You are given 10 character points and 15 perk points to be spent exclusively on their respective fields (unless certain perks are obtained to excuse otherwise)
Win by Death, Incap, or KO. Standard Gear.
DC Characters are composite Post Crisis New 52 and Rebirth, standard power levels. Marvel is 616 and current unless directly stated otherwise.
Unless otherwise stated Wildstorm characters are allowed their feats from DC comics.
Manga characters are manga/anime/novel.
Dragon Ball characters are restricted up to Cell Saga and are manga/movie, no anime feats.
Video Game Characters get Game/Tie in comic material.
Star Wars is EU: Everyone is also allowed their canon feats and are current.
No reality-warping (powers that may fall under this or have some association will be dealt with on a case by case basis due to the broad/vague nature of reality-warping).
No Luck Manipulation
No Existence Erasure or Conceptual Attacks.
No Power Stealing, Power Copying/Sharing is limited to present allies only, though characters like Amazo still have their capabilities.
No Summons, constructs, or any other fodder can be stronger than or amped beyond a FTL speed Jupiter Buster.
Summons, constructs or any other fodder cannot possess any durability bypassing hax themselves.
Summons, constructs, or any other fodder are limited to a cap of 1000.
Cloning is limited to 50.
Immortality is allowed but if a character has their all physical presence on the battlefield destroyed then they are considered to be KO'd and are out of the fight.
Characters without a tangible physical form are not allowed (I.E. ghosts, conceptual forms, etc) though intangibility is fine.
Time Jumping, remnants, and speeding up or rewinding one's own time is allowed. Other forms of time manipulation are banned.
Battlefield Removal (BFR) is allowed but has a time limit of one minute.
Characters cannot be argued or amped above Star Busting and Picosecond speeds under anycircumstances. Any example of this being broken will result in a immediate disqualification, no questions asked. Hax will similarly be judged under this scale when necessary.
Character requests are completely fine! I will need either a fully cited RT or at least a majority of the feats that said character has, however, alongside full disclosure on how strong you think they are. If I discover that you've hidden feats that are off-limits or that break rules, I will provide a immediate disqualification, no questions asked.
Posts should be done within the space of 12 days. Extensions can be requested ahead of time: please be reasonable about these if you do end up asking for one because I'm not going to be giving you more than a week at the very most unless you're near death. Respect the patience of myself and those who are waiting to post.
Battlefield
The battle takes place in an uninhabited solar system analogous to our own. Contestants start on an Earth-like planet that will reform after being destroyed 100m away from each other.
TAEP/T4V ofc. And sorry Higherpower that i didn't have a chance to vote in your last one, i simply ran out of time before Prof. closed for voting. I'll make sure to make it in time in this one.
In the world of Marvel Cosmic all three of these characters can basically be viewed as gods. Silver Surfer: The Greatest of Galactus's heralds, Adam Warlock: The Avatar of Life itself, and of course The Mad Titan, Thanos: The Avatar of Death. Each of these beings are unbelievably powerful, with Warlock and Thanos especially pushing up against the limits of the tourney. Best of all, each of these characters are either incredibly versatile or immune to essentially all versatility, and in most cases both. Superseding all of that is their combined strategic mind, which has allowed them to continuously win in fights against beings far more powerful than anyone in this tournament. What that means is that winning in a straight fight against these three is nearly impossible, and winning in a fight where they have time to prepare presents even greater odds.
I also want to mention that I have a composite Warlock/Magus. Magus is Warlock's evil version and there really isn't much of a difference between the two. I typically use "Warlock" when referring to him in this post, but anytime I use either name I'm referring to Warlock. Additionally for the sake of everyone's time, every category in these posts only scratches the surface of my characters depth of power. As a result, I may end up going into greater detail in future posts if necessary.
A Quick Aside for Prep
Before I begin going into these characters I want to mention a part of my prep strategy as it informs my character sections ill. For this tourney I got Silver Surfer Black instead of normal Surfer, the only real difference between the two is that Black Surfer has passive intangibility(Annihilation Scourge: Silver Surfer). While this is useful, it presents a much more important ability: fusion.
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Annihilation Scourge: Silver Surfer
We later see Surfer do this for an extended period of time with Bob Reynolds, the human half of the sentry. In this battle, Surfer will fuse with Warlock.
With fusion there's a couple key questions that arise: why would each character fuse and who controls the fusion. In this situation the second question answers the first. Warlock would absolutely be in charge of the fusion, his soul is ridiculously more potent than Surfer's(Silver Surfer vol 3 #46) and he has inhabited other's bodies with strong senses of will such as Gladiator.
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Annihilators: Earthfall #4
Removing Surfer's full decision making and placing him under Warlock's command fits into a long history of Thanos and Warlock working with Surfer. Neither Warlock nor Thanos view Surfer as an equal, more like a useful tool. Therefore removing the issues of Surfer's morality and incompetence by having Warlock control him is their dream come true.
As to why Surfer would accept this fusion. Both Thanos and Warlock have manipulated Surfer into making decisions he did not see the downside of several times, Warlock has an outstanding favor to cash in on Surfer, and Warlock can even control Surfer's board due to a particular connection of their souls(Warlock and the Infinity Watch #23). Surfer would likely have no choice in the matter.
The biggest reason for Warlock to control their fusion is that Surfer's main weakness is his incompetence. The essence of Surfer's character is that he has all the power and abilities in the world, but never uses them. Surfer even links his morality to his limits, an issue Warlock doesn't share(Silver Surfer: In Thy Name #1).
In contrast, Warlock is an incredibly skilled fighter and always makes great use of whatever versatility his current version has. For Warlock's skill in battle look at just a piece of his fight against the Guardians of the Galaxy in Guardians of the Galaxy vol 2 #19
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Warlock is using TK, Energy, Healing, Teleportation of Weapons, Physical shields, and his own physical strength. It's even revealed later on that Warlock is also using soul manipulation and illusions during this fight and was weakened during it. Warlock will make fantastic use of Surfer's vast versatility in this battle, in a manner Surfer could never dream.
Hax Won't Work
When building my team I wanted to make sure I wasn't going to be beaten by the laziest HTT strategy - bullshit hax, so I made sure that I basically had two characters in Warlock and Thanos who are essentially completely immune. Both are essentially halfway between mortals and abstract entities, which has given them high level resistance. One example I'll give here, Warlock and Thanos managed to survive an encounter with the haywire reality gem, which was affecting Warlock on almost every level.
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Warlock Chronicles #2: I skipped some pages because it is basically the whole comic
The reality gem is one of the fundamental aspects of the Marvel Universe, so it going haywire represents high levels of reality warping. Despite this, Warlock can power through the disruptions.
Closer reading of this instance also illustrates why I think resistance to this instance extends to most other hax. Warlock visibly goes through physical transformations such as being pulled apart, and says "the lines of life and death could fade from meaning, energy and matter would become interchangeable, the spirit no different from the flesh." I think those explanations cover most esoteric hax abilities. It's revealed at the end of this issue that Thanos withstood the same disruption placed directly on top of him.
I should also note that Surfer has shown resistances to almost every ability imaginable at this point, but he does not have the same ingrained lore reasons to resist hax that Thanos and Warlock do so I didn't include him in this section. I'm happy to go into greater detail about their resistances if need be.
Surfer's power extends far beyond this though, Surfer got his Surfer Black namesake by birthing infant stars out of the reserves of his power cosmic. He was only drawing on his reserves because he travelled back in time to before power cosmic existed and his previous encounter with a special black hole was eating away at his body on the atomic level.
