DTL Season 5-Week 4 (Set 3)

[Aristotle]

And with that, my writeups, as well as my first round of argumentation against your writeups, are up and bolded for the benefit of voters.

 

[X]

Kudos on your first week here, by the way.

Comprehensive stuff, too.

I'll give you more feedback when I'm allowed too.

 

[Aristotle]

I'm pretty confident in it. That sounds cocky, but what I mean is, I'm secure in what I did. If I lose, I don't think it will be because I suck at this.

 

[X]

Not cocky at all.

No worries on losing, unfairly at least. We had new people in this beating long standing members last week.

 

[Harlekin]

Yeah, I got pwned twice now by newbies.

 

[X]

*Shrugs*

Who might friggin' win this thing. So no shame there.

 

[XFanTim]

OK, now I need to read Aristotle's billion comments and his lengthy writeup. This might take a little while . . .

 

[DTL Commish]

Writeups are now closed.

Voting may now begin.

 

[XFanTim]

Comments on Aristotle’s Writeup

First of all, I really enjoyed your writeup. I thought it was very well written. Which is why I will take this time to remind everyone: We vote based on combat strategies and debate and so forth, not on who is a better writer. This is actually an official rule this season, to prevent people from feeling like they have to write mini-novels like we saw in previous seasons. So feel free to enjoy Aristotle’s “narrative exercise”, but when it comes to your vote lets keep it focused on the combat. Speaking of which…

“Snow, I want you on Darkchylde. Your heat subtraction should be able to keep her in check long enough for someone else to get there and take her down. We mostly need to keep her magic disruption capabilities away from Zatanna. I can't be sure how powerful those abilities are, and I need her away from Zatanna.”

Mistake #1: Your team doesn’t know Darkchylde can disrupt Magic. Because your team doesn’t have any Marvel characters, none of them know anything about Darkchylde. You only get the basic description of her powers I provided – namely that she has teleportational portals, minor magic, and a magic blade called the soul sword. So your characters should have been surprised when she neutralized Zatanna’s spells.

It should be a simple matter for the speedsters to separate her from her Soulsword, and from there Zatanna should be more than capable of dispatching her quickly.”

To reiterate, you have no reason to suspect that the soul sword is such a serious threat.

Meanwhile, on the South end of the Blue Area, outside the Spaceport, the five members of the Deadly Dozen have also laid out their strategy. Magneto is assigned to take out Batman, the superior intellect of the team. Darkchylde is assigned to take on Elijah Snow, hoping to magically disrupt his heat subtraction. Chase, because of his temporal powers' capacity to affect speed, is assigned to Flash or Apollo, whichever one he finds first, while Zoom will take whichever he finds first. Doomsday/Brainiac, the strategist and leader of the Dozen's squad, plans to work on Zatanna, hoping to use his science as an edge over magic.

Mistake #2: I don’t think the strategy you’ve laid out for my team makes much sense. Magneto is going to waste his time fighting Batman, when he has the power to take out one of your higher-level characters like Zatanna or Apollo? That would be pointless. Batman’s already fulfilled his main usefulness in planning your teams strategy. Besides, my team should make beating your ubers a priority – if we can take out your ubers, Doomsday would easily run roughshod over the rest of your squad.

Even with his time manipulation, Chase probably isn’t going to be able to get close to a speedster like Flash without help. I only had him getting close to Apollo because Apollo was focused on Magneto. In general, having my regs fight your higher levels while my higher levels waste time on your regs is just unrealistically stacking things against me. In my writeup I went with the much more logical format of ubers fighting ubers, meds fighting meds, and regs fighting regs.

Also, why wouldn’t I have Darkchylde helping against Zatanna, when she’s the only one who can neutralize magic. My team knows Zatanna is the biggest threat, they know Darkchylde is their ace in the hole against her, and yet they send her against Elijah Snow?

Meanwhile, it was only a matter of time before Zoom and Flash found each other, in a space as small as the Blue Area. Zoom gets in a few good knocks on Bart before the Scarlet Speedster puts Batman's plan into action, getting just enough of a headstart on his mentor's archnemesis to stay ahead of him for a bit. Flash burns across the lunar territory, weaving between the power plant and the Tower of Genesis before swerving back around towards the Ancient Moorings, and is gone. Even with his temporary Speed Force energies, Flash appears incredibly fast to Batman, who watches from his sniper's nest. But the coming of the Flash is a signal to Batman that Zoom will be right behind. Carefully watching and timing everything, with the precision he is known for, Tim Drake squeezes the trigger.

Mistake #3: You had Batman shoot Zoom. Even with a speedboost from Flash, Batman isn’t remotely fast enough to see a full speed Zoom, much less shoot him. In the Blitz story arc (and I did specify I have the Zoom from that story), Zoom and Flash were actually circling the globe multiple times faster than any hero could react. They actually ran right by Superman and he was frozen like a statue, unable to do anything to help. If Superman can’t so much as hit Zoom with a shot of heat vision as he runs by, you think Batman would be able to? Please note there’s a strict limit on how much speed Flash can lend Batman without bumping him up from regular to medium – at most you could make him about as fast as Marvel’s Quicksilver (pre-powerup) – in other words, way slower than Superman.

And even if I buy that Flash could somehow put a decent amount of distance between himself and Zoom – despite the fact that you acknowledge Zoom is faster – the fact remains that in the time between Flash signaling Batman and Batman squeezing the trigger they’d probably be miles a way. Again, in Blitz they were circling the Earth in mere moments. Zoom is much, much faster than Batman’s nerve impulses, even if you amp them up to the limit for any regular.

Zoom hears the sound of a gun going off at Speed Force velocity, and instinctively attempts to vibrate through it. But, just as happened years ago to Wally West, he's doing exactly what the plan calls for him to do. The bullet, set to the same vibrational frequency, attaches to his spinal cord and immediately sends him into superspeed epileptic seizures. Zoom's body drops to the ground, appearing lifeless, but in fact undergoing tremors and pains unlike anything almost any human has ever been cursed to experience.

Mistake #4: Zoom letting the bullet fly through him, and being hurt by it. You keep talking about how this bullet is a proven tactic against speedsters, ignoring the fact that Zoom’s speed works completely differently than any speedforce speedster. There’s no proof that a vibrating bullet would work on him. And phasing through it isn’t his modus operandi either – I remember not even being sure if he could phase through things in his first story (although I think he’s done it later). So he’d probably just go around it, or just flat out outrun it. Again, Flash can’t amp a bullet to Zoom level speed, because Flash himself can’t achieve Zoom-level speed without help.

“That's good, Batman,” Zatanna's voice cuts through the static, “because we've spotted Doomsday, and he's moving differently than the last time I saw him.”
…
It happens too fast for Brainiac to notice at first. But suddenly, he realizes that Doomsday is not moving as Brainiac had intended him to. Brainiac feels no connection to the limbs and flesh of the monster. And the monster is moving of its own accord. ZATANNA. It has to be her.

And it is Zatanna. Carefully slicing into Doomsday's mind, she has severed the connection between Brainiac's mind and Doomsday's mind. Doomsday is now once again a virtually mindless killing machine. Zatanna and Brainiac are both surprised at the ease with which she conquered the connection, but the Doomsday/Brainiac hybrid has always proven unstable; Doomsday's will, while not fired by intellect, is simply too powerful to be superceded even by the telepathy of Brainiac. Now Brainiac finds himself trapped in a massive, violent meat puppet as it rampages through the city.

Mistake #5: Brainiac leaving himself open to attack from Zatanna. First, you have Brainiac standing around trying to use telepathy, when as in fact it’s been ruled by Wiegeabo that I’m not allowed to have him use telepathy while in Doomsday’s body, since his mental energy is presumably focused on controlling Doomsday. (Note that I didn’t list telepathy in his powers above.) So that wouldn’t happen.

Second, my team would surely realize they have to take Zatanna out as quickly as possible. She’s a mage in the most famous superhero team in the DCU – so my guys know who she is. Even if they don’t know everything she can do, Darkchylde knows enough about magic to know how dangerous a high-level magic user is. And yet Doomsday lets her get the drop on him.

My team knows the battlefield much better (Darkchylde would have literally learned about it in school), and my team has a teleporter with anti-magic powers. The only sensible thing would be for Darkchylde to (1) stick by Doomsday’s side to defend my teams greatest weapon against magic, and (2) port him straight to Zatanna as quick as we can find her. Which would be pretty quick given our superior familiarity with the battlefield. And once Doomsday does get near Zatanna, he’s fast enough to take her out before she can get out a spell.

Even if we couldn’t find Zatanna right away, we could keep porting Doomsday around until we do, or have Darkchylde just neutralize a spell when Zatanna uses it. The fact that my team has left Doomsday undefended against magic and let Zatanna get the drop on him makes no sense.

Mistake #6: Where the heck is Magneto? While my team’s two biggest guns are going down, you have Magneto basically struggling to find your team. (Again, we know the battlefield much better, and he has electromagnetic senses your team knows nothing about, so they wouldn’t even know to hide from them.) I still maintain that having Magneto try to fight Batman is a waste of his power, but if we did do it your way, why didn’t he stop Batman from shooting Zoom with a bullet. Again, Batman can’t be amped up past the max speed for a reg, which is still plenty slow for Magneto to stop. Not that the bullet would ever hit Zoom anyway, for the reasons I gave above. But Magneto should have done something by now other than search fruitlessly for his opponents. My team also seems to have split up and allowed themselves to be picked off one by one, which is not something they’re stupid enough to do.

