★ Top Ten Duelists Tournament #3 - Yoda

VOTE FOR THE #3 GREATEST STAR WARS DUELIST!

1. Luke Skywalker
2. Anakin Skywalker
3. ?

This will be a less formal version of the Top Fifteen Tournament and directed toward ranking the greatest Star Wars duelists. 

RULES

Vote for the character that would most likely defeat the next three hypothetical contenders. For example, would Anakin Skywalker be more likely to defeat Mace Windu, Palpatine, and Yoda than Yoda would be more likely to defeat Anakin Skywalker, Mace Windu, and Palpatine, etc.? Characters can only physically attack and defend by way of a lightsaber and their body. Force usage is limited to establishing and enhancing durability, perceptions, physicals, senses, etc. All characters will be operating at their peak actualized iteration barring circumstantial or momentary amps. Irek Ismaren is banned, and Mace Windu is operating at his peak Episode III level. 

GUIDELINES

A thread titled "Top Ten Duelists Tournament #1" will be created. Members can vote and are welcome to debate other members to change votes. After six days, the votes will be tallied. Members will then choose between the two most voted upon characters. After four days, the winner will be ranked as #1 on our list.
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Caedus gets my vote for now, interested in seeing other contenders though

The Godlander has my vote.

Jaina Solo

Yoda

MasterCilghal wrote:Jaina Solo

I guess this is a good time to bring this up: what was the debunk of the combat equal quote, @DarthAnt66 @XSUPREMEXSKILLZ @LSDMB?

honestly feel like jaina, caedus, and maybe kueller (imma ask around about this one first) deserve a spot here. yoda, sidious, and windu are obvious ones, but idk if they are better than the first three

Yoda or Mace, not sure yet.

@Azronger: It's from Luke's POV, which opens it up to fallibility, downplaying of himself, and/or exaggeration of others (see: Abeloth having "dozen times" his Force strength). Just right off the bat, the sentence insinuates that Luke and Corran share comparable combat importance, and the surrounding context holds that Jaina being the "combat equal" of Luke has been proven "time and time again" ... when did that happen? When has Jaina repeatedly done anything like outdueling Palpatine, tearing through Slayers, or destroying Abeloth? Her best known feat is killing two unnamed Sith very fast. The accolade becomes a lot more plausible if you remove Luke from the equation, and that makes sense because it's uncharacteristic of Luke to mentally go, "Yeah, I'm ten times ahead of all the other Jedi." Also, the same book has Jaina hesitant to fight a Sith High Lord and her goons. Luke's more powerful than Vol, who can easily crush Workan (the most powerful Sith High Lord), let alone weaker ones.

Mace Windu

Yoda

Cin Drallig.

Darth Sidious.

I am interested in hearing the Yoda/Mace supporters on this one. The gap between RotS Sheev and DE Sheev in the force is so enormous, that it definitely mitigates any depletion DE Sheev has in skill, which I am not even convinced on even that notion. This would cause DE Sheev's aug to be increased tenfold compared to the Sheev that gave Yoda one of the toughest fights he's ever had, barely able to disarm him.

If the above is true, then contenders like Kueller would have a significantly better shot of taking this spot. Kueller was able to overwhelm and corner a "rage-possessed" Luke in pure sabers/aug, this Luke being above the one that was "too strong" for Sheev. 

Let's hear it PT supporters

Yoda

Yoda

Yoda

@DarthAnt66 Can you post the full excerpt and the surrounding context that indicates it's from Luke's POV?

The chapter is generally written from Luke's PoV:

The numbers on Luke's chrono read 11:52 GST. At precisely 12:00 GST, a brigade of Void Jumpers would hit the exhaust port. That meant Luke and his team had eight minutes-eight minutes for three Jedi to do the impossible or die.

The Jedi, obviously, were hoping for the impossible.

Their objective was a small deflector shield generator that protected the main exhaust port in this corner of the Temple. It lay 150 meters ahead, at the end of a long run of ventilation ducting. Between Luke's team and the objective were two vertical airshafts, which joined the main duct from below. Technically, the shafts were called stack-heads, but in his exhaustion Luke could no longer remember why the engineers used such an odd term. He knew only that the shafts were a pair of broad, windy chasms spaced roughly fifty meters apart, and that the grit they carried was going to make advancing down the cramped duct feel even more like being caught in a Tatooine dust storm.

But at least the duct's maintenance lighting had been activated, so it was possible to see the biggest problem that Luke and his team faced. At the far end of the run, beyond the second stack-head, four Sith were kneeling behind a tripod-mounted heavy blaster. The deflector shield generator, of course, was behind the Sith, floating on a tethered hoversled in the middle of the exhaust port.

If Luke and his team succeeded in destroying the shield generator, several thousand elite Void Jumpers would come crashing through the exhaust port. Along with their Jedi liaisons, they would disperse throughout the Temple and open other breaches in the Sith defenses, and the rest of Bwua'tu's space marine volunteers would flood in to finish the job.

This new assault plan would cost many more Galactic Alliance lives than the admiral's original plan. But the Sith would quickly find themselves cornered and outnumbered, and the Jedi and their allies would, sooner or later, liberate the Jedi Temple.

Liberating the Temple would not win the war against the Sith, or even end the battle for Coruscant. But Luke and his allies were counting on it to be the turning point, when the Sith went from entrenched defenders to hunted quarry, and momentum swung back toward the Jedi.

All Luke's team had to do was take out that shield generator.

On most days, that would have been an easy job for two Jedi Masters and Jaina Solo, who, as the Sword of the Jedi, had proven time and again that she was the combat equal of anyone in the Order.

But Luke and his two companions were not at their "normal" best. They had been fighting and retreating-mostly retreating-for far too long. At this point, they were all suffering from serious wounds. Jaina had a broken arm and probably several broken ribs. Corran had lost two fingers to a stray blaster bolt, and he was limping around on a knee swollen to the size of a hubba gourd. Luke had taken a blow to the head that still had him seeing stars, and he had a painful lightsaber burn along his left side. They were all drawing on the Force so heavily that they were virtually glowing with cell overload. Jaina had already entered a stage of Force euphoria, and it would not be long before she experienced a crash every bit as severe as a spicehead coming down from an overdose.

Also: Voting Sidious

@Azronger @Nom Anor Can you further elaborate as to why DE Sheev is a better duelist than Yoda?

My vote is still Caedus, but other strong contenders I could see a case for are Kueller, Krayt, and Sheev.

Yoda

Krayt should probably be #2, and Anakin should be below Sidious, Yoda and Mace.

@ILS: I am interested in hearing your thoughts on Krayt, I am inclined to believe he is superior to Caedus

@EmperorCaedus I have no idea whether DE Sheev is a better duelist than Yoda or not. It's possible that he's now acclimated to Yoda's fighting style that caught him off-guard once, but that remains conjecture. Whether his greater Force augmentation can compensate is also pure guesswork.

And for the record, this also applies in reverse: I see no reason to believe Yoda is definitively a better duelist than DE Sheev.