Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-25926288-20170429134340/@comment-31564770-20170714043107

Imma throw a bit of personal rankings into this. I won't do every character, just a few of the more debateable ones. All my rankings here are based on raw power alone, but I'll note stuff for actual performance and skill as well in my explanations.

Right at the top of my list is Emma. She's the Savior, the only full spellcaster who uses 100% Grade A Pure Light Magic. (Fairies don't count. They use fairy magic, which is a form of light magic, but to access it they need wands and dust and stuff whereas Emma needs nothing at all, so fairies get dropped down the power scale by a a lot.) Emma is unique in that she has abilities on par with trained Dark sorcerers, but she has almost no training herself and she is the only one with her form of magic. It's proven that Light magic is far more rare and powerful than Dark magic, and Emma has a direct line to a ton of it. That's some serious raw power there. If she were to seriously train it, she'd be freakin invincible.

Next down the list are the Dark Ones and the Black Fairy, who are tied. The Dark Ones are powerful because they get their magic from the original darkness, the very origin of dark magic. Nimue was the first user of Dark magic, and she lives in all dark ones. The Dark Ones have the undiluted power of the Holy Grail, with zero generational weakenings. By this logic Merlin also falls in this ranking. Hook was only able to kill him because he had been trapped in a tree for like a thousand years and he was probably rusty, whereas Hook was a Dark One at the time and thus on par with Merlin by default. The Black Fairy wasn't all that evil when she was banished. My guess is she strengthened herself with dark fairy dust while she was in the dark realm, and the dark power there put her on par with the Dark Ones or maybe in some cases a notch above, with the consequence of also making her super evil.

Next is Zelena. She's got some serious raw strength, and like people have said, can pretty much always beat Regina when they're fighting with equal stats. Queenie beat Zelena because Zelena wanted a sister and was desperate for love. She didn't want to believe Queenie would do it, so she didn't really fight back. Regina obviously played to Zelena's weakness in S3, but she stood no chance against Zelena otherwise. Zelena outmatches Regina in other ways as well, such as how Regina needed a ton of training to do any magic at all while it just clicked without training for Zelena.

Cora goes here, she's more powerful than Regina, but according to Rumple- who taught Cora, Regina, and Zelena- Zelena beats her. I don't think we've ever seen them fight, but I bet Cora could definitely own Regina. Just the sense I got, plus Cora is a master manipulator especially with Regina so there's that too.

Regina goes at the very bottom in terms of straight up power. She took a long time to learn magic, and is still constantly studying. I'd say Queenie and Regina have the same base strength- they're the same person, after all- but Queenie beats Regina on power levels because they're Dark magic users and Queenie was 100% evil so she gets some bonus points, whereas Regina was separated from that so she got a few negative points to her power. Of course, now that their hearts are equalized as of 6x14, their power levels balance again. Regina still remains one of the most well-used sorcerers, however, because of her intense training. She has done enough research and has enough resources available in her vault to make her extremely versatile and capable of a lot of stuff despite her low raw power. In Regina's case, she might not be able to take other sorcerers head on, but she can definitely work around it to find another way.