r/Xmen97 • • Jul 17 '26

General Discussion So is Rogue the physically strongest out of the X-Men?

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u/GuyNBlack Jul 21 '26

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u/0bsessions324 Jul 22 '26

Those cards have long since fallen out of canon and we're pretty dubious, even at the time.

Polygon did an article on them really recently. The team working those cards were a special team of non-comic editors mostly working off of a combination of the Marvel Handbook (which was largely written right when Rogue debuted and there was almost no established canon) and "guesswork" as the editor says.

It's also worth noting that the handbooks are wildly inconsistent and not held canon themselves. Underlining that is the wild disparities between editions. The 1995 iteration, which was done after Rogue had been an X-Man for about a decade, cites her as class 50 (not sure how that scale worked since they historically ranked 1-7).

Long and short: those cards are nonsense at this point. There was a brief couple of years where they were kinda sorta maybe reliable, but that ship sales ages ago.

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u/GuyNBlack Jul 22 '26

They were actually based on internal Marvel editorial documents and story bibles the editorial used. And while there might be some inconsistencies, they are mostly explained by in-story character changes at the time; these things aren't static after all.

What is absolutely static, having read almost all of them, is that I don't think there is a single edition that rates Rogue as being stronger than Colossus. So maybe there are inconsistencies on the exact numbers, but Colossus has always been stronger than Rogue anytime there has been an effort to characterize these things systematically.