Ranking the Over the Garden Wall Episodes

 

As we move closer from the transition of Autumn to Winter I wanted to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Over the Garden Wall with a quick blog ranking the episodes. I've seen numerous of these rankings and wanted to give my feelings. Obviously spoilers for OTGW. 

OTGW is a great show. It's not my favorite cartoon but it is the one I have the least amount of problems and I don't dislike any of its episodes (which is good because there's only ten), but some of them I do definitely like more than others. If I was to give what I'm looking for in an OTGW episode

1: Atmosphere. The thing Over the Garden Wall does so well is set atmosphere and evoke a tone and spirit through it. Specifically the Atmosphere Over the Garden Wall is evoking is the Autumn-y mixture of lightness and darkness, beautifully colored leaves blown by a cold dark wind. 

2: Related to that, a balance of the two sides of the show. I love the dynamic between the two main characters Greg and Wirt, and the show is at its balance I think when the two sides are balanced. The show is a horror-comedy cartoon about Classic Americana with Greg representing the cartoonish comedic side and Wirt representing the horror somber side. I love when two opposite things can mesh and come together, it's arguably my favorite thing in fiction, and just like Halloween, Over the Garden Wall just doesn't feel right if it has only one aspect or the other. 

3: Plot Relevance. Some episodes of Over the Garden Wall kinda feel like sidetracking and disconnected from things. No episode is filler, every episode does advance the plot at least a little and has SOME thematic relevance, I wouldn't like it as much as I do otherwise, but some episodes are definitely a lot more connected than others. 

#10: Episode 8: Babes in the Wood:

This episode is definitely the biggest misstep for me in the series. I do like the beginning and end of the episode but the middle 8 minutes of this 11 minute episode are a fantastical dream sequence of Greg's. I definitely get the thematic relevance and it's sweet the creators wanted to reference these older cartoon styles, but this doesn't connect on any of the three dimensions I like. It's pretty much pure Greg energy without any Wirt-iness and it's only connected to the plot via being a metaphor for their current situation. But more than anything this happens right before the final two episodes and significantly messes with the tone that has been masterfully been building since Episode 6 at least. 

 

#9: Episode 3: Schooltown Follies:

This is another ep that tends to be ranked lower and for me it's fairly similar to the above. Like Greg it's funny and cute but it lacks a lot of Wirtiness or plot relevance. It's funnier and cuter than Episode 8 for me and a lot less tonally breaking but it still doesn't strike the right balance for me. I will say it's very iconically Over the Garden Wall and it has some really funny lines and back and forths, particularly between Wirt and Beatrice. Unlike the gap between 10 and 9, there isn't a large gap between this and the next 3 eps.

The next 3 eps were hard to place and could go in any order, and I do really enjoy all three but the next one would be

#8: Episode 5: Mad Love: 

This episode is another one that's ranked lower usually and I hate to contribute to it because it's fun. Endicott's being so casual in his dropping of implied terrible deeds to achieve his wealth strikes just the right tone for the series, it's a fairly unique locale for it being set in an enormous mansion, its got a fun mystery and sideplot of Wirt and Beatrice looking for chance. Fred gets funny lines, Greg gets an adorable pun at the end. The only real problem I have with it is how disconnected it feels from the plot. We get some more details about Wirt and Beatrice but they don't even get the change for the Frog Ferry they're after the whole ep. Even ignoring that the shift in scenery and the focus on characterss that are not in most of the series make it feel fairly unrelated to most of the series. 

#7: Episode 7: The Ringing of the Bell:

So this episode is really cool and I initially had it even higher. It's got a great plot and plot twist, is darkly evocative and has themes that run more serious than normal, good lines, and has a lot of thematic relevance beyond what first appears. I will admit it does lack a bit of Greg-iness being not the funniest or cutest episode, and it's not most connected to the plot, which is why it's one of the bottom half eps.

#6: Episode 1: The Old Grist Mill:

The first episode of Over the Garden Wall has a lot to establish and I think it does a great job. Wirt and Greg's duality is first established and it forms the emotional core of the entire series. We get the establishment of running gags like Greg's Rock Facts and the varying names for his frog. We have the beautiful opening sequence and the establishment of the atmosphere. The episode is great and I'd love to move it higher. I really don't have any flaws to say with this ep outside the fact that it's maybe a little cramped with just an 11 minute timeframe, though even that somewhat works to its benefit keeping the plot moving fast. It also MAYBE verges too much on the Wirt-y side. The creator wanted it to not take place at night as it kept the viewer from seeing the Autumn Colors clearly and made the tone a bit too dark and I agree. The episode is consistently tense in a way that maybe primes the viewer in a way that might keep them from appreciating the more light-hearted sequences in later episodes. 

#5: Episode 6: Lullaby in Frogland:

Moving into the top 5 and this is an ep that I think just hits all the right notes. It's an episode that has plot development, atmosphere, exploration, comedy, tension, Autumn-vibes, and character development. It sets up the plot for the entire second half of the series while never feeling cramped. This is an ep that consistently gets high in rankings and I can definitely see why, it's an episode that really captures the feel of the series and is importance in the narrative. We have the resolution of the Adelaide plot that covers most of the first half and the revelation of Beatrice's motivation. It has a combination of fun fairy tail logic like clipping the wings off blue birds to make them humans again or the frog ferry while also having Wirt and Beatrice's seriousness providing contrast. I like it more than the first ep because while both are great, Episode 6 has better balance of the two sides of the series and has Beatrice at some of her best as opposed to basically not being in it. 

#4: Episode 2: Hard Times at the Huskin Bee:

When you think of OTGW I GUARANTEE you think of this ep. This ep is probably the most iconic of the series and if you were to show one episode to people to explain what the series is, it would have to be this ep. It's similar to Episode 6 in its incredible balance of every aspect of the series but where in Episode 6 these aspects were all divided into sections which made it feel maybe a little unfocused, in Ep 2 the darkness and light-heartedness, the festiveness and somberness, the Greg-ness and Wirt-ness flow into each other casually and without clear markers. It feels like an episode that best evokes the spirit of what Over the Garden Wall represents. The citizens of Pottsfield aren't just festive skeletons wearing pumpkins, the parts where they are threatening and somber representations of death and the parts where they are silly and light-hearted are never clear and the ep has plenty of parts you don't know whether to take as foreboding or funny such as when they find the mayor office having nothing but a turkey. This is the episode that the show really clicked for me, particularly when it was revealed that Greg and Wirt's few hours of manual labor were digging their own graves, only for that to be double twisted as really digging someone else's so the skeletons resting in them can join the festival.  The episode also ends with an amazing visual metaphor where a falling leaf gets stuck on a fence, a dead thing trapped on a borderway unable to move on, a metaphor for the Unknown in general. This episode consistently ranks highly, often being number 1 and with good reason.

#3: Episode 4: Songs of the Dark Lantern:

This is another ep that really made the series click for me.  Episode 4 is an episode that once again contains both the elements of the series but where Ep 2 wasn't the most connected to the overall plot, this is the ep that really begins Wirt and Beatrice's character development, establishes that the series have an overall plot and direction with the re-establishment of the Woodsman and the first appearance of the Beast and in a meta way expresses that plot with the song about Wirt's nature as the Pilgrim. It does this without sacrificing the humor and fun of the ep with it being mostly a sequence of interrupted songs about character roles and archetypes that is humorous and fun and yet ever so slightly off-kilter in the way everyone is just their roles rather than a named person. This ep is one of my favorite kinds of episodes, an episode that recontextualizes the rest of the series with it in mind. I love how it recontextualizes Greg and Wirt's relationship when it reveals they're half-brothers explaining Wirt's tension. I love how the revelation of the the Woodsman and the Beast's relationship recontextualizes episode 1. I love how the people living out their lives as just their roles recontextualizes the Unknown as being more Archetypal. Just a lot of great things this ep. Plus I'm really fond of when Wirt sings the song of his and Greg's situation one of the people listening says "That's not a love song!" and another crying says "It's a metaphor..." I think that joke's really funny.

I went back and forth between the top 2 episodes a lot but I eventually decided to rank them this way. 

#2: Episode 9: Into the Unknown

An episode that is surprisingly all over the place in various rankings. I don't get this at all, this was almost my favorite episode and I went back and forth between it for first. I said I love episodes that recontextualizes things and this episode does it as well any other episode of any show I've seen.  It is the infamous reveal episode that reveals Greg and Wirt are the modern real world fallen into the Unknown after nearly drowning. But more than that this episode like Episode 10 of Madoka recontextualizes the protagonist of the series and their emotional journey. For this episode that means showing in a way that's wholesome, funny, and relatable expressing something important for the viewers. It shows Wirt's fatal character flaw and it how led Wirt and Greg, a moment built up since Ep 1 where Wirt tries to blame Greg only for the Woodsman to scold him, and leads to the moment of Wirt's character progression both this ep and the next. This episode makes so many inspired decisions like showing how the "Jason Funderburker" Wirt has been negatively comparing himself to all series you expect to be some alpha jock is just some dweeby kid like him, reflecting Wirt's lack of confidence and getting in his own way in classic Byronic Hero fashion. I've said that the interaction between Wirt and Greg's personalities and energies form the emotional core of the series and this episode has the bst in the series as Greg keeps guiding Wirt with his childlike optimism much as Wirt gets angry to him (without Greg even realizing.) It's those interactions that made me REALLY wanna put this episode at number 1. Though I do concede outside Episode 8 it is maybe the ep whose plot least feels OTGW-y, set in contemporary America rather than the Unknown. 

#1: Episode 10: The Unknown

This is probably the most common ep to put as the number one spot and seems to be in at least everyone's top 5 and it's easy to see why. Episode 9 has my favorite Greg/Wirt interactions and that is the core of the series to me, but OTGW isn't a series just about the best character interactions overall are in Episode 10. Just seeing Greg and The Beast interact is that strange blend of light-hearted and funny as well as dark and somber that OTGW does so well as Greg uses tricks to solve the Beast's challenges. There's great interactions between Wirt/Beatrice, Wirt/The Beast, and The Beast/The Woodsman. Everyone is at theit best this ep. Greg isn't that funny but he is his most wholesome most pure power of childish hope and optimism. Wirt is at his final developed state having both the self-awareness that always guides him and the sense of hope that he needed to learn from Greg, The Beast is simultaneously at his strongest and weakest, The Woosdman and Beatrice complete their character journeys and the epilogue is full of wholesome sweetness. A fantastic finale and I can very well see why everyone puts it high in their ranking as it's not just my favorite for one reason but because like the show itself it doesn't falter in any dimension. Much like the brothers it is well considered, consistent, internally coherent and interconnected yet also imaginative and full of wonder. Like the show itself and the Autumnal Season it explores the world of the dark and the dead and the damned to find the beauty of life and fun and hope being renewed. 

DC Exploration: Black Hand

 

Who is he?

William Hand is the leader of the Black Lantern Corp and the Herald of Nekron, the Black Light Entity representing Death. As a boy William's family owned a funeral home and so William was constantly surrounded by death, corpses, and taxidermed animals. The young psychopath was obsessed with death growing more and more interesed in the feeling of killing. After killing and stuffing the family dog, William was sent to numerous Psychologists over and over who helped him to if not quell his psychopathic desires than to at least try to hide them and be normal. However Atrocitus, when he entered the Earth sector, sensed the immense darkness in Black Hand attacked him but was stopped by Hal and Sinestro who didn't know what he was doing in their space attacking a random civilian and Atrocitus not caring to make them understand. In the conflict an alien super weapon fell to William's feet who, on impulse, took it and ran.

With it he became a Green Lantern supervillain though was routinely defeated. However the Black Entity Nekron spoke to him and William ritualistically killed his family members before finally killing himself to appease the dark lord. For this the former Guardian of the Universe Scar, defector to Nekron, proclaimed his the Herald of their Lord and forced the first Black Lantern Ring raising him as the first Zombie Black Lantern. 

How Strong is He?

In terms of raw power, not broadly as high as one might expect for a leader of a Lantern Corp. Black Hand was able to at least lightly press Post-Crisis Hal Jordan and was equal in power to a more inexperienced Hal in the New 52 when boosted by Krona's Gauntlet there doesn't seem to be anything suggesting Black Hand is normally an equal to Hal in raw power and he has shown more relativity with weaker Green Lanterns like Kilowog, Guy Gardner, and Simon Baz. However while he was able to tank the attack from Simon he was much more pitched in a fight with Kilowog and Guy. So if this was just a measurement of his raw power, you could argue he's more of a Upper-Mid to Lower-High Lantern Tier character. 

Now effectively that's really his power level though, and when you factor in his abilities he's functionally more of a High Lantern Tier enemy, in the same range as the strongest members of Lantern Corps like Hal, Sinestro, and Atrocitus. He was able to beat Pre-Crisis Hal and Guardians of the Universe on numerous instances and has even messed with even stronger entities. 

What are His Powers?

Black Hand has broadly used two powerful items as the source of his powers. The one he's more well known for is obviously the Black Lantern Ring. Just as the Lantern Rings project emotion and energy, the Black Lantern Rings sucks it up, allowing Black Hand to absorb energy and become stronger depending on who's he fighting which is why his normal state isn't as impressive as how strong he becomes. The Black Lantern Ring has many other powers. The most notable of these are manipulation of Darkness as Lanterns do Light, Necromancy (Raising the Dead as Zombies, Turning the Living into Zombies, or Summoning the Spirits of the Dead.) It also contains corruption powerful enough to work on the Spectre, can BFR people to the Dead Zone which is Nekron's domain and it's ultimate power if ever charged to 100% as is Nekron's plan the Black Lantern Ring can summon Nekron into the physical world, which was essentially the plot of Blackest Night. They do have more abilities these are just the most notable. 

For most of his career as a supervillain Black Hand actually used a different item called the Power Rod which DC Rebirth shows he still has. The Power Rod is a device made by Atrocitus for fights between Lanterns and it's primary power is the ability to absorb energies and allow the user to wield them himself. With this power during the Pre-Crisis period Black Hand was able to be a threat to Pre-Crisis Hal Jordan and Pre-Crisis Barry Allen via siphoning some of the energy of the Green Lantern Ring (Exactly half) and the Speedforce respectively. 

