owie

I agree that Matt improved. But I'm not sure I would go so far as to say Elektra was a non factor. I could easily understand an argument that she wasn't as good as him, but I don't think she was that far below. Generally speaking I think they tried to show her as taking out about the same number of the various ninjas they fought throughout the season as he did, although they did also make a few points about having her sit down after that one fight, and a couple other things like that, that made Matt seem somewhat above. So my general feeling was that she was close, but not quite at his level. But I only watched once, and am going back through later to catalog the differences more specifically.

She got better in her own movie, and got some "kimagure" chi powers. I outlined her movie feats in the respect thread. Basically some kind of mind-clouding or super-speed, and precognition that was sort of jedi-like, it let her out-react to her speedster opponent.

Do you really think MCU Elektra is a "non factor" in comparison to MCU Matt?

MCU Daredevil and movie Elektra vs movie Daredevil and MCU Elektra

Assume good teamwork on both teams.

Battle takes place in a depopulated New York at night, starting on a rooftop, 30' apart.

In character.

Win by any means.

MCU Daredevil has his armor and newer version of the billy club, movie Elektra has two sai (and her powers are at the level seen at the end of her movie), MCU Elektra has her armored clothing and two sai (at her best, pre-death), movie Daredevil has his billy club/cane.

Who wins and why?

VS

Wow, I thought this was the post of mine least likely to be featured based on its meanderingness. But thanks. jrupert1's was particularly good, I thought.

Can I recommend that perhaps you put a link to the results at the end of the debate thread for each BotW before you lock the debate thread? That would help people find it if they've been reading the debate and want to find the results easily, instead of googling around.

Bump

Bumparoo!

Pretty close fight. I agree with some of the good points made about Cupid, shooting the arrows in different directions, and fighting both John and Thea. On the other hand Frank did very well against Matt in H2H, and IMHO Matt's fighting in general was upped to a better level this season. And Frank was also obviously a good shot, and had great pain tolerance. Since he's got only a shotgun and pistols, he can't just go crazy with the full auto or anything, so no huge weapons advantage. I gotta go review the videos but I could see arguments for either side.

This is going to be meandering. Sorry.

First I want to go into more detail about what I meat earlier about Strange’s different levels of power.

He’s often so powerful in his solo series, but then less-so in his teams, like the Defenders or Avengers. They have to nerf him to make the other members of the teams not seem useless. And he goes up and down so much, from sorcerer supreme to master of the mystic arts and back again, from white magic to black magic and back again, oh no Urthona burned his books, now he’s using the amulet of sorrows instead of the eye, etc etc etc.

BUT, I think there have been some good arguments on this thread about a pretty consistent top level that he can achieve—probably somewhere below, but capable of transacting with, hell lords and abstracts. The arguments about his time powers were good; one other example is that he sent Spidey’s spirit back into King Kull’s time in an old Marvel Team-up.

Still, there are many moments when he has trouble with lesser foes, and that’s what makes me still have a hard time fully backing him.

Here’s an illustration of what I’m talking about. Going back over the last New Avengers volume, to try to stay current, he became master of the Black Priests and their power, saying, as he says here, that he knows all the words of power. While this is a statement, not a feat, I don’t see a lot of reason to doubt it. He’s talking about a high level of control of magic. He’s got magic chops.

And just previous to that, he fairly easily defeated the Norn (the Dr. Fate guy) from the Great Society—who was himself able to destroy a world on multiple occasions to stop previous incursions. And, he released a pretty powerful demon out of himself that defeated most of the rest of the Society, and seemingly messed up a fair amount of the world, on that same occasion. He also defeated another powerful demon in the annual. So that was all reasonably good stuff.

(And, to use one other example that I think has not been brought up here, he was also in the War of the Seven Spheres that lasted 5000 years or whatever. I never read that arc directly, but whatever it was exactly, going through any 5000 (or whatever) year magical war is a pretty impressive thing.)

On the other hand, now getting to his limitations, he then gets into the library with a lot (a lot!) of Black Swans, who take him out in a pretty straight fight, due to a weakness to the “chaos” they represent. Well, I’d guess Spawn is pretty chaotic too, so that doesn’t signal good things for him. Honestly I don’t think I’ve ever seen him have this weakness before, and he’s fought tons of chaos demons, so I don’t totally buy the chaos thing and would more just say they toasted him on pure power. Regardless, it shows a level of weakness and a level of power he couldn’t deal with.

