I admit I’m trying to get more of these VS threads going because I enjoy reading peoples ideas and responses. I learn a lot about different characters that I may not have been so knowledgeable about.
That being said … Gambit with staff and cards and anything else he can find to charge VS Nightcrawler with 2 swords and his usual teleportation ability.
Fight is an abandoned warehouse.
Who takes it?
This fight won’t go 5 seconds.
bamf. stab. bamf. slice
dead cajun.
Nightcrawler would beat the holy hell out of Gambit without a weapon.
Nightcrawler only has two swords? How about 3?
Or better yet, he has no swords and uses his teleportation ability to grab Gambit by any body part you care to mention and remove it. Yeah, he probably wouldn’t, but he could.
Either way, I think it’s Kurt in a walk.
Nightcrawler.
My first exposure to Nighcrawler is in the 80s with great work from Claremont and Byrnes. He was a swashbuckler, pilot, and general butt kicker with a good sense of humor. My first exposure to Gambit is the 90s cartoon where he is fairly one note, has a questionable Cajun accent and is always trying to mack on Rogue.
Nightcrawler gets a Did Not Finish. If you have teleportation and someone is trying to put the smackdown on you, why the hell would you stick around? There’s always the chance of screwing up and teleporting into a cloud of exploding playing cards. Just zap on home, Netflix and chill. Or, alternatively, zap on home, grab a couple of containers of tear gas from the pantry, zap back, drop containers, then Netflix and chill.
Nightcrawler, knockout on round one.
Nightcrawler’s got great nightvision, incredible reflexes, blends into the dark, is very good with swords, *and *can teleport. Heck, supposedly he can lift about a ton (according to the Marvel Handbook, years ago). Dude’s hardcore.
Gambit’s got good reflexes, is good with a staff, and can make things go boom by throwing stuff. He’d never stand a chance. Kurt would teleport in behind him and run him through, Gambit would be down for the count. Heck, Kurt could just grab him and do the multiple teleport trick, and Remy would be on the floor vomiting his guts out.
The only way Gambit would stand a chance is if he were willing to blow himself up… but Kurt could just teleport out, anyway.
The movie X-Men: First Class showed a pretty good approximation of what NightCrawler could do if he chose to use his abilities to fight. Azazel(NightCrawler’s father) would grab people, teleport a hundred feet in the air, let them go, and teleport away. He would also teleport around and stab people.
I don’t see Gambit being able to do anything about a 100+ foot fall. And it’s not like he can keep NightCrawler from getting close to him.
Enjoy,
Steven
I always liked Gambit, but I have to be the first to admit he got the short end of the superpower stick. His exploding card schtick isn’t powerful enough to make up for being so limited. Even a relatively “soft” target like Nightcrawler isn’t going to be killed by that.
On the other hand… a Gambit vs Nightcrawler battle would be the perfect time for writers to get creative about the underlying kinetic energy talent. I see in the Wikipedia entry for Gambit that they threw in all kinds of crap after I left the comics world - a Death variant that can turn materials into poison, and a “full power” version that makes Gambit an energy being capable of defying gravity.
I think people are giving Nightcrawler WAY too much credit.
Nightcrawler uses line of sight teleportation and unless this changed recently, teleporting others with himself is a drain physically.
There’s plenty of clever ways Gambit can take advantage of this.
Gambit might outthink Nightcrawler.
“Okay, I know he’s gonna ‘port right behind me…so that’s where I’m ready for him wit’ de combat staff…”
Not likely, but it’s his only chance. Otherwise, Nightcrawler uses superior mobility and agility, and wins, probably quickly.
Nightcrawler’s teleportation is enough to guarantee that the fight, if it happens at all, will be on his timing, his turf, and his terms. Being able to make stuff blow up isn’t enough to overcome that.
Since when does Kurt require LoS?
Plus, while teleporting with others IS a drain, he only has to do it once. That’s assuming he doesn’t just lop off Remy’s head after the first BAMF
I don’t think Nightcrawler’s teleportation was ever LoS based - or if it was, he overcame it pretty early in Claremont’s run. The limit on his teleport ability is around two miles, but he’s gone further under extreme circumstances, including from Nevada to California once, although he didn’t survive the attempt. He had some guys arm fused through his torso at the time, though, so it was probably that more than the extreme range that did him in.
