How to be OP in Superman comics.
For this blog I am treating characters as being part of Superman's cast if the majority of their appearances are in a story where Superman is the protagonist or another character independently part of Superman's cast is the protagonist such as characters from the comic series "Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen" or "Superman's Girl Friend, Lois Lane."
Superman comics have had a lot, a LOT of characters so please excuse if this doesn't include ALL of them, though I will be including a large amount just because I think that's part of the fun of these guides exposing people to the eccentricities of different series.
Building Tier:
The lowest tier in Superman comics is the tier of characters that Superman usually resides in when he's been de-powered by Red Sun Radiation, or in other words civilian Clark Kent tier. This tier has no minimum level power and contains normal human level characters but most of the powerhouses of this tier are low building level scaling from several sources. In the New 52 series Superman under red sunlight fought Harley Quinn evenly. Lex Luthor who is a physically fit and trained human, but not enhanced without usage of technology was able to fight the Joker fairly evenly. Both of these feats open the scaling to many small building level explosions withstood by the Bat-family. This can scale pretty generously in the tier, with Superman's pal Jimmy Olsen and the Newsboy Legion being able to take blows from the clone of the Guardian, an enhanced human who should be beyond normal human capabilities like that of the prior feats. Similarly in the early New 52, a regular fireman withstood a small building explosion. The strongest characters of this tier reach into the larger building tier. Numerous Golden Age Mad Scientists created building-destroying machines. Kyack's machine can collapse buildings, Lightning Master can use his machine to shoot lightning bolts that can collapse buildings (adapted into the first Fleischer Superman cartoon), Mister Sinister created a machine to BFR buildings into the fourth dimension. Later in the Silver Age, the first incarnation of Titano appeared, essentially a King Kong reference, with building level feats such as creating tremendous tidal waves to capsize a ship. Similarly the New 52 villainess Wraith empowered people and the new wraith-creatures were able to destroy buildings.
Speedwise for similar reasons, much of this tier scales to the various hypersonic feats of bullet-timing and explosion-timing made by normal humans in the DCU. Technically Lightning Master has massively hypersonic attack speed using attacks of lightning, but as that is solely attack speed, the limit of speed for this tier is hypersonic.
Before individual characters, this tier has various civilizations and organizations. Metropolis is a shining beacon of progress, but its miracles of technology have been numerous times usurped by super-gangs of criminals. This includes SKULL, a criminal organization of disgraced scientists trying to steal power formed by the original Atomic Skull. Similarly the terrorist oganization KOBRA, worshippers of the Snake God, rival power to SKULL. There is also the elite group of assassins called the One Thousand focused on attaining power and a rival elite organization of assassins called the HIVE focused especially on revenge. However the leaders of the Metropolis Underground are the fearsome Intergang, criminals supplied with weapons from Apokalips. The technology of these groups varies depending on what technology they happened to have taken lately, but almost always they have body armor making them highly resistant or impervious to attacks from anything less than someone on their tier, and weapons that can instantly kill people on their tier with one blast, with Intergang in particularly often having Apokalyptian weapons that can sometimes be a credible threat to metahumans far outside this tier. While these crime gangs are in numerous series, there are obviously individual operatives of each that have appeared only in singular issues, including Superman comics. This tier also includes the Subterranean kingdom, a surprisingly long-standing concept in Superman comics, dating back to 1941, which are often depicted with advanced technology that can do things like generate earthquakes. This subterranean kingdom of Subterranea and their shapeshifting creatures were a major plot point in the New 52 Superman comic arc.
Due especially to Superman's alien origin, alien species often appear in Superman sometimes with metahuman abilities. I particularly want to point out one called the Metaleks, a species of sentient vehicles that collectively terraform planets to make them more suitable to alien life inspired after Bob's friends on the tv show Bob the Builder. This tier also includes the robot servants from Krypton like Kel-Ex, robotic servant to the House of El, robots equipped with kryptonian like powers on a smaller scale. However the most dangerous of the alien species to appear in Superman's comics in this tier are the daemonites. The daemonites are a parasitic alien race from another galaxy known for their tactic of possessing other species, subsisting off their mental energy. They also demonstrate phasing, fangs which can bite into the minds of other species, telepathic abilities, limited time manipulation, and a healing factor that allow them to regenerate so long as their brains persist. Another group of possessed entities includes the civilians the new 52 villainess Wrath infected people with her shadows, bringing out their rage turning them into building level monsters, and which can infect the angry into her minions.
This tier includes a LOT of mad scientists that Superman would be pitted against, especially in the early days. This includes all of SKULL and more. The first professor Zee created a machine to turn people and animals into mutated giants to go on a rampage across the nation, and the second professor Zee created a time machine. The Evolution King created special pills to alter the ages of people. The renegade Atlantean scientist Harkon created a machine to turn people into merpeople, removing all their natural powers in doing so. Acid Master is a scientific master of....well.....acid, and the scientist Fredrich Legion, alias Riot, created a machine that granted him duplication at the exchange of extreme insomnia, driven mad by his lack of sleep. Professor Sand, alias The Sandman of Crime, created extreme virtual reality technology to deceive people as to what was reality, and two alien researchers tested even Superboy via usage of complex technology illusions. The denizen of the fourth dimension, Lylo, Alias Mister Sinister using technology was able to BFR entire buildings into the fourth dimension. Professor Amos Weldon was able to create a machine to switch Superboy and Superman in time, allowing for temporal BFR as well. Finally the mysterious immortal Mister Z used his cane's crystal tip to trap the souls of people across time, and threatened to even do the same to Superman before Superman broke his cane.
Various other forms of criminals have also come about as threats. Vard and Boka are two time traveling criminals from the distant year of....2000, who can use time travel tactics against their opponent. Remnant is a mysterious villain who uses his own illusory technology strong enough to confuse even Post-Crisis Superman's senses. Deke Dickson, former employee for STAR labs, stole their portal technology to become the villain Loophole. Two crooks named Kuku and Nardu managed to get their hands on a robot elephant that went rampage until Superboy stopped it. Mercy, Lex Luthor's guard, is a skilled enough fighter that she was able to temporarily hold off Deathstroke. The Archer, a very early Superman villain in the Golden Age was an archer who extorted millionaires at bowpoint, deciding to hunt humans instead of animals. Similar manhunters are seen in Nimrod the Hunter, a man who decided that the greatest game to hunt on Earth was Superman, and Kingslayer, a trained assassin sent after the president that Superman stopped. This provides skill and range strategies as well. Exceeding in these, stealth, and more is the techno-ninja Shadowdragon, a planetary-tier skilled ninja with the ability to control technology with his hacking and high tech suit. Shadowdragon was skilled enough to briefly contend even with Lady Shiva.
These criminals were usually dealt with by Superman...but not always. Metropolis is also protected by its police force and detectives like Dan Turpin, Maggie Sawyer, Bill Henderson, and David Corporon. It's implied at times that the Metropolis Police Department have taken down threats as high as the next tier up suggesting they have weapons for detaining super-criminals. Metropolis has also come under the protection of sway of various vigilantes. First among these was Jim Harper, Alias Guardian, a police officer that grew up in Suicide Slums the downtrodden part of Metropolis and devoted himself to fixing it, becoming a long-time ally of Superman. Guardian is mostly a peak human skilled in martial arts, but also carries an "indestructible shield", even against Superman villain tier enemies. Hilariously Guardian initially took this shield from a prop store as a prop, so I guess DC just has cosmically tough prop shields lying around. Guardian was cloned to create the second Guardian, the cloning process amplifying the clone to superhuman stats and giving him a healing factor. Guardian is regularly supported by the Newsboy Legion, orphans who sell newspapers, and would often aid Jim with information and sometimes get in scrapes alongside him. Less ideological is Gangbuster, teacher turned vigilante to protect his students. Skilled at fighting and after his injury and getting a cybernetic enhancement from Lex Luthor, superhumanly strong and touch, Gangbuster is a pragmatic opponent who uses guns to take down the criminal element. Gangbuster was replaced by his niece who took up the mantle after him. Even more brutal were the Vigilantes known as Bloodsport, a legacy vigilante with three individuals taking up the mantle, with the technological ability to teleport any weapon into their hands including ones of far higher attack potency tier, and ones that neg durability. There is also the strange case of Rose Forrest, who under psychological distress takes on her violent vigilante alter ego Thorn. All of these characters are skilled agile fighters who use powerful armaments. There's also the world's most skilled boxer Muhammad Ali, who taught Superman boxing.
This tier also includes various metahumans. Titano is a giant gorilla, and there is also a lesser known other giant gorilla known as Chandu who gained x-ray vision and heat vision from drinking powered kryptonite. Superman's pal Jimmy Olsen, in addition to his genre-savviness, has randomly gained metahuman powers lots of times, revealed to be because he is a soulcatcher for the New Gods Darkseid has killed, temporarily gaining powers themed around them. Superman's original sweetheart as Superboy, Lana Lang has also gained powers from an insect-themed alien, making her the superheroine Alien Queen, gaining control of insects and the ability to transform to gain their abilities. The Mechanical Master is able to give life to machines, and the New 52 Puzzler is able to control them. The Post-Crisis Puzzler is far stranger, made up of living puzzle pieces able to dissemble and assemble them again. Even more dangerous, the villainess Red Cloud can turn her body into a poisonous mist, dangerous even to Kryptonians. The Brainiac of the Antimatter universe, is a hyperintelligent piece of anti-matter put into a jar by that universe's version of Superman, but if it were to escape and touch matter, the two would annihilate each other. The Superboy enemy Stasis can control the biological functions of living organisms, and Srakka is an alien ghostly entity that can possess people.
Despite Superman's titles usually focusing on science-fiction, there are even some magical metahumans. Baron Sunday uses voodoo to control people telekinetically, and the mysterious beauty from another world, Illena tried to seduce Superman and then petrify him with her magic. On a similar note, La Encantadora is a seductress with magic that can use the mists of Ibella to alter peoples perception or teleport herself. Late into Pre-Crisis Superboy had to battle the spectral enemy from outer space, the Wraith, an intangible entity whose touch turned all life to stone. There's also a whole family of magic-users, the Coven Family with standard magical abilities like teleportation, clairvoyance, and with their patriarch Faustus having the ability to separate the spirit of someone from their body, enslaving the spirit to their will.
However there's one type of metahuman that's very common, and probably the biggest threat of this tier, something oddly common in Superman comics, and that is psychics. This includes numerous Atlanteans including Superman's temporary love Lori Lemaris, as well as several villains including Harkon, Kronn, and Varx. Atlanteans have the ability to command sea creatures and even brainwash a couple humans at a time. Kronn amplified his psychic powers with technology as well. Over the course of his career, Superman has had to go up against many telepaths from simple ones like Mister Electronics who invented a helmet that could allow him to read minds to the nearly unprecedented like Al-Pratt, the "Emperor of America" who brainwashed the entire country to serve him, a nearly unparalled mind manipulation feat for the time he came out in. (1942) He particularly had to fight many of these early in his career Povra was a beautiful alien telepath who brainwashed Superboy into being a tourist attraction for her planet, Klaxxu was another alien who brainwashed Superboy into thinking he was a fellow alien subversive wanting to overthrow the human race. Yet another Superboy villain, Gaff Lomar, the Pied Piper mesmerized Smallville's children into following him. Arguably the second supervillain Superman would even fight, after only the Ultra-Humanite, was the Hypnotist Medici who could control Superman's body through hypnosis and could erase memories along with hypnotize crowds.
There are other types of psychics including Lena-iac, Brainiac's consciousness into Lex Luthor's daughter Lena Luthor. She was able to use her psychic power to shoot lightning, levitate, psychically protect both her and Lex's minds from Brainiac 13, and even reconstruct Superman after he was turned into data. Lois' little niece with an overactive imagination Susie Tompkins was revealed to actually be a latent psychic with telekinetic potential high enough that a 5D imp tried to use it as a weapon against the New 52 Superman. An even stronger telekinetic was shown in Rebirth with Beacon, a neighbor girl to the Kents and friend to Jon Kent Superboy, son of Superman. She has telekinesis and forcefields strong enough to be relevant to Superboy himself and reflect his attacks, along with with mind-reading and telepathic communication. However ordinarily the best psychic in Superman's comics and one of the best on the DC Earth is Manchester Black, an anti-heroic character meant to challenge Superman's ideals, a moral utilitarian willing to kill criminals. He can telekinetically rip the organs in a person's body, sent Superman flying through several stone pillars, and is stated to be able to blow a hole in a mountain. His telepathy is strong enough to scan minds across an entire nation, switch Superman and Bizarro's minds, create illusions, delete memories, and shield peoples minds from Maxwell Lord and the Martian Manhunter. He's also physically strong enough to fight Tim Drake.
However there's a character who has temporarily reached even stronger, one of the characters with more stories written with her than almost any other character in DC, or even in fiction. Lois Lane, Superman's wife. Lois Lane is a black belt in karate who on her honeymoon with Superman, when he was depowered, rescued him from gangsters after he was kidnapped, and has regularly beaten up armed criminals. In the Silver Age, she was the only one to suspect Superman's true identity consistently. In the Post-Crisis period Lois was able to learn the basics of Torquasm Rao, a martial art made for Kryptonians, allowing her to tap into the greater information of the universe, and her deepest instincts allowing for supernatural dodging ability ala Ultra Instinct or travel as far as metaphysical dimensions like Hell or the Phantom Zone. In the New 52 she was temporarily given psychic powers by Brainiac making her probably the strongest threat on the tier. This form of Lois was able to easily brainwash a city, steal the planetary psychic energy from Brainiac, telekinetically rips all the weapons from a large firefight, erase memories, project her psyche across lightyears, overload Parasite with her psychic energy, blast back New 52 Wonder Woman, send billions of nanites into a person's body at once, and more.
Going over the major threats of the tier; it includes rage-transmutation, various broken gadgetry, spacetime manipulation, separating ones spirit from their body, astral sealing, and very powerful psychic abilities including telekinesis, mind control and possession.
Powers that are considered very strong in the tier itself and would be if used by an outside would be various forms of technopathy or sufficiently strong telekinesis as many of the characters in this tier rely on their technology or on movements. However even more importantly than this I think a stealth strategy would be very effective. Despite all the psychics in this tier, they're actually pretty lacking in terms of telepathic sensing feats with only Lois Lane via Torquasm Rao's sensing of the universe and Manchester Black's telepathic scanning would nullify a powerful stealth strategy for the psychics. Outside that a few characters have some anti-stealth; the Covens can use mystical clairvoyance, but for most of the characters, a highly stealth-ed character would be hard to fight. The Kryptonian Robots have Kryptonian senses, but a technopath could simply control them.
There's another strategy that would would generally be strong against most of the tiers in the series, that being of a supernatural other planar entity. A character emerging from another plane of reality would be able to avoid the detection of Manchester Black and possibly even Lois Lane's Torquasm Rao.
A metaphysical plane entity also has the advantage of the fact that this verse's many forms of physical attacks would do absolutely nothing to them. Telekinesis strong enough to hurt Kryptonians, antimatter, poison, biological manipulation, petrification, voodoo, etc. are all useless on a being with no body. This brings me to my first counter
Atari-scream from Transformers
After possessing Atari Hitotonari, Starscream is physically only a young girl. That said, while he is possessing a human body, he is in actuality a Spark, an eternal electrical charge that Transformers have as an equivalent of a soul. With that said not only would most people not at all suspect young Atari of being their enemy, he could use his famous manipulation to deceive his way into getting access to the broken technology in the tier and should Atari be killed, Starscream can just possess any of the broken technology here.
Physical forms of attack would be absolutely useless against Starscream's spark, and even astral/spiritual attacks may not work on the Spark, given its natural as electrical charge. Not even Vard and Boka could prevent the Spark through time travel as it was not formed at any one time, and is an eternal entity. It's unknown which psychic powers would work on Starscream given he's a machine however most of them are arrogant types prone to being manipulated.
That said, it's kind of unclear if say, Manchester Black's powers would work on a Transformer and being made out of electricity, it's possible Lena-iac could mess with Starscream's spark. For a safer counter, you could use
Jinzo from Yu-Gi-Oh GX (Anime Version)
Jinzo appearing at Duel Academy, was able to drain the entire facility of its electrical energy, calced at being small building level and through duel terminal scaling should be faster than the likes of Sonic Duck which can walk at supersonic speeds. This would make him roughly mid tier in the tier for stats.
Jinzo is a Duel Spirit, a spirit manifesting from a different dimension that nobody could possibly sense him coming from which, when combined with his invisibility as a ghost would give him perfect stealth against the tier. Once again, they would be unable to go back in time using time travel and stop him since he's from a different dimension entirely, a metaphysical one almost none of them would have any access too.
Jinzo's most famous quality is his ability to negate traps, and in GX this seems to include technology in general, or at least that is something he can also do via energy-draining, meaning he would be able to shut down most of the tier's technology. His spirit can't be drawn out of his body by the Coven Family, since he is just a spirit manifesting itself, and would just manifest again. On the flipside He is able to drain lifeforce and souls offensively the way he would do to normal energy, something that would kill anyone here save the robots whom he would just drain the energy out of normally. Even if they tried to rush him, he can cover large areas with his attack "Psychic Wave." If he really wants to play with them, he can also possess people and use their own powers against the tier and the tier would have little they could do to counterplay.
There's only really a few possible counters this tier could have. It's possible that due to his hatred, Wrath's shadows could possibly turn him into a Wrath, due to being technological himself, it's possible the technopaths like Shadowdragon, and Mister Z could maybe seal Jinzo in his cane. All of these are...shaky propositions due to Jinzo's stealth, and the fact that he's a manifested spirit, but for a counter who would be immune to all these, you could use
Ai Enma from Hell Girl
Ai Enma is strong enough to easily destroy entire temples in single strikes, and fast enough rapidly fly across a mountain putting her on the upper end of the stat range for this tier.
Ai Enma is an onryo, a ghostly entity that would be immune to almost all everything the tier could use to fight her. She regularly spends her time in the Realm of Eternal Twilight, a dimension outside the spacetime continuum meaning that nobody in the tier would be able to see her coming and she could simply pop in and kill them with any number of broken haxes. She would even be able to manifest the Wraith from its spiritual form as she did to the spirit of a specific sword. Not even Mister Z's cane's sealing would work on Ai Enma, as she has resisted superior sealing from Hell and its Lord.
Ai Enma can also travel through dimensions and through time easier than anyone in the tier, and more importantly also can sense things across those distances, able to see things on Earth from the Realm of Eternal Twilight and see things across time meanwhile against any similar spacetime manipulator not only would she have better mobility but she would be able to always see them, while they would be fighting blind against Ai, not that any of the spacetime manipulators really have any way of hitting her on this tier.
Ai Enma is also a powerful technopath and telekinetic who could easily disarm every bit of technology the tier has, while the inverse wouldn't work as she has no technological components. Similarly, the strongest psychic on this tier usually would be Manchester Black who would be crippled against Ai Enma as he would be able to sense the immense pain and suffering within her, let alone if she uses his own tragic past against him with her illusions, her standard strategy. Even against Brainiac-Amped Lois, while Lois could escape from any of Ai's normal dimensions via Torquasm Vo, and is in fact the only person on this tier that can likely escape from Hell, Ai could use her immersion power to put Lois inside a piece of fiction, something that not even Torquasm Vo can escape from. Ai could also use her biological manipulation to undo Brainiac's manipulation of Lois' body, reverting her to normal.
Even the transmutation of Wrath's creatures would not work. While Ai Enma does horrific things, she is not an onryo motivated by rage, but instead is famously emotionless and stoic in her expression, as part of her job as the Hell Girl is to remain perfectly composed.
City Tier:
In eras in which Superman was not Superboy and thus had no practice, Superman is usually depicted at this level earlier on in his career, and this level is usually used as a representation of a villain that has come to Metropolis that requires Superman to stop. In other words this is the tier for a threat that looks like a job...for Superman!
The Golden Age Superman, even prior to the war period was able to punch the top off a mountain, was able to catch and slowly lower a falling city, and was able to split and push apart a mountain prior to his dramatic strength increase later during the Golden Age. Post-Crisis Superman during the Byrne Era starting Post-Crisis was dramatically depowered from his Pre-Crisis days, but was still able take a nuclear bomb that would wipe out Metropolis, produce seismic activity, punch through a stone imprisonment that Morgan le Faye thought no force on Earth could, and lifted a mountain that could crush Metropolis. At a gathering of several of Pre-Crisis Superman's villains it is stated that all of them have the destructive power to destroy a city. Several villains are stated directly to have the power to destroy cities including the villainess Livewire who is described by Superman as having enough electrical power to power a city or destroy it and the villain Neutron who was confident he'd survive a city-wide explosion and created a blast with ten hydrogen bombs worth of energy. Finally Superman has fought some giant monsters who are mountain sized and would be this tier just from size.
In terms of speed, Byrne Era Superman and Livewire are both stated and shown to move at the speed of lightning. Byrne Era Superman was also able to circle the globe quickly. Golden Age Superman has both lightning speed and lightspeed statements, though once again these kind of statements were everywhere in the Golden Age. That said during the war period he was able to intercept lightning.