There are also plenty of times he’s had trouble in the past, as well, even when he was “classic” Strange. If I think back to the old Defenders, to give just one example, he was somewhat challenged by, and needed the help of other Defenders to fully defeat the plan of, Ian Fate, a random no-name sorcerer who had seemingly kidnapped Devil-slayer’s wife. Or when Amora turned Black Knight into a statue, Strange couldn’t turn him back. Or, in modern times, when he was with the New Avengers and they were fighting the Hand under the Elektra-Skull, he added almost nothing to the fight, when theoretically he could have just put all the ninjas to sleep. That kind of thing happened, and happens, all the time.

So all together, he’s got these really high showings against very powerful opponents, and but also problems with much-less-difficult challenges, and also sometimes just an implied lack of power when he does nothing while on a team that’s fighting characters that he could defeat without any effort if the writer put any thought into it. Every character who's been around that long is going to be inconsistent, but he's more inconsistent than many others. So when I see the high and the low, my impulse is to average it out: Strange must be mid-level then. But, that’s not really accurate either; because it’s not really that he has a lot of mid-level showings, it’s just a result after mixing high and low extremes. How do I resolve this in my own mind? Many if not most of the low-level feats are writer-driven, based on the need for a tension-filled plot. Whereas the higher level ones seem to show him more in the light of his job as Sorcerer Supreme and guardian of this dimension against evil; he wouldn't be much of a Sorcerer Supreme if he couldn't actually fight those dudes. So in the end I tend to ignore the lower level ones, and instead see the higher-level feats as the “true” Strange (when he is Sorcerer Supreme and in full possession of all his powers)--but with a bit of an asterisk that still represents a certain level of inconsistency.

On to the fight in particular:

His weakness here is his lack of H2H defenses against Spawn’s obviously formidable physical attack options. I think Spawn’s speed and ferocity may be a key element.

But on Spawn’s side, I keep hearing about him fighting hell-lords, but usually it seems like a matter of physical combat. I don’t see a lot of real use of magic (necro, whatever) at a hell-lord level. Some, but not a lot. Cadence did just mention some strategies in the post right above, which are reasonable. But I'd still give Strange the edge on magic effects, from what I've seen.

Anyway, my own person take, summing it up, is that it’s fairly close. I could see Spawn winning some rounds due to purely physical attacks. But while Strange has no physical game, he does fight tons of demons and so on who attack physically, and usually manages to defend himself fairly well, so that’s not the be-all end-all of this fight. Spawn fights hell-lords, but I haven’t seen too many ways that he does so on a metaphysical, spell-power level. Whereas while Strange does have a lot of random showings where he struggles to fight mid-level guys, on the other hand when he faces high-level opponents, he usually manages to rise to the occasion. Using those as an indicator of what he can accomplish when pressed, I think he can probably deal with Spawn pretty effectively from a number of directions when it comes to magic--although Spawn will take some wins via magic/necro too. Putting those various scenarios together, I think I’m going too close to call, with perhaps a slight edge to Strange. The best way I can think to put it is, if this was a fight in a comic, I think it would be come out as a draw.

And finally:

I want to give props to @laylah and @wastelandman for good arguments, especially wastelandman. Also, question--what were those Strange vs Moondragon scans from? That was impressive. Also, the current scan rule: 3 FULL PAGE scans from one comic. More scans per comic are OK if they're single panel or thereabouts.

and

@sirfizzwhizz I don't waste my time on fan wank characters like Strange, Dr. Manhattan, Midnighter, Flash, and the like.

It's just so funny Spawn beat Doom, Etrigan, tied with Ghost Riders, and barely lost out against Thor and Loki, but oh no, Strange is the one who is too much. Screw that blind fandom noise. Spawn got his dues against people better than Strange already.

There’s no reason to call it fan wanking when someone’s arguing for Dr. Strange. That’s just putting a character, and their fan, down for no reason. He’s a perfectly respectable character who’s done a lot of interesting stuff a lot over the years. That’s not saying he’s completely consistent, or would demolish Spawn or anything. But you’re making it sound like it’s somehow not respectable to respect him or to argue for him, which isn’t the case in any way.

You make it sound like if Spawn has done such and such against Etrigan, Doom, and Thor and Loki, that’s it’s silly for Strange to suddenly be winning. First of all, all those other results were fan polls too, it’s not like they’re any more legit than this one. If you accept their legitimacy, you have to accept this one too. Or, don’t accept any of them, that’s fine, fan polls are fan polls, but then don’t use them as evidence of why Strange shouldn’t be doing so well either.

