. Here is who to pick, and why it works.
Aug 22, 2026 · figures from the Aug 31, 2026 snapshot
Every tier list tells you who to play. None of them tell you what to do when the other team already locked that hero. This is that list: the heroes our consensus rates highest this half season, and the single strongest answer we have to each.
These are not win rate readings. A counter score is matchup lopsidedness on a 0 to 10 scale, and the reason beside each one names the mechanic that does the work, so you can check our reasoning instead of trusting it.
What beats the top of the meta
Black Cat's Calling Card dashes to any enemy in line of sight, and wall crawling finds that sightline over the front line.
Area burn clears nest and mines without entering their range.
Spider-Man reaches the backline before Ultron can be peeled off, and Ultron loses the close-range fight.
Wolverine's Savage Claw takes a percentage of maximum health per strike, so The Hood's 600 health pool works against him rather than for him.
A hovering silhouette is a free scoped shot.
Damage she absorbs becomes the slam that launches Magik, and Magik has to be in melee to do anything at all.
She stacks Sparks from the air onto the second largest body in the game, and her Slow keeps his charge short. Note The Thing's Unyielding Will ignores displacement, so nothing here launches him.
How to actually use this
A counter pick is worth less than people think if you swap in and keep playing the same way. The reasons above are instructions as much as explanations: if the note says a hero's damage gets absorbed, the answer is to stop feeding it, not to press harder.
And swapping is not free. You lose your comfort hero, your team loses whatever your old pick was covering, and you do it while already behind. That last part is why the famous counters often look mediocre in raw match data: they turn up disproportionately on teams that were already losing when the swap happened.
Every hero has a full page with the complete list, not just the top answer. Start from the counter tables if you know who is beating you.
Statistical data is based on external APIs and publicly available information. It may differ from official data.