Mistake #7: Where is Darkchylde? Yes, I know you have her off “stalemating” Elijah Snow, except that that’s an incredible waste of her abilities. Not just because she should have been using her anti-magic against Zatanna, but because her teleportation should be being used to help her teammates. The whole reason I put a teleporter on my team was so they could put my other characters in the positions they need to be to take out there foes – this is a strategy we’ve already used for several weeks, and which the team would be well-accustomed to by now. For Darkchylde to ignore her main power, teleportation, and to just go one-on-one with Snow makes no sense. Not only could she have ported Doomsday into position to take someone out, but if Zatanna did cause him to go rogue, she could still port him away from her teammates and back towards her opponents. She’s the best person on my team to deal with a rogue Doomsday, and instead she’s off fighting a pointless one-on-one while Magneto has to deal with him.

Again, you have my team fighting as individuals even though (1) Magneto, Darkchylde, and Ambrose all have prior experience being part of a team, and (2) Magneto, Doomsday-Brainiac, and Darkchylde have already fought together in one of my previous matches. (week 2). They’re not going to suddenly forget such basic strategies as “teleport Doomsday to where the guys we want dead are.”

Magneto begins pulling entire residential structures up from their foundations and slamming them into Doomsday, with little effect. The beast awkwardly lurches forward after Magneto, who keeps stepping slowly backwards, dragging larger and larger chunks of metal and throwing them at Doomsday, but the monster is unstoppable. Magneto feels himself cross the Avenue of Harmony and hopes to reach the prison, which he can use as both a hiding spot and a weapon—and Apollo slams into him from behind and rips his head off.

Mistake #8: There’s NO WAY Magneto goes down that easy. Even as a medium, he’s got one of the strongest shields of any medium in this thing. It would take multiple shots from Thor to break through – and at least for DTL purposes Apollo is significantly weaker than Thor, or he wouldn’t be allowable as a medium. And if Magneto is fighting Doomsday, as you have it, then it’s obvious his shield would be up.

Plus, you have Apollo surprising Magneto. As I pointed out, Magneto can sense electromagnetic energy, and Apollo is solar powered. (Sunlight is of course just a form of electromagnetic radiation.) Even facing Doomsday, there’s no way Magneto would be so completely freaked out as to not even sense Apollo approaching. To Magneto, he’d be about as conspicuous as a bright pink elephant.

Mistake #9: Ambrose Chase does next to nothing. Look, I don’t think he’d beat Flash either – I do think he’d do something other than spend the whole fight struggling to find your team, and then get taken out after my whole team is decimated. In my writeup, even though I have my team winning, I still have your guys picking off some of my weaker characters. You basically assume my guys can’t do squat until your team is ready to deal with them. Again, why not have Ambrose stick with one of my other characters and aid them in their fights, rather than just wandering around and hoping to stumble across someone he can beat. He knows how to function as a member of a team – he should be using some teamwork.

It appears that Snow and Darkchylde are in a stalemate, which may be the most we could have hoped for. He's kept her away from me and preoccupied, and she appears powerless to do anything but defend herself against the cold. Her sword seems to disrupt magic.”

Batman nods. “Our strategy is simple. Apollo, you rush in first from the West side and knock her Soulsword out of her hand at high speed. Flash, you're faster, so you double around the back of the power plant and come back into the target area to catch the weapon when she loses it, and deliver it to me. I'll be standing here,” he says as he points to a spot on his map, “between that building there and the plant. I'll then rush in with the Soulsword, which as I understand it, should be enough to disrupt her power, and Zatanna, that's when you set her down magically. My suit is sealed and temperature-regulated, Flash's suit is sealed, Zatanna can protect herself, and Apollo can survive at extreme temperatures, so Snow won't even have to dial down his heat subtraction.”

Mistake #10: Your team still doesn’t know Darkchylde can disrupt Magic. They shouldn’t have known it at the start of the battle, and there’s nothing about her fight with Elijah Snow that would give that away. Not that she’s going to beat your whole team once Magneto, Zoom, and Doomsday have gone down like a bunch of chumps.

Anyway, the bottom line is you don’t have my team functioning as a team, you have them all using their powers in one-on-ones. You don’t even have them choosing the most sensible one-on-one matchups. You don’t have them using the fact that they no more about their opponents than their opponents know about them. You don’t have them using the fact that they no more about the battlefield. Just because my team doesn’t have Batman doesn’t mean we can’t think of a decent strategy. Brainiac, Magneto, Ambrose Chase . . . this is a smart team. Which is why, as much as I enjoyed your writeup from a storytelling perspective, I don’t think it would go down like that.

 

[XFanTim]

Reply to Aristotle's Comments (Part 1)

That much I'll grant you, and if I didn't explicitly acknowledge that in the writeup, I meant to. That's why I had Bart try and get a head start by ducking and running from the fight.

Yeah, but Zoom can run faster. He's not getting far ahead of him.

Here's where I take my first issue with your combat scenarios. Why would that be Batman's trick, when he knows there's a method proven to be more effective?

Vibro-bullet hasn't been proven against someone with Zoom's form of superspeed. And as I've said, even Batman with his reflexes amped to the max allowed for a reg isn't fast enough to hit Zoom going full speed, which is exactly what he would be doing in a fight with Flash. And Flash can't make a bullet as fast as Zoom, just like he can't make himself as fast as Zoom.

I chose the burst of light attack because it's something Zoom probably couldn't dodge, unlike a bullet fired by a reg. I was having Batman use what I thought was the better strategy.

Also, Batman isn't the only one capable of arming his teammates. My team would do their best to give Zoom an advantage, too.

You overestimate Zoom. Hunter Zolomon's a criminal profiler, not a fighter. He hasn't had the kind of training in fighting that a cloned Bart Allen, growing up under the tutelage of Tim Drake, has.

You could say the same in comparing Zoom to Wally West -- Zoom's not a fighter, blah blah blah. And yet he was more than a match for Wally until Wally got a speed boost to match him, and was still practically a dead-even match for Wally afterwards. Future Bart may be superior to Wally, but I don't bye that Bart is that far superior to Wally. Wally wasn't close to on par with Zoom without an additional boost.

how does Zoom guarantee that Flash will be at a pre-made portal? Flash isn't going to just stay in the right place. This kind of fight always moves.

Glad you asked, I meant to emphasize this a bit more. (1) Zoom is deliberately forcing Flash in the direction of the portal, whereas Flash doesn't know it's there so he can't be actively trying to avoid it. (2) With their level of speed they probably cover just about every inch of the battlefield, so they're bound to go by it pretty quick, and Zoom picks that moment to send them tumbling through. (3) Darkchylde could have made multiple portals, making it even easier for Zoom to get Flash to one.

Second: I was under the impression that combatants can't exit the battlefield unless it's the only way to win a fight? I'm not accepting that, if the fight gets to this point (which, again, it doesn't), the only way to win is to go to a different dimension.

That's not really true. In general, the way I've always understood the rules is that if you have no active characters left on the battlefield, then you lose, but you're allowed to stray from the battlefield if it's natural your powers would lead you there. It's certainly natural in a battle with Darkchylde, who's an interdimensional teleporter. Anyway, I took the battle to Limbo last week and no one objected then, so I assume it's still legit. (I've also brought up the possibility of Darkchylde taking things to Limbo in the discussion thread without anyone objecting -- the only note was if she goes there herself she becomes an uber, since her magic is way stronger there.)

Even if you don't buy my interdimensional thing, it isn't really necessary, as Zoom already has the advantage in this fight.

Why send the same uber against both ubers? That's a bit blitzy. Long story short, I wouldn't have picked this matchup, and it's written with almost everybody out of character. Zoom doesn't plan ahead, Zatanna somehow knows that Zoom will come for her instead of trusting in Flash's ability to hold him off for awhile (those superspeed fights usually do end up taking quite a long time, even in normalspeed time), and Magneto and Brainiac somehow believe that Zoom's tracker stopping means he's anything but down?

I don't know how you can complain about it being "blitzy" when I let your character take him out super-easily. Yes, I wrote Zoom as a bit stupid here, because otherwise once he beats Flash the rest of your team would be down in less than a second. No one else on your squad has superspeed except Apollo, and he's not remotely fast enough to touch Zoom. So yeah, I under-rated my own guys on purpose for the sake of making things more competitive, which I think I have the right to do.

I don't buy that Zoom's fights with Flash take a long time in real-world time. They take a lot of pages of a comic, but everyone else is basically frozen like a statue as they run by them. And we're talking fights where they circled the globe -- in this confined environment, it'd be even quicker.

And yes, of course Magneto realizes Zoom is beaten when he stops moving. Having him say "It means he's found her" was just my pseudo-dramatic way of saying "It means Zatanna just kicked his ass." Sorry if this wasn't clear.

