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Batman Gambit / Marvel Universe

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Batman Gambits seen throughout the Marvel Universe.

Comic Books:

  • In the Annihilators backup story, Star-Thief sent a killer clown after Rocket Raccoon, knowing that Rocket would investigate the clown and that the trail of clues would lead him back to Halfworld. Rocket's very presence on Halfworld would then allow Star-Thief to free himself from his confinement and wreak havoc.
  • In Civil War (2006), the trick to trap Hulk in the satellite and shoot him into space was based on the likely reactions of Bruce Banner: that he wouldn't trust the people leading S.H.I.E.L.D., but that he would trust Nick Fury, not knowing that he's been missing since Secret War (2004), and that he would decide that "this is a job for Hulk".
  • In a crossover with Daredevil and The Defenders, the hero and team find themselves at the mercy of the Grandmaster and an old Doctor Doom robot called the Prime Mover and the Grandmaster is able to beat the Prime Mover and obtain the Earth. When he decides he wants to turn Earth into a breeding ground for super-powered pawns, Daredevil challenges him to a game of heads or tails, double or nothing, playing with the Grandmaster's addiction to gambling. Though Daredevil cheats to win, the entire plan hinged on Grandmaster accepting. Hawkeye would pull the same trick years later with even more blatant cheating.
    • Grandmaster is hit with this again at the end of Avengers: No Surrender as he's confronted by Lightning, who challenges him to a game of poker to decide the fate of the Earth. Grandmaster becomes so scared of Lightning having a higher hand than him that he folds. Then Lightning reveals to him how he did it: he's never played poker before. Lightning bluffed him just by being convincing.
    • Grandmaster is one of the Elders of the Universe, each is the last survivor of an ancient race that has adopt a particular hat in order to have a focus and be ablet to survive the boredom of immortality. Likewise, the particular obsession can be used to turn the tables on them (e.g. threaten to start smashing The Collector's stuff).
  • Believe it or not, Deadpool. You see, everyone thinks that Deadpool's a moron. He's not. This was proved without a doubt when he executed a plan involving the manipulation of the X-Men, HAMMER, Norman Osborn, some random called Kincaid, the SFPD, the public, the local news, and a chicken, over the course of five issues. Deadpool first declared to the X-Men that he was going to kill Kincaid, causing a public fiasco, making the X-Men look like criminals, then, he proceeded to interrupt a live broadcast, wearing a home made X-Men outfit, then, he let himself be captured by Domino, knowing that her morals would mean that when Cyclops ordered Wolverine to "take Deadpool out of the picture", she would protect him, then, Deadpool got Domino to tell him her greatest fear, then stuck the chicken, (which was Domino's worst fear) into an air vent in a train station, knowing full well that Osborn would put Kincaid in an open spot to GET him killed to make the X-Men look bad, fully expecting the X-Men to try to save Kincaid by way of a vent, pulling out the lights FIRST to add to the confusion. Then he flushed Kincaid into the open. While Kincaid was in the open, Deadpool kept an eye out for snipers, PROTECTING Kincaid, while making it look like he was going to kill him. Then, when Wolverine saved Kincaid, Deadpool made a run for it, and fought the X-Men (except for Wolverine who would, by now, be in on the plot, Deadpool made sure of that) on the roof, allowing a camera guy taken by Wolverine to film them, making the X-Men look like heroes, and Osborn to look like an incompetent buffoon, just as planned!
    • This aspect of Deadpool's personality was lampshaded by Nick Fury in Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 where Nick Fury states that with his intelligence and skill, Deadpool would easily be the most dangerous being on the entire planet if it weren't for his insanity preventing him from doing too much.
  • The founding of the Thunderbolts was likely the most elaborate example of this Trope in Marvel. With most citizens at the brink of the Despair Event Horizon after Onslaught seemingly kills The Avengers and the Fantastic Four, Baron Zemo comes up with a brilliant Evil Plan, which is to gather the former members of the Masters of Evil and use new identities, posing as heroes to gain the public's trust until they could strike by complete surprise. And it worked brilliantly. Nobody, not the government, the media, nor the remaining heroes like Spider-Man ever suspected a thing. The plan may well have succeeded, had not half the original team not discovered that being respected and admired had more benefits to being hated and feared.
  • In Earth X, Captain America uses Alicia Master's Marvels (animated clay fashioned in the guise of Earth's heroes) to have an army immune to the Skull's mind-control, and to preoccupy the supervillain's superhuman slave army. Cap then disguises himself as a Marvel made in his image to fool the Skull into believing he's also immune to the boy's powers, allowing Cap to get in close and snap the Skull's neck
  • In Excalibur, it is revealed that Merlyn arranged the formation of Excalibur and manipulated many subsequent events (including faking his own death), in order to ultimately prevent the collapse of Merlyn's Energy Matrix and destroy Merlyn's former teacher Necrom. The gambit is only half-successful: while Necrom is destroyed, Captain Britain and Meggan create a feedback loop in the Energy Matrix and destroy it, greatly reducing Merlyn's power.
    Was all this deception really necessary? - Merlyn's daughter Roma
  • Fantastic Four: If you know anything about Victor Von Doom, you can easily see why this trope could just as well be called The Doom Gambit (most of them involve him being Actually a Doombot).
  • In Marvel's The Infinity Gauntlet crossover, the coldly calculating Adam Warlock sets into motion several futile engagements against the omnipotent Thanos and his upstart successor Nebula, designed to exploit the villains' Achilles' Heel and ineptitude (respectively), and ultimately transition the Infinity Gauntlet to Warlock himself.
    • It's part of the same gambit, but it's worth pointing out that a substantial part of Warlock's gambit was to script an entire battle involving more than a dozen of the galaxy's strongest warriors sacrificing their lives, to get Thanos to raise his hand at the right moment.
