7 Most Unkillable X-Men Supervillains, Ranked

The X-Men have amassed one of the greatest groups of villains in comics, if not the greatest. The team faces the most varied threats of any superteam; sometimes they’re up against a confederation of human bigots and robots. Sometimes, they battle against mutants who trying to hurt humanity or their fellow mutants. They find themselves in space a lot for the civil right metaphor team, so they’ve battled all kinds of aliens. They’ve faced off against cosmic forces, gods, and monsters, with their most powerful villains returning again and again. The men and women of X are no slouches, though, and that means these villains have to be extra tough.

X-Men villains are just plain built different. The team is full of powerhouses and highly skilled fighters, and they can inflict quite a beating on their foes. They need to be able to withstand tremendous punishment and shouldn’t be more than slowed down by death. These are the X-Men’s seven most unkillable villains, bad guys who take a licking and then come back numerous times for more.

7) Sebastian Shaw

The Hellfire Club proved to be one of the X-Men’s most formidable group of foes and that started at the top. Sebastian Shaw was the Black King of the Inner Circle, a genius inventor and financier who has the power to absorb kinetic impact and convert it to strength, with the requisite invulnerability that implies. Shaw is extremely hard to kill, because every time you hit him, you make him stronger. It takes a very smart enemy to hurt him, and that’s before we even get to actually killing him. He’s been dead before, or at least everyone thought he was, having shown that he can survive anything and keep going.

6) Stryfe

I don’t want to offend any of his fans, but Stryfe is one of the worst villains in comics. The clone of Cable has never really felt like a real character and has only had a relative handful of stories you can actually consider good. However, one thing you can say for Stryfe is that he is certainly hard to kill. Able to tap into the full power that Cable could if he didn’t have the techno-organic virus, he’s proven to be very hard to take down. He has been killed, but his nature as a clone means that’s just a momentary stumbling block. He always comes back, just as crazy and powerful, ready for another go at… I don’t know, making sure Apocalypse takes over the world or killing Cable or something.

5) Sabretooth

Sabretooth is Wolverine’s greatest enemy and that means that he has to be able to survive basically anything. While he doesn’t have the adamantium skeleton that Logan has, he does have a healing factor and it’s allowed him to survive basically anything thrown at him. There have been numerous times everyone thought he was dead – that time Wolvie popped a claw through his brain springs to mind (kind of like a claw through the brain) – but he survived, ready for more death. He has been killed several times over the years, but it usually ends up being a clone or something of that nature. Sabretooth is the bad penny of Wolverine’s life, and he’s going to keep turning up as long as the ol’Canucklehead is breathing.

4) Shadow King

Shadow King is one of the X-Men’s greatest villains and he’s partly earned that reputation because he’s unkillable. Amahl Farouk was a telepathic boy who allowed himself to be possessed by the Shadow King, an entity of pure loathing and malevolence, the two menacing the Earth for centuries. The thing about the Shadow King is that he’s a being of pure mind; he can jump from body to body, so any physical form is just a puppet. His astral form can be defeated and he has seemingly died, but he always ends up returning to menace the team again. Unkillable psychic parasites do be like that sometimes.

3) Cassandra Nova

One of the first things that Cassandra Nova ever did was die and she got better. In the womb, she attacked her sibling Charles Xavier, forcing him to use his powers to kill her. Part of her survived, becoming a clump of cells on a sewer wall, and she rebuilt herself a body that would allow her to destroy her twin brother and everything he loved. Cassandra knows how to shoot her mind out of her body and is powerful enough to possess all but the most powerful telepaths. The X-Men have thought her dead and gone many times, but she always shows back up, ready to menace Xavier and students with a new genocidal scheme.

2) Mister Sinister

Mister Sinister is the most dangerous geneticist in the Marvel Universe (sorry High Evolutionary), having handcrafted himself into one of the formidable enemies the X-Men have ever faced. Sinister’s body can survive just about anything and he’s constantly making himself better, able to survive even more extreme circumstances. He can graft just about any superpower out there to his DNA and has reached a level of existence where death is little more than a hypothetical. He has contingency plans in place so that if the X-Men are actually able to kill him, he’ll be back soon with an all-new plan. Dying has become just an inconvenience for him.

1) Apocalypse

Apocalypse isn’t the oldest X-Men villain, but he’s definitely proven to be the fittest. En Sabah Nur was born with fantastic powers and ended up finding a Celestial ship in Ancient Egypt. Aboard the vessel, he was able to enhance his powers and outfit himself with basically impregnable Celestial armor. He’s invulnerable and has complete control over his molecular structure, giving his flesh a pliable quality that is extremely hard to puncture. He’s also able to put himself into special resurrection creches and bring himself back if his enemies are able to kill him. On top of that, he can do the patented shoot his mind into another body technique. Basically, even if you somehow kill Apocalypse, he’s going to come back for another go.

Who do you think is the most unkillable X-Men villain? Leave a comment in the comment section below and join the conversation on the ComicBook Forums!

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