Character Analysis: Scarlet Witch

Background

• Full Name: Wanda Django Maximoff
• Height: 5’7” | 1.7 meters
• Weight: 130 lbs | 59 kilograms
• Twin sister of Quicksilver
• Groups: Avengers, Force Works, Brotherhood of Evil Mutants
• Fluent in French, German, & Slorenian
• Number of retcons: Too many
• Into robots

Along with her brother Pietro, Wanda Maximoff was born the daughter of Natalya Maximoff (the former Scarlet Witch) and an unknown father, before being handed off as babies to their uncle and aunt, a pair of Romani named Django and Marya Maximoff. Unfortunately, soon after, they were kidnapped by the High Evolutionary, and experimented on in the Wundagore Mountains. After becoming disgusted by the results, the Evolutionary returned the twins to Django and Marya’s care, albeit with newfound superpowers.

As they grew up, Wanda and Pietro discovered their latent abilities; in Wanda’s case, she had the ability to cause random occurrences with hand gestures. However, the two hid their powers out of fear that they would be prosecuted, a fear which was eventually proven warranted. When Wanda accidentally set fire to a town with her powers, the locals believed her to be a witch, and tried to stone her to death. Then, just when it looked like the end, Magneto arrived and saved Wanda and Pietro from the mob. Owing to him their lives, the twins joined Magneto’s cause, becoming members of his Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. It was then that Wanda officially took up the mantle of the Scarlet Witch.

Soon enough, however, Wanda and Pietro grew disillusioned with Magneto due to his cruel tactics, and having repaid their debt to him many times over, deserted his cause, soon joining the Avengers in order to hopefully use their powers for good. Over time, Wanda gained greater and greater control of her powers, and eventually learned a truth that nobody could have expected: her abilities are actually Chaos Magic, granted to her as a baby by the elder god Chthon. Soon after, she learned another disturbing “truth”, that Magneto was actually her father (it was revealed decades later that this was a lie that the High Evolutionary cooked up, don’t worry too much about it). However, in spite of having a villainous “father” and demonic magic, Wanda became a reliable hero over time, and even married one of her Avenger teammates, the android Vision.

However, just when the two of them settled down and had children, tragedy struck. Vision was stripped of the emotions that he had learned over time, and the pair’s children turned out to not be children at all, rather, pieces of Mephisto’s soul which Wanda turned into children out of a desire to have a family. After the children ceased to exist, Wanda’s memories of them were erased, in order to spare her the trauma of losing her newfound family.

However, this would not be permanent. Eventually, Wanda’s memories re-surfaced, and she was driven mad with grief. With some assistance from Doctor Doom, she tapped into a reserve of great power called the Life Force, and used it to rewrite reality, making mutants supreme, placing her family in power, and bringing her sons back to “life”. Ultimately, though, this House of M reality did not last forever, ending with three words from Wanda: “No More Mutants.” In a flash, reality was restored, but mutant-kind was nearly wiped out, and the Scarlet Witch had disappeared.

After a while, Wanda resurfaced, having suppressed her memories and powers in order to recover after the events of House of M. Soon enough, however, she regained them, sane once more. In the years that would follow, she endeavored to make up for the atrocities that she committed, resuming her career as a superhero, and helping to defeat many powerful threats, such as the Dark Phoenix, Red Onslaught, the Celestial Destructor, Chaos, and Nyx. Slowly but surely, despite having become one of the most dangerous beings alive, Wanda has continued to work toward redemption.

Experience

Having been around since the early 1960’s, Wanda essentially has decades worth of experience as a superhero, though Marvel’s sliding time-scale makes the exact amount of time rather wonky. Over the course of her history, however, Wanda has spent years practicing with her powers and gaining greater understanding and mastery over them. She has fought in hundreds of battles against all manner of opponents, and has experience as a member of teams such as the Avengers and Force Works. She even led the West Coast branch of the Avengers for a while.

As far as formal training is concerned, Wanda has received magical instruction from both Agatha Harkness and Doctor Strange, though in both cases the instruction took place over a relatively brief period. She has primarily learned through experience, becoming more and more self-sufficient over the years as she became more familiar with magic. Nowadays, she has become one of the Earth’s go-to magic users in a crisis, and is even knowledgeable enough to become a magic teacher at Strange Academy.

