Who's the strongest?

So, I was wondering which heroes were actually strongest, and decided to base it off of the melee damage done.

As a baseline, it looks like:

1 melee damage: The Rat Beast and Horrid Skunk Ape do a single melee damage

2 melee damage: The Abominable Snowman, or a single pack of velociraptors

3 melee damage: Collapsing Hallway does this, so this one would be the damage of a building collapsing on you

4 melee damage: ???

5 melee damage: Getting hit by a monorail.  Or smacked by the Kraken.

The main doers of melee damage are Mister Fixer, Fanatic, Legacy, and Haka, with an honorable mention to Wraith.

Mr. Fixer does 1 damage, but styles and weapons can push that up.  Still, I'm inclined to say Mister Fixer has peak human strength.

Wraith has a combat stance that does 2 melee damage, but that seems to be all skill rather than muscle power.

Chrono-Ranger can do 2 melee with the Terrible Tech Strike, which is robotic, so it seems like robotic limbs are just barely superhuman (note: Omnitron-X's rocket punch is also 2 damage, but it's projectile).

Then we get to the three power houses: Haka, Legacy, and Fanatic.

Haka and Fanatic both do 3 melee with their signature weapons (Absolution and Taiaha).  Both seem to do about 2 damage with their unarmed strikes (Smite the Transgressor vs. Crush).  However, Haka has the Rampage card, that does 5 base damage (holy crap!).  Legacy can thokk for 3, or backfist for 4, doing as much damage unarmed as Haka and Fanatic do armed (though less than rampage).  Legacy has Surge of Strength for a sustained damage boost, while Haka has Haka of Battle for massive pushes of damage.

So, I'm inclined to say that Legacy is the strongest, with Fanatic trailing behind.  When Haka is calm, he's as strong as Fanatic.  However, when he decides to flip out, he can match or exceed Legacy's strength.

To fill the gap in your Environment damage, I think Matthew Hayes deals four damage with his shotgun.

Matthew hayes is using a hunting rifle of some sort, he's all refined and tea drinking, precision is the name of the game, he wouldn't use something as scattershot as a shotgun!

Legacy definitely. On the surge of strength card, it has him stopping that aforementioned monorail. That means that he has to be able to exert more force than the monorail puts out. Ergo, more than 5 melee.

Maybe he's pulling a "world of cardboard"?

I was actually looking almost entirely at melee damage.

Projectile Damage (like Matthew Hayes does) is a different game, where you have some relying on raw power (Bunker and Tempest) and others on precision (most of the gun fighters). 

For example, pistols do 1-3 damage:

• Projectile 1: Some pistols (Chrono-Ranger's six shooter, Expatriette's hairtrigger reflexes and submachine gun, Megalopolis's police backup).
• Projectile 2: Expatriette's signature pistols.
• Projectile 3: Silver Gulch's Cyrus Hays does 3 damage with dual revolvers, and Sherrif Pratt does 3 damage though it's not obvious what with.  From the Block, we get the F.I.L.T.E.R. officer who does H-1 damage with a pistol.

• Projectile 2: explosives (Expatriette's RPG, Bunker's grenage launcher, and Silver's Gulch's explosive's wagon) and gatling guns (Bunker's gatling gun, and Silver Gulch's Tyler Hayes, who has some sort of hand-held gatling gun?).  Omnitron-X has Rocket Punch and Disruptive flachettes.
• Projectile 3: Bunker's flak cannon does 3.  Ra can throw his staff for 3, but considering that the staff gets destroyed, I'm guessing it explodes on impact. But maybe Ra's actually as strong as Fanatic and Haka...

• Projectile 1: squall
• Projectile 2: Into the Statosphere
• Projectile 3: Localized hurricane

• Projectile 1: Dart guns (Wraith's stun bolt and Chrono-Ranger's neuro-toxin dart).  Some archaic weapons (Chrono-Ranger's compound bow, Wraith's throwing knives).
• Projectile 3: Falling Objects: Rook City's falling statuary does 3, and Fanatic's final dive does up to 4 (I'm guessing she grabs someone, flies up, and drops them on someone else from very high up).  Wraith's Razor Ordnance (not sure what this is? sharper throwing knives?)
• Projectile 4: The most projectile damage anything does is shotguns and rifles (Expatriette's tactical shotgun and Silver Gulch's Matthew Hayes with his rifle). 

Some time back, someone wrote up a bunch of D.C. and Marvel heroes in Champions.  They gave Superman the disadvantage "never uses his full strength."

Anyhow, yeah, I'd say Legacy is stronger than Haka.  Even with Haka of Battle, it isn't clear if this is Haka going bezerk a la Hulk, or doing some sort of "study the enemy and hit them just right" sort of precision damage.

Really, the evidence seems to be that Haka is always holding back, which is nice of him, given that when he does cut loose (Rampage), he literally hits like a train, but is so unrestrained that he smashes friend and foe alike.  Not a trick to let loose on the kindergarden playground.

Legacy, on the other hand, has a lot more precise control - it helps that he has a Danger Sense watching his back, I suppose.  Thokk, Back-Hand Strike, and Flying Smash all showcase this precise, destructive power.  However, I don't think that, under normal circumstances, he's "stronger" than Haka.  Under abnormal circumstances, however, he might reach deep within and call on a truly amazing Surge of Strength - with two of those in play, his Thokk is six damage, outpacing Haka, while his Flying Smash is often just as good as a Rampage, but with perfect target control.  But read it is as significant that Surge of Strength is not called "True Strength" or anything that implies he's World Of Cardboarding it up - instead, I take it to be an adrenaline surge... augemented by the reactive Legacy powers.

