Samurai Outriders Complete the Launch Roster: Blade, Loki & Deadpool Confirmed

The Roster Is Complete, and It Ended on the Best Possible Note

Evo 2026 just gave us the single biggest roster reveal of the year, and I’m still catching my breath. Sunday’s finals stream cut to a trailer nobody had officially previewed, and by the end of it, Arc System Works had confirmed the fifth and final team for MARVEL Tōkon: Fighting Souls. The Samurai Outriders are complete, the launch roster is locked, and the internet has not stopped screaming since.

The headline: Blade, Loki, and Deadpool join Ghost Rider to round out the Outriders. That closes the book on a roster that now sits at a clean 20 fighters across five teams of four, and it retires our long-running roster tracker for good. No more counting. No more slots. We know exactly who’s showing up on August 6.

Let’s talk about why this specific trio landed like a truck.

Blade — The Daywalker Finally Gets His Fighting Game Debut

Start with Blade. Eric Brooks has been begging for a proper fighting game moveset since forever, and Tōkon delivers it with the Muramasa — a demon-slaying sword that anchors his normals — backed up by guns and glaives for range control. The trailer leaned hard into his vampire-hunter fantasy: silver-edged slashes, point-blank gunfire to stagger, and a confirmed special called Heartstopper, where Blade drives a stake directly into the opponent’s chest for a pin that looked absolutely brutal on impact.

That’s the kind of move that tells you everything about a character’s identity in about half a second. Blade isn’t a flashy magic user or a screen-filling zoner — he’s a hunter, and Heartstopper is the moment the hunt ends. Imari Williams voices him, and from the handful of lines in the trailer, the delivery is ice-cold in exactly the right way. Understated menace, not action-movie one-liners.

What makes Blade’s inclusion notable beyond the moveset is the historical footnote attached to it: this is the character’s first appearance in a traditional fighting game, full stop. He’s shown up in plenty of Marvel media, but never with frame data. That changes now, and given how the sword-and-gun hybrid kit reads on paper, I expect him to have real staying power once players start digging into his cancel routes.

Loki — Trickery, Illusions, and a Redemption Arc You Can Feel in the Kit

Loki is the other half of this reveal doing something genuinely new, and it’s a big deal for the same reason as Blade: this marks Loki’s first playable appearance in a traditional fighting game. The God of Mischief has cameoed everywhere, but he’s never had to answer the question of what his kit actually does in neutral. Tōkon answers it with illusions, trickery-based mixups, and ice-and-magic projectiles that look built to confuse as much as they damage.

The framing in the trailer matters too. This isn’t mustache-twirling Loki looking for another throne to steal — it’s a character explicitly written as seeking redemption, which tracks with where his character has been heading across recent Marvel storytelling. Mechanically, that redemption arc seems to translate into a push-pull toolkit: illusion clones that bait reactions, ice projectiles that control space, and presumably some kind of swap or feint mechanic given how much “trickery” got emphasized in the reveal copy. Jason Spisak is on VA duties, and if you’ve heard his range in other projects, you already know he can nail both the smug troublemaker energy and the quieter, more sincere moments this version of Loki seems to be reaching for.

I’ll be honest, illusion-based characters are always a coin flip in fighting games — they either become beloved high-execution nightmares or they get patched into blandness within a month. Given Arc System Works’ track record with characters like Faust and Testament, I’m cautiously optimistic Loki lands on the fun side of that line.

Deadpool — The Crowd-Pleaser Everyone Predicted, and He Still Popped Off

And then there’s Deadpool, who was the single most-predicted unrevealed character across basically every FGC prediction thread for the last two months. Wade Wilson showing up was never a matter of if, and yet the Evo crowd reaction when his silhouette hit the screen was full-volume regardless. Some reveals you can call and still lose your mind over.