Additionally, Wanda is skilled in hand-to-hand combat, having received formal training from the likes of Captain America, Mockingbird, and U.S.Agent, all expert combatants. She is skilled enough in hand-to-hand combat to spar with U.S.Agent, beat master martial artists like Cable, and fight off an army of undead with martial arts.

Arsenal

None notable.

Chaos Magic

Overview

Originally, Wanda had a mutant ability called hex powers, which can basically be summarized as "she makes a hand gesture, and something random happens as a result". This was the case for a while, until her powers were retconned to actually be uncontrollable probability manipulation, which is what causes the random stuff to happen. Later, this was once again retconned to be actual reality warping, in addition to probability manipulation. Eventually, Agatha Harkness also taught her to tap into some latent magical abilities, which granted her control over natural things (plants, animals, etc.). However, those abilities were then retconned to be magic bestowed upon her by Chthon. So then she had hex powers and demon magic, instead of hex powers and nature magic. Until that also got retconned, making it so that hex powers and Chthonic magic were the same thing, called Chaos Magic, streamlining her abilities and making them less confusing… sort of.

Then House of M happened, and Doctor Strange dropped the bomb that there's no such thing as Chaos Magic, and that's just something that Wanda's mind made up, because she'd been slowly going mad. However, it has since been treated as though Chaos Magic does exist. One storyline tried to say that Chaos Magic isn't the proper term for it, it's actually related to life, nature, as well as womankind, but that was also ignored in subsequent stories; they’re back to calling it Chaos Magic.

Regardless of all that, Chaos Magic is responsible for all of Wanda’s abilities, and she’s got a lot of them. By tapping into it, Wanda can manipulate the fabric of existence and reality, as well as probabilities on an extreme scale, achieving a massive variety of effects. The following section lists every ability she has explicitly demonstrated, but in theory, by manipulating the probability of any occurrence, she should be essentially capable of doing anything that she can think of.

