Marvel Rivals Bans Explained: How Bans Work + Best Bans

Quick answer: Hero bans unlock once everyone in the lobby is Gold III or higher in Competitive. Since Season 10, Marvel Rivals uses a turn-based draft instead of a blind vote: each team bans 3 heroes (6 total) in a 1-2-2-1 order — Team A bans one, Team B bans two, Team A bans two, Team B bans one — so a ban can no longer be wasted on a hero the other team already banned. Right now Devil Dinosaur, Gorr the God Butcher and Gambit are the most-banned hero in each role.

• free costs nothing
• cheap small cost
• setup needs preparation
• grind pays off slowly
• skip the thing to stop doing

Bans at a glance

Best bans by role (current ban rates)

How the ban draft works today

After loading into a competitive match and pre-selecting the hero you'd like to play, both teams move into the ban phase.

1. Confirm your lobby is Gold III or higher freeThe ban screen only appears when every player in the match is Gold III or above — below that rank there's no ban phase at all, and the game goes straight to hero select.
2. Expect a turn, not a blind vote freeSince Season 10, bans are drafted in order rather than voted on simultaneously: Team A picks one ban, then Team B picks two, then Team A picks two more, then Team B closes with one. Three bans per team, six total, and because each side sees what's already gone before choosing, a ban can't be wasted on a hero the other team already removed.

This replaced the earlier system, where every player voted independently and the outcome was a weighted random chance rather than a clean majority — that older system is what the rest of this guide's source video (below) describes and reacts to.

The older vote-based system (what changed, and why)

Under the old system, every player voted on which heroes they wanted removed, and the percentage shown wasn't a majority tally — it was each hero's statistical chance of actually getting banned. Five players could agree on one hero and still lose the ban to a single holdout's pick, since the outcome was randomized rather than decided by whoever had the most votes. Worse, there was no coordination between the two sides' votes, so if both teams independently banned the same character (or, unluckily, the same pair of characters), a match's four potential bans could collapse down to as few as two.

A content creator pitched a fix and tested it with real viewer-submitted ban votes split into two mock teams, to see how often it would have avoided a wasted duplicate.

Red Team's six submitted ballots were lopsided: all six picked Daredevil, four picked Gambit, and three picked Winter Soldier, with a scatter of single votes elsewhere.

Blue Team's six ballots were more spread out: Gambit led with five votes, followed by two apiece for Deadpool (Strategist), Daredevil and Hela.

1. How the proposed fix avoided duplicate bans grindEach team's top pick became a ban first: Daredevil for Red, Gambit for Blue — no overlap. Red's next pick was also Gambit, but since it was already gone, the concept moved to Red's next-most-requested hero (Winter Soldier) instead of wasting the slot — the same no-waste idea the live 1-2-2-1 draft now achieves by having teams ban in sequence rather than blind. 4:06

Run through with real numbers this way, the proposed concept reached four unique bans without a single wasted duplicate slot — a fan-made preview of the direction the live game would eventually take.

The video also tested pooling both teams' votes into one shared list before picking the top four, which landed close to the same result with the same two headline bans (Gambit and Daredevil) but let two lower-vote picks (Winter Soldier and Deadpool) edge out a hero that only reached 2 votes once every ballot was combined.

FAQ

How many bans are there in a Marvel Rivals ranked match today? Three per team, six total, once every player in the lobby is Gold III or higher. Bans are drafted in a 1-2-2-1 turn order rather than voted on blind, so all six slots are normally used.

Is the ban phase still a random vote? No — that changed in Season 10. Bans are now a turn-based draft: Team A bans one hero, Team B bans two, Team A bans two more, and Team B closes with one, with each side seeing the board before choosing.

What rank do I need to access hero bans? Gold III or higher, for every player in the match. Below that, the match skips straight to hero select with no ban phase.

Which heroes get banned the most right now? Devil Dinosaur (34.14% of Vanguard bans), Gorr the God Butcher (22.02% of Duelist bans) and Gambit (16.49% of Strategist bans) currently top their roles — see the table above for the next few behind each.

Was the fan-made ban rework in the source video ever added to the game? Not directly, but the problem it was built to fix — wasted, duplicate bans under the old blind-vote system — is exactly what Season 10's turn-based 1-2-2-1 draft solves, just through sequencing rather than vote-pooling.

Sources

Current ban mechanics (Gold III+ requirement, 3-bans-per-team turn-based 1-2-2-1 draft) verified against Marvel Rivals Season 10 patch coverage. Ban-rate percentages are from RivalsTracker third-party match data as aggregated and published by Beebom, updated October 1, 2026 — NetEase does not publish official ban-rate statistics. The historical "vote-based system" section and its screenshots are from a pre-Season 10 fan video proposing a ban-draft rework; treat that section as historical context, not current mechanics.

Read next

• Marvel Rivals Tier List — current meta and tier rankings
• Marvel Rivals Hero Proficiency Guide — fastest way to Lord and Champion
• Best Duelist Heroes in Marvel Rivals — who's strong enough to be worth a ban
• Marvel Rivals Counter-Picking Guide — what to do when a ban doesn't go your way