DTL Season 5-Week 13 (Set 2)

[Aristotle]

Short of calling up Grant Morrison and asking him I really don't know what you're looking for.

If you can't prove that it's magical, and the comics do not indicate that it's magical, and his bio in the Secret Files doesn't indicate that it's magical, then it isn't magical.

 

[Aristotle]

Deadly Dozen

 

[LadyVader]

This point is moot. Obviously you have a different perspective than all the internet sources on Aztek. Btw, found another one...

They used their covert resources to forge a high-tech slimline battle suit that was controlled by a five-pointed mystical helmet.

I guess we're going to have to leave it to each and every voter to search deep within himself and ask himself if he believes in Santa Clause. I mean if he believes that helmet is magical or not.

 

[Aristotle]

Yes, we certainly will have to leave it up to the voters to decide whether or not they believe the Bush Administration. I mean, whether or not the helmet is magical. Unless we can find that Secret Files.

Also, mystical does not equal magical.
Definitions of mystical:1. mystic; occult.
2. of or pertaining to mystics or mysticism: mystical writings.
3. spiritually symbolic.
4. Rare. obscure in meaning; mysterious.

None explicitly or implicitly indicate magic, although they retain that possibility.

 

[Aristotle]

By the way, I went back and checked, and before this match, you had already used well over the required 12 characters this season:
Byakko
Captain Atom (Armageddon)
Clea
Dead-Girl
Deadpool
Duke of Oil
Engineer
Green Lantern/Bruce Wayne
Jaine Cutter
Kayla Ballantine
Kono
Meggan
Miss Martian
Nemesis
Prometheus
Stellaris
Thordis
Wiccan
Wonder Woman/Witchblade
Wonder Woman
Warlock

This means you did not HAVE to use Black Alice.

 

[LadyVader]

I thought the idea was to use all of your characters at least once.

 

[Aristotle]

That wouldn't be possible. Characters are sometimes picked up and dropped between matches. The sheer amount of characters each player cycles through in a season would make that impossible.

 

[wiegeabo]

I thought the idea was to use all of your characters at least once.

Just a number of characters equal to your roster. This just prevents people from using the same characters throughout the season (which was happening in the first couple of seasons).

 

[LadyVader]

I think I like my version better. Anyway, that's how I understood the rule. At the end of the season whatever characters in your roster you never used, you have to use them in the final match.

 

[Nightwing]

I thought the idea was to use all of your characters at least once.

This too was my understanding.It was never that you had to use 12 it was you had to use the 12 that were in your line up atleast once.

So if you use your 12th character one week but then drop them for a new character then you still have to use that new character before the season is out.

If you wish to pick up new characters after week 13's line ups have been submitted then thats the only time this rule wouldnt come into place.

 

[Nightwing]

Deadpool's Harem vs Authorititans - with this one on one hand I can see Ari's arguement about the attacking the med with an uber but Im not convinced its an attack but never-the-less i think Ari's team would take this one.
Deadly Dozen vs X

 

[XFanTim]

As I understand it, the rule is just that you have to use at least 12 different characters over the course of the season.

 

[XFanTim]

I'm torn on who to vote for here. I thought LV's writeup was a bit more creative, and I disagreed with Ari on a number of the points of debate. That said, it's harder to come up with "creative" ways to beat your opponents if your team is flat-out more powerful, which Ari's is, at least on the uber end of things. And while some of his debating points I thought were b.s., there were others I found more convincing.

Is Aztek magical? LV cited plenty of profiles. It's true that examples from the comics trump profiles, but that doesn't mean profiles are worthless. You can't expect your opponent to buy comics on all your guys and scan them in just so they can debate you. And Ari didn't have specific scans of the comics where it was stated Aztek is purely technological. Really, he's seems to be saying "My interpretation of the comics (Aztek isn't magical) is more accurate than the profile-makers interpretation of the comics (Aztek is partly magical)." I'm not sure I buy that. I also don't buy that "occult" or "mystical" mean something different than "magic" in this context.

