CaV: Darthjhawk (Ultron) vs UndeadBantha (Nicol Bolas)

I'll start on dealing with these in one go. Ultron has complete control of his atoms, evident by not only his regenerative capabilities but also by virtue of being able to shift his atomic structure and form as seen here:

I'll start on dealing with these in one go. Ultron has complete control of his atoms, evident by not only his regenerative capabilities but also by virtue of being able to shift his atomic structure and form as seen here:

Nicol Bolas is all about hax over stats. You are correct to assume that Ultron takes that statistical advantage, indeed he does by leaps and bounds, but Nicol Bolas will take far more important advantages. Don't let that fool you into believing that Nicol Bolas has poor stats, far from it, but his true strength lays in his magical power, the versatility of his spellcasting, and the absurdly hax stuff he can do with his magic. This is what will win him the day over Ultron. Lets begin by looking at the raw power of his spells overall...

Even after The Mending Nicol Bolas has proven himself to be one of the most powerful beings in the entire multiverse. He has plenty of casual planetary feats, some scaling beyond planetary, and even once performed a star level feat. Overall he sits well above planetary level in power and should be beyond Ultron in raw power.

Lets begin by showing one of Nicol Bolas's more recently demonstrated planetary feats. Vivien Rein is the only survivor from her home plane of Skalla. For reasons we aren't aware of Nicol Bolas showed up and destroyed Skalla with fire. Here we see her recounting it's destruction.

"What it is like where you come from?" Frederic traced a finger along the knob of bone that rose from Vivien's brown wrist, the motion precise as the pleating of his lace jabot, and turned her arm onto its back. His touch wandered up the tributaries of her veins, while Luneau, dusk-lit and haunting, flaunted itself through the window.

Vivien tried not to think of an antlered silhouette rising into the sky, tried not to think of the screaming, the pop of skin as it crisps and breaks, tried not to think of how soundless it became as the world burned to white. She tried not to think of fire.

"It was beautiful." she whispered.

Magic the Gathering: Unbowed Part 1

What is particularly amazing about this display of power is that it's clear that Nicol Bolas performed this feat with very little effort, Vivian even recalls that he was laughing while making Skalla burn white hot.

This was worse than the torture, worse even than spectacle at the coliseum, worse than anything but the sight of Nicol Bolas rising into that burning sky, laughing as Skalla winked to white.

Magic the Gathering: Unbowed Part 2

Just to clarify, when i say he destroyed a "plane" or effected a "plane" that is just a planet. An MTG plane is usually one solar system-multiple solar systems big with one inhabitable planet for which the entire plane is named. So in order to destroy a "plane" that just requires killing the planet since the rest is uninhabited, and because the plane is named after the planet it sounds more impressive than it is. That is often a point of confusion so i hope that cleared that up.

Because it is one of his most well known feats, and his top showing ill demonstrate his star feat right away for you. After showing up on Amonkhet and performing a slue of impressive feats of power in a row, Nicol Bolas ends his first journey there with his most impressive feat of power...he commands the movement of one of the planes two suns.

He spelled the second sun to move as he was ready, to count down until whenever he decided to return. This would be the cornerstone of his machinations on this world.

Magic the Gathering: The Hour of Revelation

The whole point of the sun feat was to act as a timer for when he returned. When the sun rests between the horns of his monument the Hours will commence and the God-Pharoah shall return.

This is what it looked like when the sun finally reached its point in the sky...

Thats a very nice star level feat, but here's the kicker. The sun only reached that point in the sky sixty years after he cast the intial spell, meaning his magic kept a star on a very specific trajectory for sixty years in his absence.

The memories began as a trickle, then flooded through him as the tangled dam of magic unraveled. And Rhonas's very spirit recoiled as the true events and nature of the God-Pharaoh revealed itself, a crushing tidal wave sweeping away everything he had believed for the past sixty years.

Magic the Gathering: Hour of Glory

I can predict you claiming that this is merely an outlier that should be ignored, however Magic the Gathering is very heavily focused on continuity where every story is very carefully planned out. This isn't a comic book company where authors get to go nuts. Plus the sun counting down was a huge factor in the Amonkhet story, a story that the creators have stated was meant to show off Nicol Bolas's power. This wasn't just a cheeky author sneaking something in because they want Nicol Bolas to be absurd, this was carefully planned out executed and the story was designed with this event as a large factor in it. This is not an outlier, this is what the creators at Wizards believe Nicol Bolas is capable of.