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Silver Surfer: Black #1 & 5
Surfer was also severely weakened for the second instance of creating an infant star. S urfer is further famous for literally surfing supernovas, something he's done since his first appearance.
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Fantastic Four #48, Silver Surfer Annual #2, Quasar #50; Just a few examples
I would also not be doing my due diligence if I didn't mention Surfer's healing as well - for example after being cut to pieces he could immediately make himself whole again once he regained his powers.
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Silver Surfer vol 3 #24
While all of this is great, the main power of Surfer lies in his versatility, which I'll address later on in this section.
Before I begin with Warlock, I want to discuss the meaning of a composite Warlock. At this point Warlock has at least 10 clearly distinct versions with several more delineations within those 10. At times I'll make reference to the power of a specific version as it relates to later sections. Just as a list to keep track the main versions of Warlock I'll use in this post are:
"Standard" - The longest lasting version of Warlock that Starlin created, most people are probably familiar with this version. Largely a brick who relied upon his physicals, energy, and elite skill to win in fights.
Peter David Magus - A version of Magus who learned techniques from the Soul Gem and as a result grew to be immensely powerful
Energy Manipulator Warlock - A version of Warlock who used high level energy manipulation as the basis of his power.
Current - An amalgamation of energy and physical based versions
The real strength of a composite Warlock is that since all of his versions focus on different abilities, the sum of his parts is much greater than any individual version.
For Warlock's raw power I first should establish that as his power level increased, he began to be seen as more powerful than Surfer. To the point that in Thanos: The Infinity Revelation, Energy Manipulator Warlock one-shot koed Surfer with a blast.
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While this blast did take Surfer by surprise, I think the showings in Surfer's section illuminate why this is still so impressive.
Furthermore Warlock has quite a few impressive raw power feats for his own, the most clear cut of which comes from Thanos Imperative: Ignition, where Quantum Magician Warlock blew up at least 18 planets including some massive gas giants just by blinking. People have questioned the legitimacy of this feat. I fully stand behind it, and can elaborate on that if need be.
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Beyond that, the same version of Warlock's energy shields have point blank no-sold a supernova
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Annihilation: Conquest #3/4
Warlock was also able to use this energy as constructs, such as armor, and to amplify his strikes. He even did a decent job fighting Ultron, who easily broke a smaller version of Warlock's shields in the same issue the supernova feat took place.
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Annihilation: Conquest #3
Ultron later decides that Adam's body is the perfect melding of technology and humanity and uploads his own consciousness into Adam's body, signifying the power Quantum Magician Warlock wields.
While these feats of raw power are certainly impressive, the versatility of this fusion is far more dangerous. Warlock and Surfer collectively have access to basically any ability at an extremely high level, with Warlock having an expertise on the metaphysical and Surfer on the physical. In this section I'll be going over four of the most fundamental aspects of comic universes they have control over, plus a few bonus examples.
Master of The Mind
Of the two of Warlock and Surfer, Warlock has shown a greater inclination for offensive telepathy so I won't get into Surfer's own mental might much unless you plan on taking control of me, in which case Surfer's unbelievable resistance to telepathy may come into play. That said, Surfer still has used telepathy on a planetary scale before as he did in calming down an entire planet in Annihilators #1.
For Warlock, telepathy has started to become an opening move. Take for example Guardians of the Galaxy vol 6 #9 where a child version of Magus takes down AU Moondragon, a solid telepath in her own right, extremely easily.
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Furthermore, Surfer and Warlock have both displayed great power in telekinesis: Surfer has even caught and thrown a small star with his TK.
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Deadpool team-up #883
Warlock as per usual has more experience using telekinesis in combat. He has even ripped fodder apart(Guardians of the Galaxy vol 2 #13) using telekinesis before. As will become a frequent trend, Surfer demonstrates the raw power of the versatility of this fusion, while Warlock shows the finesse and use in battle.
Master of The Soul
This is really Warlock's realm. Even without knowing a bunch of characters I'm going to make the claim that Warlock is most likely the strongest soul manipulator in the entire tournament: it's the most fundamental of his powers. Usually his soul manipulation is associated with the soul gem, but his power extends far beyond the gem. He's shown the ability to manipulate millions of souls without it such as when he channeled the life energies of millions dead kree for Phyla-Vell to use as a weapon(Annihilation: Conquest #6).
More importantly to this battle, Peter David's Magus learned from the soul gem how to rip others souls of their bodies, which he was even able to partially perform on Genis-Vell.
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Captain Marvel vol 4 #34
This is incredibly impressive because as Genis mentions in the scan, Genis's soul is directly tied to the soul of the universe. In draining even just "spiritual energy," which Genis confirms, Magus was able to rip some of the soul of the universe itself. This knocks on the door of tourney limits in terms of soul manipulation.
Furthermore, This ability does not just rip souls, it repurposes the energy from souls into power for Magus, either to keep for himself or to use as an energy weapon as Warlock did against Ultron above. Every soul Warlock drains makes my team even stronger or provides a weapon. In the above instance of draining part of Genis, Magus was able to grab enough power to return from being a ghost to a full version of himself.
Master of Energy
Having a mastery of energy is a great mixing of the realm of Surfer and Warlock as there's a lot of overlap in power. For example both of them can drain energy, but here's an example of Warlock draining Ikon dry with a tap(Thanos: The Infinity Revelation). Ikon is not particularly powerful, but I just wanted to show draining as an option.
Likely more relevant to this battle, Warlock was able to short circuit Quasar using his energy manipulation(Thanos: The Infinity Revelation). Quasar is the premier energy manipulator in the Marvel universe, easily being capable of manipulating any energy in Marvel or draining practically anybody, yet he succumbed to Warlock's energy manipulation with little resistance.
Meanwhile Silver Surfer demonstrates the raw power available in this fusion's energy manipulation arsenal. In Silver Surfer vol 3 #103, Surfer tries to stop a star from going Supernova by blasting it(which is nonsensical), but doesn't have enough energy so he absorbs energy blasts from a number of space ships, giving him enough energy to stabilize the star.
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This showing should safely put the level of energy Warlock and Surfer can manipulate at star level at least. Between this and the Quasar instance, Surfer and Warlock illustrate both a high level of power and precision in their control of energy.
Master of Matter
Matter Manipulation is largely Surfer's realm and outside of his physicals and energy blasts it's the most commonly used piece of his arsenal. Without morals, Surfer quickly results to matter manipulation such as in Fantastic Four Annual #5 where he realizes Quasimodo isn't quite human and so immediately turns him to stone with no effort.
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Even this instance oversells the amount of effort required for Surfer to manipulate matter. In Nova vol 4 #14 Surfer uses matter manipulation to fix a warp drive on the other side of the planet with just a blink of an eye. From my perspective, that's all it would take to turn another team into stone.
Now that we've covered four basic elements of comic universes, I want to look at a few last expert areas for this fusion.
Master of Senses
Surfer has probably the greatest senses of any character in comics. In Silver Surfer vol 5 #4 Surfer showed he can know literally everything on Earth, and Surfer has demonstrated extreme precision in senses. He can track a grain of dust through an endless void(Silver Surfer vol 3 #1). Everything your team does, my team will know. Furthermore, Surfer's senses reveal weaknesses(Galactus the Devourer #6), and thus anything physically exploitable about another team is known to mine.
