(Image credit: NetEase Games)

There’s a lot going on in Marvel Rivals. Between grinding out ranks in the new competitive season and completing limited-time events like the Spring Festival, most players are kept on their toes pretty much constantly. But one area of Marvel Rivals that perhaps isn’t given as much attention is the Gallery Cards.

Gallery Cards are a feature in Marvel Rivals that serves as a reward for completing seasonal tasks. They are collated in seasonal comic books called Serials, with each season having a dedicated comic strip that stores all the unlockable art. But as well as giving players cool art of some of their favourite heroes, completing these pictures also gives players access to some lore drops. For example, in Doom’s Rise (the Serial for Season 0), after completing events to unlock the ‘Your Biggest Fan’ comic strip, you can read more about the non-playable narrator Galacta. Some bits of lore are more exciting than others, but the latest drop is something that has really stood out to players.

Plans Within Plans is the latest Gallery Card in the Season 1 Eternal Night Falls Serial, and accompanying this piece of art is a passage from the Book of Doom – 2099. The short passage is mostly just Doom recounting giving a shard of Chronovium to Dracula and how, despite New York City being cast into darkness, everything’s going according to Doom’s plan of using the Vampiric Verses to become immortal.

But before his sinister plan can take place, Doom admits that he’s had to join forces with some of the heroes fighting against Dracula to throw them off the scent of his ambitions for immortality. And with that, he announces, “Doom has a gala to attend.”

To most that may just sound like Doom’s got some fancy Friday night plans in his diary, but some players think that this short line is hinting at something far more important. “Season 2 is Hellfire Gala confirmed in game!!!” DynamiteDynamo10 says. The Hellfire Gala is an X-Men storyline that saw a new X-Men team unveiled and depicted the terraforming of Mars into Planet Arrako. The gala itself sees various Marvel heroes interact for an in-universe vote (influenced by an actual fan election) to choose the new members of the Krakoan X-Men. The guest list for the gala is also pretty stacked: Doctor Doom, the Fantastic Four, and Magneto all make appearances, and Deadpool even tries to gate-crash the party during the festivities.

But the cameo that players are most excited about is Emma Frost, who gives the closing remarks and a celebratory firework display at the end of the night. “Emma Frost confirmed next season then,” one player says. Others chime in, saying it’s pretty likely that the heroes joining the roster in the next season will be Emma Frost and Blade.

Blade was already teased in the map trailer for Central Park, which saw him chained up by Dracula and robbed of his cool sunglasses. You can actually see him for yourself, as he’s also currently being used as map decoration in the defending team’s spawn room. There’s also been tons of speculation about Emma Frost joining Marvel Rivals ever since dataminer XOX_LEAK leaked plans to make her into a Vanguard towards the end of last year. The same dataminer also recently shared uncovered in-game voice lines which tie Frost to the Hellfire Gala and Arakko.

But despite everything pointing towards Emma Frost and the Hellfire Gala, it’s still important not to get ahead of ourselves. Marvel Rivals’ executive producer Danny Koo has previously said that the developers don’t want to spend a great deal of time thinking about the supposed datamined leaked heroes and would just “rather spend our time developing the game.”