Finally Black Hand has gained some abilities of his own separate to his items though for most of his career these were fairly tame. Due to the inner darkness within him he was able to tell if and how someone died. During the Silver Age he was briefly treated as a supergenius and created a divine that could send Green Lantern into another dimension. He gained the ability as he was becoming the Herald of Nekron to drain the lifeforce out of people to regenerate himself via touch. Finally the strangest power, after getting a piece of the Source Wall trapped in him he developed the ability to petrify things by touching them including entire planets. 

What are His Weaknesses?

Even prior to his more psychopathic depiction Black Hand was a madman obsessed with sayings and believing he could be the perfect criminal by having a little Black Book with rules about everything a criminal needed to do to succeed and a contingency plan for what he believed to be every scenario, relying on it entirely. Afterward it he became an insane psychopathic killer unable to contain his obsession with death. 

Beyond that Black Hand's powers has some physical weaknesses. He mostly relies on his Black Lantern Ring and the Power Rod for his abilities and without them loses almost all of what he can do. The Black Lantern Ring's powers can also be defeated by the White Lantern Ring's powers and against enemies whose powers aren't energy based in anyway, he's not as potent a fighter. 

So Overall Black Hand is a High Lantern Tier Enemy, equivalent to most Lantern Corps Leaders. He's equivalent to one of the strongest Heroes of Earth though if they're not energy based he can be beaten by characters who are more Mid Lantern/Kryptonian Tier. On the other hand he's for the most below anyone from the Godsphere who view universes and the things in them like Lantern and Kryptonians as specks of dust, though he can be a threat to them in certain situations like summoning Nekron or corrupting them with the Black Lantern Ring.

Black Hand's best matchups are against other characters who are energy based and has an amazing matchup against any other Lantern Corp Leader. Someone like Atrocitus or Sinestro would have very similar problems with Black Hand as Hal did especially given that Black Hand has two devices both geared towards siphoning energy. He was already a major threat to the Flash during the Pre-Crisis period. Whether he'd be a big threat to someone like Kryptonians and could fight someone like Supergirl is questionable though I'm inclined to say he could drain the solar energy from them. Though this probably wouldn't work on Superman himself, with Superman having faced similar energy drainers before like Parasite.

Black Hand's worst matchups are against inorganic enemies that don't particularly rely on energy manipulation. Someone like the most recent Cyborg Superman would be a massive threat as while he does technically rely on electrical energy as a machine, he doesn't use energy based powers at all so Black Hand probably couldn't drain him the same way he can't drain the chemical energy from a human. Black Hand's death based abilities would also do nothing to Cyborg Superman so he would just in general have very little he could do. I could even see someone like Victor Stone aka Cyborg being able to beat him. Cyborg uses plasma and sound projection in the comics which Black has not shown the ability to absorb and is in the same range of power as base Black Hand.

The Gold Saints of Athena vs the Spriggan 12 (Stats Equalized)

 

In 1986, Masami Kurumada introduced the "Gold Cloth", the armor of the greatest heavenly warriors of the goddess Athena, the Gold Saints. The 12 Gold Saints propelled the series both in popularity and power into being legendary, the arc revolving around them being the most popular and also one of the most famous high-power anime/manga to have come out, spoken of in the same contexts as Dragon Ball and Bastard, each having ridiculously crazy powers and abilities. 

In 2014, Hiro Mashima, a fan of Saint Seiya and Kurumada's works created a villain group comprised of 12 villains he designed to each individually be overpowered to that the point that would be worthy of being final bosses of the series. These were the Spriggan 12, the greatest warriors of Emperor Zeref.

Now SS and FT have different general scopes and different power levels but what if that was not the case? The Gold Saints' Cosmos is lowered so it's roughly equivalent to the level of magic power that the Spriggan 12 have. They still have all their abilities though abilities affected by cosmo are proportionate to their power level. Who's abilities are stronger? Are the original overpowered dozen golden warriors of the 80s still THE titans of hax or have two decades allowed hax power creep enough for the new dozen wizard hax masters to overtake them. 

Some Base Assumptions:

1: The Gold Saints are assumed to be sent to Earthland by Athena to root out the evil of Emperor Zeref. However there is some aura on the planet that causes the Gold Saints to be lowered. This is a question of who's abilities can outhax the other, not who's got a higher power level. 

2: Both Cosmo and FT Magic are linked to emotions and both sides can rise in strength, but for the purposes of this, it will be assumed both sides can't grow stronger

3: On both sides all 12 are assembled, highly rare for both. They won't betray each other though some personality weaknesses like Mephisto's cowardice or Brandish's laziness may come up. 

4: This is the original 12 Gold Saints from Saint Seiya, as they were when they gathered at the Wailing Wall

5: This is the Spriggan 12 as they were when they went to attack Fiore. Assume Athena sent them down to intercept Zeref's invading forces and Zeref is too busy with Acnologia and getting the Fairy Heart to interfere. 

6: Manga continuity for both

I'm going to start with the Gold Saints as they have a lot more abilities in common with each other. 

The Gold Saints all use the power of Cosmo. The power of Cosmo is fundamentally to wield the fact that all things in the universe including the user, the earth beneath them, and  the stars above them are made of the same atoms that were all one. When manipulating their cosmo, they are surrounded by a unique cosmo that is usually burning hot. By manipulating those atoms, the Saints can destroy things on the atomic plane, or even down to the subatomic, the quantum. 

Things that are quantum can no longer really be considered physical, but something like energy, and allow the Saints to hit the incorporeal aspects of things, such as destroying their opponents souls or minds with their attacks, with the Gold Saints able to destroy 20 billion souls at once as both Deathmask and Shura have demonstrated. This can even allow them to destroy conceptual things like curses, the dryads which are mankind's sins given form, and even the Gods themselves. 

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Saints don't just manipulate their opponents with their cosmo but can manipulate hypothetically anything. They can manipulate their body to undo paralysis or as Leo Aioria did in Episode G. Hypothetically they can regenerate their body on the atomic scale from any injury so long as they main consciousness enough to will it. They can and regularly do use their cosmo to manipulate the environment around them and can reflect the attacks of their opponents by manipulating the cosmo of their attack. This cosmo is channeled through the Saints' Higher Senses.

The Sixth Sense is the Sense that all Saints develop. It is a telepathic sense that allows for sensing things as far as other dimensional realms with Shiryu and Deathmask able to hear the prayers of Shunrei from the living world while they were in the underworld. It allows for the sensing of cosmo, and the discernment of it, along with many other more minor psychic abilities like levitation, telekinesis, telepathic communication, enhanced intuition to the point of mild precognition and so on. 

Higher than this is the Seventh Sense, the Sense unlocked by the Gold Saints. The Seventh Sense allows for the replacement of all other senses when lost allowing people to "see" without sight, and fight even when unconscious. The ultimate extension of this power is the power of "Miracles", the human capacity to surpass the gods and grow infinitely. Miracles are a form of possibility manipulation, turning the impossible into possibilities. This is the key to the Gold Saints miraculous and impossible abilities such as moving at the speed of light or freezing things to absolute zero.

Virgo Shaka of the Gold Saints communicated with Buddha as a boy, and through him the Gold Saints of this generation unlocked the Eighth Sense, Arayashiki, the overcoming of death. The Eighth Sense allows the user to control one's soul and grants primarily two abilities. One is the ability to enter the underworld without losing all lower senses as is normal. The other is to exit the underworld. Even when he had his body annihilated entirely, after unlocking the Eighth Sense Shaka's souls imply returned to the living world, and could recreate a body for him. This gives the Gold Saints a form of low-godly regeneration.

The Saints are also not just powerful users of cosmo but are specially trained warriors. Along with their high degree of combat skill and knowledge of mythology, the Saints are trained with their most famous ability: Reactive Evolution. When a Saint experiences an attack, they develop a resistance to it, hence why it is always said "the same attack won't work on a Saint twice." Sometimes even seeing the move being used or experiencing a move like it, causes the Saint to become resistant and Saints that resist an ability can turn it back on its user. 

Saints are also born under the protection of their guardian constellation and have resistance to the powers of even the gods. In Episode G the Gold Saints had to battle the Titans who even while sealed were able to reality warp dimensions, full of worlds of followers of theirs, creating and destroying them, showing manipulation of matter-energy, minds, souls, and spacetime, yet struggled to affect the Gold Saints. Other forms of resistance have also been shown by the Saints sporadically as well particularly in their ability to regularly endure attacks from each other despite their own offensive abilities. 

Going into the Individual Gold Saints...

Aries Mu is the First Gold Saint and is the great master of the sixth sense, that is to say the greatest psychic among them. He along has the telepathy strong enough to communicate with people across dimensions and can create illusions potent enough to fool Silver Saints. 

He was able to teleport eight people at once as well as teleport Phoenix Ikki and Virgo Shaka, powerful psychics in their own right, through dimensions that are "between time and space", something Ikki couldn't do and Shaka couldn't do to Ikki. 

However his most used psychic ability is his telekinesis with which he can paralyze people. He was able to casually paralyze Leo Aioria, another Gold Saint meaning it has potency that would be relevant here, with barely any movement or effort, a binding Aioria states is stronger than the Titan Hyperion's.

In Saintia Sho Mu was also able to hold back a meteor with the power of the gods Eris and Ares behind it, a power far greater than the Gold Saints raw power, showing the potency of Mu's telekinetic force, able to work on people far stronger than him. 

Outside the sixth sense he also has numerous techniques. 

Mu's main attack, Starlight Extinction is manipulation of spacetime. It is potent enough to teleport Cancer Deathmask and Pisces Aphrodite, two gold saints, to the underworld, a metaphysical dimension and in the fight again the Titan Iapetus Mu used his Starlight Extinction completely destroy Iapetus' dimension, absorbing it into his cosmo. 

The Crystal Wall Technique can reflect attacks back at the user, including from other Gold Saints or from the Titan Iapetus

Crystal Net is a binding technique where Mu ensnares an opponent in a net that worked on the similarly powerful Papillion Myu

Finally is his forbidden ultimate technique, the reverse of Starlight Extinction, Stardust Revolution with which Mu creates his own dimension that rains down shooting stars upon his enemies. This allowed Mu to attack from one Earth to a parallel Earth and defeat the Sealed Titan Iapetus

Taurus Aldebaran is the Second of the Gold Saints and is mostly known for his high level of physical strength, strong enough to lift even the celestial sphere that Atlas had to as his punishment, the firmament with the weight of all the stars. with one hand. His strength is definitely high enough to be relevant against similarly powerful enemies.

He also has an attack technique called Great Horns that launches cosmo in the form of two prongs that slam into the enemy like horns which stalemated the attack of the similarly powerful gladiator Mordred. In the same fight he shows a stronger version called Glorious Horn which he used to defeat Mordred. 

Gemini Saga the Godslayer is one of the most famous characters in all of Saint Seiya and often considered to have some, if not the strongest abilities of any Gold Saint as well as having a very high power level to the point that it is considered very controversial to claim anyone of the Saints of Athena is stronger than Saga, especially when just talking about the latest generation due to his absolutely dominant performance in essentially every fight he's ever been in. Because this is Saga at the Wailing Wall, he wouldn't have the evil spirit possessing him as it departed him at his death. 

Saga is one of the most powerful psychics of the Gold Saints, with likely only Mu being superior. He has said that only Mu and Dohko could even deliver a jolt to his mind. He was able to project his telepathic voice into all of Sanctuary and can remove the senses of people one by one just by pointing at them. 

Saga can create illusions up to and including whole illusory environments which can trap people in an illusory maze that loops in on itself. He can create illusory duplicates of himself or of other people such as when he created an illusory duplicate of Aiolos to fight Aioria. These illusions can use the same attacks their original counterparts with Illusory Saga using his Another Dimension and Illusory Aiolos being able to use his divine arrows, these attacks causing actual real physical damage but were unable to be hit even by Saints' cosmo.  

Saga weaponizes this with his Phantom Demon Emperor technique, a technique which he projects cosmo from his hand which brainwashes his opponent's mind and works even on other Gold Saints. 

Saga also has his Another Dimension technique. Another Dimension is a technique that tears a hole in space and time into an endless dimension to be lost for eternity. Saga can use this to BFR enemies. Its pull working on incorporeal enemies like Specters, and is so potent that it worked on Saori, the Current Incarnation of Athena, and even Shaka was nearly defeated by it.

Saga also tends to use it to block incoming attacks, opening a hole in spacetime that sucks in any kind of projectile or energy sending it into the empty void. The power of this is attack is also stated to warp the universe, showing that it causes spacetime distortion as well. 

But his ultimate technique is one of the most famous moves from the entire series, Galaxian Explosion, the explosion of Saga's cosmo which even casual usage of it threatens galaxies. The Galaxian Explosion is considered the most destructive power of any of the Saints, powerful enough to threaten Cronos, the leader of the Titans for which Cronos gave Saga the title of godslayer. This shows not only its power able to kill entities stronger than Saga himself, but that it can affect a conceptual deity with immortality, regeneration, and passive attack reflection of all non-divine attacks, showing that the Galaxian Explosion defies all these defenses. The Galaxian Explosion has been able to destroy illusory things as though they were reality as well. 

In addition to this, Saga is one of the most physically powerful Gold Saints, to the point that only Taurus Aldebaran is likely stronger. Saga has with his physical blow sliced through the body Cronos made for himself and was able to pierce his Gold Cloth, armor tough enough to withstand the Galaxian Explosion. He also wields a divine golden dagger that itself can threaten deities. 

The Fourth Gold Saint is Mephisto or, as he is better known, Cancer Deathmask. The Cancer Cloth is given dominion over life and death, though Mephisto uses it primarily for the manipulation of souls and spirits. He has killed countless people and sealed their souls in the Cancer Temple so they can never reach the afterlife. 

Deathmask can manipulate souls at will, sending them to the afterlife or to some far flung unknown dimension they can't return from as well. Any undead Deathmask is given dominion by the Cancer Cloth to banish to the underworld or a far flung dimension. 

