How Thanos Could Be a Literal Game-Changer

Beyond who has been ushered into Marvel Rivals’ already sizable roster thus far, there are still countless characters, both popular and obscure, who deserve a role as either a vanguard, duelist, or strategist. Luckily for Marvel Rivals, Marvel’s comic book source material is about as deep of a well as any IP could hope to be, spanning over eight decades with many iconic characters who’ve managed to hang around for nearly that long, too.

Spider-Man being on Marvel Rivals’ roster was inevitable, whether he was going to be a launch/Season 0 character or not, for instance, and there remains a laundry list of heroes and villains whose popularity will surely secure them a role at some point in the future. Marvel Rivals hasn’t flung itself wholly at characters who’ve appeared in the Marvel Cinematic Universe despite there being a rich catalog of MCU-inspired skins in-game. But, if more villains are going to follow Loki and Season 2.5’s Ultron, it’d make a world of sense for Thanos to arrive in Marvel Rivals sooner rather than later, and one Infinity Stone, the Reality Stone, could be far more astonishing than its knuckle-socketed counterparts.

Marvel Rivals: What Could Thanos’ Kit Look Like?

Though nothing has been confirmed, Thanos seems like a great pick for a playable villain in Marvel Rivals with a wide range of potential skills.

Thanos Swapping Marvel Rivals Maps Mid-Match Would Show the True Power of the Reality Stone

Of all the Infinity Stones that Thanos wields, the Reality Stone could have the most exciting and unparalleled applications in a Marvel Rivals gameplay kit. Bending reality to his will, it would be fantastic yet wholly bewildering for all players if he could turn a match’s present map into another on the fly. This would admittedly be quite the technical nightmare and performance-annihilator if every single player’s game had to switch to a completely different map at the press of one person’s keyboard key, but it would appropriately befit the Stone’s immense power and be one of the most captivating abilities in Marvel Rivals without question.

There are many maps now in Marvel Rivals, and swapping to any other of the same match type could have both teams need to restrategize or reconsider team comps based on the environment, and it’d only make sense if this Reality Stone ability had as long of a cooldown as Doctor Strange’s Pentagram of Farallah so that it wasn’t spammed over and over, crashing everyone’s game.

Why Thanos Coming to Marvel Rivals is Inevitable

Of course, Thanos has not been confirmed as a playable character, and it’s unknown if NetEase has any plans for the Mad Titan.

That said, without reading between imaginary lines too much, it seems like it’s only a matter of time before he’s considered as a villain character, regardless of whether he’s a vanguard, duelist, or strategist, because of his prominence in the MCU. Likewise, it’d be fair to assume Thanos is in the pipeline considering other ‘villain’ characters that are in Marvel Rivals have either had a role in the MCU (Loki in Thor, The Avengers, Thor: The Dark World, Thor: Ragnarok, Loki Season 1 and Season 2; Ultron in Avengers: Age of Ultron; and Hela in Thor: Ragnarok), Sony’s off-brand movies cherry-picking Spider-Man villains and characters (Venom in Venom, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, and Venom: The Last Dance), or Disney’s popular X-Men ’97 (Magneto).

Of all the Infinity Stones that Thanos wields, the Reality Stone could have the most exciting and unparalleled applications in a Marvel Rivals gameplay kit.

Thanos’ era in the MCU is long finished, and maybe his popularity as a character will eventually be eclipsed by Robert Downey Jr.’s Doctor Doom in Avengers: Doomsday, which is now releasing at the tail-end of 2026. However, Thanos is a fixture of the MCU and a relic of what made that original era so thrilling.

Not having Thanos in Marvel Rivals at all would be a travesty, but deciding how he should play or how the Infinity Stones should be wielded may require a ton of deliberation and playtesting to ensure that he isn’t bombastically overpowered or disappointingly underpowered. Either way, Thanos is a monumental Marvel character regardless of what made him more popular in the modern era, and Marvel Rivals would be fortunate to have him, especially if he could switch the map players are on with the Reality Stone.