Master of Fighting
I mentioned earlier how Warlock is an incredibly competent fighter while showing how he uses powers, which is certainly true, but is not close to the extent of his fighting capabilities. Warlock is genuinely skilled in fighting, and has used his skill to overcome physical disadvantages. For example, in Thanos #2, Warlock stomps 10 Rigellian soldiers amped to have stronger physicals than him relying upon his much greater skill.
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This showing also illustrates another personal favorite weapon in Warlock's arsenal: teleportation and the surprise attack. If Warlock is ever under threat, he tends to teleport away, and attack with the advantage of surprise. Warlock has demonstrated great stealth, and uses techniques such as nerve strikes when he sneaks up on an enemy(Warlock and the Infinity Watch #4)
Essentially even if you were more powerful than my fusion and could resist all it's versatility, that's no guarantee that you would not get stomped due to Warlock's high level of competency.
The Power Cosmic
The power cosmic gives Surfer all manner of absurd abilities that he basically never uses, partially due to incompetency, partially due to morality, partially due to bad storytelling. As I mentioned, Warlock loves to use esoteric abilities to win fights, so I want to mention some specific abilities that Surfer has shown that could hold relevance in this fight.
Several of these showings result from Doom stealing Surfer's powers. The instances of Doom stealing Surfer's powers perfectly illustrate the threat of Warlock wielding them here. When a competent fighter such as Doom controls the power cosmic, the universe itself is his fiddle on an atomic level. I believe I have proven Warlock competent enough to say the same will happen in this battle.
However, the main point of this section is that Surfer has an answer to everything because the nature of the power cosmic is to be able to do anything. Just read the narration I showed at the beginning of this post from Silver Surfer: In Thy Name #1
Perhaps the most important part of all of those claims: "all without effort."
Surfer's Surfboard
I have neglected to mention speed thus far, and that's because Surfer's surfboard acts as the centerpiece of his speed so I wanted to make it a separate section. I like how he phrases it when fighting Runner, the board functions as legs do for others(Silver Surfer #3). The lore of the board has of course grown since, but it illustrates the dynamic nicely.
Surfer's board allows him to propel himself forward at great speed and with great control, essentially meaning that when he has room, such as in the vast space of this battle, he can fight as fast as he can travel. There's several clear examples of this, but I want to look at Annihilation Scourge: Omega which demonstrates how much faster Surfer is in this regard than the rest of Marvel.
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Surfer is casually flying around and in every direction much faster than Bill, Nova, or Quasar can replicate at top speeds; all of whom are easily FTL in a straight line and Nova appears to be flying around that speed in this instance. As I mentioned, Surfer can incorporate that speed into combat like he does in Silver Surfer #33, taking out a number of ships at one time.
Basically Surfer is fast enough to keep up with just about anybody, and in open space with a better mind using it, even take advantage of his speed. His speed simply manifests in a unique manner.
The Mad Titan
Thanos is by far the most powerful being on my team, and he's proven that time and time again. To give you a perspective about the pure gap of power, Thanos has shown he can completely no-sell Surfer and casually beat him to death.
Scan 2-4: Thanos casually beats Surfer to having a breath between life and death(Cosmic Powers: Unlimited #1)
Even this doesn't quite demonstrate how far Thanos is above Surfer, so I'll keep elaborating. I mentioned above that energy manipulator Warlock one-shot koed Surfer. Well that version of Warlock was killed with one blast from Thanos.
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Thanos: The Infinity Conflict
The gap between Surfer/Warlock and Thanos in raw power really is gigantic. For one last example of the space between them I want to look at the event Thanos Imperative, where all three play a role. Thanos Imperative is where Quantum Magician Warlock destroyed at least 18 planets just by blinking and is the same version as his supernova shield feat. Despite this, the main villain of the event, Lord Mar-Vell vaporized Warlock with one blast(Thanos Imperative: Ignition). Lord Mar-Vell went on to fight Surfer, and broke his board, taking him out of the fight in just one shot(Thanos Imperative #4). The amount of power required to break Surfer's board has fluctuated over the years, but it generally signifies that character is a real threat to Surfer. Later on in the event Lord Mar-Vell encountered Thanos, and what happened? Thanos was ignoring his hits and beating him like a dog.
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Thanos Imperative #5
Consider everything I posted for Warlock and Surfer in particular. It's been shown time and time again that Surfer simply cannot stand up to Thanos in a fight in any form. This Lord Mar-vell instance speaks to how ludicrously far above Warlock and Surfer Thanos really is in terms of power. If you thought Surfer and Warlock were difficult to beat reading their section, Thanos is another thing all together.
Past his raw power I'm going to go into a few different identities Thanos has and how they influence his fighting.
Engineer
Thanos is above all else a scientist, he loves to explore, learn, and build new technology. He then often incorporates that technology into battle, but for my purposes I want to specifically mention his shield and portals. Both of these technologies mesh perfectly with Spider-Sense as well, as with a warning, Thanos can throw up a shield to stop any one attack such as he does against power-gem Thor(Silver Surfer #88). Thanos can also use multiple layers of shields to help himself withstand particularly powerful attacks as he does against Omega, a more powerful clone of Galactus, which otherwise would have killed him with its blast.
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Infinity Abyss #6
I also want to note it's stated in this scan that in a battle involving Adam Warlock, Doctor Strange, and Genis Vell, Thanos is the only "one true foe of any measure" speaking to his power yet again.
Thanos can use his portals to move around the battlefield, including as part of surprise attacks, and to move his troops around.
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Thanos: The Infinity Relativity
Immortal
Another important point with discussing Thanos is how hard he is to kill. Thanos was banished from death's realm and then later evolved beyond Death itself, which has made him unbelievably resilient in clinging to life, better than even abstract concepts. Now I won't get too much into the upper levels of his ability to survive anything since it's not combat applicable and far beyond anyone in this tourney, but I want to look at how quickly he can regenerate from death.
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Thanos Imperative #3/4
Here Thanos quickly regenerates from having everything but his skeleton destroyed. You may think you can replicate this attack, but the being who used this attack on Thanos, Drax, has been described as Thanos's "silver bullet" and in this iteration is essentially Thanos's kryptonite. This power has been a bit inconsistent in application, but has recently appeared again in a similar application so I wanted to include it.
Prep
The main aspect of my prep is obviously the fusion, but I do have a few other elements I want to include. Firstly, Peter David's Magus has shown that he doesn't fully view time linearly, which allows him to gain future knowledge.
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Captain Marvel vol 4 #34
In this example, Magus communicated with Captain Marvel across time and from the past learns that Captain Marvel has gained cosmic awareness as well as Captain Marvels current appearance. Magus builds a plan around the information he learns from future sight, and even learns enough to extort Captain Marvel using his friends. In this battle, my team will have basic knowledge about yours before it even starts: your characters general powers, who's the strongest, perhaps even their personal tendencies.
Analyzing the future will take essentially no time so Warlock and Thanos have time to take advantage of their vast resources. Warlock can teleport entire planets(Thanos Imperative: Ignition) so bringing anything to the battlefield won't be a problem and won't take hardly any time. For this battle, Warlock will bring The Universal Church of Truth, and Thanos will bring The Chitauri and the Black Order, I'll go over a few relevant fodder first.