With all that being said, however, i will say that this feat is out of combat and he may have had many hours to potentially even a day cast the spell, so im not saying that this is something he can just pull out of his back pocket (boom sun to the face) but it does demonstrate just how ridiculous Nicol Bolas can be with his magical power.

Of course i do have many more planetary feats to show but for now i will leave at this. I think its clear to see the when it comes to raw magical power, Nicol Bolas is not to be messed with and he certainly does have the raw power needed to destroy Ultron.

Okay Nicol Bolas has a lot of raw power but what kinds of spells does he have? You know how in the basic info i said it was too many to list? Well im going to try, but Ill probably miss some.

• Telepathy
• Telekinesis
• Pyromancy
• Flight
• Teleportation
• Astral Projection
• Metal Manipulation
• Leyline Manipulation (complicated but ill explain sometime in this debate)
• Summons
• Physical Warping
• Soul Manipulation/Destruction
• Illusions
• Stasis Fields
• Intangibility
• Invisibility
• Counter Magic
• Earth Manipulation
• Heiromancy (white based law magic. Umbrella term for lots of spells)
• Necromancy (Reanimating the dead and draining life force and such)
• Time/Timeline Manipulation
• Curses
• Lightning Manipulation
• Magical Energy Blasts/Manipulation
• Inter-Planer Travel
• Geomancy (manipulation of organic material)
• Strength Empowerment

Daum dude. Do you think hes well rounded enough? Basically he is a living library of spells with probably the deepest understanding of the magical arts out of any character in MTG. These are only the spells that we have seen him use, there is no way of knowing how many spells he has actually learned throughout his 25,000 years. I wont cover all of these spells but I will cover some of the more relevant ones to this match up. Lets start with the obvious...

Nicol Bolas is either the top or second best metal manipulator that we know of in MTG. Metal Manipulation is probably the most logical way of bypassing Ultron's durability. Adamantium won't make it any harder for him to manipulate either because Nicol Bolas easily has been shown to manipulate an even more complex super metal in the form of Etherium. I wont go into explaining everything about Etherium right now, but basically its a metal that simultaneously exists in reality and in the space between realities.

Nicol Bolas doesn't have a whole lot of feats in Metal Manipulation but instead he gains feats by association to Tezzeret, the planeswalker who's whole deal is Metal Manipulation. During a confrontation with Tezzeret, Nicol Bolas reveals that he actually founded the Seekers of Carmot, which is the group that trained Tezzeret how to manipulate metal in the first place and knows everything that any member of that group knows and more.

As he set about doing so, he found himself considerably amused by the occasional boasts that Tezzeret liked to make, about being the Multiverse’s greatest master of etherium. Apparently Tezzeret’s enormous intellect had managed to slide right past the fact that Bolas himself had created the Seekers of Carmot, and that there was nothing known by any of the Seekers that would not be known to the dragon as well. Not to mention that there were a number of features of etherium that Bolas was reasonably certain only he knew (and possibly Crucius, if the elusive sphinx ever turned up again). One of these was that due to etherium’s peculiar nature—existing simultaneously in reality and in the Blind Eternities—there were certain vulnerabilities that someone with the right sort of power might exploit.

Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

The Seekers of Carmot teach people to manipulate metal to such a degree that they can replace large parts of their body with Etherium.

And Tezzeret can manipulate metal to such a degree that he changes the properties of that metal on the fly, which would prove disastrous for Ultron if Bolas made his body a softer metal.

Venser brushed the hand aside, but as the fingers and palm dripped back into the wrist, the tips of other claws poked out of the wrist, and another hand grew before his eyes, literally. Soon there was another claw.

Then something exceedingly odd happened. All the metal on the Phyrexian began to arc upward, as though it were dripping upside down. The dark metal of it began to dance and wind, much to the creature’s amazement. Its exposed sinews and muscles looked strangely naked as its whole body began to tumble down without the metal’s support. The metal of the creature’s structure danced higher and higher in the air. The meat parts of the Phyrexian fell with a wet thump to the metal floor. But nobody was watching that. All eyes were on the metal, arcing up and down and side to side in graceful loops and peaks.