But there are also reasons why Strange may do well in comparison to those other characters. Strange is more powerful than Doom in a straight up fight. With prep, that may be another matter. But in a random encounter, Strange is clearly a more powerful sorcerer by a significant degree, and Doom’s standard tech that he carries around with him isn’t necessarily enough to make up the difference. Strange is also a better and more diverse magic-user than Etrigan. Etrigan’s pure physical force and hellfire gives him effective tools against Spawn that Doom doesn’t have, which is why I thought Etrigan would do better than Doom; but Strange’s magic gives him even more of a toolbox, and gives him even more alternatives to try to win. It’s not just the level of power, but the variety of kinds of magical effects that he can bring to the table. The examples of time manipulation are just one example. Thor is by no means more formidable than Strange when it comes to fighting extremely powerful magical foes; for instance I expect that Strange would do better against Surtur than Thor has—although Thor does have physical power that Strange lacks. So I could imagine a situation where a given person might think that all three of the former characters might lose against Spawn, and yet believe that Strange wins.

A comic called C.O.W.L. and a movie called The League. They take place in 1960s Chicago where superheroes are all part of a union.

Here are some basic feats/descriptions for the COWL team, I can provide scans of anything in particular if desired.

Gregory Warner is a tactical genius, sharpshooter, and ex-professional boxer. He's sort of a play on the Green Hornet and (less so) on Captain America. Has had a decades-long (WWII to 1960s) career defeating criminals, powered and non-powered. John Pierce is also an ex-boxer, and ex-CIA. Marlow is a sharpshooter, whose best feat was killing a guy with superhuman strength by shooting him in the balls after a bruising H2H fight. Sparrow is a play on Bucky, and is said to be an expert in 8 martial arts. Those guys are the weaker ones on the team, they'll be more equivalent to Hera, Zeb, Sabine, Rex, and Chopper.

Recon tends to fly up above the action, where he can radio instructions to the rest of the team about how to work together, who to target, and provide specific targeting instructions.

Radia is a telekinetic, she has used her TK to break a guy's neck (while blind and being unable to see him), shot dice through a guy's body at high speed, can fly, trapped people against a ceiling.

Blaze has a sci-fi tech glove that has powers. It can make force fields, shoot energy blasts, he can fly, move at super speed (enough to be a blur), and has TK as well.

Arclight can fly and shoot heat beams that have a high degree of control--enough to burn someone's skin like a sunburn, or to burn someone's body up.

Eclipse can basically turn off energy, both kinetic and "actual" energy. He has frozen gun's so they don't fire, turned off a guy's forcefield, and negated Blaze's tech glove.

The powered types are more likely to be fighting Kanan and Ezra, but would also probably be needed in the fight against Hera/Sabine/Chopper/Rex as well. I would say that Kanan and Ezra clearly have more H2H skill than anyone on the COWL team.

A Star Wars Rebels team (Ezra, Kanan, Hera, Zeb, Sabine, Captain Rex, Chopper) vs a C.O.W.L. team (Geoffrey Warner, John Pierce, Grant Marlow, Sparrow, Recon, Radia, Blaze, Arclight, Eclipse).


Ezra has his saber/stun gun and energy slingshot; Kanan has his saber and a blaster pistol; Hera has a blaster pistol; Zeb has his bo-rifle; Sabine has two blaster pistols and multiple forms of explosives; Captain Rex has two blaster pistols and his partial armor; Chopper has his standard internal tech.


Warner, Pierce, and Marlow each have two .45 pistols. Sparrow (hand to hand combat), Recon (flight, targeting scopes), Radia (telekinetic), Eclipse (anti-kinetic and anti-power powers), and Arclight (flight, heat blasts) are unarmed. Blaze has his gauntlet (flight, force fields, telekinesis, energy blasts).


In character. Rebels include all canon sources, C.O.W.L. characters can combine comics and movie feats (in the case of Blaze, Sparrow, and Eclipse).

Battle takes place on the populated streets of Chicago, starting at 50', with the C.O.W.L. team believing that the Rebels are new versions of the Chicago Six, and the Rebels believing that they have found an Imperial base. (Both teams will avoid civilian casualties.)


Win by any means.


Who wins and why?


Rebels team

and


vs

C.O.W.L. team