Wanda Maximoff, aka the Scarlet Witch, is one of Marvel’s most powerful characters. In the MCU films, Wanda’s bone-crushing telekinetic powers were strong enough to frighten Thanos, while in the comic books, the Scarlet Witch’s ability to warp reality has affected the entire Marvel multiverse.
But how exactly do Wanda’s powers work? And how have they evolved over her comic book history? Let’s take a look back at the life of the Scarlet Witch and see how she’s grown from being essentially superhero window dressing to one of the most OP characters in the Marvel Universe.
The Scarlet Witch first showed up with her brother Pietro (aka Quicksilver) in The X-Men #4 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, as members of Magneto’s Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. Originally, Wanda’s powers were said to be the result of her mutant genes and were termed “hex powers.” Just what these “hex powers” could do was not well defined. Readers learned that when Wanda pointed her finger at people, strange disasters befell them. These could range from fairly minor mishaps (a jug of water would tip over and splash them) or major (a house would spontaneously combust).
Wanda’s control over her powers was also not well established—and it often seemed that she couldn’t control precisely what happened to her targets. This made it easy for the writers to simply use Wanda as a “deus ex machina” plot device by having her release a hex when the obstacles became too much for her team, allowing them to win. Eventually, Wanda and Pietro would reform and join the Avengers in Avengers #16 (also by Lee and Kirby). Once again, her powers were used sporadically and had unpredictable effects on the heroes’ enemies.
The Scarlet Witch later gained a more precise definition of her powers in The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe. Here, her powers were defined as “probability manipulation,” allowing her to cause unlikely (but not impossible) events to occur when she released her “mutant hex power.” This included causing guns to backfire, objects to fall, or machines to malfunction. Wanda could even cause “good luck” to befall her teammates, altering probability so that the odds were in their favor.
Although Wanda’s control over her mutant abilities was initially minimal, later writers had her study witchcraft under magic users like Agatha Harkness and even Doctor Strange. This granted Wanda magical abilities that she used to gain control over her mutant powers to cause specific events to happen—most notably when she married the android Vision and had twin sons with him by using her powers. Since the odds of a human woman having children with an artificial being are astronomical, this indicated that Wanda’s powers were much more powerful than anyone had thought previously.
Wanda’s own backstory continued to be altered and retconned as different creative teams told her story. Originally, Wanda and Pietro were supposed to be the twin children of World War II superhero The Whizzer. Later, this was retconned and the twins became the biological children of Magneto and his wife Magda. Much later, writer Kurt Busiek established that when Wanda was born, the demon Chthon altered her original mutation, allowing her to wield and control “chaos magic”—one of the most powerful forms of magic in the Marvel Universe. It is also revealed that Wanda and Quicksilver are not actually mutants, and that Magneto is not their real father.
Different depictions of Wanda’s magic have allowed her to warp reality, sometimes on a multiverse-level scale. This was seen most dramatically in House of M where Wanda altered reality to create a world where mutants were the dominant species and ruled over humans. Later, Wanda undid this reality during “M Day,” where the vast majority of mutants in the Marvel Universe lost their powers. An alternate version of Wanda went even further in one parallel universe by stripping every super-powered being, from Doctor Strange to Spider-Man, of their superpowers.
Despite the vast power that she is capable of wielding, Wanda's unstable emotional state and mental problems often cause her to create disasters. On more than one occasion, the Scarlet Witch has turned her powers on herself, removing or suppressing her magical abilities. However, this inevitably proves to be temporary and Wanda regains her powers—often in ways that make her stronger than ever.
With Wanda finally being established as the Scarlet Witch wielding "Chaos Magic" in the Disney+ show WandaVision, Wanda has finally made the jump from a powerful telekinetic/telepath into a genuine reality warper. What this means for Wanda and the MCU from this point is unknown, but the Scarlet Witch has been responsible for many status-changing events in the Marvel Comics Universe. If the same is true for the movie version of Wanda, viewers should expect some big changes in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.