Deathmask has claimed to have created Yomotsu Hirasaka, the gate to the underworld and can travel there at will. He can also attack from there, having telekinetically attacked Shunrei from the gate to the underworld. 

Deathmask's technique is known as the Praesepe Underworld Wave, a cosmo emitted like a wave sending people to Yomotsu Hirasaka as well. This power even worked on Phlox, one of the Giants. Deathmask has also said if he uses this attack on someone already in Yomotsu Hirasaka, their soul would be shredded and blown to some unknown dimension forever. 

Leo Aioria is the Fifth Golden Saint who uses electromagnetic themed powers. He's primarily known for his overwhelming attack power. His most famous move is his Lightning Plasma where he strikes with 100,000,000 punches that strikes with lightning. This move appears as 100,000,000 blows even to those at the same speed as him and move as a pattern, making the attack more of a danmaku-style attack then anything. 

Aioria has other techniques as well, including his Lightning Bolt where instead of 100,000,000 blows, he attacks with a single intense bolt of divine lightning, doing even more damage to a single target. This attack was powerful enough to stalemate Virgo Shaka, and was able to drill a hole through the Titan Coeus, damage the Titan Hyperion's Armor and defeat the Titan Iapetus. The power of the divine lightning is such that it can ignore the titan's normal defenses.

He can also use the Lightning Fang which divides the lightning into several bolts around an area so as to avoid hitting a nearby target like a hostage and can shoot lightning without it being a technique. His lightning is noted to cause paralysis in targets.

Aioria's strongest attack however is Photon Burst which calls damaging light to emanate from his opponent in the form of ultra-powerful photons. Saga is explicitly calls this power equal to his with the narrator saying that Aioria is one of the two most powerful Gold Saints of the Sanctuary referring most likely to the strength of their attacks. The Photon Bursts nearly killed Sealed Cronos just as the Galaxian Explosion did with it taking six goddesses coming down from Heaven to create a barrier to protect Cronos. 

Virgo Shaka, the Sixth Gold Saint, often said to be the man closest to God, and one of the Gold Saints most often considered the strongest Gold Saint by fans alongside Gemini Saga. He has spoken to Buddha since the young age of eight whereupon he learned the secrets of life and death, becoming the first Saint of this generation to unlock the Eighth Sense. Virgo Shaka has some of the most impressive displays in the series, and while Saga focuses on broad power in the form of raw offensive power, raw mental domination, unbreakable defense, sheer speed, etc. Shaka instead is the master of skill and hax, having some of the most broken and/or subtle techniques that can bypass the power of many opponents. 

Shaka is primarily known for his psychic and mental powers, especially his illusions. Shaka's illusions are of such potency that he can create mental worlds large enough to contain galaxies and implied the universe as he trapped Phoenix Ikki in an illusion where he traveled to the end of the universe yet it was still in Shaka's palm as reference to Sun Wukong and Buddha. Similarly he created an illusory world for Saga, Shura, and Camus that they had to travel through containing numerous galaxies on panel. His illusions can distort one's sense of time and can be layered such that one can escape an illusion while still being inside another illusion that the former was within. 

His illusions can also involve summoning monsters and attacks that are relevant threats to other Gold Saints. While the raw potency of his psychic power is not on the level of Mu, Saga, or Dohko, his skill and subtlety with it can allow him to at least temporarily trap someone like Saga in an illusion. It also worked on his Dryad counterpart Dysnomia, tricking her into thinking she had destroyed Sanctuary. 

Shaka also demonstrates many other assorted psychic abilities. He erased Ikki's memories and gave it a condition for which it would return. He regularly levitates, has telekinesis strong enough to aid Mu against the comet empowered by Eris and Ares, and could telepathically speak to Mu from another dimension. Shaka also knows a special technique to purify himself of hesitation and fears. 

In Next Dimension when the Bronze Saints 200 years in the past were threatened by his predessor Virgo Shijima Shaka astral projected back in time to protect them and in Saintia Sho, Shaka showed the ability to enter a place beyond space and time where he represented order and Dysnomia represented Disorder, the two able to see the birth of universes and potential futures that would come about. This area was stated to be a place even the gods can't see and which passes through all of spacetime. 

He was also able to teleport Aioria to Earth from another dimension, telepathically sensed a Titan's cosmo others could not sense and when Ikki nicked him, a pool of blood came out that threatened to drown Ikki in blood. Shaka stated that this was not an illusion, so what it was is unclear. 

Shaka also uses numerous techniques. Khan is a barrier technique creating a barrier that blocked attacks from Saga, Shura, and Camus at once with Shaka only receiving a small wound, though in fairness in the manga they didn't use their attack techniques. 

Shaka can attack with Rikudo Rinne, an attack which divides one's consciousness among the six Dharma realms of Rebirth (The Realm of Damned Souls, The Realm of Hungry Ghosts, The Realm of Beasts, The Realm of Warring Demigods, The Realm of Man, and the Realm of Gods) and should the person's mind collapse into one of the realms their soul is sent there to be trapped in rebirth

Shaka can attack with Tenku Haja Chimimoryo which summons hordes of river and mountain spirits to attack his enemies. 

Shaka's primary form of attack is Tenma Kofuku where he builds up his Cosmo with a chant before releasing it all at once. He regularly keeps his eyes closed to help build up cosmo further when he opens them. This power was able to route Saga, Shura, and Camus at once and the guidebook states it can reach the power of the Galaxian Explosion albeit is clearly a slower move to use. 

When Shaka opens his eyes he can use the attack Angyo representing the light at the beginning of the universe. When he projected into the past to fight his predecessor Virgo Shijima who uses Ungyo, the Darkness and Sound at the end of the universe, the two engaged in an astral battle of Light and Darkness where many universes were formed and ended and threatened to become an eternal battle. 

Even this is not Shaka's ultimate move. Shaka's ultimate technique is Tenbu Horin, the Heaven-Dancing Dharma. The Tenbu Horin is a technique that traps his opponent in another dimension where they can neither move nor attack, and ridding them of their senses one by one, with only those that have reached enlightenment able to escape. This power was the one that worked on Saga, Shura, and Camus at once. 

Libra Dohko is the Seventh Gold Saint and is essentially the Yoda of the Saint Seiya Universe. He was able to create a projection of himself and passively creates a fake image of himself to hide his true appearance. 

He also can undo paralysis and learned the Ancient Divine Art of Misopethamos, or Anti-Aging. Because of this he only aged 243 days over 243 years. 

Libra Dohko is the one who taught Dragon Shiryu his techniques and can use the Rozan Rising Dragon where he creates a dragon from his cosmo to attack his opponent. He also knows the stronger version Rozan One Hundred Dragons creating 100 dragons of his cosmo to destroy his opponent.

However what he's most known for are the Legendary Weapons. He has the Libra Shields, two shields so durable that they can protect from extremely powerful deities like Poseidon or Pontus, way more powerful than the Gold Saints or any of their attacks making it functionally invulnerable to anyone mentioned so far. It also includes five pairs of weapons. It's unknown if their potency is similar to the shield's potency, but contextually they probably are. 

Scorpio Milo is the Eighth Gold Saint, the Scorpio Saints being those who manipulate pain and the body's vital points. Technically Milo can use this to heal people by in order to stop bleeding though he mostly uses this to attack people.

Milo's primary technique is the Scarlet Needle, a series of 14 fingerpoints he makes that shoots out and injects the body with poison. Even the first of these normally drives men insane from the sheer pain. The point cripples the body permanently and rids them of their lower senses one by one. The 14th point kills the person via sheer poison overload.

Milo can also use a variant called the Crimson Stinger that uses explosive power instead and killed a Faceless, a monster made of 20,000,000,000 souls. He also has demonstrated the ability to suck up nearby power and focus it into his attack. This is how he beat The Ghost Silver Saint Orion Rigel by sucking up his flames into the Scarlet Needle and launching the Crimson Needle Blaze.

Scorpio Milo also has an additional technique called "Restrict" which can paralyze opponents. It has worked on two opponents at once and worked on characters as strong as God Cloth Aquarius Camus which should be much stronger than Milo. 

Sagittarius Aiolos is the Ninth Gold Saint. While all the Gold Cloths are stronger because their Cloths have absorbed the holy power of the Sun since time immemorial, the Sagittarius Gold Saint weaponizes this power with their holy bow which fires the holy light of the Sun. With one shot from his bow Aiolos defeated the Egyptian God of Chaos and Darkness Apophis, channeling the light of the Sun God Atum, being an attack stronger than his own natural power.. 

He channels this power with his "Infinity Break" Technique which fires millions of arrows of light relevant in speed to him and characters equal in speed to him. 

Aiolos also can fire a secret arrow called the Shadow Arrow onto someone's shadow to immobilize them as he did to the Gold Saint Pisces Aphrodite.

Capricorn Shura is the Tenth Gold Saint, the Divine Swordsman. This is him from the Wailing Wall and therefore hasn't got the huge change he received in Episode G: Assassins that upgraded him to one of the strongest Gold Saints though is still plenty formidable. 

Capricorn Shura is most known for wielding the divine blade. He uses the technique of Excalibur, which turns either of his arms into a cosmo blade that can "cut through anything." He has developed it further into Eclipse Caliburn, the mastered form stronger of Excalibur. This power ignores durability completely and can hit conceptual things. 

It was able to slice through the lightning of Zeus (one of the strongest deities in Saint Seiya), cut off the Ethereal Zeus' arm and was compared to the blade of Hades (the ultimate weapon of another very powerful deity). Excalibur can cut through even conceptual things like deities as well as completely ignore it's durability.

Humorously enough in Fairy Tail: 100 Year's Quest there is actually a character with a similar power called Kiria. 

When Shura had his arm broken and so could not use Excalibur he developed a backup technique called Ex-Caliburn which also lets him strike with a cosmo blade, though doesn't seem to have quite the potency of  Excalibur. 

Aquarius Camus is the Eleventh Gold Saint whose powers focus on freezing opponents by slowing the atoms of their body or their attacks. His ice has threatened to freeze the water and the body of the Ocean Titan Oceanus showing its potency to work on characters similar to him in power. 

He has frozen numerous enemies at once and with his technique Kol'tso can create a ring of cold that freezes all those caught in it.

Camus can weaponize his cold with the technique Diamond Dust, shooting waves of cold from his hands. This piercing cold has penetrated the Titan Oceanus' armor and froze the knee of Shaka, with it being stated to take Absolute Zero temperatures to freeze the Gold Clothes, suggesting that it's at Absolute Zero temperatures.

With his Freezing Coffin technique, Camus can encase an enemy in ice to freeze them and keep them unconscious. This coffin was tough enough that the Bronze Saints after awakening their Seventh Sense couldn't break it, though it has never taken an attack from someone on Camus' own level. It is confirmed however to be at near Absolute Zero temperatures.

Finally is Aquarius Camus' ultimate attack, Aurora Execution. Camus holds his hands up in the shape of vase and what flows from it is the purest cold of Absolute Zero or even lower, with it being able to threaten the eternal life of the God Oceanus if not for Gaia's protection. It is stated it would take temperatures far below even Absolute Zero to affect even gods like Hypnos and Thanatos.

Absolute Zero is a fundamental impossibility in the natural world as trying to extract energy from system will always inevitably put some energy in by interaction, as absolute a law as reaching as matter reaching the speed of light in a vacuum where the energy requirement reaches infinity. At Absolute Zero there would no longer be any binding energy of atoms, causing the atoms to simply break down. This would be a form of at least physical existence erasure, and given how atoms work in Saint Seiya and how it almost worked on Oceanus, it likely applies on the metaphysical as well. 

Pisces Aphrodite is the Final Gold Saint, the effeminate wielder of the Pisces Gold Cloth which manipulates plants and poisons. 

Aphrodite has shown several usage of vines, including restraining opponents as strong as the giants who are physically relative to the Gold Saints as well as healing Aioria though he doesn't use its healing aspect often. Primary however he's known for weaponizing the roses his plants create to inject poison into his enemies.

The Royal Demon Rose weaponizing the Red Roses is the most painless of these options. Their fumes when inhaled or the brushing of their thorns against someone's skin causes the victim to slowly lose their senses and fall into unconsciousness before dying. This worked against an opponent who was a Giant.

His Piranha Black Rose simply breaks down his opponents, devoured as though by Piranhas.

But the most dangerous is the Bloody Rose, a white rose that when it touches the opponent's body, instantly sucks up all blood in it usually killing them instantly and turning red from the blood.

Pisces Aphrodite also has the strange ability to disguise himself as a woman well enough that people close to him for extended periods of time don't notice. 

Finally the Gold Saints have a final technique. Any Three Gold Saints together can use the Athena Exclamation, a forbidden move. This technique recreates the Big Bang that started the universe, and is clearly supposed to be the strongest attack technique of the Gold Saints. All of them are superhumanly good fighters with often high degrees of intelligence and tactical experience. 

In terms of weaknesses, the Gold Saints are still normal humans physiologically. They usually rely on their Cloths to protect themselves from the power of even their own movements and attacks and don't normally have special resistance to biological forms of attacks. While they can protect their bodies from raw force or biological attacks by focusing on their cosmo, this is something they can only maintain actively. Any lapse in concentration can cause them to instantly die, and degenerative diseases and aging will eventually effect them and slowly kill them in the moments they're not paying attention to it. Of course this is less of a problem for Saints who have awoken the Eighth Sense and can just... leave the underworld when they feel like it. 

In addition, the Gold Saints have a number of psychological weaknesses. Some of them are connected to the personality faults associated with their respective constellation such as Deathmask being cowardly or Aioria being proud and impulsive. They're also characters from an 80s Battle Shonen and can be rather overly theatrical and dramatic such as Gemini Saga telepathically contacting the whole Sanctuary to proclaim his victory without any tactical reason. As part of that they don't have the best teamwork sometimes, focused more on asserting their will and ideals than fighting together, though they do come together when the need is great enough. 

The Spriggan 12 are pretty different from the Gold Saints in the fact that while all the Gold Saints share essentially an origin and power source, the Spriggan 12 are only really connected by being 12 wizards of extraordinary power united under Emperor Spriggan the Black Wizard and thought to be strongest in the world. They have completely unrelated origins to each other nor do they much in the way of association with each other the way the Gold Saints do, either in power or as a team. Some of them have particular relations with each other and there is a hierarchy with the weaker members broadly respecting the stronger members, but these are entirely based off their own personalities without any shared status save that they are Wizards. 

