While fans of the MCU are well-aware of Scarlet Witch’s immense strength as her latest exhibition of power cemented her spot as the strongest amongst the Avengers, Wanda Maximoff actually proved that she is the most powerful Avenger long before the MCU was even established.
Wanda Maximoff aka Scarlet Witch made her first appearance in X-Men #4 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. In that issue, Scarlet Witch is actually portrayed as a villain who worked under Magneto in the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. While she was originally a bad guy, she wasn’t actually a bad person and hated living this life of villainy that she and her brother, Quicksilver, were forced into by the Master of Magnetism. Eventually, Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver left the villainous squad and decided to try out for the Avengers when they were alerted that the Avengers were looking for new recruits. After being accepted on the team, Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver proved their commitment to heroism and Wanda wasted no time in displaying her superior power.
In Avengers #18 by Stan Lee and Don Heck, the Avengers are captured by a villainous group of communist extremists who have lured the Avengers to their base in an effort to prove to the world that communism is superior to capitalism. Once the Avengers were in their grasp, each member of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes were forced to fight an extremely strong villain known as the Commissar one-on-one. The Commissar was basically a heightened version of Captain America as he exhibited superhuman strength, speed, stamina, and near invulnerability (though it would later be revealed that he is an android and not a human Super Soldier). As the Avengers were thrown into the ring with the Commissar, they were each taken down by the villain with little effort–that is, until he came face-to-face with Scarlet Witch.
While the Commissar proved to be a better fighter than Captain America, stronger than Hawkeye’s most devastating arrow, and more agile than even Quicksilver, he was immediately defeated by Scarlet Witch who beat him with a mere point of her finger. In the early days of her Marvel Comics’ career, Scarlet Witch’s powers weren’t explicitly magic-based. Originally, Scarlet Witch used a power that was known as her Hex Bolts, and based on the parameters of that power, anything she pointed at would suffer extreme tragedy and destruction in whatever form was the most impactful to her victim without any way to counter the attack. So, with the point of her finger, Scarlet Witch reduced the powerful villain to a pile of gears and bolts, revealing that the Commissar was a robot and defeating him without breaking a sweat.
This issue gave readers the clearest look at Scarlet Witch’s powers in comparison to her fellow Avengers. It isn’t that Wanda is stronger than the other Avengers, it is just that her powers are on a whole other level and can’t even be compared to those of her fellow heroes. In the MCU’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Scarlet Witch proves to be even more powerful than Doctor Strange who was previously able to defeat interdimensional villains like Dormammu and playfully toy with the likes of Thor and Loki like it was nothing.
By beating Strange time and again within the Doctor Strange film alone, Scarlet Witch shows that she is the strongest Avenger–something she proved long before the MCU.