Everybody Wants to Play as Blade in Marvel Rivals

By Garrett Martin | July 31, 2025 | 5:50pm

Video Games News marvel rivals

Everybody Wants to Play as Blade in Marvel Rivals

Marvel Rivals starts a series of big updates on August 8 that will eventually bring a new map, new team-ups, and a whole new mode to the game—and almost none of that matters, because everybody’s talking about one single thing: Blade, the game’s latest playable character. The Daywalker comes to Marvel Rivals at the end of next week, along with the launch of Season 3.5: The Abyss Awakens, and it sounds like the vampire killer will immediately become everybody’s main.

Is it any surprise, though? Ever since Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan introduced Blade in The Tomb of Dracula #10 over 50 years ago, he’s been one of Marvel’s coolest characters. He became a true superstar when Wesley Snipes brought him to the silver screen in 1998, launching a successful movie series whose rep has really grown lately. And with Marvel continuing to flub its long-gestating movie relaunch, despite initial excitement over seeing Mahershala Ali pick up the leather jacket and shades, Blade’s coolness hasn’t been dinged by quipping it up in the increasingly uncool MCU. Blade started cool, got even cooler, became a supernova of cool in the late ‘90s, and has never looked back. As Detroiters taught us, Blade is friggin’ cool. Of course Marvel Rivals players would jump at the chance to play as him.

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It helps that the game seems to totally understand what makes Blade tick. As Endless Mode’s associate editor Elijah Gonzalez pointed out in our Slack earlier today, Marvel Rivals basically just gave Blade all the moves from Devil May Cry—which, given Dante hunts demons, and Blade hunts vampires, who are pretty damn demonic in their own Eurotrash way, makes a lot of sense. A new member of the game’s lineup of Duelists, Blade appears to hit hard and fast with his gigantic swords, pulling out a sidearm when he needs to strike from a distance, and whipping out an Ultimate that seems to slash through everybody on screen a good half-dozen times or so. It’s a real damn sword storm, I tell you what.

Blade arrives in Marvel Rivals on August 8, as part of Season 3.5: The Abyss Awakens. Other additions throughout this season include a Throne of Knull map coming on August 22, and a new game mode called Resource Rumble. Knull’s apparently some kind of evil cosmic spider-god villain connected to Venom, which, yeah, sure, okay, comic books. And I’m going to guess the Resource Rumble is a rumble of some kind, perhaps over a certain set of resources? I don’t know, I just hope it’s set to the Link Wray song for the sake of all Marvel Rivals fans out there. This update is also adding a number of new team-up abilities, which are basically two-player combos triggered when specific characters cooperate with each other. That name is an obvious nod to Marvel Team-Up, a long-running book where different guest stars teamed up with Spider-Man every month, which ran from 1972 up to the mid ‘80s—and yeah, if I already didn’t tip my hand with the Tomb of Dracula reference, I absolutely just showed my age with that one.

The extreme reaction to Blade would probably happen even if there wasn’t a trailer full of in-game footage announcing his arrival, but there is, and yeah, it makes him look like a ton of fun to play. You can check that out below. The only thing that would make this cooler is if Blade came with a Farmer Zack skin.