This tier contains numerous mad scientist types or superhuman intellects. Primarily there are the two Silver Age villains the Prankster and the Toyman which are among the group stated to have the power to destroy cities, the two often teaming up with both having gimmick-themed inventions. Oswald Loomis, the Prankster uses lethal pranks ala the Joker including acidic gas and electricity-based ones, and is an expert hacker, able to hack into Nightwing's suit mid-combat. Winslow Schlott, the Toyman has various lethal forms of childrens toys including acid-shooting squirt guns, toy planes strapped with miniguns, binding toys, android duplicates of himself, and toy mecha for himself. While Prankster is more of a joke, Toyman is horrifically delusional and is creepily obsessed with children. This tier includes Professor Emil Hamilton, a scientist who was originally one of Superman's allies but fell into villainy, becoming the villain Ruin. Ruin can absorb energy, has integrated Kryptonian technology including a Phantom Zone projector into his suit, and has a metal arm durable enough to stop a blow from Superman. This tier includes the Host. Before humans, Earth was host to a race called the H'v'ler'ni, a hyper-advanced race that to save themselves from a plague either were sent into space or uploaded their remaining members on Earth into a giant robot called the Host, having the collective scientific knowledge of their hive mind. The Host was considered physically comparable to Byrne Era Superman. There's also the Kryptonian-hating space pirate Amalak, enemy of Kryptonian Colonialism, listed as one of Silver Age Superman's villains with the destructive power to destroy a city, and uses a spaceship shaped like an asteroid, alongside advanced guns and blasters, as well as a personal forcefield capable of protecting Amalak from even the destruction of his starship. Amalak also has technology that can transform people into elemental themed creatures.
There are numerous kaiju that Superman has had to fight in his career including ones themed around the elements. This tier has numerous metahuman entities outside that, including numerous "bricks", characters meant to engage in fisticuffs with the main character. Early in Post-Crisis, Superman had to face Rampage, a young scientist who in her rage turns into a giant orange rampaging brute ala the Hulk. He also had to fight numerous failed clones of himself created by Lex Luthor, dubbed "Bizarro." with similar versions of his powers. There's also the Atoman, a failed Nazi attempt to recreate Superman. He battled the Golden Age Superman during the War, with strength, speed, durability, and super-lifting to match the Man of Steel, and later returned in the Silver Age having developed kryptonite energy blasts and flight. He has complete control of his own bodily functions, able to simulate death to play possum, and can punch past the dimensional barrier.
In terms of non-brick metahumans, the most famous is easily the shock jock Livewire, a villainess with powers over electricity, able to fire it over a city-wide range or absorb it from a similar range. Her ability to drain electricity has allowed her to, after draining energy from the Blue Beetle, fight characters in a far higher tier. Superman has stated Livewire can transmit information across an entire galaxy with her electrical signals, though it was possibly a bluff, she can turn into electricity itself, and she can also use sound-based attacks. This tier also has Neutron, a villain who is pure energy contained in a suit, who uses radiation based attacks and powers. Neutron can shoot energy and radiation or shape it into constructs including an energy dome around all of Metropolis that if broken would rain down and destroy the city. There's also the very short-lived aspiring villain Amok who used his energy projection to knock Superman into space with a surprise attack only to be easily beaten immediately after.
This tier also has a few magical metahumans. Emanating from higher planes are Sleeze and Skyhook. Sleeze is the New God of Perversion and Degeneracy, originally a companion of great Darkseid until Darkseid's ambitions and statue grew greater and he had no time for Sleeze's pettiness, banishing the embarrassing wretch. Sleeze can mind control people and can draw energy from their base lusts to empower himself. Skyhook, originally a human, is a mutated demonic entity with flight, superhuman stats, the ability to create mist, and the ability to transmute children into demonic entities like himself. This tier includes the witch Arathaza. With the Sherabite stone, Arathaza can drain the lifeforce from other entities and summon mountain sized monsters. The mermaid Lori Lemaris temporarily entered this tier in the Post-Crisis period when she gained a mystical necklace that gave her the ability to warp reality on at least a city-wide scale based on her greatest desire.
But the most versatile and dangerous threat of the tier is stronger even that. The biggest threat of this tier is the mystical entity known as Silver Banshee. Silver Banshee is a mystical entity able to move at comparable speeds to Byrne Era Superman and survived a nuclear blast. She is most famous for her Banshee Wail which can either be a sonic attack powerful enough to hurt stellar level entities or cause instant death to anyone who hears it and she knows the identity off. Masked entities can survive it, but only barely. She has magical powers that lets her transmute people, summon lightning that can hurt an early Superman, summon fire, turn Lois Lane into a child, track Superman's psychic residue and various other minor bits of magic. And perhaps most dangerously, even if her body dies, her soul can possess people and add their powers to her own.
So what would be some good counter strategies? Broadly not being a biological entity would be helpful. If one isn't, then lifeforce draining, radiation, acid, and Silver Banshee's death wail wouldn't do anything significant. It could also hypothetically help against Sleeze's form of hax. Being a technological entity wouldn't work though as Livewire's electricity manipulation could basically turn off a technological entity used against her, and Prankster can hack into any technological entity. A better option would be use an undead or an elemental counter.
I especially like using an elemental type character as while Livewire being able to turn pure electricity, Neutron being pure energy in a radiation suit, and Silver Banshee's abilities may seem to make them hard to put down, but all have one clear weakness; being frozen. If frozen solid, none of them would be able to freely escape. Freezing also has a lot of benefit against most of the tier, with mermaids like Lori requiring liquid water around them, and various bits of technology not functioning well when lowered in temperature dramatically. Any sort of trapping based abilities similar to that would work, though due to the synergy with elemental beings, freezing seems to be the most natural to me.
Finally this tier is seriously lacking in skill and stealth. Only Amalak and Silver Banshee have any skill feats whatsoever, and they would only be C Tier, proficient in fighting. Similarly only Silver Banshee has any anti-stealth abilities with her ability to track someone via psychic residue. So someone using skill and stealth could basically ninja the tier.
This brings me to my first counter
Big Chill from Ben 10
Big Chill was able to tank the attacks from the Forever Knights laser, and briefly fought against NRG's true form, suggesting his power would be somewhere in the tier, particularly in his Ultimate Form. In terms of speed NRG was a lightning timer, and Big Chill scales.
Big Chill is a superhero with significant combat experience, being likely able to scale in skill similar to Amalak and Silver Banshee, and has invisibility meaning no one here would be able to tell where he is, meaning he could essentially Ninja strat against the entire tier. This is helped by his intangibility which would make him immune to most of the attacks in the tier.
Big Chill is a freezing based hero, who could freeze the water around Lori, or just freeze her necklace to stop her reality-warping, could freeze the space around the bigger threats like Silver Banshee or Neutron or freeze the bits of tech of people like Ruin or Toyman. Even if Atoman uses his dimensional barrier punching feats, not only should Big Chill be capable of withstanding a blow, if he's knocked into space, Big Chill can actually survive within space. Likewise his cold and heat absorption would be especially helpful against giant monsters like the magma monster at the start of new 52, or the monster that Arathaza can summon. The cold would likely negate Skyhook's immortality as well due to DC demons weakness to otherworldly cold.
Granted Big Chill does have a weakness to lightning and sonic based attacks so Livewire might be a danger, but given her only sensory ability is electricity based, he can probably beat her via stealth and skill. Similarly Arathaza could potentially drain the life-energy from Big Chill, but unless it defeats him instantly, he can just freeze her staff, something he would likely think to do given his interactions with magic based heroes and villains like Gwen and Charmcaster. Though for a safer counter one could use
Count Dracula, from the Universal Horror-verse
Dracula scales to several city level feats including his own of creating a large storm, Frankenstein's monster tanking an explosion that could turn a tower to atoms, and a wind demon being stated to be able to destroy cities. He also scales to lightning timing, putting him in this tier stat-wise.
Dracula is an immortal vampire, and as an undead would be immune to things like radiation or lifeforce draining. He's also gathered an immense amount of information and experience that, along with his ability to turn both invisible and intangible would make him an immensely good manipulator and skillful infiltrator against the tier.
Dracula has powerful hypnosis to one-shot anyone he gets into eyesight outside maybe the Host being a collective Hive Mind of more people than Dracula has shown the ability to control at once, though he could just wear the Host down if it came to him vs that since it has no ability to hit intangible entities. Along with this Dracula has ability to seal their minds into his ring, which would allow him to trap Silver Banshee despite her ghostly nature and telekinesis that could disarm any tech that the tier tries to use against him. Even if actually damaged, Dracula has a regen factor so strong that nothing save basically the Banshee Wail would be a physical threat to him as he can regen from just his skeleton and possess people from beyond the grave to aid his regeneration if needed. This would allow him to perform the same strategy as Silver Banshee does but being far more sane and tactical.
The only real threats to the tier are Neutron being pure energy means Dracula might not be able to hurt him, though hypnotizing him should be viable, Sleeze might be able to brainwash him back, and if they figure out who he is, the weaknesses of Dracula aren't exactly unknown. I think the best counter to the tier would be
Lapin from Puella Magi Tart Magica
Homura believed a relatively weak seeming witch could create a barrier containing a large city and its surroundings which suggest Lapin as a powerful magical girl and witch would be much stronger than most of the characters in this tier. She also scales in speed to Madoka's arrows putting her at similar speeds to the tier.
Lapin has two main offensive powers; her eyes can nullify the powers of other entities, and she can use her magnetism to take all the technology from entire armies at once. This would disarm every single bit of tech and de-activate every power in this tier at once. This would instantly stop every single threat on the tier save maybe for Sleeze whose abilities are neither powers nor tech but his natural capabilities as a New God. However while Sleeze can brainwash two people at once, Witches can brainwash whole fortresses of people at once and magical girls like Lapin can tank their mind manipulation.
This brings up the standard powers of a Magical Girl/Witch which would include all the strongest powers of this tier. Lori can reality-warp an entire city to her deepest desire and Arathaza can drain lifeforce, but Witches can do both regularly warping reality in their barrier or draining the lifeforce from normal humans, something that Puella Magi have resistance to and and are immune to respectively, the latter due to their nature as basically Liches. Lapin just from having the powers of a Witch and a Magical Girl would have access to all the strongest abilities of most of the tier. She can also summon three flying turrets and it's implied that witches have technopathy just to make her seem even more specialized in beating the tier.
She complements this with stealth, as witches are invisible to non-magical entities, and skill capable of fighting master tier fighters. And even if they were able to kill Lapin, most likely from a lucky strike Silver Banshee's Banshee Wail, it would actually not do anything because the immortal rabbit, when she dies as a Magical Girl changes to her Witch form and vice versa. The tier has no way at all to kill Lapin permanently, and the only way they could BFR her, the way she was defeated in her own series is for Ruin to use his phantom zone projector to trap her in the phantom zone, which would be almost impossible when she can telekinetically grab his technology, telekinetically mess with it, mess with him via reality-warping and life-draining, and if all else fails, literally just dodge the attack, something she is adept at doing.
Planetary Tier:
Superman would quickly get stronger in all continuities he appeared in, getting up to the range of destroying large parts of planets up to planets themselves. By the end of his first year of superhero-ing in Post-Crisis Superman would one-shot an enemy with the strength of a planet, an entity absorbing Superman's power fighting a royal Atlantean (Aquaman) in physical combat, and later in Post-Crisis it is stated Post-Crisis Superman could split a planet in half with a sneeze. Similarly in the New 52, Superman began a training regimen that involved lifting the weight of the world for days in no sunlight, only giving off a single sweatdrop, and surviving the shockwaves of a violent planet explosion despise being weakened. It's likely the Truth Arc Superman where Superman was depowered in the New 52 is in this tier as well, as he fought an enemy that absorbed his own power, likely his base power untrained as well as an Aquaman villain, Black Manta. If you think that the Sand Superman Truth Arc Superman fought had 80% of End of New 52 Superman's power instead of his base power, he'd be in the next arc up, and would scale the characters up accordingly, but that would be inconsistent with how Superman was depicted as dramatically weaker.
In terms of speed, the characters in this tier are FTL, generally significantly FTL. Post-Crisis Superman, even relatively early on was able to travel between Star Systems and to the Sun and back, while New 52 Superman flew from Pluto to Earth in moments, speed feats hundreds of times the speed of light.
Kryptonians in general in the DC Multiverse tend to be depicted as being in this tier, and broadly a general metric for if a metahuman is particularly strong is that they can compare to a Kryptonian. Kryptonians from other universes are seen sometimes in Superman's series, and usually they're treated as being broadly in this tier. Even Superman analogues from other universes tend to end up in this tier. Kryptonians are a race of aliens that with enough solar energy gain superhuman stats, flight, heat vision, freeze breath, cosmic-tier senses along with x-ray vision. They also tend to possess resistance to a wide variety of environments and abilities, enhanced intellects with even normal Kryptonians being considered a genius by human standards, and have developed advanced mental plane martial arts and advanced technologies like projectors that trap people into a metaphysical dimension called the Phantom Zone. Kryptonians can take over most planets single-handedly, and to be able to beat them in single combat is considered an accolade in the DC Universe.
This tier includes numerous villains the New 52 Superman fought early in his career including the New 52 version of Titano, whose a giant ape as per usual, a phasing villainess called Anguish, and a nanite imposter of Superman with his abilities but made out of nanites that can regenerate from its component parts. However the most famous New 52 villain of this tier would be Lord Helspont, leader of the Daemonites. As a Daemonite himself, Lord Helspont would have all their normal abilities but stronger than normal. Given he is likely the same as his Wildstorm Universe counterpart, Lord Helspont would also possess energy manipulation and possession strong enough to possess numerous host bodies at once and also showed in the New 52 the ability to teleport himself and his entire ship.
This tier likely includes the characters from the "Truth" arc of the New 52 where Superman was depowered. As mentioned during this arc he fought an enemy with 80% of his power. Given that Superman was clearly much weaker than his prior self, it really wouldn't make sense if it was 80% his trained power, and was moreso 80% of his power untrained and more like the power of early New 52 Superman. If you think that Truth Arc Superman and the Sand Superman are 80% and 20% of his late power, that would put them easily in the next tier up as well as everyone who scales to them. This group of characters includes the Sand Superman himself, a group of animate sand in which 80% of New 52 Superman's power was drained into, having his abilities including the solar flare as well as sand-based logia. The descendant of Vandal Savage, Salvaxe was a bruiser capable of somewhat fighting Truth Arc Superman. This also includes the former villain Albert Michaels, the original Atomic Skull who fought evenly with Truth Arc Superman. Atomic Skull produces radiation passively and can shoot radiation blasts, electricity, and automatically comes back to life after being killed. Atomic Skull after becoming a good guy in DC Rebirth would fight his old crime partner Shockwave evenly, Shockwave being a power-suit wielding enemy who creates shockwaves and can shatter matter by targeting their molecular structure. However the biggest threat of this period and probably the biggest threat of the tier is the villainess Wrath. Wrath is a supernatural villainess that can manipulate darkness, both literal darkness and the metaphorical darkness of wrath within people, turning them into infected empowered wrath monsters that serve her. She can see, hear, and feal the sensations of everyone infected by her and can shape her darkness into physical tendrils and spikes to use as weapons. However her most dangerous ability is she gets stronger via the rage of others making it essentially impossible to beat her without a heart pure of anger. She's also a cunning manipulator, acting as Metropolis mayor while manipulating events to her favor.
There's also a few Pre-52 characters that would fall in this tier. Post-Crisis Superman had to fight a giant rock monster with the strength of a planet in Year One, and along with aid from the Justice League battled the alien duo of Psi-Phon and Dreadnaught. Psi-Phon was a small psychic alien that stole the powers of other metahumans and added them to Dreadnaught, a big bruiser alien, though Psi-Phon can only steal powers one by one. He managed to steal the powers of Superman, Aquaman and Martian Manhunter adding their abilities at the time, which includes all their basic powersets, though still early in Post-Crisis and not developed that much, until Shazam was able to stop him.
Finally this tier includes the Pre-Crisis Alien Super-Thief Grax. Grax has famously and repeatedly claimed to be a 20th level intellect, an intellect completely and totally unparalleled to anything in the DCU, beyond even 12th level intellect Brainiac who can make technology equivalent to Type 5 civilizations. Grax has developed the K-Meson Bomb, a bomb that causes atoms to fall apart which can destroy entire planets, and has stolen Brainiac's forcefield technology which even Superman can't break. If he is truly is as intelligent as he claims, it would be a form of hax in itself given Brainiac has shown the ability to do things like predicting the future via algorithms and Lex Luthor being able to basically mind hax people by talking to them.
So how to counter this tier? Well there is one thing that consistently would be really helpful on this tier and that is magic. While Top Tier Kryptonians have developed some resistance to magic, famously the Kryptonians invulnerability doesn't work on magic and it's basically like they have no inherent resistance save raw durability. Magical transmutation, mind hax, or anything else works on them as it would anyone else even if they would otherwise have resistance. Even Hypergenius intellects in DC can't predict magic. Dreadnaught despite having the powers of three powerful metahumans was defeated by Shazam in part due to his lack of any resistance to Shazam's magical abilities. This isn't a perfect counter on its own, Lord Helspont and Wrath both have no real weakness to magic but supernatural abilities in general would help against a lot of the enemies.
Of the entities that can fight magic normally, Lord Helspont and Wrath are the biggest threats and a power helpful against both would be exorcism or banishment. Lord Helspont is a Daemonite possessing an Acurian body, and could possess anyone by touching them with his intangible Daemonite body. Outside their bodies Daemonites lack stats nearly as strong, and can't even survive Earth-like planets' environments, though Helspont should be stronger than normal to this. Likewise Wrath infects people with her darkness, turning them into wrath monsters and draws power form the anger of people nearby so the ability to purify them would allow for cutting off her power. Not an instant win button, but a helpful power for sure.
Wrath is generally the biggest threat of this tier. Not only does she basically require a character with a heart devoid of rage to beat her lest they be transmuted and every blow of theirs would strengthen her, but if they can't stop her infected minions spreading rage or stomp her via pure stats, she will eventually grow vastly higher in stats just from absorbing power from the rage of all the bystanders. The key to bypassing her greatest weapon is a rageless character who can fight without anger and can use a power over an area of effect to take care of all her creatures.
This brings me to my first counter
Witchcraft from the Champions Universe.
Witchcraft is a high tier Champion, with powers that are given as examples of their power level include villains who can destroy planets via megalasers or heroes who can push planets around. Similarly the villainess Gravitar is said to be able to rip a planet in half and the lower end cosmic villainess Istvasha V'han is said to be able to obliterate planets. High tier Champions are also stated to be able to travel around the planet and the solar system with easy, and easily scale above a standard Champions speedsters build which can move at 8 lightyears per year, or exactly 8c, putting her very clearly in this tier. Her reactions may be even higher as while she doesn't have cosmic speed, it's likely she can react to those who do, with "standard" cosmic speed involving traveling 32,000 lightyears per year.
Witchcraft is the premier mystic of the Champions with a versatile magical ability she can shape into a wide variety of effects. However her basic starting move is to use "Irresistible Slumber", a spell that puts people to sleep. Not only would this work on basically everyone in the tier, but if used on civilians, would keep them from feeling rage and cut off Wrath's powerset. And Wrath couldn't draw from Witchcraft's anger as Witchcraft has none. Witchcraft is, of all the Champions, the one most known for her gentle and compassionate personality not even feeling anger towards her enemies. For this she can channel the magical light of the Bright Moon and the purifying witchflame which would be absolute anathema and burn away the darkness of Wrath.
The witchflame would also be a secondary defense against Psi-Phon as it can't be used by evil and would burn Dreadnaught trying to wield. Like with pretty much everyone in this tier, they're also not immune to her own basic spells like turning people into frogs or making herself irresistibly beautiful, something which can also counter the rage strategy of Wrath.
Even against a group, the tier couldn't do much against her as Witchcraft has a mystical danger sense telling her of all threats and can conjure a mystical shield as well as use area effects like the witchflame against numerous enemies.
The only major threat to her would be Lord Helspont. Time Manipulation is a rare power seen as really powerful in the Champions Universe and Witchcraft has no inherent resistance to possession. Similarly Witchcraft is actually one of the newer less experienced Champions while Lord Helspont is a highly skilled warrior and conqueror. While Witchcraft can likely beat him at any time due to her being a skilled occultist with knowledge on how to exile possessing entities from their host bodies, Helspont might present a danger with no knowledge. It's also possible Kryptonians could trap her in another dimension with a Phantom Zone Projector.
An even better counter might be
Ulquiorra Cifer from Bleach: Hell Verse
Apparently it's contentious if Hell Verse is canon, but if it is not just assume it is specifically that version of Ulquiorra. While it's a one-sided fight against him, Ulquiorra is able to somewhat withstand several attacks from Vasto Lord Ichigo who in Hell Verse is stated to be able to threat to the world and a threat to Hell, a realm implied to be similar or larger to the Earth in size. He also scales above lesser characters being able to light-time. This puts him somewhat relative to the tier, probably in the middle somewhere.
Ulquiorra as a Hollow passively erodes the souls of those around him and, as an Arrancar, can use his spiritual pressure to crush weaker enemies around him including Psi-Phon and all the people giving Wrath her powers. Wrath herself couldn't transmute or gain energy from Ulquiorra as Ulquiorra represents the emptiness of death and is a totally stoic composed entity lacking any rage in his heart. Ulquiorra could also completely negate her darkness by trapping her in the light of Negacion.
Ulquiorra is naturally invisible, and would be undetectable to most entities in the tier conventionally and could use long range attacks stronger than him at a range most couldn't match with even his transformation threatening the entirety of Las Noches. Ulquiorra's basic attacks as a Hollow can hit the soul, and probably just his basic spiritual pressure would completely bypass the durability of most of the entities here including Helspont's true form and the Kryptonians. In contrast Helspont would not be able to possess him as his mind is entwined within his soul, something Helspont has never shown the ability to possess, and even if Helspont manages to get a strike on him via something like time manipulation and his telepathy, Ulquiorra has a natural regen factor strong enough to quickly regenerate from anything but his internal organs. Beyond that Ulquiorra is a likely similar or greater fighter, having centuries of direct combat experience and would likely one-shot before Helspont could hit him, and definitely one-shot him before Helspont hits him twice.
Shockwave's molecular disruption as well as Grax's K-Bomb would likely not work on Ulquiorra who is made of Reishi particles rather than conventional atoms. Likewise, Ulquiorra's spiritual pressure would likely penetrate right through Brainiac's forcefield which has only shown the ability to block physical strike punches. Even if the Kryptonians managed to send Ulquiorra to the Phantom Zone, Ulquiorra can easily create portals between realms as he has explicitly shown the ability to create such portals, which are considered common in Bleach.
