Classic Mode — The Comparison-Grid Marvel Rivals Puzzle

Classic Mode is the original Rivaldle puzzle and the one most players spend the most time with. Pick any hero from the live Marvel Rivals roster, submit them as a guess, and the game compares them to today's hidden answer across eight columns: gender, species, affiliation, role, eye color, hair color, HP, and a hidden year-of-comic-origin hint. Each cell colors itself green for an exact match, yellow for a partial match, and red for no match. Keep guessing — the grid gets more informative every row — until you find the hero. There is no time limit, no guess cap, and no penalty for taking your time.

How Classic Mode works

The eight columns are not all equal. HP is numeric and uses an up or down arrow on red cells to tell you whether the secret hero's HP is higher or lower than your guess — this is the single most narrowing piece of information per guess and you should use it aggressively. Eye color and hair color are arrays, because some heroes have more than one canonical value (Storm has white hair and blue eyes, characters with cybernetic eyes have multiple entries). A yellow cell on either of those means your guess shares at least one of the values with the answer but not all of them. Species, affiliation, and role are categorical — green or red, with yellow reserved for the small number of multi-affiliation heroes such as Deadpool. The year-of-comic-origin column lives inside the header tooltip and reveals whether the answer is older or younger than your guess. For long-time Marvel readers, that column is often more useful than HP.

Strategy: an opening guess that narrows the field

The strongest opener is a hero who sits in the middle of every column rather than the extremes. We recommend Magneto as a default first guess. His 650 HP is shared by three other Vanguards (so the HP arrow narrows the field aggressively in either direction), his X-Men affiliation is the second-most-common in the database, and his Mutant species cell is the largest single species group in the roster. Whatever you learn from a Magneto row will rule out roughly half the database in one move. If you prefer a Duelist opener, Iron Man plays a similar role for the 250 HP tier.

From the second guess onward, switch from coverage to elimination. Every subsequent guess should test a specific hypothesis, not gather more information about the field. Look at your current colors and ask: given these constraints, who am I most uncertain between? Then pick a hero whose row will distinguish those candidates. Resist the urge to throw "fun" guesses just to see another row of feedback — Classic Mode rewards discipline, and a clean three- or four-guess solve is more satisfying than a sloppy eight-guess one.

The most common Classic Mode mistake is locking onto the role column too early. The Duelist role has more than twenty heroes in the database, so a green role cell on a Duelist guess is genuinely not that narrowing. Always pair role information with HP before committing to a hypothesis. For a deeper strategic breakdown of every column, see the Classic Mode section of the how-to-play guide.