Marvel Contest of Champions – Summoners Fest 2025
I spent the weekend at Summoners Fest 2025, a tournament and exhibition for Marvel Contest of Champions. If you’re unaware, like I was, MCoC is a mobile fighting game that’s been running since late 2014. That is a crazy amount of time for any kind of mobile game whatsoever. I was initially confused as to how a game like this a) had a tournament scene, and b) had lasted this long. My time at Summoners Fest answered both of these questions with ease.
While the controls allow for highly precise inputs and skill-based gameplay, the real battle happens beforehand. Such an enormous roster means you have to choose your champions with careful deliberation. If you bring the wrong champions to a given battle, you’ve more or less lost said battle already. In other words, you’re sort of playing two different games simultaneously. I understand the fighting game, at least in theory. But the strategy RPG that’s been smuggled in alongside it continues to elude me.
A High Skill Ceiling
I learned all of this after seeing a handful of tournament battles. Said fights are another anomaly. It’s an asynchronous PvP system where you’re facing off against your opponent’s draft picks. Everyone’s picking from a stacked cast of seven-star monstrosities, and it’s these choices that can determine the outcome of a high-level match. It’s impossible to overstate how dense and intense the strategy commentary gets during fights like these. But rather than feeling intimidated, I was enthralled. Seeing the heights of skill one can reach, you’re encouraged to begin climbing that same mountain. I was playing a lot of MCoC over the weekend, in other words.
In between the semi-finals and the finals, we got a bunch of announcements regarding the game itself. There’s a new game mode, Coliseum, coming out in a month. You and your team work together to take down a boss with a preposterous amount of health bars. Stellar Forge champions are coming early next year, along with Fortress Assault and the Collective system. They also showed off some of the new champions coming in the next few months. Punisher, Doctor Doom, and Blue Marvel are all slated to drop in the near future. MCoC gets two new champions a month, a pace that’s put them well north of 300 champions by this point.
So Many Characters
I didn’t test out Coliseum mode myself, but I did watch a Kabam presenter, Mike, burn through 10 of Adam Warlock’s health bars using Gladiator. It was both impressive and informative. Could I, with practice, get this good at the game? Maybe not on mobile, but they did release the PC version earlier this year. Although the control scheme on mobile can be distilled down to swipes and taps, old men like myself are better suited to buttons and sticks.
We also got a good look at Collectives, which are this genius method for making your whole roster feel useful. Your champions are organized into Collectives based on their stats and their class, with the strongest member acting as their captain. From there, any gains acquired by said captain apply to the whole collective, and vice versa. The stronger the whole Collective, the more bonuses everyone receives. It’s dropping sometime next year. As someone who would rather collect than battle, updates like this are what keep me playing. I want every member of my roster to feel essential.
There was a whole series of trivia challenges on the second day of Summoners Fest. Players registered and were randomly chosen to be the next ‘Summonaire,’ eligible to win thousands of units of in-game currency and other prizes. In fact, even the tournament itself used these units instead of cash. Although there was that rad championship belt to be won as well. The final match was an absolute nailbiter. Liam was up 3-1 in a best-of-seven set, which honestly should have been the end of it. But Andrew rallied just long enough to turn it into a 3-3 sizzler, with victory coming down to the second-last possible battle. In the end, Liam took home the belt using his ‘consistent’ playstyle.
Right Down To The Wire
The energy in the space was undeniable, to be sure. There’s something incredible about watching two absolute pros duke it out, especially in person. Yet somehow it seems like the competitive scene is just starting to heat up. Competition online has been white-hot for at least a decade, but there haven’t been that many official tournaments, at least not the kind you can fly to. Most of the tournament’s stars have been busy building their own followings online, turning their talent into respectable YouTube and Twitch careers. But MCoC hasn’t broken containment IRL, at least not the way it should. Seeing these players square off in this unique arena has me convinced that the scene is only going to get bigger as time goes on.