The Great Debate Season 16 Round 4!!!

[u/Verlux]

Rules

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Out of Tier Rules

• For Out of Tier requests, simply ping myself and/or Chainsaw__Monkey and state your case for why you believe someone's combatant is out of tier, then proceed with the debate as per normal. We will evaluate that request individual of the debate itself and make our decision in judgments. Reminder: the Head Judges maintain the right to DM any user we believe to be skirting OoT lines and make our own OoT accusation, with said user having 48 hours to defend themselves.

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Battle Rules

• Speed will not be equalized for this tier.

• All combatants are aware of the basics of their allies' combat abilities but are in the blind on their opponents (unless they have canon knowledge of said person via sharing a fictional universe)

• Battleground:

[*"The Parthenon is a former temple on the Athenian Acropolis, Greece, that was dedicated to the goddess Athena. The Parthenon is 45 feet tall, with an interior chamber that is 98' x 63' and a total area of 240' x 112'. For our purposes, the Parthenon has been fully restored, meaning the interior chamber is enclosed and contains a statue of Athena.

The arena of Great Debate Season 16 AKA Wonder Woman is the fully restored Parthenon.

Of note:

• For our purposes, the total arena is Athenian Acropolis, which is 7.5 acres. This area cannot be left by participants. The area extends into the sky ~400 meters
• Participants start inside the Parthenon interior chamber, on opposite sides.
• The chamber walls are normal stone walls, and thus extremely destructible to participants; however, the columns of the Parthenon have the middle 80% made of untamperable WhoWouldWinium, making them detachable from the building but still usable as a weapon by the sufficiently strong.
• The statue of Athena is behind the "team 1" side start. Destruction of this statue will make Wonder Woman very angry and substantially reduce her restraint.
• Recreation of the Parthenon interior for reference
• Recreation of the Parthenon front exterior

Opponents will start 90ft across from each other, in the central chamber of The Parthenon. Teammates are spaced 10ft apart from one another.

*All numbers are rough approximations and may not stand up to pixel calcing.

Submission Rules

• Tier: Must be able to win an unlikely victory, draw/near draw, or likely victory against Wonder Woman in the conditions outlined above. All entrants will be bloodlusted against Wonder Woman, meaning they will act fully rationally and put down their opponent in the quickest, most efficient manner possible regardless of morality, utilizing any and all possible techniques/tactics/attacks if necessary. The bloodlust does not give any foreknowledge of Wonder Woman or his capabilities.

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Debate Rules

• Rounds will last approximately 5 and a half day days, hopefully from Monday until Saturday at noon of each week of the tourney; there is a 48 hour time limit both on starting (we do not care who starts, you and your opponent can figure that out) AND on responses, AND ADDITIONALLY each user MUST get in two responses or else be disqualified. If one user waits until the very last minute to force this rule to DQ their opponent without any forewarning to their opponents or the tournament supervisors, they will be removed from this tournament, no exceptions.

• Format for each round: the one to go first gets an Intro + 1st Response, their opponent replies in kind, then both get a 2nd response, then a 3rd response in a back-and-forth style, and a closing statement individual of one another that can be posted any time after both 3rd responses are complete. FOR THIS ROUND, EACH DEBATER'S RESPONSES MUST CONSIST OF NO MORE THAN ONE FULL 15K CHARACTER-LONG REDDIT COMMENT FOR THE FIRST RESPONSE, AND 20K CHARACTERS FOR EACH FOLLOWING RESPONSE!!! You are allowed an intro post as stated above, which can include basic feats, of up to 5000 characters, but no arguments or comparisons may be made in comparison to the opponent.

• Rounds will either be a full 3v3 Team Match, or 1v1 single matches. 1v1 matches are determined by randomization. Match format will switch every round, with Team Matches always followed by single matches, and vice versa.

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Brackets Here

Since the last round was individual matches, this round is:

3v3 Team Melee

Round 4 Ends Sunday May 25th, 12:00 CST

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Special Note: Don't forget that combatants are spaced apart based on the reach of their striking capabilities. If you have a 10 foot long spear pointed at the Tier Setter, you start with the tip of the spear 10 meters away from him; if you are riding a giant monster, you start with the end of the monster's arms/shoulders/head at the 10 meter away point, etc etc.

Links to:

Tier Setter Page

Sign Ups

Round 1

Round 2

Round 3

[u/mikhailnikolaievitch]

R1

Intro

Ame's tendency is to overload his characters with more possibilities than they can realistically tap at once, all while cherry-picking his best interpretations while pretending the worst don't exist.

This holds true in this fight, where Team Drunk Mik (TMD) are stat-superior foes with straightforward methods that quickly put their opposition down.

Paragon Solos

Paragon's power is to copy improved versions of the powers, skills, and intelligence of everyone around him simultaneously.

• Without his suit, just being in his eyeline is enough to instantly copy powers
• With his suit, he keeps a "charge" of the powers he copies
• And prior to his improved suit, his copying range was at least comparable to the distance from the surface of Earth to the ozone layer
• It is clarified he copies magnified versions of multiple people's powers at once
• And he copies magnified skill that puts him three steps ahead of his opponents
• Including magnifying feats of intelligence and combining different fields of knowledge from different people

What does that mean for this fight?

It means it starts with Paragon instantly copying everyone's powers, the area of the total arena is below the range of his power copying so it is impossible to escape, and he can maintain the charge of combatants' powers even after they die. Through the entirety of the fight Paragon is definitionally the most formidable opponent; stronger, more durable, faster, and more skilled than anyone else in the round.