Abilities

• Probability Manipulation: Wanda’s primary ability, her hex magic allows her to manipulate probability on a high level. With this, she can increase or decrease the chances of something happening, changing things from a mathematical impossibility to an absolute fact and vice versa, achieving a wide variety of effects as a result. Many of Wanda’s other abilities are derived from her altering probability in some way.
• Probability Manipulation Negation: She can also negate probability manipulation used by others. She has done this to Black Cat’s probability manipulation, as well as to a probability-altering Celestial drone.
• Reality Warping: Wanda has the ability to warp and rewrite reality itself, though the extent to which she can do this is dependent on how powerful she is at the time. At her peak, she can do so on a universal to potentially multiversal scale.
• Existence Erasure: She can use her reality warping to erase others from existence, which has been stated and demonstrated multiple times.
• Energy Manipulation: Wanda can affect energy in a variety of ways with her powers.
• Energy Projection: She can launch destructive energy attacks called Hex Blasts. These often have probability-altering effects as well.
• Energy Fields: She can create Hex Spheres, energy fields in which her probability manipulation can be applied.
• Energy Absorption: She can absorb various types of energy with her powers. She has absorbed Nuklo’s nuclear energy, and even just general disorder in her vicinity.
• Energy Disruption: She can disrupt energy. She has used this to disrupt energy-based force-fields, as well as energy that was affecting Rachel Summers, Radioactive Man’s nuclear energies, Hulk and She-Hulk’s gamma radiation, and Magnum’s internal energy. She has also prevented weapons from generating enough energy to fire.
• Energy Draining: She can drain others of their energy. For example, she once forced the gem in Vision’s head to empty itself of all of its energy, nearly killing him. She also attempted to do this to Pagan, though was unsuccessful.
• Kinetic Energy Manipulation: She can manipulate kinetic energy, typically by nullifying it and causing projectiles to lose all of their momentum. She has done this to Thor’s hammer.
• Energy Transmogrification: She can transmogrify all forms of energy, with lightning being the easiest.
• Energy Weapons: She can create weapons out of chaos energy. She has created a sword, shield, and weird hand-blade looking thing.
• Electricity Manipulation: She can produce surges of electricity, and manipulate lightning.
• Electromagnetic Manipulation: She can generate an electromagnetic charge with her powers, as well as affect Spectrum’s body, which is composed of electromagnetic energy.
• Light Manipulation: She can produce light, as well as manipulate it. She has used this to illuminate dark areas, as well as fold light-based attacks back onto themselves to dispel them.
• Barriers: Wanda can create energy barriers using her hex powers. These can be both small and omni-directional, and are based around probability manipulation. For instance, she can pick and choose what she wants to allow to pass through her barriers by altering the probability of it successfully blocking individual objects - she did so to make oncoming attacks miss while letting Hawkeye’s arrows pass through in the other direction. These barriers are explicitly not passive, but Wanda is capable of maintaining them while casting other spells and doing other things.
• Force-Field & Barrier Disruption: She also has numerous ways of counteracting or nullifying opposing energy barriers outside of just overpowering them. She can disrupt barriers with an energy field, in order to destabilize them or create a hole through them. She can transmute them into things like flowers or crystal. She can find imperfections in their defenses and increase them. She can make them disappear outright. She can even make her chaos energy pass through barriers and affect what’s inside without breaking the barrier, even when said barrier is specifically designed to repel Wanda’s powers. However, it has been shown that if a force-field is constantly shifting its frequency, this is enough to prevent Wanda from getting through it easily.
• Nature Manipulation: Wanda can manipulate various elements and other aspects of nature with her powers.
• Weather Manipulation: She can create intense storms.
• Lava Manipulation: She can manipulate lava, causing eruptions originating from the core of the planet.
• Meteor Summoning: She can change the course of meteors, calling them down from space.
• Plant Manipulation: She can control plants, making them grow rapidly and uncontrollably, as well as manipulating them to restrain people with.
• Earthquake Manipulation: She can produce small-scale earthquakes.
• Air Manipulation: She can manipulate the air, controlling the movement of oxygen and carbon dioxide in order to do things like put out fires or suffocate opponents.
• Flight: She can levitate and fly via “localized non-randomization of chaotic air current motion”.
• Wind Manipulation: She can create wind currents, which she has used to slow her fall.
• Fire Manipulation: She can manipulate fire. For example, she once redirected fire away from herself.
• Heat Manipulation: She can spontaneously alter the temperature of objects, for example, she once heated up Attuma’s sword, burning him and making him drop it.
• Water Manipulation: She can control water, for example, she has made a geyser erupt from an underground water main.
• Water Purification: She has shown the ability to purify a lake, turning it into holy water.
• Time Manipulation: Wanda has demonstrated several time-related abilities.
• Time Travel: She can travel through time. She has done this across weeks, and even centuries.
• Time Slowing & Stopping: She can slow down time to a crawl, and even stop it outright.
• Temporal BFR: She can send others to different time periods.
