YouTuber Christopher Odd’s penultimate gameplay showcase for Marvel’s Midnight Suns has arrived. Unlike other games that may be able to get their basic gameplay premise across in one or two trailers, it is fortunate that Marvel’s Midnight Suns is taking the time to dive in-depth with each playable character. Marvel’s Midnight Suns is a card-battler with diverse Marvel characters, and their abilities are surely comprehensive enough to warrant individual showcases for each. Nico Minoru, also known as Sister Grimm, is the latest character to be featured.
Staying up to date with each gameplay showcase is smart for fans who want to know the ins-and-outs before launch. Odd’s gameplay showcases are fantastic for learning Marvel’s Midnight Suns’ card abilities and status effects that will become integral to players’ strategies. Knockback, Block, Taunt, Exhaust, and Chain are only a handful of effects players will want to be familiar with by the time that Marvel’s Midnight Suns launches. One ability is introduced with Nico Minoru that fans may not see anywhere else, and involves RNG to determine what effects her cards will have.
Marvel’s Midnight Suns’ Nico Minoru is a Random Roulette
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Perhaps one of Marvel’s Midnight Suns’ most intriguing characters, Nico Minoru wields a mechanic called Roulette. This mechanic contains an effect that is randomly selected when its associable card is drawn.
For example, Nico Minoru’s upgraded Curse attack card has Roulette, and can therefore generate a random effect—in the case of this gameplay showcase, that random effect turned out to be an application of two Weak effects when Curse was drawn. Other characters in Marvel’s Midnight Suns have cards with predetermined effects and abilities, and thus players can count on certain cards to be drawn to set up for future strategies in battle.
But Nico Minoru’s Roulette cards are completely random, giving her deck a large RNG element. As Odd states, players “have to do the best with the hand that [they’re] dealt.” Some of Nico Minoru’s cards will only have a certain feature of it randomized, such as her Swarm heroic card.
Swarm has Roulette, but only its damage output is randomized. Interestingly, Odd notes that late-game mods can in fact add some reliability to what players can expect from any of Nico Minoru’s Roulette cards, such as Swarm recovering health when redrawn.
Cards of hers that do not have Roulette may still be dictated by some sort of random element to it. Nico Minoru’s Witchstorm heroic card, for example, targets an enemy and then either damages them or random nearby enemies. Once upgraded, Witchstorm also has a percentage-based chance to apply Marked, which could lead greatly into her golden Marvel’s Midnight Suns card, called Crack the Sky.
This heroic card consumes all heroism to damage random enemies as many times as heroism points were spent, though one heroism is gained back for each resulting KO. Upon upgrade, Crack the Sky can also be redrawn to gain heroism.
Nico Minoru Aids the Team as a Support Character with RNG
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However, Nico Minoru is not the only character to benefit from her Roulette mechanic, and other cards of hers have direct, positive effects on others as well. Based on the gameplay showcase, Nico Minoru may be one of the most difficult characters to befriend at Marvel’s Midnight Suns’ Abbey.
Further, her passive ability gained and leveled up through interactive character friendships seems fickle, at least at level one. This passive ability can apparently only be triggered when she is at full health, which suggests that it will at least be active at the beginning of each combat mission.
Nico Minoru’s passive ability grants a percentage-based chance to draw a card when one of her cards is played. Upon upgrade, Odd confirms that the passive ability’s full-health requirement is omitted, resulting in a reliable flow of new cards drawn for any Nico Minoru cards that are played. It therefore seems imperative that players upgrade her passive ability as soon as possible if they plan to keep her around in their party.
Likewise, Nico Minoru’s ability to support other characters comes down to the RNG of Roulette. Some effects drawn may be the perfect accommodation to another character’s effects, or may be able to capitalize on the effects that other characters have already distributed around to enemies and the environment in Marvel’s Midnight Suns.
Nico Minoru’s Roulette is Largely Unpredictable, But Powerful Nonetheless
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One of Nico Minoru’s most interesting cards is the Double Up skill card, as Odd emphasizes. Double Up introduces the Generate mechanic, which creates a random card. The catch to Generate is that the card created will be removed from combat entirely once played or discarded, since it is a card generated from thin-air and not the player’s deck.
That said, Generate has different applications within certain cards. Double Up features the Generate mechanic, but its effect results in a copy of every attack, skill, or heroic card in the player’s hand being made, with which card type in particular being randomly selected. In the gameplay showcase, Double Up is drawn and its effect randomly lands on attack cards being the type that will be copied from the player’s hand.
This is incredibly exciting, and obviously has high risks and high rewards depending on what cards players already have in their hand, though it does have Marvel’s Midnight Suns’ Exhaust effect. But as if that was not enough, Double Up also removes its Exhaust upon upgrade, giving it a ton of potential.
Nico Minoru has immeasurable potential on players’ teams, and although they may not always receive the most optimal effects from her cards, there is always a chance that Nico Minoru could draw Roulettes that support other party members in significant ways. Marvel’s Midnight Suns is now left with only one final character gameplay showcase, meaning that fans will soon get to see what gameplay for Robbie Reyes’ Ghost Rider looks like.
Marvel’s Midnight Suns launches December 2 for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S with PS4, Switch, and Xbox One versions coming later.