He moves superfast. He doesn't have to be invisible.No one can see him coming if he doesn't want them to. All Apollo has to do is go at top speed, and he'll rip Magneto's head off--exactly what he did in my scenario.

At the very least, the invisibility-tactic was to stop him from being seen by Zoom, who is much faster than Apollo. If Apollo has even Flash-level speed on top of his other powers, then he's misranked as a medium. You have him as a med, you have to use him as a med. The same reason I'm not having my med-level Magneto just freeze all your characters in place by redirecting blood from their brains, something uber-level Magneto can readily do.

As for Apollo ripping Magneto's head off -- don't be absurd. Magneto's shields, even '60s Magneto who was even weaker than the '70s & '80s Magneto I have, was capable of blocking at least a few shots from Thor before his shields would fail. He'd have his shields up at the start of the fight, so there's no way they wouldn't be up when Apollo gets there.

Doesn't matter. Magneto can't see at superspeed.
...
Again, Apollo's faster. If that trick even works on him, he's out of there MUCH faster. But as with Zoom, Mags doesn't even survive this long.
...
Mere moments later, Apollo has freed himself and is baring down on Magneto in hot pursuit.
...
Again, the moment Apollo is in hot pursuit, that's the moment Magneto's dead as a doornail.

Magneto is damn fast with his powers, fast enough to deal with some superspeedsters like Quicksilver. I think you're making Apollo's speed out to be more like Superman level, in which case he's not a medium at all. But OK, for the sake of argument let's say Apollo is able to fight way, way, way faster than Magneto can think. Magneto still has his forcefield up to start the fight, and any medium level character would need at least a full second to pound through his field. Which is all the time Ambrose Chase needs to slow him down. And once he's slowed down, Magneto can immediately have the Phoenix-killing gun blast him. He could start the battle standing right beside it if he wants, because my team knows it's there and yours doesn't. I added a little more back-and-forth because I didn't believe Apollo should be as fast as you make him, but really, it doesn't matter.

Magneto's forcefield is already in place before the battle starts -- you're not just zooming in and tearing his head off. To me, that was the most implausible part of your writeup -- even more so than my team not using any teamwork and just fighting unfavorable one-on-one fights.

To me, a more reasonable strategy for your team would have been for Apollo to keep Magneto occupied while Elijah Snow freezes him (because "heat-subtraction" doesn't really seem like the sort of thing you can block with a forcefield.) I don't really see why you expect all the fights to be one-on-ones.

Zatanna's immediate second step should be to sever that Brainiac/Doomsday connection: Doomsday/Brainiac was never a stable connection. Why wasn't Zatanna's first order of business, after getting him off balance, to cut that connection and turn Doomsday loose?

As I said in my post writeup commentary, Zatanna really shouldn't even have been able to speak a spell before Doomsday splattered her, given that Darkchylde can port him in right next to her. Deathstroke was too fast for Zatanna in Identity Crisis, and Doomsday is about a million times faster. So once again I'm making allowances for your team by having her get in any attack at all -- but I still played it that she was too rushed to turn Doomsday against my team, which has to be at least a little harder than just trying to freeze him in place or float him away. Also note that just making him brainless probably wouldn't stop him from attacking her, and she needed to do something that would.

He does? If Zoom, moving at impossible speeds, didn't pop that, how's a brick gonna punch through it? Darkchylde should have slashed it immediately. Unfortunately, she didn't think to do that.

Darkchylde could have slashed it, but I wrote her as occupied with Elijah Snow. Note that not only am I having my team make more use of teamwork than you did, I'm even having your team make more use of teamwork.

As I said, I only let Zatanna take out Zoom to try to give your guys a fighting chance. Really, am I convinced she could block a Zoom-speed impact? Absolutely not. I'm even less convinced she could create a forcefield capable of holding off Doomsday, who in this incarnation has trashed the whole JLA. Are you honestly telling me you think Zatanna can make Doomsday-stopping forcefields? I'd sure like to see the issue where she does it.

Snow can do that trick awful fast. I don't see her being able to do that and stay above freezing to a cube. Furthermore, I hate to be a stickler, but she's leaving the battlefield, and that really seems cheap to me. It's not part of a trick or a tactic, it's just a cheap escape. Still, I'll give it to you, since she apparently just jumped over to Batman. Not much of an escape.

Exactly, she didn't leave the battlefield, just ported to a different part of it. And anyway, as I've said, we've allowed people to stray from the battlefield before -- Zatanna included.

Anyway, if she'd been killed by Snow instead of by Batman, it wouldn't change the outcome of my writeup one bit.

This is yet another example of a plan that would work, but requires just way too many steps to be executed. Simplify, simplify.

What you call simplifying I call having my team fight without good strategy or teamwork. Potato, Po-tah-to, I guess.

Tim's not that dumb. Furthermore, with no remaining teammates, he doesn't need her to do that. Bottom line, he knows what she can do. He's not going to give her a single chance. He just blows her to kingdom come right there.

In my writeup, Tim is the one with no teammates at this point, not Darkchylde. Which is why he makes what I admitted was a desperation ploy, since Darkchylde has the power to eliminate Doomsday but Tim doesn't. Ultimately, I had Tim kill Darkchylde but get taken out by Doomsday, which is perfectly reasonable.

1) A lot of good plans, but the setup is just way too much. There are too many steps in the plan, which means something IS going to go wrong. Plus, those steps are, in most cases, highly improbable, and at times ignore the realities of the characters.

Personally, I feel like the only time I "ignored the realities of the characters" was in having your team put up that good a fight. In particular, Zoom and Doomsday would both be much harder for Zatanna to deal with, given that she can only act at the speed of speech and they're far faster. And not everything that happened was necessarily planned out by my team in advance, but they just used good teamwork and strategy and adapted to the things their opponents threw at them. Much more plausible than having them all split up and try to fight one-on-one.

2) This battle is NOT going to go as planned. Fights never do. It's important to take into account that organic aspect of a fight. My scenario is more organic, as is my interpretation of your scenario.

And who is better equipped to adapt when things don't go according to plan? The team that knows their opponents better, that knows the battleground better, that's faster, that's more mobile . . . all of which is my team.

3) I think my characters are underwritten. While it's true that you make more concessions to my team than I do to yours, I write your characters as simply having been jumped by better players. You write my characters making fundamental mistakes that they wouldn't make. On the contrary, I can't think of a moment in my writing of Doomsday/Brainiac, Zoom, Magneto, or Chase, that had them act in a way that ran counter to the way they usually would. I'm not as sure about Darkchylde--you already know I don't know much about her. But given what I could find in a short time, I think I wrote her fair and square too.

Oh come on -- you had my team splitting up when they're much more formidible working together. You had most of my team not really doing anything for a good chunk of your writeup except looking for your guys and then getting ambushed by them. I think I gave both our teams more credit than you did in terms of using their intelligence and employing teamwork and strategy. You wrote it as a series of one-on-one matches, with the only assist from a teammate being Batman somehow being able to time a gunshot to hit someone who can move faster than the nerve impulse travels from Batman's brain to his trigger finger -- and who could outrun the bullet anyway.

As for my team "getting jumped by better players": Zoom is faster than your faster guy. Doomsday is faster than the rest of your team. Darkchylde can teleport. We know the battlefield far better. We know your team better (since you have minimal information on Magneto and Darkchylde). And somehow my team is the one getting "jumped" and taken off guard?

4) Bottom line, my team takes either one of these matchup scenarios.

Bottom line, I disagree.

 

[XFanTim]

Reply to Aristotle's Comments (Part 2)

In this situation, I don't think it makes a huge difference. Pre-Fatal Attractions Magneto and Darkchylde can both be counteracted with a base knowledge of what their powers are. Case in point: I basically knew jack-squat about Darkchylde when I developed a preliminary strategy against her. Then I went and researched her as well as I could, and as far as I can tell, that strategy--developed with no knowledge of the character--remained workable after research. If I can come up with it, so can Batman.

Actually, you had your team make specific use of knowledge they wouldn't actually have -- namely that Darkchylde's sword disrupts magic.

Also, I feel that my writeup did a pretty good job of illustrating how your teams lack of knowledge could work against them.

Superspeed. Bart Allen is the only DCU speedster who could retain knowledge gained at superspeed. You know how fast he moves--you referenced it in your writeup. He could find out pretty much anything you'd want to know about the Blue Area in 24 hours. That's practically an eternity to a full-speed Bart Allen.

He can gain knowledge of the terrain, sure, but he's not going to learn that some ancient looking weapon can be powered up to fully functional, because he doesn't have the power to do it. No one on your team does.

Also note that Zoom will retain anything he learns at "superspeed", because his speed works totally differently -- in his reference frame, it's just as if he's learning things at a normal pace. Superspeed, normal speed, it makes no difference, because his brain doesn't actually have to work any faster than normal. It's just faster from everyone else's perspective. So he's as effective at scouting the area -- only he's actually more effective since my team knows what they're looking for.

Why's that not enough for my guys to deal with them?[/B] Magneto controls metal and electromagnetism? In my writeup, we very quickly saw what extent of control he has. And the best way to deal with it was to sneak up behind him at superspeed and rip his head off.

