Why Sandman Would Be a Versatile Roster Villain

Posted by By our-little-miss-is-home March 17, 2025 7 Views 6 Min Read
Why Sandman Would Be a Versatile Roster Villain
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It’s been a few months and two seasons into Marvel Rivals and, while its roster is varied and its kits diverse, it is still sorely lacking in villain characters. Marvel Rivals obviously isn’t opposed to villain characters—Loki, Magneto, and Hela, for example, with Ultron supposedly on the way—and yet the heroes far outweigh them. Marvel Rivals is also probably in no rush to perfume its roster with villains seeing how it will be around for years and has ample time to do so, but some more than others could make for fairly great additions.

Marvel Rivals could add a Spider-Man villain to its roster in each new season for the foreseeable future due to how many there are. Venom is already a popular tank character in Marvel Rivals, for instance, and his Symbiote Bond Team-Up with Spider-Man makes them a powerful duo—trio, with Peni Parker. It’s not realistic to expect a handful of Spider-Man villains in the next little while, but considering which may make the cut eventually is exhilarating. If any nemesis of Spider-Man’s would make for a dynamic roster character, it’d arguably be Flint Marko’s Sandman.

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What Marvel’s Sandman Lacks in Depth He Makes Up for in Spectacle

Sandman is an antagonist whose abilities are usually far more interesting than the character himself. Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 did a commendable job of making Sandman’s side quest engaging without him even being present throughout it, and even then it’s eclipsed entirely by Sandman’s tutorial set-piece boss fight. That said, Sandman’s simplicity and general superficiality would ironically make him perfect for a game like Marvel Rivals that can author captivating, extracurricular lore for him while primarily emphasizing all the cool ways he can become granular.

What Sandman Could Look Like in Marvel Rivals

Sandman would be a toss-up between Vanguard and Duelist in Marvel Rivals as his versatility is born of the fact that he can manipulate his body and have it be malleable to whatever shape or density he pleases. This allows him to literally become an unassuming body of sand, tower high into the sky, or mold his hands into implements such as a spiked ball or hammer. These examples alone could compose ‘Shift,’ ‘E,’ and ‘M2’ abilities in a Sandman kit, and characters already in Marvel Rivals could be a terrific base of reference:

  • Sandman could submerge into the ground (or a puddle of sand in Sandman’s case) and ‘swim’ around like Jeff the Land Shark.
  • Sandman could create humanoid sand minions like Namor casts Monstro spawns or like Loki creates clones.
  • Sandman could inflate and embiggen like Mister Fantastic.

Unlike Venom and Spider-Man’s shared history with the symbiote, it’d admittedly be a bit more difficult to conceive a Team-Up between Sandman and Spider-Man. That’s not to say Spider-Man would need a Team-Up with every villain of his, but it’d be a fun way to encourage their pairing in a team composition if Marvel Rivals was able to get creative with how they might interact.

The argument could be made that Jeff would render Sandman a pile of congealed sludge; however, Wolverine going toe-to-toe with Magneto in Marvel Rivals is similarly nonsensical.

Sandman also wouldn’t be a character whom Marvel Rivals could add a themed map for, unlike Klyntar for Venom, but it would be worthwhile due to how varied his kit might be anyhow. Fantastic Four’s Thing is wholly one-note as a character, for instance, and even he was given an armor buff with rock pieces floating around him and whoever else he buffs nearby, which opens the door wide to even more nontraditional and brand-new abilities with any other character. Sandman surely has no shortage of abilities that could be adapted, though, and it’d be exciting to see how NetEase might tackle that challenge with Flint Marko.

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