The Matriarch
Leader of the Universal Church of Truth. A bit of a glass cannon, but has emotion based powers, such as blasting with "pure agony"(Guardians of the Galaxy vol 2 #24), and making Drax experience all the pain they ever inflicted, which "burned out his soul"(Guardians of the Galaxy vol 2 #21)
Proxima Midnight
Proxima's main ability is that she has a spear she can throw and then the spear takes a mind of its own. They have intercepted Monica Rambeau(Mighty Avengers #2) who in her light form moves at light speed. Furthermore when they pierced Hulk, who was resisting an atom cutting glaive at the time, they were capable of imposing upon him the weight of a star(Infinity #6)
Supergiant
Supergiant is a pretty bog standard telepath. Just as an example here she takes down a bunch of x-men with telepathy, and takes over iceman(Infinity #3). Her telepathy focuses on taking over opponents, which could prove quite useful. In this instance perhaps Angela?
Meanwhile the Chitarui are a monstrous, faceless horde that needs an answer. An example of the Chitauri horde's power from Secret Empire #0
The Universal Church of Truth is a church completely dedicated to Adam Magus, declaring him their messiah. The Church has been declared the most powerful force in the Universe and has the feats to back it up. The Cardinals, the churches infantry unit can create constructs out of faith(Guardians of the Galaxy vol 2 #3), even capable of briefly affecting Quantum Magician Adam Warlock. Furthermore the Cardinals wield knives capable of not only stabbing Quantum Magician Adam Warlock, but seemingly sapping his powers, taking him out of the fight completely(Guardians of the Galaxy vol 2 #3).
The ships of the Universal Church of Truth hit even harder, with each blast of each ship using the same energy as the average output of a star over the course of a week(Annihilators: Earthfall #1). The ships also show the capability to take these blasts and continue fighting. However the most dangerous aspect of these ships is that Warlock can draw upon their belief fonts to generate extra power. Using the power of only 10 or so ships he was able to merge two timelines(Guardians of the Galaxy vol 2 #17), a universal feat of power. Obviously I'm not allowed to go that far, but safe to say whatever the limit of this tournament is, Warlock is there power wise.
Thanos also has a lot of useful technology to bring to this battle with prep. Thanos's tech is either in his ship which Warlock can teleport to the battlefield, or Surfer can easily assemble it with matter manipulation as he did with Banner's tech in Incredible Hulk #250.
Knowing the power of his opponent, Thanos is likely to prepare well and bring some of his less used gear, such as his stasis rifle, which he used to trap Power Gem Thor. B&T Thor could stomp Surfer before getting a massive amp in the form of the power gem, and proved a pretty good fight for Thanos, though I would argue Thor was still inferior.
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Silver Surfer vol 3 #88: The fight between Thanos and Power Gem Thor is in the same issue.
The most important part of prep however is just time for Thanos and Warlock to come up with a plan. Thanos and Warlock are perhaps the two most impressive strategists I've seen in Marvel, although both operate in different ways. Thanos is an expert planner and strategist, working with the details of battle while Warlock is an expert manipulator and leader of others, capable of expertly predicting others moves with little knowledge. The combination of both is quite lethal.
To give you an example of the level of battle intelligence Thanos operates on I'll point to his challenge against the Grandmaster for an infinity gem. The Grandmaster is an Elder of the Universe and exclusively focused on learning how to play games to the best of his abilities. With the fate of the universe on the line he challenges Thanos to a game of battle strategy. Thanos bests Grandmaster, only for it to be revealed that Grandmaster cheated, feeling the stakes were too high. The only problem: Thanos cheated as well, outmaneuvering Grandmaster in two separate ways at the same time.
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Reverse Order, Thanos Quest #2
I think this showing speaks to how dangerous an opponent Thanos is mentally. Of course I mentioned that Warlock's mind is just as dangerous a weapon, something Thanos recognizes as well when he "can't help but admire the skill with which he was handled"(Infinity War #1) by Magus, demonstrating how well Warlock works with manipulation.
I mentioned earlier that Peter David's Magus can see time non linearly, but there's another layer to that ability, Warlock can actually plan across time. In Captain Marvel vol 5 #24, Magus changes his plans to capture Moondragon in the past when Genis-Vell stops his plan to capture Marlo thousands of years in the future, acting simultaneously in strategy thousands of years apart, even as the past is changed in front of him.
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This also demonstrates a fantastic telepathy feat as Magus gains complete control of Moondragon, a telepath.
When I have Thanos planning my battle strategy and Warlock working to manipulate your team, the execution of everything from my side will be absolutely perfect. Especially when they can change strategy non linearly. Actions from the past can impact the future in ways their opponents would never expect or they can adapt to abilities their opponents may try to hide.
Even just Thanos has been able to use his battle strategy to stop the incursion of a universe eater, who was consuming Galactus's attacks in the same fight. This preparation used bombs and colliding planets to bring the World Eater himself to his knees.
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Thanos #6
For all of the raw power I've shown of Thanos, his mind is what lets him routinely fight far out of his league as he does in this instance. Combined with Warlock's mind to bounce ideas off and a non linear viewing of time, the duo will see every action before it happens, have an answer, and can easily create answers to seemingly unsolvable problems.
The Battle
That scheming section wasn't for nothing, so let's think about what my team could come up with. Warlock and Thanos above all else love deception, so perhaps Warlock will use Surfer's ability to phase out of the Universe, making him invisible to even Eternity, universe itself.
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Silver Surfer vol 5 #14
I mentioned earlier Warlock is a master of stealth, and expert in the surprise attack. Warlock will wait in the shadows until a character on your team is exposed in the chaos, and take advantage to hit them with a blast of energy so powerful as to easily KO them when taken by surprise, rip their soul out, dominate them mentally, manipulate their matter, nerve strike them, short circuit their energy, even stab through their heart, and if all else fails he has the great resource of the power cosmic to take down your team or he can draw upon the energy of the Universal Church of truth to massively supercharge any of those abilities. With abilities like telepathy and matter manipulation, he can even take out several at once without even leaving the shadows.
To make things even more difficult for the other team, Warlock will cast illusions over the battlefield so that your team has no real clue what's real and what isn't as he did in Guardians of the Galaxy vol 2 #23.
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This will ensure that your teams fundamental sense of reality is wrong. Lastly for deception, Thanos loves a good fake. Fake Thanos robots, or fake Thanos ships, in this instance I would guess the latter. Your team will arrive and see Thanos's flagship, an easy target, and likely rush towards it, only for it to be rigged as a bomb. When rigging a trap correctly, Thanos has proven capable of even taking mighty Galactus to his knees as I showed in the strategy section. If anyone falls for this trap: They will not survive.
Only in this moment of despair and confusion will the true battle begins with any stragglers left surviving. Thanos will BFR the most powerful opponent on the field, as he does to Gladiator in Thanos: The Infinity Revelation. He will also immediately dispose of the next biggest threat with the stasis field, or wait for the biggest threat to return to use it on them.
Meanwhile you will face an onslaught of fodder in the Universal Church of Truth and Chitauri. More than anything their raw size and power are distractions, allowing Thanos to portal in Proxima, the Matriarch, Cardinals, and Supergiant to attack weaker opponents, while Warlock hides them with illusions. Thanos may lower himself and join the battle as a direct adversary at this point, but picking his spots using his chair to teleport in and out, crushing weak opponents or taking a particularly powerful enemy out of the fight, while letting his armies pick off the stragglers. Throughout all of this Warlock waits to pounce, slipping out of impeccable hiding to slash a throat and immediately returning.
If something should go wrong with Thanos that his own immortality can't handle, Warlock can quickly heal him as he did to Surfer in Infinity Countdown #3. In this instance, Warlock healed Surfer from not only the Ultron Virus, which acts on the atomic level, but manipulation of the Soul Gem as well, showing it operates on metaphysical attacks as well.
