My Hero Academia’s power system is a long-standing point of interest, and relatively straightforward abilities that are often used in creative ways. There are a handful of quirks that truly make the series seem like a show about whether you were born powerful or not, but the frequent quirk awakenings and power advancements are enough to keep fans invested and excited to see new quirks each season.
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Quirks range from complex world-altering abilities to horns on the top of someone’s head, and the very nature of these abilities means that some, even when awakened, may not ever be as powerful or versatile as others. Much of the My Hero ethos is predicated on the fact that Izuku Midoriya, aka Deku, our protagonist, was born quirkless but had the soul of a hero, and in that, he was chosen to inherit one of the best Quirks in the series, One for All. One for All is quickly shown to be a powerhouse Quirk and evolves to an even higher extent as the anime continues, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t other quirks that can stand in the same arena as it. This list will focus on the top ten best quirks we have seen used in My Hero Academia.
1) All For One
All For One will be the first quirk we will focus on, and the first thing to discuss is what exactly the quirk is capable of. This quirk is seen in use multiple times by both All For One himself and Tomura Shigaraki, and the basics of it are the ability to steal quirks. This ability is activated by touch but can steal any quirk as long as the user is in contact and can then give the stolen quirk to another person of the user’s choice. All For One made an empire out of stealing quirks he wanted or relieving people of burdensome quirks in exchange for servitude.
Given that quirk theft is the floor for this quirk, things begin to get close to unstoppable as All For One and Tomura add touches of personal flair to the ability. Firstly, the quirk can stockpile the abilities it takes from people, they don’t dissipate, they don’t overload, the additional quirks just sit and wait to be used by the owner of AFO. On top of stockpiling, the quirk is also capable of combining and fusing quirks stored in it to create impressive and devastating compound quirks.
2) One For All
On the opposite end of our first entry is One For All, the non-thieving stockpile quirk that was originally owned by Yoichi Shigaraki. This quirk is a basic stockpiling quirk that stockpiles the quirks of those it’s passed down to and enhances them per user. Quite literally the opposite of AFO, this quirk must share its power to grow, and by the time the fans get to see it in use, it has become more powerful than just about any other quirk.
One For All has managed to stockpile six quirks along with the physical amp that comes from gaining the ability. Deku has managed to unlock all six abilities and has begun to mix abilities to use combo-style moves, such as using Black Whip, Fa Jin, and Float to create a super-speed rocket-like flight for Deku. On top of that, Deku can speed-blitz the fastest villain, Shigaraki, by activating Gear Shift along with Fa Jin to create an unprecedented speed and power boost.
3) Decay
Decay is the main quirk used by Shigaraki throughout My Hero and is represented as a fairly simple destructive quirk early on in the series. Decay was a quirk that was given to Shigaraki without his knowledge as a child and has a destructive capacity that the villain mentally suppressed for a long time. Upon his first introduction, Decay needed full contact of the hand to activate and decay its target fairly slowly.
However, as Tomura began to come into his own as a villain, and began to truly understand that his goal was unfettered and unchecked destruction against Re-Destro. Once he awakened his quirk, Shigaraki became an unprecedented threat. With the awakened version of Decay, the quirk would spread from one point of contact to another, allowing for Shigaraki to rapidly destroy whole cities.
4) Overhaul
Overhaul was the quirk owned by and used solely by the criminal Kai Chisaki and was a quirk not unlike Decay. Overhaul, much like Decay, was a contact-based quirk; however, once contact was made, the quirk was able to rapidly deconstruct whatever it was in contact with. At the base level, it appears to be identical to decay; only Kai has the ability to reassemble the target of Overhaul. Kai had full control of the speed of destruction and reconstitution and was also able to reconstruct whatever was under his quirks’ effect as he saw fit, such as removing impurities.
On top of healing through reconstruction, Overhaul can also break down multiple things at the same time and recreate them all together as its user sees fit. This has led to Kai creating immense chimera-style monsters out of his team members and even himself to amp up his physical stats in a battle. Overhaul is a pretty clearly incredibly powerful quirk that doesn’t spread the way Decay might, but has additional levels of utility beyond the outright destruction.
5) Half-Cold Half-Hot
The pinnacle of Endeavor’s flame quirks with all of the support of a built-in cooling system, Half-Cold Half-Hot is the iconic quirk of the cool and collected Shoto Todoroki. The simplest portion of this quirk is that one side of Shoto’s body produces flames like his father, Endeavor, and the other produces ice like his mother, Rei. Early on, Shoto favors the cold portion of his power in spite of his father, and even with nerfing himself, he still manages to easily become one of the top-scoring students during the U.A. Sports Festival.
