In 5 land you can play gambit and almost whoever you want and do well…but you pretty much have to play gambit to really shine.
I’d take it all day over the rocket/gamora/medusa/carol stuff tho. That sucked to fight against and with… having NO way to avoid damage or mitigate a substantial amount of incoming damage each turn was super lame.
I think now that medusa grocket are classic, you will soon start seeing a bit more variety in sim (even more once gamora moves out. There are a few good 4* in the latest that players will level higher and start playing with them (Chavez, Rogue, MB, vulture)
Like someone else said, 4* land is Grocket-fest in Sim, but 5* land is Gambit-fest EVERYWHERE. I guess if you want to play only one character in every single game, that’s up to you. That said, I’m sure he’s getting nerfed and this will all be moot. But as it stands now I’d definitely prefer seeing them in one event (Sim) and having SEVERAL options to defeat them than play with the same character and against that same character in every event. Yikes.
As for your second point, I don’t have Thing champed, but doesn’t he intercept the damage? I do have X-23 champed, and know that she can heal it all back up. Rogue can also mitigate large chunks of damage, and like I posted earlier, in the words of Matt Hardy, Kraven can make the strikes…OBSOLETE! (though you will take a hit or two before it happens).
different strokes, gambit is everywhere but so is gamora/medusa and rocket its easily the quickest push in all pvp events. And god forbid you have a high level medusa then its just medusa and rocket.
You just see the “holy” trinity in sim 4 land and in pvp you just see 2 out of 3 plus the required.
They are and have been everywhere for almost a year now. Dominating 4 land, with damage you can’t really get around.
I’ll take seeing a gambit with 2 other characters over 2 characters plus whosoever required all day, I came up out of that and I wouldn’t go back… now if i didn’t have a gambit of my own. I think it would suck either way and since 5 are hard to come by I’d rather deal with possibly just maxing out a medusa.
Anyway thing/x23 work ok, but medusa ends up healing or stealing your protect tiles (or both) and X23 needs to tank the colors and doesn’t kill no were quick enough to be a threat or useful.
Interesting that all you saw was Grockdusa every event. I MIGHT see them a max two times during my early climb in a given PVP event and I have 54 4* champs. Basically, 90% of the teams I see are the required and any mix of the top 4 boosted characters for the week. I would love it if all I saw was unboosted Grockdusa. Whenever I see them (which is rarely) the boosted 4s eat them alive!
Thank you for all the ideas… I do have some feedback to some of the discussion I wanted to add…
tried the RHulk, C4rol, R&G - that was definitely fun for a change - although it is def. a board dependent game. (had a game or two where all I could do was match Blue and Black, did not end well)
Some of the other teams ideas I will have to try, I love seeing new combinations that I had not thought of.
I hope that this teams reign is on the way down, but they have been there for SO long I would not hold my breath.
(IMHO) Fighting against this team is not as much the “mitigate damage”, it is a game of “downing Medusa ASAP”. And if you can’t do that, you’re screwed. (and why you will see Medusa, Groot, +who ever required a lot if times in 4* PVP land. ) If this was an issue of JUST mitigating damage, you can figure out counters (Cage comes to mind)
Personally, I think her powers are a bit “broken”. You CAN NOT get around her. I may be wrong, but she is one of the only ones that has this “if either team does X , I fire”. Most everyone else has a limit based on which side does the match…
I’m in 3* land and in the current PvP, I’m seeing Sentry + 1 3* + 5* GR 90% of the time, once I reach 700 points. I went in and fought one team and his match damage hit like a brick (close to 1 k damage). A cascade happened and I’m out. I think they could lock out 5* in PvP until a player has 3 champed 4*.
Each * land has its own set of problem.
Medu and Gamo are fine. Problem with that team is Rocket.
His design is bad. Blue is lackluster, Green is actually good, Yellow is just busted: it gets way too much just for having another guardian present.
2k+ match damage right out the gate for nothing.
Other team comps have to actually build up to what they get at the start for free.
XFDP/Drax/Grocket
Kraven/Medusa/Venom (Eddie Brock)
thing/Wasp/Medusa
Carol, RnG, Loki. Yes, Loki. Let them make a 4 match and let the countdowns power up your strike tiles. Boom. Mic drop.
Wins at least 80%.
That is like one of my main teams LOL.
I rather enjoy the Medusa/Mr. Fantastic/Carnage team myself.