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In the absolute worst case scenario, for which Thanos and Warlock always plan, Surfer has the ability to travel in time back to the start of the battle(Thor/Silver Surfer '98), essentially creating a time remnant. While Surfer would never employ this himself, Warlock absolutely would. In fact the original way that Magus began to exist was by taking advantage of time travel into the past as seen in Warlock #9.
If your team could potentially eke out a victory after surviving such an onslaught, you have to do it again, but with an additional Surfer/Warlock fusion waiting in the shadows, up to the cloning limits of 50 times. I do not expect that this ability will ever need to come into play, I only bring it up to show even in the absolute worst case scenario where my team does not easily win, they have other avenues to ensure their success.
Captain Cold and The Engineer will do the heavy lifting during prep. Their main asset is their technological prowess, the potential of which will be fully realized when combining their strengths.
The Engineer
Angela will be especially dangerous here as she is endowed with Reed Richard's brainpower. Thanks to her technopathy, this gives her access to a wellspring of indispensable knowledge and information that she'll make the most of. Angela's body is a shapeshifting liquid; she has metal blood flowing with nanites that enable a variety of capabilities. They allow her to adapt to almost any experience, environment, or stimuli, protecting her from adverse effects as soon as she encounters them, and providing her with great control over technology. She can rearrange matter around her at the atomic level, spread and construct biological and technological viruses, absorb and manipulate energy, generate electrical storms and force fields, completely control the battleground, and create complex machines and inventions out of thin air.
Because of the cloning limits, they'll be restricted to 50, but that's more than enough to get the job done. So here's some crucial information: The Engineer is a bit of a "meta" character. But this quality is canon to her and the way the Wildstorm was written. Angela has read and owns every single DC comic published since 1956! It was explicitly stated that when she was growing up, as a comic book addict, she fantasized about the stories of the Flash and Green Lantern. This means she already knows everything there is to know about Captain Cold since pre-Crisis. Which will be very helpful in their collaborative efforts here. Once the bodies have been produced, Angela will use radiotelepathy to mind-link the entire team and keep them in perfect sync during the building stage and the actual battle.
With the stage set, the next phase of my prep involves Engineer and Captain Cold recreating tech they've made before or would know how to construct thanks to Reed Richard's brainpower. Angela will then use her clones and nanites to mass-produce them on an assembly line as if she were a walking corporate manufacturer.
This is not only easy to accomplish in a matter of minutes, but it's also in-character and plausible considering they've both pulled off more complicated feats in shorter amounts of time and worse situations without nearly as many resources. Captain Cold for example rebuilt his Cold Gun while incarcerated using spare freezer parts he found in prison.
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Meanwhile, The Engineer can create constructs or replicate them out of thin air on the fly, such as emergency medical equipment to stabilize a grievously wounded Midnighter. So going through the trouble of rebuilding them isn't even necessary. She can produce anything she needs if she understands the technology. She should be capable of understanding any technology you can imagine, considering she was able to incorporate a baby universe inside The Authority's interdimensional spaceship the Carrier as its main energy source.
Though she is no longer fused with it, she maintains a radio-telepathic connection with the ship at all times and can remotely access its functions as part of her standard gear. The level of connection Angela can establish with any iota of metal, technology or mechanics can not be overstated because of the power of her nanites. The Engineer's blood is so densely concentrated with nanites that a single drop was able to exponentially multiply and spread throughout every tectonic fissure of the Earth's crust in moments, fuse with Skywatch's construct, and reinforce a new mantle for the entire planet that made it more durable and robust than it was before Armageddon, or ever had been at any point in its history.
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So Angela can easily fuse with the planet, making her nearly impossible to detect once you spawn, and further impossible to assault once she reinforces its structural integrity and additionally sets up exterior defenses. Angela can project shields that are invulnerable to attacks at the level of most of your characters, as she did when she created dozens of shields in orbit to protect the Earth from gigantic fireballs ejected from the Sun directly, blocking them from crashing into the planet:
As this was accomplished with clones, it should be noted that only one Angela (the primary) needs to fuse with the battlefield. The rest can set up shields that adapt to your attacks and layer them on top of each other, making them that much harder to penetrate. Generating multiple stacked shields that will be amped to the durability limits and can reform once broken, adapt to attacks thanks to nanites, and can be reapplied indefinitely. With the Carrier's Doors, she can open shields in the past as well as the future, offering complete coverage no matter where or when you attack her.
Now, what does Reed Richard's brainpower mean for her with all this?
Well, it means she becomes vastly harder to stand against. Reed Richards is widely regarded as the smartest character in the Marvel Universe. His knowledge and intelligence are such that he can inform cosmic powers with step-by-step details of how to recreate the entire universe from scratch. And he's done so twice.
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In terms of just the sheer scale and complexities of information down to the minutia, and the tenets of reality and existence in a setting like Marvel, this feat is pretty hard to beat short of omniscience. Molecule Man gave Reed the power of the Beyonders to rebuild the Marvel Multiverse after it was destroyed in Secret Wars along with Franklin thanks to his knowledge. MM is famously an "omniversal" character but still submits to Reed's brainpower and intellect.
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Then there's Reed's feat of creating a Mobius dimension that ignores literal paradoxes to trap Doctor Doom. The dimension is infinite in size while simultaneously being finite, and because of that contradiction, it is inescapable. Reed mentions that "There's no way out. For either of us." even though both characters can travel the multiverse.
Lastly, very recently Reed created a device that can separate overlapping universes on short notice. The last time an operation like this was done, it required the Infinity Gauntlet which broke in the process. So anything that can be built in the entire Marvel canon library is on the table here. Even without mentioning his over-the-limit inventions like Cosmic Cubes and The Ultimate Nullifier, or his capabilities to access the Infinity Gauntlet, Reed can do pretty much anything given time.
Captain Cold
As I've shown, Angela can recreate any technology she understands, and she understands and knows everything inside the entire Marvel multiverse thanks to Reed Richard's brainpower. Furthermore, she canonically has read every post-Crisis DC comic, and she understands the Carrier's tech which exists outside of space and time and can achieve an assortment of impossible time/space/dimensional/anomalous reality feats. So every major tech item within limits in both DC and Marvel is fair game here. This should prove she can manifest and empower Leonard's tech even if she hadn't read all of The Flash's comics. If you're just a natural skeptic and you still think I'm reaching, then consider the fact that my characters are mind-linked with TP, which means they'll communicate, pool their resources together, and share all the knowledge and information they have to employ the best strategy regardless.
Now, Captain Cold is a regular person who can consistently fight the Flash all because of his Cold weapons. His main weapon is his Cold Gun, which in short weaponizes Zero Point Energy; not just absolute zero. The reason why is that even at absolute zero, which is the complete halt of entropy, the fundamental particles retain quantum vibrational motion but at the minimum levels achievable naturally. Whereas the Cold Gun prevents the movement or generation of thermal energy and motion completely. According to Captain Cold himself, his gun "negates thermal motion and stops protons and electrons dead in their tracks."
So he doesn't necessarily freeze things as much as he completely invalidates thermodynamics. Things like regeneration still involve motion and the abstraction of energy transference. But anything frozen solid by Captain Cold simply becomes brittle and breaks off/disintegrates.