As I've stated, you blatantly underestimated the strength of Magneto's forcefield. Your team might try it, because they don't know how strong his shield is -- which sets Apollo up perfectly to be slowed by Ambrose and then taken out like I wrote it. That's exactly what I mean about the disadvantage of not knowing your opponents.

As for Darkchylde, what's to know? Zatanna's completely in touch with magic.[/B] She could figure out whatever minor details were left out. The glaring omission is what a soulsword is, but I'm confident that Zatanna could figure that out via magical scrying

In past seasons, we might have allowed something like that, but lately we've been pretty strict about not overwriting the mages. Having Zatanna just scry and learn everything about her opponents wouldn't be allowed. And besides, if she's so good at scrying, why doesn't the JLA just have her scry and give them the locations of every supervillian hiding out throughout the world. Why not just have her scry to find out who killed Sue Dibny. Scrying isn't that heavily used in the comics, and it shouldn't be here.

And you can't tell me that whether or not she knows Darkchylde has a sword that counters magic isn't a big deal. She's a mage, going up against someone whose weapon neutralizes magic, and she doesn't know it!

Just because they don't know his hidden strengths, that doesn't mean they'll play into them. Not when a superfast kill is all that's necessary.

Again, Magneto would never go down that easy.

Again, Zee could figure out the sword's properties, and the dimensional teleportation is only a factor in your very stilted, inorganic, too-set-up fight between Flash and Zoom. What we don't know really doesn't hurt us this time.

Again, she wouldn't figure it out until it's used against her, and that's all the opening Doomsday needs. (And again, I'm being generous by not having him pummel through her defenses on his own faster than she can cast a spell. Far lesser speed has defeated Zatanna before.)

As for Flash and Zoom, Zoom has the advantage anyway, I just used the interdimensional thing to make it a bit more interesting. And what you call "too set up" I call "having a strategy".

Doesn't matter. He always loses because he doesn't know what to do with his speed. That's how it goes down in the comics, and that's how it'll go down in my scenario, or in yours.

Or, he kicks Flash's ass until Flash gets a speed boost from a bunch of other speedsters just to be able to keep up, and then it's basically even.

Look, I specified the arc I'm taking him from. This is Zoom before he gets stuck in his own time warp, develops a stutter, and arguably is never the same. Have you read Blitz? You're making him out to be blatantly inferior to Flash, when the exact opposite is shown right there on the page.

Creative, maybe, but also very stilted and unlikely. If Zoom tries to keep Flash in one place, Flash will pick up on it.

When did I ever have Zoom try to keep him in place? They were both on the move, and when they passed a hidden portal, Zoom sent them both tumbling through. My takedown of Flash specifically exploited the fact that he was moving at full speed (and without the speedforce, he couldn't stop himself).

Except he can't fly, can he?

Doomsday doesn't need to fly when he has Darkchylde to teleport him wherever he wants to go. Yet another reason it's stupid for my team to all split up and go off on their own.

Aside from the forcefield that was still up, which withstood an object moving at impossible speeds? It could withstand Doomsday.

I deliberately underwrote Zoom at this point to give your team a chance, which is my perogative since he's my character. That doesn't mean I'm obligated to underwrite Doomsday.

Where has Zatanna ever shown Doomsday-blocking forcefields? Nowhere, that's where.

She figures it out pretty damn quick I imagine. And in my scenario, she has time to get a feel for what's going on in the area, mystically.

She figures it out when it's used against her, and by then she's screwed. She's already at a massive speed disadvantage against my ubers, even without Darkchylde creating an opening.

And you're making Zatanna better at magical info-gathering than she is in the comics, and better than we allow in the DTL. Sorry, but we simply don't permit you to say "I magically find out the details of all my opponents powers and weapons", whether backwards, forwards, or any other way.

To the contrary. It wasn't enough because my characters were written as blundering idiots.

Why, because my characters didn't waltz right into their attacks without using their speed or forcefields to avoid them, and only after pointlessly splitting up and wandering around the battlefield with no strategy whatsoever. Yeah, I made your team idiots.

 

[XFanTim]

ATTENTION: I'm going out of town this weekend, so I'm not sure if I'll be able to get back on here and reply to any further commentary Aristotle has before voting. But I think I've made my opinion pretty clear -- at this point I'm happy to let the voters make their own judgements. I just don't want anyone to think that if I don't reply further, it means I'm agreeing with him. It doesn't.

Aristotle -- Again I'd like to say that I enjoyed reading your writeup, and thought it was a good effort, despite the fact that I was able to take issue with some of the specifics. Don't take the snarkiness of some of my commentary to mean I thought it was all crap -- but of course it's my job to criticize. Anyway, whether you end up winning this fight or not (and until the voters weigh in, who really knows?) I think you'll do well in the league.

 

[Aristotle]

Aristotle -- Again I'd like to say that I enjoyed reading your writeup, and thought it was a good effort, despite the fact that I was able to take issue with some of the specifics. Don't take the snarkiness of some of my commentary to mean I thought it was all crap -- but of course it's my job to criticize. Anyway, whether you end up winning this fight or not (and until the voters weigh in, who really knows?) I think you'll do well in the league.

Likewise, my snark was not intended to convey disdain.

I'll be putting up another round of responses here within the hour.

 

[Aristotle]

Mistake #1: Your team doesn’t know Darkchylde can disrupt Magic. Because your team doesn’t have any Marvel characters, none of them know anything about Darkchylde. You only get the basic description of her powers I provided – namely that she has teleportational portals, minor magic, and a magic blade called the soul sword. So your characters should have been surprised when she neutralized Zatanna’s spells.

That's true, and I actually meant to change that so that they don't figure it out until the very end, when Zee takes stock of the situation before they charge in. However, I still would have sent Zee against Doomsday because she's the only character with a hope of stopping him. And I would have sent her in the air to avoid running into anybody like Zoom, even though Flash took care of Zoom.

To reiterate, you have no reason to suspect that the soul sword is such a serious threat.

As an aside on that, I don't think "Soul Sword" is enough of an official description. At first, I decided to just pretend that they would know what Soul Sword meant, because you really should have to explain your team's powers, but in the end I realized it wasn't necessary--I just forgot to change the writeup. Even if the team doesn't know exactly what Darkchylde can do, they know that Zee needs to be freed up long enough to take out Doomsday--that means no magical interference can be allowed, no matter how lightweight, so we still send Snow to stop her.

Mistake #2: I don’t think the strategy you’ve laid out for my team makes much sense. Magneto is going to waste his time fighting Batman, when he has the power to take out one of your higher-level characters like Zatanna or Apollo?

Actually, if Brainiac tells him anything at all about Zatanna, and if Chase knows anything about Apollo, which he should, Mags knows he can't do **** to either one. Apollo moves WAY too quick for him, and Zatanna's got magical protections that will make Mags' best attacks look piss-poor.

Besides, my team should make beating your ubers a priority – if we can take out your ubers, Doomsday would easily run roughshod over the rest of your squad.

Of course they should. That's why Zoom takes off running immediately, and Doomsday/Brainy starts looking around for Zee. It's true, I split them up, but villains are notoriously hard to team up, and you spent no time explaining why these guys work together, or want to work together.

Even with his time manipulation, Chase probably isn’t going to be able to get close to a speedster like Flash without help. I only had him getting close to Apollo because Apollo was focused on Magneto.

But Apollo wouldn't have to focus more than a second, before Mags was down.

In general, having my regs fight your higher levels while my higher levels waste time on your regs is just unrealistically stacking things against me. In my writeup I went with the much more logical format of ubers fighting ubers, meds fighting meds, and regs fighting regs.

First of all, as I noted, your scenario is TOO logical--fights are organic, and do not go as planned. Second, I didn't do much mismatching--Zee took out Doomsday, Flash took out Zoom with help from Batman, Apollo took out Mags, Snow neutralized Darkchylde long enough to get help. The only mismatch between my characters and yours was Flash on Chase, which happened because there were no other enemies to fight. The only other mismatch I force on you is Doomsday vs. Magneto, which is actually the fairest way I could have done it--having interrupted Brainy's control, Zee's mind-controlling him away from my players, so I take him to the highest possible player on your team still standing.

Also, why wouldn’t I have Darkchylde helping against Zatanna, when she’s the only one who can neutralize magic. My team knows Zatanna is the biggest threat, they know Darkchylde is their ace in the hole against her, and yet they send her against Elijah Snow?

This goes back to the situation of villain teams not working well together. They're going to split up, they're going to be hard to corral together, they're going to go for individual matchups. And the team should know that Darkchylde's magic is no match for Zatanna's in this dimension, so they won't send her up there alone. Now I can grant that they might have had her port back as soon as Zee was engaged, but it happened too fast for Brainiac to be able to send a message--suddenly his control of Doomsday is severed and he's trapped in a giant meat puppet. Mags also doesn't know what's happened. Darkchylde just never engages Zee--and even if they had messaged her, she's stuck fighting Snow.