The only way anyone in this tier could defeat Ulquiorra would be a Kryptonian using Torquasm Vo to trap him in a mental battlefield as it's unknown if Ulquiorra's powers would work on the mental plane. However for the best counter to the tier I would suggest
Wedding Peach from Wedding Peach
Wedding Peach even outside her final love wave, was able to fight powerful demons of the Rafaal tribe, superior to demon Petora who can destroy the human world outright and similar to Angel Selece who could create a barrier around the entire Angel World by herself. Wedding Peach in terms of speed scales to her own love waves which quickly traveled from the Human World to the Angel World and back quickly. This would put her in this tier, at the upper end for stats.
Wedding Peach seems like a character personally designed to beat Wrath. She and the Angels use a holy spiritual light that dispels evil darknesses like her. Wedding Peach is an angelic entity representing love and forgiveness that Wrath would get even less rage from than Superman. Just her presence was powerful enough to purify less devils in her civilian state which would purify all the people infected by Wrath.
Against Lord Helspont, Wedding Peach's power can nullify powers drawn from dark sources, and she can easily exorcise entities, even spiritual entities like Devils. She can also absorb energies and would just absorb Lord Helspont's energy powers. Similarly against Atomic Skull, Wedding Peach's purifying light would just purify the radiation and heal those affected. Neither them or any of the beaters would be able to do much lasting damage given her own power can heal herself, even on a metaphysical scale and their hostile energies would be passively purified by her love wave.
Even if Psi-Phon could steal Wedding Peach's holy light, which is unlikely, Wedding Peach's own power would do nothing against her, as seen in the anime, due to her own good nature. Similarly Wedding Peach's odd quirky logic and supernatural levels of love and goodness equaling the goddess of Love Aphrodite would likely be unpredictable against even the hypergenius Grax who is arrogant and unempathetic.
Against all of them, Wedding Peach would also have the advantage of stealth as the friendship between the angels make their civilian identity impossible to connect to their transformed selves, as well as psychic information on her enemies through psychometry, prophetic dreams, and being able to look into their hearts and see their memories.
The Kryptonians would be the toughest problem as some of them are good, and she likely couldn't do any direct damage to them. That said her passive aura can reflect attacks which would likely turn any attempt to use heat vision or a solar flare back on them instantly beating most Kryptonians given those are their strongest powers or can just absorb the energy. And she can keep distance to keep them from doing else via her teleportation. At the end of the series she could also use a final love wave that put the Devil Queen to sleep and which would likely work on the Kryptonians. Even if they tried to use Torquasm Vo on her, Wedding Peach's powers clearly work on the mental plane as seen in her battle in the dream world of Arushion's, and if they tried to bfr her into the Phantom Zone, not only can the Angels' attacks tear through dimensions, but her final love wave has an inter-dimensional range that encompassed all of Devil World, Earth, and Angel World, a range no one in the tier can match.
Stellar Tier:
This tier includes characters from Star Level to Star System level. By the end of the Golden Age, the Superman of Earth-2, Kal-L has risen to this level, somehow throwing two moons together with enough force to create a star and withstanding an explosion that almost rocked the solar system, a level of power the other Earth-2 Kryptonians scale to from his fight against the Kryptonian Criminals Kizo, Mala and U-Ban. During the Post-Crisis era, near the end of the first period a monster known as Doomsday appeared, the strongest enemy Superman had faced yet that tore through the Justice League, and Superman would have to adapt and reach a level of strength he didn't know he had in him. This Superman demonstrated the ability to survive the implosion of a Sun-Eater calced into the large star level and fought the monster Doomsday who tore through Green Lanterns, the Protectors of the Universe, whose shields can protect from Black Holes and Supernovas. After the Death of Superman storyline would be the Reign of the Superman storyline, where four entities would try to replace Superman, each being a reflection of one of his aspects, and each being here during the time period and which a lot of characters use for scaling. Later characters in Post-Crisis Superman's timeline that Superman didn't use his full power against would also be here, as later on Superman could easily throw a black hole threatening the Solar System and weakened survived an explosion equal to 50 of Keplar's Supernova. After his training regimen the New 52 Superman would reach this level as well, being able to survive, alongside the New 52 Brainiac, a Black Hole calced at 2.4 supernova worth of energy. People get confused about this since Superman was infected with the Doomsday Virus at the time, but the Black Hole burned away the virus while Superman was still inside it on panel and he still withstood it, plus he's stronger than New 52 Brainiac who also briefly survived it. New 52 Superman also fought Orion whose shockwaves in his fight against the Galactic Golem destroyed a star system. There's a lot more feats of this scale for this tier, these are just the ones connected to Superman.
Speed-wise, this tier scales to characters that can traverse the universe in hours or days, requiring speeds trillions to quadrillions of times the speed of light. The New 52 Superman traveled from the edge of the Universe to Earth in 60 days. The Supergirls traveled to the Source Wall at the edge of the universe in hours. The Lanterns regularly patrol entire space sectors that comprise signifying sections of the universe and can travel the entire universe in hours. Probes from Brainiac and Imperiex traverse the universe in a not cosmic span of time.
This tier includes numerous Kryptonians. Most Kryptonians from Earth-2 are in this tier based on the three Kryptonian criminals U-Ban, Kizo, and Mala, the first Kryptonians ever seen outside Superman, fighting the Golden Age Superman evenly. They also had a piece of Kryptonian technology that removes the moisture from the air causing rapid dehydration. This tier also includes numerous Daxamites, an extremely similar species to Kryptonians except with their weakness to Kryptonite replaced by a weakness to lead. Brainiac, in an attempt to develop a weapon to kill Superman, genetically modified the homeless girl Mia into a Kryptonian, tricking her into think she was the Kryptonian Girl Cir-El, and briefly became Supergirl. Cir-El Supergirl has the ability to produce red sunlight bursts. Similarly, the dictator of Pokolioston Avruskin through Soviet Experimentation was given, named after the Kryptonian General Zod due to his Reverse Kryptonian powers where he would gain Kryptonian powers under a Red Sun but lose them under a Yellow Sun. Dana Dearden was a Superman stalker who stole enchanted coins giving her Kryptonian like powers as well as lightning manipulation, dubbing herself "Superwoman" but which Jimmy Olsen named in the papers "Obsession." Obsession was able to fight the Psychic Maxima who was on par with Death of Superman-Superman and Doomsday. The New 52 would add as well an Imposter Superman which had the New 52 Superman's powers, as well as heat and energy manipulation. Supergirl Kara Zor-El during the New 52 would briefly become a Red Lantern adding Red Lantern Constructs and Rage Empowerment to the Kryptonian powerset. However the New 52 also added three major arc villains for Superman with Kryptonian type powers; Wraith, H'el, and Superdoom.
Wraith was an Alien Superweapon used by the US Government with similar powers to the New 52 Superman, though significantly stronger and faster, and with the abilities to turn invisible and to absorb and drain all forms of electromagnetic energy including solar power. Though he fought alongside and even admired Superman, he was forced to battle him for interference with General Lane's plans. Superdoom, the Superman of Earth-45, is a thoughtform, a being created by belief, that represents the commercialization and darkening of the comics industry, a killer Superman franchise that wants to destroy all rival Supermen in the multiverse to maintain brand singularity, who grows stronger or gets weaker based on peoples belief in his superiority. He has rapid adaptation abilities such as when his outer hide immediately adapted to K-Blasts after being hit by a K-Blast. However most dangerous of them was H'el, a composite clone of numerous Kryptonians designed to preserve Krypton's legacy. H'el has numerous psychic abilities including the ability to enter the astral plane and fight physical entities from there, the ability to alter the size of others such that Supergirl could go into the shrunken city of Kandor, and teleportation strong enough to affect structures the size of the Fortress of Solitude and go all the way to the Sun from Earth. He has telekinesis that lets him rip apart the atoms of entities or attack their internal organs through their body, psychic barriers powerful enough to protect from strikes from even New 52 Superman, and telepathy strong enough to create illusions, mind control, or telepathically destroy the brains of other Kryptonians, despite their mental resistances. After exposure to the Star Chamber, H'el also developed time manipulation, able to time travel, see someone's past and future psychically, and even duplicate himself through time though this required a huge strain. H'el is also a supergenius capable of creating time travel and dimensional travel, cloning extinct species from Krypton, hacking into Apokalyptian Boom Tubes, and conquered Krypton itself in one timeline, and has an extremely high stealth proficiency, able to hide from Superman and Supergirl at close range despite their Kryptonian senses. It's pretty easy to see why H'el is broadly considered Superman's strongest New 52 villain.
This tier includes numerous entities that are emanations from the metaphysical entities in the Godsphere. From Apokalips are the two mad scientists Simyan and Mokkari, comparable to earlier Pre-Resurrection Superboy and should be comparable to Desaad who, while disguised as Darkseid, was able to fight an Early Post-Crisis Superman. As scientists for the New Gods, Simyan and Mokkari are scientific hypergeniuses, creating various monsters to attack Superman. Also from Apokalips is Amazing Grace, a godly psychology manipulator, who manipulates the lowlies into revolt so they can be crushed again, breaking their spirit and possesses mind control. The demon of chaos Bloodthirst is here, and though he only appears briefly, he should have all the standard demon powers such as possession. The human Ulysses was warped by being sent into the Fourth World into a flying brick with energy manipulation strong enough to match a machine that was meant to drain millions of humans of their energy, gives him infinite stamina, and allows him to make portals to the Fourth World dimension. He hunted the fourth dimensional monster Klerik, a being with similar stats to him and Superman, until he was aided by Superman in the fight. The New 52 also had the Ghost Soldier, an assassin sent to kill Superman who can phase, even phasing his knife's molecules to be able to cut the super-durable molecules of New 52 Superman, as well as teleport as far as the Phantom Zone.
More conventionally, this tier has numerous various assorted metahumans including the mind-reading material-copying Anomaly, the shapeshifting underground giant pet Baka, and the phasing magnetism manipulator Baud. Cary Richards made a deal with Satanus to gain supernatural powers including teleportation, flight, enhanced stats, and psychokinesis as the gritty 90s metahuman Adversary. Though Superman defeated him relatively easily, he was at least in the same tier enough to downscale. Similarly gritty 90s villain Equus is a cybernetically enhanced human with metal Wolverine claws capable of scratching Supergirl and, again like Wolverine, quickly regenerate limbs. The second Atomic Skull, Joseph Martin, is here after his deal with Neron, gaining extreme radiation powers. The Post-Crisis Insect Queen is an Alien Hive Mind Queen who can control all insects or insectoid entities, metamorphosis herself into different insect forms or turn others into insect monsters, as well as having telepathy strong enough to control her entire Hive and overwhelm Post-Crisis Superman briefly, and possessing her subjects. An unrelated but similar entity called the Hive Queen was one of Brainiac's experiments in the New 52 with general psychic powers including using the negativity in Metropolis to bombard New 52 Superman mentally and a regen factor of unknown strength. Stronger than any of these was Lexus, Devourer of Life, a cosmic evil and threat to the galaxy, a giant being who can shoot energy bolts supposedly nothing in the universe could survive...until Superman withstood them. Lexus had an unique healing factor. So long as it's heart wasn't destroyed, whenever it was damaged, it would suck up nearby matter, incorporating that as part of its being. It could only be killed by damage to its heart.
Like every tier of Superman's series, this tier includes numerous psychics. While some are included in other categories, this tier also includes Maxima, the warrior queen of an advanced planet known for her psychic power who was on par with Death of Superman-Superman and Doomsday. She's an extremely potent psychic able to telepathically destroy peoples minds, mentally overwhelm characters with mental resistances like Wonder Woman and another alien psychic. She can shoot bolts of psychic power, create forcefields, and can telekinetically disassemble Red Tornado. She can telepathically scan a city, and create illusions and avatars to fight for her. She can also teleport people across the galaxy and has transmuted her suit from one form to another. Another powerful psychic on this tier would be "Savior", Ramsay Murdoch who believed the true Superman died against Doomsday and the Superman who returned was just an imposter. Savior can manipulate psychic energy to warp reality, creating things like a stampede of pink elephants and suffocating smog that worked on Superman, turn himself into pure energy, give himself the powers of Superman, "anything he can imagine." However the strongest psychic on this tier is even greater, one of the biggest threats on this tier, that being Oracle. Oracle is a cosmic entity accidentally awoken by H'el stated by Word of God to be able to destroy the solar system with a sideways glance. After Superboy died, Oracle resurrected him as his herald. The Oracle has perfect knowledge of the timeline, seeing the past and future, and to aid against H'el's disruptions to the timeline, send Hel's Krypton to a different timeline and sent Superman, Supergirl, and Superboy to different points of the timeline to help fix history. Oracle naturally exists at the edge of spacetime, is stated to perceive "a few infinities" more than humans do and is implied to be able to duplicate itself. Oracle is one of the two biggest threats of the tier.
There's also numerous very powerful technology-wielding entities in this tier. One of the four characters to try and take Superman's place in the Reign of the Supermen arc was John Henry Irons, Steel, representing Superman's aspect "The Man of Steel." His first three armors would be here, and while they have slightly different capabilities; all have superhuman stats in this range, jet boosters, a kinetic hammer for melee, and a rivet gun for ranged warfare. The second has trackers, tracers, and teleportation capabilities and can be summoned to him from a remote distance. The third sacrifices power for mobility, can disguise itself as normal clothes, and can absorb energy. Another of Superman's replacements was Hank Henshaw, the Cyborg Superman, reflecting Superman's aspect as "The Man of Tomorrow", a cyborg man infused with Kryptonian genetics. He has power rivaling 90s Post-Crisis Superman himself and was considered a powerhouse compared to the others at the time able to put down First Armor Steel and Eradicator's body with one or two strikes. He's able to easily regen from any spare metal around, assimilates nearby technology or can possess it, transmitting himself as electricity or as a disembodied ghost to take control of technology. His control of technology extended even to Apokalips' technology or the JLA Watchtower. While he would eventually grow out of this tier, his initial body was this tier. Very similar is the villain Metallo, a robot with the ability to control and incorporate technology. While his technopathy isn't as strong as Cyborg Superman, Metallo possess in addition the ability to shoot blasts of any form of radiation, including kryptonite radiation, and possesses a body made out of a super tough metal considered indestructible even to Superman. Brainiac's agent Cyber Angel would also be in this tier, a robot capable of fighting Superman with teleportation and the ability to transmute matter into energy.
Speaking of, this tier has numerous Brainiac bodies, all of whom are hypergenius intellects considered among the finest minds in Creation and being 12th level intellects. This tier includes Fine-iac, the psychic Brainiac with pretty much all the psychic powers mentioned before as well as numerous others including pain inducement, separating peoples consciousness into good and evil halves, switching peoples bodies, time/dimensional travel, manifesting psychic energy as physical objects or absorbing them outright, and being able to sense things on a galactic scale. He's also a mental plane entity that possesses various bodies. This is the same Brainiac as Brainiac 2.5 the technopathic Brainiac, who developed numerous advanced gadgets including bfr on the galactic scale, and whose technopathy was so strong that he was able to contend with Brainiac 13 who has casual planetary technopathy, consistent with his own feat of manipulating Earth's technology all at once. Brainiac 2.5 was also able to plan every single one of Superman's moves with predictive analysis through sheer intelligence. This tier includes the New 52 Vril Dox Brainiac a broad overarching villain for the New 52, who in addition to many of the prior abilities had physical, astral, and mental manipulation; amping Lois from lightyears away, creating things like the Hive Queen, fighting the ghost army of the Phantom Zone, and manipulating the psychic energy of the Earth to reality-warp the universe. He also has an army of robots relative to him in strength and technology that can spy into the fifth dimension. The most dangerous Brainiac of this tier, and one of the biggest threats of the tier is Brainiac 12, the disembodied essence of Brainiac 13, the future Brainiac, able to travel in time, create time rifts, assimilate matter, disguise himself, create techno-bugs and is generally hard to fight as Brainiac 13's essence.
This tier has one more threat, possibly the strongest threat on this tier, that being The Eradicator, one of the other four replacements for Superman, his aspect as "The Last Son of Krypton." The Eradicator is a Kryptonian weapon/supercomputer designed to preserve Krypton's purity and genetics. In the Reign of the Supermen The Eradicator was a thematic contrast to Cyborg Superman. While Cyborg Superman was a man who looked like a machine who acted like he had Superman's values at the start, but slowly revealed his internal evil, the Eradicator was a machine that looked like a man who initially had no value for human life, but grew to understand Superman's code and rose into heroism. The Eradicator has matter-energy manipulation that is so advanced it's basically magic. Of course he can do simple tricks like phasing, making Phantom Zone projectors, changing kryptonite into solar power to amp Superman, give Jimmy Olsen superpowers, teleport people galactic distances and creating an energy field Superman couldn't break but these are all honestly bit feats for him. The Eradicator can manipulate all forms of energy, even Superman's bio-energy, and even when an energy vampire tried to drain him, he controlled his energy inside of it. He was able to, without his memories, make a clone of Superman out of stone, cloned Wonder Woman and Daxamites, even removing the latter's weakness to lead, terraform Earth into an identical copy of Krypton, changing the people into the exact people that were on Krypton based on Jor-El's memories. He could change the Sun into a copy of Krypton's red sun Rao, altered the genetic code of all Kryptonians to make it so they would die if they left Krypton, and altered Krypton so any alien entity would instantly die if they entered its atmosphere. Its advanced enough that Brainiac 13, the reality-warping Brainic of the future fled the Eradicator and later tried to use it as a weapon. His mind hax is strong enough to read Superman's thoughts, control him for weeks, overpower Maxima, and mindwipe people of his existence. While the Eradicator's original body wasn't that strong for the tier, it doesn't really matter as when his body dies, his essence will fuse with whatever is nearby including human minds or the energies of the Sun. Even when his energies were destroyed, he was recreated at the Fortress of Solitude due to a failsafe he had prepared, a form of Mid-Godly regen. He can also fight on higher planes of being being able to fight Superman in Torquasm Vo which is insane considering how good Superman is at T-Vo. He also battled his own xenophobic programming given to him by his creator Kem-L, which had changed into a mental being resembling Kem-L telling Eradicator to destroy all alien filth. This Kem-L tried to drain away all of Eradicator's spirit, his life energies, his essence, yet Eradicator purposefully fed him only the hate and xenophobia of the original Kem-L, flooding him with metaphysical darkness before dying him with one blast, proclaiming he no longer needs them. Oh and if that isn't enough, after his upgrade Eradicator can now gain data from the entire multiverse, giving him a cosmic awareness on a multiversal scale and would let him see every version of a fight.
So how to fight this tier? The biggest threats are probably Oracle, Brainiac 12, and the Eradicator and to be more specific about abilities awareness of all spacetime, spacetime manipulation, mind hax, technopathy, spiritual plane entities, mid-godly regen, planetary mind-energy hax, as well as just a little bit of everything.
While awareness of all spacetime is strong, it's not necessarily absolute awareness. If a character comes from a dimension outside a spacetime continuum, like a metaphysical dimension ala the Godsphere realms neither Oracle or the Eradicator would be able to normally sense it, and only New 52 Vril Dox could with special technology, plus it would be hard for anyone here to access, with only the Eradicator and the Fourth World entities being able to reach there. This would also protect against the time-traveling tactics of people like H'el and Oracle. If the character can affect the physical world from there, that's even better as it would be hard to figure out where the attack is coming from and counter-attack.
Similar to prior tiers, a character using mystical type abilities would be an outside context problem for most of the tier, and would bypass almost all the resistances the tier has. Similarly intangibility is considered a strong enough ability that it's basically Ghost Soldier's only power, and two of the biggest threats like Brainiac 12 and The Eradicator are so hard to kill since they are basically disembodied essences. As such a more ethereal type enemy would be particularly strong.
Eradicator due to being essentially technology has struggled against technopaths like Cyborg Superman before and also while he can regenerate from just his energies, or even his energies dispersed, he can't fight as disembodied energies meaning that affecting his brain with things like mind control or memory wiping should still work, especially since he has lost his memories before. Less is known about Brainiac 12 but while he is Brainiac's 13 essence, he can be trapped as the way Superman stopped him was trapping him in a skip in time. Either could hypothetically be stopped by energy absorption as well just absorbing their disembodied energy, though Eradicator's energies could possibly absorb the counter as well.
All this seems to add up to a very particular type of strategy to me; that being that of the demonic trickster. A metaphysical demon from a metaphysical Hell dimension, or at least some kind of metaphysical evil from a nightmare realm would be very difficult for the tier to both find and to reach, with no individual character being able to do both and with a lot of characters like that having the types of abilities that would be strong against this tier such as magical mind manipulation or transmuting, absorption, spiritual attacks such as corruption or making a duplicate of one's evil self. That brings me to my first counter
Lord Darkar from Winx Club.
Lord Darkar probably scales to the Winx using convergence to stop the shaking of every planet in the universe, a feat calced as taking as a low-end 442 supernova worth of energy, and probably scales to various characters flying from Earth to another dimension at likely quadrillions of times the speed of light, meaning he is likely around this tier in speed, and stronger than everyone save Oracle. It should be noted that Darkar's feats and hype are somewhat contradictory, and this is more of a midballed interpretation, and he could be anywhere from multi-city block level to universe level depending on how you interpret the statements made about him.
Lord Darkar naturally resides within the magic dimension outside the conventional spacetime continuum. He is an ancient deity of the pure darkness of the void before the Great Dragon, and being made of darkness things like matter-energy manipulation from someone like the Eradicator wouldn't work on him. Darkar would be essentially Wrath from the prior tier but on a higher level. His basic powerset is manipulation of darkness, including making basic dark energy beams and shields, creating armies of monsters made of darkness, and corrupting/controlling people with the darkness inside them.