• Atemporality: Her powers operate at least somewhat independently of typical linear time. At one point, Hank Pym tested her abilities by having her use them on a piece of metal, which he had previously analyzed and determined had no weakness. When she used her powers to introduce a weakness and shatter it, this altered reality so that the weakness in question always existed, changing Pym’s prior readings accordingly.
• Superpower Manipulation: Wanda has shown various powers related to manipulating the abilities of others.
• Power Nullification: She can block the abilities of others, and has spells capable of de-powering people. At her peak, she even did this to almost every mutant on Earth, and potentially others throughout the omniverse.
• Power Reversal: She can create a power feedback in order to reverse the direction of an opponent’s attack and harm them with their own powers. She has done this with the Enchantress’ magic, Loki’s magic, Leonard Tippit’s energy, Wasp’s stings, and Electro’s electricity.
• Power Amping: She can amp the power and abilities of others. She has done so to Ultron, Domino, Quicksilver, Spectrum, Wasp, etc.
• Durability Amping: She can increase the durability of things by making them more likely to withstand pressure.
• Speed Amping: She can increase the speed of herself and others. She once amped Quicksilver’s speed, allowing him to move beyond the limits of space, time, and speed itself, “unsticking” him from time and trapping him between moments while the rest of the world sat suspended in time. She also repeatedly replicated this effect temporarily on herself, allowing her to interact with Quicksilver in this state for brief intervals before the effect wore off.
• Power Disruption: She can make people’s powers go out of control. For example, she has done so to Kamala Khan, as well as Plant-Man.
• Power Stabilization: She can also do the opposite, stabilizing powers that have gone out of control. She once did so to Hank Pym, slowing down his uncontrollable growth.
• Power Bestowal: She can grant others abilities, such as when she gave the mutant Rictor his power back post M-day.
• Resistance Negation: She can negate the resistances of others, as shown when she made Ultron vulnerable to Vision’s phasing, despite the fact that he had previously evolved to resist phasing.
• Telekinesis: Wanda can apply her hex powers for telekinesis, allowing her to move objects from a distance without physically touching them.
• Biological Manipulation: Wanda can affect a target’s body, such as by making a blind person able to see temporarily, un-fusing the Uni-Mind into the Eternals composing it, giving an opponent leg cramps, making a flying enemy’s wings malfunction, causing a target to experience random and chaotic growth, shredding internal organs, boiling people’s blood and brains, and tapping into a person’s “bio-energy”, which she used in an attempt to revert a group of Hulks back to normal.
• Age Manipulation: She can manipulate the age of a target, causing them to age thousands of years into dust, or reverse their aging and turn them into a baby.
• Pain Manipulation: She can cause others to experience intense bursts of pain.
• Healing: She can use her powers to heal others and presumably herself. By reversing probabilities around a dying man, she was able to heal him and prevent his death.
• Causing & Curing Illness: She can cause illnesses, as seen when she boosted and multiplied the germs in the Wrecking Crew’s bodies, making them keel over from sickness within seconds. She can also cure illness, as seen when she instantly cured a man’s cold..
• Extrasensory Perception: Wanda has superhuman sensory abilities, allowing her to sense things that would not normally be perceptible. She has sensed the presence of others, Moondragon’s invisible mental energy, Brainchild reading her mind, a man’s evil intent, mystic presences, danger, a person’s death, and the presence of a soul within a sword.
• Witch’s Sight: She possesses a magical ability called “Witch’s Sight”, which allows her to see invisible things, as well as a person’s evil, pain, and who they really are.
• Spiritual Awareness: She can see spirits, and perceive Doctor Strange’s invisible astral form. She has also sensed Loki’s astral form when Agatha Harkness could not.
• Psychometry: She can discern facts about events, people, etc. by interacting with relevant objects. For instance, she has traced Entrakt via the magic residue he left behind in Thor’s hammer, and by attuning herself to a rock in a crate, she was able to discern where it came from.
• Teleportation: Wanda is capable of teleporting. She can also teleport others to her location; she did so to Spider-Man.
• BFR: She can forcibly teleport people away from herself, for example, she did so to Phoenix Force Namor.
• Summoning: Wanda has various ways of conjuring or creating other beings to fight for her.
• Self-Duplication: She can create a duplicate of herself to act in her stead while she remains elsewhere. She did so during House of M.
• Duplication of Others: She can create duplicates of various heroes, villains, and others, which she has control over. She has created duplicates of Vision, Wonder Man, Agatha Harkness, Dormammu, etc., as well as an army’s-worth of Ultron drones and Doombots.
• Temporal Duplicates: Though she has never used this intentionally, she has shown to be capable of conjuring duplicates of a person from different points in time, though does not automatically have control over them.
• Spirit Conjuring: She can temporarily summon spirits from the afterlife in order to converse with them. She did so to a man’s deceased wife, allowing him to speak to her and gain closure.
• Animating Objects: She can animate non-living objects, granting them pseudo-sentience. She did so to a chair once.
• Necromancy: She can raise the dead, accidentally raising 16 million zombies in Genosha, though she used a magic scepter to do this. She can also reverse necromancy, returning souls of the dead to rest.