The metal turned colors as well—first red, then jet black, and then a bright, shimmering gold. Venser heard Koth’s sharp intake of breath when the metal went a glassy blue. It pulled together into a square shape and fell with a hard thump on the ground next to the crumpled Phyrexian the metal had come from, who looked at it with eyeballs bare and wobbly.

Magic the Gathering: Quest for Karn

Even with Ultron having control over every atom of his body, its going to be a contest of power as to who gets control over his body. I don't see him transforming out of Bolas's control either, as his other forms are also made out of metal. With just this power alone i dont see Ultron surviving against Bolas.

The next hax that could win this for Bolas on it's own is Clockworking. Clockworking is the most advanced school of time manipulation. Basically a student of clockworking treats time like another spacial dimension. Here are some of the things that Nicol Bolas can do with clockworking.

• Teleport forward or backwards through time
• Timeline jump
• See the future or past
• Create temporal bubbles to rapidly age or deage someone
• Pause, slow down, or increase time
• Perceive an infinite amount of alternate timelines.

Here is Tezzeret is explaining what clockworking can do, and states that a clockworker is only limited by the power of user and the probability of the outcome. The less likely the outcome the more power it takes. Luckily ive already shown that Nicol Bolas is an absolute power house.

“Chronomancy is not even on a nearby plane to clockworking. A clockworker can actually control time. You understand teleportation. To a clockworker adept, time is simply another spatial dimension. They can jump forward and backward in time as easily as you or I might teleport across a room.”

Her frown turned into a scowl. “So if I hit him with something that rocks his world, he can just, like, jump back to right before I hit him and deliver a preemptive smackdown?”

“It’s more complicated than that—clockworking is fiendishly difficult and, no pun intended, time consuming—but essentially, yes. He can also control your own personal temporal flow in ways no magic at our command can counter. No shield will stop you from getting old. And that’s not all.”

She winced. “It gets worse?”

“A good clockworker—which Renn is—can, with proper preparation, move sideways in time.”

“What in the hells is that supposed to mean?”

“You’d have to ask a clockworker for the details,” I said. “I’ve never looked deeply into the theory, and so I have only a layman’s knowledge. The best I can understand is that time isn’t a single straight line—it’s more like a big rope, braided and rebraided out of an infinite number of different temporal strands. Every time you make a choice—turn right instead of left—you split off a new temporal strand. If the choice you make doesn’t affect other nearby main lines—if you arrive at your destidestination at the same moment you would have if you’d turned the other way—your strand gets braided back into the main cable and everything proceeds as usual. But a clockworker adept can sense the nearest strands of other main lines and decide which one he wants to be in. In other words, he can pick and choose the outcome he wants, and move himself into the time line where that’s what happens. And he can take you with him.”

“Wow.”

“Yes. The only limitations of clockworking are the power of the adept and the dictates of probability—the more improbable the outcome the adept is looking for, the more power it takes to get himself into that alternate line."

Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

Nicol Bolas takes this to a whole new level. He is able to move other people and objects from different timelines to his own. He used this once to move the corpses of a bunch of timelines where he had died to his timeline and then moved a Liliana Vess for each one to reanimate the dead bodies to fight for him while still wielding a portion of his power.

The dragon reared, forelimbs and wings spreading wide, and brutally intense flame rained down upon the artificer. Baltrice barely managed to raise shields around her and Jace. From what she could see, Tezzeret’s armor seemed to be working just fine. He didn’t appear to notice the hellfire raging around him. He made a quick motion of his right fist, as though delivering a punch to an invisible opponent.

And the dragon exploded.

Right atop the steaming pile of internal organs, Nicol Bolas flashed back into existence. He stretched forth his talon and annihilating energy poured forth, setting the air itself on fire. The power blasted Tezzeret backward and down, sliding into a deep, steep-sided pit of white-hot etherium sand. The fringes of the back blast alone chewed into Baltrice’s shields so fast that she had to grab Jace and dodge back along the plinth to keep them both from being roasted alive.

The dragon kept pouring the blazing torrent of power into the pit as though he couldn’t be bothered with trivial things such as conserving mana. He blasted Tezzeret with levels of energy that should have killed him along with the artificer, as power of this magnitude could be maintained only by pouring his life into the assault along with every scrap of mana he could gather. The intensity of the attack liquefied the sand, turning the pit into a cauldron filled with molten etherium, into which Tezzeret sank like a sounding stone.