Let's highlight some of the other combatants' feats that Paragon would not only be replicating, but replicating enhanced versions of:

• Superman takes a merciless beating for hours that rips him through buildings and stone and still gets up
  • So Paragon can take hours of building-busting strikes and continue fighting
• Black Adam's tackle immediately smashes through layers of steel-reinforced concrete
  • So Paragon is tackling with top tier force
• BA charges instantly at Mach 5 as a bare minimum, and his charging speed does not even begin to flag until it hits Mach 500
• Superman uses his heat vision to intercept automatic gunfire within 10ft. amidst a night of FTE adventuring
  • So Paragon is charging the opposition at Mach fuck you speeds and then engaging them with reaction times superior to their own
• Superman outfights multiple simultaneous opponents faster and stronger than himself through skill.
  • The narration here puts him significantly beyond a veteran Batman, who in his first career year was outfighting trained martial artists and beating up multiple armed opponents that included a Green Beret
  • So Paragon is more skilled than the above throughout the match.

Add all of that together and the result is Paragon bashing into the opposition at the round's start faster than they can react, pummeling them with coordinated strikes while evading their counterattacks, and inevitably overpowering them because he is too skilled to lose even if he were weaker and slower.

Stat Triangle Superiority

While Paragon is just definitionally the best in STR/DUR/SPE in the round, Black Adam and Superman handily outstat Captain Marvel and Wonder Woman as well. The common problem both CM and WW share is that Ame has selected characters with such a tremendous volume of material that they suffer abundant antifeats even while he cherry picks their best feats to present them.

Captain Marvel has a severe problem with speed. She does not have the speed sufficient to be competitive in this tier.

• Scaling to Rogue through Rogue having CM's powers is erroneous.
  • Rogue's primary speed feats here occur years after she absorbs CM's powers, meaning she's undergone grueling training 6 hours a day 5 days a week with advanced technology that prepares her for any scenario. CM does not share this.
• The only speed feat for CM herself that's been cited is deflecting a missile before it reaches anywhere near its full acceleration, and a major plot piont earlier in the same story involves CM and everyone she scales to being unable to react to an arrow from across a field
• Any reference to how she normally fights shows how little speed she utilizes
  • Normal sharks attack her and destroy an oxygen tank she needs
  • Red She-Hulk can deflect her blasts
    • RSH has no notable reaction feats
  • A Skrull outfights and restrains her
    • He's just a normal Skrull with barely any appearances or notable abilities)
  • A training robot for Hercules is faster than her
    • Hercules gets hurt by arrows from across a field
  • Tigra leaps past her defenses and cuts her
    • Tigra's only listed reaction feats are actual dog shit
  • A ram several feet from her is too close for her to dodge

By comparison,

• BA exchanges blows while the world is statued around him and still lands a blow on a person radically faster than himself
• BA has gobs of scaling showing he is a top competitor in a universe of ms reaction times
  • BA catches Power Girl's punch. PG outraces and catches a bullet
  • BA intercepts Hawkman's thrown sword within 1-2 ft. HM deflects automatic gunfire right in front of himself
  • BA outfights all 3 members of the Marvel Family at once. Just 1 of them catches a bullet from automatic gunfire in her teeth and perceives people in slow motion
• Superman vaporizes automatic gunfire feat away from him with heat vision
• Heat vision also intercepts an arrow 2-3 ft. from his face
• At full speed, Superman can dodge missiles from a distance requiring ms reaction times

Wonder Woman's problem comes in suffering from STR/DUR to be competitive since she does not consistently operate on this level

• A falling dinosaur bone stuns her
• A fallen tree trunk pins her
• Extended effort and time eventually allows her to stop a bus
• Needs help being unburied from debris
• Needs concerted effort to lift a boat of people
• Barely stops a wrecking ball
• Needs extended effort to stop a jet
• Needs effort and to talk herself through landing a small plane
• Hurts her arm in a car wreck
• A grenade exploding in her hands causes her pain
• Exerted and extended effort allows her to redirect a rocket eventually

By comparison,

• BA's strikes and tackles have tank-destroying force
• BA keeps fighting after a building-busting blow
• BA casually flies with a large chunk of stone he then busts
• Superman dead stops and crumples a speeding train while moving at FTE speeds
• Superman takes a merciless beating for hours that rips him through buildings and stone and still gets up
• Superman can intercept and redirect an ICBM seconds before detonation and lifts and crumples tanks

Ryu and CM's lack of grappling severely handicaps them here and quickly results in their loss

• Neither have any grappling/lifting feats even proposed
• BA lifts over 100 tons, as does Superman while weakened. Neither Ryu or CM come close to this. Just half that amount is considered a workout for a person copying CM's powers
• Both abuse the above advantages in fights to both pummel and grapple their opponents.
  • These scans show breaking limbs and strangulation, neither of which even needs to be maintained for long in order to decrease a foe's efficacy or outright win
  • BA chokes out people all the time, even one handed while fighting others, and this assumes they are even strong enough to resist just getting their neck snapped, which he also does consistently

[u/mikhailnikolaievitch → u/mikhailnikolaievitch]

Rebuttals

Team Tactics

Ame choreographs the fight with no other logic than his characters magically ascertaining and exploiting perceived advantages. Let's look at a couple ways this is ridiculous

• In both their verses, Superman and WW are lovers/allies. Neither would prioritize engaging the other
• Ame's WW is familiar with a weaker Black Adam that she hates and oneshots while notably never using her lasso on him. BA is her likeliest target here, and the one she most underestimates
• At no point have I said TDM opens with energy attacks other than Darkseid, who is not in this round. Ame's citation is just me saying what it could do, I insisted repeatedly in that round on an opening blitz strategy
• Paragon and BA and Superman all almost always open with a grappling blitz

Characterization in mind, the likeliest matchups are for Paragon to go for CM as the most obvious power source and only target without gear, WW to go for BA who she knows and underestimates, and the jingoistic Superman to go for Ryu for reasons you can imagine.

