3:3 - Samurai Jack vs. Deathstroke

[UMPIRE]

SEASON 3, ROUND 3

Samurai Jack

Slot: Bringing the team's Sword
Season Wins: 1
Season Losses: 0
Fantasy Team Page
Read more about Samurai Jack at Wikipedia
Official Site: Cartoon Network

Deathstroke

Slot: Bringing the team's Sword
Season Wins: 1
Season Losses: 0
Fantasy Team Page
Read more about Deathstroke at Wikipedia
Official Site: DC Comics

Battle Terrain
Combat Terrain: Detroit Ruins

[Macklemore]

Deathstroke is more accustomed to fighting in city areas, and he's a better planner, martial artist and arguably swordsman, but Jack has him beat in strength and speed unfortunately. Fortunately, Deathstroke has mingled with speedsters before and he has come out on the winning side more often than not. I think I'll abstain for now, cause it's not as clear cut as I'd like it to be, but if anyone can put a foot in this fight it'd be much appreciated.

[Peypeypeypey]

So this will come as a big surprise, but I think Jack wins. It's closer this time though. Deathstroke has better armor (ie. he has armor), more tools to use, has a neat sword that would probably be immune to Jack's sword-breaking trick, and he is physically a force to be reckoned with. However, I disagree when you say he's a better swordsman. By what metric can we even judge that? Jack has been training his entire life, and uses his sword skills to kill and defeat literal armies. 

Jack is definitely faster. Slade is a bullet timer, but Jack is fast enough to block every shot from a minigun fired directly at him. As mentioned before, that's at least dozens of shots every second. Jack can dodge sunlight, putting his reaction and movement speed at relativistic levels. He's so incredibly fast that he's sort of like a speedster himself. While Slade has tagged speedsters with some consistency, it almost always seems to be him exploiting the fact that the speedsters tend to be sloppy combatants. Here, Kid Flash is gloating in his face before he lands his hit, and in this scan, Kid Flash is moving in such a predictable pattern that he literally runs into Slade's attack. Slade didn't even have to stab, he just held out his blade and let Flash do the stabbing for him. Honestly that's just an embarrassment. That's more of an anti-feat for the Flash because good God. 

Unlike the speedsters though, Jack isn't a sloppy fighter. He spent his entire life refining his craft. Every strike he makes is precise enough to chop bullets out of the air, and fast enough that they're often impossible to perceive with the naked eye. He's faster than Deathstroke's fastest feats that I could find, and he's no less ruthless or skilled. At least, not substantially, and not enough to make the difference here.

[Macklemore]

9 minutes ago, Peypeypeypey said:

However, I disagree when you say he's a better swordsman. By what metric can we even judge that? Jack has been training his entire life, and uses his sword skills to kill and defeat literal armies.

It's a matter of circumstance in my opinion. Jack is a great swordsman, we literally see him train under every famous person in the world, the best in their respective category, but my only real reason for calling him more skilled is cause Deathstroke is the go-to assassin within the DC Universe, that everyone who's in the know how calls upon. The fact of the matter is Deathstroke is tested more often than Jack is, and I say this as a big fan of Samurai Jack. You do have a point though, Jack not being a sloppy fighter. I wouldn't call it an anti-feat either, it's a matter of circumstance. I doubt Flash was actively doing Flash things within that panel but he's not really above looking down on others and I that's literally what happened here too. I hear it often how this is an anti-feat for Flash cause they see him running at trillion times the speed of light and they're like "well, why didn't he do that against a literal human that has showcased no reason to be that lenient towards". I don't know, I don't buy the anti-feat for Flash thing, it's totally within his line of thinking for him to be this stupid.

 

Furthermore, that's not Kid Flash, it's THE Flash. Yet funnily enough, his fight against Kid Flash better showcases his reflexes as opposed to the one time he fought the Flash and lost. Furthermore, he beat every single person in that comic panel there, including Green Lantern by taking his ring off if I recall correctly.

Here's another instance where he manages to tag Kid Flash by actively hitting him with a baton.

[Hugo Fowl]

Aku's placed another order I see.

That said, I'm leaning towards the Samurai for the reasons mentioned by Pey.

[Peypeypeypey]

2 hours ago, Hugo Fowl said:

Aku's placed another order I see.

That said, I'm leaning towards the Samurai for the reasons mentioned by Pey.