And out from which he arose once more, lifting smoothly into the air as though borne aloft by the power that should have destroyed him.

His armor didn’t even look hot.

He clasped his hands in front of his face, and the dragon’s blast was instantly extinguished. He pushed his doubled fists straight downward like a man hoisting himself out of a pool, and the great dragon himself pitched helplessly headfirst into the molten etherium.

A volcanic eruption of flame and burning metal from below blasted upward around Tezzeret without noticeable effect. The effect on the dragon was more spectacular, as his entire head instantly flash-burned to ash, and his neck roared with flame and burned all the way down to his breastbone.

This time two Nicol Bolases appeared simultaneously, on either side of Tezzeret. One simply lashed out and grabbed the artificer, while the other bent his neck to bite the mage in half.

...

Both dragons who had restrained him had been reduced to redly glistering skeletal remains, their flesh having melted and dripped away, puddling beneath their bones in huge pools of meat syrup. But now four dragons came at him, two with magic and two with claws and teeth, and to Baltrice's experienced eye, it looked like Tezzeret was starting to feel the pressure. More and more he started to be focusing on defense, and his counter strikes were no longer instantly lethal.

Not that it would have mattered if they were, as eight more Nicol Bolases came wading through the gore of their predecessors, waiting their turn to attack.

Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

Firstly I'd like to point out that Liliana Vess is not necessary; Bolas is capable of reanimating the bodies himself. He likely only summoned Liliana to conserve energy.

Secondly this feat wasn't achieved by the real Nicol Bolas, this was done by a construct of Nicol Bolas that is massively weaker than the real deal. That means that the true Nicol Bolas can replicate this feat more easily and to a higher magnitude than what is depicted. The construct is so much more weaker than the real thing that when it meets the real Nicol Bolas it is in disbelief at his level of power and thinks that it is impossible.

Nicol Bolas settled himself onto the etherium sand. At last he could begin to excise the artificer’s annoying little gimmicks and get himself out of here. “Damn, I thought he’d never leave.”

“You and me both, brother.”

Bolas lurched upright. The voice had been impossibly deep, impossibly dark, and most of all, impossibly close. Behind him was a rip in the fabric of the universe, held open by some impressively sizable talons. Bolas gathered himself into a crouch—talons like those usually belonged to dragons, and from their dimensions, it wasn’t impossible that this new planeswalking dragon, whoever it was, might be even larger than Bolas himself. “Take it easy, pal,” the new dragon said. “I’m not here to fight.”

“It’s a good thing you’re not,” Bolas growled, “because you have no idea who you’re about to—”

“It’s more the other way around,” the new dragon said as he shouldered his way into the world. He stopped, stretched, and gaped his great fanged mouth wide in a jaw-cracking yawn.

Nicol Bolas stared in uncomprehending astonishment. “You—you look just like me!”

“That’s more the other way around, too.” The dragon grinned down at him, and Bolas realized that despite the resemblance, this dragon was vastly larger than he was, and younger, and possessed of a staggering magnitude of power that Bolas could only faintly glimpse. All his senses, magical as well as physical, told him that this dragon was so powerful he shouldn’t be able to even exist.…

Nothing in his twenty-five thousand years of life had prepared him to face a being like this.

“You—are you—who—I mean, what? What’s going on? It’s as if you’re me.”

“I am you,” the new dragon said with a vast and gleaming fang-filled grin. “You’re the one who’s not you.”

“What?”

“Nice job with Tezzeret, by the way. You learn a lot about someone by how he treats you when he’s got nothing to fear. And now we’ve got him working for us willingly. Enthusiastically. Hells, he thinks he’s doing us a favor.”

Bolas still couldn’t quite get his mind around what was happening, though a terrible dread had begun to curdle in his gut. “Us? What do you mean, us?”

“Oh, well, there’s that, I suppose.” The dragon waved a talon in languid dismissal. “By us, you should understand that I mean me. There is no you. Not really.”

“What?”

“Yeah, I know, you’re having a hard time with this,” the other dragon said sympathetically. “There’s a couple of reasons for that. One is that constructs like you have a pretty limited useful life span. You start to break down only a day or two after you’re created. You must have noticed how it’s gotten harder and harder to think.”