• Matter Manipulation: Wanda has the ability to manipulate matter down to a molecular level, which grants her a variety of applications.
• Destruction: One of the most common uses of her hex powers, especially early in her history, she can make things spontaneously break or fall apart by directing her power at them. She is even capable of breaking down something as durable as Adamantium.
• Molecular Manipulation: She can manipulate molecules, for example, she is able to hex apart molecular bonds, control the movement of atoms in the air, and disrupt the molecular structure of a target in order to destroy it.
• Transmutation: She can transmute matter into something completely different. She has turned earth into water, transformed the Gargoyle’s stone body into flesh and blood, turned a living flame creature into non-living stone, turned energy-based force-fields into physical matter, transmuted War Machine’s armor into pure iron, and has regularly turned people into weird tetris blocks in order to transport or erase them. She also once attempted to transmute people into frogs.
• Soul Manipulation: Wanda’s powers are capable of affecting the soul. Her hex blasts have been described as “soul-searing”, she stated at one point that her (amped) Chaos Magic was “eating away at her soul”, and she has threatened to “rend” others souls from their bodies and “rupture” their souls on occasion. She has also specifically refrained from using her powers for exorcism out of fear that she would harm the souls of people caught in the crossfire.
• Astral Projection: She is capable of astral projection. While astral projecting, she can enter people’s minds, is still capable of doing her normal magic, and can rejoin her physical body without difficulty. In the past, it was shown that performing magic as an astral projection weakens her ability to maintain her spiritual form, but she has more recently done so without exhibiting any such issue.
• Exorcism: She is capable of exorcising all kinds of spiritual beings. She has exorcised demons, undead spirits, ghosts who were possessing people, more demons, and even could have exorcised the Emerald Warlock, a fellow magic user who was possessing a boy.
• Dimensional Travel: Wanda is capable of using her powers to travel between dimensions. Though, she has implied once that she needs specific books to do so.
• BFR: She can BFR people to other dimensions. She did so to Spider-Man while she was controlled by Xandu, as well as to Necrodamus.
• Mind Manipulation: Wanda has numerous abilities capable of affecting a target’s mind.
• Mind Control: She can affect the minds of others, for example, she once altered Wonder Man’s neural synapses, allowing his suppressed personality to take command of his brain (he was under the Enchantress’ control at the time).
• Memory Manipulation: After House of M, she suppressed her own memories with her powers to the point where she did not remember she was the Scarlet Witch. Logically, there is no reason why she could not do something similar to others as well. She also altered the memories of everyone on Earth during House of M, but this is likely because she had some access to Prof. X’s powers at the time.
• Illusions: She can cast illusions, even to the point of messing with Prof. X and Dr. Strange. She has also tricked both the Emerald Warlock and the Ringmaster with illusions.
• Causing Hallucinations: She can make others hallucinate. Leading up to House of M, her powers going out of control caused Captain America to experience lengthy hallucinations.
• Sleep Manipulation: She has spells to put people to sleep via affecting their minds, which can even work on characters like Emma Frost, Cyclops, and Magneto with his helmet, all of whom have powerful mental resistance.
• Empathic Communication: She can empathically communicate with others, which has the side effect of slowing their perception of time to a crawl. As a bonus, this essentially functions similarly to a “time-out”.
• Magic Manipulation: Wanda has several abilities that allow her to counter the magic of other sorcerers.
• Magic Dispelling: She can dispel magic to negate its effects. She has canceled out the Mandarin’s magic by folding it back on itself, and dispelled Nyx’s darkness magic. She has also purged the Minotaur of an enchantment that had been placed on him, and diffused Moonglow’s magic spells.
• Magic Absorption: Her magic allows her to absorb other magical attacks, such as when she absorbed Emerald Warlock's magic without him noticing, or when she absorbed Moonglow’s magic.
• Magic Bypassing: Her hex powers have shown the ability to sidestep magical restraints created by Mordred’s Chthonic magic.
• Miscellaneous
• Gravity Manipulation: Her probability manipulation can cause gravity to go wild, intensifying it for one person while decreasing it for another. She can also simply diminish the effects of gravity in general.
• Technology Manipulation: She can manipulate technology, using her probability powers to activate it, make it go haywire, make it short out, make it fail completely, etc.
• Non-Physical Interaction: She has managed to interact with the villain Lore, who was an intangible spirit at the time, by altering probability so that the two of them would co-exist physically in the same space. She has also regularly affected intangible spirits with her powers.
• Image Projection: She can project energy-based images with her powers, for example, she once projected an image of 1730’s Paris.
• Magnetization: She can magnetize things, as seen when she once magnetized a wall.
• Understanding Languages: She can use her powers to make herself understand people who speak a different language and vice versa.
• Uncontrollable Powers: Her powers are naturally chaotic and difficult to handle, so people who copy them are typically not able to control them properly. This has happened with Hope Summers and Rogue, both of whom normally gain control of the powers that they copy.