 

[Aristotle]

Mistake #3: You had Batman shoot Zoom.Even with a speedboost from Flash, Batman isn’t remotely fast enough to see a full speed Zoom, much less shoot him. In the Blitz story arc (and I did specify I have the Zoom from that story), Zoom and Flash were actually circling the globe multiple times faster than any hero could react. They actually ran right by Superman and he was frozen like a statue, unable to do anything to help. If Superman can’t so much as hit Zoom with a shot of heat vision as he runs by, you think Batman would be able to? Please note there’s a strict limit on how much speed Flash can lend Batman without bumping him up from regular to medium – at most you could make him about as fast as Marvel’s Quicksilver (pre-powerup) – in other words, way slower than Superman.

Fair enough, I grant you that, we revert to your scenario--but once again, the flash-bang on Zoom would WORK. Flash-bangs work on TRAINED SOLDIERS--you think it won't work on some creep in spandex? The flash-bang works, Flash's razorang hits home, Zoom still drops.

And even if I buy that Flash could somehow put a decent amount of distance between himself and Zoom – despite the fact that you acknowledge Zoom is faster

First of all, Zoom isn't THAT much faster than Flash--all Wally had to do was "push himself" to catch up and beat Zoom in Rogue War. Second, I grant you your Flash vs. Zoom fight, with the exception that the flash-bang works and Zoom goes down.

Mistake #4: Zoom letting the bullet fly through him, and being hurt by it.

Again, I've accepted your scenario, but with a different outcome.

Mistake #5: Brainiac leaving himself open to attack from Zatanna. First, you have Brainiac standing around trying to use telepathy, when as in fact it’s been ruled by Wiegeabo that I’m not allowed to have him use telepathy while in Doomsday’s body, since his mental energy is presumably focused on controlling Doomsday. (Note that I didn’t list telepathy in his powers above.) So that wouldn’t happen.

He's not "standing around" trying to use telepathy. I didn't mean to imply that he was "standing around." But you're right, he can't. So he's just looking for people then.

Second, my team would surely realize they have to take Zatanna out as quickly as possible. She’s a mage in the most famous superhero team in the DCU – so my guys know who she is. Even if they don’t know everything she can do, Darkchylde knows enough about magic to know how dangerous a high-level magic user is. And yet Doomsday lets her get the drop on him.

What can he do? Tell me how he could have stopped that from happening? He could barely maintain control of Doomsday with regular telepathy coming at him--magic? He can't do a thing about magic.

The only sensible thing would be for Darkchylde to (1) stick by Doomsday’s side to defend my teams greatest weapon against magic

Again, you've presented no good reasons for this team to work together. These aren't just a bunch of villains, they're a couple of ambiguities and three villains with VERY different motives. Why's this team give a **** about each other?

port him straight to Zatanna as quick as we can find her. Which would be pretty quick given our superior familiarity with the battlefield. And once Doomsday does get near Zatanna, he’s fast enough to take her out before she can get out a spell.

If Zatanna takes to the air, and Flash takes out Zoom, they don't find her. And even if Darkchylde WOULD have found her, Zatanna would eat her for breakfast with magic blasts. You hit somebody hard enough and fast enough with the team of Zatanna and Apollo, and they won't have time to cut anything with a sword, or port away. You're lucky Darkcylde DIDN'T find Zee, or the fight would have been over even quicker.

 

[Aristotle]

The fact that my team has left Doomsday undefended against magic and let Zatanna get the drop on him makes no sense.

They're a bunch of individuals, not a team. My team has an effective leader and are of a relatively singular purpose--they are heroes at any cost. Your guys are far too disparate.

While my team’s two biggest guns are going down, you have Magneto basically struggling to find your team.

Your ubers go down in about a minute. Flash and Zoom happens FAST. Zatanna and Doomsday happens pretty fast too. It's nothing against Mags--who COULD find anyone to fight inside a minute, without superspeed. That's a CITY.

but if we did do it your way, why didn’t he stop Batman from shooting Zoom with a bullet.

First, I've granted you your scenario. Second, can Mags stop something as small as a bullet from the opposite end of a city? That exchange happened inside five seconds.

Again, Batman can’t be amped up past the max speed for a reg, which is still plenty slow for Magneto to stop. Not that the bullet would ever hit Zoom anyway, for the reasons I gave above. But Magneto should have done something by now other than search fruitlessly for his opponents.

HE HAD NO TIME. Flash takes out Zoom immediately (again, even in your scenario Flash would win because your overwrote Zoom.) That's a matter of seconds. Magically scrying for Doomsday, Zatanna finds him in probably fifteen/twenty seconds, and has him taken care of inside a minute. How, exactly, did Magneto get ahold of anybody inside a minute?

My team also seems to have split up and allowed themselves to be picked off one by one, which is not something they’re stupid enough to do.

Already explained. I had them react as villains often do—alone, mostly concerned for themselves and their own success and well-being, and easily tempted into things like “speed races” and fighting amongst each other. These sorts of negative behaviors are only increased by the presence of a team unknown to one another, from several universes, and rightfully a bit suspicious. You talk as if your guys being from multiple universes is a good thing--but these are ambiguities and villains. Not knowing each other makes them all the more serpentine and mistrusting, which is something they have a problem with in the first place.

Furthermore, look at their powers: Doomsday, Magneto, and Chase all have powers that have dangerous spillover. Doomsday is a destructive creature, and Magneto often makes a mess as well. Chase affects a wide enough area as well. If the team stays together as a group, they're just as likely to interfere with each other as they are to help. Since these guys are all pretty solid players, they assume that there's no need to stay together when they may be a more effective fighting machine if they divide the opposing team and conquer it.

Yes, I know you have her off “stalemating” Elijah Snow, except that that’s an incredible waste of her abilities.

Of course it's a waste of her abilities. The whole point of getting the drop on her was to waste her abilities.

The whole reason I put a teleporter on my team was so they could put my other characters in the positions they need to be to take out there foes

One of the reasons I targeted her with Snow.

For Darkchylde to ignore her main power, teleportation, and to just go one-on-one with Snow makes no sense.

You're giving her too much credit. She's being assaulted by temperatures cold enough to turn a human to ice, too fast for her to react. If she lets her guard down to try and cast another spell, she's going down.

if Zatanna did cause him to go rogue, she could still port him away from her teammates and back towards her opponents.

You miss the part where Doomsday ISN'T rogue--he's controlled.

She’s the best person on my team to deal with a rogue Doomsday, and instead she’s off fighting a pointless one-on-one while Magneto has to deal with him.

Again, Doomsday's not rogue, and again, there's a reason we tried to keep her occupied.

 

[Aristotle]

Again, you have my team fighting as individuals even though (1) Magneto, Darkchylde, and Ambrose all have prior experience being part of a team, and (2) Magneto, Doomsday-Brainiac, and Darkchylde have already fought together in one of my previous matches.

1)They don't have experience being part of the SAME team. 2)It might have been nice to see something in the way of prep-time and strategy. Furthermore, if you didn't demonstrate why they would work well together in Week 2, you should have been called on it then too.

Mistake #8: There’s NO WAY Magneto goes down that easy.

He's got to consciously put that forcefield up, and he's still trying to get offensive with Doomsday, trying to stop the big guy by throwing big stuff at him. He may have something of a forcefield up, but it'll be aimed at Doomsday, not at his backside, where his senses are telling him there are no threats.

Plus, you have Apollo surprising Magneto. As I pointed out, Magneto can sense electromagnetic energy, and Apollo is solar powered. (Sunlight is of course just a form of electromagnetic radiation.) Even facing Doomsday, there’s no way Magneto would be so completely freaked out as to not even sense Apollo approaching. To Magneto, he’d be about as conspicuous as a bright pink elephant.

If a bright pink elephant is moving at speeds too fast for the human mind to comprehend, I still think I wouldn't see it. I mean, there is no shade of pink so bright that it transcends superspeed.

I do think he’d do something other than spend the whole fight struggling to find your team, and then get taken out after my whole team is decimated.

Remember, your ubers and your med got taken out VERY quickly, probably in a matter of less than five minutes. It's no shame on Chase that he didn't find anyone. It was a quick fight.

You basically assume my guys can’t do squat until your team is ready to deal with them.

I took pains NOT to write it that way. Let's look at a timeline:
0-5 seconds: Flash gets Zoom (we're going with your scenario, but my more realistic outcome)
0-60 seconds: Zatanna finds and deals with Doomsday/Brainiac
1-3 minutes: Magneto engages Doomsday, Apollo takes him down, Zatanna neutralizes Doomsday.
3-4 minutes: Chase taken down by Flash.
4-10 minutes: The team takes down Darkchylde.

Nobody on your team is just "waiting around." Remember, we have a detailed map of the city too, and no matter how much your guys learned about it in school, it's a CITY. You could live in a city your whole life and still not know everything about it. We have a good enough working knowledge of the city to find your guys quickly and deal with them in a fashion superior to their efforts.

Again, why not have Ambrose stick with one of my other characters and aid them in their fights, rather than just wandering around and hoping to stumble across someone he can beat. He knows how to function as a member of a team – he should be using some teamwork.

I don't recall Ambrose Chase being so cool with out-and-out villainy. He's good friends with ELIJAH SNOW. I don't think he likes working with these guys at all, not until you give me a good reason.

 

[Aristotle]

They shouldn’t have known it at the start of the battle, and there’s nothing about her fight with Elijah Snow that would give that away.