“Constructs? Like me?” Bolas shook his head wildly, as though he could jerk himself awake from this terrible nightmare. “You’re saying I’m … that I’ve always been …”

“Don’t take it too hard,” the other dragon said. “It’s a fail-safe, really. Otherwise, every time I put one like you together, I’d have to chase you down and kill you myself, just to keep you from screwing around in my business.”

“Your business? I still don’t understand.…”

“Of course you don’t. In addition to that construct thing I told you about, I also had to make you pretty stupid.”

“What?”

“If you were a tenth as smart as I am, you would have been ten times too smart to fall into Tezzeret’s trap. As it is, you’ll be dead a few hours from now, and your corpse will evaporate. If I want Tezzeret to find a Nicol Bolas here when he gets back, I’ll have to make another of you. Maybe even several more.”

“You’re saying—you’re saying that you—?”

“Damn, you really are stupid,” the larger dragon said. “Well, I guess Tezzeret can’t be wrong about everything, can he?”

The vast, unimaginably powerful dragon looked down upon the pale, dying simulacrum he had created, and sighed.

“Yes, idiot. I am the real Nicol Bolas,” he said. “And I did not reach my exceedingly advanced age by being stupid enough to do my dirty work in person.”

Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

Basically I don't see how Ultron can counter this in anyway. Ultron could get around being rapidly aged because his body probably wont break down just by time passing, but Bolas can do so much more than that with time. He can get advanced knowledge on Ultron simply by perceiving how their battle goes on different timelines, he can predict moves, slow Ultron down by putting him in a temporal bubble, or just flood the field with dead Bolas's.

For the most part Nicol Bolas doesn't favor any powers over the other, he just prefers what ever spell achieves his goal, however he does have a special fondness for telepathy. Even Jace Beleren admits that he could only be maybe the 2nd best telepath in the multiverse, although i think Jace is overselling himself a bit there. Neither by feats or by statements have we seen a telepath as powerful as Nicol Bolas in the entire multiverse.

His mind is so powerful that the will of literal gods are fodder to him. Here he breaks the mind of the Kefnet, the God of Knowledge, simply by dipping his chin at him.

The dragon tipped his chin and fractured Kefnet's mind in two.

Magic the Gathering: Hour of Revelation

He then follows it up by owning the minds of two gods at the same time, Oketra the God of Stability and Hazoret the God of Zeal, with a swipe of his claw.

The dragon burst through the mausoleum door. Oketra and Hazoret charged. With a wave of a claw, the dragon sent forward a pulse of magic, and the minds of the two gods went utterly blank.

Magic the Gathering: Hour of Revelation

These gods are the ultimate manifestation of power on the plane. Ill go more into how powerful these gods are later because Bolas has plenty of feats of making fodder out of them, but simply by a god dying causes intense pain and agony in all like on a city wide scale, even in the other gods.

As Rhonas collapsed, his life extinguished, the invisible strands of leylines and mana tied to him snapped, sending ripples of force blasting out across all life in Naktamun. Mortals doubled over in shock as the god perished, and even the other gods stumbled and recoiled where they stood.Magic the Gathering: Hour of Glory

Nicol Bolas has shown to be able to communicate casually with Sarkhan Vol while being no where near him but still appearing in illusions beside him.

Gallery

Nicol Bolas has also shown to be cappable of shattering Jace Beleren's defenses with no effort, and while fighting the rest of the Gatewatch.

Bolas ignored Chandra's fire, trampled Liliana's dead, and broke Nissa's vines. He did not move to attack them, merely continuing to fling a helpless Gideon against the wall. He stared at Jace, knowing what the telepath was trying, and failing, to do.

The voice blasted into Jace's mind with all the subtlety of an avalanche, shredding several of his defenses effortlessly. You have been alive for all of an eye-blink, and because of a thimble of natural talent you presume to touch my mind? And some have called me arrogant. Bolas's laughter was acid, scarring Jace's mind.

Magic the Gathering: Hour of Devastation

Jace Beleren has displayed his telepathic defenses against the likes of Emrakul, a planetary telepath. For the sake of time ill display feats of Emrakul's telepathy in the next post because in the post im going to provide it states that she is attempting to consume every mind on the world.

Jace, too, felt the urge to go to Her. I'amrakul.

No.