Wizards in Fairy Tail are those that absorb a form of microscopic particle called Ethernano existing throughout the entire universe. By bringing one's spirit, one's heart into alignment with the flow of nature, these people can create powers beyond the bounds of reason known as magic. One's magic grows with the power of one's heart and Lucy, a superintelligent character believes that the one magic, the source of all other magic, is Love. 

There's not a lot of powers shared between all Wizards that would apply to all Wizards. Presumably all of the Spriggan 12 would share the ability to absorb Ethernano. All of them could sense the magic of people nearby and could at least hypothetically get stronger via their emotions though that's shared with cosmo and power-amping is removed from this scenario. Regardless all 12 are considered some of the greatest masters of magic.

Unlike the Gold Saints there isn't a special "order" to the Spriggan 12 so I'm going to be in roughly the order that they were defeated in the story (emphasis on roughly) which has the added side effect of going vaguely stronger over time. 

Ajeel the Desert King is a Sand Mage. He has the power to convert himself into sand itself making him a form of elemental intangibility as well as merging with the sand. In this state he can quickly shift his position within the sand faster than he was moving prior allowing him to avoid quick attacks, can gain information from the sand which he claims tells him what he needs to know, and claims no sword can cut him because anything he touches turns to sand, though Erza's water sword was able to bypass that by being liquid instead of solid.

Like a Molding Mage, Ajeel is also able to fashion constructs out of his sand. He has made swords and axes out of sand to use as weapons, presumably with higher attack potency than his baseline strength due to focusing the energy on a smaller area but his main way of using it is the creation of constructs.

Ajeel was able to create numerous monsters from sand including wolflike creatures and pterodactyl like creatures as well as his biggest creation, the Sand Golem. These were major threat to Fairy Tail's strongest Team, including Natsu and Erza who would both being relative physical threats to Ajeel in the same arc, and from which they couldn't run from suggesting they were creations of similar power to Ajeel himself. 

Ajeel can use the Ant Lion Pit, which creates a massive quicksand pit to envelop and crush/drown enemies. This technique can encompass entire towns and was difficult to escape for even the members of Fairy Tail that were there including Natsu and Erza. 

In an environment without Sand attack can incorporate sand via the Sands of Death Technique which creates a massive sand tsunami. This sand drains the life-giving water from whatever it touches, mummifying whoever it touches. It's of such scale as to cover basically the horizon in sand. 

Finally Ajeel's ultimate move, implied to be his last resort, is Sand World. Sand World creates a massive sandstorm that Ajeel can merge into the size of an entire town like Magnolia. This obscures the vision of even other Wizards who normally have good sensory abilities and hinders their movement as well as allowing him to move within the sand. It's likely this move is considered his last resort ultimate move because it also significantly hinders any of his allies who are also there with even other members of the Spriggan 12 finding it more difficult to act under Sand World. 

The second Spriggan 12 is Brandish the Country Demolisher. Her magic is called Command T and is a form of matter manipulation that allows for size manipulation which, as might be imagined, can be used to make things either bigger or smaller. 

Brandish can obviously use her power to make herself gigantic in order to bolster her stats. This wouldn't work here as stat amplifications aren't allowed but she can hypothetically use her size increasing powers on her opponents to make them bigger targets or as she has shown to be able to affect singular body parts of her opponents, she could simply make one of their internal organs rupture by making them grow too large. 

Brandish can also shrink things as big as whole islands or nations and can shrink them so much that they poof from existence. Shrinking things lowers their stats and while the rules ban stat amplification, it doesn't ban Stat REDUCTION. This means Brandish's size decreasing gives her a form of stat reduction and physical existence erasure. 

Brandish can use her shrinking powers fast enough that a heart wound caused by August, a stronger Spriggan 12 didn't kill Mirajane because she shrunk the wound and can be applied to such things as injuries, tumors, other internal body parts, and even others magic as she was able to compress Lucy's magic. 

The Third of the Spriggan 12 is Eight Dragon God Serena, originally the strongest wizard of Ishgar. God Serena had 8 Dragon Lacrima, crystals with the power of the Dragons within them, implanted into his body gaining 8 different forms of Dragon Slayer Magic associated with the elements Fire, Water, Wind, Earth, Thunder, Stone/Diamond, Light, and Darkness.

Dragon Slayer Magic is Magic made... to slay Dragons, as the name implies which are normally immune to magic and as such bypasses normal Magic Immunity. Dragons also find it impossible to regenerate from their magic.

Dragon Slayers broadly have their magic associated with an elemental type, and gain the ability to project that elemental in various elemental techniques as damaging attacks. God Serena having eight Dragon Lacrima can attack with eight different elements.

They are also highly resistant to their own element naturally (considered immune in their universe) and can consume their element so long as it's not produced by themselves to both heal themselves and bolster their power. 

God Serena has Eight Types of Dragon Slayer Magic that he uses to greater or lesser extents. 

God Serena has Lightning Dragon Slayer Magic which he showed briefly. He may have similar lightning capabilities to the Lightning Dragon Slayer Laxus who was able to create constructs like balls and spears out of his lightning and was able to turn into lightning himself. 

God Serena has Cavern Dragon Slayer Magic which lets him manipulate the earth to do such things as cause massive fissures and the ground to fall apart on opponents. 

God Serena has Purgatory Dragon Slayer Magic which allows for producing large torrents of flame from his hand. If his fire magic is at all comparable to Natsu's in control he likely has enough control of this power to cauterize wounds with his fire or to literally write words with flames.

Similarly God Serena has Sea Dragon Water Slayer Magic which lets him produce torrents of water as an offensive attack of similar power to his fire magic and which he is talented at using at once. 

With Gale Dragon Slayer Magic, God Serena can attack with massive tempests of wind including numerous cyclone like attacks at once. 

God Serena has Diamond Dragon Slayer Magic with which he can coat his body in diamond armor that can make attacks from even relative opponents not work at all. 

With Spark Dragon Slayer Magic, God Serena has the ability to produce extremely powerful lights which can blind enemies and is especially potent against darkness based enemies, overpowering even ones relative to him. It's possible he may be able to create laser like attacks with it like the Light Dragon Slayer Sting. 

Finally God Serena has Darkness Dragon Slayer Magic which can project darkness and can use the inner darkness within someone to consume them from the inside literally. He may also have Rogue the Darkness Dragon Slayer's ability to become living shadow at will. 

God Serena is a master at using his styles in combination perhaps best shown with his Dragon God's Fang Technique that summons eight spectral dragons representing his elements to fight for him. 

as well as his Eight Dragon's Glorious Death Technique where he places eight seals upon his enemy which erupt into a massive explosion. 

Being a Dragon Slayer also gives God Serena a few more added passive benefits. He can naturally sense things from hundreds of kilometers away, detect poisons, and even predict their opponents' motions via their senses which Natsu used to fight an opponent moving much faster than him. Albeit these enhanced senses tend to give them motion sickness.

While it wouldn't be especially helpful against a Gold Saint, being a Dragon Slayer also gives one resistance to the effects of Anima as well as the ability to absorb another Dragon Slayer's magic and add it to their repertoire under specific circumstances. And most dangerously to themselves and others, overuse of Dragon Slayer Magic can turn one into a Dragon which would normally bolster their stats and give them immunity to any other form of magic. 

The fourth of the Spriggan 12 is Wall Eehto, the Judge. Wall is a Machias, a machine given life that learned to use magic. As a Machias, Wall naturally has an immunity to any power that involves effecting his biology as he is an artificial body. 

Wall's primary magic is "Weakness" Magic which lets him detect the strengths and more importantly the weaknesses of anyone he sees. It also allows for a general analysis of his opponents, gaining insight on their power level, power type, potential strategies against them as well as lock on target against them. It does freak out however against opponents with too many weaknesses. 

The Machias are capable of performing the magic of Alchemy, the transmutation of matter from form to form, with Wall being adept enough at it he is able to alter his own Machias body, from which he uses most of his abilities as well as removing the normal weakness of the Machias. His manipulation of himself is good enough to both change his appearance and even change his personality should a different one be able to exploit an enemy weakness better. Wall can also use Alchemy on external things which he mostly uses to construct powerful machine weapons.

To keep his real body safe, Wall can create and send out a Mechanical Puppet with most of his abilities as well as self detonation. 

Wall has created numerous conventional weapons like guns and missiles to use against his enemies as well as more devastating firepower such as the Railgun he created to use against Laxus, shooting powerful lightning he thought would be able to one-shot an enemy relative to him, albeit one worn down a little from battle. 

As well as likely the pinnacle of his alchemy used on other objects, the Ultra-Long-Range Anti-Material Magic Cannon, a magical artillery cannon with an effective range of 400 KM and with enough speed and firepower the members of Fairy Tail believed they had no ability to stop it and it could completely demolish the guild. 

The pinnacle of Wall using his Alchemy to transmute himself, Wall can enter into Assault Mode where he becomes engaged for combat, gaining numerous more weapons, more armor, and flight. His strongest two include a personal Etherion Cannon capable of supposedly destroying Laxus to such an extent his body would be "gone."

as well as Magic Confinement Fusion. This creates a nuclear fusion within the area of his powers, enough to matter is both vaporized and energized until it reaches the state of matter known as plasma generating extreme amounts of power. 

Wall also has on him at all times a particle canceller, This creates a field around him that erases all forms of magic repelling particles including those that make up forcefields as well as bane particles. 

While Wall is a Machina and would be hypothetically vulnerable to lightning abilities, he used his own Weakness Magic to discover his own weakness and remove it. He can use the technique Voltex Charge to absorb lightning and redirect it at opponents in the form of electric explosions. Even without using the technique however, Wall is immune to lightning at least on the level of someone like Laxus. 

Dimaria, the Warrior Queen, is the fifth Spriggan 12 with the to stop time. This power is pretty self-explanatory in how it functions and its uses but she will its and time stops for everyone but her, and seems to work on a universal scale based on it description of sealing time away. It doesn't affect beings stronger than Chronos the God of Time himself, though with stats equalized that doesn't matter. 

While this is her most used ability by a good margin as it's usually all she needs, Dimaria can offer her body to the God Chronos manifesting his god soul in her body, fusing into one entity with more powers. In this form, Dimaria can create powerful energy novas or shoot lasers. 

Her Time Powers increase as well with her being stated to gain the power to generally manipulate time and to use the Age Scratch Technique which inflicts the pain of time on their target. The anime makes it more explicit what the power does, essentially causing the person to experience all the pain they ever have in their entire life. 

She also claims she will pierce Wendy "to the far end of time" suggesting maybe some form of temporal BFR? Or possibly it's a poetic description of her Age Scratch ability or her desire to hurt Wendy into eternity. 

The Sixth Spriggan 12 Member is Jacob Lessio, known by his epithet Assassin. Jacob is a genius assassin with mastery of conventional assassin weapons like knives and bullets he has on his person and seems to have master level assassin skills conventionally which he combines with his magical assassin powers. 

Jacob's main magic is Assassination Magic which is a form of stealth magic, able to allow him to turn things imperceptible to sight, hearing, or smell at will, or to make them perceptible again. He can use this to hide himself or his weapons.

It also allows Jacob to sense and effect things that are invisible. This even included Mavis the First Guild Master of Fairy Tail who was an incorporeal spirit that only Fairy Tail could see. 

The Second Magic Jacob has at his disposal is Transport Magic, a form of spatial BFR magic that allows him to teleport people to "Death's Door" where they will die if not returned. This is activated by a clap and effected almost all of Fairy Tail at once save for those not physically present in the guild hall at the moment. 

The Seventh Spriggan is Bloodman, The Grim Reaper. Bloodman is an Etherious, a type of Demons made by the Black Wizard Zeref to try and circumvent his own immortality. Bloodman's body is made of bane particles, particles of anti-magic making him very difficult to harm either physically or magically and allowing him to shift his body around. However these bane participles are in turn weak to holy powers and exorcisms. 

Uniquely among the Spriggan, Bloodman due to his Etherious Nature primarily uses Curses instead of Magic. While Magic is derived from the ancient one magic that might be love, Curses are instead derived from the most negative emotions and broadly have much more malefic effects. They are not magic. Bloodman primarily uses three connected curses called The Three Seals.

With the First Seal released, Bloodman seems to emanate his Bane Particles outwards. This causes people in his area to passively die from his presence, inhaling the toxic Bane Particles. 

By Releasing the Second Seal Bloodman is able to summon a horde of skulls representing the dead to consume his foes, though this power can be similarly warded off with holy light. 

After this is the release of the Third Seal during which he regains his true Etherious form in the process. He describes it as a move that surpasses that of the Nine Demons of Tartaros where he creates a portal capable of sucking people directly into the afterlife. He also seems to either have another move that does this when he dies or it's a continuation of the same move. 

Created to be the Ultimate Demon, Bloodman can also use the Curse Powers of Nine Demons of Tartaros, his Etherious Brethern. These would include:

1: Tempester's "Calamity" Curse that manipulating calamities and natural disasters sumoning them at will including cyclones, earthquakes, quicksand, lightning strikes and so on. 

2: Seilah's "Macro" Curse that allows her to give orders to people and forces them to do her bidding. It's not mind control as the person is still fully cognizant, they simply cannot resist. To a lesser extent it also works on non-living things like objects or corpses though Seilah has admitted it's not as potent. It can also be used to give the user commands to force themselves to do things including such things as transform into a stronger state. 

3: Ezel's "Tenga Goken" Curse which gives his limbs the properties of blades which he claims can "cut through anything" using spatial slicing properties and fire sword beams

4:  Franmalth's "Absorption" Curse which allows him to stretch his limbs and absorb things including the bodies of enemies, the souls of enemies or even the souls of their attacks rendering them inert. Kyoka used this curse to absorb Seilah's power suggesting it also has power absorption capabilities. 

