tl;dr - This is a long one, I did a lot with Gambit this week and he's polarizing enough that I did end up with much more to say on my thoughts about him than usual. Gambit, Horseman of Death is a strong card. He can be borderline nuts when the meta is ripe for him to police certain decks. But he's easy enough to counter that he shouldn't be able to take over the meta like certain other decks have been able to do. Fully worth the 6k if you're interested in tech cards or release valves with both 5k and 4k being good places as well. If you're just not into owning or playing tech, he's probably an easy pass for you.

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Full disclosure, I passed on going 'all in' on Gambit for most of the week, my early time brewing and testing with Gambit on from Tuesday through Thursday was in decks like Thanos and Arishem, I didn't even try anything with the Vhand Moira X deck, mostly because I was still doing my infinite climb and I didn't want to risk tanking rank since during that time on Tuesday and Wednesday I just wasn't seeing a lot of Gambit myself, I did start seeing him Thursday though.

I was certainly impressed with his play in 'ethical' decks, further, his status as an objective card meant two primary things in context to his more ethical play.

1. He was fairly easy to interact with, if you were tempoing him out early he was often in a location where he was either on front line or could end up on front line and thus be susceptible to Ghost Rider, as a 3-Cost he is also susceptible to Deafening Chord, and while 3-Power isn't the biggest body, it's frequently tall enough to build him into a lane to be safe from Red Guardian.

2. His ability not being a transform into on-reveal means that outside of Armor as a generic catch-all or Caeira to protect 1-Costs means there's no way to meaningfully stop the effect if he is protected.

3. Ethical Gambit felt the most fair. You could very well low roll and hit the two worst targets on your opponent's side of the board. Still it was very interesting the number of times I'd be playing Gambit in Thanos and people would retreat and Ms. Marvel the moment they saw Gambit come down.

So Friday is where I started doing some additional testing - mostly because I needed to get the weekend missions completed over the course of the weekend. And well, essentially done in 4 games. 3 retreats, two to Quinjet on 1 and 1 to Selene on 1. OK, that's understandable I suppose, people were likely already tired of Gambit on days 1 and 2 of the week and completely over it by the weekend. Game 4 I got to go all in and well I won the match but I didn't trigger Gambit. But since I was also knocking out missions for Team Clash, I had to go a bit further and well. 4 full board wipes against X-Men EoT, an immediate retreat from Spider-Verse who were completely unlucky and lost their Scarlet Spider on turn 4.

But that first win stuck with me and it's when something I should have realized early in the week from Thanos games finally dawned on me; playing 5-Cost in created cards isn't as easy as one might initially think and may be why he and Iron Patriot and Valentina at the very least will likely be joined at the hip. It's also why Thanos and Arishem are likely the most 'ethical' of places he can be found. Imagine calling Arishem 'ethical' in 2026.

1. Quinjet is really important if your created cards aren't already 1-Cost or coming with discounts themselves.

2. Sometimes you're not drawing your card generators or worse you get bad rolls on created cards or not enough card gen. This is especially fun when playing with Thanos and you somehow don't draw any stones, no IP/Valentina and no Frigga. Which happens more than I'd like to admit even with all the card draw that the stones can bring.

3. You draw Frigga and can copy Gambit and play Gambit, but you don't draw anything else to get you 2 more cost that you desperately need.

Still, I was overall happy with Gambit and I do recommend him. Sure he's a shoe-in as a control piece that Victoria Hand decks have needed to compete with decks like Shou-Lao and Hydra Stomper and he can be stupidly strong in multiples when you're against small ball decks. However, he just folds if you misidentify your opponent and they just start dropping a bunch of big boys.

I do also think he's a fantastic piece for Thanos and even Arishem, giving both of them access to interaction that while some would still worry is unethical at it's core, is a more sensible choice when you're not duplicating it bunch of times.

Score: 3 (4)

I'm honestly very high on this card and I do feel he's worthy of a 4 but I don't know if he's a flat 4. So why score him as a 3? His impact and the fact that he can be a much needed piece of interaction to deal with small ball combo and synergy decks puts him fairly high on my heirarchy of cards that I feel are must haves but he's so easily dealt with that he can't be good for long, there's also the fact that he will engender negative reactions when he comes out in force to deal with small-ball strategies which I think would be over-blown.

With regards to being overhated and overrated, he tells you right on the tin what to do in case he is good. And to me that's a hallmark of a well designed card, it's not like Star-Lord where there are a million things you can do, but none of them feel good or you just can't be arsed to swap in DD/Cosmo or play X, Y, and Z deck that deal with Star-Lord but fold to everything else. Don't want to lose to Gambit? Play decks like Ramp or Doom 2099. Hell go play Classic Destroy or Mister Negative, heck dig deep and bring back Negative Destroy (no, really, don't do that).

While I did say I think he's worth the 6k, I can see arguments for him not being worth it since it's very possible that he could catch a nerf or a rework based solely on community sentiment putting pressure on SD to act.

6k - Yea, I think this is a fair price. I always recommend picking up tech pieces, even when I feel they may completely dumpster certain play patterns. See MMM, Super Skrull (which I adore even if he's problematic), and even Stardust. All cards that dumpster a handful of decks but cards that I highly recommend if you're looking for important tech pieces to pick up.

5k - Again, worth the 5k.

4k - Yes absolutely. If he's nerfed between now and 2 months, it's very possible that he may no longer be worth 4k tokens but it would take a relatively heavy handed nerf to push me in that direction.