He wanted to shake himself. He had to clear his mind. He had to think. He couldn't let Her have what She wanted. He once again mimicked what Tamiyo had taught him, clenching his hands into fists with the effort. The process of ensuring that there was no residue of delirium was not unlike clearing away cobwebs from inside one's head. Thick, lattice-like cobwebs exuded by a towering Eldrazi monstrosity hell-bent on consuming the mind of every living thing on this world. Jace shuddered.

This is what he would have to be able to do for them, for Gideon and Chandra and Nissa. He'd have to protect their minds along with his own. He couldn't bring them here and then leave them to be consumed by Her. He wouldn't. So then the question was: Could he do it? He had asked himself this very thing what felt like a hundred times, and yet he didn't have the answer.

Magic the Gathering: Emrakul Rises

Of course Nicol Bolas has an even better TP feat than owning Jace but ill save that for later. I think ive proven that as a telepath his is not to be messed with and could replicate the feats that you have provided for Ultron.

Firstly, a quick counter to your preemptive counter to my intangibility.

So if the metal manipulation becomes a problem, Ultron can shift his form, releasing Bolas' control over him, attack and defend at once, along with countering intangibility. This was shown as much above when Ultron states: "Into sheer ionic force which even you may no adjust your molecules to withstand". That is how Vision goes intangible and yet Ultron's ionic burst is able to quite clearly make that advantage negligible.

You

The way you demonstrated Ultron being able to counter intangibility will not work on Nicol Bolas because Nicol Bolas does not use the same method as vision does to go intangible. Vision alters his density to achieve intangibility, but Bolas does not. To become intangible Nicol Bolas offsets his body a half step from reality.

The dragon protected himself from the attacks of the other gods by separating himself a half-step from reality. The vision of his form remained, but his body was safe from their blows.

The gods of Amonkhet roared and cursed, but no blow from their weapons would land.

Magic the Gathering: Hours of Revelation

Due to his intangibility not being a matter of how dense his body is, but rather that he is partially disconnected from reality, the ionic blast from Ultron should not work at countering this ability. Ultron will need to find a way to drag his body fully back into reality.

Nicol Bolas also has a gigantic astral form.

Obviously Nicol Bolas has lots of other spells than this but I think you get the basic idea. He has tons of spells and he can do wacky absurd things with them. Ill get more into other spells if they become relevant.

Yes plural. One of the ridiculous things about Nicol Bolas is that he has all of these crazy spells and abilities and he can focus his full attention on multiple ones at the same time because he has multiple minds throughout his body. A regular dragons ability to multitask puts a humans to shame, and Nicol Bolas's ability to multitask puts a dragons to shame.

Due to their saurian ancestry, most dragons retained great knots of neural ganglia between their wings and at the base of their tails, so large and complex that they were essentially subsidiary brains; the evolutionary adaptation that allowed them to coordinate their subbrains gave many dragons a multitasking capability far beyond any human’s imagination. And Nicol Bolas’s capabilities were beyond the imaginations of dragons.

His mind was a vast and cluttered place, stuffed with twenty-five thousand years of memories, half-forgotten spells, and disordered remnants of dreams and aspirations. Millennia before, he had begun a process of compartmentalizing his mind, setting up an organized mental structure that allowed him to access information he wanted without having to sift through metaphorical mountains of irrelevancies. In the process, he’d split off functions of cognitive processing, virtual minds whose responsibility was the management of each of their particular sectors of knowledge, experience, and skill.

Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

He has such control over his minds and consciousness that if he runs out of minds to delegate tasks too he can subdivide his primary consciousness even further to allow for even more multitasking.

Nicol Bolas subdivided his primary consciousness into three parts. One part undertook the mystical focusing of will that was the beginning of planeswalking. The second undertook to summon a specific subset of the dragon’s memories dealing with a certain type of magic. The third phased its attention into the near future, scanning the probability smears for hints of coalescence. When the first part completed its task, a hole in reality began to rip itself open … but instead of stepping into it, Bolas used the second part of his primary consciousness to reach into the Blind Eternities with an intention to doing one or more of a list of magics at his command, while the third kept focused on the future, seeking one that would end with Tezzeret in his hand.

The submind that had been processing his interactions with Tezzeret warned Bolas sternly not to kill him; there was still too much to be learned.

“I’m not going to kill him,” Bolas muttered to himself. “But this is going to hurt.”