Paragon

There was not really a satisfactory strategy proposed for Paragon. A few corrections:

• Paragon targeting CM first seems even likelier if she's the only one without equipment.
• Paragon copying CM is deadly.
  • Ame's scan for CM's powers supposedly not being copyable deadass shows her getting overpowered by the person she said that to.
  • The same scan shows the power copier requiring touch. Paragon doesn't.
  • Ame has repeatedly referenced Rogue copying CM's powers, something CM cannot stop
  • Ame's own argument that CM absorbs energy for an insane power up that goes wildly out of tier backfires horrendously against Paragon, who is fundamentally at all times stronger than her
  • Paragon's power source is CM herself and he holds any charge she loses. This is insanely explicit: Paragon cannot be powered down without first powering down those he copies, and even then he maintains their charge. It is impossible for Paragon to lose CM's powers until long after CM is dead.
• WW's gear isn't enough
  • Her lasso won't work. It's her slowest attack, she provably never uses it against him, Ame himself provided WW not using her lasso against people copying her powers, and it doesn't depower other power copiers when she actually does use it
  • Her sword won't work, as Paragon is copying Ryu's piercing resistance Ame himself said outscales WW's sword, so Paragon can now resist stupid giant weeb slashes
• In fact, let's re-highlight Ame's tier justifications because it basically points out how Paragon solos the whole team. Paragon being stronger and faster than Ame's team while having ranged attacks and being immune to piercing means they have 0 win cons to press against him. Ame designed a team that tries to cover all its bases, and now Paragon has all those same bases covered at once.
• I already showed Paragon's range exceeding the full area of the arena. There is no way to knock him away, no way to depower him, and direct engagement with their superior is the opposition's only option.

Black Adam

The downplay for BA's stats was just silly.

• BA flies through a mountain of stone and still craters on impact
• BA's building-level durability is clear, as we see the buildings in the area he's tackled into while fighting back and the space he's in is leveled
• BA's endurance keeps him fighting even when he sustains injury, as he fights off an army of superheroes while sustaining injury and cratering him in the ground. Note here that it's specifically stated this army included people stronger and faster than BA, scaling his durability far above his own strength
• BA's speed is unassailable, as Ame's own scans show him under no threat with no reason to dodge. When a blade proves it can cut him, he immediately prioritizes disarming it

Superman

These were probably Ame's silliest arguments of all.

• Literally nothing in Ame's scan indicates CM knows how to exploit Superman's powers. TDM's Superman isn't one Ame's team are familiar with, and his powers were active as an infant before he ever reached a yellow sun -- there is 0 proof that solar energy can be "drained" from him to depower him, only examples of him boosting or regenerating himself with energy he absorbs.
• Notice that Ame's skill section doesn't mention Superman at all. That's because Superman outskills multiple simultaneous opponents faster and stronger than himself. The scans for Ame's team were:
  • WW can "briefly stalemate" soldiers with her powers, except it's not even a stalemate. The scan ends with her submitting, and if you look up that fight you see that WW did submit and is restrained
  • CM "dominates a fight against her physical equal" in a scan where CM just exchanges blows with 1 individual and there is 0 domination
  • Ryu is even "less refined than his allies" and the only scan for him was fighting a single foe
• Ame avoided any description of beating Superman as much as possible. The only ones he mentioned were
  • WW's sword, which we've already seen she has little reason to use IC against her lover/ally
  • CM's energy absorption, which she doesn't know would work and can't work anyways
  • Just kinda beating on him, ignoring that Superman can sustain merciless tier-relevant blows for hours

Prebuttals

I want to sign post some of the counterarguments Ame is likely to make so as you read them you can bear in mind they are not as solid as he will portray them:

• WW's canon is weird, and you have to take the good with the bad.
  • Ame said WW knows who Paragon is and that she knows how his suit works, except Paragon only has 3 appearances, WW is only in the first one, and Paragon's suit is improved in the second one
  • 10 issues after the only appearance where WW could recognize Paragon, she's knocked unconscious by a rock. Look at her own comic from that time, and she fears an ordinary torpedo despite Ame thinking BA casually busting through a nuclear submarine was laughably weak
  • Do only modern WW feats count? Here's rocket-powered bullets breaking her wrists. Here's her breaking her wrists in the effort to lift a far less than 100 tons. Here's a gas line rupture OHKOing her.
• CM's canon isn't weird, but Ame's likely hoping that ambiguous power ups negate her antifeats. This is weird for a few reasons.
  • Rogue copies CM fairly early on. It's pretty explicit Rogue copies CM before CM has any power ups. Yet Ame heavily employs Rogue scaling when CM's own feats won't suffice. Just how much STR/DUR/SPE did Carol have in the same issue Rogue copied her? Getting cracked through a wooden floor stuns her. She's nearly choked to death by a robot arm. It explicitly takes her full heartbeats to fight. If Rogue's stats are better then this, then her own improvement is totally independent of CM's.
  • I doubt CM's power ups a very explicit about which stats are improved or how consistently her powers are affected. Sometimes she's OHKO'd be wall-busting energy, sometimes 20k volts of electricity down her, sometimes it's a few 1000 megawatts. She can be crushed to death by debris, nearly breaks her wrist on a fist-sized amount of stone, gets plowed through by a car, can barely stop a train employing its breaks, and gets grappled by a squid
  • CM's power ups are not explicit enough to make her strong and more durable and faster and increase her energy absorption. Her progression is neither linear nor consistent, and certainly not across the board in stats. Pay careful attention to just how explicit the power ups Ame argues for are.