Status as a Nexus Being

Wanda is the Nexus Being of the Marvel 616 reality. This means that she belongs equally to all possible timelines, realities and divergences, and is the central connecting point for her reality’s mystic energies. Essentially, this just means that she is more receptive to channeling magic power than other beings would be.

Resistances

• Mind Resistance: Wanda has shown some resistance to mind control, though she is a bit inconsistent in this regard. She has resisted mental manipulation multiple times from the god Set via the Serpent Crown, though is consistently affected by it and only capable of holding it off for a while, never outright overcoming it. Similarly, she was affected by Immortus’ mind control, but eventually managed to break out of it. Prof. X’s telepathy was capable of subjugating her for a time during House of M, but wouldn’t have been able to do so indefinitely. The Eye of Agamotto was capable of shutting down her mind, but not permanently, and this did not negate the effects of her powers. She does have several decent instances of countering mind manipulation (freeing Agatha from Dormammu’s sorcery, was implied to be able to resist Attuma’s mind control collar if she were uninjured, resisting Starro’s mental control in Avengers/JLA, etc.), she also has several instances of being affected by it and unable to resist at all (falling prey to mental manipulation from Magneto, Emma Frost, Red Onslaught, etc.).

• Soul Resistance: She has withstood her own soul-searing Chaos Magic, and has semi-regularly survived other attacks that targeted her soul. For example, she has had her soul removed, switched with another person, and/or sent back in time, and none of this has proven fatal to her. She has also successfully channeled energy that posed a risk to her soul, and survived a somewhat lengthy period of time in which the use of magic aged her soul, taking years off of her lifespan.

• Illusion Resistance: She has shown the ability to destroy illusions, shake off death demons that were making her see illusions, and resist the Ringmaster’s hypnotism for months on end.

• Transmutation Resistance: Once performed a spell to create a talisman, which prevented Gath’s magical barrier from transforming her and the other Avengers into alternate versions of themselves.

• Power Nullification Resistance: At one point, a power-nullifying collar failed to fully block her magic, though it did weaken it. She once “quelled” the Liberator’s attempt to interfere with her powers. Her abilities are also comparable to her son, Wiccan, whose power is inherited from her; it was stated that no one, not even the Sorcerer Supreme, would be able to take away Wiccan’s power.

• Existence Erasure Resistance: In her fight with Hope Summers, who had copied Wanda’s abilities, the two of them attempted to erase one another, and both were able to resist and keep fighting.

• Possession Resistance: Though she has been possessed before on occasion, such as by Chthon, Wanda also has the ability to counter possession. For example, she once placed a hex on a boy that made him impossible for the Emerald Warlock to possess. It has also been stated that Doctor Voodoo or his brother are the only people capable of possessing her, and even against them, she proved able to resist somewhat.

• Madness Resistance: Once, she had her soul switched with another person, and it was only her being accustomed to the mystic arts that prevented her from being driven mad by the transferral. However, this is not an absolute immunity, as Wanda can still be driven mad due to channeling more power than she can handle.

• Sleep Resistance: At one point, an enemy attempted to burn a specific weed and make her smell it, in order to forcibly make her fall asleep. Via willpower, she was able to resist this. She has also stayed up for 10 straight days with no sleep before, and remained more-or-less physically and mentally sound, something no normal person would be capable of.

• Acid Resistance: She has used her powers to prevent acid from harming her.

Life Force Empowerment

It was established in Avengers: The Children’s Crusade that during House of M, Wanda tapped into something called the Life Force, a massive reserve of energy which boosted her abilities. This is what allowed her to create the House of M reality, as well as subsequently cause M-day. Not much is explained about what the Life Force is or how it works, but there are some things we do know.

