MultiVersus dataminers have discovered that Morty's recovery has been repurposed from Gandalf's, providing further proof that Lord of the Rings has been completely removed from the game.
Yesterday, Morty was finally added to MultiVersus after weeks of teasing, and not even a single gameplay trailer or screenshot for the character. Following his release, dataminers have been trawling through the game to see what else has been added aside from some unused taunts and skins.
One of the more interesting discoveries comes from dataminer multiversusie, who discovered an eagle had been added to the files alongside Morty's character data. They were quickly able to identify that the eagle was linked to Gandalf's moveset, although why it had been added with Morty was a mystery for a little while.
As it turns out, however, the eagle seems to have been added with Morty because his recovery is actually repurposed from Gandalf's. For those who haven't been able to play Morty yet, he has one of the more unique recoveries in the game, screaming and calling out Rick's spaceship beneath him to keep rising from the ground and stop him from falling, essentially acting as a summonable platform.
We haven't seen a recovery move like this in the game yet, but it seems like at one point we were going to with Gandalf. As pointed out by multiversusie, Gandalf's movellist has previously been datamined from the game, so we know what his recovery was going to be. This is the move description for Gandalf, "Summons a massive eagle that can be used as a platform. Has a COOLDOWN".
Compare that to Morty's, "Morty calls in the spaceship as a PLATFORM that moves upward. COOLDOWN applies", and add in the fact that the eagle was accidentally added to the game alongside Morty, and it becomes pretty clear that MultiVersus has repurposed Gandalf's recovery for a different character.
This further supports the theory that all Lord of the Rings content has been removed from MultiVersus and is unlikely to ever come back, something that now seems even more certain considering the Embracer acquisiton of the franchise.