Summary

The fight boils down to Paragon being inescapably superior, Superman and BA being too durable to put down while outfighting even superior opponents, and WW and CM suffering such thick heaps of antifeats they can't compete in this fight.

[u/Ame-no-nobuko → u/mikhailnikolaievitch]

Response 2 Pt. 1

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Character Behavior

Knowledge

My team has extensive knowledge of their opponents:

• Carol was part of a shared universe with DC. Supes' powers, how they work and their weaknesses are public knowledge, and an Avenger like Carol would have greater access
  • TDKR Supes runs on solar energy and is weak to kryptonite
• WW everything about Supes including how effective her sword is and she's also fought a very similar version of Paragon in n52

Contrast that with Mik’s team who either don't know my team or have interacted with a drastically weaker version, making it unlikely that Supes feels threatened by WW sword as his WW's sword does nothing to kryptonians like him

Behavior

The actions and capabilities of my team are consistent and clear:

• WW is from a warrior culture she will use lethal force against threats. She has no issue maiming her friends, or killing them if they are threats. Her lasso is regularly used against flying brick foes.

  • It doesn't matter her target, none tank the sword
  • The instance Mik links for Paragon is Post Crisis which I'm not running. I'll concede that if Mik's BA is one shot she'd never think to use her lasso, but otherwise its always on the table

• Carol as stipped starts by blitzing/blasting and then baiting her foes to amp her with energy attacks

• Ryu is just a big brawler without his sword, so his options are just blitzing/punching

If anything Mik is projecting a bit:

• Supes holds back all the time, especially against allies (like WW as Mik points out).
  • He routinely holds back against Batman
  • He refused to even defend himself against his daughter.
  • The skill feat Mik harps on is coached in that he's held back using this skill up until this fight. This Supes has been in dozens of end of the world, to the death situations, and never once used this skill, not even when his worst enemies took over the US. Why stop holding back against my team?
• Paragon begins most of his fights by monologuing about how his powers work, and the one time he did blitz, he immediately wasted it by monologuing about how his new suit works. IC he is going to rant to WW about revenge then remind my team exactly the info they need to beat him

By default my team of superhero team mainstays will work better together than Miks. Paragon hates Superman, and BA isn't a team player.

Stat Comparison

Mik's anti-feat posting is really scattershot, often the wrong canon or with pretty blatant mitigating context

Striking

My team has really clear cut ~building level striking:

• WW: Her hits routinely destroy building sized objects of various sizes and other comparable objects.
• Many of low showings Mik brings up are Post Crisis, not the WW I am running, the rest are lifting feats which don't have any direct bearing on striking:

1/6) The only real feats here, congrats you found 2 anti-feats for a character with 1000+ comics

2) WW is poisoned here

3) Smaller boats than this, not filled with people weigh 100+ tons

4) This scene is a hallucination, it never happened

5) WW isn't struggling to land the jet, she's trying to do so gently as to not kill the pilot

• WW regularly lifts 100+ ton objects and assits in lifting even larger

• Carol: Her strength isn’t really contested much, but she also very consistently can deal building level damage

• Ryu: Ditto for him as well

Contrast this with Mik’s team. Even looking at the feats he has provided they are much weaker:

• BA: While he has good showings vs things like tanks, his presented feats aren’t even close to building level:
  • BA smashing through like 3 reinforced 2 inch thick floor is not even 1/100th of building busting.
  • His mountain slam required significant lead up, and isn't something he could reliably land on fast foes like my team
  • This is BA and Marvel just dropping large rocks and them shattering under their own weight
• Supes: Similar to BA where he exhibits good strength for like the lowest end of the tier, but anything beyond that is lacking:
  • Stopping a train thats coming to a stop at a train station and crumpling a single car isn't building busting
  • As mentioned the asteroid feat is also bad

Lifting/Grappling

Carol’s lifting wasn't mentioned as its not something she does offensively, but she’s easily strong enough to counter BA/Supes:

• Lifting large chunks of or entire buildings

• Rogue is copying a much weaker version of Carol (see later)

Lifting doesn't help with being choked or having your neck/bones broken, both are a function of dura. Everyone on my team can takes hits applying 100s of tons of force, and only Ryu needs to breath

• Choking out is an impossible win con. It takes seconds to do so and all of my team (especially Ryu) can throw 100s of punches in that timeframe. BA would be KO'd long before Ryu blacks out.

Durability

Especially with how weak Mik’s teams strikes are my team can take whatever they can throw.

Blunt Force

Like with their striking my team can withstand ~building level hits:

• WW: Counter to Mik's assertion, WW can and does regularly take ~building level damage:
  • Withstands a hit that collapses a multi-story building
  • It requires a hit that shatters the Washington monument and creates a large crater to nearly oneshot her
  • Takes a beating from Supergirl who punches harder than anyone on Mik's team
• Again many of her "anti-feats" are PC or have context:

1) Lol, this is a stretch to say she's hurt at all here. Literally nothing in the following pages indicates she's at all injured

2) WW has minimal piercing resistance, a fragmentation grenade is going to sting her

3) Major Disaster's powers amp up the magnitude of the disasters he makes. Like the lighting that hurts Superman

• Carol: She's also consistently at building level dura.

  • Basically all of the anti-feats mik linked are before she even got her energy absorption which explicitly amps her. Of the remainder they are mostly because she can't really absorb pure KE or the odd outlier.