This source of power is massive, described as “too much power”, said to exceed the Beyonder, and was something that neither Wanda nor Doctor Doom could handle without being overcome and driven mad. Wanda retained some connection to this power after House of M (she says when Doctor Doom temporarily absorbed it that she “can’t feel it anymore”), but needed Doom’s help to tap into it in the first place, and still needed his help when she wanted to use it again in Children’s Crusade.

After Doctor Doom stole the Life Force’s power temporarily, and was quickly overcome by its power, it isn’t explained what happened to it, and it’s unclear whether Wanda ever regained any sort of connection to it. The Marvel Encyclopedia says that channeling too much power drove her mad, and that she couldn’t handle that level of power, so it’s clear that at minimum, she has yet to tap back into the same level of power that she was channeling during House of M. That being said, Wanda does say at one point that given a sufficiently immense source of power and enough casting time, she could replicate her “No More Mutants” spell, and she does do something similar to the Phoenix Force in Avengers vs X-Men.

Feats

Overall

• Led the West Coast Avengers
• Nexus Being of the Marvel 616 reality
• Considered a candidate for Sorcerer Supreme
• Cosmic counterpart to the Phoenix Force
• Caused House of M and M-day
• Aided in the battle against Nyx
• Considered by some to be the most dangerous mutant on the planet and most dangerous Avenger to ever live
• Helped send the Celestial Destructor back to his dimension
• Defeated Magneto, Ultron, Dormammu, Red Onslaught, Phoenix Five, Dark Phoenix Cyclops, Chaos

Strength

• Her powers interacting with a Celestial drone could have destroyed the universe.
• She is an equal to the Phoenix Force, and temporarily erased it from existence with Hope Summers’ help.
• Doctor Doom says her power is beyond all comprehension.
• Combined her power with six other sorcerers to hold back Ego.
• While combining her power with Agatha and Natalya, was able to temporarily match Chaos, though they couldn’t defeat him outright until they merged into one being. Chaos was stated to be on a comparable level to Eternity.
• Hurt Nyx, who was strong enough to snap Zeus’ neck. Later amped Spectrum and Vision to the point of striking a blow worthy of Zeus against Nyx, drawing blood from her.
• Overpowered Doctor Doom’s barrier and nearly killed him.
• Stated in the Marvel Encyclopedia to be powerful enough to defeat Dormammu.
• [House of M] Matched Doctor Strange.
• [House of M] Re-wrote all of reality, creating House of M.
• [House of M] Punched a hole through the wall of causality, indirectly creating a Chaos Wave which nearly wiped out existence.
• [House of M] Erased mutants across the planet (potentially the “omniverse”), weaving her magic throughout all of existence, including alternate dimensions, and creating cracks across all realities.
• [House of M] Power of the Life Force far surpasses Cosmic Cube Beyonder.

Speed

• Was stated to think at the speed of light.
• Reacted to or tagged Quicksilver on several occasions.
• Put a wall up in front of Ja’Rou when he was outpacing Quicksilver.
• Amped Quicksilver’s speed beyond space, time, and speed itself, later temporarily replicated this effect on herself.
• Disarmed Nyx of her shard, and then grabbed it faster than she could.
• Reacted to Thor’s hammer and halted it mid-air on more than one occasion.
• Reacted to Thor’s lightning.
• Dodged a blast from Ultron.
• Dodged a blast from the Mandarin.
• Redirected beams from M.O.D.O.K.
• Dodged gunfire from Cable.

Durability

• Survived her own hex energy backfiring on her and coursing through her body, though was knocked out.
• Withstood a surprise attack from Phoenix Force Emma Frost.
• Survived an attack from Chaos before shielding herself with a barrier.
• Took a hit from Mantis, who proved strong enough to harm Wonder Man in the same fight.
• Without defending herself, survived a backhand from a mindless Vision, who’s stated to be as powerful as Wonder Man immediately after.
• Survived a black matter bullet of “world-shattering energy” which was capable of destroying the Rainbow Bridge, blowing up a city, etc.
• Survived a blast from the Silver Surfer, though was knocked out.
• Survived an explosion caused by her hex bolt colliding with Wasp’s sting.
• Survived an explosion that she created which was visible in comparison to the planet’s curvature.
• Briefly survived Luminous’ chaos magic, which was superior to Wanda’s own.
• Survived an exploding space-ship.
• Tanked a blast from Dr. Doom.
• Survived a blast from Lore.
• Survived a blast from the Mandarin.
• Tanked Wasp’s sting.