Due to his nature as a supernatural darkness from a magical dimension outside the spacetime continuum, the only tactics the tier would have against him would be mind/soul hax, BFR-ing him, creating enough light to destroy him, or Eradicator absorbing him. Mind/Soul hax-ing him is possibly but unlikely because while there are strong psychics in this tier in terms of potency, they lack the area of effect to hax a large number of people and Darkar in-character would first overwhelm them with large armies of shadow monsters and evil versions of the fighters in the tier before getting involved himself so they wouldn't know who to target. BFR-ing is unlikely as most of the characters in the series including his subordinates can create inter-dimensional portals and so it would take BFR to somewhere like the Phantom Zone to trap Darkar. He's far too durable for the tier to be able to create enough light to hurt him. Absorption from Eradicator is unlikely to work as in order to try it, Eradicator would have to get in close range to Darkar who could then use his own absorption, and so it would be a question of whose absorption is stronger. Eradicator was able to fuse with the energies of the Sun, but Darkar is treated as the dark equivalent to Winx Club's original God Tier, the Great Dragon because the Great Dragon can create all things, the universe itself, while Darkar can absorb all things, even the Great Dragon's flame. And it's not like Eradicator can overwhelm Darkar with the dark parts of his psyche, given that Darkar is darkness embodied. Meanwhile Darkar can one-shot anyone in this tier via his corruption save maybe Eradicator who can delete negative aspects of his own programming, but he could just destroy Eradicator's body with one dark energy blast and then absorb his energy.
With that said, there's enough psychics on this tier, that maybe one will luckily hit him with mind hax, particularly Maxima or Fine-iac via their telepathic scanning or he could be hit by a phantom zone projector. I think this is unlikely given his usual MO of using henchmen rather than risking himself. He also might not belong in this tier though. For a better counter you could use
HIM from the Powerpuff Girls
HIM maintained a chalk dimension including its own sun, and based on the PPG's performances against the Justice Friends, shouldn't be cosmically weaker than Monkey, who once moved the solar system at ftl speeds. He also scales to the Powerpuff Girls in speed, who can become omnipresent in a city through speed, calced at over 230 trillion times the speed of light, as well as to spaceships which can traverse the universe in presumably not a cosmic length of time. Overall his stats would be fairly normal for this tier.
HIM naturally exists in his own dimension that seems to be outside the spacetime continuum and possibly is within nightmares. Either way he definitely can enter nightmares and attack peoples minds from there. While the PPG have the ability to fight on the mental plane, that ability is fairly rare on this tier limited to basically Kryptonians with Torquasm Vo, The Eradicator, Fine-Iac, and possibly Superdoom and Savior. The latter two are truly not a problem as Savior relies on using psychic energy from people and Superdoom relies on the belief of others for their power while HIM has shown the ability to turn the people of Townsville's love for the Powerpuff Girls to hate, literally inverting their power source.
In the same episode HIM showed the ability to control the City of Townsville directly. While Fine-iac has a brokenly versatile amount of mindhax, he's only shown the ability to affect a small crowd at once, meaning HIM could actually just mind control Fine-Iac himself, the same way Maxima did after Fine-Iac lost the Warworld Enhancement to his psychic power. That would be a hilarious fight due to both characters super theatrical personalities but HIM is more devious and also has transmutation abilities, even able to turn chalk into giant monsters on the PPG's level and Fine-Iac had the major weakness that his psychic powers were confined to his body and alterations to his body would limit his ability to use them so if HIM just transformed him with magic into, say, a mouse, that would keep him from using any of his powers. Against both Eradicator and Brainiac 12, HIM can counter their essence regeneration by creating shadow clones made of their Sins as he did to Blossom and Buttercup in the comics, something should work even on spirits. Even if Eradicator is able to defeat his dark half, the way he beat Kem-L, HIM also has seemingly demonstrated memory erasure which should work fine on him.
Against the Kryptonians HIM's other abilities should come to play. HIM has demonstrated the ability to act as a red smoke, even on the mental plane, which most Kryptonians wouldn't be able to fight while he can use magical attacks to negate their Kryptonian invulnerability. If they tried to use a Phantom Zone Projector on him, he could bring it to life or possess it outright, or at the very least just teleport away when they would try to use it on him. Add onto this a general reality-warping on a scale no one in the tier has shown resistance too, and HIM could hypothetically one-shot anyone in the tier on the physical or mental plane...save again for Brainiac 12 or The Eradicator but he can fight them in other ways.
The only way he can really lose is if he gets arrogant and tries to fight the tier physically as his defenses are not as potent as his offenses. In a physical fight someone like Oracle would just one-shot HIM with overwhelming power. For the best counter to the tier, I would suggest
Queen Nehelenia from the 90s Sailor Moon Anime.
Nehelenia withstood a direct hit from the Golden Crystal, a magical crystal said to be able to destroy the stars. She's also easily comparable, likely superior, to the Super Sailor Senshi, with Super Sailor Moon having flown to the center of Pharaoh 90, a universe encompassing the Sailor Moon universe in seconds, putting her in the same stat range as the tier, maybe a little bit on the faster weaker side.
Nehelenia is basically the last two counters mixed with the Mirror Master. Nehelenia is sealed inside of a mirror dimension, that she can't leave even if she wants too. In this dimension time and light are stopped. Light being unable to move is pretty notable as it means any Kryptonian there wouldn't be able to get the sunlight that empowers them, but more notably time is frozen. That means anyone who enters there would be frozen unless they can resist time stop, which is just the Fourth World Entities. Even Brainiac 12 could not enter Nehelenia's dimension, as being thrown into a skip in time, a place with no time, is how Superman stopped Brainiac 12. This means for the most part Nehelenia would be free to attack with little-room for counter-attack.
Nehelenia, after being given the mirror of hatred by Galaxia, was able to rain down mirror shards on the Sailor Moon Earth, these shards if they hit a person's eye, rendering them obsessive over her mirrors and eventually comatose, or otherwise grow into mirror parodies, mirror replicates of Nehelenia seemingly able to use all her abilities. This can do things like disperse or reflect ranged attacks, a particularly strong ability for the tier given how many powerful energy attacks there are. She can also command the spiders to create a web that can block out the Sun over cities, which is relevant given the number of solar-powered characters in this tier. These webs can bind even Super Sailor Senshi and can shock with electricity or drain energy from people. Nehelenia would be a nightmare for Kryptonians particularly if they were around actual Kryptonian technology like the Fortress of Solitude or the City of Kandor. Kryptonian objects are noted for their crystaline appearence which gives many reflections of the Sun. However Nehelenia can appear in any number of reflective surfaces to attack from, draw people into her nightmare dimension or put into eternal sleep. Similarly all the technology this tier has would provide innumerable more reflective surfaces to attack from.
Even the metaphysical nature of the Eradicator and Brainiac 12 wouldn't help, as Nehelenia is leader of the Dead Moon Circus with their powers and can summon her court at will, the Dead Moon Circus being able to drain the life from the plane of Elysian, the plane of dreams. Spiritual energy draining is probably the single most dangerous power for the tier, and not only can Nehelenia do it, every single one of her minions can, along with knocking out peoples dream mirrors, rendering them memoryless. Similarly H'el, Brainiac 12, and Oracle's temporal attacks are unlikely to work. While Nehelenia was defeated by Sailor Moon using the Silver Crystal's power to change time in the past to make it so Nehelenia was never evil, this was the mystical crystal affecting something in another dimension as Nehelenia is native to the dream realm, something none of those three would know about or have any way to get too. For comparison, Sailor Pluto can also travel through time freely yet was unable to simply stop Nehelenia that way.
Nehelenia usually attacks via creating an eclipse, attacking with illusory flowers that brainwash or illusory fire that burns or similar illusory forms of attack. An eclipse would depower the Kryptonians, particularly in conjunction with the Dead Moon Circus' energy-draining attacks, and the illusions are something only the psychics and Torquasm Vo users would be able to really fight given they cause real physical effects. Meanwhile the only ones in the tier that could really even try to counter-attack are the Fourth World Entities who can go to the Fourth World, a place outside space and time. However Nehelenia has a far more broken and dangerous powerset than any of the Fourth World characters on this tier, and should be able to overwhelm them with dangerous hax like attack reflection, energy-draining, overwhelming them with mirror parody duplicates, and even magical transmutation which she did to turn the Amazon Trio into humanoid states. That even assumes that they can get to her as they use Boom Tube portals to travel, however Nehelenia can remotely close portals as she did to Chibiusa's time portal to travel back to the future. It's possibly Nehelenia could prevent them from even reaching her realm. They'd have to coordinate to try to overclock her attention by creating numerous portals at once, only to enter a realm she has far better abilities and a realm she seems to be able to control.
The only one who has really any chance at doing this would be Amazing Grace, the Apokoliptian Manipulator of Darkseid, who could enter Nehelenia's dimension and maybe manipulate Nehelenia's vanity, like the sad lonely little girl she really is, Amazing Grace being a character whose main purpose in Darkseid's design being incredibly psychological manipulation. However, hilariously, even this would not work permanently as Nehelenia has one last trick. The Dead Moon Circus have a form of conditional immortality and regen, that so long as humans have dreams to waste, the Dead Moon Circus can not fall to ruin. The realm of nightmares exists parasitically on the realm of dreams. Even if Amazing Grace beats Nehelenia once, Nehelenia will eventually return and, being known for her insane grudges, would kill Amazing Grace first. And without foreknowledge, Amazing Grace would definitely not be able to stop this, as her purpose given by Darkseid is to inspire revolt so he can crush it, the cycle of dreams and nightmares meaning Amazing Grace's own mission would ensure Nehelenia's revival.
Galactic Tier:
Superman in Post-Crisis would learn that he placed Mental Barriers on himself to avoid accidentally destroying things and would learn to release his restraints with Mongul. Early in Post-Crisis, the comparison made for Superman regularly both in and out of universe was that he was weaker than the Pre-Crisis Kryptonians, outclassed by the "Pocket Universe Kryptonians" unaffected by the Crisis, and out of universe being said to be much weaker by author interviewers. However in the leadup to the Event Infinite Crisis, numerous parts of Pre-Crisis history were being referenced, leading up to the event where a major thematic part is the conflict between the Pre-Crisis and Post-Crisis morality system and worldview, with Superman having to fight two Pre-Crisis Kryptonians; Kal-L, Superman from Earth-2 and Superboy Prime. Superboy Prime was treated as a major next level threat in the crisis itself, ripping through the Green Lantern Corps killing them en mass, easily overwhelming the Justice League, matching the speed of the speedsters, only to be fought and eventually beaten by Kal-El and Kal-L including a brief fight before they are weakened. This event would bring back into Post-Crisis canonicity Superman's adventures as Superboy with the Legion of Super-Heroes, and start the reintroduction of elements from the Silver Age into canonicity.
This tier includes two subtiers; the Silver Age characters and the top tiers post Our Worlds at War in 2001, and the higher tier of the early Bronze Age, and the late Post-Crisis period post Infinite Crisis in 2005-2006. The characters in this tier scale to galaxy to multi-galaxy level with the first subtier being galaxy level and the latter being galaxy level+ up to multi-galaxy level. During Our Worlds at War Post-Crisis Superman was able to absorb enough anti-sunlight to vaporize half a galaxy, and in Pre-Crisis Superboy was stated to be able to destroy half a galaxy without breaking a sweat. Sun-Eaters, not that large a threat in the Pre-Crisis period but a large one in the Post-Crisis period, are stated to be able to swallow galaxies whole. Superboy Prime tanked a galaxy busting bomb and tore through the Green Lantern Corps who could stop a galaxy-busting explosion with singular green lanterns pushing them to the limit withstanding black holes that are imminent threats to their space sector. Kal Kent, Superman 1,000,000 demonstrated the ability to use his Force Vision to hold back a galaxy temporarily, Superman later demonstrating through use of his Torquasm Vo the ability to use the powers of various forms of Superman including Kal Kent. Superman also beat Earth 616 Thor in the canonical 2003 crossover JLA/Avengers. With the coming of the Bronze Age and the introduction of the titanic New Gods, Superman's power grew in the Bronze Age, with early Bronze Age Pre-Crisis Superman being only slightly hurt by Magnar hitting with the magnetic repulsion flow of a hundred galaxies and enduring the weight and gravity of heavymass galaxies. Broadly speaking I think Earth-1 Kryptonians without Mental Blocks are Galaxy Level, Military Tier Kryptonians are several times stronger then that with Post-Crisis Superman requiring several other Kryptonians to hold him down, similar to the difference between normal humans and military personnel, and characters that scale to Bronze Age Superman are multi-galaxy level based on the feats against the new gods.
This tier has a notable speed increase from characters who can travel the universe in an extended time frame vs very quickly or instantly, calced at speeds of quintillions or sextillions of times the speed of light. Initially in Post-Crisis this tier of speed was reserved for speedforce users, but as Post-Crisis progressed, the fastest non-speedforce users began to catch up to this level of speed, the level of speed had in the Pre-Crisis era. Wonder Woman famously blocked the pieces of the shattered god, trillions of particles quickly traversing the universe, calced at being between 52-315 quintillion times the speed of light. A feat for Wally West that should apply to some of the fastest Post-Crisis characters as this was Pre-Infinite Crisis where Superboy Prime would match the speedforce users was Wally outpacing the Big Bang, lowballed at 3.7 sextillion times the speed of light. In Final Crisis near the end of Post-Crisis, Superman, Shazam, and Overman stopped reality-blitzing missiles at a speed calced at being just over 3 sextillion times the speed of light. This actually makes a degree of sense as Shazam and Wonder Woman both use the Speed of Mercury, a God who has outpaced an early Wally West, with Shazam performing similarly vs an Early Wally West, both of whom have the same power source as Jay Garrick who also has the Speed of Mercury and is a relevant speedster to Wally, if significantly slower than Later Post-Crisis Wally. Near the end of Pre-Crisis, Superman traveled billions of lightyears in a nanosecond, 63 septillion times the speed of light, so they may be as high as that if you think Kal-L was close to him in speed, and if he is a notable fraction then that speaks for itself. There are numerous other Pre-Crisis feats of characters traveling or moving objects between dimensions instantly requiring speeds easily quintillions of times the speed of light supporting this. Characters in this speed tier of DC can break the time barrier, allowing them to travel through time via their own speed. Broadly, Pre-Crisis Kryptonian tier characters are quintillions of times the speed of light, and speedforce tier characters are sextillions of times the speed of light.
This tier includes the Kryptonians from Earth-1 under a Yellow Sun, so long as they don't have mental barriers around their powers. Any Earth-1 Kryptonian can reach this tier as when Doomsday returned with his latest evolution late in Post-Crisis during the New Krypton arc , he was dogpilled by about a dozen untrained kryptonians who curbstomped him, a scene meant to showcase to the viewer just how impactful having so many Kryptonians was. 27 Kryptonians were able to defeat the Heroes of DC Earth, with 4 Kryptonians being able to hold down Post-Crisis Superman, consistently said in late Post-Crisis to be the strongest hero of Earth. Post-Crisis Supergirl, a Kryptonian without mental barriers was hyped up during the mid Post-Crisis period as having all of Superman's strength and later to be the strongest girl on Earth with the exception of Wonder Woman. Likewise in Pre-Crisis until near the end, all Kryptonians were treated as having equal superhuman stats with even scientist types like Jax-Ur being stated to have the same "earthly powers" as Superman. Just as being able to beat a Kryptonian is a great accomplishment in the DC multiverse in general, being able to beat an Earth-1 Kryptonian is a great accomplishment for Earth-1.
Kryptonians in the lower sub-tier of power includes the thousands of Kryptonians from Kandor and potentially all of Earth-1 Krypton under a Yellow Sun as well as a few others, starting at the bottom with the Kryptonian Juvenile Deliquent Dev-Em, clashing with the Goodie Good Boy Superboy Kal-El in Pre-Crisis. Preus was one of the law enforcers in the city of Kandor. In the Pre-Crisis period, numerous Kryptonians were saved from Krypton's destruction by being trapped in the Phantom Zone, mostly criminals, especially scientists. Xa-Du is a scientist who whose illegal experiments on people in suspended animation accidentally killed people. He has an ecto-suit that lets him "project his willpower into reality" allowing him to do things like teleport, plant subliminal suggestions in three different people, and enhancing himself, and an artificial virus allow him to rewrite peoples' memories and minds. He was also basically the only one of the Kryptonians to realize "Hey, I'm not a fighter, I should avoid Superman." Nam-Ek is a Kryptonian scientist that turned him into a monstrous entity seeking immortality. Despite his horrid visage, he can regenerate from "almost any injury", even from Kryptonite, is immune to toxins, and can heal anyone around him. Jax-Ur was the first Kryptonian criminal to be consigned to the Phantom Zone for his accidental destruction of one of Krypton's moons and its people with one of his missiles. He aided Superman in his fight with Pre-Crisis Black Zero, enemy of all Krypton, and is considered perhaps smartest of the Kryptonians in the Phantom Zone. He has super hypnosis that even works on other Kryptonians and can command people to build time machines, phantom zone projectors, and other sci-fi gadgetry. Quex-Ul was a bountry hunter who hunted the endangered Rondors, however was secretly under mind control. After being freed, he became an ally of Superman's. Va-Kox is a notorious Kryptonian Criminal who can mentally control people all the way from the Phantom Zone, and has various powerful technology including a laser gun, aranchoids, robots that destabilize spacetime, erasing several galaxies and creating a bridge between the Phantom Zone and material reality, and disguises so good that it can fool Superman into thinking he was Clark Kent. Kru-El, cousin to Jor-El, was a Kryptonian weapons dealer with some advanced weapons of his own including a mind-over-matter device which manifests anything he wants, a temporal forcefield, a mind-transfer device that would swap peoples minds through time, a disintegrator gun, an orbital cannon phantom zone projector and more. Speaking of, this tier would include Superman's parents, Jor-El and Lara Lor-Van. Jor-El is Krypton's most brilliant mind, a mind Brainiac considers a kindred mind, perhaps suggesting he was smarter than even Lex Luthor, a level of intellect that could give himself 5D powers via science. Jor-El discovered the Phantom Zone, a metaphysical dimension outside spacetime, created the Phantom Zone projector, and is responsible for Krypton's most wonderous technologies. Lyla was a Kandorian telepath who stole Superman's powers after pulling him into Kandor. This tier also includes Power Girl, strongest of the Earth-2 Kryptonians, explicitly the equal of Post-Crisis Supergirl who is her alternate universe counterpart.
The strongest Kryptonian on this sub-tier is Superman 1 Million, Kal Kent. Not only does Kal Kent have Kryptonian powers, he has a boom tube generator to create inter-dimensional portals even to metaphysical dimensions, 5D senses and the ability to enter the fifth dimensional, a metafictional space, and psychic powers allowing for mental manipulation of a crowd, force vision able to hold back a galaxy, telekinesis able to dissemble weapons from a distance, creating telekinetic bubbles, memory erasure, and freezing people in place. He can also punch through the time barrier if need be and is stated to be immune to magic.
Krypton also has a military, characters that are considered physical powerhouses even in comparison to other Kryptonians like the difference between normal humans and trained soldiers. This includes the deadly Faora Hu-Ul, a Kryptonian war criminal in the serve of Dru-Zod. Faora is an extraordinarily skilled fighter, much more than even Superman, and is trained in the Kryptonian Martial Art of Horu-Kanu which uses pressure points to cripple or kill enemies. On the side of good, the heroes of Kandor Flamebird and Nightwing, Thara Ak-Var and Lor-Zod. Flamebird was provided power by the mythical Flamebird, giving her fire manipulation, immunity to Red Sun radiation, a resistance to mind hax, and enough power to fight a god-amped Jax-Ur. She also is skilled enough to fight Ursa, a Kryptonian soldier serving Zod and carries a Phantom Zone projector and a grappling hook. Her partner Lor-Zod was the child of Zod and Ursa in the Phantom Zone, but defected to the side of good becoming the hero Nightwing. Due to the strange conditions of his birth in the Phantom Zone, he can maintain his physical form in the Phantom Zone. He has darkness manipulation which he can turn into darkness constructs and allows him to sense all things happening in darkness, and he has psychic powers including teleportation strong enough to teleport an artificial Sun into the Phantom Zone and telekinesis strong enough to work on Kryptonians. This tier includes Kingdom Come Superman, an alternate version of Post-Crisis Superman who should have most of his powers and also has a vastly higher resistance to Kryptonite and Magic, and senses strong enough to see through the time barrier, seeing the past and future. It also includes the original Superman, the Superman of Earth-2, Kal-L, the Golden Age Superman who was able to equal the early Bronze Age Superman. Kal-L has most of the same powers as Post-Crisis Superman along with a few random abilities like ventriloquism and shapeshifting. He's a master of pressure point combat, has resistance to mind hax, and can hypnotize people including himself. Ultraman, the Evil Superman of Earth-3 would also be here due to his repeated fights with the Supermen of Earth-1 and Earth-2.
There are numerous other entities in this tier that have Kryptonian abilities. Krypto the Super-Dog, Streaky the Super-Cat, Beppo the Super-Monkey, and Comet the Super-Horse are Kryptonian animals with relations to Kryptonians the way those animals would with humans, Krypto having some of the best senses in the entire DC Universe with a powerful sonic attack the super-bark, Comet being a particularly quick speedster. This tier includes daxamites like Mon-El who are similar to Kryptonians but different weaknesses. Pre-Crisis Superboy had numerous duplicates including Rebello, a robot duplicate of him, The Negative Superboy, a reverse of Superboy created by a cosmic energy storm and an energy dragon within, and the first Bizarro, a clone of Superboy. The criminal scientist Professor Sardon gave the runt Pee Wee Ragan Superboy's powers to encourage him to get revenge. In Post-Crisis, a monster known as Kancer was generated from cancerous growths removed from Superman. Kancer was a creature with Kryptonian DNA and so had Kryptonian powers, but also radiated kryptonite that didn't affect it, and had a necrotic touch dissolving everything it touched.