    • Warlock's evil half the Magus is not to be outdone in the sequel crossover The Infinity War, implementing an elaborate scheme geared towards the acquisition of the Infinity Gauntlet. Unfortunately, two Chessmasters (three, if you count Thanos' duplicitous doppelganger) are better than one, and after Warlock and Thanos discern the Magus' end game, they execute a counter-scheme that sabotages the villain's newfound godhood, and ultimately leads to his defeat.
  • The Iron Man comic showed that Howard Stark pulled an epic one during "The Secret Origin of Tony Stark". Howard and Maria Stark were expecting a child, but they come to find out that their child was very ill. He wouldn't be able to be active at all if not be dead. Enter the Rigellian Recorder robot 451, who promises that he can heal him in exchange for using him for a powerful robot that is said to help lead humanity into a golden age of peace and prosperity. However, Howard realizes that all of 451's talks of this use Alexander the Great as an example and realizes that his son would live, only to die years later. What does he do? He finds a way to negate 451's modifications, then, while hiding the child away, adopts another and proclaims him to be his son. The boy he adopted? Tony Stark. When 451 came to collect, he had no idea of what had happened.
  • The Mighty Thor:
    • Absorbing Man isn't exactly a genius, but he's good at using his powers, and always tries to absorb the properties of Thor's hammer or Cap's shield if either hero is present. In one story, Thor anticipated this and fooled him into thinking a papier-mâché duplicate of his hammer was the real thing. having absorbed the properties of papier-mâché, the villain was defeated easily.
    • Odin has one of his own, when it's revealed during the "Disassembled/Ragnarok" story arc that all of the trials and tribulations that Odin had put Thor through over the years (centuries, millennia) were preparing him to finally be the god to put an end to the Ragnarok Cycle once and for all.
    • If you followed Thor since Avengers Disassembled, and through Dark Reign and Siege, and up until now, you probably already know this. Loki was shown to ensure his own adoption by Odin, caused the last Ragnarok, made sure Thor would revive all the gods, manipulated humans, gods, demons and Doom to ensure he won't have an afterlife and that he would be reincarnated, caused Osborn's downfall, made it possible for Asgard to exist without harming Yggdrasil, all with everyone around him being clueless. And the best part? No one has yet realized the magnitude of the plan that was executed or the reason behind it.
    • In Loki: Agent of Asgard, the main villain of the piece manages to pull off one of these that involves time-travel, murdering a shapeshifter who looks like an otter, setting the shapeshifter's brothers against each other, a young Odin, Asgard's greatest hero, and shooting a giant fish that's actually a dwarf with a bazooka, all to cause the creation of a sword that the current Loki acquired before the series began.
    • In The Mighty Thor storyline The Ballad of Beta Ray Bill, the dwarf leader Eitri executes a nice gambit on Odin. Odin wants the dwarfs to make a new hammer for Beta Ray Bill, similar to Thor's hammer but different. Nobody else can do it. Eitri offers Odin a bargain: first the Asgardians have to send a goddess to fight against their champion first. If she wins, they'll make the hammer for Odin; if not, their champion gets to keep the goddess as a love slave. But this bargain isn't what it seems. Eitri knows that Odin will send the Lady Sif as his champion, and Sif will certainly win against the dwarfs' champion. Which is just what Eitri wants. The dwarfs' "champion" is the freakishly huge dwarf Throgg, who has been using his great size and strength to bully and dominate the other dwarfs. Being beaten by a woman (even a warrior-goddess) will humiliate Throgg so badly that he'll never bother the other dwarfs again.
    • In The Mighty Thor storyline The Surtur Saga, Surtur pulled one on ALL the Asgardians: after breaking the seals barring the exit from Muspelheim with Malekith's aid, they launched an all-out invasion of Midgard, forcing the Asgardians to muster all their armies and allies and head down to Earth to stop them. During the initial stage of the battle in Midgard, while he and his Fire Demons rampaged and fought against the Asgardian forces in New York, they end up setting a lot of fires that threaten to burn the whole city down. To prevent this, Thor called forth a thundering rainstorm which put out the fires out… and that was what Surtur intended all along, as due to the mystical nature of the storm, once the clouds part and a rainbow appear, he could sense and find his way to the rainbow bridge, Bifrost, allowing him to immediately assault Asgard, now empty save for Heimdell and Odin himself as its last-line of defense, where the Eternal Flame he needs to light his greatsword Twilight and burn the Nine Worlds to ashes. And with all the Asgardian forces and heroes stuck on Midgard trying to hold off against the forces of Muspelheim, only Thor can head back to help his father stop Surtur from winning.
  • The Mole on the team in Runaways attributes this to the success of their plan near the end of the first volume - specifically, they let Nico suggest part of it after arranging things so there wouldn't be many other options.
  • Spider-Man: Pretty much all of Spider-Man's victories against supervillains depend on Batman Gambits, especially ones much more powerful than he is. Spider-Man will either set up in advance or improvise on the spot various traps and goad his enemies into falling into them, and even if he can beat a supervillain in straight combat, he'll joke around and mock them into fury and carelessness to make the fight easier.
    • Tombstone pulled one of these off in a Spider-Man's Tangled Web story that featured him as a Villain Protagonist. After suffering a heart attack (due to his very unhealthy diet) Tombstone was arrested and sent to the super-villain prison the Raft, where he quickly developed an enmity with a crooked correction officer and the Kangaroo, who the correction officer used as his enforcer to keep the inmates in line. Tombstone planned to murder the Kangaroo, but he had a problem – his cellmate, the Spot, learned of the plan, and didn’t want to be an accessory to murder, seeing as he was up for parole soon. Tombstone threatened the much weaker man, but the Spot betrayed the plan to the guards anyway (even though turning stool-pigeon on any inmate, much less one like Tombstone, is usually suicide) and Tombstone was caught in the act. He was sent to solitary, where the crooked officer tormented him and kept his medication from him, while the Spot was granted parole for his act. Eventually, Tombstone got sicker and sicker, until he had a second heart attack. The crooked officer knew he was in trouble, because Tombstone would be transferred, and the Kangaroo wouldn’t work for him if Tombstone survived. So his Number Two arranged for the guy to personally guard the villain as the ambulance transferred him so he could kill the villain and Make It Look Like an Accident. That’s when Tombstone’s long-prepared escape plan came to fruition, and it was revealed that the Number Two and the Spot had been in on it all along. The Spot opened a portal to Switzerland (where Tombstone could get better medical treatment with confidentiality) and the villain killed the correction officer during the transit. (Unfortunately for the Spot, Tombstone later repaid him by snapping his neck, showing that while his heart was healed, it was still black as pitch.)