Scaling

• Phoenix: Wanda’s Chaos Magic is a counterpart and equal to the Phoenix Force, allowing her to defeat Dark Phoenix Cyclops, as well as temporarily erase the Phoenix Force with Hope Summers’ assistance.
• Healed the M’kraan Crystal and is comparable as a threat to it. The M’kraan Crystal is a threat to all of existence.
• Galactus: Wanda scales to the Phoenix, which possesses power that rivals and is revered by Galactus.
• His battle with the Other and the Scrier threatened to destroy the entire infinite multiverse.
• Odin: Wanda is comparable to a weakened Nyx, who killed Zeus, who is comparable to Odin.
• Sent shockwaves across every plane of reality in his battle with Seth.
• Fought Surtur and Seth, who can both destroy Yggdrasil, which exists in all planes of reality, of which there are infinite.
• Sent Thor from Asgard to Earth in a fraction of a microsecond.
• [House of M] Cosmic Cube Beyonder: The Life Force is stated to be far more powerful than the Beyonder.
• Post-Retcon Beyonder possesses the power of a Cosmic Cube. Kubik, a similar Cube Being, would have been capable of shredding the fabric of existence across infinite dimensions in a fight against someone equal to him.
• Miscellaneous
• Hulk destroys a universe with a thunderclap.
• Invisible Woman’s barriers protect from an Incursion.
• Thor crosses the universe in moments.
• Loki sends Ulik from Asgard to Earth in 2 seconds.
• Rick Jones’ energy travels across the universe in a heartbeat.
• Loki retreats from Earth to Asgard with only microseconds to spare.
• X-Man and Ares fight between moments in Planck time.
• Valkyrie scours every corner of all the nine realms in the blink of an eye.

Supporting Evidence

• Mephisto: Wanda once amped Hawkeye’s arrows, allowing them to pierce Mephisto.
• Dormammu: Wanda is stated in the encyclopedia to be powerful enough to defeat Dormammu, and could outright conjure a duplicate of him during House of M.
• Eternity: Wanda is at least somewhat comparable to Eternity via her showing against Chaos, who is stated to be on Eternity’s level.

Weaknesses

Consistent Weaknesses

Weaknesses that Wanda has shown on a consistent basis throughout her history.

• Despite some high-end durability feats, most commonly depicted as a glass cannon physically.
• Typically requires hand gestures to use Chaos Magic.
• Though, she does have at least one instance of using it while her hands are restrained.
• At her full potential she can do it just by thinking, but this is usually not the case.
• Has a more difficult time affecting things that are significantly more powerful than she is.
• Channeling too much power at once has negative mental repercussions on her.
• Physically human, and thus needs things like oxygen in order to live.

One-off Weaknesses

Weird weaknesses that show up once or twice and never again.

• Once mentioned that it’s dangerous for her to use her hexes on “real magick”, though she didn’t elaborate.
• Her powers otherwise have interacted with magic just fine, plus it was later revealed that they… are magic.
• Once had difficulty affecting Nefaria because his energy was too “unnatural” and “alien”.
• In one story, it was established that casting magic ages her soul, taking years off her lifespan.

Former Weaknesses

Old weaknesses that are no longer an issue.

• Formerly mentally unstable.
• This was mainly during House of M. After Avengers: The Children’s Crusade, it is typically not the case unless her mind is altered by outside forces, or she is channeling too much power.
• Early in her history, she had recurring stamina problems, often only being able to use a few hex blasts before tiring out.
• From The Vision and the Scarlet Witch (1985) Issue #1 onward, this is no longer a problem for her.
• Early in her history, stated that she could not use magic while her eyes were covered.
• In Avengers: No Road Home, she uses magic while blind, though still has some difficulty with more complex spells.