The fourth of the four replacement Supermen after Superman's death was Superboy, Conner Kent, Kon-El, representing Superman's aspect as the Metropolis Kid, who after his death and rebirth was strong enough to fight Superboy Prime himself. Superboy is a clone created with the DNA of Superman and Lex Luthor who has Kryptonian powers and, for some reason, psychic abilities. His psychic abilities are unaffected by Kryptonite or Red Sun radiation. It's a vast and versatile arsenal including telekinesis strong enough to fight people on his level and telepathy strong enough to read Supergirl's mind before mind wiping her. He can directly interact with energy, and manipulate psychic energy which he used to negate H'el's powers. He can communicate directly with the planet, can feel danger and the emotions of all things around him, and can learn languages through touch. He can also create visible or invisible forcefields that can reflect attacks and a bright battle aura around himself. The level of power he would eventually reach was foreshadowed by one of his earlier villains, Post-Crisis Black Zero, an evil future Conner Kent from an alternate reality, who has all of Conner's powers amplified by age and experience, who was able to fight Pre-Crisis Kryptonians and Krypto, but using Hypertherium can travel through Hypertime, metafictional time, and bfr opponents into it. Using this he also got access to an army of Doomsdays.
The other replacement Supermen would also get to this level at different points. Cyborg Superman was upgraded and by merging with a piece of the Source Wall would itself or when he fused with the Watchtower would reach this tier. If he can use any part of the Source Wall's sealing then he would have absolutely broken sealing, which would work on almost anyone in this entire blog since it could seal even Perpetua. The Eradicator would go on to fuse with the Fortress of Solitude, becoming strong enough to overpower Superman post his training with Mongul and could fly to Earth instantly from the ends of space-time. Steel used two new armors superior to his last ones that kept up with the power creep in the Post-Crisis Superman series. The first was the "Shining Armor", that drew blood from Atlas, and has most of the capabilities of previous armors. The Shining Armor had greater sensory abilities, spikes, sonic cannons, and adaptable nanotech that adapted to fighting a Kryptonian by producing Kryptonite radiation. To aid in the fight against Imperiex, Darkseid gave an Apokoliptian super-weapon armor to Steel, the Entropy Aegis, probably the strongest thing on this tier in raw power able to bat away the tendrils of Brainiac 13. It easily overpowered Metallo despite his normally indestructible metal, and can use boom tube technology, even channeling the energy of Apokolips to create a boom tube to the Big Bang. The Entropy Aegis will automatically go to Steel and protect him.
Pre-Crisis Superboy and Silver Age Superman had a lot of one-shot villains who were usually treated as being human level or "super" level like them, and as such there's a lot of random Pre-Crisis villains on this tier. This includes the planet of Xenon, whose people have super powers like Pre-Crisis Superboy, and are a cruel tyranny. Solar Boy is a particularly cruel villain, who sadistically tormented Krypto and powers on Superboy's level. Turlock the Barbarian is a stereotypical Swords and Swords Barbarian who fought Superboy with a magic sword and a pair of two-headed dogs. Glowman is a fire-themed villain, and Pulsar is an energy and magnetism manipulator. Mister Cipher was a supergenius who created numerous robots, each with the strength of Superboy. The Gem was a crystal life-form that consumed all matter it came into contact with and The Seeker, a possible inspiration for both The Eradicator and the World Engine in the DCEU, is a sentient Kryptonian spacecraft with the mission to terraform Earth into a new Krypton that conflicted with Superboy. Mighto is an Ulgarian, a Kryptonian level species with a weakness to music who created a machine that could send the Earth into the prehistoric past, and wiped Ma and Pa Kent's memories of him. Kosmon the Hunter is an alien bounty hunter who uses a Lightning Lance, shapeshifting protoplasm, and a combination of manipulation and learning his preys weaknesses such as kryptonite. Ron-Avon is a youth from the planet Belphagor forced to fight Superboy or have his parents killed, but later befriended Superboy after they managed to rescue his parents. His tech can let him fly at speeds similar to Superboy, create force blasts, heat blasts with the heat of three suns, darkness and lightning. His tech can also grant people elasticity and he has an invisible spacecraft that can travel to Belphagor instantly despite the fact that it would take Superboy weeks to travel to Belpaghor. Nylor Truggs, 30th century criminal stole the H-Dial to give them abilities of a wide variety of superpowers at different times. There's also the psychics Dyna-Mind who has telekinesis and can both create and animate large statues, and Mind's Eye who mind haxed Smallville High, amping himself up on their psychic energy to fight Superboy.
As he grew to adulthood, he would encounter more rogues. Xasnu is an alien plant monster whose fruit grant superpowers on the level of Silver Age Superman's, but the spores contained give Xasnu the ability to possess the individual which usually tries to infiltrate a planet stealthily. Pan is a music-themed supervillain with the ability to brainwash crowds with his hypnotizing music. Annihilator and his successor Annihilator Jr. are living bombs are superhumans with a dangerous explosive chemical compound in their bodies, such that if they are attacked, the explode with a planetary blast radius and enough force to kill even Superman. Pre-Crisis Black Zero is a particularly wicked villain who engineered the destruction of Krypton forcing Superman and Jax-Ur to work together to stop him, with fire manipulation, intangibility, resistance to hypnosis, and with the ability to create matter with just his mind such as red-solar energy bullets. Zha-Vam is a Captain Marvel reference, a being made by the Gods to be a rival to Superman with lightning manipulation that Superman outclassed. On one adventure Superman ran across the ghost of a space criminal Aabur-Z and the ghost of the lawman Enforcer NS-II, still pursuing him even after going to the grave. These two would possess clothing and physically fight, with Aabur-Z being relative to Superman. The Kryptonite Man is also here, a man emanating deadly green radiation and superman tier stats regardless, able to fight Krypto powering through the kryptonite. Chemo is a walking man of chemicals, who just standing in an ocean chemically irradiates it so no life can exist within it, whose presence no normal human can withstand and Superman can only temporarily do so. He can shoot out or replicate any chemicals and can extend over an entire world, or shift his logia chemicals body to perfectly replicate people, even Superman. Chemo is one of the few characters unaffected by the Crisis as part of him actually withstood the crisis event, and actually regenerated from it, the same regeneration feat Swamp Thing is much vaunted for.
Pre-Crisis Vril Dox is also here. Pre-Metamorphosis he already had accumulated many abilities. This includes a forcefield with universal durability, size manipulation on the scale of planets which could erase things from existence, space-time radio, time travel, temporal bfr, a coma-ring that can paralyze even Superman, a "doom-o-mat" that can summon "space-bats" which shoot matter-dissolving rays, creating phantom images of a target that will disintegrate each other upon contact, invisibility/intangibility, voodoo, and personality aspect stealing, among many other abilities. He also created at least 12 other versions of himself including the female one Genia that possessed several additional abilities including martials arts and illusions. Nanite-iac who fought Superman post training with Mongul would be here, being a being made of nanites who can enter cyberspace, and regenerate from nanite components.
Post-Crisis, Superman has a few other villains in the first subtier, villains who fought his true strength Post-training with Mongul, but before Infinite Crisis and the one year timeskip. Mongal is Mongul's daughter who is basically a brick with a chest laser that fought Superman. Emperor Joker created the villain Ignition, a nuclear themed villain with superhuman stats and flight specifically to fight Superman and prove an equal to him. Sodom and Gomorrah are supervillain couple who, when together, can shoot fire blasts that turns people hit by it into salt, also with superstats and flight.
Higher subtier villains would battle Superman in the late Bronze Age and late Post-Crisis, as Superman's strength grew strong enough to battle even Kryptonian military leaders. Atlas was a gladiator given a magic crystal to amplify his strength and durability to the level of Post-Crisis and Kingdom Come Superman's. The Aunctioneer is a giant alien robot that wanted to sell the superheroes of Earth, including Superman as toys, and somehow doesn't come from Pre-Crisis, tanking the Post-Crisis heroes of Earth's attacks. Subjekt-17 was an alien who crash landed in the Soviet Union as a baby, developed by torture into a superweapon with the same stats and Superman, and mild telepathy and telekinesis, going on a rampage after the fall of the Soviet Union and it was released, serving as a mirror image to Superman on what he might have been raised to be if he had landed in a harsh and bleak world. The "main" Bizarro would be here, after the Bizarro universe was created in Post-Crisis by Emperor Joker, Bizarro being a reverse Superman strong enough to fight the Kryptonian soldier Non. He has "reverse" versions of Superman's powers such as fire-breathing and cold vision, enhanced stealth abilities he used to sneak up on Batzarro, and unconventional resistance to probability manipulation. Since Bizarro thinks with backwards logic, trying to give him "bad" luck, will give him good luck by a normal standards, something Mxyxtplk used to defeat the probability manipulator A.
The upper subtier has numerous energy/matter manipulator. Galactic Golem is an energy-draining enemy, that can drain energy from every star in the universe at once, made of the primordial matter-energy of the early universe. Blackrock is a human with energy-manipulating power armor which can be used to shorten out technology, create illusions or a forcefield, fire lasers and more. Microwave Man is a two-parter one-shot Bronze Age villain with the ability to manipulate energy and the molecules making up matter. Jarod Naylor is given faith based powers from his religious congregation on his mission to protect missionaries in Africa, becoming the metahuman Redemption, with flight, superhuman stats, energy absorption, and gravity manipulation. Momentus is a Bronze Age villain who also has gravity manipulation along with a logia liquid like body. The Quarmer is another logia-like being made of sand that can drain energy and replicate them, replicating Superman's powerset and appearance. Its true form is non-corporeal as it came from an intangible dimension.
Other metahumans including the technopathic metal creature the Kryptonoid. Khyber is an immortal assassin using stealth techniques and a power suit that brings him up to Superman's level and Alexander Luthor is is the Lex Luthor of Earth-3 where he is the Hero fighting the villainous Ultraman, his powersuit giving him the stats to do. His super suit also allowed him to fly, shoot energy blasts, and turn intangible. Tolos is an Alien Wizard who was temporarily thought to be the one to have shrunken the city of Kandor when Brainiac's history was retconned early in Post-Crisis before being restored. Tolos is a being made of energy, that can phase, possess people, absorb the energy of beings, and obviously has size manipulation on a city-wide scale. Gog is a metahuman villain given powers by the dormant deity...Gog....who has superhuman stats on the level of Kingdom Come Superman, time travel so good that he can travel though hypertime, metafictional time, and teleportation that can work on groups of people at once. He also has the power staff of Gog capable of killing or threatening multiversal beings way stronger than Gog including the deity Gog, the god Zeus, and Mister Mxyzptlk.
Finally this tier has two more versions of Brainiac. Post-Metamorphosis, Pre-Crisis Vril Dox was even stronger than his Pre-Metamorphosis self and could threaten Bronze Age Superman. He also gained in addition to his old powers; mental plane being, power draining, more advanced matter manipulation and more. The Post-Crisis Vril Dox has literal armies of Pre-Metamorphosis Vril Dox as drones. He also has more abilities including information-stealing, technological fields that nullify metahuman powers and potentially acausality.
So, how to fight this tier?
This verse has an insanely dangerous set of abilities, and part of the problem of fighting them is just that they're really fast even for their tier. No one ability is going to handle everything due to the numbers and versatility of the tier. With that said some commonalities of weaknesses can be seen. One of the broadest as a weakness is surprisingly range. Kryptonians and their enemies tend to fight at melee or at essentially melee from a cosmic perspective. Even their large scale abilities like heat vision and frost breath which have been shown to work on the planetary or stellar scale are....really nothing compared to the scale of galaxies, galactic range making stellar range look like melee in comparison. The only characters who can attack at a galactic range on this tier as Kal Kent's Force Vision and Galactic Golem draining energy from every star in the universe. You might think this wouldn't super matter as there are so many characters with cosmic senses as well as so many characters with advanced forms of movement like time travel, teleportation, metafictional space/time movement, that they could easily get within any range they want and for the most part that's true but it does give a few extra perks to someone who can actually fight at that range. If the character doesn't look out of place and doesn't give indication they are the ones attacking, then it provides a whole new stealth strategy because the tier's characters wouldn't have the counter anywhere near them and wouldn't know where to find them in the universe. Range advantage, even made up almost instantly, so long as the speeds are comparable, would give the character with farther range the first hit meaning anything that works instantly becomes far more dangerous. Finally if a character is just really really big, then the tier any power has to either be significant enough in size to be relevant to them, or it has to ignore size entirely meaning a galaxy-sized character would be very hard for most characters in this tier to fight even if they hypothetically have the attack potency for it.
This tier, like honestly pretty much all the tiers before it isn't that strong against higher plane entities. There are a few astral plane entities (The Phantom Zone Prisoners, Aabur-Z, and NS-II), one mental plane entity (Brainiac), and kind of a spiritual plane entity. (The Eradicator) They have some ways of fighting higher plane entities. There's significant mental hax and mental plane fighting with Torquasm Vo, but above that there's only the Phantom Zone projector, BFRing into metafictional spacetime (Kal Kent's Fifth World Portals, Post-Crisis Black Zero's Hypertime Travel, Gog's Hypertime Travel), Gog's power staff being able to hurt metafictional entities, and possibly Cyborg Superman using sealing if he can use the sealing of the Source Wall. That's a significant amount still, but a spiritual character or a conceptual character would immediately be outside most of the threats of the tier.
Finally there's one thing that comes up a LOT in this tier which is energy manipulation. There's a lot of energy manipulation because Kryptonians rely on stellar energy for their powers. Starfire, a relative mid tier of DC Earth, was able to relatively easily beat a Kryptonian by draining them of their energy, and Starfire's energy-draining isn't even that strong. There's also a lot of technology usage which relies on energy. This also gets around the logia characters and can just absorb Tolos outright.
So to be a good counter to this tier, one should use a character that's a higher plane entity with energy-draining and massive range, maybe massive size. One example of this would be
Aurelion Sol from League of Legends
Aurelion Sol casually creates galaxies for his attacks and created all the stars in the universe putting him on the upper end of the in terms of power. He's able to casually fly around the universe which is fairly low in speed for the tier, though it really doesn't matter. It's also possible he's even faster if you think he creates each star individually involving going there, and can slow down enemies with "Voice of Light" and speed himself up with "Comet of Light."
Aurelion Sol is a Celestial Dragon, Celestials being a race of conceptual entities that filled the celestial sphere of spacetime with wonders, Aurelion Sol doing so with stars. He's expressly the size of a galaxy in his true form, meaning it would be already be difficult for the tier to fight him, outside of the fact that he's a conceptual entity.
Aurelion Sol fights via creation and manipulation of the stars, which would be obviously very dangerous in this tier as, if wanted, he could just replace the nearby stars with Red Stars that Kryptonians can't fight under. He also fights by bringing constellations to life to fight for him, these constellations being individually trouble for the tier due to lack of area of effect. And he would know to do this as Celestials know all things about a person via cosmic awareness from their birth to death.
He also possesses energy and matter manipulation able to create stars and galaxies from material nearby, allowing him to drain any of the technology wielding enemies of their electrical energy or Kryptonians of their solar energy, along with a variety of other useful abilities like paralysis inducement or opening/closing holes in reality.
However Aurelion is also arrogant and was tricked into defeat by the Targonians despite his cosmic awareness. Brainiac might be able to perform a similar feat given his hypergenius intellect able to mentally compete with the multiversal embodiment of Entropy, The Time Trapper, especially given Sol does not have an immediate way of killing a mental plane entity like Brainiac. An even stronger counter would be
Morgoth from Lord of the Rings
Morgoth is the fallen Vala, the Vala being a council of 14 beings created by Eru which collectively had complete control over the physical universe Ea. Morgoth was greatest of their number, able to war against the rest by himself. Most of the tier's stronger fighters downscale from a space sector which is 1/3600th's of the universe, with a green lantern being able to stop a black hole that was an imminent threat to the space sector, while Morgoth upwards scales from 1/14th of the universe, making him more than 250 times stronger than even a generous interpretation of most of the tier's fighters. He for the most part lacks speed feats to remotely compare to the tier but as his true self exists beyond time, even able to enter the Timeless Halls, dwelling place of Eru creator of Ea, speed would be somewhat irrelevant to him.
Morgoth is a spiritual entity without physical form residing in the unseen world, possibly which he created. His true size is unclear, but is possibly relative or superior to stars depending on how one interprets the two trees being stars, which especially in conjunction with his spiritual form would make it difficult for the tier to affect Morgoth.
Morgoth has many powerful abilities for the tier. He has spiritual manipulation able to corrupt things, up to and including the universal songs, being able to curse people with doom, despair, and eternal life, necromancy including the summoning of dark spirits, and affecting the other Ainur who are other spiritual entities. This would be a form of attack that would work on everyone on the tier. While the dark spirits he summon would be fodder in statwise, they would still be a distraction since it would be hard for most of the tier to hurt him.
Morgoth as the lord of shadows has the power to drain the energy from things, including light itself which is relevant as the Kryptonians gain the energy from the light of the Stars, and many characters rely on cosmic energy sources or technology that relies on electrical energy. His spear, the Black Spear, was even able to pierce the two trees, associated with the stars and drain their light. He even has hypothetical access to the Silmarils which contain the trees energy to more directly stellar manipulate the tier, though it burns Morgoth to use them due to their holy nature. He also has a lot of basic useful powers such as energy manipulation and shields. It's possible he many have time stop abilities as well as the Vala Vaire, their queen, makes a record which is the history of Ea, and he has the powers of the others Vala. Superman has shown some time stop resistance but not to universal time stop, and this may not scale to most Kryptonians anyway.
However, all of this could be overcome by teamwork and numbers from the tier. He has one surefire weapon however that would be nigh-impossible for the tier to counter, Morgoth's most famous feat. In the beginning all was the beautiful harmony of Eru, but Morgoth wove the first discordant music into the theme; introducing all chaos and discord into the world, a form of music-based universal reality-warping, bringing discord and darkness. Similarly in DC all the worlds are as well a musical harmony and manipulation of frequency and music allows for incredibly potent abilities. Superman was able to stop the Godhead of Darkseid himself by the musical harmony of the multiverse. It's incredibly clear that Morgoth's ability to effect the Ainulindale, the symphony of the cosmos, would make him even more powerful in DC then he was in Lord of the Rings.
The one weakness Morgoth would have, is he would be vulnerable to a time travel strategy. While the Vala can go back in time to a previous time, they cannot effect the past, moreso seeing what once was. Similarly Morgoth's power wanes with time due to the decomposing nature of evil. While this would take literal ages to happen, it wasn't uncommon for Silver Age DC speedsters to just casually zip into the far past or far future. Plus if Morgoth's not cosmically sized it's possible Gog could one-shot him via the Staff of Gog which crippled a metafictional entity much stronger (Mr. Mxyzptlk.) While I don't think either is likely to happen against Morgoth, for the best counter I would suggest
Satan from Bastard!!
Satan from Bastard!! is cosmically stronger than Fallen Uriel with his Augoeides being the size of the center of the galaxy, and Uriel's being the size of mountains, Fallen Uriel and Dark Schneider having reached the level of power to destroy a galaxy before rising in power by 130 times twice. This is consistent with being called the destroyer of the universe repeatedly, though in an unknown but not that long timeframe with it being stated to being dragging into a dark void, and being able to scratch Alcatraz space which required the energy of the Big Bang to be fully opened, putting him at near the top of this tier in terms of power with only maybe the Entropy Aegis being similar in power. His speed is far lesser but it's somewhat irrelevant as Satan exists at once on the physical, astral, and spiritual planes with the spiritual being outside conventional space-time, with destruction of the spirit being ridding one across time from the cycle of causation, along with a particular ability of Satan's.
Satan can basically do the strategy Morgoth could do, but WAY better. Satan, as a demon is composed of Eternal Atoms, separate bodies, one each on the physical, astral, and spiritual planes that can act independently and which he can regenerate quickly from a single atom of any of the three. These three bodies are protected by countless millions upon millions of shields protecting against various hax called Dispel Bounds, which protect against almost every ability in the tier. Gog's staff, while it would be able to penetrate Dispel Bounds and Eternal Atoms would only create a small hole in Satan's giant form, which would be instantly regenerated. Especially given that as a demon his spiritual atoms are made out of spiritual darkness, direct attacks from the tier are never gonna kill Satan, leaving the only ways of beating him being higher dimensional BFR/Sealing, namely Kal Kent opening a portal to the fifth dimension, Post-Crisis Black Zero BFR-ing into hypertime, Kru-El's orbital cannon phantom zone projector, Va-kox's robots merging a physical universe's space into the Phantom Zone, and Cyborg Superman's potential sealing with the Source Wall. Of those only Va-Kox's has even been shown to work on a scale that could be relevant to Satan's true body, and Satan has other defenses that would take care of any of those five strategies if they tried. Satan is surrounded by a massive aura of dark matter reducing the cosmos of a void. Angels of a far weaker rank than Satan has caused paralyzed, transmuted to salt, or taken complete control of the mind and soul of normal mortals just looking at them. While the characters that might be able to get past Eternal Atoms might resist one of those abilities, they certainly don't resist all of them making even looking at Satan a dangerous proposition. As if to make it even harder, Satan being of the highest rank of demons can cause the area around him to be frozen in time, or even reverse in time, on a level no one on the tier has shown resistance too.
