Verlux vs Ken

God told me Jack was OOT so this judgment will not be considering him.

Not having Jack makes Verlux's whole thing pretty strange from the start, since the setup to the round that both people agree on is that Saito will run in, Kirei will hang back and then run in, and then Jack will be in the back the whole time fucking shit up. Without him in the back, the argument is literally just kind of Saito will run in and 1v3 and then Kirei will run in and 1v3. Both of them need to be on a really high standard for that to like, at all be successful.

And I think in general Verlux doesn't really do enough to make that work.

First biggest problem is the speed, I think Verlux gets close to dismantling all of the speed for Ken's team, but there are a few critical cracks in the arguments.

Sabertooth I think just stands, I am not really following the argument Verlux is making about the reds and the rpg feat. Because Sabertooth is speed amped, and thats his only objective feat, that means that for some reason none of the other speed feats count? even though it's an amp? Like if the RPG thing was a speed anti-feat there might be some kind of argument, but as presented its just like "yeah he can do this while speed amped and thats it so thats how fast he is" but there are literally just several other scans of him fighting bullet timers in the round. I don't think the arguments against his speed hold up.

Greedling is like closer, but I think Ken is more or less correct here, the fact that Greedling can dodge strikes and block attacks from Bradley does suggest that he could at least dodge/block attacks from other people in the round. And that's like all he needs to be doing, he is not extremely relevant to the offensive weight of Ken's team. I think he will not really be easily dispatched by Saito.

Guts I'm not really sure how Guts' speed shakes out, but I think I at least vaguely buy the range argument, I think he'd be like minorly annoying to bypass in a 1v3.

I also, critically, think all of Ken's characters piercing res holds up pretty well. Sabertooth can take large amounts of piercing damage and get through it, Greed generally seems fast enough to block shit, and the Serpico scaling seems generally good enough. For the most part, Verlux doesn't counter these extremely well enough.

So with all that said, I don't think Saito or Kirei can do huge amounts of work in a 1v3. Saito struggles to meaningfully put out damage, and neither of them really have some kind of big advantage they can exploit to actually really get some damage in without dying. Kirei's ability to crush organs is probably good into Greed and Guts, but the fact that he's going in second negates that somewhat.

I think in general, Ken's characters stand up to scrutiny well enough that they are unlikely to lose a 1v3 against Saito or Kirei, which means that

Ken wins.