What gives it away is Zatanna surveying the mysticism going on in the battlefield. She's very in touch with magic.

Not that she’s going to beat your whole team once Magneto, Zoom, and Doomsday have gone down like a bunch of chumps.

They didn't go down like chumps. Zoom got bested by Flash--the Flashes have ALWAYS known how to use superspeed more effectively than Hunter. That's why they always win. If this was the OLD Zoom, it would be a different story--that one's a smart one. But this one always loses because he's dumber 'n dog**** with superspeed. Doomsday got bested in about the same way he would eventually be beaten in Doomsday Wars. It still works. Brainy just can't keep that tight of control on Doomsday. etc., etc. They didn't go down like chumps, they just went down.

Anyway, the bottom line is you don’t have my team functioning as a team

Already explained why: there's no reason for them to act like a team. You've got three VERY different kinds of villains, an ambiguous sometime X-Man, and a guy who, if anything, is an ambiguous anti-hero.

you have them all using their powers in one-on-ones.

Fights don't go like that. However, I have now conceded Flash vs. Zoom instead of Flash + Batman vs. Zoom, and Zatanna took Doomsday on her own. There are SOME one-on-ones, but a fight doesn't go down that way.

You don’t even have them choosing the most sensible one-on-one matchups.

I've explained why I think they were sensible.

You don’t have them using the fact that they no more about their opponents than their opponents know about them.

That same aspect is their downfall--they're villains AND they're strangers. They've got no trust.

You don’t have them using the fact that they no more about the battlefield.

Yeah, but largely, neither do you. That's because it's not that big of an advantage. It's not even home floor advantage. It's just, "uh, I've been here before." Not enough.

Brainiac, Magneto, Ambrose Chase . . . this is a smart team.

With no reason to act like a team.

Which is why, as much as I enjoyed your writeup from a storytelling perspective, I don’t think it would go down like that.

My conclusion, after this first round of debating, is that Flash takes down Zoom using the flash-bang and the razorang. Other than that, the fight goes down pretty much as I wrote it, and I remain unconvinced that anything else would go differently. I think my writeup writes my characters about the way they're written usually, and except for Darkchylde, who I don't know nearly enough about, I feel I can confidently say I did the same for your team. Obviously, as the writer for my team, I may have given my team a BIT of a strategic edge--but that's the point of writing. To win. And I didn't make your team a bunch of ******s throwing ice cubes at the sun. Not saying you did that to my team, but you did make them pretty f'n stupid.

 

[XFanTim]

Well, here I am again. Now I look like a liar for saying I'm going out of town -- I really am about to leave, but I have just enough time to post a brief reply:

"Soul sword" not enough of a description? I'm supposed to keep it somewhat brief so as not to totally invalidate the advantage of characters having prior knowledge. And it's not even Darkchylde's main power -- teleportation is. Maybe I should have said "soul sword, a magical weapon" but it still doesn't help you much. Also note: that description has been up since I posted my lineup, so plenty of time to contest it.

Magneto couldn't hurt your ubers? I disagree. My magnetic dust attack seems reasonable to use against Zatanna -- she needs to breathe after all. Again, she's been hurt by Deathstroke -- she's nowhere near invulnerable.

My team wouldn't work together? (1) Most of them have been in teams before. (2) Villains are often willing to work together so long as it remains advantageous to them. A fairly standard assumption for this league is they've been offered some sort of prize or incentive to make them compete. (3) They've worked together in previous weeks of this competition, and they remember those experiences for this battle. That's also why I didn't think I needed to address it now.

Flash-bang attack would stop Zoom? His recovery happens in superspeed just like everything else. And I had him use his speed to get out of the way of what Flash was throwing and immediately strike back with an omni-directional attack (metal shards thrown in all directions) -- i.e., one that didn't need to be aimed -- to keep Flash occupied while he recovered his sight. I still think that's reasonable.

Anyway, your touting the flash-grenade attack just goes to show I really was having your team use intelligent strategy.

Me giving Zoom too much credit? I think you're not giving him enough. He's more than a match for Flash, especially at the point I have him from. I guess the voters can decide who's assessment is right.

Doomsday couldn't do anything against Zatanna's flight/magic? He could with Darkchylde helping him, which is why it's so important that you not neglect my teams ability to work together. And all Darkchylde has to do is give Doomsday the smallest opening, and he can take Zatanna down -- she doesn't have enhanced speed or durability, so if he gets close to her its all over.

You have her controlling Doomsday? I understood it as you just booting Brainiac out, which I concede might be possible if she got the chance (I just don't think she would). Controlling Doomsday is another matter. Even high-level telepaths -- who specialize in controlling people -- have had trouble controlling Doomsday. I'm not convinced Zatanna could manage this while in the middle of trying to fend him off.

Also, when has Zatanna ever shown the ability to insta-control anyone? If I remember right, when she altered Doctor Light's mind she already had him unconscious and it still seemed to take her several minutes to do. And she didn't convert him to their side, just kind of made him dumber. Fact is, there's no reason to think that she's that good at mind control.

You misunderstand my point about Darkchylde and Elijah Snow. She'd never enter that fight when she's more useful helping Doomsday against Zatanna. She knows the battlefield as well as anyone and she can teleport, so she'd have no problem choosing who she matches up against. If Snow wants to attack he'd only be able to do it once she and Doomsday engaged Zatanna, as in my writeup. He can't hope to get close to her until Doomsday's attention is otherwise occupied, and besides she'd port them to Zatanna right away.

If you want to say Elijah Snow should have killed her at the point I had them fight, rather than it falling to Batman to do it, that's fine with me. By then the damage to Zatanna was done.

Magneto and Chase getting in each others way?No way, they both have a high-degree of control over their powers, Magneto especially. They won't be accidentally hitting each other.

Magneto's forcefield pointing the wrong way? Nope, it extends all the way around him, and as I've said he'd have it up at the battle's start. Even with Apollo's speed, he's not instantaneously getting through Mags shield, which gives my team a chance to strike back. Again, here's where teamwork is essential.

My team not waiting around? What did Ambrose do before he was taken out? What did Magneto do until Doomsday was turned against him? If you make the timeline compressed enough, it doesn't seem like that much waiting, but it doesn't change the fact that your team got to initiate virtually every fight. This despite the fact that my team knows the battlefield better, that my team on the whole is faster (at least in the ubers), and that my team has a teleporter. If anything, it should be my team taking the fight to yours, not vice versa.

Ambrose Chase wouldn't work with them?Ambrose isn't evil, but he's not a hero either. What's important for my purposes is that he's willing to kill when necessary, which he certainly is. Anyway, he doesn't know much about his teammates and their past evil deeds, since he's from a different universe. And they'd be smart enough to keep certain details to themselves unless they're sure he'd react favorably.

Besides, to hear Magneto tell it he's the champion for poor oppressed mutants in the Marvel Universe, and Ambrose isn't going to know any better.

Anyway, if people are absolutely unwilling to buy that my team would cooperate with any semblance of teamwork, despite them all being willing to use ruthless methods, most of them having been parts of teams for long periods of time, and them having already spent some battles together in this thing, then I guess they'll probably vote against me. But if you're not willing to buy into a villain team ever using decent teamwork, we might as well not even have any villain teams in this thing.

If you do buy that my team could work together to some degree, rather than just instantly splitting up and wandering off in search of their opponents, then I think my writeup is the more plausible one. Given how badly Aristotle has them getting thrashed after splitting up, you'd think they'd be smart enough to work together out of self-preservation if nothing else.

OK, now I really do have to go. I'll be back in town late tomorrow night, but probably won't be on here again until Sunday.

 

[XFanTim]

And I didn't make your team a bunch of ******s throwing ice cubes at the sun. Not saying you did that to my team, but you did make them pretty f'n stupid.

One more thing -- how the hell did I make Aristotle's team stupid. Seriously. I tried to come up with good strategies for them. I even had them pick off a few of my guys. He basically had my whole team get ambushed one after the other.

He's also the one who basically flat out said Zoom is an idiot who doesn't know how to use his power. And who had Magneto getting his head ripped off in half a second. How the hell am I the one making his team look stupid?

Also, Zatanna being "in touch with magic" doesn't mean she instantly knows exactly what the soul sword does. In general, I think he's having Zatanna do some things that it just isn't established that she can do. She's powerful, sure, but she can't do whatever she wants or she wouldn't be legal to use. I'm not convinced she could immediately know everything she needs, and I'm not convinced that she could immediately take control of Doomsday and turn him against his own team. I would have objected more sooner, but originally I thought she was just expelling Brainiac, not taking control.

Oh, and this just occured to me, but he's mixing heros like Zatanna and Apollo with cold-blooded anti-heros like the Titans of Tomorrow. And my team is the one that wouldn't hold together?

Now I'm really gone.

 

[Aristotle]

Yeah, but Zoom can run faster. He's not getting far ahead of him. Vibro-bullet hasn't been proven against someone with Zoom's form of superspeed. And as I've said, even Batman with his reflexes amped to the max allowed for a reg isn't fast enough to hit Zoom going full speed, which is exactly what he would be doing in a fight with Flash. And Flash can't make a bullet as fast as Zoom, just like he can't make himself as fast as Zoom.