Once Shoto begins using his flames and ice in tandem, the quirk skyrockets to a versatile, powerhouse-style quirk. The ice portion of the quirk is repeatedly used to make slopes and sleek ground to aid in Shoto and his allies’ transportation and battle speed. Along with speed and AOE control, Shoto also masters his abilities to use the two sides in conjunction, creating immensely powerful attacks such as the Great Glacial Aegir, which creates flames cold enough to extinguish any other flame. By the end of the series, Shoto is capable of using fire as hot as his father’s while also being able to cool down any other flame that may reach that level of heat, making him the ultimate area control hero.
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6) Permeation
Labeled as a useless quirk and often touted as a quirk that was improved solely through hard work. Permeation is the phasing quirk possessed by the head of the Big 3 U.A. seniors Mirio Togata. Mirio notably struggled to master the quirk and felt like he and his father had been given a useless quirk that was too difficult to use to become a hero. The quirk itself is fairly simple; it causes the user to permeate through all objects, but they keep their mass.
The way fans see Mirio use Permeation, however, is not as a useless quirk but rather as a finely tuned machine that is close to unstoppable. If any fans had seen Kitty Pride or Obito from Naruto, they would quickly recognize just how powerful the ability to not be able to get hit is. On top of his immense evasiveness, Mirrio can also land a blow with enough force to knock out an average target due to his forced propulsion when deactivating his quirk. Permeation may be difficult to master, but it is by no means a weak quirk.
7) Wave Motion
Wave Motion is an outright powerhouse of an energy-based quirk wielded by another of U.A.’s big 3, Nejire Hado. Unlike her classmates’ quirk, this one is straightforward. Wave Motion converts and propels the user’s vitality in the form of spiraling blasts of energy. The energy-based quirk itself is fairly straightforward in that it can do anything an average blasting quirk can do, but it has substantially more versatility for Nejire.
Nejire often uses the quirk to fly, and because of the quirk’s slow-moving attacks, she often has to get creative with the ways she uses the energy waves. She has a handful of moves that allow her to use the energy in concentrated bursts to deal the maximum amount of damage to an opponent and also can redirect the attack mid-air. Nejire is also a capable fighter up close and has been seen using her quirk around her limbs like offensive melee striking weapons.
8) Manifest
The final member of U.A.’s Big 3 is Tamaki Amajiki, and his quirk is one hundred percent the most versatile of the group. Tamaki’s power Manifest is the ability to manifest portions of what he has recently eaten onto his body. The baseline for this ability is giving himself wings or tentacles to use in battle and as physical support to aid in rescue-style missions. Manifest lasts as long as the substance is in the user’s system and at first is shown to be used with different foods, but as Tamaki grows, he begins to consume non-food items to better amplify himself.
The examples of better controlling his quirk also extend into his ability to become a full chimera, gaining all of the amps that the foods he’s eaten can bring. Tamaki’s chimera modes are notably powerful, and he even has access to an amped up chimera based combo attack with Nejire, where he uses Manifest to create a large chimera-style canon and uses it to rapidly and in immense volume launch some of Nejire’s energy.
9) Explosion
Katsuki Bakugo is the hot-headed and incredibly violent yet competent rival to Izuku Midoriya. Given that he is the protagonist’s rival, it comes as no surprise that his quirk, Explosion, is one of the strongest non-combination quirks in the entire series. Explosion is a simple quirk and does exactly what its namesake implies. Bakugo’s sweat in his palms is capable of being ignited like nitroglycerine, creating larger and larger explosions based on how amped up Bakugo is.
Explosion is used with immense control by Bakugo and is used to maneuver and fly around the battlefield in its base form. However, once Bakugo begins getting left behind, he awakens his quirk and begins using the “cluster” portion of Explosion, where the beads of sweat are hyper-condensed, allowing for rapid movement and repetitive explosions. Eventually, Bakugo is even able to speed-blitz the likes of AFO when his clusters become so condensed and backed up that they begin releasing explosions all over his body.
10) New Order
New Order is the USA of quirks, in the sense that it is a quirk that functionally says, “what I say goes.” Cathleen Bates, aka Stars and Stripes, is America’s number one hero, and she reps this amazing quirk with style. The quirk requires contact, and for Cathleen to say the name of the target before she can apply a rule to it. Examples of these rules are when she states that if Tomura Shigaraki moves, his heart will stop. The only reason that the quirk didn’t work in this instance was because Shigaraki struggled with his persona, meaning that the target was not recognized by the quirk.
However, Cathleen was also able to apply rules to things like the air, making them physical manifestations of herself, allowing her to make powerful long-range attacks with the very air itself. This quirk was so powerful that AFO was truly worried about Cathleen heading to Japan, and even when Shigaraki thought that he had won and stolen New Order, she was able to use the quirk itself to make it incompatible with any other quirk, meaning it destroyed many of Shigaraki’s stored quirks and itself. New Order is truly one of the strongest quirks in the series and has no conceptual upper limit as long as its user is creative and doesn’t fall to the narrative.
See any favorites of yours? What Quirks in My Hero Academia should have made the list, but didn’t make the cut here? Let us know in the comments below!