5: Torafuzar's "Tenchi Kaimei" Curse which summons a flood of the black waters of Hades that are poisonous and instantly lethal to most lifeforms if swallowed, and gradually so if just submerged as it is composed entirely of Bane Particles. 

6: Keyes' "Necromancy" Curse that allows him to raise the dead up to hundreds of corpses at once

7: Jackal's "Bomb" Curse which lets him manifest explosions anywhere he can see that are dangerous to people of his power level

8: Kyoka's "Enhancement" Curse with which she can increase properties of people and while power amping is not allowed by the rules she can use this to greatly amplify someone's sense of pain so that the slightest brush of the wind feels like the pain of being set on fire and can derive people of their five basic senses

The Ninth is actually quite special. Technically while Bloodman primarily relies on curses rather than magic, he does have his own magic from Silver the Ninth Demon, and while it's weaker than the other Spriggan's magic, it is an option. Specifically he has Ice Demon Slayer Magic. Demon Slayers are quite similar to Dragon Slayers but for Demons and with similar powers geared against Demons. This gives him ironically anti-demon abilities as well as the control to super potent ice abilities. 

 

He's also stated to know all of Tartaros' attacks and seems to possesses the powers of their master as well Mard Geer giving him plant manipulation as well as access to Memento Mori, the curse of existence erasure. Memento Mori was a technique designed to try and kill the unkillable Zeref summoning and creates a dark mist that envelops and erases the target so they are no longer living or dead. 

The Eighth Spriggan is Invel, the Winter Wizard. Invel is an Ice Mage, rather than an Ice Make Mage like Gray who focuses on creating constructs from his ice, Invel focuses on the purity and potency of ice by itself, so cold it can freeze the normally impervious Ice Mage Gray, the eternally fiery Natsu, and Mavis, Fairy Tail's greatest wizard as well as freeze Gray's ice outright nullifying it.

Invel's ice power is enough to create a blizzard over a large area cold enough to begin to freeze Gray near the center, can freeze large areas instantly, and if this is counted as canon is said in an editor's note in Weekly Shonen Jump to have colds that surpass Absolute Zero, the temperature at which atoms no longer have any energy decompose basically physically erasing them.

Invel is also associated with mind control with two techniques related to it. The first is the Ice Slave Technique. By fixing an ice collar to someone's neck it steals the target's ability to feel coherent thoughts, and causes them to obey any order given. This is done because according to Irene it "freezes the heart" stealing away their sense of self. 

 He also has the very similar Ice Lock Technique which works very similarly except it's used on two people at once and very strong emotions have overcome it before. 

Finally, he has the True Ice Kamui for defense which forms a Knight Armor around him made of Demonic Ice that instantly freezes its targets and threatened to freeze even Gray from touching it. 

Invel also creates constructs at a few points and calls Gray's Ice Make Magic a derivative of True Ice Magic, with the narrative implication being that he could hypothetically do the same things as Gray can, suggesting he too can make ice constructs to likely similar proficiency as Gray was able too or at least gain some of the same abilities. 

The Ninth Spriggan is Neinhart. Neinhart uses Life Make Magic, creating life from memory. He has the ability to peer into his opponents hearts and see the memories and feelings there. 

His signature ability is Historia of the Dead in which he gives life to memory, reviving usually the enemies of the people he's using the magic on as tangible again to fight for him. It is explicitly not Necromancy but instead specifically the giving flesh to memory. However the stronger the power of the people and the number of them he's maintaining at once the harder it is with him describing it as taxing to maintain three of his fellow Spriggans. 

However this was pre-amp. Irene then amped him to become stronger than before. This likely gives him greater magic power to maintain a greater number of people at once and made him immune to Brandish's power. 

The Tenth Spriggan is Larcarde, the White Dragneel, who's powers focus on Biological Manipulation primarily He states that he is one of the top three of the Spriggan 12 and that the gap between them and the lower nine is quite substantial.

Lacarde primarily focuses his powers through three magics. 

The First is Pleasure Magic which subjects all those in the area of his magic which encompasses numerous kilometers who have experienced sexual pleasure to experience overwhelming and overbearing pleasure, enough to completely incapacitate them and eventually "send their souls to Heaven." He can also focus it as tendrils made of light that can affect anyone they touch with the same effect. That said this effect can be nullified by inflicting enough pain onto oneself to drown out the pleasure.

The Second is "Famished Soul" which causes those affected to experience cartoonishly extreme levels of hunger to the point of wanting to eat their allies and hallucinate them as food. This also makes it difficult to build up strength for obvious reasons, essentially inflicting the same weakness of starvation. 

Larcarde's ultimate magic however is Rest in Peace (RIP), a spell which induces extreme drowsiness in targets, causing them to fall into sleep which kills them. 

Somewhat ironically given his true nature, Lacarde can also fight with general light magic, shooting blades of light or using tendrils of light to bind. 

The Eleventh Spriggan is Irene Belserion, the Scarlet Scourge. The arc consistently makes the point that Irene and August represent a cliff of power, in a completely different tier than the other Spriggans with Irene being considered the strongest woman, August the strongest man, and their relative status unclear. 

Irene's primary magic is the power of Enchantment, the magic of imbuing traits onto objects.

Irene is of the highest conventional title, a Grand High Enchanter, one who can enchant the very traits of nature itself which she demonstrates by imbuing a wintery surroundings with the essence of spring, making it warm and the local flora blossom. This can be used offensively in a wide variety of ways from setting the atmosphere ablaze, creating destructive atmospheric effects, or causing enemy objects to explode like she did Erza's armor. Irene can easily enchant entire armies at once and effecting the entire surrounding prior to even using her wide scale enchantment. Her manipulation of natural forces extends even to the fundamental forces as she can manipulate gravity with enough force to knock back Acnologia, a villain stronger than even her, and can fly and levitate with it. 

Irene can enchant people in a wide variety of ways including diminishing their power or amplifying their power as she did to Neinhart as mentioned earlier. Using Deus Corona she increases resistance to all forms of attack and with Deus Eques increases their physical capacities. She was able to delay the birth of her child while pregnant, was able to turn Princess Hisui into a mouse, and was turn the entire Alvarez Army into Berserkers, amplifying their stats and turning them into raging monsters that feel no pain. She also has a contingency Deus Zero ability that allows for the nullification of other Enchants, and can counter even another Deus Zero basically being Counterspell for Enchantments specifically. 

Deus Zero is derived from a broader form of magic Irene is particularly skilled in called Separation Enchantment where she can seperate magic from someone. She can use this to permanently disable someone's magic by stripping their magic power from them and it was with this power she and Zeref believed she could with difficulty remove the Fairy Heart from Mavis. 

Irene also has Personality Enchantment which allows her to enchant things with a personality. Using her own personality she was able to basically take Wendy's body as her own, and mocks the idea of it being a simple possession spell as she had essentially overridden Wendy's personality with hers. She also considering doing that to her infant child. Though this ability does have something of a limit in that she is limited then by the capabilities of the body she put herself into. Irene can also enchant objects with personalities basically turning them into minions of hers.

Even more powerful, and not even magic, Irene can use Conceptual Enchantments allowing her to use spiritual life force to change the attributes of things on a conceptual level. 

Her strongest enchant as a Grand High Enchanter though is Universe One, the world reconstruction magic. A magic that can stretch at least the length of a continent and allows her to spatially rearrange everything it, where she wants if she chooses, and otherwise at random. This shrunk the area to at most 5% of its original size and was powerful enough to affect beings stronger than her like Zeref and Acnologia. It was also maintained until the moment of her death. 

Juliet Sun and Heine Lunasea are two swords Irene enchanted and can summon to her at any time. Plus given they're abilities come from her wouldn't have anything she can't replicate. The two have different forms of binding with Juliet using a gooey mucus while Heine uses magical bands of clothing. Juliet's mucus can also melt like acid or be slippery while Heine's bands can also block attacks or electrocute people. They might have relevant power as they were able to be threats to Satan Soul Mira who defeated Jacob though Jacob was handicapped due to a character weakness so make of that what you will. 

Irene also has a sensory spell outside of her Enchantments that summons a giant eyeball in the sky to see things as well as possibly to intimidate. 

Greater than this, Irene is also secretly the first of the Dragon Slayers, the Sage Dragon Slayer, who 400 years ago enchanted herself with the power of her Dragon ally Belserion. As such she has access to the Dragon Slayer powers mentioned above

The greatest combat asset this gives Irene is the ability to regain her true form, that of a Dragon. This form would normally massively amplify her stats, as well as gives her an immunity to non Dragon-Slayer magic, enhanced endurance and regeneration, and a major boost to all her magical powers. 

With this power, Irene's Enchantment Power raises to the superhuman level of Master Enchanter, who's magic affects not just nature but transcends the natural and reaches the level of the Celestial, able to affect the celestial bodies themselves. With it she can use Deus Sama, summoning a meteor from the Heavens to strike her enemies. 

The Final Spriggan is August the Magic King. The Narrative hypes August as being in a tier above all the other Spriggans save maybe Irene, the "Strongest Man" to her "Strongest Woman." 

August's primary ability is Copy Magic, the ability to instantaneously copy an enemy magic used against him and become immune to it. Copy allows him to become a master at whatever magic he users such that he can become stronger than the person who targeted him with the magic. The only limitations are it must be castable with his own body meaning magic that requires external objects or things he does not possess he can't use. August hides the source of his abilities under the guise that he has simply mastered every magic in the world to keep people from knowing how his abilities worked. Some of the abilities August has either through independently learning them or by copying them include:

August can at any time enter his battle form which completely mitigates the physical limitations born of his old age and gives a few other advantages. He was able to go into it after being stabbed by Spriggan Member Brandish without being inconvenienced

August can create magical barriers. He used one of these to protect Spriggan member Ajeel from a blow August thought would kill him though Ajeel disagreed with the notion. 

August put up false markers to fool Fairy Tail's Psychic Warren who was able detect and approximate the Alvarez Army Forces on a continental scale. 

From an unnamed source, August learned Sleep Magic capable of putting Spriggan Member Brandish to sleep with a wave of his hand. 

August can shoot unnamed beams and magic bullets from his fingers capable of one-shotting Mira who as mentioned earlier has scaling to Jacob albeit Jacob had something of a handicap. 

August has copied Fire Magic capable of making giant torrents of flame strong enough even the Fire Dragon Slayer Natsu was not immune to it despite Dragon Slayer's famous immunity to magic of their element. He can also create explosions in an area with fire magic. 

August copied sound magic from Erik, giving him the ability to hear events hundreds of miles away as well as hear someone's very thoughts. This also gives an ability to predict an opponent's moves from the slight sounds of their muscles. 

From Sawyer he copied Slow Magic, magic that creates time distortion around him to make outside events move slower and making him seem much faster. Notably as this is not actually boosting his speed but instead slowing down time around him, this would work in a Stats Equalized match. 

Immediately after, August copied Midnight's Reflector Magic and his Spiral Pain technique derived from it. Reflector Magic is focused on the reflection or distortion of non-living things with Spiral Pain being a distortion of air around a target into a violent storm tunnel around the target. By altering distorting light Reflector Magic can also produce illusions. 

From Gildarts August learned Crush Magic, the Magic of Destruction. Crush Magic is the magic of spatial distortion for the purposes of destruction, able to crush even non-solid things such as fire, wind, or even a black hole singularity into nonexistence. August instantly mastered it to a level even Gildarts hadn't using the spell "Realize" to dissemble as floating blocks and reassemble as a form of defense and movement. 

August was even able to copy the Magic of Fairy Glitter, one of the Three Great Magics derived from Mavis. Fairy Glitter gathers energy from the celestial bodies for the denial of the opponents' very existence, erasing them on a metaphysical level. 

It is quite likely and essentially confirmed August has copied many more spells than this, it's just not known which he has. 

August's ultimate magic is called Ars Magia for which he is known as The Calamity. Ars Magic causes him to erupt into a magical aura and begin to levitate as he begin to cast it. It a spell that blocks out all other magic and destroys all things, melting the Earth and vaporizing blood and oxygen. Its extent can be large enough to destroy entire continental sized areas. The scale of the power depends on the among of magic he puts into it, though if he puts all his power into it, it will inevitably kill him even if he chooses to cease the power. 

Mages also have the option of using their magic in combination. It is suggested that the magic of multiple mages is greater than the sum of its parts and that multiple mages can combine their magic into a Unison Raid, a stronger spell than either could do individually. However Jellal claims it's incredibly difficult citing a monk who attempted all his life to perform one but failed to do so. 

In addition the Spriggan 12 are all obviously expert or master mages being the greatest of the Alvarez Empire that dwarfs all the mages of the nation of Fiore and many of them also have master level or superhuman level fighting skills in terms of feats. 

In terms of weaknesses, many of the Spriggan 12 have psychological weaknesses. Brandish for example is comically lazy while Jacob has a phobia of women in a state of undress. They also collectively have a sense of arrogance, used to being uncontestably strong.

On a broader level, the Spriggan 12 were never meant to work together, rarely ever gathering, and it shows. As compared to Fairy Tail which is meant to represent a family the Spriggans, the Grotesque Fairies, have very limited connections with each others and many of their powers, especially their strongest powers, are just as much a hinderance to nearby allies as they are to their enemies. 

So what would happen if the Twelve Guardians of the Holy Goddess of Wisdom Athena stood across the battlefield from the Twelve Guardians of the Black Wizard Zeref?

As you might have noticed there's a lot of powers here, and a lot of things that could happen so the best thing to analyze both sides is go through both sides back and forth member by member and what possible counters the other side could offer. This isn't a measure though of just if each side has a counter, it's a measure of how many possibilities they have, trying to understand broadly how dangerous each member is to see what trends might emerge.

Starting with the Gold Saints Base Abilities:

The Saints as wielders of Cosmo fight by manipulating the enemy atoms, which can be used to strike on a conceptual level and a subatomic precision. To what degree can the Spriggans protect from this?

So obviously this would completely bypass Logia Intangibility from Ajeel, Bloodman, August, and potentially God Serena as it doesn't just hit their atoms but hits on the conceptual level. Antimagic or Copy Magic also wouldn't work as Cosmo is not magic. Brandish and Irene can both use forms of stat reduction and while that might prevent their atoms from being destroyed, it's unlikely it would protect them on a metaphysical level as even much weaker cosmo wielders such as Black Saints Arc Phoenix Ikki can tear apart someone's soul with one blow. Obviously they can try to dodge their blows but do they have more sophisticated counters?