Did LV overwrite Byakko? I don't think so. She wrote her as she was depicted in the comics. You can't really say those issues exaggerated her power unless you can point to other issues where she's clearly way weaker than that. Also, arguing Byakko's power makes her an uber (which I don't agree with) doesn't really make sense here. Even if she is misranked, LV is supposed to write her accurately, not downplay her. We only downplay a character if there's already been an official ruling that they're ranked too low (but it's too late to change the weeks lineup.) Arguing someone made their character too powerful really only makes sense if they've given them some powerup that raises them above the powerset on which they were ranked. If their baseline powers make them uber, it's Wieg's fault for allowing them as a med, not the owner's fault.

That said, there's things I don't buy about LV's writeup. She didn't really convince me that Black Alice should be allowed to attack Aztek. (Admittedly, I didn't even notice this flaw until Ari pointed it out.) Even though Black Alice starts with no powers, if she's ranked an uber than I think she should be treated as an uber, and not allowed to attack the meds first. And as Ari points out, LV didn't really have to use Alice, even though she thought she did.

The other thing is I don't really think Thordis could hold off Superman Prime and Surfer for any length of time. Surfer alone, maybe. And I get that Thordis has a ton of powers, but he's not as fast as SMP. Neither Surfer nor Thor have remotely Superman-level combat speed. As we've discussed, being able to fly at superspeed is a vastly different thing than throwing and blocking a multitude of attacks at super speed.

The other thing is the take down of Superman-Prime, while cool, isn't totally convincing. I buy that putting the helmet on his head would make him go nuts. But a crazy Superman is totally unpredictable. Maybe he kills himself. Maybe he kills your whole team. Maybe he punches himself in the head and cracks the helmet into a billion pieces. Who knows.

So the bottom line is that much as I liked LV's writeup, and I did, both the legality and effectiveness of her tactics for beating SMP are somewhat questionable. Ari's was more straightforward, but it leaves me with less to doubt.

So, I guess I vote for the Authorititans.

 

[wiegeabo]

The Authorititans
The Deadly Dozen


Tim winning is a no-brainer.

I almost voted for LV just because she went all PowerPoint on Ari's ass. Just kidding.

This was actually a very tough choice. Yes, Alice can take the magic from beings outside the Panoptichron. Doesn't matter if they're in another universe. If accessing other universes did matter, then the Flash's wouldn't be able to use the Speed Force in Marvel locations. They can, so it doesn't matter. (This was settled way back in season 2, I think. Maybe season 1.) Could she take Aztek's helmet? Yes, it looks like it. If it has magical elements she can take them all. Can she steal Aztek's power since he's a Middleweight? No. Unless Aztek attacks her first, or Ari's ubers are down, she can't.

Of course, this still means Alice can fight Supes or the Surfer powered up by someone else's abilities like, say, Dr. Fate. This also means Aztek is still able to fight fully powered himself. So it's still a 5-5 match. And I think it'll be down to 3-3. Alice/Thorids/Byakko vs. Surfer/Supes/Aztek because Byakko and Aztek's intangibility could allow them to take out the regs. Now, if Aztek attacks Alice, she can steal from him. But then she's left with only Aztek's powers, and wouldn't stand a chance against the ubers. So she probably wouldn't. In the end, I think Ari's final 3 are just a bit more powerful than LV's. Especially with the speed they have.


Although I do have to say that the thought of SMP ripping his own head off made me laugh. And, yes, you should have called Morrison.

 

[XFanTim]

Wieg, I disagree with you somewhat on your interpretation of the rule regarding Black Alice.

Yes, we all agreed that characters powers should still be treated as working normally even if they aren't in their own universe. Having Flash's power not work because there's no speedforce in the Marvel Universe, or having Silver Surfer's power not work because there's no Power Cosmic in DC would be unspeakable lame. I trust everyone can agree on this point.

But Black Alice is different, because she has a targeted ability. She's not just using a power that happens to duplicate someone else's. She's targeting a magical character and taking away their ability to give to herself.