 

[Peypeypeypey]

4 hours ago, Macklemore said:

It's a matter of circumstance in my opinion. Jack is a great swordsman, we literally see him train under every famous person in the world, the best in their respective category, but my only real reason for calling him more skilled is cause Deathstroke is the go-to assassin within the DC Universe, that everyone who's in the know how calls upon. The fact of the matter is Deathstroke is tested more often than Jack is, and I say this as a big fan of Samurai Jack. You do have a point though, Jack not being a sloppy fighter. I wouldn't call it an anti-feat either, it's a matter of circumstance. I doubt Flash was actively doing Flash things within that panel but he's not really above looking down on others and I that's literally what happened here too. I hear it often how this is an anti-feat for Flash cause they see him running at trillion times the speed of light and they're like "well, why didn't he do that against a literal human that has showcased no reason to be that lenient towards". I don't know, I don't buy the anti-feat for Flash thing, it's totally within his line of thinking for him to be this stupid.

 

Furthermore, that's not Kid Flash, it's THE Flash. Yet funnily enough, his fight against Kid Flash better showcases his reflexes as opposed to the one time he fought the Flash and lost. Furthermore, he beat every single person in that comic panel there, including Green Lantern by taking his ring off if I recall correctly.

Here's another instance where he manages to tag Kid Flash by actively hitting him with a baton.

You're right in that anti-feat is probably not the best way to phrase it. It's just the Flash being cocky and getting punished because of it. My larger point with the Flash feats though is that he doesn't really hit them because he's that fast, it's more that they're that sloppy, 9 times out of 10. And while at his best he is a match for the entire Justice League, when he's totally prepared and has had time to study their weaknesses and attack patterns, Jack really has few weaknesses, and he's just about as skilled as Deathstroke while also being way stronger and faster. 

My thinking is that Deathstroke is very inconsistent, and while he does have wins against people who are way above Jack himself, he also regularly fights even with or even loses to the likes of Batman, Nightwing, etc. Here are a few examples of what I mean:

Example 1

Example 2

Example 3

Example 4

Now none of those people he's fighting are slouches by any means, and he actually wins some of those fights, or at least doesn't lose them. I'm not bringing all this up to disrespect him or those opponents. However, I think it clearly shows that Deathstroke is great at punching above his weight class because he can exploit sloppy fighting and over-reliance on superpowers. However, when he's up against a foe who is similarly skilled, he struggles a lot more because there is no such shortcoming in their combat style. He just has to be better than them, and in the case of Samurai Jack, you have someone with superhuman physicals and at least comparable skill. He has no weakness to exploit really, at least not an easily visible one that Deathstroke can actually use in a fight like this. 

 

[Magnamax]

Most people should disregard Identity Crisis in terms of Deathstroke. That fight is one of the most ludicrous outcomes I’ve ever seen in a comic, given who he was up against and how easily he’s able to beat each of them. 

[Macklemore]

8 minutes ago, Magnamax said:

Most people should disregard Identity Crisis in terms of Deathstroke. That fight is one of the most ludicrous outcomes I’ve ever seen in a comic, given who he was up against and how easily he’s able to beat each of them. 

Disregarding things ain't really my forte, sorry. What if I just came into this thread and said "let's disregard Samurai Jack dodging sunlight, he only does it once after all," and then I leave.

[Peypeypeypey]

11 minutes ago, Macklemore said:

Disregarding things ain't really my forte, sorry. What if I just came into this thread and said "let's disregard Samurai Jack dodging sunlight, he only does it once after all," and then I leave.

That's not the same at all. One of them is saying "This is such a massive outlier that it shouldn't really be considered because either the circumstances for the fight were so specific that it holds no barring on any fight he would be in (hence the "Most people should disregard"), or it is such an outlier that none of his other feats can compare to it, and when taken with the whole of the character's feats it's clear that their overall level of power is nowhere near that," while the other one is saying "I'm going to choose to ignore a direct feat which is canonically consistent with the character because I don't want to deal with it." Most of these debates boil down to interpreting and contextualize feats, and there are plenty of times where the valid contextualization is "that was a massive outlier and/or requires such specific setting up, planning, and stupidity on the part of the opponent that it holds no water in this discussion. 

Also, as another point, I think it is fair to call the sunlight-dodging feat into question. There's nothing "wrong" with calling any specific feat into question, logically. If a character, like Jack, is internally consistent, we can say "alright, let's temporarily agree to ignore that feat. Jack is still massively FTE, blocks minigun fire, kills 6 people before a drop of water can hit the ground likely moving at supersonic speeds to do so, and on more than one occasion has blocked or dodged lazer fire, which would also be light speed, so it is a consistent feat that he could potentially dodge sunlight."