Well first Elemental Based Counters should still apply. Aiolos and to a lesser extent Aioria use Light Based Powers, Aioria uses Lightning Based Powers, and Camus uses Ice Based Powers. Even if the attack would hit them on a conceptual level that God Serena could absorb the Light Based Powers from Aiolos and Aioria, both God Serena and Wall could absorb the Lightning based powers of Aioria, and Bloodman and Invel could absorb the Ice Based Powers of Camus. Because they're absorbing the elemental that is the manifestation of the cosmo before it reaches them, this should allow them to nullify the attack even if their normal resistance wouldn't let them tank it like normal due its conceptual nature. Functionally it would be similar to Natsu consuming Zancrow's God Fire even though it bypassed his normal resistance. Granted this only helps with three but Bloodman hypothetically could do this with any attack due to the Absorption Curse which steals the "soul" of an attack. 

They could also try to just keep the power from reaching them. August would be especially potent as this as not only can he create barriers of equal potency to their attacks, but he has Midnight's Reflector ability which can turn attacks that are non-living back on their opponents. This wouldn't help against being punched but would against cosmo based ranged attacks. Invel can also create the True Ice Kamui which similarly would create a barrier against being hit by a cosmo attack. Irene may be able to protect the Spriggans via Deus Corona. Deus Corona is stated to give resistance to all types of abilities and as enchantments can affect things on a conceptual level it's not a stretch to suggest it can protect against Cosmo attempting to destroy people on a conceptual level. Some of the characters also have various forms of stealth or precog/mind-reading individually that may help.

Defensively, the Gold Saints all boast both Atomic Regen and Godly Regen. Can the Spriggans fight this?

Well yeah, Irene has the ability to grant people to fight immaterial souls so fighting their souls is plausible. Now granted, this would still probably mean killing them twice to find out this and they would need to know what's going on but it is at least possible for Irene to allow pretty much any of the Spriggans normal powers to affect the Gold Saints and kill them permenantly though they would still need to get past Atomic Regen. Beyond this the Spriggan powers that at least hypothetically can bypass Astral Existence and Atomic Regen.

Brandish, Bloodman, and August all have forms of existence erasure with Bloodman and August's explicitly working on souls. Bloodman and and Invel via Command Spell and Ice Lock which can at least hypothetically get the Saints to kill themselves as can August via Attack Reflection. Jacob's powers explicitly work on ghosts, and both he and Bloodman have BFR. Bloodman has astral absorption, Lacarde and August have sleep manipulation, and Irene has numerous abilities that would work. Each of these methods can be tested in the Spriggan's section, but there are hypothetical win cons against the Gold Saint's regen. 

While the other Gold Saints abilities will come up mostly in whether they can resist the Spriggan's abilities, the other big one to keep in mind is their Reactive Evolution. A Gold Saint that experiences a power gains resistance and this can include even just seeing it or experiencing a power like it. This means that if a Gold Saint witnessing one of the Spriggans fight another Gold Saint, they may gain resistance to their ability. The Spriggans with the smaller arsenals of abilities are likely to do worse against the Gold Saints in general. 

The First of the Spriggan is Ajeel. So how would the Gold Saints do against the sand powers of The Desert King?

For the most part he has no way of killing anyone with the Eighth Sense. If Irene grants him the ability to hit on the spiritual plane, that does obviously change things.  His sand monsters would basically be throwing sand monsters of relative stats at the Gold Saints and while mildly annoying can be dispersed by any exertion of their cosmo on the atoms of the creatures. His Ant Lion Pit is unlikely to work as the Sixth Sense grants the Gold Saints the power to levitate in the air and obviously his Logia Nature wouldn't do anything to Saints who wield cosmo that hits the conceptual atoms. His transmutation of things that touch him to sand might work though as the Saints can regenerate themselves on the Atomic scale, it's rather dice-y if it works fast enough for them to not replenish their own atoms. 

His Sand Tsunami is a bigger trouble, as draining the water from the Saints bodies should actually work, assuming that Irene's enchantment allows it to work despite their Eighth Sense nature and the water-draining is fast enough the Gold Saints can't replenish themselves via their Atomic Manipulation. Though the Saints still have numerous counters. Mu, Saga, Deathmask, and Shaka have all shown spatial manipulation such as creating dimensions, warping spacetime, or BFR-ing people through spacetime so as to help the Gold Saints avoid the attack. In addition Mu and Shaka have powerful telekinesis that might let them push the sand wave away, stronger than their own attack potency. And of course multiple usages wouldn't work as they would gain resistance to the technique.

Ajeel can also use the Sand World technique but he's less inclined to as it would hamper the other Spriggan, and it wouldn't hinder the Gold Saints that much. The Cosmo-Sensing of the Gold Saints, even with their Cosmo diminished, would be still enough to sense people across dimensions, and with just the Sixth Sense can fight without any of the five prior senses, meaning that having their vision obscured wouldn't help that much. Ajeel being able to quickly adjust his position would be a bit annoying, but it's not that strong a defense when the Saints have plenty of large scale attacks. 

The First of the Gold Saints is Aries Mu. So how would the Spriggan 12 do against the Psychic of the Gold Saints?

Aries Mu's basic combat style involves using his psychic powers. This allows him to create illusions that can fool even the Silver Saints with the Sixth Sense, allows him to use telekinesis and paralysis along with Crystal Net to paralyze opponents on his own level of power, and use telepathic sensing and telepathic attacks strong enough to deliver a jolt to the mind of Gemini Saga. So how would the Spriggan 12 deal with these powers?

The Spriggan 12 have numerous information-gathering powers to deal with illusions. The Dragon Slayers God Serena and Irene as well as the Demon Slayer Bloodman have enhanced senses to the point of mild precognition and August has similar with his Sound Magic. Though admittingly this is similar to the Sixth Sense, which Mu has fooled before, although he may not be focusing as much on illusions if he's not fighting Saints. Beyond that Neinhart and August have outright mind-reading, Irene has Clairvoyance with her Eye Magic, and Ajeel can gain information from the sand. Beyond that Wall has Weakness detection and all the Spriggan have magic detection if Mu tries to disgust himself as one of them. Finally Irene's Enchantment might be able to grant the other Spriggans enhanced senses.

Against Mu's Telekinesis which is strong enough to paralyze or bind someone equally strong as him completely and hold back a Meteor far greater than him, the Spriggans have a few options. This telekinesis is never shown to work on immaterial things so the logia entities meaning Ajeel, Bloodman, August, and potentially God Serena could potentially slip out of it. Irene can likely grant physical states to not get crushed by the telekinesis with Deus Eques to the other Spriggan and potentially grant them similar logia by imbuing them with the essence of natural forces like light as she can imbue things with another fundamental force like gravity. 

Mu's Telepathy is also extremely potent, strong enough to give a jolt to the mind of Saga's mind who's mind would be as durable as his body. The Spriggan don't have a lot of good counters to this but August could create false markers of where the Spriggans are in Mu's mind, which could at least keep him from instantly crushing their minds. Beyond that Bloodman could possibly use the Macro Curse on a Spriggan who's mind has been destroyed to make them keep fighting by giving them "orders" to fight. Natsu was able to fight without using his mind such that the mind-reader Erik couldn't hear his thoughts. If this is derived from his Dragon Slayer status, it's possible the Dragon Slayers could use this naturally and possibly that Irene could imbue the Spriggan 12 with this ability. 

Mu's more serious abilities including his teleportation and BFR. Mu can teleport eight people at once, and can teleport at least two people at once through dimensions. To be honest, while being spatially teleported would be annoying for the Spriggans, Mu's dimensional BFR would be a much bigger trouble as no one save maybe Jacob could return from being dimensionally BFR-ed outside of generous interpretations of August and Irene. He also has Crystal Wall which reflects attacks. This is functionally a weaker version of Midnight's Reflector Magic and while it might be a little annoying for some Spriggan, it wouldn't be that troublesome. 

Mu's strongest techniques are using his Stardust Extinction to absorb a space into his cosmo and Starlight Revolution to create his own dimension to rain shooting stars upon the enemy. Protecting against Enemy Projectiles wouldn't be that hard and the Spriggan have plenty of ways avoiding the projectiles. The bigger part is spatial absorption and trans-dimensional warfare. The Spriggans do have their own spatial manipulation through Bloodman having Ezel's Tenga Goken Curse, Jacob having reversible dimensional BFR, Irene having Universe One, and August having Crush Magic from Gildarts which can let them avoid being in the space that's being destroyed, and attempt to access the dimension Mu creates around him potentially destroying the dimensional barrier between them.

The Second Spriggan is Brandish the Country Demolisher. Brandish has a rather simple power and tactic here. She can shrink the Gold Saints to reduce their cosmo further, weakening their power level. How would the Gold Saints deal with this?

So the Titans who the Gold Saints can resist the powers from do have Size Manipulation, resizing planets and able to shift the size of individual limbs like Brandish. That said the Size Manipulation of the Gold Saints is far smaller proportional to their power level than Brandish's is compared to her power level, meaning that with their cosmo reduced Brandish's power should still be able to affect them. If Brandish tries to physically erase them immediately, their soul could just reconstitute their bodies. Even if Irene granted Brandish the ability to shrink their astral bodies via Enchantment, the Saints do have some level of existence erasure, though it's arguable if it's on their level. 

The better tactic for Brandish is reducing them to small so their attacks are weaker. This wouldn't stop the secondary effects, like the sixth sense psychic powers or cosmo's ability to threaten their concepts, but it would give the Spriggan 12 a stat advantage. 

The Second Gold Saint is Taurus Aldebaran, the physical specialist. How would the Spriggan 12 deal with him?

Pretty easily with stats equalized. Many of the Spriggans are themselves fairly physically adept and they can all be made such by Deus Eques. The Spriggans have plenty of abilities to make trying physical combat a bad irene such as Bloodman's toxic bane particles passively emitted by the first seal or Invel's True Ice Kamui as well as plenty of ways to avoid letting Aldebaran getting in close range or using his fairly basic attacks against the Spriggans. 

The Third Spriggan 12 is God Serena, the Eight Dragon God Serena. So how would the Saints deal with his 8 Forms of Elemental Manipulation?

Without that much difficulty. Even if Irene allows him to bypass the Eighth Sense Regen.  to God Serena can absorb the lightning and light powers of Aioria and Aiolos and as a Dragon Slayer can get an advantage against Dohko's cosmo dragons, but even something as simple as the Gold Saints' attack reflection would mess with most of his strategies. God Serena is a Dragon Slayer which means he should have the ability to predict opponent motions via hearing their muscles, but this is functionally similar to the mild precognition from enhanced intuition the Sixth Sense grants anyway, if not lesser. 

God Serena can try to swallow with their inner darkness which could probably have some effect on at least Deathmask and Aphrodite but the Saints cosmo can destroy the Dryads, which are humanity's sins as a whole so I think they could fight back pretty easily. He could also summon eight spectral dragons or use eight seals to cause a massive explosion and while they would probably be his best attacks here, Dohko can create 100 Dragons at once from his cosmo. Eight Dragons' Glorious Death would probably be his most effective attack here, though he would need to get into dangerous melee with them for it to work.

The Third Gold Saint is Gemini Saga the Godslayer, one of the biggest threats of the Gold Saints normally. How would the Spriggans be able to do against the legendary Godslayer? He wouldn't have his normal overbearing cosmo to use against the Wizards, but his arsenal is still very strong. 

Saga has much of the same psychic powers of Mu and what was said about Mu's telepathic attacks and illusions would still apply here. Saga's telekinesis wouldn't be as much of a threat here but he has his own advantages mentally. Saga has numerous ways of making the Spriggan fight among each other with Phantom Demon Emperor which instead of just destroying their brain like Mu could do, brainwashes them to serve him and can create illusory duplicates of himself or of others like he did to Aiolos which can use their normal attacks that do real damage. Some of the Spriggan would have a little resistance to this in the form of resistance or invulnerability to their own abilities but against each other, these would be highly potent. Saga can also create illusory battlefields that loop in on themselves infinitely but tbe Spriggans can handle this much better. Bloodman can cut through iut with Tenga Goken and August can destroy the warped space with Crush Magic. Irene can also use Universe One to rearrange their placement on a far wider space and if there's sand in the area stretching to outside it, Ajeel might be able to escape via merging with the sand and slipping out the illusory area. An attack on Saga's person causes the illusion to drop, so as long as one of the Spriggans attacks him with something, the others can escape. 

Saga can also remove a person's senses one by one with gestures. Some of the Spriggans can deal with this: Neinhart and August both have mindreading, Irene can probably Enchant Senses back onto her, and Ajeel can information from the sand depending on how it works, but this would still be dangerous if Irene can't just Enchant Senses back onto them.

Saga can use the Another Dimension as a Dimensional BFR Technique as well as a spacetime warping defense move. As mentioned the only Spriggans can that protect against Dimensional BFR are Jacob and maybe Irene and August. This would protect against any of the attacks from the Spriggans that has to travel across space to hit its target though they do have some abilities that seem to bypass the space in between such as Irene's Enchantments and Bloodman's Curses. 

Finally Saga has of course the Galaxian Explosion, the strongest attack of the Gold Saints individually. If its full power hits any of the Spriggan they would be destroyed. If its' power is enough to then CRONOS than even Stats Equalized it would bypass most defenses. For instance August's Reflector Magic wouldn't work as the Gods passively reflect non-divine attacks and the Galaxian Explosion can threaten even a god. The Spriggans do have two options against it though. Brandish could shrink Saga's cosmo, which would weaken the Galaxian Explosion. She'd have to shrink it a lot but she absolutely can do that. The Galaxian Explosion is a bursting of sheer power and cosmo and if Saga was reduced in power, the Explosion's power wouldn't be haxing them in any particular way. The other way by  a similar metric is that Bloodman can use the Absorption Curse to absorb the soul of the Galaxian Explosion, rendering it inert. Granted in both these cases, Saga would still have his Divine Golden Dagger which would still have the same power but it would require him to get into melee range to use. 