While defensively Satan would be nearly unstoppable, offensively he could one-shot anyone in the tier, if not everyone. Satan's signature strike, "Arch-Enemy" can one-shot even Seraphim despite their Eternal Atoms showing he can casually kill spiritual plane entities. Satan as a demon can amplify their negative feelings in enemies, eventually turning them into monsterous minions of his, which would work on four of the five characters that can get around his Eternal Atoms, the only other one being Kal Kent. But Kal Kent relies on the Super-Sun, just as the normal Kryptonians rely on the Normal Suns. Powers-rank Angels control atoms and electrons, and Virtue-rank Angels control the physical laws of the universe which could be used to manipulate all the electricity and light in a surrounding area, or indeed the very laws of electromagnetic propagation to reverse the usual properties of stars, making all Suns drain Kryptonians of their powers rather than grant them. All Augoeides can also manipulate the energy of the universe, meaning he could likely drain the energy of everyone in the tier, like the Galactic Golem but more aggressively and quickly. The physical law manipulation also causes Augoeides to reflect any physical attacks meaning for most of the tier even trying to attack Satan would hurt them more than it would him. Satan can one-shot basically everyone in the tier, even at once, especially considering that he should have access to basically every spell in Bastard!!
Finally it's likely Satan has some manipulation of the Song, the mystical chorus the Angels used to create the universe, which should give the ability to tap into the multiversal chorus as mentioned above. And if he wanted to, he could do all this while just keeping his physical form disguised as a normal if intimidating looking humanoid figure.
Universal Tier:
By the end of Pre-Crisis Superman had reached a new tier of power, which due to Rebirth recanonizing everything in DC and Rebirth's more loose power scaling has allowed numerous characters to reach this new tier of character. Characters in this tier have universal to macrocosmic power. Superman was able to withstand the Big Bang, Maaldor turned into a living evil universe Superman had to seal away with his Heat Vision, Blackstarr had control over the universe in every aspect, and Supergirl managed to break Anti-Monitor's armor, Anti-Monitor being an entity who prior stalemated the Monitor for a million universes who created a netherverse containing two universes with his dying energy. There's also a few other characters in this tier just from personal direct feats. Pulsar Stargrave created ruptures threatening the spacetime continuum, Brainiac 13 reformatted a cosmos, Brainiac 1,000,000 bottled hypertimes, and Superman Prime, the amped Superboy Prime fought Monarch whose armor contained the energy of a Big Bang, rupturing it destroying that universe and was fine.
In terms of speed, Superman could travel the length of the infinite multiverse, almost flying into Heaven, in a finite timeframe, requiring infinite speed. There are similar feats for numerous characters in this tier. Not everyone in this tier has infinitely movement speed, but they all can react to Superman or similar characters requiring infinite reaction/attack speed.
This tier includes most of Superman's classic villains including his central villain across his entire series; Lex Luthor. Lex Luthor is the smartest man on Earth, relative to Brainiac the smartest being in the universe, both outscaling Superman by far, Superman being a Type 5 intelligence. Lex has given himself 5D Imp powers as a teenager, and can talk people into suicide just by speaking to them. Lex has had many extremely powerful pieces of technology, most often warsuits capable of matching Kryptonians and Kryptonian tier enemies. He temporarily become the Zone Child a universal conceptual reality-warper in Post-Crisis though had the weakness of forced pacifism. However as of Rebirth, Lex was given by Perpetua an even greater power, becoming Apex Lex. Apex Predators are the pinnacles of evolution with "all the powers of the universe." He has all the abilities of the Martians including superhuman stats on the level of Superman, flight, heat vision, psychic powers, invisibility/intangibility, regeneration/elasticity and more, but that's really scratching the surface. Apex Lex has infinite metaconceptual acausality able to perform actions not written in the Book of Destiny of the Endless and can use the Seven Crisis Energies, the ultimate seven dark powers of Perpetua opposite the Seven Connective Energies, these being the energies all creations are made from. The Crisis Energies include The Still Force, the cosmic current towards stillness and death, The Ultraviolent Spectrum, the invisible self-destruction emotional energies, The Void Wind, a malevolent wind that nullifies sound, magic and divinities, The Tear of Extinction, which drives entities to isolation and causes instant death, nullifying all healing or regeneration, The Black Apple, the forbidden knowledge that drives one insane, The Sixth Note, an underlying frequency that governs the unimaginable, and Faithlessness, which causes a sense of fatalistic doom. These can work at a potency so strong that it would work even on sixth world super-celestials.
Lex Luthor's Silver Age often-partner in crime the alien Brainiac has numerous versions here. His Silver Age self's greatest creation, the Planet Eater, a giant machine that sought to undo the Big Bang, absorbing all matter-energy, and easily overpowered late Bronze Age Superman. Pulsar Stargrave, another version of him in the Pre-Crisis would be here as he could create and fix space-time ruptures, threatening whole space-time continuums. He could also remake matter from energy, and was said to be the embodiment of a star's solar force. The briefly seen Flashpoint Brainiac was likely here, being Post-Crisis Vril Dox with five centuries of advancement after taking over the Earth, showing power/energy-draining with his technology, able to drain the speedforce from Kid Flash's cells. During the Post-Crisis period, the strongest Brainiac was the fearsome Brainiac 13 from the end of the time who reformatted the entire cosmos in his digital image, showing universal reality-warping and battling the similarly powerful Imperiex Prime evenly. He showed many of the abilities of his less advanced selves, as well the regeneration from just his consciousness, projecting his essence Brainiac 12 backwards in time, the ability to split his consciousness into one billion to fight Imperiex Prime in an "omni-temporal fight", and planetary, possibly universal, scale digitization and technopathy. Brainiac 13 also temporarily fused with Imperiex, with Imperiex-iac having universal mental plane reality-warping, threatening to turn the entire cosmos into his perfect orderly mind-cosmos. Even more advanced then even this was Brainiac 1,000,000, the Brainiac upgraded by the super-celestial Perpetua and the equivalent to Apex Lex. Brainiac 1,000,000 gained the ability to bottle sections of hypertime, hypertime being metafictional time, time from the real world, three-dimensional time.
Various other classic villains would be here as well. Mongul, conqueror of worlds and lord of Warworld, is a brick capable of smashing Pre-Crisis Superman with dangerous acquired "pets" like Sun-Eaters and the Black Mercy, a plant that causes those that touch it to hallucinate they are in their ideal world. Parasite is a power-absorbing villain who drains the power, information, matter-energy, and all else from anyone around him, stealing the powers of Pre-Crisis Superman to become as strong as him, with a regenerative factor to come back from atoms. His power-draining is so advanced it even effected Kismet, the Lord of Order. He also possesses the "Prism of Power", a small object that seems to do whatever Parasite wants including reviving and empowering Solomon Grundy, protecting Parasite, removing Superman inhibitions and more. The Ultra-Humanite was Superman's first villain, who in his current body of a modified Gorilla can fight Superman. The Ultra-Humanite has various mental powers including telepathy/telekinesis relevant to Kryptonians, bringing people from the past to his present, linking telepathically with himself in the future to bolster their combined mental power, enhanced intellect, psychic beams/forcefields, resistance to illusions and possession, and most famously body-stealing. The Eradicator and Cyborg Superman in the New 52 were initially different, having different backstories but merged together with their Post-Crisis selves to become their Rebirth selves having their old abilities but being relevant to Rebirth Superman physically. Cyborg Superman has also gotten a Phantom Lantern Ring, which is a special Lantern Ring outside the normal color spectrum, giving him lantern constructs as well. The most famous of Superman's post-crisis era villains has also grown to become a relevant threat in Rebirth as well, that being the monster Doomsday.
Doomsday, the monster that killed Superman, is a brick stronger than even Rebirth Superman, known for his regeneration and adaptation, regenerating from complete destruction and gaining resistance to whatever killed him last time, as well as growing more powerful and adapting weapons to exploit enemy weaknesses. He also has poison, emanating poison and radiation strong enough to affect a continent sized area, and passively drains the lifeforce of anything nearby. He can punch through dimensions like the Phantom Zone, can physically interact with beings of energy, and absorb energy as strong as that of the Guardians of Oa, on the level of the Big Bang. He is considered the ultimate weapon and as fundamental to the universe as death itself.
This tier has various other super-powerful aliens Superman has run across in his travels. Vartox, champion of the planet of Valeron is a alien superhero with a wide powerset including psychic abilities, energy manipulation, phasing, teleportation, illusions, hydrokinesis, brainwashing crowds of people, precognition, temperature control, magnetism manipulation, and, most broken of all, being styled after Sean Connery. Validus was a normal infant warped by Darkseid into a monstrous being with little intellect, as strong as three Pre-Crisis Kryptonians, and able to shoot psychic lightning, who was manipulated by Superman's villains into going on rampages. The Thing from 40,000 AD was one of the first aliens Superman of Earth-1 would fight, and would return near the end. It was a protoplasm blob that replicated the appearance, mannerisms and abilities of other entities it came across and naturally replicated Superman, ending up allowing itself to be disintegrated to save others and coming to understand what it truly means to be Superman revealed in the epilogue to be a non-physical that was trying to learn about the world. However most dangerous and evil of these was the dreaded Maaldor. Maaldor was born of the creation of an alternate dimension and could wield the cosmic energies of the universe, even the life-energy of other entities to kill them. He can summon beings from different dimensions and drive people insane through dimensions. He is specifically associated with insanity, as when Superman tricked him into turning his life-draining inwards he collapsed into a dark dimension of pure insanity, threatening the rest of the multiverse by breaking dimensional bounds.
Superman has also run across other powerful metahumans from Earth. King Kosmos is the human tyrannical dictator from a dark future of Earth. He can use technology to create city-wide illusions, brainwash Earth to fear Superman, drain Superman's energy or empower people with stolen energy, bfr people through dimensions or time, or shut down their nervous system. However while his technology can allow him to fight Superman, without it he's only as strong as a normal human. Blanque was a serial killer with psychic powers, particularly strong telekinesis who fought the Pre-Flashpoint Superman Post-Convergence which merged the Pre-Crisis and Post-Crisis periods. His telekinesis was strong enough to throw around Pre-Flashpoint Superman, and has a degree of fire manipulation and telepathy, able to control technology or normal people, and telepathically contact people across dimensions. The Planeteer, not to be confused with Captain Planet, was a child prodigy who developed magnetism manipulating technology to rival even Late Bronze Age Superman, particularly his magnetically repulsive forcefield Superman couldn't breach. However most powerful of them was Blackstarr, who after unlocking the Unified Field Theory was fused with the cosmic forces, being a universal elemental being commanding every aspect of the universe itself and who battled Pre-Crisis Superman and Supergirl. She has universal reality-warping, able to control every single aspect of the universe.
This tier includes as well numerous magic-wielding metahumans. L'Call or "Godslayer" is an alien with enhanced stats, teleportation, and the magical ability to see the future who seeks to assassinate people will commit atrocities in the future, which caused him to collide with Warsuit Lex and caused Superman to have to come to the aid to his long-term enemy, Godslayer being able to contend with both temporarily, along with his psychic ally Zade who can dampen the powers of others, including dampening Lex's supergenius intellect. The second Bizarro, a clone of Superman created by Lex, came back during Rebirth, temporarily possessed and amped in power by a demonic possession, eventually going into Hell and killing Trigon, taking his throne. Pre-Crisis Superman also had to deal with two cosmically powerful evil magic-users, the sorcerer Lord Satanis and the witch Syrene and their battle for supremacy. Both demonstrated numerous magic powers including binding, temporal/spatial bfr, magical blasts and forcefields, telekinesis, animation, and more. Satanis also demonstrated the power to turn to atoms and back, split Superman into two, created illusions that could fool Superman, and claimed to be able to summon chains from Hell that could put Superman into eternal sleep. Syrene was able to drain power or empower others, or call upon Satan himself to drag an opponent down to Hell.
Not much is known about them, but the Gods of Krypton should be here as well. The chief God of the Kryptonians was Rao, for whom their Red Star was named, a god of fire and creation who could create whole universes and their concepts from pure chaos. His three children Flamebird, the immortal phoenix goddess of fire, Nightwing the god of darkness, and the creation god Vohc the Builder all have intervened to grant Kryptonians great power. The House of El is known to be descended from Rao through one of these three, granting characters like Superman their potential greater than even most Kryptonians. Cythonna, the ice goddess was a rival to Rao, whose casual backhand was as strong as the full power blows of Bronze Age Kryptonians. Her passive presence was freezing the Earth into a new ice age, and her mind control was strong enough even Superman struggled to resist her commands. There are two Goddess of Beauty; Kara and Lorra, a God of Strength, Mordo, and a God of Wisdom, Telle. Trolius is the God of Air, and Yuda is the Goddess of the Moons and Marriage. They should all also possess the standard god powers in DC; reality-warping, conceptual existence, possession, invisibility/intangibility, and empowerment based on belief.
That brings us to the Kryptonians themselves. This tier has some of the strongest Kryptonians, many of them Demigods among the Kryptonians due to their lineage tracing back to one of the Gods themselves. In the history of the Kryptonians it is said there has been 211 recorded demigods, though how many are currently alive is unknown. Superboy Prime after his amp became Superman Prime and was here, being able to fight the quantum manipulating Monarch in a battle that destroyed the universe they were in, surviving, has resistance to magic and could even punch into the fifth dimension. General Dru-Zod is a Kryptonian General considered the greatest military mind Krypton has ever seen, with the general abilities of a Rebirth Kryptonian, able to match Rebirth Superman, with Torquasm Rao/Vo training, and has developed minor mind-reading and an aura that incites bloodlust in all around him. Due to the intervention of Doctor Manhattan Jor-El was taken from Krypton as it was being destroyed and forced to witness the atrocities of mankind, Jor-El eventually confronting his son, the two treated as relative in physical and mental capabilities. The classic Supergirl, Kara Zor-El would be here, being repeatedly stated to have exactly the same powers as Pre-Crisis Superman. This tier also includes the second to take on the mantle of Superman, Superman's son Jonathan Samuel Kent, who possesses similarly the powerset of Rebirth Superman, if not quite as experienced, and a similarly strong will able to just power through time freeze. He also temporarily fused with Conner Kent, Kon-El, the Two Superboys forming the Jon-Kon fusion with both their powers. Jonathan Kent recently proved his mettle in Dark Crisis able to temporarily hold off Pariah's entire Dark Army by himself including Ares, Darkseid, Doomsday, Eclipso, Nekron, Neron, and Aztar all cosmically powerful villains that would normally take the Justice League to stop. However before Doomsday could give the final blow on him, he was saved by the last character in this tier, the main character of the series, his father.
The Man of Tomorrow, The Last Son of Krypton, The Man of Steel, The Metropolis Kid, The Most Famous Superhero, The Champion of Truth, Justice, and the American Way....SUPERMAN! Superman is generally considered the strongest person on Earth, with anyone scaling fully to him being considered controversial both in and out of universe. He's invulnerable given him a greater durability even relative to his strength compared to a human, and giving him resistance to...basically every conceivable ability, able to resist basically every ability in this entire series and more. He's fast enough to nearly fly into the Heaven, considered so fast only Wally West and Barry Allen are cleanly faster than him, faster than entities that can nearly reach the speedforce. He can see as far as other universes, as small as the sub-atomic, as fundamental as conceptual deities, into higher dimensional space, and across the entire electromagnetic spectrum. He was able to hear Kal-L shout from another universe, and can hear individual molecules around him. He could smell brownies in North Dakota from the Watchtower and has a danger sense. He is skilled enough to beat a Kryptonian dragon without his powers and has out-skilled Kobra, a master of every martial art, while he was in Kobra's body and Kobra was in Batman's body. He is smart enough to trick Mr Mxyzptlk, a being who sees all of the infinite timelines at once, and rebuild the Miracle Machine, a machine that can create a multiversal metafictional happy ending through wishes. Superman has cosmically precise Heat Vision he can use to burn and freeze breath, both of which he can use on the scale of stars, and which can hit the astral plane, or higher. Superman can also use his heat vision to reflect attacks. He can use Torquasm Vo and Torquasm Rao at a masterful level even using it to counter the Multiversal Lord of Order Dominus via bringing him into a mental plane battlefield and using the powers of different versions of him. Superman can phase so well that he can phase a planet out of the omniverse, and can create counter frequencies so powerful as to nullify True Form Darkseid, a conceptual multiversal entity. Superman also boost his power level by going into the Sun, gaining a cosmic power boost. While Kryptonians are broadly weak to kryptonite, red sun radiation, and magic, Superman has developed a limited resistance to all these things as well. The only weakness Superman has not gained any resistance to is that he still can't see through lead.
Superman's resistances are probably his most insane trait, he is the tank of the Justice League who withstands abilities vastly beyond his own already impressive tier. He resisted the sealing of the Source Wall that can seal Perpetua (in fact it was made to do), can resist the infinite conceptual existence erasure of Darkseid's Omega Effect, resisted the infinite soul manipulation and fusion of Aethyr the Oversoul, resisted the infinite mind hax of the Lord of Chaos Dominus, resisted universal death manipulation from the embodiment of his own death, resisted the possession of Eclipso who can possess entire galaxies and higher plane entities like the Spectre, resisted the Hollow Men who manipulate information, emotions, life-force, willpower, powers, and the actual script of the comic, and has a general resistance to plot hax strong enough that even Retconn Corps can't change his story. Time Trapper, the multiversal embodiment of Entropy focusing on spacetime powers, can't erase Superman from the timestream. Superman and Supergirl resisted Blackstarr who has control of the universe in "every aspect." Superman also has more minor resistance to basically every power you can think off.
So how to fight this tier? It's difficult because this tier includes, for this tier of DC Comics, probably the single strongest offense Apex Lex being able to use some of the most overpowered attack techniques in DC, as well as the strongest defense in Superman, the tank of the Justice League. With that said there are some strategies that would be helpful here that aren't even particularly that rare. An oddly recurring ability that would be really helpful is attack reflection. Lex Luthor's offenses are ridiculously potent but a clever counter could turn that to their advantage by turning it back on him. Superman has defeated numerous enemies here by using their own powers against them. Even Lord Satanus who uses magic, something Superman is supposed to be weaker against had his magic attacks reflected by Superman spinning around at super speeds. Blackstarr was defeated when Supergirl turned her own power against her. Likewise while Superman himself resists seemingly everything in the universe, there's nothing stating his ATTACKS have the same resistance, so reflecting them the way Wonder Woman did in her few fights with Superman would be a really helpful tactic.
This tier is also relatively low in terms of macrocosmic power. Supergirl's feat is based on scaling to a Netherverse containing only two universes. While it's a super casual feat made of Monitor's dying energy, nonetheless a character with feats like destroying thousands of universes at once or similarly large structures would be likely hundreds of times stronger than most of the characters in the tier. Outside Brainiac 1,000,000 who can bottle hundreds of universes only Superman/Kryptonians or Doomsday would be able to rise to that kind of level via sundipping or adaptation respectively. Validus being only three times stronger than a Pre-Crisis Kryptonian made it very difficult for Superman to stop him. Another classic tactic that would likely work is psychological manipulation. Superman most often defeats enemies on his own tier not by overpowering them but by using his intellect. While it wouldn't be a one-way street; Superman and Lex are both extremely good tricksters and there are numerous other super-intellects like Brainiac, the Ultra-Humanite, and Jor-El, a lot of the characters here are defined by psychological weaknesses rather than physical ones; either being arrogant and haughty like Lex, Ultra-Humanite and Maaldor, untactical like Doomsday, Bizarro or Validus, or are concerned moreso with the protection of innocents than their lives and are prone to trying to tank the attacks of enemies like Superman, Supergirl and Superboy. Even Brainiac, the smartest intellect in the universe, usually loses because he thinks mechanically and doesn't understand "irrational" things like emotions.
Of the characters who are the big threats of the tier, about half of them are characters who have been heavily warped from their normal states; Apex Lex, Brainiac 1,000,000, Doomsday, Parasite, Blackstarr etc. Usage of purification or age manipulation (backwards) would remove their powers. A lot of the others have been beaten by being trapped in a space they can't escape the way Brainiac 13 was sealed inside Kryptonian technology or Cythonna was by the Sun's heat, or Lord Satanis was by Hell. So having sufficiently strong spatial manipulation or bfr in combination with purification or de-aging would be a very potent combination. The only one who has resistance to both sets of abilities is Superman himself. While using one of Superman's classical weaknesses would be fine, there's a power I think would be even greater, that being the strategy Mxyzptlk uses and Superman never resists; toonforce and metafictional powers. While Superman has some resistance to plot manipulation specifically, he's never shown resistance to being metafictionally erased or having his design messed with, or his action sound effects removed, or being put inside a fictional setting. So the trifecta of abilities to get for this tier would be 1: Purification or Age Manipulation, 2: Spatial Manipulation or BFR, 3: Toonforce or Metafictional Hax. Toonforce had the added benefit of being something Brainiac would have absolutely no idea how to counter given it works on humor rather than logic, even though he's the only one in this tier with metafictional abilities. Conversely Lex might be able to understand it since he could replicate the 5D Imps powers with tech, but without prep would have no counter. Immersion in particular would be an exceptional power to have being a metafictional bfr, being something that would work on everyone here except Brainiac 1,000,000 due to his feat of manipulating hypertime and maybe Lex over time by creating tech to recreate the Imps metafictional powers.
Finally there is one semi-common type of hax that Superman oddly doesn't seem to have resistance too, that being probability manipulation. The Post-Crisis villain Major Disaster specifically used it against Superman and he didn't really have a counter. The only thing that could potentially be resistance to it is if you think probability is one of the aspects of the universe Blackstarr has control of, as she has control over every aspect of the cosmos. However because probability in DC is based on the many worlds interpretation where universes are formed in the multiverse based on probability, it's actually likely that probability would not be considered an aspect of a singular cosmos. So Probability manipulation could be seen as a little added bonus. At the very least even if Superman does resist making himself unlucky, the user could still make THEMSELVES lucky.