[Macklemore]

6 minutes ago, Peypeypeypey said:

and on more than one occasion has blocked or dodged lazer fire, which would also be light speed, so it is a consistent feat that he could potentially dodge sunlight."

Lasers don't move the same speed in media, especially in the hands of an inexperienced mook. Him being able to dodge sunlight would literally break the story setting, considering he literally never shows reflexes this fast again and gets tagged by slower things.

[Peypeypeypey]

6 minutes ago, Macklemore said:

Lasers don't move the same speed in media, especially in the hands of an inexperienced mook. Him being able to dodge sunlight would literally break the story setting, considering he literally never shows reflexes this fast again and gets tagged by slower things.

Sure, and I think that's a fair thing to bring up. I think it's good to point out the biggest outlier and say "that one doesn't make sense because..." The more I look into it, yeah, it's fair to say that Jack, whose other feats peak around supersonic reactions and movements, maybe shouldn't be able to dodge sunlight. Fair enough. It doesn't change the outcome of this fight in my eyes, because consistently massively supersonic is still comfortably faster than Deathstroke is usually portrayed, but it's good to call into question. Again, debating the legitimacy of feats is a good thing. In the same way, Deathstroke taking on the entire Justice League, and then getting regularly slapped around by the likes of Nightwing, Batman, etc. on their own is another massive inconsistency, and it's fair to say that random encounter Deathstroke is going to be close to the latter in strength than the former

[Macklemore]

1 minute ago, Peypeypeypey said:

Sure, and I think that's a fair thing to bring up. I think it's good to point out the biggest outlier and say "that one doesn't make sense because..." The more I look into it, yeah, it's fair to say that Jack, whose other feats peak around supersonic reactions and movements, maybe shouldn't be able to dodge sunlight. Fair enough. It doesn't change the outcome of this fight in my eyes, because consistently massively supersonic is still comfortably faster than Deathstroke is usually portrayed, but it's good to call into question. Again, debating the legitimacy of feats is a good thing. In the same way, Deathstroke taking on the entire Justice League, and then getting regularly slapped around by the likes of Nightwing, Batman, etc. on their own is another massive inconsistency, and it's fair to say that random encounter Deathstroke is going to be close to the latter in strength than the former

But that's what i'm trying to say though, they're still feats of the character even if they're not technically doable at all times. Jack dodged the sunlight, because I recall the scene in question, he knew the sunlight was coming and he had literally 8 minutes to prepare himself. Meanwhile, Deathstroke's is the same. Sure, he couldn't do this in a straight up battle, but he did it because he knows these people exist and had literal years to study a way to beat them the way he did, which is not impossible as Deathstroke is usually portrayed as being smarter than Batman.

Essentially my argument boiled down to, "We shouldn't straight up disregard feats, rather we should post the context alongside the feat as well."

[Peypeypeypey]

1 minute ago, Macklemore said:

Essentially my argument boiled down to, "We shouldn't straight up disregard feats, rather we should post the context alongside the feat as well."

I agree, but again, I think Magnamax was just using different language to say the same thing. By saying "Most people should disregard," I interpreted that to mean "this feat is so specific, such an outlier, and requires so much set-up that it isn't relevant o 99% of fights." That's how I read it, anyway. "Disregard" might not be the right word for it, but I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment: the context for the feat makes it not really relevant to most fights, in the same way that you can say "Jack technically dodged sunlight, but he is regularly tagged by stuff that is so much slower that it's much more consistent to put his speed around the supersonic range than the light-speed."

[Magnamax]

6 hours ago, Macklemore said:

Disregarding things ain't really my forte, sorry. What if I just came into this thread and said "let's disregard Samurai Jack dodging sunlight, he only does it once after all," and then I leave.

It’s usually the first feat brought up with Deathstroke: “he can take down the entire Justice League” but it’s just outrageous compared to what he should be capable of, there are plenty of plot-induced-stupidity feats that shouldn’t be taken as a character’s usual output. Deathstroke has no abilities or skill that should put him on Green Lantern, Flash or Zatanna’s level in an open fight, certainly not those together with four other heroes to back them up. 
 

 Now, you can certainly call into question whether Jack dodging sunlight seems like a realistic feat relative to his fighting ability. If he’s fast enough to dodge sunlight, then the Scotsman (for example) shouldn’t have any chance of fighting him. This seems to be the point of discussion, being able to take feats and reason them out. I don’t think the Identity Crisis feat is reasonable for Deathstroke’s ability. 

[UMPIRE]

Match Final Results

Samurai Jack: 9
Deathstroke: 5