The Fourth Spriggan is Wall, The Judge. How would the Gold Saints do against his various weapons and magical technology?

Most of his weapons would be fairly ineffective. While they would have ultra-high attack potency, pretty much any of the Saints could do things like reflect conventional attacks by atomic manipulation. Even his nuclear fusion is only just reaching the level of atomic manipulation that any Saint can do. 

Wall's bigger assets are his Weakness Magic and his Alchemy. His Weakness magic definitely helps his teammates as he can inform them of the Saints' biggest weaknesses, namely that they have normal human bodies for the part and their Clothes are what they rely on for their defense, as well as individual weaknesses.

Whether he could transmute the Saints with his Alchemy is an interesting question. The Saints can resist the matter manipulation of the Titans which could create dimensions of "countless" stars. This either gives them matter manipulation resistance on the level of their attack potency, or a matter manipulation quadrillions of times smaller which in this scenario would give them either continental-planetary matter manipulation resistance which with their proportionally lower cosmo would give them resistance to matter manipulation somewhere in the range of a person or a bus. Wall's Alchemy allowed him to transmute matter on such a scale that he was able to create a magic cannon notably bigger than a person, albeit probably smaller than a bus. So it's possible his alchemy may be able to affect the Gold Saints, though if Irene doesn't buff him, he can't bypass the Eighth Sense Regen.

The Fourth Gold Saint is Cancer Mephisto, the Deathmask. How would the Spriggan deal with his underworld themed powers?

Deathmask's main form of attack are his Underworld Waves. Bloodman can create a portal to the underworld at will though whether he can retrieve someone is more speculative and unlikely. It's possible with the Necromancy Curse of Keyes he could functionally do this though Deathmask can bypass this by sealing their souls in the Cancer Temple instead. Interestingly Jacob's dimension is called "Death's Door" and could arguably be equivocated to Yomotsu Hirasaka, the entrance to the underworld. If that was the case, Jacob might be able to teleport to and from Deathmask's dimension. Any of the Spriggans there would have to be wary of Deathmask using his Underworld Waves and destroying their souls, though they could avoid this the same way they could avoid any other random form of attack. 

Deathmask also has the advantage he can attack from another dimension. This would cause some trouble for the Spriggans since they would have no way of knowing where the attack is coming from. Now granted, Deathmask's attack didn't even kill Shunrei so whether it would actually threaten any of the Spriggan is in the air, but random attacks coming from another dimension could potentially put them off guard for another Gold Saint.

The Fifth Spriggan is Dimaria the Warrior Queen. How would the Gold Saints deal with her time warping powers?

Dimaria's base Time Stop would be completely counterproductive. In Saint Seiya Omega the God Saturn stops time and anyone with even basic cosmo completely resists it. If Dimaria froze time, the only thing that would happen is keeping any of her allies from doing anything. 

In her god form, things become more interesting. Assuming the anime description the Age Scratch would probably be a very effective attack. The Saints do have enhanced endurance such that most can survive at least the first few blows of Milo's stingers, but this is a higher level of pain hax than they have dealt with. She can also possibly temporally BFR them. Time Travel in Saint Seiya is extremely difficult and the only one who would be able to return from that if she can do that is Virgo Shaka who can project himself across time and enter a space outside space and time traveling through all of space and time. 

Also the Saints would likely be intimidated by the implication she is possessed by Chronos. 

The Fifth Gold Saint is Leo Aioria, the The Fierce Lion. He's like a giant electromagnetism wielding human-y cat. How would the Spriggans deal with this?

Aioria's primary attack is a lightning based danmaku attack of 100,000,000 blows at once as well as a few variants. The Spriggans have numerous defenses against this. Both God Serena and Wall can just absorb lightning based powers, regardless of the number of them. August can use Reflector Magic to protect himself, and Irene could imbue the Spriggan with the properties of rubber. This is along with all the normal means of protecting from attacks they have. 

Aioria's ultimate move is the Photon Burst which has similar power to the Galaxian Explosion and a lot of same threatening properties. Bloodman probably couldn't use Absorption Curse on it as it being the Holy Light of the Sun would absolutely mess up his weakness and it just spawns on his location. On the other hand, God Serena can potentially protect himself and others from it if he acts fast enough as he can absorb the light. 

The Sixth Spriggan is Jacob, the Assassin. How would the Gold Saints deal with stealth magic?

Jacob's imperceptibility to the five basic senses wouldn't be that much of a trouble for the Saints who regularly fight with their higher senses anyway. He does have the unique benefit that he can actually hit their Eighth Sense souls and potentially bypass the Eighth Sense regen though he would still have to get past the Gold Saints atomic activate-able regen. 

More notably Jacob has Dimensional BFR. The Gold Saints do have numerous counters with Mu, Saga, Deathmask, and Shaka showing dimensional abilities. 

Also he's extremely afraid of women in a state of undress. If the Gold Saints find out about this Mu, Saga, and Shaka can all create illusions of this, and Aphrodite can threaten to reveal himself while in disguise as a woman. 

The other of the big threats of the Gold Saints is the Sixth Gold Saint Virgo Shaka, the Man Closest to God. How would the Spriggans deal with the Enlightened Powers?

Shaka's lesser powers like his barrier creation, drowning people in his blood or summoning hordes of angry spirits could be countered pretty easily. Irene can grant the Spriggans the ability to hit spirits, and most of the Spriggans can avoid being drowned by logia existence or spatial manipulation etc 

Shaka is a powerful psychic with Telekinesis strong enough to aid Mu and with his own illusory powers that can be layered on each other to be extra deceiving or summon illusory creatures that are relevant threats. The summons would be a threat but some of the same anti-illusion abilities should still be helpful. He also has memory erasure as he did to Ikki which the Spriggans don't have resistance to.

Shaka has very potent spacetime manipulation able to enter an area outside spacetime as well as project himself into the past. While there are abilities in Fairy Tail that would be able to reach him here in Natsu's fire, none of the Spriggans have the ability or they'd be able to kill Zeref. It's unknown if Shaka can fight from there but if he goes there, he's essentially invulnerable.

Shaka has Tenma Kofuku which is a technique that can reach the same power as Galaxian Explosion though is much slower to buildup power. Similar tactics of Brandish shrinking his cosmo or Bloodman absorbing the attack's soul would be even more effective here. Shaka's Angyo Technique which is a light based attack could also probably be absorbed by God Serena though if it's not he can start creating a procession of realities which would be a difficulty.

Shaka can use the Rikudo Rinne to split any of the Spriggan's consciousness among the six realms of rebirth and should their fall into one they are reincarnated there. How well the Spriggans would deal with this kinda depends on which one. Finally he has the Tenbu Horin. I don't know if any of the Spriggans can be said to have enlightenment as all of them are still quite clearly limited by Death, represented in Zeref as well as their material drives. Beyond that the sensory removal, paralysis, and dimensional bfr combination is something I don't any of the Spriggans can deal with particularly. 

The Seventh Spriggan is Bloodman, the Grim Reaper. How would the Gold Saints do against his curses?

Well firstly his bane particles are no trouble for the Gold Saints to hit and the Gold Saints have the ability to literally attack curses directly. That said assuming Bloodman can get hits off with his abilities which would be of particular notice.

The First Seal would work pretty well against anything save maybe Pisces Aphrodite as the Pisces Saints have greater resistance to poison. The Second and Third however can be hard countered by Deathmask who can banish the dead or the undead to other dimensions and teleport people at will from the underworld to the living world. The Eighth Sense in general also kinda nullifies the Third Seal. Deathmask would also nullify the advantage of the Necromancy Curse if Bloodman tried to resurrect fallen Spriggans with it. 

Some of the other Demon Curses would act as alternative ways of attacking and wouldn't really be countered or provide a huge advantage. That said of the more notable ones would be:

Macro: As Macro doesn't use mind control it's possible it would work on the Gold Saints despite their resistance. The Gold Saints have ways of temporarily disabling each other with things like Paralysis but that's obviously still a major difficulty. Also they can technically punch the curse if it's effecting one of them.

Tenga Goken: Basically the same as Shura's Excalibur Technique and would be similarly a threat

Absorption: The Gold Saints don't have absorption resistance so assuming he can get close to one, this should work.

Tenchi Kaimei: The Black Waters of Hades and it's biological manipulation should work though it's not instant if not consumed and the Gold Saints would probably have at least a better ability to fight it due to things like dimension shifting and such

Enhancement: Having ones senses removed is not a problem for the Gold Saints as each higher senses replaces the lower ones. That said being in excruciating pain might cause them some trouble and while they could suffer it better than most due to the Saints having enhanced endurance, it would still likely be troubling

Memento Mori: The Existence Erasure of Memento Mori where one is neither alive nor dead does seem like it would negate the Eighth Sense regen. This might work on the Saints though they do arguably have some degree of Existence Erasure resistance. Whether it's on par in this scenario would be unclear. 

Of course the big problem for Bloodman is that Aiolos and Aioria naturally use his weakness and would be included to use it against him in the form of holy light which is not just his weakness but counters some of his powers. 

The Seventh Gold Saints is Libra Dohko, the Saint of Justice. How would the Spriggans do against him?

Well he has quite strong telepathy, enough to be called out as one of the two saints that could give a jolt to Saga's mind, which means he would have a fairly strong telepathic attack. Other then that his other abilities could be handled fairly reasonably. Summoning 100 Cosmo Dragons sounds scary but the Spriggans have at least two Dragon Slayers in God Serena and Irene plus Irene can grant dragon slaying abilities onto people. 

Beyond that Dohko carries the Libra Weapons and Libra Shield. While the Libra Shield would be conventionally invulnerable and the weapons would be massively damaging if they get a hit in, the Spriggans have plenty of ways of fighting powerful weapons. Bloodman can use command to control them, Irene can enchant them to lose their properties, Brandish could shrink them to non-existence etc. 

The Eighth Spriggan is Invel the Winter Wizard. How would the Gold Saints deal with his ice powers?

Well Invel is said to reach Absolute Zero, the cold that even the Gold Cloth freezes. I think the obvious match people will want to happen is Invel vs Camus for obvious reasons, both having Absolute Zero colds. Against another Saint, fighting Invel would be pretty similar to fighting Camus. 

Invel has mind manipulation though he's never shown the ability to use it on many people at once and even Bronze and Silver Saints have shown some mind hax resistance before. He also theoretically can create constructs including his True Ice Kamui which would give him an added layer of defense though it wouldn't help against Gold Saint powers that don't travel through space. 

Invel can also obviously create a blizzard but this would moreso inconvenience his own team rather than the Gold Saints as their Cloths only freeze at Absolute Zero. 

The Eighth Gold Saint is Scorpio Milo, the Golden Stinger. How would the Spriggan do against his pain and madness powers?

Well I think the non-biological members Wall and Bloodman would be able to resist pretty handedly. This is how Orion Rigel was winning against Milo since he couldn't feel anything regardless as a ghost. Similarly Invel's ice could freeze the poison as it tries to reach him similar to Cygnus Hyoga vs Hydra Ichi. And if need be Irene can grant anyone there Berserker State with Berserkers not feeling any pain. 

That said Milo shouldn't be counted out despite that as he is quite inventive and was able to absorb Orion Rigel's own fire into his Scorpion Stinger to beat him. Against opponents that use energies based powers (Wall, God Form Dimaria, August), Milo could absorb the energy of their attacks to use against them.

Milo also does have a few other techniques. The Crimson Stinger would probably work on most fighters here due to it being a raw power type attack and Restrict is probably his strongest move here as it's simply a paralysis type move, though the Spriggans do have a few abilities they can active without moving. 

The Ninth Spriggan is Neinhart. How would the Gold Saints fare against the Historia of the Dead?

Neinhart can bring back any Spriggan who's died. It's possible Deathmask can immediatly banish them against given the Cancer Cloth's dominion over life and death but as Neinhart's powers are giving life to memory it's not exactly clear if this would work.

He can also summon people from the Gold Saints' memories. This would include the Dryads, the Gladiators, the Giants, characters of similar power but not really the same level of hax which would be troublesome but not the worst......

except Episode G the Gold Saints fight the Titans. Worse still Saga fought....

Cronos. The Mad Titan King. The Father of Zeus. One of the Strongest Beings in Saint Seiya. 

There are reasons to assume that Neinhart couldn't summon Cronos. Cronos like all the Titans is a conceptual entity and Neinart has only ever shown the ability to affect memory and life rather than concepts. Neinhart has trouble maintaining powerful characters. It's not clear if Cronos would have the seals on him if he was brought back by Historia of the Dead. However I made this it's own section simply to say...

if Neinhart can bring back Cronos, that's it. The Spriggans technically win though they may also die in doing so. Cronos is a multiversal deity who's powers completely control time and can threaten every timeline. His passive power is far greater than anyone else here, even if stats weren't equalized. His presence was turning back time on a planetary scale quickly which means that the Spriggans would technically win as their oldest members (at least 400 with Irene) is older than the oldest Gold Saint (Dohko at 261) and that's without Cronos even fighting though in fairness if Cronos does not shield Neinhart from the effect, Neinhart would be wiped out earlier, leaving just the people older than Neinhart left 

The Ninth Gold Saint is Sagittarius Aiolos, the Golden Archer. How would the Spriggan 12 deal with his holy bow?

Similar to Dohko, the Spriggan 12 have numerous ways of messing with Aiolos bow such as animating it or changing its properties conceptually. While they can't rely on staying out of range like they could with Dohko they have the additional benefits of anti-ranged abilities such August using Reflector Magic on his arrows. 

The Tenth Spriggan is Lacarde, the White Dragneel who primarily uses three kinds of magic. 

The First, Pleasure Magic, is probably not very relevant here. While it's not know what activities the Gold Saints do in their spare time, they're broadly focused on the protection of the Goddess Athena as well as mostly on the younger side, so it's unlikely to be of importance. 

The Second, Hunger Magic, is probably going to be more of a problem, not so much that it would cause them to try to eat each other, the Gold Saints enhanced endurance is probably sufficient of that, but it would diminish their fighting strength some. 