As I've noted, I've switched to your scenario.

I chose the burst of light attack because it's something Zoom probably couldn't dodge, unlike a bullet fired by a reg. I was having Batman use what I thought was the better strategy.

You're exactly right. Zoom COULDN'T dodge that, nor could he recover so quickly. He would be disoriented, and he would go down.

Also, Batman isn't the only one capable of arming his
teammates. My team would do their best to give Zoom an advantage, too.

Sadly for Zoom, he let Bart shoot first. That's your writing, not
mine.

You could say the same in comparing Zoom to Wally West -- Zoom's not a fighter, blah blah blah. And yet he was more than a match for Wally until Wally got a speed boost to match him, and was still practically a dead-even match for Wally afterwards. Future Bart may be superior to Wally, but I don't bye that Bart is that far superior to Wally. Wally wasn't close to on par with Zoom without an additional boost.

He was only better than Wally with PURE SPEED. With intelligence on how to USE that speed, Wally was always better. Bart, trained by Tim, would be presumably even more intelligent, or at least on a par with Wally.

(1) Zoom is deliberately forcing Flash in the direction of the portal, whereas Flash doesn't know it's there so he can't be actively trying to avoid it.

Anyone can see if they're being directed somewhere. And Zoom has never been that good of a fighter. But again, he never makes it here, and I notice you don't talk much about that.

Again, Zoom just doesn't have the reflexes. He's never been shown to have good combat reflexes. When both fighters are moving at superspeed, it essentially brings them to almost the same level, and Zoom isn't that much faster than Bart that he could compensate for bad combat reflexes.

(3) Darkchylde could have made multiple portals, making it even easier for Zoom to get Flash to one.

Zoom still has to have a combat mind. He's never been trained. Bart has. Furthermore, you didn't specify multiple portals. You only said one.

That's not really true. In general, the way I've always
understood the rules is that if you have no active characters left on the
battlefield, then you lose, but you're allowed to stray from the battlefield
if it's natural your powers would lead you there. It's certainly natural in a
battle with Darkchylde, who's an interdimensional teleporter. Anyway, I took the battle to Limbo last week and no one objected then, so I assume it's still legit. (I've also brought up the possibility of Darkchylde taking things to Limbo in the discussion thread without anyone objecting -- the only note was if she goes there herself she becomes an uber, since her magic is way stronger there.)

But it isn't natural for Zoom's powers to take him there.

Even if you don't buy my interdimensional thing, it isn't
really necessary, as Zoom already has the advantage in this fight.

If Zoom had an advantage in a one-on-one with Flash, he wouldn't lose every one-on-one with Flash he's ever had in the comics. He's not smart enough. Flashes have always beat him.

I under-rated my own guys on purpose for the sake of making things more competitive, which I think I have the right to do.

You under-wrote EVERYONE in the fight, which to me invalidates it. No reason to under-write your own guys anymore than you should underwrite mine.

I don't buy that Zoom's fights with Flash take a long time in real-world time. They take a lot of pages of a comic, but everyone else is basically frozen like a statue as they run by them. And we're talking fights where they circled the globe -- in this confined environment, it'd be even quicker.

Actually, most superspeed fights, in a team setting, are underwritten so the speedsters don't finish before everyone else. Look at any team fight with a speedster on a speedster--it goes awhile. However, again, I've conceded your version of the fight, but with a more realistic outcome.

And yes, of course Magneto realizes Zoom is beaten when he stops moving. Having him say "It means he's found her" was just my pseudo-dramatic way of saying "It means Zatanna just kicked his ass." Sorry if this wasn't clear.

Ah, understood.

 

[Aristotle]

At the very least, the invisibility-tactic was to stop him from being seen by Zoom, who is much faster than Apollo.

Fair enough.

If Apollo has even Flash-level speed on top of his other
powers, then he's misranked as a medium.

Quicksilver speed, maybe? I didn't rank him as a med, but that's how he was when I got him. I'm just using him the way I know he is used. He was, I assume, ranked med because that's what everyone thought he should be ranked as.

You have him as a med, you have to use him as a med.

I did. The only character he took out was Mags.

As for Apollo ripping Magneto's head off -- don't be absurd. Magneto's shields, even '60s Magneto who was even weaker than the '70s & '80s Magneto I have, was capable of blocking at least a few shots from Thor before his shields would fail. He'd have his shields up at the start of the fight, so there's no way they wouldn't be up when Apollo gets there.

I've addressed that earlier.

Magneto is damn fast with his powers, fast enough to deal with some superspeedsters like Quicksilver.

From behind, when he has no idea where Apollo is?

I think you're making Apollo's speed out to be more like
Superman level, in which case he's not a medium at all.

Apollo was
ranked as a medium on the merits of him as he has appeared in comics. I am using him as he has appeared in comics.

But OK, for the sake of argument let's say Apollo is able to fight way, way, way faster than Magneto can think. Magneto still has his forcefield up to start the fight, and any medium level character would need at least a full second to pound through his field. Which is all the time Ambrose Chase needs to slow him down. And once he's slowed down, Magneto can immediately have the Phoenix-killing gun blast him. He could start the battle standing right beside it if he wants, because my team knows it's there and yours doesn't. I added a little more back-and-forth because I didn't believe Apollo should be as fast as you make him, but really, it doesn't matter.

But again, the whole fight is written wrong. Apollo moves faster than Chase can react. And Apollo KNOWS who Chase is--they're both WildStorm. He'll do this fight in a way that allows him to pound through the forcefield while staying out of Chase's range. He's smart enough to fight that way. But again, I don't see the fights lining up like this anyway. (And who's complaining about no one-on-ones now? Apollo wins this fight without a discussion, unless you throw in a two-on-one.)

To me, a more reasonable strategy for your team would have been for Apollo to keep Magneto occupied while Elijah Snow freezes him (because "heat-subtraction" doesn't really seem like the sort of thing you can block with a forcefield.) I don't really see why you expect all the fights to be one-on-ones.

That's how YOU wrote the fight, more than me--unless, of course, you were writing three-on-ones, or three-on-twos, or two-on-ones. I wrote my fights much more fairly stacked than yours. Zatanna and Apollo vs. Doomsday, and later Magneto? That's a complex two-on-two. Everything else was basically one-on-one, but in a much more organic way than your one-on-ones were written.

As I said in my post writeup commentary, Zatanna really
shouldn't even have been able to speak a spell before Doomsday splattered her, given that Darkchylde can port him in right next to her. Deathstroke was too fast for Zatanna in Identity Crisis, and Doomsday is about a million times faster.

Again: magical forcefield that YOU had her put up.

Also note that just making him brainless probably wouldn't stop him from attacking her, and she needed to do something that would.

First, he can't fly after her, and she comes at him from the air. Second, she DID do something: she mind-controlled him.

Darkchylde could have slashed it, but I wrote her as occupied with Elijah Snow. Note that not only am I having my team make more use of teamwork than you did, I'm even having your team make more use of teamwork.

Apollo worked with Zee. Batman worked with Flash. ALL FIVE teamed up against a REG. That's teamwork enough for me.

Really, am I convinced she could block a Zoom-speed impact? Absolutely not.

She's a very high-level mage. I think she could. Regardless--that's how YOU wrote her. I wrote her using her powers in a much more believable way, but you decided you were cool with her erecting a forcefield that could stop an object moving impossibly fast--whether that's Zoom or Doomsday, that thing ain't crackin'.

 

[Aristotle]

Are you honestly telling me you think Zatanna can make
Doomsday-stopping forcefields? I'd sure like to see the issue where she does it.

Again, I used Zatanna in a more textually-supported way, but in YOUR writeup, YOU gave her a forcefield that stopped the fastest creature in possibly the entire DCU (now that Bart "I Am The Speed Force" Allen is dead). That'll stop Doomsday too. At least for awhile. Long enough to deal with him.

What you call simplifying I call having my team fight without good strategy or teamwork. Potato, Po-tah-to, I guess.

No, what I call simplifying is the OPPOSITE of what you did. I'm urging you to simplify future writeups--your plans just take too long, and too many steps, to be completed. They wouldn't work that perfectly. My plans are simple, elegant, and effective--the less machinery there is, the less likely it is to get fouled up.

In my writeup, Tim is the one with no teammates at this point, not Darkchylde. Which is why he makes what I admitted was a desperation ploy, since Darkchylde has the power to eliminate Doomsday but Tim doesn't. Ultimately, I had Tim kill Darkchylde but get taken out by Doomsday, which is perfectly reasonable.

Problem is, that in YOUR writeup, you miswrote things. The way I argue/rewrite your writeup is the way I see your writeup turning out, meaning Tim is the one standing tall with five on the floor against one down and out.

but they just used good teamwork and strategy and adapted to the things their opponents threw at them. Much more plausible than having them all split up and try to fight one-on-one.

But you don't demonstrate WHY they should work so well as a team. I just remembered ANOTHER reason they won't work well together--they've got an entire team of leaders and maybe one follower. Brainiac--not accustomed to following. Magneto--a leader. Chase--a leader. Darkchylde--the Sorceress Supreme of her dimension. Zoom--wild
card at best.