The strongest function of the Cold Gun is the Cold Field, which once deployed passively stops and freezes anything that enters its area of effect. According to Leonard himself, nothing short of a speeding Flash has enough momentum to move in the Cold Field, and even then "he'll be slowed to a crawl".
The Cold Field moves with Captain Cold maintaining an area of absolute defense around his body, passively shutting down anything that gets close to him. But that's not the extent of Captain Cold's technology or weapons. Leonard also has a standard utility belt with a devastating function, which I'll dub the Cold Wave. He generated an impulse of absolute cold across the entirety of Central City, leaving everyone and everything in a state of suspended animation. Only he and Iris were spared because he treated them with negative radiation beforehand, and the wave formed an impenetrable ice barrier that cut off the city from the rest of the world. The barrier was so strong that it was able to completely stonewall a speeding Flash, and he had to shift to a higher vibrational frequency and gradually drill through the ice - which again he did from the outside in. There's no guarantee he would've been able to move at all if he was already caught in it. The ice also closed up behind him so no one else could get in or out.
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The last and most important piece of Captain Cold's tech here is a special, evolved version of the Cold Gun that he built in Rebirth using S.T.A.R. Lab's black hole tech that created the Speed Force Storm. The gun has an engine inside of it that can tap into the Speed Force itself, and it not only freezes things like before, but now it can disrupt the Speed Force and prevent Flash from vibrating through it like he did moments before.
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This feat is obscenely impressive for so many reasons. Disrupting or absorbing the speed force is known to be impossible because it is an infinite energy source that has instantly overwhelmed drainers and siphons. Wally once ran so fast that Barry Allen (arguably the second fastest Flash) couldn't even perceive him, and he overloaded Cobalt Blue's draining with Speed Force energy when he tried to absorb/drain Wally's speed after the latter eclipsed light speed.
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I'm not scaling Barry and Wally as they have different levels of connection to the Speed Force, but Wally's feat among a plethora of statements from characters, narrators, and text boxes, demonstrates the mechanics of the Speed Force as a force of the universe. It is consistently boundless and immutable. For Leonard to successfully depower any Flash even just momentarily with the Cold Gun and prevent him from breaking out of ice (something he shattered on the previous page) is insane, especially because it showcases his tech's capabilities to absorb, nullify, or disturb even infinite energy sources that span DC's entire cosmology.
Offensively, one of the easiest and most lethal things Angela can do in conjunction with this is spread her airborne particle nanites through the battlefield. These nanobots propel a web of knives that can "slip between atoms" which she uses to tear apart the Gamorran mass-produced supersoldiers into literal nothingness. This implies destruction on a sub-atomic level.
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With the clones and Angela being part planet herself, the entire battlefield itself can now instantly rend you into elementary particles as soon as the match begins once you spawn in completely frozen and unable to do anything.
The Tools
My 1 hour of prep anywhere will take place in the Carrier. Even with Angela being a self-sufficient unlimited technological resource depository, it lends some credence to my argument and use of Reed's intelligence to have it occur in ship full of weapons and labs. Here are some of the following weapons that will be mass-produced by all 50 clones and shared between each member of my team:
This is just to start, a list of everything they'd be able to prepare here would of course be exhausting. I'll be introducing more stuff as the debate goes on.
The Vanguard
Even basic human-level fodder would be dangerous for your team when armed with the equipment that Angela is providing them with. Psycho-Man has his own lethal technology which can be mass-produced, but I'll let him retain his individuality for the hell of it. Parasite meanwhile will just become an unassailable grunt.
Regarding strength, speed, durability, and overall power, Spawn lies at the absolute limits of this tournament. A major turning point in his character arc and timeline of power was when he became the King of Hell, which he achieved after dethroning the previous Hell King Malbolgia and inheriting his power.
Spawn's speed is a bit trickier because most of the best speed feats in the verse obey "the rule of cool" in the sense that they're absurdist in nature and generally hard to quantify, but you know they're impossibly fast (like this). Here Angela implies that she needs at least 100 light years to fight unimpeded which is a good baseline for something with numbers. And it's definitely about her combat speed as she was explicitly fighting while zipping across those distances. This should be easily believable anyway considering she fought the Argus storm that was tearing through space at MFTL speeds, eating planet after planet until she stopped it from reaching Earth.
I'll wrap this up by touching on hax. Now Spawn has too much hax to list, so I'll focus on things he's likely to use the most as my win conditions. Most notably as the King of Hell his soul manipulation scales above Urizen, whose soul attacks he also resisted. Urizen can consume the souls of entire worlds and his presence alone can inspire madness and destroy souls.
But more than his win conditions are your lack of them, as Spawn is not only unkillable in every sense of the word, but his hax resistance makes him completely untouchable to any character in this tourney if they're argued within rules. I'm sure he's not the only one, but he should be among the most blatant. He's able to resist reality warping at a high enough level that I would argue it is blanket hax resistance. Remember the Dimensional Lance that forcibly casts you to lower planes of existence and dimensionality? Yeah, Spawn was able to come back from that, climbing back from a lower reality in a way that immunized him from the standard configuration of reality, which made him invulnerable to the laws that governed Paradise so that angel weapons stopped working on him. The nature of his existence is fundamentally out of sync with the underlying abstract concepts of higher planes and dimensions than even our 3D world. Even while Spawn was actively using the Lance, there was still no record or trace of him OR the Lance ever existing. Also, he's immortal in every incarnation and has reality-warping resistance since his every version. (But I only argue it as blanket hax resistance once it's clear that their resistance is contingent on the nature of their character being conceptually distinct and immutable from any aspect of reality.)
Updated Strategy
The last round showed me the chinks in the armor of my earlier strategy. I relied too much on scaling for Spawn, the Kang Armor stuff was a little out there, and overall I don't think I made good use of all my characters together, which I now definitely need to do.
This time I want to talk much more about Spawn going forward, as I believe he remains the most powerful and dangerous individual in this battle, but I will not neglect to emphasize how all of my characters can contribute to disrupting your plans here and finding a way to eliminate your team and their armies.
During prep, Angela creates 50 clones. One drop of blood from one individual Angela stores enough nanites to fuse with an entire planet and sustain the corresponding amount of technological and biological mass. Reproducing enough weapons here with Reed Richard's brainpower is light work.
The weapons and items that will be reproduced for each member of my time are:
Once they're all equipped, the Cold Waves will be activated, completely negating thermodynamic activity for everything that isn't a member of my team protected by negative radiation. The black hole Cold Guns that can disrupt infinite energy sources will be fired indiscriminately on top of this.
Psycho Man's shrink ray can reduce any member of your team to non-existence essentially, in fact he can shrink every planet in the solar system that the battle takes place in and all your summoned forces, and his Control Box will mentally dominate members of your team that are susceptible.
The Universal Entropy Gun should also be guaranteed one-shots, and the energy corruption can operate in tandem with the anti-matter gun psychic neutralization.
The Actuality Shell should provide completely invulnerable protection to all attacks. Assuming you can get past the Cold Field and inertia/energy drain from Parasite.
Spawn will be vaporizing souls and releasing star-busting FTL attacks from the word "go". The countless microscopic anti-matter bombs should also aid in the complete disruption of any offensive game plan you have.