Finally his Sleep Magic would also be pretty good and while they can fight the Drowsiness, they don't have special resistance. 

Granted, this would also effect any Spriggans in the area so that's a problem. Plus the Dimensional Travelers of the Gold Saints can simply leave the area if it's effecting them, and someone like Shaka who has attained Buddhist Enlightenment might be unaffected by the first two regardless. Also Lacarde has no way of bypassing Eighth Sense regen unless Irene enchants him.

The Tenth Gold Saint is Capricorn Shura, the wielder of the blade Excalibur. How would the Spriggans do with this?

So if Shura gets a hit in on any of the Spriggans with Excalibur they die pretty instantly. Excalibur is a blade that can cut the arm of Zeus' astral body. As such they would have to avoid Shura getting into close range though they do have plenty of ways of doing that. Excalibur is functionally just a stronger form of Tenga Goken, which is just one of Bloodman's Curses.  

The Eleventh Spriggan is Irene, the Scarlet Scourge. She's one of the Big Two Threats of the Spriggan 12. How would the Gold Saints do against the Grand High Enchanter?

So ironically Irene's most flashy and highest techniques wouldn't be that helpful here and instead it would be her more normal tricks that would help. 

Universe One wouldn't be that helpful in most cases as the Gold Saints have people that can communicate and teleport across dimensions to gather together again and would only come in handy of the Gold Saints willingly tried to fight whoever Irene put near them which isn't entirely OOC. Deus Sama is also basically the meteor that Eris used and could be similarly stopped by Mu and Shaka's telekinesis.

On the other hand Irene is the one who provides the ability for the Spriggans to broadly win via Conceptually Enchanting them to be able to hit the Gold Saints' souls and not have them resurrect themselves endlessly. Deus Corona along with other abilities can provide resistance to a lot of the Gold Saints abilities via scaling as well.

Her strongest move however would be Personality Enchant. Not only does this give her a way to bypass the Gold Saints' mental resistance, it can also be used on their Gold Clothes to bring them to life. If she can deprive the Gold Saints of their Clothes, it would remove much of the Gold Saints' protection. 

Broadly speaking her conceptual manipulation is so versatile there are assuredly ways she can use against any particular Gold Saint they don't have resistance too. 

The Eleventh Gold Saint is Aquarius Camus the Ice Saint and... yeah the obvious question is how well he'd do against Invel. 

Both have Absolute Zero Cold and resistance on roughly the same level. Camus has the advantage of being a skilled warrior moreso than Invel as well as the general advantages of the Sixth Sense while Invel has the advantage of making ice-based constructs with neither probably being able to affect the other's mind to control with Ice Lock or to put them into eternal sleep with Freezing Coffin. 

The Aurora Execution would probably work on most of the other Spriggan 12 though Bloodman can probably absorb with Silver's Powers and August could probably reflect the freezing air with Reflector Magic.

The Twelth Spriggan 12 is August, the Wizard King, the other Big Threat of the Spriggan 12. How would the Gold Saints do against the ultimate copycat?

The Ability to immediately gain enemy magic wouldn't work on the Gold Saints powers and similarly Ars Magia's ability to nullify all magic in the surrounding wouldn't work on the Gold Saints making it more of a threat to his own team than a threat as the Gold Saints have multiple dimensional teleporters. While the raw energy of it would be a threat here, the other Spriggans wouldn't have escape methods except maybe Bloodman while the Gold Saints would have methods of escape. As such much like with Irene, it's not so much August's biggest and flashiest techniques that would help against the Gold Saints but instead but some of the less impressive spells. 

When August fought Crime Sorciere he happened to gain several abilities that the Gold Saints have never shown resistance to including mind-reading, time slow, and attack reflection, all of which would make it extremely difficult for them to hit August conventionally. Their telepathic attacks might still be a threat but August has probably the best matchup against it via his illusions and his ability to throw off telepathy with false markers which would be the mental equivalent, forcing them to guess where he really is. 

That's on defense. On Offense August has several very potent offenses. He has Fairy Glitter, a form of existence erasure that would work on hypothetically all the Gold Saints at once. Now it's possible that they could resist however only a possibility and Brandish or Irene could help by weakening their Cosmo and thus their resistance. Though if he tries it once and it doesn't work the Saints might develop resistance to it and they might be able to sense and affect the cosmic energies drawn in by the spell for its casting, similar to their own Cosmo. Besides this he has Crush Magic which would let him basically do what Excalibur does but at range even if the logia intangibility doesn't really help him here, and he has sleep magic which is another form of magic that the Gold Saints haven't shown resistance too and with sleep manipulation being treated as a very potent ability in Saint Seiya. August really is a grab-bag of abilities that are treated as very high tier abilities.  

August does have a potent psychological weakness, but without knowledge of it, someone like Shaka wouldn't know to create the mental image of Mavis as an illusion. 

The Twelfth Gold Saint is Pisces Aphrodite, the Beautiful Poison. How would the Spriggan 12 do against his poisonous powers.

His poison powers would ironically be his weakest asset here as the Logia Users can resist it through becoming something without blood, Wall is a machine, and Brandish can make them grow so much that the blood the white rose drains is insignificant. His roses poison gases would work similarly as it would probably knock the biological members of the Spriggan 12 out but many of them can create counters since it doesn't seem to work immediately or non-biological in the first place. Granted it did work on a giant so Brandish becoming giant probably wouldn't protect against this so it's a bit more potent. 

His more effective weapons would be the Black Rose which eats at opponents like Piranhas though would still be tanked by the Logia Users and probably most his vines which can bind and would be similarly effective to the telekinesis binding of characters like Mu here, though not quite so much. Still numerous characters here can control fire (God Serena), Explosions (Bloodman), or both (Irene, August) and could free themselves pretty evenly from strong vines. 

The Gold Saints:

• All the Gold Saints have regen that most of the Spriggans would struggle to get past without assistance due to being able to regen from their soul as well as regenerate their atoms at will
• The Saints attack hit on the conceptual level which give them one-shot potential against any of the Spriggan
• The Saints have reactive evolution and so would be getting harder to fight over the battle
• Much Better Teamwork as a lot of the Spriggan's abilities would also trouble the other Spriggans which isn't really a weakness of the Gold Saints
• The Saints are all psychics who's sixth sense equal the awareness of a Dragon Slayer
• Their Psychic Powers also give them numerous offensive options especially Mu, Saga, Shaka, and Dohko who can attack opponent's brains, telekinetically paralyzing or crushing them, or others. Only August can really stop them from doing so
• Scorpio Milo and to a lesser extent Pisces Aphrodite have other forms of Paralysis they can use
• Better Dimensional Powers overall (Mu, Saga, Deathmask, and Shaka vs Jacob and arguably Irene and August) Arguably better spacetime combat capabilities overall
• Shaka's Rikudo Rinne and Tenbu Horin Techniques should work on most or all of the Spriggans
• Deathmask can nullify Bloodman's and arguably Neinhart's ability to revive the fallen Spriggans
• Saga's Another Dimension can protect from most ranged attacks of the Spriggans
• Galaxian Explosion and Photon Burst can bypass Reflector Magic 

The Spriggan 12:

• Neinhart can possibly summon Unsealed Chronos which, if he can, would be checkmate
• More Wide Area Attacks that can hit multiple enemies at once
• Can nullify any elemental based cosmo attack
• Brandish and Irene can lower the Saints power level 
• Numerous forms of biological attack the Saints don't resist
• August can protect against ranged cosmo attacks except Galaxian Explosion and Photon Burst via Reflector Magic
• August and to a lesser extent Neinhart can read the Saints' minds and Wall can analyze their weaknesses giving them info on their enemies
• Invel can reach the level of cold needed to freeze a Gold Cloth
• Irene can make all the Spriggans potential threats via Conceptual Enchantments
• Irene can mess with the Saints' equipment via Personality Enchantment
• Some of Bloodman's Curses are things the Saints don't resist
• Memento Mori and Fairy Glitter are forms of existence erasure the Saints probably can't resist. Likewise Brandish's Reduction to Nonexistence if Enchanted by Irene to affect the soul as well would likely do similar.

Obviously with so many factors there are so many ways this fight could go that you have to speak somewhat in generalities. However comparing both sides offensives vs the other sides defenses:

The Spriggans don't have that many defenses that would be especially strong against the Gold Saints, especially if you include passively. The Spriggans are mostly normal wizards and their only passive defenses like logia intangibility or anti-magical abilities would do almost nothing against the Gold Saints.The only exception is their elemental absorption which only works against specific Gold Saints. 

Actively speaking they do have some defenses of note. August's Reflector Magic can protect against any of the Gold Saints projectiles outside of specifically Galaxian Explosion and Photon Burst which bypass Divine Attack Reflection. August can throw the Gold Saints off telepathically with his false markers. Irene can imbue the Spriggans against resistance to a large swath of abilities via Conceptual Enchantment. Brandish can reduce the power of an attack as well and Jacob can potentially teleport the Spriggans back from Dimensional BFR. 

In contrast the Gold Saints have a few passive defenses. They have numerous resistances as Saints of Athena with High Cosmo. They actively develop and evolve from experiencing and seeing attacks. And from the Eighth Sense they regenerate from anything less than their soul is destroyed. For some of the Spriggans the Gold Saints would be invulnerable unless Irene actively buffs them. The ones who naturally have the capacity to stop a Gold would be August and Bloodman due at the very least to existence erasure not even including their other abilities, Irene due to Conceptual and Personality Enchantments, Invel due to being able to freeze them, and Neinhart due to summoning relatively enemies from their past. 

The Saints also have several types of active defenses. All of them have some attack reflection, and Saga has Another Dimension which can protect from functionally any projectile, giving the Saints broadly the mirror of August's Reflector Magic. 

The Saints do seem to have an advantage in most of their defenses being passive and having collectively a lot of defenses including a lot of resistances, regen, and attack reflection making it hard for most of the Spriggans to kill most of the Golds one v one while most of the Golds do have at least the option of conceptual attacks allowing them the ability to kill most of the Spriggans in one blow. Now granted the Spriggans do have the advantages of having more abilities that are multi target at once. Irene can easily enchant all the Spriggans at once and both Memento Mori or Fairy Glitter can threaten hypothetically all the Gold Saints at once. 

If you look at their other abilities which can be used to get hits on the others easier, the Gold Saints all possess the Sixth Sense, equivalent to the senses of the Dragon Slayers in Fairy Tail, telepathic communication with each other, and greater teamwork. In comparison the Spriggans have two Dragon Slayers, Weakness detection from Wall, sand information gathering from Ajeel, Memory Sensing from Neinhart, and Mind-Reading from August. As seems to be the broader case for this matchup the Gold Saints have more consistent information gathering abilities while the Spriggans have more diverse information gathering abilities. 

Because the Gold Saints share more powers and there's not such a bottleneck in the strongest abilities, it seems that the Gold Saints are more likely to act more consistent. Every Single Gold Saint is always at least somewhat of a threat to every single Spriggan but no Gold Saint presents a threat to every single Spriggan. In contrast August and Irene are major threats to the Gold Saints as a whole via things like Fairy Glitter or Conceptual Enchantment, but some members present no real threat to the Saints by themselves. So in my opinion what this fight actually comes down to is how well the most relevant members of the Spriggan 12 can multi task in offense, defense, and support at once. If August and Irene can help protect and bolster the other Spriggans with telepathy blocking false markers and conceptual enchantment, protect them, and launch their dangerous attacks at once, the Spriggans can definitely overwhelm the Gold Saints. If they have to focus on just one at once, they would get overwhelmed. The truth is certainly going to be somewhere in between. 

Overall my general sense is that the Gold Saints probably would win if both sides have no information. While August and Wall can quickly gain information on their opponents, the Sixth Sense would give the Saints an intuitive sense of the danger level of their opponents. The Gold Saints are also very used to fighting opponents on their level, something that's clearly not common for the Spriggan 12 whom are used to fighting individually and lording their superior magic over them. Something as simple as Dimaria freezing time thinking she can solo the enemies while time is frozen can give the Gold Saints the crucial opportunity to attack their frozen opponents. 

Beyond that the Saints have a more limited version of a lot of the Spriggan's strongest advantages:

-August has Reflector Magic but the Saints can reflect attacks 

-The Spriggans have existence erasure and conceptual manipulation  but all the Saints have conceptual attacks and numerous of them have instant kill moves themselves with psychic attacks

-Invel can reach Absolute Zero and while Bloodman absorb Camus' cold, if Bloodman is not with Invel at the moment Camus can also reach Absolute Zero

This is also true in reverse as well, the Spriggans do have their spacetime hax, dimensional hax, etc. but often the Saints have some resistance to these things and more counters. 

There's also a thematic reason I think the Saints might win. 

Mashima took clear inspiration from Kurumada in the creation of Fairy Tail. And one of the clearest examples is in their final arcs. The final villain of each series is a character representing Death, either Hades the Lord of the Underworld or Zeref, the Black Wizard, both the bringer of death wherever they go. And in both series the thing that triumphs over death is friendship and the passions of idealistic youths.

In the final arc, The Gold Saints awaken the Eighth Sense, reaching symbolic triumph against death. They reunite at the Wailing Wall. There the Bronze Saints remark that the Gold Saints are like their older brothers. The Saints of Athena are a large dysfunctional order of knightly brothers. With all their fights and inner struggles, they still come together in the face of a greater threat. In this way they are like the the dysfunctional guild of Fairy Tail and the ideal Mashima was trying to evoke, a family where people can fight and be apart yet always have a home within, and will come back together someday when they are needed.

The Spriggan 12 are described as the Grotesque Fairies. They don't have the sense of camaraderie with each other, and many of their powers are actively harmful even to their allies nearby. They regularly try to do things on their own and are clearly not used to fighting together. It's the lack of cohesion and teamwork that I believe would let the Gold Saints beat them both literally and thematically, the family who, in their bonds that overcome death, also overcome Death's presence in the form of its minions. 

Or at least that's my take. With this many characters and such a huge range of abilities I can easily imagine a lot of opinions on this matchup. If you have any particular thoughts on it, feel free to say ☺Maybe Neinhart just summons Cronos.