What, then, of Iron Legacy?  Well, he's so emotionally messed-up, that he has that impossible adrenal surge all the time.

Ironic

P.S. Of course, I also think it makes sense for Ra to have some level of super-strength - comic books gods always seem to, regardless of their powers, and his deck gives out no melee damage at all.  Still, he'd be on a much lower level than Haka and Legacy, more comprable to Fanatic.

No, considering the time period, it would be a gatling gun.  Miniguns didn't appear until the 1960s.

There's a couple members of the Ennead that can make attacks of 2 melee, and sense most of those guys have comperable abilities, I think we can assume that most of them can do 2 melee if they didn't have better things to do with their turns.

Hmm.  We could then break the heroes into approximate brackets based on strength:

Bracket 5: Monorails, the Kraken, and Iron Legacy

Bracket 4: The big guys: Haka, Legacy

Bracket 3: The clearly supernatural: Fanatic, Ra, Mongolian Death Worm, Apostate (presumably), the various Ennead

Bracket 2: Rather big things.  Bunker, Abominable Snowman

Bracket 1: Augmented human.  Absolute Zero, Chrono-Ranger (via cyber arm), Mister Fixer (maybe?), Omnitron-X, Tempest, Rat Beasts, Horrid Skunk Apes, Amphibious Chupacabras.  The Chairman and Operative are probably here as well.

Bracket 0: Normal/Athletic human.  Argent Adept, Expatriette, Nightmist, the Scholar, Tachyon, Unity, Visionary, Wraith

Next question: how many of the heroes can fly?

This came up as a question in the Sentinels forum-based quiz game thingy a while back...and was partially derailed by a discussion on whether capes should let you be able to fly (someone joked that the Adept's cape lets him do so) ;).

Since you brought it up, why did the quiz game stop?

I don't know about his cape, but we do see the Adept flying in Akash'Bhuta's art...

He probably has a song for that, just like everything else ;).

I hope it's R. Kelly's…

The heroes who I'm pretty sure can fly:

Legacy(Flighs all over the place in his cards)

Bunker?(Might own a suit that could allow flight, butnot the one featured in the cards)

Fanatic(Those wings aren't just for show)

Tempest(Fairly sure he can fly using the winds to lift him up)

Visionary(Via telekinesis)

Argent Adept(Flying right there on the cover art of Infernal Relics, so yeah...)

Omnitron-X(We see him hovering during Defensive Blast, maybe he floats by controlling magnatism or some other ways. He does apparently have rocket fists, maybe he can actually get some lift from those...)

Scholar(But probably only in his Energy form)

Surely Ra, a god, can fly as well.

As for Bunker, I think he can fly, but not gracefully or for extended periods - picture the jet jump which destroyed the Mark I armor in the first Iron Man film.  Bunker's suits are huge and bulky, so they don't really look like they were designed for flight as a main option.

Likewise, Unity's electromagnetic powers can probably let her levitate, but that's not something she focuses on, so she probably isn't much good at it.

Oh, and The Wraith can fly.  She has a grappling hook - she can do anything.

It's a big maybe on RA flying. I think there is one where he's got his back to the sun and he looks like he's flying, but I haven't really noticed it on any other cards. But maybe I'm wrong on that?

As for Unity, I'm not to sure on that...

Ra seems to certainly be "raised up" in come way on Living Conflagration, which appears to depict him, hovering and surrounded by fiery rays, before some kind of Sphinx/Pharaoh/Ra statue.

If Human Torch can fly, then Ra should be able to as well.

Well, heat rises, so... ;)

Belatedly:  one of these things is not like the others.  I may not own The Scholar, but I am reasonably certain that he is not physically "normal".

Well, Nightmist is certainly not physically normal, being how she's mostly made of mist, or something…but her abilities come from the power she wields, not from any physical strength. Same with the Scholar - without that Philosopher's Stone, he probably wouldn't be too effective at anything which didn't involve talking (or sitting on his arse having a drink ;)).

And Donald Blake was just a guy, until he picked up the Staff of Ra.  I think all of them are now something else, even on a physical level.

I didn't see anything in Scholar's deck indicating that he possesses superhuman strength.

If Form of Iron turns him into actual metal, then he likely has great strength while it's active, if only because he weights half a ton.

Other than that, he seems like a normal guy with a healing factor and the alchemist's stone.

I can't tell if this was an intentional joke or not, but Dr. Donald Blake transforms into Marvel's Thor.  Blake Washington, Jr. (which, I'm convinced, is an homage to Donald Blake) transforms into Ra.  There have been times that I've wrongly labeled one of the characters with the other's name.

Dr. Donald Blake Washington, Jr takes the Walking Staff of Ra and becomes The Mighty Thor, God of the Sun…der!

It was an honest mistake.  The double Blake gets me every time... and Argent Adept being named "Drake" just makes things worse.

I completely understand.  They're easy to mix up!

He does two damage when he hits someone with a rock, so…I guess it's actually kinda normal strength for someone hitting you with a pretty big rock.

Double Blake sounds like the frattiest nickname ever.