So who would be a good counter? You could use
Arale Norimaki from Dr. Slump
Arale in Dragon Ball Super was able to casually fight Super Saiyan Blue Goku, who at the time would have been even heavily conservatively hundreds if not thousands of times stronger than he was when fighting Beerus, their clashes accidentally threatening the Dragon Ball cosmos, putting her at having a significant power advantage vs this tier. She can also travel through time, literally just by running, and she's acausal to the point that her past self being erased doesn't effect her and the Arale of every page is basically an independent character so she could avoid a blitz via going back in time and protecting her past self.
Arale is a gag-based characters with extremely potent metahax, being considered one of the best gag power users in manga in general, including plot hax, the ability to manipulate many aspects of the metafictional series she's in, the ability to casually learn the metafictional history of the character she's fighting and immersion ability to trap enemies in fictional settings or casually get out of them herself, a type of attack only Brainiac and MAYBE Lex could recover from.
Arale also has the ability to absorb attacks used against her and either reflect it or gain the ability to do it herself giving her a potent defense against whatever the tier might try to use against her, and has a passive friendship aura that causes people to become her friends and even break out into song just from her presence giving her plenty of time to work her powers.
Arale has also gotten a time stopwatch that can stop time for as long as she'd like, something few of the characters here would be able to resist and a "Restore Gun" which shoots people back to the way they were, and given her hammerspace power she could likely just pull these out whenever she would want them.
With that said, Arale is a super unfocused character whose not a fighter at all, and is also a robot that relies on electrical charge. Plus technically one could say the Restore Gun and Time Stopwatch are not standard even though she almost certainly could get them via her gag powers. Brainiac 1,000,000 might be able to beat her via technopathy and energy-draining, especially as he is one of the few characters that could return from immersion and has the ability to survive physical attacks from her, though given her extremely irrational thought-process he would be unlikely to predict and general ability to one-shot him anytime with her broken abilities she'd likely still win. That said for a counter that's a lot more of a fighter, you could use
Axe Cop from Axe Cop
Axe Cop were able to beat the robots Tu and Bu which could destroy a universe in one attack and arguably is far stronger due fighting characters who power multiplies after naming objects after them, suggesting he'd be in this tier for power or perhaps significantly high into it, especially if he uses the Power of Christmas to amp himself. He also is arguably in the same speed tier as his daily workout routine involves doing "infinite amounts of reps in everything" and doing infinite actions in finite time would be infinite speed.
Axe Cop is a versatile gag-based character who is a master tier fighter with a highly broken powerset. He can use a unicorn horn to gain universal reality-warping yet can also resist similar reality-warping which means he could resist the reality-warping from characters like Brainiac 13, Maaldor, and Blackstarr while reality-warping them back in turn. Axe Cop primarily uses his axe which can be used to reflect attacks and can create waves that insta-kill anyone evil which combined with his reality-warping is a combination of abilities that should be able to beat anyone in the tier save the Kryptonians specifically who could resist reality warping from Blackstarr and are good characters. That said against them Axe Cop could just his immersion, able to easily enter and exit fictional settings or grab things from them. This metafictional bfr would work on anyone save Brainiac 1,000,000 specifically and maybe Apex Lex who he could use his reality-warping against, or use special flowers he has that can de-age people back into babies, which would undo the gifts given to them by Perpetua.
Axe Cop also has some additional defenses that could aid him. He can fight as a ghost, which is not super difficult to fight for this tier with most of the characters being able to fight astral plane entities, but would make him invulnerable to a few of them such as Blanque, Godslayer, and maybe Blackstarr. Combined with his blood that prevents him from becoming evil and his reality-warping resistance he would also be immune to Maaldor. More notably, Axe Cop has 500 extra lives, which would make it extraordinarily difficult for anyone in this tier to defeat him in any kind of conventional way, and would basically require one of the stronger haxes. However his most notable possible defense is that he has clones of himself in his closet. Even if Brainiac 13 divided his consciousness into billions of copies of himself, Axe Cop has trillions of clones of himself meaning Axe Cop would outnumber the tier.
However, the feat of him doing infinite amounts of reps in everything is contested, and also he doesn't seem to have any probability manipulation so it's possible someone like Apex Lex could get a lucky shot in with a hax like the Tear of Extinction. For the best counter to the tier, I would suggest
Bugs Bunny (Super Rabbit) from The Looney Tunes
Bugs Bunny via his Super Rabbit transformation has canonically overpowered Validus, an enemy with three times the strength of Pre-Crisis Superman, pretty much canonically putting him in this tier. It's possibly that with Superman's training/solar absorption and Doomsday's adaptation that they might have increased their power by 3x since then, but he's probably in their range regardless.
Bugs Bunny is considered one of the textbook masters of toonforce, with a broken arsenal of goofy metahax. He famously was able to make himself the animator able to draw and shape the reality of the universe around Daffy on a metafictional level and erase things metafictionally with a pencil. Superman and Doomsday have both been able to withstand conceptual existence erasure from withstanding the Omega Effect which can effect other New Gods, but neither have shown the ability to resist metafictional existence erasure. He can also just exit the cartoon he's in which only Brainiac and Lex with prep can follow, and while they both are hypergeniuses they are classic examples of arrogant intellects Bugs is used to tricking. Similarly he can immerse people easily, being able to trap Daffy in a video game and sending Daffy and Elmer into a movie.
Even outside that Bugs has a broken arsenal of abilities. Bugs is immune to conventional death as the Grim Rabbit doesn't want Bugs' soul anymore, as well as the fact that he will continue to persist so long as he continues to make children laugh. He was also unaffected to changes in his past meaning that conventional attacking and a trans-time assault would likely do nothing to Bugs forcing a reliance on hax but he has resistance to most haxes of the tier. He was unaffected by a chemical that drove most people insane meaning he could resist Maaldor's madness and he both can easily travel on a metafictional plane and tanked Elmer's attempt to hypnotize and send him asleep showing that Lord Satanus' chains that induce sleep and send people through dimensions would do nothing to him, as an example.
While things like Apex Lex's Hidden Forces would work on him, Bugs has the ability to use a toon gag called force/causality reversal where when one person tries to attack them, the logical effects of what they were going to do are applied to the attacker instead, for instance if a person was going to kick Bugs out of a building, the kicker would themself going flying out of the building. With this he could easily reverse the attacks of someone like Apex Lex back onto him. Against someone like Brainiac who relies on his technology Bugs has shown the ability to directly enter into data and physically effect it with his normal abilities meaning he could basically turn off Brainiac's tech from the inside. Not to mention, Bugs has shown the ability to affect the ages of things, turning eggs into birds or vice versa, which he could use to reverse characters like Lex and Brainiac back to their normal selves.
Even if they tried to overwhelm him, Bugs also has particularly strong time manipulation, able to freeze time for characters who would normally even resist time manipulation on a large scale, or duplicate himself at will. He also has his secret weapon. As a rabbit, Bugs is naturally lucky. He can easily win casino games that are statistically impossible to win including impossible feats like asking for 21 cards in blackjack and having each of them being an ace, getting a perfect 21. With that level of luck, no one on the tier would ever get even close to being able to hit Bugs let alone all his other powers.
Multiversal Tier:
The strongest entities in Superman's series are much stronger than Superman himself, characters with infinite cosmic power that can threaten the entire multiverse.
Brainiac's strongest and true form is here, God-iac. God-iac is a godlike consciousness with any entity whose awareness grows strong enough to glimpse it becoming an aspect of him, possessed by his intellect. God-iac has the abilities of every version of Brainiac and more besides. He can easily bind Parallax Hal Jordan, a multiversal entity, and has power nullification technology that can work on entities that strong. He is one of the strongest time manipulators in DC Comics, able to easily overpower the time manipulaters of the multiverse he captured and warp time on a multiversal scale. He has potent enough speed and sealing resistance to travel to the Source itself, a metafictional speed, which is what mutated him into his God form. He also has minor probability manipulation and his ship the Blood Moon contains all the information in the multiverse.
Superman has also come into contact with various gods from the Godsphere. The Kryptonian Gods in their true forms rather than their emanations should be in this tier, however the Kryptonians knew of a god even stronger than their normal gods; Aethyr the Oversoul. Aethyr is a spiritual entity that created the Phantom Zone, all of it, as a way of interacting with the mortal universes. Aethyr can warp the reality of the Phantom Zone however it chooses, maintaining it and all things about it via its will. It has infinite soul manipulation and fusion powers, able to manipulate the infinite souls within the Phantom Zone and assimilate the bodies and souls of any entity who falls into the Phantom Zone with this power.
The two demon half-siblings should also be here; Lady Blaze and Lord Satanus, the latter not to be confused with the Pre-Crisis sorcerer Lord Satanis. The two are immensely powerful half-demons and children of the Wizard Shazam. Lady Blaze is the ultimate temptress, a manipulator that tricked her way into being queen of hell, able to look into other realms. She has control of hellfire and can summon the darkness in someone to absorb them. She also has sealing potent enough to seal away a building and unseal her three half-siblings Sin, Terror, and Wickedness from the Rock of Eternity. Her domain passively absorbs the energy from others, and her likely most potent ability is her ability to absorb physical space, even to the degree of absorbing the entire physical world into her conceptual domain. Lord Satanus is an immensely powerful demon who remade all the infinite conceptual Hells of DC in his own image. He has cosmic awareness, knowing of all things in Hell, can shatter someone's sanity with a gesture, can create dark chains to bind the spirit, and was absorb the soul of Metropolis corrupting the spirit of the city. He has various other more minor abilities and probably due to the fact that he's a half-demon rather than a full demon can use a holy sound attack through a Church Bell that is anathema to other demonic entities.
The fourth world also contains the Lord of Order Kismet, and the corresponding Lord of Chaos Dominus, the latter probably being the strongest enemy Superman has truly beaten. Kismet is one of the Lords of Order, phenomenally powerful wizards who became cosmic entities in service to the "Light", the Presence. Kismet is a metaphysical entity representing the physical DC universe itself, and sometimes the multiverse. She is considered equivalent to Eternity from Marvel Comics in the canonical crossover JLA/Avengers, and has numerous esoteric powers. She controls destiny for all living things, illuminates all realities and the pathways available before someone, even the other Lords of Order and Chaos, was able to open a portal to non-space, an area without space, and empowered her champion Superman to fight Imperiex Prime. Her primary power is called the "Light of Reason" and it allows one to break through mental realities and illusions including ones as strong as Dominus, and allows one to become all-seeing across the DC Multiverse. Like all Lords of Order, Kismet should also have the power of creation as all Lords of Order can channel the White Light of Creation to summon things into being.
Dominus was originally the Lord of Order Tuoni but in jealousy of the power of the Lord of Order Kismet, became the Lord of Chaos Kismet. While Kismet represents the Light of Reason, Dominus represents illusions and delusions. Dominus is a metaphysical entity, while he was able to fashion a body for himself only a bit stronger than Superman was at the time, when it was killed a future version of him just casually came back in time and replaced him. Dominus controls an entire infinite mental plane multiverse of realities he controls that he can filter through someone's brain, trapping them in an endless illusory maze of realities like a slightly less dark version of the Omega Sanction. He is most vaunted for his thought materialization able to create anything anyone thinks of, manifesting Superman's villains from his thoughts. He can use the Goneness as a form of existence erasure, able to erase large parts of the timelines, thousands of years. He can absorb souls on a planetary scale, split Superman into four selves across four different universes, and was able to temporarily replace Kismet as the representation of the DC Universe.
Far greater than even these are the fifth world entities including one of Superman's oldest enemies and the strongest recurring Superman character, Mr. Mxyzptlk the fifth dimensional imp, and his cohorts the other Imps. Three other Imps are Superman characters. One is Lord Vyndktvx, a serious, sinister and logical Imp. He was one of three children born of the queen, Brpzx but when his smart and serious ways were rejected making him the court jester in favor of Mxy's more free-spirited chaotic style, he became mad with envy seeking to destroy Mxy's favorite plaything "Superman." Nxyly also known as Miss Gzptlsnz is Mxy's girlfriend, who sometimes came to Earth in a rage looking for Mxy. Nzykmulk is Mxy's older and cooler cousin who Superman and Mxy had to team up to stop. However strongest of all these in raw power, strongest of all the Imps in raw power is Mr. Mxyzptlk, an imp powerful enough to make the entire fifth dimension disappear.
Mxyzptlk uses toonforce styled powers and reality-warping able to warp reality all the way up to the metafictional fifth dimension representing imagination. He has done all kinds of insane nonsense like sealing away the concept of colors, making the DC Universe cartoon-y, and reducing the dimensionality of the cosmos. Most notably is his metafictional powers to alter the plot, recreate plot elements, skip comic panels and pages, read the comic book he's in to know the future and past, speak to his editors, put people inside fiction settings and take things out of them, popping speech balloons, retconning past events and more. Mxy also has an extremely strong form of immortality, where even after manipulating the plot to make himself die and relinquishing his powers, he still couldn't permanently die.
While Mxy is broadly the biggest threat of the tier, there's actually a few characters that are stronger that have popped up on very rare instance. Superman from the Strange Visitor universe is a highly powerful alternate universe version of Superman with the experience of fighting from 1939 to the end of the universe. He was able to maintain the universe against the power of entropy and could reach dimensions even Mxyztplk could not. He created Superman Sentries, thousands of himself with part of his power to guard the universe before re-fusing into one. Earth-1 Superman himself temporarily reached this level of power after sundipping with 6D stars, being able to punch out the World Forger, a 6D entity far stronger than Mxy. The Golden Superman, Superman Prime 1,000,000 is mostly featless but has hype putting him here having given his descendant powers "far beyond any held by any metahuman ever", logically scaling him above his descendants which include 5D imps after the Superman family married into the line of 5D imps. This is somewhat supported by Mxy's clear respect and loyalty to Superman Prime 1,000,000 and the fact he sundipped way longer than his past self did against World Forger, though it being a 6D sun may make the feats incomparable. Finally when Mxy temporarily died after manipulating the plot to make it so, he briefly met the writer Mike Carlin, a metafictional entity writing Superman comics at the time, whom Mxy mistook for God. Yes the strongest entity in Superman comics is arguably...Mike Carlin the comic book writer.
So how to counter this tier? Well the Imps have a pretty famous weakness; Mxy returns to his own realm for an entire year if ever made to say his own name backwards. Originally he physically had to do this, though at the end of Pre-Crisis this was changed to being a psychological compulsion based on the Imps collective tendency to create games and stick to the self-made "rules." though this compulsion is still strong enough to be a weakness. The Imps, viewing DC as fiction constantly play little games trying to make the Multiverse more exciting for them, and are the opposite of serious focused fighters which has allowed weaker entities to get the better of them with even Krypto having outwit Mxy before. The Joker tricked Mxyzptlk into revealing his true name once, getting 99% power of the imp becoming Emperor Joker. Thus the ability to learn entities true names would be immensely helpful here.
This would also be vastly helpful against the godsphere entities. Knowing a god's true name is equivalent to gaining power over them as when Isis usurped the god Ra's power via his true name. Names and words have power in DC, carrying magic. Similarly deriving them of their faith dramatically weakens Godsphere entities which would include Kismet, Dominus, Aethyr, Satanus, and Blaze. Granted to derive them of faith across the multiverse would be quite a feat, but doing so could cripple the powersource of the godsphere entities, as belief carries magic.
The only entities that would leave are the mostly featless Mike Carlin, the super-amped Kryptonians, and God-iac. Both the latter two still have psychological weaknesses with both SV Superman and Golden Superman seeking to protect the innocent over himself, and God-iac consistently having difficulty understanding emotions and symbolic logic, even coming to despair as he came to understand his own isolation and loneliness. So the combination of abilities for this tier would be a high degree of psychological manipulation, true name manipulation, and belief manipulation. A character that can already fight on this tier with these powers would be a good counter. A good counter would be
Asmodeus from Dungeons and Dragons
Asmodeus is the leader of the devils, able to move around the entire Abyss containing infinite layers, moving at speeds relevant to itself, putting him clearly in this tier of power and speed.
Asmodeus has a massive arsenal of evil magic similar to Lilith the DC demon who controlled all black magic. Particularly with his reality-warping Asmodeus would be able to match anyone here save maybe the Imps in terms of versatility. Both Asmodeus and the godsphere beings from DC work on a similar basis in regards to gaining power from belief but Asmodeus has an extremely powerful weapon against them; Asmodeus can wipe the memories of everyone in the multiverse as he did of his own name, something that could be done to essentially power null any godsphere entity he would fight. Meanwhile if Asmodeus dies outside of Baator he will be resurrected there, meaning they would need to find his domain to kill him, which would make them weaker as cosmic entities in DC are stronger or weaker depending on domain and they would be walking into the heart of Asmodeus' power.
Asmodeus also has specific counters to some of the Godsphere entities. Against Aethyr, Asmodeus can survive having his body, mind, and soul being completely destroyed by a sphere of annihilation, as his true self is the concept of oppression and indulgence meaning that even infinite soul manipulation wouldn't do anything and on the contrary Devils can absorb soul energy to grow vastly strong meaning if Asmodeus was put in the Phantom Zone, he would just absorb the energy. Against Satanus and Blaze, Asmodeus is more than used to fighting cosmically powerful Demons and while Satanus can overpower Asmodeus with infinite conceptual reality-warping or his holy attack, Asmodeus could easily manipulate him the way his sister did and against Lady Blaze not only would hellfire only empower Asmodeus but he has equal or greater spatial manipulation to her, being able to move the entire abyss. Against Dominus, Asmodeus has true sight which gives a complete immunity to any form of illusions, can tank his soul manipulation, and as a Devil has law manipulation, the Devil upholding the alignment of Lawful Evil across the multiverse, anathema to the power of a Lord of Chaos. Against Kismet, Asmodeus could usurp her position via power-drain similar to Dominus as he can use the imprison spell to trap beings as strong as other gods in a crystal ball or with chains that drain their power.
While Asmodeus true sight means he is likely to immediately view God-iac's true form, Asmodeus is a conceptual entity which God-iac has never shown the ability to assimilate as one of his aspects and Asmodeus has a probability manipulation that would put God-iac's to shame. While God-iac can make a coin come up one-side over and over, Asmodeus can make the probability of anything but that which is 0% into 100%.
Asmodeus is considered one of the greatest manipulators in the D&D multiverse, on a similar tier if not superior to Lady Blaze and would likely easily be able to manipulate the 5D Imps into giving him knowledge of their names. With that said if the Imps ever do get into a direct fight with Asmodeus, most likely Vyndktvx he would be pretty easily splat by metafictional power. Also Kismet could win via the light of reason which would break the deceptions of Asmodeus given his malevolent deceptive nature. For a more noble even stronger counter you could use
As the highest of the goddesses, Amaterasu should be similar or superior to even the Sages of Gensokyo including Okina Matara who maintains a reflection of the multiverse including Makai the demon world which is not just an infinite realm, but a conceptually infinite realm, similar to one of the realms of the Godsphere putting them as similar in power to the strongest of the godsphere entities like Lord Satanus who warped all of Hell.
Amaterasu is a solar creation goddess who could employ the same tactics that Rao did, as she and the other kami created all concepts including their conceptual forms. Because of this she could likely tap into the white light of potential in the Godsphere to manipulate possibility itself, not that she needs too. Her holy light would burn away demonic entities like Blaze and Satanus, and against any of the Godsphere entities she can simply bring them to Gensokyo at any point, a realm of forgotten things where their power would be gone.
Beyond that Amaterasu also formed the three layers of the world alongside the other gods and can manipulate them freely, the third layer being the layer controlling all memories, fate, and destiny. With this she can essentially use Kismet's destiny manipulation and Light of Reason herself while power-nulling all Godsphere entities by removing all memories of them from the physical realm.
That leads into Amaterasu's strongest offense on this tier; Onomakinesis, the manipulation of names. In Touhou the gods created every concept by giving it a name and thus a boundary, something all magic-users imitate when they create spell cards to give a spell its name and power. Similarly Amaterasu can change her name or the names of others at any point. Not only could she instantly know all the Gods names simply by the fact that she can control them, she can even control the names of the Imps, gaining similar control of them and their power.
She has also has an extremely potent form of defense. Amaterasu, like all the Kami existed predating concepts and her true form is concept-less, transcending concepts and dualities. Even Mxy's metafictional powers are not absolute in DC, as shown by his interaction with Mike Carlin, who as a writer would still be lesser compared to the Overvoid which is absolute space in DC. Mxy's normal powers would obviously work on Amaterasu's conceptual avatar, but her primordial form would be beyond his manipulation outside maybe manipulation of hypertime. And he's highly unlikely to use that quickly especially given that while not much is known about Touhou Amaterasu, if she has the traits that of her Shinto counterpart she would have access to the imperial regalia representing the concepts of valor, wisdom, and benevolence, meaning she would be wise enough to beat the Imps quickly.
The only real way I could see Amaterasu Omikami being beaten is if her presence as a Solar-Emanting entity empowered Superman Prime 1,000,000 and he's able to affect her based on the 6D-Solar amped Superman being able to hit World Forger who was made of the Overvoid which is absolute space. I don't think it's very likely but for the best counter to the series I would suggest another character named Amaterasu...
Master Unit: Amaterasu from BlazBlue
Master Unit: Amaterasu is one of the three Sankishin, entities that can manipulate and control the entire of the boundary itself, which is a transcendent realm outside spacetime but overseeing the entire multiverse. This boundary is itself infinite and yet the Sankishin are able to traverse it in finite time, giving them infinite speed as well.
The Master Unit is an abstract entity made out of seither and has the quantum property of neither existing nor not existing due to the way Observer Entities behave in which much like a wave function, a wave exists in all possible states until observed. This means it would be impossible for any conventional conceptual attack to work on the Master Unit and it would require the metahax of the Imps specifically to hit. However if anyone else even tries to attack the Master Unit, she could reflect the attack by summoning the Tsukuyomi Unit, another of the Sankinshin she can summon to her side which acts as the ultimate defense not even she can destroy, to reflect their attacks back which would actually likely work on even 5D Imp powers based on how they are usually depicted. While it wouldn't necessarily protect against the more esoteric hax, Tsukuyomi would protect against all conventional forms of attack the Imps might try. However Amaterasu probably wouldn't have to rely on that at all.
