With the upcoming Storm DLC set to cap off Marvel's Midnight Suns' Season Pass, the game will have received all of its announced post-launch content. While the final roster of heroes is solid, featuring a mixture of Midnight Suns, Avengers, and X-Men characters, there is one missing Marvel hero who would have been a perfect addition to the card-based gameplay of Marvel's Midnight Suns. The X-Men's Gambit seems like he would have fit right alongside the rest of the roster while bringing a unique twist to its deck-building formula.
Although adding Storm to the Midnight Suns roster will increase its total X-Men count, the group still seems underrepresented compared to other Marvel teams. There are a lot of iconic characters from the X-Men comics that the game could have pulled, but the team's representation feels limited. With Wolverine, Magik, Storm, and Deadpool being the X-Men-affiliated characters chosen, it seems like including Gambit would have given the team a stronger X-Men identity.
Gambit's Card Powers are Perfect for Midnight Suns' Combat System
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Making his first appearance in 1990's The Uncanny X-Men #266 by Christ Claremont and Mike Collins, professional thief Remy LaBeau joins the X-Men as Gambit after saving a powerless Storm from the Shadow King. His power of molecular acceleration allows him to fire any object like projectiles by charging them with kinetic energy, leading to the use of his most iconic weapon: playing cards. Aside from his molecular acceleration powers, Gambit can also stun enemies by accelerating their sensory awareness, and can accelerate his own energy to give himself a boost in speed and power.
With all of these powers at his disposal, Gambit's potential abilities within the combat system of Midnight Suns are pretty clear. Since playing cards are Gambit's weapon of choice, incorporating Midnight Suns' card-based abilities seems like a natural fit, and Gambit could even put a fourth wall-breaking spin on the system with an ability that would allow players to permanently sacrifice a card to use it as a weapon, creating a high-risk/high-reward scenario. Other abilities for Gambit could focus on debuffing enemies by inflicting them with Stun and buffing himself with Fast or Strengthened using molecular acceleration.
Including Storm as a DLC character in Midnight Suns is also begging for Gambit to follow suit, since the two have an important history together. It was Storm who introduced Gambit to the X-Men and helped him join the team after he rescued her from the Shadow King. Although he later joined Cyclops' Blue Team over Storm's Gold Team, the two mutants shared a strong connection. With the way Midnight Suns missed the perfect chance for great character interactions between Wolverine and Deadpool, making up for it with a Storm and Gambit storyline would deliver the kind of X-Men fanservice that Firaxis' game desperately needs.
Creating a Marvel game that utilizes a deck-building system for combat and not including the most iconic card-wielding hero seems like a major misstep on the developer's part. Although there are no confirmed plans for a second Season Pass, Firaxis could still have something planned for the series, including the possibility of a sequel to Marvel's Midnight Suns. If more content does eventually make its way to the game, there needs to be a more significant X-Men presence, so Gambit should be kept in the cards.
Marvel's Midnight Suns is available now for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S, with PS4, Switch, and Xbox One versions coming later.
