Hulking and Wiccan for sure
Kevd4wg's forum posts
Round 2: Major points
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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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.
Anti-matter bombs capable of obliterating entire planets. These can be mass-produced in the thousands and shrunk down with Pym particles before being dispersed with the airborne particle nanites (so they'll be inhaled & get in your bloodstream as well as phase into your body).
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.
A Universal Entropy Gun capable of one-shotting Celestials by corrupting their energy.
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.
Doctor Doom's Actuality Shell which was capable of fending off assaults from an amped Nightmare.
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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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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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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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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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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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:
Angela was also capable oftanking the Kron’s lightning which is stated to be equal in power to an exploding pulsar.
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:
To supplement the consistency, Angela is also a high-tier Angel so she scales to the likes of Angels like Abdielwho was able to outright trigger a supernova with raw power.
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:
HereAngela implies that she needs at least 100 light years to fight unimpededwhich is a good baseline for something with numbers. And it's definitely about her combat speedas she was explicitly fighting while zipping across those distances.
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.
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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.
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.
Warlock probably just rips his soul though.
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