Your strategy begins with the Warlock/Surfer fusion phasing out of the universe to hide, something that doesn't really impact the battle to me. There isn't a consensus singular planet starting location for all the main team members, but since the Cold Wave travels with each member of my team via the belts around us and has at least a city-wide range, it will be impossible to get physically close to my team members without being frozen in stasis. Most of the fodder and summons will simply be turned into statues or atomically disintegrated by Angela's nanites upon spawning or progressing near us. Additionally the countless anti-matter bombs dispersed like spores would wipe out everyone that doesn't have durability at the limits which is just your main 3 (really two, cause two of them fused) characters. But the heavy hitters on your team still require counters to this specifically, and show they can fight effectively while undergoing that stress of being frozen several levels above basic flash freeze and having their atoms ripped apart relentlessly.
Beyond that I think Psycho Man's shrink ray can be very dangerous, along with the Entropy Gun and Experimental Anti-Matter Gun, and every other weapon, as they've worked on characters with much superior hax and hax resistance. Next post I'll really dive into how Spawn throws a massive wrench into any offensive game plan because of the sheer amount of attention he demands and how suped up he is here, which exposes your team members to vulnerability to attacks from all the one-shot weapons Angela can provide and the every-present draining threat of Parasite.
Unfortunately I found that more than anything, Vulcan's first post failed to address the strategy I set out. Vulcan sidestepped the issue of his team falling for my plan and many of his arguments fail to take into account my characters positioning and strategy when the debate begins. So I'd like to start this post by reiterating how my team is approaching this battle. My characters are starting planetary distances away from the traditional starting point, concealed by distance and illusions. Even the fodder armies refrain from entering the battle until the trap is sprung.
Coldfields, guns, and subatomic pieces of metal simply won't survive forces that dwarf planets and threaten Galactus.
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Everything Angela worked so hard to build will be pieces shrapnel the instance the battle starts. More than likely everyone on HP's team will die to this collision, no one has feats exceeding Galactus, given that in the same arc he stood in the center of a Supernova that wiped out a solar system and did not seem to even notice its power.
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Thanos #3
There is not a single piece of technology that HP has mentioned that can withstand being within several planets lengths of these forces. No one on Vulcan's team outside of Spawn comes within 1/100th of power that Galactus can ignore, and even Spawn isn't close to Galactus. If anyone is caught in Thanos and Warlock's schemes, they die before the battle begins.
Prep
Even with establishing everything above, I still have some gripes with how Vulcan portrayed his prep that I'm going to get into here and counters for some of the devices being used. I'll start with my issues in Vulcan's prep, move into my general counters, and then specific counters to a few items.
Issues
I'll begin with a discussion of what Reed Richard's brainpower actually means. For everyone who's voting on this, I think HP's misunderstanding is my fault, as I asked ProfessorRespect what brainpower meant and paraphrased to HP. So HP's interpretation is based on my paraphrasing and not PR's specific ruling. Don't hold it against him. Here is what PR said to me:
To me this means that HP can still build technology that was created fully under Reed's brainpower, but not anything Reed had help with, or only knows through knowledge. With that in mind I'll move into talking about a few of these devices.
These bombs were built by Reed and T'Challa together, and were reverse engineered from Black Swan's bomb. I think it's fair to say this isn't under solely Reed's brainpower. Pam Particles are also obviously not under Reed's power.
This gun has two parts, puncturing the celestials shell, which did not require much power under this author, and then corrupting their energy. The second part doesn't apply to any of my characters and the first part isn't enough power to matter.
As this was built by Doom it obviously does not apply to Reed's brainpower.
S.T.A.R. Labs Black Hole Cold Gun
The gun has an engine inside of it that can tap into the Speed Force itself, and it not only freezes things like before, but now it can disrupt the Speed Force and prevent Flash from vibrating through it like he did moments before.
I do not understand how a speed force gun is notable against my team. None of my team uses the speed force, which is how it affected Flash. If anything this gun should be less effective than the normal one. Feel free to waste time building them.
Planet Fusion:
The Engineer's blood is so densely concentrated with nanites that a single drop was able to exponentially multiply and spread throughout every tectonic fissure of the Earth's crust in moments, fuse with Skywatch's construct, and reinforce a new mantle for the entire planet that made it more durable and robust than it was before Armageddon, or ever had been at any point in its history.
If I'm reading the scan and this quote correctly, the Engineer can only fuse with the planet because of the presence of skywatch. Skywatch should not exist on this random planet and thus the Engineer should not be able to fuse with it.
Full Knowledge:
Angela can also instantly get full knowledge on your team either through radiotelepathy combined with Reed's observation tech or her nanites that are already omnipresent through the battlefield sensing the slightest changes in the environment and atmosphere.
I did not see any of Reed's tech that can gain information on my team. My team has strong telepathic defenses so I do not see radio telepathy working and the nanites will never get within a planets distance of even my fodder before being destroyed, I do not see any way Engineer and company could learn anything about my team.
General Answers
In both this section and specific answers I'm assuming everything is working to plan in order to counter them. That does not mean I think the tech will work or even exist at the start of the battle.
Surfer is an unfortunate opponent to face when relying heavily upon weapons and technology since he has a number of ways to completely ruin it. Firstly, Surfer can just shut all of it down, as he did with all technology on earth in Silver Surfer #3
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Silver Surfer can make all technology he wants inoperative, including cold fields, psycho boxes, chronal fields, and guns. Effectively shutting down your prep the second the battle starts. Alternatively, Surfer has shown the ability to dismantle weapons with his TK, another avenue of making everything you bring useless. Lastly Surfer can always just manipulate the matter of these weapons to change them entirely, as he does to the Obliterator's weapons in Silver Surfer vol 3 #5.
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I showed in my last post that Surfer can use matter manipulation across a planet in the blink of an eye. Even if all your prep worked, Surfer provides a complete counter to it.
I'd also like to mention that with subatomic bombs and cutting glaives, Surfer/Warlock can simply use their TK to direct these attacks back on your team.
Cold Field
For the cold field, I have two answers to it. Surfer has already shown the ability to easily dissipate blocks of absolute 0.
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Silver Surfer vol 3 #13
This scan also shows another herald being conscious in a block of absolute 0, just without Surfer's ability to easily dispel it. Therefore the cold field should have no effect on Surfer. I'm also not convinced about the efficacy of the cold field or blasts against the rest of my team. Even the fodder of my team, the Chitauri live on a planet that has a cold field of sorts and it does not bother them and did not bother Thanos.
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Thanos vol 2 #13
Chronal Fields
Firstly, these things do not have on and off switches. If you are outside the flow of time, you cannot affect my team. These are big physical bracelets that will not withstand combat and are not easy to put on and take off. I think they're pretty useless for actual combat application.
That said my team has plenty of methods to detect invisible characters. I showed in my first post Surfer's insane cosmic senses and how he can track a dust mite across a galaxy, but I should also mention that Warlock can see souls, making hiding from the physical realm irrelevant. Furthermore Thanos has shown the ability to see things that even Genis with Cosmic Awareness, which essentially connects his senses to the universe itself, could not.
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Captain Marvel vol 4 #18
I highly doubt the efficacy of any invisibility against my team.
Planet Fusion
The simple response to planet fusion is that Angela is still vulnerable by many other means. As far as I know, Angela still has a soul that Warlock can easily rip out, and Warlock has shown the ability to change the matter of entire planetoid's.
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Guardians of the Galaxy vol 2 #13
With Surfer's powers this only becomes easier. Alternatively since the planet is not indestructible, Surfer could just blow it up.
Psycho Man
HP made it seem as though the control box can easily contain Surfer, but this is simply not the case. HP posted two instances of the Control Box working against Surfer, but both have problems. The first comes from Webspinners Tales of Spider-man #3-6, where Pyscho-Man had been following Surfer for months to learn how to manipulate Surfer's emotions in order to control him, and in this instance Pyscho Man is only able to do so due to Surfer's highly unstable emotions.