  • The Ultimates:
    • Nick Fury performs one of these. In order to eliminate a dangerous assassin and recover the high tech rifle he possesses, Fury anonymously contacts the assassin and orders a hit on himself. He manages to successfully lure the assassin into the open and kill him. The best part. The assassin is armed with a gun with X-ray vision and a special bullet that will phase through any barriers between him and his target. As he's setting up his aim, the last thing he sees is Nick Fury aiming the only other copy of this same rifle at him. He didn't just call a hit on himself, he slipped the assassin just enough information about his own schedule so that he'd know exactly when and where the assassin would attack.
    • Hulk does not care about the Chitauri alien invasion, but he's a Dumb Muscle. Captain America easily manipulates him to fight with Blatant Lies: first he told him that the alien leader had been flirting with Betty Ross, and then that the rest of the armada had been calling him a "sissy boy".
  • In Wolverine: Origins, Wolverine has a plan with Bucky. The first part of the plan requires Bucky to hire a mercenary to attack Wolverine. Bucky hires everyone's favorite fourth-wall destroying, partially insane, merc with a mouth, because Bucky knows how he hates that everyone thinks he's a Wolverine knock-off — so Deadpool will draw Wolverine into a very noticeable battle. Deadpool is also the only guy who could have a chance against Wolverine. Hence, the battle ensues, and eventually Deadpool has Wolverine hanging above a secret pool so that he can drown him, which may take a long time. But then, Wolverine's son, Daken, shows up, Bucky shoots Daken with a special bullet that will dull his healing factor, keeping him knocked out for a long time, so Wolverine can un-brainwash him. It turns out, that was the entire point of everything. Deadpool did not get paid.
  • X-Men:
    • During the Onslaught Crisis Crossover, it was revealed that Professor X (like Batman) kept secret files on how to kill each X-Man in case they went rogue, including himself (which was good, since Onslaught was created from a combination of Xavier's and Magneto's minds).
    • The "Xavier Protocols", as these plans are known, eventually end up becoming important plot elements in various other arcs.
    • In Curse of the Mutants, Xarus's vampire army manages to turn Wolverine. Xarus then puts Logan in the lead of his attack on Utopia, as a psychological gambit to demoralise the mutants. Then, just when Xarus thinks he can't lose, Cyclops reveals the vampirism only worked because Doctor Nemesis shut off Wolvie's Healing Factor, and turns it back on. Now Wolverine's back, very unhappy, knows where Xarus is based, and the vamps really aren't expecting him to turn on them.
      Cyclops: I had to assume the possibility that you'd get bitten and turned. In fact, I counted on it.
    • Jubilee was actually able to pull off one of these in an early issue of Generation X, the first time the team dealt with Emplate, the demonic mutant brother of the M-Twins, who could feed off the genetic material of other mutants and assimilate their abilities. Emplate managed to capture and subdue the entire team (even Emma Frost, believe it or not) and had them at his mercy. So Jubilee suddenly decides to spend the time insulting him. (The best one? She parodies David Letterman with "The Top Ten Reasons Emplate is a Loser", number one being that despite all he's doing, he's still not as annoying as his sister M.) After enduring one and a half issues of this, Emplate loses his temper, and uses his draining power on her, only to find out that Jubilee was trying to make him angry on purpose, because she has been known to lose control of her powers when she's angry. Because she succeeds in tricking Emplate into assimilating her powers when he's enraged, well, the results are explosive, and the team is able to fight back.
  • One Punisher comic has a white-collar criminal flee to a Caribbean Banana Republic, strongarming its president into letting him run his criminal empire from there. The president retaliates by mentioning (during dinner with an American diplomat) that the newcomer is certainly doing lots for the country's economy, having started to build a huge runway. The diplomat goes on high alert due to the possibility of the staging point for a Soviet invasion, the criminal is completely dumbfounded to find a U.S. Army division on his doorstep (he built the runway to make it easier to smuggle drugs, and is completely baffled anyone would suspect Soviet involvement, although of course he can't exactly say so in public).
  • Marvel Adventures: The Avengers:
    • During Issue #10, Cap spends Iron Man's jousting match against the Black Knight on the phone with Jarvis, wanting to find some jousting rule that invalidates the match, counting on Iron Man's loss as well as Morgan le Fay being honor-bound to agree to a rematch. It works, as he discovers jousting matches require all participants to wield shields, and gives Iron Man his.
    • When the Mad Thinker unleashed her Super-Adaptoid and used it to copy the powers of Quicksilver and Spider-Man. After it copied everything about Bruce Banner, Quicksilver notices some odd quirks towards the Super-Adaptoid. Quicksilver is able to get the remote the Thinker is using to activate the Adaptoid's ability, snatch up Captain America and get it to copy his abilities. To the Avengers' shock, the Super-Adaptoid stands down, proclaims the Avengers good people and flies off. Quicksilver explains that he realized that the Adaptoid's odd quirks meant that it had possibly copied the heroes' personalities as well as their powers. He also didn't tell Cap his plan because he knew he wouldn't trust him with pulling it off.