He could judge the potential effect of each magic on his second part’s list by scanning the probable futures that shifted and developed as the second part considered this or that spell, power, or combination of such. Neither the first nor third part of his mind was actually aware of what spell he ended up using, but they didn’t have to be; the second part had that issue fully under control, as it was able to use the ætheric dimension of Tezzeret’s armor to channel a combination of telekinesis and minor shaping that transformed, in the current reality, the inside of the mechanist’s etherium breastplate into a blade that shattered his breastbone, slashed open his heart, and severed his spine just between the shoulder blades. “How’s that for power?” several of his subminds said in unison, as at least three of them saw—and one felt—the mechanist’s heart spew most of his blood out through the joints in his armor.

Magic the Gathering: Test of Metal

Im sure Ultron being a computer and all has something similar to this, but thats not the point. Because Nicol Bolas has so many spells and powers that do so many wackily broken things, the ability to delegate and multitask just breaks his character. Maybe a single power wont end Ultron on its own, but a complex mixture of spells wielded with precision might be enough to take him down, and that is why his minds are so important.

Ultron wins the edge in stats. I think this is already established. Bolas isn't going to harm Ultron with his strength and Ultron has dealt with more durable characters so im not even going to bother posting feats, unless you force me too.

Basically this is just for speed. Yea Nicol Bolas is slower than Ultron but he has time manipulation to make that edge null and void. All i am here to prove is that Bolas doesn't get instantly blitzed. MTG is much worse than Marvel with the whole slow characters thing. They like to make absurdly hax characters who are as slow as molassas. Luckily Bolas isn't as bad as most characters.

In the battle with the Gatewatch on Amonkhet Nicol Bolas is described as moving lightning-fast with his attacks. And i mean I said i wouldn't post strength feats but this quote sees Bolas treating a mountain+ level brick like a childs toy ball.

Nicol Bolas's tail whipped around, lightning-fast, and its end slammed into Gideon and his invulnerable shield with the force of a charging baloth. Gideon sailed into a thick brick wall lining one side of the plaza. His shield kept him unharmed, but he had no leverage to do anything more than be whacked against the wall by Bolas's tail like a ball hit by a stick, over and over as bricks flew and shattered with each impact.

Magic the Gathering: Hour of Devastation

That feat may not be meant to literally mean that Bolas is as fast as lightning, but fortunately he has supporting feats. Nicol Bolas is capable of reacting to and dissolving the god Oketra's arrows from a relatively short distance. He was hovering over the city, and she was on top of one of the tallest buildings.

Oketra loosed another arrow, this time aimed directly at the dragon's eye. The beast glanced at the incoming projectile; it splintered and dissolved mid-flight.

Now we do have a general idea of how fast Oketra's arrows fly. They fly so fast that they come over the horizon faster than Gideon Jura can perceive.

Suddenly, a dazzling light burst from the horizon.

I threw up an arm and shielded my eyes on reflex as a force knocked me flying back through the air. The next instant, my mind had to catch up with what it saw.

A massive arrow, blazing with burning white light, pierced the wurm that loomed over Liliana's unconscious form. I watched, stunned, as the wurm withered away, its body turned to ash. The arrow vanished, as though a sunbeam glancing off the reflective sands, as the remnants of the wurm blew away in the wind.

Magic the Gathering: Impact

Gideon Jura is so fast enough to perceive attacks and move faster than a peak human can realize.

Both Kiora and Gideon moved so fast that Jace didn't realize what was happening until he was on the floor, pushed by Gideon's thick arm, and Gideon was deflecting the strike of Kiora's bident meant for Jace.

Magic the Gathering: Hedron Alignment

And when being observed in combat he is a never ending blur.

The Eldrazi were driven into a frenzy by the earth shifting and rumbling beneath them. No longer lethargic, they buzzed in intensity as they hurled themselves at Gideon and Noyan. Gideon's skin glowed and golden sparks from an invisible shield of energy shimmered constantly as he became a never-ending blur of savage cuts and thrusts. An Eldrazi tentacle lashed out at Noyan's face, and somehow Gideon was there first, knocking it away and decapitating the Eldrazi in one near-impossible motion.

Magic the Gathering: Shaping an Army

Yet a blur speed character like himself couldn't react to an arrow that came all the way over the horizon? That arrow is flying very fast. But Nicol Bolas easily reacts to it at a fairly close distance. I think that at least proves that he is fast enough to not completely get blitzed right out the gate by Ultron.