Not all heroes in the Facebook game Marvel: Avengers Alliance were always on the side of angels. Many were once actually villains. A select few still are basically villains, though they will fight on your team for various reasons. These unique heroes are called lockbox heroes, because they can only be obtained by opening lockboxes. Each lockbox hero comes from a unique type of lockbox which can only be acquired in a very specific way. If you fail to acquire enough lockboxes during the normal event, you can purchase additional lockboxes with gold. Since gold is a precious commodity in this game, you only want to do this for the best lockbox heroes. The following are the top five lockbox heroes ever released in Marvel: Avengers Alliance.
5. Thane – This villain is one of the lesser known characters in the game, never appearing in any movie and only rarely seen in the comic books. His in-game abilities, though, make him stand out. Thane is one of the rare heroes that can apply despair and nanoplague and he also has one of the best defensive powers in the game. He is an unusual mix between a support character and a debuff character, but he does it well, especially given that he is a blaster. As new heroes have gained similar powers his star has fallen, but he still manages to slip into the top five.
4. Sabretooth – Sabretooth has one of the more amusing bios in the game. According to his bio, he has a chip implanted in his head that will explode if he ever returns to villainy. Besides his amusing story, he is a rather effective hero. He can follow-up on ally attacks and has a very high chance to do so. Additionally, unless enemies are immune to bleeding, he will regenerate stamina at a rapid pace. Additionally, he is one of the many heroes with any area stun power, which is always handy. Finally, he automatically resurrects once per battle and acts twice per round after doing so. This final ability made him a key player in PvP until the metagame started to adapt for it.
3. Taskmaster – Taskmaster has exactly the abilities that are extremely popular in PvP. He can adapt his class to his attacker and gain an extra action when that happens. As an added bonus, whenever he adapts his class, he gains an attack that will neutralize the enemy that attacked him. This combination of abilities makes him very adaptable in both PvP and long PvE battles, like boss battles. Unfortunately, the randomness of his class changes makes him just a little too unreliable. If he had any control over his class changes he would easily climb higher on this list, possibly contending for the top spot.
2. Omega Sentinel – Omega Sentinel has a nearly perfect set of abilities spread between the best three classes in the game. She can heal, remove debuffs, protect, buff her allies, and deal massive damage all at the same time. She has very limited ability to apply negative status effects to enemies, but the main one she can apply, targeted, is one of the best in the game. If she weren’t so susceptible to exhausted and could strengthen her team without attacking every single enemy, she’d actually just manage to overtake the number one lockbox hero on this list.
1. Magneto – The first lockbox hero ever released is also the best. Magneto is an offensive powerhouse who also happens to have one of the best defensive powers in the game. His Magnetic Field power grants a shield to all allies and grants an extra action when the shield is broken by damage. Additionally, Magneto has a catastrophic attack, an attack that can stun, and an attack that applies magnetized. That last ability wouldn’t be so impressive except that whenever Magneto is attacked by a magnetized enemy, he has a chance to preemptively counterattack. Adding to this combination of impressive abilities, he has a unique ISO that makes it impossible to remove the magnetized status effect he applies to enemies. Finally, he is immune to psychic attacks, a fact which all but took Emma Frost out of the top tier of PvP single handedly.
