The ratio system
Owing to the many years of a solidified "top tier" meta in competitive MVC2 centered around extremely strong teams an alternative set of rules for team building has risen known as "ratios". In general it works like this: Each player has a point budget they may spend on the team of 3 characters to select before gameplay. Strong characters cost the most points while weaker characters cost less points usually divided by cost groups.
The cost groups are generally designed to make it impossible to pick a team of 3 top tier characters, and incentivize carefully picking characters that are considered weaker without risking an entire team on the survival of a single strong character and two other comparatively useless characters.
Justin Wong's system
Considered the "standard" by the MVC2 community and most popular variant. This system allocates 7 points to each player and divides each character with the following groups:
- 5 points: Sentinel, Magneto, Storm, Cable, Iron Man, Spiral.
- 4 points: Strider, War Machine, Doctor Doom, Cyclops, Captain Commando, Psylocke, Cammy, Dhalsim, Blackheart, Tron Bonne.
- 3 points: Ruby Heart, Colossus, Omega Red, Rogue, Silver Samurai, Silver Surfer, Jill, Mega Man, Guile, Juggernaut.
- 2 points: Gambit, Ken, Akuma, Ryu, Anakaris, SonSon, Zangief, Morrigan, Sabretooth, Spider-Man, Hulk, Charlie, Sakura, Marrow, Venom, Felicia, B.B. Hood, Jin, M. Bison, Thanos.
- 1 point: Dan, Servbot, Hayato, Amingo, Shuma-Gorath, Captain America, Chun-Li, and both Wolverine variants.
- 0 points: Roll.
This system makes it impossible to pick more than one of the characters considered "God" or "Top" tiers while positioning Roll as the "empty" or "useless" pick. One observation about this spread is that many tier lists place Wolverine much higher in traditional tiers than his companions in the 1 point group.
Community member Bankbank has created a mod for the arcade version of the game which enforces this system at character select.