Redhulk medusa fantastic
redhulk tank injury
medusa drain ap and heal
blue ap for fantastic to stun enemy medusa
purple and green ap for red hulk team attack
I used this team to kill all RG4 medusa gamora in BoP pvp
The Red Hulk/Carol/Grocket team really is the fastest and most efficient counter at the 4-star level. As soon as I see a Grocket/Gamora/Medusa team in sim I start salivating because it’s just so easy. Red Hulk should be tanking 3 colors so it’s not hard to keep him in front.
But the OPer makes a hidden point in that this meta combination has been going on for too long. This has been the dominant sim team for a year, outlasting all the other flavor-of-the-month teams by a good stretch. Makes me miss the days of Cardusa.
In 3* land, I don’t see any team being used like this. However, it seems that every team has Strange, no matter which are the other 2.
The ‘problem’ i have with people advising teams to counter Grocket/Gamora/Medusa is that a lot of those combos consist of characters that are much harder to champ/have champed. People playing in the vaulting days have a good chance to have the G/G/M team champed, but Rhulk or Mr F or Carnage is something different.
So while the advice is well meant, it’s much less useful with those characters undercovered.
To get an idea of the difference, here’s my situation. G/G/M is at 2x champ and 1 lvl 250, while Rhulk is at 90, Mr F at 94 and Carnage at 70.
I think more to the point is just stating how many counters exist to this team. There’s a myriad of options, some a little older and harder to come by, but it’s not a situation where you have to run mirror team only for success.
So the effective counters to r&g/medusa all involve a r&g or Medusa…imagine that.
Before this trio became omnipresent in the Shield Simulator a few months ago I was never even close to reaching the 2000 points max progression to get the newest 4-star.
Whenever I reached about 1,700 points I got hit faster and lost more points than I could gain - very frustrating.
But now the last climb from 1,700 to 2,000 points fighting only against Gamora & Grocket & Medusa-teams is so easy and fast. I use C4rol & Gr4cket & Indestructible Hulk. You just have to bring Hulk in front with your first move (red or green for my Level 230 Hulk) and watch the enemy suffer from Hulk’s Anger and Carols yellow passive strengthening your own strike tiles. After a maximum of 2 or 3 matches you will win. I’ve never lost one of those fights. Sometimes you get such cascades that you don’t even have to use a health pack on Hulk afterwards.
The other day after my first match the enemy team (all around Level 280) started witch some cascades of their own bringing down my Hulk from 15,000 to 3,000 health… I never had to do a second match because the board went all green killing all three enemies in a few seconds!
Here is a summary of the teams from this thread, if someone noted the strategy for said team, I added that here as well. I did not include any of the 5* suggestions, as those are kinda off topic. There seems to be basically 9 teams - with some trade-out available (bringing total to 18)
My thoughts on a few great posts from earlier…
@thedarkphoenix = Out of the 18 teams listed above, 11 of them include either RbG, G4mora or Medusa … so “yes” you are correct, you have to bring at least one of them to the fight 
(and if your counting, 5 of them include Vulture)
@Daredevil217 " I just don’t get the ‘I have to play them to beat them’ crowd " … I am on day 955, and I have 37 champed 4s – so I am not exactly new to the game, or new to 4 land. Despite that, out of the 18 teams listed above, only 4 teams are champed for me, and 3 of those come from the Carol + RbG + Countdown Tile maker team. So finding a team that works has been troublesome for me, and based on the replies, many of us. I tried team after team, only to limp out or get wiped out. And I just got my 13th cover for Rulk in January (see below for additional), so for me, mirroring seemed to be my only option.
Vaulting, as @Dogface has noted, I think has made many of these teams difficult to have champed. XFDP (23%), Fantastic (13%), Carnage (16%), Thing (18%) , Antman (17%) I think all suffer from people not having champed, despite their longevity in the game. (Compare to Nightcrawler at 22%, but only been in the game for ~4 months)
Just as an example – I am on day 955…I play a mostly casual game… I actually got my first Antman cover back when he was introduced in his only little PVE event, and I just now got him champed within the last 2 months. My XFDP has been stuck at 5/1/5 but I have Vulture and Rogue at 12 covers each. (think about that based on how long the covers have been available in my 955 days???)
The good thing is there are some 18+ teams of mixed covers (old/new/vaulted/unvaulted). So as @LifeofAgony
noted, there are options - just some can be harder to have covered due to vaulting or too new.
Thank you everyone that contributed – I am glad I found a few teams in my roster I can pull from, and hopefully we can start seeing a mix of teams at the top 4* level again. This “holy trinity” has been on top for so long now it is down-right boring.