His kit is exactly the chaotic grab-bag you’d hope for: guns, grenades, and swords, all wrapped around a healing-factor mechanic that appears to reward genuinely reckless, high-risk play. Take damage, keep swinging, regenerate, repeat — it’s the kind of design that turns Deadpool into a character who punishes opponents for playing too passively, since every second they’re not closing the stock is a second his healing factor claws some of it back. Nolan North voices him, which was never in doubt, and the trailer’s fourth-wall gags are present and accounted for. There’s a moment where he seems to acknowledge the tag system directly, glancing toward an off-screen teammate like he knows exactly how the mechanic works. Small touch, but it’s the kind of writing that makes Deadpool worth including beyond pure sales appeal.

The Samurai Outriders, Assembled

With Blade, Loki, and Deadpool locked in alongside Ghost Rider, the Samurai Outriders become the fifth complete team, joining the Unbreakable X-Men, Amazing Guardians, Fighting Avengers, and the previously revealed Knights of Doom. Here’s the full picture, team by team:

• Unbreakable X-Men: Storm, Magik, Wolverine, Danger
• Amazing Guardians: Spider-Man, Ms. Marvel, Star-Lord, Peni Parker
• Fighting Avengers: Captain America, Iron Man, Black Panther/Shuri, Hulk
• Knights of Doom: Doctor Doom, Magneto, Green Goblin, Carnage
• Samurai Outriders: Ghost Rider, Blade, Loki, Deadpool

Twenty fighters. Five teams. Every archetype gap that people were speculating about in our earlier fourteen-confirmed roundup has now been resolved one way or another, and honestly the Outriders as a unit make a ton of thematic sense once you sit with it — Ghost Rider’s supernatural street-level horror, Blade’s monster-hunting grit, Loki’s Asgardian mysticism, and Deadpool’s anything-goes chaos. It’s less a cohesive theme than a “cool characters who work in the same tonal register” grouping, and that’s fine. Not every team needs to be the Fantastic Four.

What This Means for Team Building

A finalized 20-character roster changes the conversation from “who’s left” to “what do I build.” The tag system rewards thinking about your four-character order in advance, and the Samurai Outriders alone offer a fascinating internal question: does Blade’s grounded sword pressure work better as a point character while Deadpool’s healing factor makes him a durable anchor in the back? Does Loki’s illusion game function as a mid-team disruptor that resets neutral before your hard-hitters come in?

I don’t have answers yet — nobody does until the open beta gets real hands on these kits — but the shape of the questions alone tells you this roster was built with team synergy in mind, not just star power for its own sake.

DLC Is Coming, But Don’t Believe the Leaks Yet

Arc System Works also confirmed, in the same breath as the roster completion, that Year 1 post-launch content is already planned: four additional characters and one new stage, arriving after launch across the game’s first year of support. That’s it. That’s the entirety of what’s been officially confirmed about DLC.

I want to be very clear here because the timelines right after a reveal like this get messy fast: no DLC character names have been announced. If you’ve seen leaked rosters or “insider” lists floating around claiming to know who’s coming in Year 1, treat them as unverified speculation at best. We’ll cover Year 1 content properly once Arc System Works actually says something concrete, and not a moment before.

One More Thing — Mark Your Calendar

Buried in the same announcement, almost as an afterthought given how loud the roster reveal was, Arc System Works confirmed an open beta running July 24–26, 2026, with Blade playable ahead of launch. That’s your first real chance to get hands-on with the Daywalker before August 6, and we’ve got the full breakdown of what to expect in our open beta guide.

Final Thoughts on a Complete Roster

Twenty characters is a genuinely stacked launch lineup, and closing it out with Blade, Loki, and Deadpool feels like Arc System Works understood exactly what would make Evo lose its mind. Two fighting-game debuts and one guaranteed crowd-pleaser, delivered as a trio instead of drip-fed over months. That’s how you end a roster reveal cycle.

Six weeks out from launch, there’s nothing left to guess about who’s playable — only how they play. Check our confirmed roster guide for the full breakdown of every fighter’s archetype and difficulty rating, and keep an eye on the everything we know hub as more gameplay details surface. The roster’s locked. Now the real work — the labbing, the tier-list arguments, the frame-data deep dives — begins.