This arc also reveals another issue of using the control box. To do so, Pyscho Man has to hold a large, physical box that can easily be destroyed. Annihilus easily takes it out with just one energy blast. The box won't last a millisecond in the carnage of this fight.
The second instance HP posted of Psycho Man was from Loeb's Hulk run. Putting aside the... irregular power levels during the run, the Silver Surfer in this instance was taken from immediately after he gained the power cosmic. I'm personally of the belief that Surfer's incredible mental resistance comes as a result of him breaking free from Galactus's control and thus holding a strong independence of mind. However if that's not clear enough, Surfer has had specific amps to his mental resolve such as in Annihilation Silver Surfer #3, which is after both instances HP posted.
With stronger mental resolve, the guilt that Psycho Man spent months researching to use against Surfer no longer plagues him and the second instance Vulcan posted is completely antiquated.
In another example of Surfer encountering Psycho Man, Surfer was easily able to break free of his TP once he was aware of its presence and even use the same powers on Psycho Man, leaving him crying on the floor.
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Silver Surfer vol 3 #145
This instance shows that can Surfer easily resist Psycho Man once he's aware of him, which he would be in this case due to Warlock's future sight. Generally Psycho Man needs a lot of prep and the element of surprise to be effective. Here has neither and is dead weight.
Spawn
At first I was quite impressed by HP's portrayal of Spawn, but as I looked into the feats posted I found myself... underwhelmed. Almost every single feat used for Spawn is off panel or an implied feat of power. On top of that, many of these come off as figurative to me rather than literal. Those that are literal do not strike me as too impressive. Take for example:
Except this is not what's happening. Angela is having to tell herself to hang on when power weaker than an exploding pulsar is hitting her. She then wraps herself in bands as the force hitting her continually increases until eventually reaching the level of exploding pulsar. On panel it's said that her bands are taking the brunt of the force, so what this scan actually shows is that Angela cannot handle power level dramatically below that of an exploding pulsar. Almost the opposite of how HP portrayed it.
Furthermore I have an issue with scaling to off panel feats as HP does here:
Firstly it's said that Abdiel is potentially the first angel. Personally I think that indicates that not all high tier angels inherently scale to him. Secondly, with off panel feats there are important pieces of context left out. We have no idea the time this took Abdiel, how he went about it, how much energy it took to expend, the toll it took on him etc. These details are almost more important than the feat itself as if this feat took Abdiel one second it's incredibly impressive, if it took him 10 minutes he's going to lose to Surfer in a fight. Unless there is more information, we simply cannot know the answer to that question for this feat, or Korn's feat of destroying a star(which clearly contained him for some time).
and he could crush the Earth in his palm when partially manifesting in our reality.
This and the exploding pulsar feat seem like the clearest actual feats in Spawn's section and both are way below "releasing star-busting FTL attacks" level of power that HP suggested in his conclusion. Based on these feats, Spawn will have a great fight against the Universal Church of Truth ships.
Spawn's speed is a bit trickier because most of the best speed feats in the verse obey "the rule of cool" in the sense that they're absurdist in nature and generally hard to quantify,
I see a quote like this, but then you try to quantify his speed and argue he will use it on full display in this fight. That seems like an inherent contradiction to me. If Spawn's speed follows the rule of cool, I don't think he's going to be spamming attacks at FTL speeds. Even the feats supplied are pretty weak to me:
Nowhere does that scan imply Angela needs 100 light years to fight unimpeded. She just tells the fodder to back off a thousand light years or so or she'd kill their leader. For one that feels more figurative than literal to me and two that has absolutely nothing to do with her combat speed. Her "explicitly fighting while zipping" is just her swinging a sword. Daredevil has scans like that. Plus if Angela needs 100 light years to fight unimpeded, she's not actually fast in a one on one battle scenario. My characters are never going to fight across 100 light years so by your interpretation, Spawn would not be able to use his speed.
This whole section feels like it's debating for the entire verse of Spawn rather than Spawn himself. Most scaling presented here is not based off direct relationships between characters, but rather Spawn's general standing in universe. I have an issue with this, as characters can be weaker overall, but be faster, or more durable, or have a particular area of expertise. At some point I just want to see an actual feat of Spawn acting at the level HP is debating him as.
I'm sure Spawn is powerful, from this post it looks like he can defeat characters around star level in power when he's going all out and it looks like he probably won't have any issues with Surfer's speed as "rule of cool" would imply, but the idea that he's flying around at MFTL speeds dropping Star Busting attacks seems entirely incoherent with the actual feats presented.
As for Spawn's esoteric abilities
Most notably as the King of Hell his soul manipulation scales above Urizen, whose soul attacks he also resisted. Urizen can consume the souls of entire worlds and his presence alone can inspire madness and destroy souls.
To give you an idea how far below Warlock this is in soul manipulation, Magus taught his soul absorbing abilities to another person, who was able to absorb entire solar systems worth of souls.
Spawn is losing the soul battle and his soul attacks on anyone else won't matter, since I showed Warlock healing souls in my first post. The only other ability from Spawn I really think is worth countering is this:
And I don't think your matter manip immunity would stop his basic Necroplasm/Hellfire blasts which destroy you on the atomic level and also burn away your soul into nothingness.
Even if an attack takes place on the atomic level, you still need to prove you have the actual power necessary to destroy my characters with this attack since their durability comes from their atoms. As for soul destruction it's blindingly obvious nobody is pulling that off on Warlock, and Thanos has become so immortal to the point that's not an issue. Take for example The Ultimates #5 where a omniversal being killing Thanos and another omniversal being removing Thanos from the omniverse itself could not destroy his essence.
Gallery
Safe to say this attack is of no concern.
Everything else Spawn has seems pretty generally countered by the resistances I showed. I have to say after digging into the feats posted, I'm not worried about Spawn. I think Thanos can take him alone, I think the Warlock/Surfer fusion can take him. If both gang up on him he doesn't really have a chance.
HP also provided no answers to my Spawn strategy. After the initial trap is sprung, if Spawn survives, Thanos will BFR him for 60 seconds. Following that, Thanos will contain him in a block of pure force that could contain a Thanos level opponent for 3 hours while they were constantly growing in power and pushing against the block of force. Currently, it seems Spawn gets trapped in the block of force and that's it.
Conclusion
I'll mostly reiterate my first post here. HP's team will spawn in the maws of a trap covered by illusions, as well as expert planning and manipulation. This trap can kill everyone on his team and even the weakest shockwaves of it will certainly destroy every piece of tech as well as kill every clone of Angela, Captain Cold, Psycho Man, and Parasite. If he manages to survive Spawn will be bfred for the first 60 seconds. By the time Spawn returns nothing of his team will remain. Anything else remaining from the planets collision will die from Surfer doing this.
Silver Surfer Annual #7
Walking through the hypothetical of Spawn somehow surviving, Thanos traps him in a block of stasis once he returns from being BFRed. Even if he's only briefly stuck, Thanos can rig another planet collision+bombs set up to kill him while he's immobile. If he manages to escape the block, he has 0 support and is ganged up on by not just Thanos and Warlock, but all of their fodder army, including the powers of the Matriarch hitting him with emotional pain, Supergiant assaulting his telepathic defenses, and Proxima Midnight bearing him down with star level weight.
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