And who is better equipped to adapt when things don't go according to plan? The team that knows their opponents better, that knows the battleground better, that's faster, that's more mobile . . . all of which is my team.

Nope, it's the team that knows and trusts EACH OTHER, coming from the same multiverse, often the same universe, and all being of a singular purpose--heroism at any cost.

Oh come on -- you had my team splitting up when they're much more formidible working together.

I defended my decision to do that. Can you defend yours?

You had most of my team not really doing anything for a good chunk of your writeup except looking for your guys and then getting ambushed by them.

Most of the fight took place in four minutes. There's no shame in Mags and Chase finding no one--they never got a chance to move very far.

You wrote it as a series of one-on-one matches, with the only assist from a teammate being Batman somehow being able to time a gunshot to hit someone who can move faster than the nerve impulse travels from Batman's brain to his trigger finger -- and who could outrun the bullet anyway.

Again, I had much more teamwork than that. And my one-on-ones were PLAUSIBLE. You wrote my characters as if they were all dumb enough to get caught in three-on-ones, two-on-ones, three-on-twos, etc.

As for my team "getting jumped by better players": Zoom is faster than your faster guy.

But Flash is BETTER.

Doomsday is faster than the rest of your team.

Again, he's as unstable as a three-legged table. Not a BETTER player.

Darkchylde can teleport.

And Snow prevented that.

 

[Aristotle]

We know the battlefield far better.

It's a city. You really can't know it so well that you could get the drop on us as well as you write it. And even if you did--the way I see your writeup going down, your plans just don't work out. My guys take it.

We know your team better (since you have minimal information on Magneto and Darkchylde). And somehow my team is the one getting "jumped" and taken off guard?

Because my team knows EACH OTHER better.[/quote]

He can gain knowledge of the terrain, sure, but he's not going to learn that some ancient looking weapon can be powered up to fully functional, because he doesn't have the power to do it. No one on your team does.

You only used that once, in a very implausible scenario.

Also note that Zoom will retain anything he learns at
"superspeed", because his speed works totally differently -- in his reference frame, it's just as if he's learning things at a normal pace.

That's true, but I was making the point that the Flash, given an eternity of 24 hours, could learn EVERYTHING about this place, and retain it all.

As I've stated, you blatantly underestimated the strength of Magneto's forcefield. Your team might try it, because they don't know how strong his shield is -- which sets Apollo up perfectly to be slowed by Ambrose and then taken out like I wrote it. That's exactly what I mean about the disadvantage of not knowing your opponents.

Apollo's not dumb. IF you have that forcefield up against Apollo, which I don't concede in my writeup, Apollo hits it once, figures out it's there, and keeps moving. He's still too fast to react to, even for Chase.

Having Zatanna just scry and learn everything about her
opponents wouldn't be allowed.

Not what she did. She learned a
generalized piece of information about a magical item.

And besides, if she's so good at scrying, why doesn't the JLA just have her scry and give them the locations of every supervillian hiding out throughout the world. Why not just have her scry to find out who killed Sue Dibny. Scrying isn't that heavily used in the comics, and it shouldn't be here.

I didn't write her as being able to do that either. But she IS very in touch with magic, and would be able to figure out a generality about a MAGIC item.

And you can't tell me that whether or not she knows Darkchylde has a sword that counters magic isn't a big deal. She's a mage, going up against someone whose weapon neutralizes magic, and she doesn't know it!

Again, the point is to keep ANYONE who uses magic away from Zatanna. She needs to focus.

As for Flash and Zoom, Zoom has the advantage anyway, I just used the interdimensional thing to make it a bit more interesting. And what you call "too set up" I call "having a strategy".

Zoom does NOT have the advantage. He has an advantage in raw speed, but he has never been as proficient with using it.

Or, he kicks Flash's ass until Flash gets a speed boost from a bunch of other speedsters just to be able to keep up, and then it's basically even.

Nope, he kicks Flash's ass until Flash tricks him into doing something stupid--like getting suckerpunched with a flash-bang.

Look, I specified the arc I'm taking him from. This is Zoom before he gets stuck in his own time warp, develops a stutter, and arguably is never the same. Have you read Blitz? You're making him out to be blatantly inferior to Flash, when the exact opposite is shown right there on the page.

I've read the entire run of Flash Vol. 2. I'm a HUGE Flash/Rogues fan. I know these characters. Zoom. Is. Dumb. He doesn't know how to use his speed effectively.

Doomsday doesn't need to fly when he has Darkchylde to teleport him wherever he wants to go.

So she ports him into the air, and...he falls back down. Hard.

we simply don't permit you to say "I magically find out the details of all my opponents powers and weapons", whether backwards, forwards, or any other way.

And that's not what I did either.

 

[Aristotle]

He's also the one who basically flat out said Zoom is an idiot who doesn't know how to use his power.

That's because it's true. Zoom always loses because he's not educated or trained in the use of his powers, or in the use of basic hand to hand techniques. That's why he always loses.

Also, Zatanna being "in touch with magic" doesn't mean she instantly knows exactly what the soul sword does.

No, but a generality? Why not?

She's powerful, sure, but she can't do whatever she wants or she wouldn't be legal to use. I'm not convinced she could immediately know everything she needs

I didn't have her do that.

and I'm not convinced that she could immediately take control of Doomsday and turn him against his own team.

I didn't have her do that either. I had her keep him away from HER team--there is a difference.

And it's not even Darkchylde's main power -- teleportation is. Maybe I should have said "soul sword, a magical weapon" but it still doesn't help you much. Also note: that description has been up since I posted my lineup, so plenty of time to contest it.

I don't care if it's her main power or not--anything that's enough to disrupt the magic of one of the more powerful mages in the DC Universe oughtta be disclosed, yes?

My magnetic dust attack seems reasonable to use against Zatanna -- she needs to breathe after all. Again, she's been hurt by Deathstroke -- she's nowhere near invulnerable.

Problem is, YOU gave her an INCREDIBLY durable forcefield, but then suddenly decided to take it down when some dumb brick hits it. You gotta live with how you wrote it.

Most of them have been in teams before.

Not with each other.

Villains are often willing to work together so long as it remains advantageous to them. A fairly standard assumption for this league is they've been offered some sort of prize or incentive to make them compete.

But villain teams are often very suspicious and bickering--and that's when they all KNOW each other. Your guys don't. Furthermore, maybe that assumption should be added to the rules--the rules say that there's no guarantee people work well together just because they're in a tournament. That should be taken into account.

They've worked together in previous weeks of this competition, and they remember those experiences for this battle. That's also why I didn't think I needed to address it now.

But if you never addressed it BACK THEN, your entire argument is built upon a foundation of sand. The underlying presupposition itself is flawed.

His recovery happens in superspeed just like everything else.

Yes, but so does Flash's response. Because they're BOTH in superspeed, they cancel each other out when they go head to head. Zoom is a LITTLE faster--but a flash-bang ****s you up. You get disoriented. And just might leave yourself open to a razorang.

And I had him use his speed to get out of the way of what Flash was throwing and immediately strike back with an omni-directional attack (metal shards thrown in all directions) -- i.e., one that didn't need to be aimed -- to keep Flash occupied while he recovered his sight. I still think that's reasonable.

HE'S DISORIENTED. TOTALLY DISORIENTED. Flash-bangs do that to the most hardened Marines, you think they won't do it to some punk in a suit with no training whatsoever?

Anyway, your touting the flash-grenade attack just goes to show I really was having your team use intelligent strategy.

Yes, for one brief shining moment, your writeup was better than mine. That era ended rapidly.

I think you're not giving him enough. He's more than a match for Flash, especially at the point I have him from. I guess the voters can decide who's assessment is right.

I give him plenty of credit. He is faster. He also has no idea how to use his speed, not compared to the way the Flashes do. You might look into picking up Barry Allen's archenemy, Professor Zoom/Reverse-Flash. That guy was a smart one.

Doomsday couldn't do anything against Zatanna's flight/magic? He could with Darkchylde helping him, which is why it's so important that you not neglect my teams ability to work together. And all Darkchylde has to do is give Doomsday the smallest opening, and he can take Zatanna down -- she doesn't have enhanced speed or durability, so if he gets close to her its all over.

She ports him into the air and he falls right back down. He can't tread water up there. He can't ****in'...hover, or whatever. He drops like a rock. Knowing that guy, he probably drops a mile down into the moon.

You have her controlling Doomsday? I understood it as you just booting Brainiac out, which I concede might be possible if she got the chance (I just don't think she would). Controlling Doomsday is another matter. Even high-level telepaths -- who specialize in controlling people -- have had trouble controlling Doomsday.

Zatanna rewrites minds. Completely. She made Dr. Light, a vicious bastard, into a joke. She made villains turn good. You don't think she can tell Doomsday, "no, go over here"?

I'm not convinced Zatanna could manage this while in the middle of trying to fend him off.

Since she's in the air, I'm thinking she doesn't really need to fend him off.

Also, when has Zatanna ever shown the ability to insta-control anyone? If I remember right, when she altered Doctor Light's mind she already had him unconscious and it still seemed to take her several minutes to do.

Doomsday has a MUCH more rudimentary brain.