• Ryu: He's a very consistent building buster

Just like with striking, Mik's team continues to be lacking here:

• BA: His entire fight with death takes place in a cemetary there are no buildings being destroyed

• Superman: Only two feats in this fight are even close to building busting. WW does more damage with her basic strikes that throw large foes obliterating the roofs of or entire sides of large marble buildings

Esoteric

In R1 I presented ample evidence that my team can tank heat/electricity magnitudes stronger than what Mik's team has. Their attacks would just serve to amp Carol to Binary.

• Heat and electricity are the two most common things Carol absorbs. She has absorbed a nuke before, no amount of energy will be an issue

Speed

Mik mainly attacked Carol here:

• Rogue absorbed a weaker Carol in the 90s, since then she has gone through at least 2 distinct amps allowing to enhancing her physicals by siphoning ambient energy and the Cru virus amping her further. Her powers have constantly and explicitly been growing stronger
  • Rogue herself admits when they fought in the mid 2010s that Carol’s power far outstrips her copy
• The “anti-feats” are largely lacking context, old or just an artifact of a character with 1500+ appearances (and growing powers):

1)Like with WW, congrats you found a anti-feat from a character with 1500+ appearances

2) She Hulk isn't deflecting these blasts. Looks like she put her arms to block them, randomly blocked one and the rest pushed her back into Thor like Carol wanted. Also how fast Carol's blasts are have no bearing on her combat speed

3) This is from an ad for the Empyre event, I wouldn't put much weight on it

4/6) These are early 90s, before Carol got 90% of her current powers. She was a different character back then

5) Also pretty old (00s), before Carol got the Cru amp

[u/Ame-no-nobuko → u/Ame-no-nobuko]

Response 2 Pt. 2

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Carol’s feats back up her having single digit combat speed:

• Reacts to/hits a missile at near point blank. The 115 m/s number in R1 is based on the initial velocity of an RPG, which alone places her in the upper single digit ms. A Air/Surface-To-Air missile would be much faster.
  • Does similar in another part of this fight
• Reacts to a Air-To-Air missile
• She was the second fastest Avenger to complete a training course after only Quicksilver
  • Avengers at the time include bullet timer Captain America
• Reacts/moves in a similar timeframe as it takes a bullet to travel the length of a guns barrel
• Performs an incredibly charged up attack in the timeframe it takes the massively hypersonic Nova to travel a few 100 meters
• Rogue copying her powers can catch bullets at close range and move to intercept them

My other two team mates aren’t contested by Mik, but to re-iterate both are fast enough to react and throw punches in a few ms:

• WW: She can briefly move as fast as a bullet, match the RPM of a M230 chaingun and block all its bullets and even deflect completely silent bullets from behind
• Ryu: He can react in 3 ms, block point blank arrows and is described as fast by a bullet timer. His strikes very regularly create sonic booms and gaps between each of his attacks can be measured in the single digit ms

In comparison Mik’s team:

• Adam: Other than maybe one feat he entirely exists on the merit of scaling, which is rarely solid:
  • Power Girl: She has like 2 solid bullet timing feats in Jeff's exhaustive RT and isn't without her own anti-feats and poor showings
  • Hawkman: Blocking a thrown sword doesn't scale to Hawkman's reaction. As the person who RT'd Hawkman I can assure the judges, this is his only bullet timing feat, he is at best arrow timing
  • Flash: Flash lands like 15x more hits than Adam does. Mik also really hasn't explained what this means speedwise beyond that Adam can occasionally get a lucky shot in
• Supes: The vast majority of his speed feats are basically pure reaction via heat vision and lack any evidence he can move to dodge or throw a strike in single digit ms, and even those indicate he’s slower than my team:
  • Reacting to a MP40 (400 m/s) as its bullets travel 1-2 m is a 2.5-5 ms reaction feat
  • Reacting to an arrow that crosses like 2-3 m is a 20-30 ms feat
  • These are all feats of just pure mental reaction, if it takes him even 2.5-5 ms to just mentally react and send a singal that makes him a magnitude slower than Ryu/WW who can react and act in that approx. timeframe
  • The only presented reaction feet involving being stated that at his top speed he could dodge some missiles. Basically he can do what Carol did but he has to be the absolute peak of his speed to achieve it

Mik's team is slower than mine, especially Black Adam. His own feats don't back up the idea he is as fast as anyone on my team:

• He gets mogged by a group of nerds with ray guns. Literally people as fast IRL humans, and he doesn't dodge at all despite being threatened

• Fails to dodge multiple bullet-like projectiles that hurt him, fired by a black widow analog who has no speed feats

• Gets hit by arrows that pierce him and later gets hit more

• Failed to dodge a sniper fire

• Stargirl (no enhanced speed) easily jukes him

• Atom Smasher (not a bullet timer) hits and hurts him

Win Cons/One Shots

My team retains a number of options that let them very easily win, if they choose to do basically any of these they win. This is ignoring their straight up physical superiority and that their skill/speed lets them land much stronger hits than normal:

• WW’s sword can gore or kill any of Mik's picks, none of them have sufficient dura to resist
• WW’s lasso has the ability to strip foes of powers not inherent to them, and it works with the briefest touch. This would work to both permanently remove Adams and Paragon’s powers, which she knows.
  • This isn’t a hard win con to achieve. Her lasso can easily tag supersonic objects. She can wrap it around her fists and she has tagged even speedsters with it
  • She does use the lasso against that group of soldiers
  • This is the Amazo virus Amazo his powers are more a form of hyper evolution than power stealing
• Carol can rip Superman’s solar energy reserves out of him, deprive him of additional energy and emit kryptonite radiation weakening him.
  • Carol doesn't need to know how Supes powers to rip energy out of him she can sense it
• Carol can absorb the heat vision from Superman/electricity from Adam getting stronger and faster until she goes Binary and can one shot them