As an analogy, would you allow Xavier to mind-link to Reed Richards in order to understand some invention, even if the battle took place in Metropolis and Mr. Fantastic wasn't a participant? On Marvel earth, Xavier could certainly telepathically contact Reed (as Xavier-Juggernaut did in his What If?) But to do it from Metropolis makes no sense, because Reed isn't there, and Xavier's power can't reach from one dimension to another, much less from one multiverse to another.

It's mostly irrelevant to this fight since LV didn't try to use Alice that way, but still probably a point worth clarifying.

I also question whether a Black Alice who can steal from Dr. Fate even when he isn't there, or can steal from any opposing uber mage if there is one, isn't too uber. Basically she's an uber mage who can't be opposed by an uber mage. The interpretation I prefered, which made her a more reasonable uber, was that she should only be stealing from the battlefield participants, since except in the case of a populated battlefield no one else exists for the duration of the battle.

 

[Aristotle]

Still, I should think she'd be tuber. It was hard enough getting people to agree to a blank-slate Libra, who just evens the playing field. Alice steals the whole kit and caboodle, leaving a powered uber against an unpowered uber. That's basically an instant-kill for any uber mage.

 

[LadyVader]

The Authorititans
The Deadly Dozen


Tim winning is a no-brainer.

I almost voted for LV just because she went all PowerPoint on Ari's ass. Just kidding.

This was actually a very tough choice. Yes, Alice can take the magic from beings outside the Panoptichron. Doesn't matter if they're in another universe. If accessing other universes did matter, then the Flash's wouldn't be able to use the Speed Force in Marvel locations. They can, so it doesn't matter. (This was settled way back in season 2, I think. Maybe season 1.) Could she take Aztek's helmet? Yes, it looks like it. If it has magical elements she can take them all. Can she steal Aztek's power since he's a Middleweight? No. Unless Aztek attacks her first, or Ari's ubers are down, she can't.

Of course, this still means Alice can fight Supes or the Surfer powered up by someone else's abilities like, say, Dr. Fate. This also means Aztek is still able to fight fully powered himself. So it's still a 5-5 match. And I think it'll be down to 3-3. Alice/Thorids/Byakko vs. Surfer/Supes/Aztek because Byakko and Aztek's intangibility could allow them to take out the regs. Now, if Aztek attacks Alice, she can steal from him. But then she's left with only Aztek's powers, and wouldn't stand a chance against the ubers. So she probably wouldn't. In the end, I think Ari's final 3 are just a bit more powerful than LV's. Especially with the speed they have.


Although I do have to say that the thought of SMP ripping his own head off made me laugh. And, yes, you should have called Morrison.

Stupid slideshare robbed me of my proper dues. My original ppt had music and special effects and everythihg. I even wasted time to make sure the slide-show was properly timed. Curses!

 

[Ahura Mazda]

The Deadly Dozen

The Authoritarians - For me, I thought Black Alice was a useless pick for this battle because there was no one among the ubers she could attack or steal from. Superman could take out Thordis pretty easily by himself given she is a weaker version of Thor. However, the originality of LV's lineup does deserve something but unfortunately we do not have any other prizes to hand out besides our vote.

 

[LadyVader]

You appreciation is enough for me Ahura.

 

[XFanTim]

Stupid rapidshare robbed me of my proper dues. My original ppt had music and special effects and everythihg. I even wasted time to make sure the slide-show was properly timed. Curses!

I downloaded the file, so I was able to see all that stuff. But it doesn't show if you just view it on the site.

 

[XFanTim]

I've continued the discussion of Black Alice in the Rankings thread.

 

[Harlekin]

The Authorititans
Deadly Dozen

Sorry LV, but I have to agree with Ari that taking Black Alice with you wasn't the best tactical decision.

 

[LadyVader]

tactics shmactics. You all fail to recognise my brilliance.

X gets my vote.





















































Just kidding.

XfanTim

 

[DTL Commish]

Voting is now over.
Final Results.

Deadpool's Harem 0
The Authorititans 5

The Deadly Dozen 6
X 0