The Master Unit has numerous offenses that would absolutely devastate the tier. The most famous of these is the legendary BlazBlue hax "Phenomena Intervention" from where her strong defense arises from as well; manipulation of the quantum position of something as existing or not existing or both or neither. Phenomena Intervention is the perfect weapon against a DC god one could ask for as not only is it existence erasure on a conceptual+ level, it also erases all memories of them, erasing the thing which would normally allow a DC god to regenerate. Phenomena Intervention also perfectly circumvents Kismet's Light of Reason power as while Kismet might try to limit all of Amaterasu's pathways save the ones she loses, Amaterasu can manipulate the existence of pathways from not appearing to appearing. This power also allows Amaterasu to create dimensions where the rules are what she decides and manipulate order itself, as Noel who has the power of the Azure is also stated to be able to manipulate order. Such would not only be another counter to Dominus, but if Amaterasu was to create a dimension with game rules, the Imps are absolutely the type to try to enter and "play" only to lose at Amaterasu's manufactured rules.
Besides that Amaterasu would be able to discern the names of everyone in the tier quickly. She should scale to Raquel Alucard whose manipulate of the Boundary allowed her to absorb infinite information from the Boundary at once and gives supernatural information about people, and she should scale to Mu-12 who through the Eyes of the Azure understand the metafictional true identities of characters calling Ragna "Bloodedge", Jin as "The False Hero" and so on. However even if the Imps were uncharacteristically serious and coordinated and tried to attack Amaterasu seriously before she could use their true names, Amaterasu has one final trick, and the Imps have one more obscure weakness.
The Imps homeworld have been taken over by the probability manipulating A, and the quantum manipulating Quantum Mechanics. Mxyzptlk has mentioned he's weaker than the quantum manipulating Doctor Manhattan and in DC Rebirth Dr. Oz was able to trap Mxyzptlk in a "negative space" in which his powers didn't work. This is actually the most basic function of Phenomena Intervention, a power that puts things in quantum superposition of being and not being, and is possibly what actually killed Mxy in "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow." Amaterasu could take the place the Imps are currently in and convert it to a quantum superposition via dis-observing it, power nullifying them. But even if killed Mxy will just return even without his powers right? Well the Azure Grimoire can do damage that transcends even the properties of Phenomena Intervention and Ars Magus were weapons that could permanently kill the Black Beast, a monster which is a self-observer and to bring itself back into existence....so no.
Amaterasu uses manipulation of quantum superpositions to set the godsphere entities and all the non-imps to nonexistent, erasing all memories of them so they can't regenerate and when the Imps try to stop her with their toonforce goofery, she either turns the space they're in into a game which she beats them at, or into a quantum superposition of nothingness where their powers don't work and simply overwrites their regeneration.
And that's how to be OP in the Superman series.
Imp this blog was absolutely amazing and you should be very proud of this accomplishment! The Superman series may only be a sub series of DC Comics, but it is still one of the longest running and most iconic series and I thought it was incredible doing this massive deep dive into it. I cannot understate how impressed I was that you managed to do this, but I really feel like only you could, as impressive as it was for you to read the entire superman series and do this blog its actually in the same ballpark of impressive as blogs you have already made such as your definitive blog on Spider-Man! But while you doing that Spider-Man blog only makes you an expert on Spider-Man specifically rather than Marvel, this along with several other blogs Make you the definitive Expert on DC Comics that I would wanna turn to!
ReplyDeleteWhen I first saw this concept I thought it would be cool, as while you did do a Strategy Guide on all of DC Comics before, you definitely couldn't get this specific, having So many Characters from So many sections of that massive series that almost all of these characters got lost in the mix, evidence by how I managed to barely read that blog in one night but this one took almost a week! But I think there is another benefit here, as Not only did the Superman characters get a lot more exposure here, but I also got a much better feel for the Superman series as a whole, with its Optimistic, Hopeful, Somewhat Goofy, but also Progressive and Humanist Sci-Fi comic. It makes it very clear why you love it so much and gives me so much more appreciation for it!
Every single tier on here was fantastically laid out! there was just a flood of incredibly cool concepts and characters in each one that I had such fun learning about and seeing represented. I got to see lots of my favorite Superman heros and villains like Supergirl, Conner, Doomsday, Lex, Brainiac, Myx and The Man of Steel Himself, I got to see a lot of other characters who I knew about but didn't know were PART of the superman series like Chemo, Steel, Atomic Skull, Lady Blaze, Lord Satanus and more, and mostly I met a Ton of really Awesome sounding characters I had never heard of who ranged from Ridiculous and Hilarious, to Awesome and Cool, to absolutely terrifying and wicked. Characters like Maxima, Wrath, Wraith, The Eradicator, H'el, Gog and so many more!
I liked learning tons of new things like just how much Superman'd power varied throughout the course of the series, from as low as City level to as high as Universal with motherf*cking Infinite Speed. The feats that he had in some areas just blew my mind, particularly the ability to vibrate the planet in such a way that it phases out of the DC Omniverse somehow! or how about Jon Kent having a last stand in a 7 on 1 fight against some of the heaviest hitters that possibly could have been thrown at him like a complete Badass. NTM how hard he was to kill in general. Plus several of the storylines in this series just sounded really fun or interesting at several points, I think more than anything you did in this blog, which was a lot, what you did best was do a great job showing just how cool this series has been and can be!
DeleteNow obviously this was a pretty freaking insane series to try to counter, as youve said! Each tier seemed to just have innumerable threats, fantastic defenses, and more often than not fairly broken speed. But You Completely rose to the challenge! you countered this series I think probably better than any series ive seen countered by Either of us! and thats saying something, exploiting weaknesses of the entire verse in ways that really showcase your expertise on the genre like using sound manipulation abilities to exploit DC Comics being based upon String Theory, or Toonforce to exploit how even the Conventional Gods of DC cannot understand the joke even if they know they are fictional, or generally helpful powers like demonic energy, spatial manipulation, attack reflection, energy manipulation or magical powers.
Bonus points for, despite your claims of having to dig deep to find counters here....you really didnt get that obscure to counter this verse! With even I personally knowing quite a few of these characters, and the vast majority of them being from series i have heard of! I was Really happy to see so many of these counters From Ai Enma, to Big Chill to Wedding Peach, to HIM Morgoth, Axe Cop and Amaterasu (Both of them)! Every single tier managed to blow me away with its counters who seemed to counter literally everything the tier had SO Comically well that it legit seemed Suspicious! I think some standouts have to be the 2nd tier where I knew all 3 counters extremely well and could instantly see why each of them would be so broken, capitalized with Lapin who at first i thought, well she can't really Die so ofcourse shes broken, but then you made me eat those words by showing shed basically be unstoppable even without that with her normal powers and thats more just extra security. Momoko was also a fantastic one cause I thought she'd be insanely broken even before I got to the counters, which is saying something as I havent actually seen either series directly, Nelhelenia because her very nature makes her quite literally untouchable to the entire tier she has to combat. Bastard Satan because like.......Holy Moly that things defenses are beyond what this tier can handel, and even can counter Gog's Spear! and Bugs Bunny because....honestly it just felt right seeing the WB's most Iconic Hero being countered by its most Iconic Toon :)
I Thank you immensly for making this masterpiece and I can assure you this will come in plenty handy for many blogs I make in the future, as all your Big DC Comics blogs do! Merry Christmas Imp!
Fantastic Job Imp. I didn’t think you’d do a DC comics sub-series as its own strategy guide, but I am glad you did because there is still a lot to talk about. I consider myself a more casual DC Comics fan right now, who appreciated Superman more from his movies and cartoons, but I think you did a good job of displaying everything cool about his long comic run. Alongside the Superman comics that you’ve mentioned in previous blogs, you definitely made me more interested in the Superman mythos with this blog. It’s hard to narrow down all the cool things you put in this blog, but I’ll do my best.
ReplyDeleteThe Building Tier was interesting, because I feel like those are the threats I hear the least about when it comes to Superman. It’s not a big surprise that more average humans like fire man would still be super durable in a verse like DC. It was fun to learn about the various criminal gangs that Supes would have to face, as well as the various eccentricities such as super strong prop shields or an anti-matter Braniac. Though the funniest spotlight for me has to be on the Bob the Builder inspired aliens :P. It was also interesting learning about Superman’s other romances besides Lois Lane such as Lana Lang or Lori Lemaris (Superman’s type are those with the initials LL apparently, which coincidentally includes Lex Luthor XD). As for the counters, it was a cool idea to counter spiritual attacks with the uniqueness of a Transformers’ spark. It was cool you found a use for Jinzo’s trap destroying abilities, and Ai Enma was cool to think about with her onryo powers, technology manipulation, and various haxes.
The City Tier felt pretty familiar to me since I watched Superman the Animated Series. It was fun to see characters I recognize from cartoons such as Livewire and Toyman. It was nice to see one of my favorite Ben 10 aliens with Big Chill who’s freezing and ghostly abilities are a surprisingly potent combination. Dracula I wouldn’t have normally guessed to be a relevant threat at all so that was cool.
The Planet Tier was interesting, especially learning about the New 52 threats I was not familiar with. I think the coolest character I learned about there was Wrath with her control of darkness both literally and the darkness of wrath within people. And I like your strategy of choosing characters that wouldn’t get enraged easily to counter her. It lead to interesting competing strategies such as Witchcraft’s intense compassion or Ulquiorra’s stoicism. And it was only natural that Wedding Peach would be the epitome of that strategy; she would seem to be a hard counter with how her powers work, but you really pulled it off.
I didn’t know much about the Stellar tier, but I found it really cool. You definitely made me curious to check out “Reign of the Supermen” with intriguing sounding characters such as the Eradicator. I was happy to see you found a use for a PowerPuff Girl villain somewhere in this blog, and it was fun to see him compared to Fine-iac. And Queen Nehelenia was really cool to imagine as a villain, especially with how her powers would work around Kryptonian objects.
DeleteIt’s funny that range would be such a significant weakness for the Galactic tier, particularly since I just made a blog for a verse that was pretty similar in that way. With Aurelion Sol, it was a cool idea to just have that much control over the stars on top of being galaxy sized and a conceptual entity. That sounds perfect against Kryptonians. It’s also surprising to see how many verses use the general concept of universal musical reality warping. And of course, you can almost always count on Bastard!! to have a useful counter.
Nothing too surprising in the Universe level threats, though it is always interesting to me how impressive Lex Luthor can be, though I guess you have to be against Superman. Universal to Multiversal level feats are so common in DC that they hardly surprise me any more. Superman is unsurprisingly, super OP, but I do find it funny that he still has trouble seeing through lead. Side note, but I think I got more of a respect for the concept of resistances the more I delve into versus stuff; defensive strategies are less flashy but are still really cool. Honestly, I think the counters to this tier are among my favorites in the entire blog. It’s fitting and funny that Arale would be just as OP against Superman as she was against Goku, and it’s generally insane that she has that level of acausality. Killing Axe Cop just seems like an unsurmountable obstacle. And of course, Bugs Bunny might be my favorite counter just in imagining the scenarios that would occur in him defeating the tier. It’s funny to imagine Bugs treating Lex as Elmer Fudd :P.
The multiversal tier also wasn’t super surprising. I do kinda like how one of Supe’s major foes is someone as cartoony as Mxysptlk, and it was fun learning more about the 5D imps here. Also, a minor thing, but it’s cool that DC took the time to differentiate the fourth, fifth, and sixth dimension and what they were about instead of arbitrarily mentioning them. The counters here were pretty interesting with the general strategy of taking away the god’s power by taking away people’s beliefs/memories of them. And Amaterasu transcending dualities and concepts sounds generally broken. And I commend you for the choice of Master Unit: Amaterasu just for the complicated strategy that goes into Quantum Mechanics.
So overall, you did a fantastic job on this Imp! The amount of work this must’ve taken is staggering.
You know, it's kind of funny what can be considered a "normal human" in certain verses. While seemingly silly on the surface, things like Karate Kid able to tangle with Supes is really inspiring when you consider what these characters are symbolically. It basically means that any person has the potential to be Superman, which really brings out my inner child and warms me as an adult.
ReplyDeleteSupes really has this unfair perception that he's some sort of infallible "Gary Stu", but seeing his character as unrealistic is honestly a cynical and defeatist attitude, especially considering there are people in real life who are optimistic and kind like that , and the unbeatable part is no doubt brought on by frustrations in VS matches, where on a casual level people just throw up their hands and say "He can't be beaten".
It honestly showcases not only a lack of knowledge on the character, but also a lack of imagination, as you can write plenty of stories where Superman is defeated, and we have lots of them.
On the other end, of course we have out of context (and often outdated) scans of Superman getting hit by a human street level character and using it to downplay. It's great to have a resource like this to squash misconceptions like that, that's honestly my favorite part of VS debating. So thanks for doing the homework so the rest of us don't have to :P
"based on Bob's friends from Bob the Builder"
I actually did a double take to make sure I read that right.
I'm flattered that you included Axe Cop, I always feel special when someone references my blogs. I'm not surprised he'd be tough to deal with hax wise, since that's kind of his thing. And while I am more less guilty of hyping him up a bit, I'm also not surprised he falls a bit short when it comes to multiversals.
I also loved how you dealt with the "infinite" statements as they are usually regarded as nlf statements, but they are still part of the character's lore, so considering it a feat of "universal causality" seems a fair and rational way of approaching them.
A blog worthy of the Man of Steel himself! Even just sticking to the comics, I'd imagine this is probably the most material you've had to go over for a blog. Way to go! Seriously, I don't think I have the words to properly give you the respect you deserve for such a massive undertaking. You should be really proud of this!
ReplyDeleteFollowing your guided tour of Superman's comics from the weakest beings up to the very strongest has the predictable and very welcome side-benefit of getting to meet a lot of characters that appear all over DC as a whole. I got the impression that because Superman is THE superhero and so central to the DC mythos, that this could also double as a guide on how to be OP in DC. There were so many characters, villain and hero alike, that I had never even heard of before! So thanks for the introductions. And because you've covered DC comics so much (I'd go as far to say you're the biggest DC expert I've come across), there were plenty of familiar names too, which gave me a sense of satisfaction whenever I came across them. So thanks for that too!
“How do you become OP in this series?” I'm so glad it wasn't up to me to answer that question. It was something that I kept wondering as I read on and on, as my jaw dropped lower and lower as each tier unveiled beings that would be totally OP against so many verses just by themselves. I could figure out a few things, as I think reading your blogs has been making me better at this sort of game, but many times I was at a loss for who could possibly take on everything in a tier. I would say pulling off this blog successfully is one of your most impressive accomplishments within this blog series, and that's going by the already high standards your work has set in the past. So congratulations, pat yourself on the back!
Okay, so now I'm gonna do my usual thing with these blogs and go over my thoughts on the counters you came up with for each tier and mention my favorite one. First up is building tier, and Starcream is a schoolgirl apparently?! Atari-scream was a shock, and an amazing niche counter. She (he?)'s a great example of how one's actual nature as a being can be super OP at low tiers. Jinzo's a familiar face and would've been an easy pick for my fave of this tier if it wasn't for the final counter (get to her in a moment). I love his powers and the idea of a techno-ghost dominating with a mix of draining powers and technopathy is so cool. Ai takes the cake though. Busting her out already, to be OP against the very first tier, was a great indicator of the sheer level of OPness you were going to unleash in this blog. So many of your biggest and best counters are getting used here, and for good reason! You and Thor have gotten me pretty familiar with the Hell Girl, so I didn't really need to read her entry to know how she'd stomp this tier, but I happily read it anyway because it's always cool to see you discuss how to counter each specific threat in a tier.
In the city tier, I didn't expect Big Chill to have such devastating ninja tactics. Figured he'd just freeze stuff, but you showed he's more than meets the eye! Darn, should've used that for Starscream in the last tier. The OG Dracula showed an even more versatile kit, and his presence here confirmed that a lot of your favorite series would be having reps in this blog. I'd like to take a moment just to say that made for an even cooler blog: bringing together all the series you like outside of DC to overcome Superman's comics! Lapin was my favorite counter for this tier, and a new character to me. What blew me away with her is that she couldn't even be killed in her own series! The powers of a witch and a magical girl, seemingly with no downside and even some unique upsides like that revival, and her two main offenses are totally broken here and in many other verses too! We're already at “whoa, that's OP” levels.
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Planetary tier, the littlest of the big leagues, and starting off with my favorite counter for this tier: Witchcraft. Sleep magic to negate Wrath's power source is brilliant, and that's just her most basic trick! I love sorceress characters, they're so versatile and, well, easy on the eyes :P Tons of insta-win hax, nice defenses and that super cool witchflame rounds her out nicely. Ulquiorra Cifer was a Bleach character I've never even seen or heard of. Soul stuff showing how OP it is, and the ability to escape the Phantom Zone with ease means there's no stopping him. And there's Wedding Peach, one of the biggest win buttons against evil I've ever seen. This is like a nuke you've been sitting on for ages with this blog series and it wow'd me to see her being brought out. But hey, bring big guns to a big fight, right? Glad to see you're not hoarding your elixirs like a jrpg fiend (like me). I like how you showed that even though she's the ultimate anti-evil being, she can still battle just fine against good opponents too (and is even immune to their good-themed attacks).
DeleteThen there's stellar tier, where Kryptonians are becoming a regular occurrence. Makes sense, given it's the Superman blog, but it still blew my mind just how many Kryptonian characters there are! I never expected to see a Winx Club character here of all places and even if I did, I figured it'd be one of the girls. I like darkness/shadow-themed villains, so he would've been my fave here if HIM wasn't a counter. Victory through corruption is an interesting way to be OP, and being able to make evil copies of the tier's combatants is icing on the darkness cake. As I said, HIM's my fave counter here and I love how OP his kit is between nightmare powers, mind control and magic. His ability to change the battle to his own terms and his inability to be contained and headed off at any turn shows he's a villain that would truly dominate here. Nehelenia being the previous counters combined with even more stuff is something I'd like to see more often: taking all the best parts of what makes someone OP versus a tier and putting it together with something to make them unique on top (in this case, her mirrors). Yeah, stellar tier is doomed, great work!
Galactic tier was huge! And by the time it finally got to the counters, I was completely bewildered. How were you possibly going to be OP against all of that?! And what's more, I could see there were even more tiers beyond this one! I suspected this was the tier where you'd need to just start finding ways to ignore speed and I was right. Aurelion Sol is my favorite counter here, mostly because he's a League character I didn't know about at all and I think his nature and powers are really cool. Plus, he's a dragon! His control over stars is such a thematic counter for all the Kryptonians flying around, and the ability to control both matter and energy means he's got an answer for everybody. Morgoth and Satan showing me once again that you are bringing out some of the most infamous big guns across all of fiction, wow these guys are OP! It's pretty impressive how easily you can transition from showing how OP the denizens of a tier are to how OP your counters are in comparison. A master at work, you are! Speaking of, I thought it was brilliant how you connected Morgoth's dissonance feat with the cosmic power of music in DC. And finally, Bastard!!'s version of Satan is easily the most OP character I saw in the blog so far, and that's saying something. That thing I was just saying about wanting more perfect counters that combine the other counters? Yeah, seems like you heard me in the past and already delivered. And making suns drain Kryptonians instead of empowering them? This guy's OP, and that was with just a thought, too.
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Universal tier, the Superman tier. And there's still another one above Superman?! This blog itself is OP. I figured there'd be less characters here, and there was, but there's still quite a lot! If other verses reach this tier, they usually only have like one or two. Arale was my fave counter here, I can't believe she's still messing around in Toriyama's works and has incredible Dragon Ball Super feats. This tier really had to get cartoony and silly to overcome the raw indomitable power levels and hax present. Arale's powers really do read just like she's cheating and I think one of the main reasons she's my fave here is that she has access to the lovable “friendship ending” for so many fights. Axe Cop is another crazy OP character to use in a blog, but put to great use here! He's exceedingly hard to kill and can just reality warp any answer to any situation; dude's gonna have a field day here. Now for the last counter of this tier, I wanna tip my hat to you, Imp. This version of Bugs being able to be OP against THE Superman? It's brilliant, it's so perfect and encapsulates the theme of this tier's counters of gag powers triumphing over more conventionally powerful and serious comics. I knew Bugs was busted, but this goes even beyond what I had imagined! I especially liked how he can counter Brainiac, my favorite DC villain, by attacking his data physically.
ReplyDeleteThe tier above Superman, holy moly. It even has a real comic book writer in it! This is getting nuts, I don't think I've seen a verse push things this far. And yet, you managed to show how to OP even here, rising above the pinnacle of power to the skies on high. Picking a fave counter here is hard, as I like them all, but I'm gonna go with the last one because she opened my eyes to how insanely broken BlazBlue gets. But first, there's Asmodeus, who was a welcome surprise because I was actually thinking about D&D gods that might fit as counters here. His law manipulation is a fitting specific counter to Dominus and his nature makes him unbelievably hard to kill. Touhou's Amaterasu, wow, yeah, we're climbing so high here. I might have heard of her once, but I really didn't know this character. Jeez, part of Asmodeus being OP is his conceptual nature, and Amaterasu transcends concepts? Wild. Plus that name manipulation power is so perfect when you're at this level of play and literally in the sphere of the gods. I love how his can be turned against the 5D imps in particular. And last but certainly not least, you gunned down the final tier with not one, but TWO Amaterasu! You know a character is OP when you outline a ton of busted stuff that would dominate the tier and then say they “wouldn't have to rely on that at all.” “Phenomena Intervention”?! I've seen a lot of win buttons, but that's gotta be one of the best. You could've stopped here but you went even further, and I love how found and explained a way to finally and truly kill Mxy once and for all. Well done Imp, bravo!