Mik can quibble over the likelihood of any particular one of these win cons IC, but all are things my team regularly does (i.e. WW stabs a lot) and all of my team are competent fighters, they aren't going to leave obvious win strategies on the table

Paragon

Paragon isn’t nearly as effective against my team as Mik seems to think. Most critically he can’t copy Carol/Ryu or WW’s gear:

• Carol: Her powers can't be copied.
  • She's overpowered here because the power copier had already copied Sentry + other powers before hers
  • Rogue is a much stronger power copier than Paragon. She can copy powers permanently, at range, doesn’t need a suit to hold powers and also gains their memories. She can absorb the powers of inorganic beings like Wonder Man who is made of ionic energy, the dead and spirits, and can hold the power of nearly all superhumans on the planet at once. Paragon has no feats on this scale. He has never copied more than a couple of people at once, and his powers struggled with an energy being like the Galactic Golem.
  • Even against a much stronger copier like Rogue, Carol once she got her energy absorbing powers (after Rogue first stole her powers), can resist Rogue’s absorption with it taking an extended fight and Carol being will for Rogue to copy her
• Ryu: Ryu’s powers are due to a implanted guideline that gives him a digital video-game like leveling up system. This system gives him access to an energy source called Aura that suffuses his body and provides him with enhanced physicals. This is incredibly analogous to people Paragon can’t copy like Green Lantern (ring that provides energy that amps his physicals) or Red Tornado (air elemental in a robot) in which a semi-mystical power source provides power via technology

Paragon's effective range is only a few 100 ft.

• That the limit at which his prison restricts superhumans

• The distance that Superman was keeping him at to drain his suits charge

• And the distance Red Tornado hit away from the rest of the JL

Considering his tendency to monologue it would be easy to hit him away before he gains a charge (theres no evidence he can get a significant charge in the first 10s of ms of the fight) or Carol can drain it/WW can cut up his suit/him.

Paragon isn't capable of soloing a team by himself without his allies (who are easily taken out by my team). He can only copy WW, and not even her gear. Even if he can copy more of my team he does poorly against multiple foes getting easily beaten by a group of weakened daxamites despite copying them and a full strength Superman

Conclusion

My team dominates this fight. They have multiple easy one shot options, and Mik's team can't match their speed, durability or offense. Their esoterics are useless, and they'll struggle to even hit my team. They aren't strong enough to win quickly with blunt force while my team can deal devastating blows if this became a slugmatch. Paragon becomes a liability in a fight where he can't copy 2 of my team and my third has incredibly powerful gear. To win Mik has to somehow contend with the fact that WW's sword can hurt every member of his team, that all of them will be charging Carol up making her stronger, faster and more durable (and that she will soon after go Binary, one shotting them all), and that Ryu outstats them in every way imaginable.

[u/mikhailnikolaievitch → u/Ame-no-nobuko]

R2

Intro

Let's focus on the debate's most relevant portions so we can give them due attention. Paragon either solos straightforwardly, or WW and CM get outstatted so severely that nothing else matters, especially Ryu.

Wonder Woman

WW does not consistently demonstrate the STR/DUR to matter in this fight.

Canon

The majority of Ame's defense against the antifeats here is to dismiss them as Post-Crisis (PC). This is both weird and doesn't really work.

• In R1, Ame used Paragon's PC appearance as evidence WW's familiar with him. When pressed, he switched in R2 to citing WW fighting "a very similar version" in N52. Except they never fought. Because Paragon & Wonder Woman have literally never appeared together in any other continuity than PC.
• Ame's kind of weaponizing Rebirth WW's confusing continuity. What is Rebirth? It's the new DC continuity specifically created to blend in the Post-Crisis canon to what came after it. Ignoring her PC canon is kind of arbitrary and up for opinion.
• Want to dismiss an antifeat? Say it's PC. It's not PC? Say it's outweighed by WW's 1,500+ appearances -- an appearance list that includes 30+ years of PC continuity

Personally, I see no reason PC antifeats aren't fair game, especially when Ame is trying to slip in the advantages of PC's canon wherever he can manage. For the sake of transparency, let's reiterate all the WW antifeats I provided and bold the ones Ame dismissed as PC while reasserting the others.

• Dino bone stuns her
• Tree trunk pins her
• Struggles to stop a bus - Antifeat granted
• Needs aid with debris - WW is poisoned ~50 pages prior to this debris, and at no point before or after says anything about the poison affecting her. This is all Wonder Woman #755-759 if you want to skim
• Struggles to lift a boat - Ame found a bigger/heavier boat to compare it to
• Barely stops a wrecking ball - WW is not surprised by her struggle here. She thinks this is normal.
• Struggles to stop a jet - Going "NNGH! HNNGH!" for half a page has nothing to do with being careful.
• Struggles to land small plane - Antifeat granted
• Hurts arm in car wreck - WW is gripping her shoulder in pain the same as the human next to her
• A normal grenade causes her pain - This isn't piercing. We see WW's hands and they aren't bleeding. She goes "HGGGNK!", is panting, and explicitly in pain.
• Struggles with a rocket
• KO'd by a rock - Antifeat ignored
• fears an ordinary torpedo - Antifeat ignored
• bullets break her wrists.
• breaks wrists lifting <100 tons.
• Gas line rupture OHKOs her - Nothing in Ame's scan indicates this villain makes gas lines deadlier.