Films:

  • Marvel Cinematic Universe
    • All of Loki's plans in The Avengers (2012). All of them.
      • He counts on the Avengers' instability as a team and the Hulk losing control to help his master plan along.
      • Finally, Loki's eventual defeat and return to Asgard: He knows that the Avengers would want him to take responsibility for his actions, and Thor would of course want to keep Loki as close as possible.
      • There's also an alternative theory. It's a possibility that the Chitauri picked up Loki from the void and coerced him into stealing the Tesseract for them, and then using it to transport their army to Earth — and that Loki, who didn't like being coerced, played both sides against one another instead. By that idea, his actions in the film would have been calculated to unify the Avengers to the point that he could use them as his own personal wrecking ball against the Chitauri. It would also make the spectacle he put on in Germany much less stupid, and more plausible, and explain why he seemed to be afraid of the leader of the Chitauri, which he probably wouldn't have been if he'd was in a position of power with them.
    • Employed by Thor in Thor: Ragnarok. Knowing Loki's Chronic Backstabbing Disorder, he expected him to betray him at some point, and put Valkyrie's shock disk on his shoulder in the elevator. The thing Thor didn't expect was Loki reflecting on the fact that he had become so predictable, and deciding to aid the gladiators in saving the surviving Asgardians.
  • The Punisher manages one in his second film, manipulating the crime lord who had his family killed. Frankie planted evidence that the crime lord's wife and secretly gay right-hand man were having an affair, leading to the crime boss directly killing the right-hand man and hurling his wife onto a railway track.