I do. Newton to the rescue: equal and opposite reaction. All he’s got to do is slow himself down.
Stabbing is a possibility, I guess. But Kurt seems to have more scruples than his father. Though I guess you could be thinking a Nightcrawler who gets turned evil–that’s always one of the ways to have superheroes fight.
Though, really, Gambit turned evil without scruples is a more interesting story, I think. The Kurt version would more go the Superman-gone-evil route. And, in those, you fight as a team against him, not one-on-one.
Though I do note there is one form of protection, if I remember correctly: Kurt can only teleport somewhere he’s seen or been. So the basic strategy is to go somewhere where he doesn’t know where you are while he’s being distracted, then work out a plan to stop him.
Not quite.
One of Kurt’s minor powers is an unconscious form of spatial awareness. This allows him to teleport short range relatively freely - he instinctively knows not to teleport into a sofa on the other side of the room. However, the range on this awareness is shorter than the range on his teleport - beyond a couple hundred yards or so (IIRC) there’s a very real chance that he’ll materialize in the middle of something solid, unless he’s very familiar with the area he’s teleporting into.
Back in Claremont days, Doom knocked him unconscious and put him in a small featureless room. He didn’t use or appear to have such a spatial awareness power, but instead teleported a large distance straight up, on the theory that his odds of living through a blind teleport were best that way.
I’m going with Night Crawler, but question: Is Gambit’s power limited to inanimate objects or can he turn a living person into some kind of bag of charged energy ready to explode? That would be pretty badass.
Aren’t we selling Gambit’s ability to convert energy a little short? How’s Nightcrawler going to teleport when Remy is converting all the energy he’s throwing into it into another form? Hell, how’s he even going to grab him if his static shield is up.
Hell, I’d argue that if Gambit used his powers properly, dropping him from miles up should not affect him at all - he should just be able to convert that kinetic energy into a static charge.
Not sure about converting the kinetic energy from teleporting or falling.
Firstly, Gambit’s powers convert “potential energy” into static charge or kinetic energy. He has never been demonstrated to be able to convert kinetic energy into anything AFAIK. If he could then he could go toe-to-toe with hulk by converting all the punches into static charge and firing them straight back. Of course when the comics say “potential energy” they don’t mean what a physicist means. They means something akin to nuclear energy that is dependent solely on the object’s mass, not its position.
Secondly, the larger the mass he works with, the longer it takes to charge. He can charge a card instantly, he can charge his staff in about 10 seconds. He can charge an entire dumpster, but he has to hide behind it for a few minutes. Based on that, he would need at least a minute to charge the human body. Not useful against most falls.
So it’s not clear that Nightcrawler would be faster or more acrobatic than Gambit in a straight up fight, and with Gambit literally in constant motion it isn’t even clear that Kurt could teleport to him. Near him, sure, but he would need a moment to reevalute when he arrived, and that moment could be crucial.
Gambit also “the ability to create static, because of the charged potential energy always in his body… the shield has the added effect of destabilizing touch-based abilities”. Since NCs teleport is a touch based ability, it shouldn’t would work on Gambit, or at least it shouldn’t work properly.
I’m not seeing this fight as nearly as one sided as some seem to think. The two seem pretty equally matched in terms of acrobatics, agility, combat training etc. Gambit has the edge in terms of armour and innate ability to absorb damage as well as having much more powerful attack ability (his fully charged staff can floor the Thing temporarily). Nightcrawler has an edge because he can dictate the terms of the fight and he has excellent evasion abilities. I don’t think NC will be able to effectively grab an teleport Gambit and it’s arguable if he will be able to teleport into immediate attack position against a character that is canonically in constant motion while he is fighting. Gambit’s armour will make sword attacks far less effective.
It’s a really interesting match.
I got this from the old cartoon, where he once re-absorbed the charge from some cards after he’d charged them. But fair point on charge times.