That ~1,000 appearance number Ame threw out? The vast majority of that number is 30 years of PC continuity Ame is also wanting to ignore. Practically every appearance list assumes PC is canon to Rebirth. Try to find one without it, because I couldn't. Without the PC appearances factored in, the ratio of n52/Rebirth antifeats to feats is abysmal.

WW's STR/DUR is very clearly so wildly inconsistent that we cannnot trust the high-end cherry-picking she relies on to be relevant in this fight.

Lasso

Elephant in the room here, how is the two-handed WW supposed to wield a shield, a sword, and a lasso all at once? 95% of the scans show her requiring two hands to use the lasso.

Regardless, it's ineffective.

• It's not even argued to be used against Superman
• Its argument against Paragon requires scans that are super explicit about purging foreign genetic material when Paragon's powers are natural & genetic. Ame's been citing Paragon saying he was only born with the mental half of his powers to suggest they're not natural to him, when he says on the next page his powers fully developed at puberty.
• Its use against BA is moot since we know, definitively, WW never uses it in combat against the BA she's fought before even when he's overpowered her

The lasso's usefulness, much like everything else here, is overhyped. It nearly never depowers anyone, her commands can be interrupted, and she's overpowered while using it all the time.

Sword

The sword is WW's most effective option and it's not even very effective.

• Paragon is just immune to it thanks to Ryu
• Superman is far too skilled for it to reasonably touch him. He knows the sword is a threat, because his WW's sword slaughters Kryptonians in his verse. The feat Ame cited to the contrary is Superman's daughter, who is half-Kryptonian & half-Amazonian.
• Regardless, Ame's own scans indicate how hesitant WW would be to use a sword on Superman. The one time she comes close it's clearly she really really doesn't want to do it and even then only after an extended fight where she avoided it. She never used it on him on any fight previously and even when he's amped and corrupted she makes a point of sheathing it because she refuses to use it against him
• Ultimately, if Black Adam or the immune Paragon just disarm WW of her blade at any point she loses this win con entirely

Captain Marvel

CM simply doesn't have the physicals to participate in this fight, and in particular suffers in her speed. None of her weirder tricks work either, and these are the arguments where Ame reaches the most.

Antifeats

The main skepticism I expressed in my Prebuttals was that Ame would argue for vague power ups dismissing all of CM's antifeats, despite none of those power ups saying anything about increasing all of her stats across the board.

And they don't. Here's what every power up scan Ame presented says:

• "Your absorption of ambient energy keeps your strength, flight, and photonic abilities at an impressive level"
• "But Cru, aside from powering me up, made me face myself."
• "You evolved beyond that a long time ago". Note that a few pages prior she's caught off guard and shoved by someone magnitudes weaker and slower than this tier
• "Ah'm usin' 'em like a comfortable old shoe, while she's been gettin' better."

None of this says anything about speed. None of this says anything about durability. All the talk of "strength" and "power" seems to specifically apply to her new energy-absorption abilities, and even then it seems pretty damn well vague. I dug through years of Handbook appearances for her and none even list super speed among her powers, despite all noting her strength.

That's because this is not a character who is super fast. All of the evidence I asserted for that cannot be dispelled by mention of vague power ups that never say anything about increasing her speed.

• She cannot evade normal sharks
• She cannot out-react slow people
• Random featless aliens get the better of her
• She's outsped by someone severely sub-arrow timing
• She has 0 speed advantage against slow people
• A ram several feet from her is too close for her to dodge
• Explicitly takes full heartbeats to fight

And that's to say nothing of her other antifeats, most of which Ame just kinda assumed you'd grant him the benefit of the doubt that some vague power boost took place after it occurred to negate them.

• Getting cracked through a wooden floor stuns her.
• Nearly choked to death by a robot arm.
• OHKO'd by a wall-bust
• Can be crushed to death by debris
• Nearly breaks her wrist on a fist-sized amount of stone
• Plowed through by a car
• Barely stop a train employing its brakes
• Grappled by a squid

Ame himself seems to think the old stuff counts -- despite Rogue copying older shitty CM, he keeps asserting speed feats for Rogue despite Rogue's training/growth being independent of CM's. 2 of the 6 speed feats proposed for CM come in the same comic with the arrow antifeat.

She's always been slow. She's still slow.

So what speed does CM have?

• A missile long before full acceleration that is clearly not an RPG
• CM occupying space next to where missiles fire
• CMeventually intercepting a missile that is garbage compared to Superman.

[u/mikhailnikolaievitch → u/mikhailnikolaievitch]

• The training course, which she explicitly needed Cap's assistance with, which we see her completing with power blasts rather than speed, says zilch about scaling to Cap.
• This gun does not fire until she has her hand on it. Compare to Black Adam explicitly disarming a gun after the "click" of its trigger pull and this is garbage.
• She performs an attack in a timeframe that is explicitly "a few seconds." This is not good. This is bad.

CM's Solar Absorption

Let's start with the claim that CM instantly depowers Superman and all the problems therein

• Ame's own description of CM's behavior does not suggest she does this
• Ame's argument for CM depowering Superman based merely on them sharing a crossover together is extremely weird, because they actually fight in that crossover and she doesn't do what Ame's saying she'd do and instead gets her ass kicked because he outspeeds her
• Against Hyperion, a Superman copy who also derives his powers from absorbed energy, CM also doesn't do this, ignoring commands, and getting stomped
• What was the evidence Ame presented for CM draining foes to depower them? Was it this where she doesn't do that? Or this? Or this?

Essentially, the argument here is that CM will do something she's never done before, on someone she barely knows, in a manner that has 0 evidence of doing what he's claiming it will.

Paragon copying

Let's highlight here for a second where Ame's "CM absorbs energy and becomes planet-busting" goes, because there's two eventualities if that happens.

