Is Marco almost invincible with his Devil Fruit?

We thought everyone knew, but the more we talk about Marco these days, the more we see that half the people have no idea how his power works.

So let’s break it all down.

1) Marco’s regeneration has a limit

This was confirmed by Oda in an SBS.

Question: Hello for the first time, Oda-sensei. I’ve read the previous 57 books, and I thought to myself that I didn’t quite understand how the Zoan fruit of the “Phoenix Marco”, of the “legendary beast” type, was different from the “Meramera” fruit of Ace. PN CNY

Oda: Yeah, I know…I left out the explanation in this war arc, because I focused on the pacing and wanted to move the story forward. To explain Marco’s ability a bit: he’s Zoan, so he has a body. But since he possesses “the blue fire of rebirth” – the Phoenix ability – wounds regenerate, and attacks don’t damage him (although there is a limit to regeneration). In other words, the flames are for regeneration. These blue flames don’t have the characteristics of real fire – they don’t spread and burn things, and they aren’t hot. They are completely different from Ace’s flames. The boundary can also be demonstrated by the fact that after MF, during WB’s funeral, Marco was wearing bandages, implying that he had at least a few wounds that he couldn’t heal with his powers because they were exhausted at that time.

2) Forget limbs, as long as his regeneration is available, Marco can survive mortal wounds

• Example 1 – Kizaru turns him into Swiss cheese and rips out part of his brain.
• Example #2 – Fodder pierces his skull with a sword.
• Example #3 – Queen almost detaches her head from the rest of her body.

The board should be self-explanatory. This is the reason Marco can pretty much block anyone, including Admirals and Yonko. There’s not much more you can do when mortally wounding a guy doesn’t work. There are only two ways to deal with him:

• Suppressing his regeneration with Sediment Stone (as in Marineford) or with hax powers (e.g. turning him into a toy with Sugar’s power).
• Keep hurting him so he needs to regenerate until he reaches his limit and can finally be killed (pretty much the standard strategy).

It’s unclear if you can just knock him out (like Luffy after Thunder Bagua) or if his regen will trigger and wake him up immediately [Rappelez-vous que Enel a fait démarrer son coeur…] but considering that even Big Mom didn’t want to try and wanted to move on, we’d say no.

3) Is it really impossible to kill him while he has his regeneration?

Alright, maybe there’s a way. In DBZ, the way to kill Majin Bu is to simply annihilate him completely. Erase every atom from his body so that there is nothing to start the regeneration process.

It might work, or it might not, because Marco might even regenerate from scratch, who knows? But the question is debatable because no one has shown the attack power to do anything close. Maybe a magma bath from the Akainu could do it, but we doubt that’s fast enough to kill Marco before his regeneration kicks in if Marco is free to move.

So ultimately, as long as his regeneration is available, Marco is basically immortal.