Literature:

  • In the Avengers novel Everybody Wants to Rule the World, Iron Man ends up confronting Ultron on his own as Ultron is about to unleash a complete takeover of the Internet and reach a level of artificial consciousness that would make him impossible to defeat. At one point Ultron stops what he is doing simply because Iron Man has stopped attacking him, recognising that Stark wouldn't just give up trying to fight unless there was some obvious benefit to it, such as Stark having a back-up plan that he could only put into action if Ultron completed his plan. In reality, Stark had no plan, but by pausing like he did it gave him time to max out his own power reserves and deliver a more powerful blast that legitimately delayed Ultron's efforts and gave Tony time to keep fighting him until back-up arrived in the form of the Vision.

Live-Action TV:

Western Animation:

  • Iron Man: Armored Adventures: Mr. Fix, after being turned into a computer AI, launches one to ruin Justin Hammer, the one who placed him in this state. Fighting his programming, Fix wasn't able to attack Hammer directly, so he instead found another, much more effective method: make Hammer, through his own flaws, destroy his own organization. He poses as an unknown blackmailer, threatening to reveal Hammer's criminal activities to the world. Hammer, who's already been established as an impatient and egotistical Psychopathic Manchild, quickly begins devolving into paranoia, killing off his own thugs one by one under suspicion of the blackmailer being one of his own men. When Hammer prepares to kill the last one, Killer Shrike, he allows Iron Man and War Machine into Hammer's lair to record his raving before broadcasting it to the entire world, ruining Hammer forever. After he's finally defeated by Iron Man and War Machine, Mr. Fix finally finishes him off, using his own Z Gas to do it.
  • X-Men: Evolution:

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