• CM goes Binary, so Paragon drawing power from her goes more-Binary. Nobody else in the fight matters anymore, and Paragon just overpowers CM.
• CM doesn't go Binary, but Paragon uses Superman/BA's powers to make himself go Binary. The man won 3 Nobel Prizes, then received 2 more while imprisoned without copying any metas and while constantly drugged. This simple plan doesn't take a genius.

Scared of that, Ame's kind of inventing reasons Paragon can't copy CM at all.

• Ame's 1 scan saying she can't be copied is her being copied. She's not draining powers she's draining energy, so Paragon would just drain her energy back better than she can.
• Ame also claimed CM is only overpowered in the above because of the copiers other copied powers. Which is Paragon's whole deal.
• So Ame invents some weird copying limitation, despite Paragon copying Superman and 3 people with the power of Superman while magnifying all of their powers at once. The contention that he "never copied more than a couple of people at once" isn't based on anything -- Paragon's always copied everyone around him simultaneously without fail.
• Ame's scan of struggling to copy a power is explicit: "Normally, it happens automatically, just through proximity! But I can only replicate organic powers, and this thing isn't truly alive!"
• CM is a living being with organic powers.

Let's See Paul Allen's Antifeats

When Ame tries to return fire by digging up antifeats for TDM, the most he squeezes out are 6 scans, exclusively for BA, and all of them fall limp.

• BA getting hit by energy beams from super scientists prepared for his arrival is not an antifeat.
• Getting shot with energy bolts while engaging separate opponent is not an antifeat
• Getting hit with arrows with his back turned that he doesn't even give a shit about is not an antifeat
• Getting surprised with a specially-designed bullet he had no idea could hurt him, which he states on panel when he's used to bullets doing jack shit to him is not an antifeat
• Ame picked 1 panel of Stargirl evading a punch from the same fight where BA fights a super speedster while IRL people are statued around him
• So Ame cropped this sequence to suggest BA's Atom Smasher fight is an antifeat when the unedited fight states that BA was under the effect of power dampeners expressly to make it a fair fight

Instead, Ame focused the majority of his attention on downplaying the feats presented for TDM without ever arriving at much of a conclusion.

• BA's STR Ame admits is good against tanks, so he fixates on the thickness of steel-reinforced concrete while ignoring the radius, which is fuckoff huge. He tries to ignore the mountain slam because of its lead up, which is less than the spawn distance.
• BA's DUR Ame ignores the surroundings, the rubble, basically everything. BA literally wields a broken column from the building busted around him. Maybe the buildings are mausoleums?
• Supes STR he kinda just calls bad without reason, ignoring that Supes brought a train to a dead stop, crumpled it, and then busted through multiple buildings all while moving FTE, or that he destroys giant chunks of stone with single blows
• Supes DUR he totally misses the point on. Taking 2 building-busting blows at the START of an hours-long MERCILESS beating does not mean his durability caps out at 2 building-busting blows.

When it comes to speed the gap is only wider, because CM sets such an insanely low bar.

• BA exchanges multiple blows while people are statued around him, and the feat starts with him saying he could kill all of the JSA in the space of a heartbeat. Need I remind you, CM explicitly takes full heartbeats to do anything.
• BA scaling to bullet-timers who sometimes don't bullet time is still massively better than CM scaling consistently below people who never bullet time
• Supes being fast enough to dodge 6 missiles surrounding him from feet away is just so much massively obviously better than CM flying in to intercept 1 targeted at someone else. Supes reacting to gunfire amidst a series of complex actions makes it incredibly clear these aren't purely mental reaction feats.
• Superman also outfights Red Son, who bullet-times from point-blank range
• And even still, both BA and Supes have feats for outfighting multiple simultaneous opponents faster than themselves

CM does not matter. She cannot do anything before she's charged instantly at Mach 5+, and all she contributes to this fight is giving her powers to Paragon.

Also:

• Supes doesn't hold back. By EoS he's just unleashing on motherfuckers, him teaching his daughter a lesson earlier doesn't matter, and he's always employed his skill. He trained as a marine and just hides the skill well.
• Choking/snapping necks isn't time consuming. BA does it one-handed while fighting an army and his target "blacks out instantly" from loss of bloodflow. Snapping a neck is even faster.

Paragon

Especially when neither of his allies can die quickly, Paragon absolutely can solo this fight.

• The best Ame could lowball Paragon's range to was 100ft. Combatants start 90ft. apart, teammates 10 ft. apart, and the total arena is 7.5 acres horizontally and 400 meters vertically. He's got his opponents copied at the start of the match, and none of them have ranged attacks of consequence to further that gap.
• All 3 scans Ame gave to get the 100ft. range suck. Copying surpasses so far up above his 3 story prison his targets are specks. Calling several city blocks 100ft. is lol. This scan says nothing about going beyond copying range.
• To the contrary, Paragon uses Superman's super speed even after hitting Superman into the ozone layer. The ozone layer is 10-25 miles up.
• He copies Superman from a skyscraper away in a city stuffed with skyscrapers. Even at a lowball Paragon's range is between 800-1,500 ft, spanning practically beyond the whole arena.
• Paragon can copy Ryu. His stats/powers are still organic, it doesn't really matter their source because Paragon copies the people themselves regardless of where they get their powers from

Paragon copies everyone at spawn, is impossible to depower, and can solo the fight.

Conclusion

CM dies before she does anything but empower Paragon, WW dies on contact with anyone, and Ryu gets 3v1'd while never mattering anyways. TDM cannot die quickly, and at minimum Paragon overpowers the opposition by necessity.