A regular on lists of the most useless X-Men character, Cypher is a mutant given way too much flak. The young mutant Doug Ramsey was infamously killed off way back during The Fall of the Mutants crossover because of his unpopularity with readers. This negative reputation was the result of his power to translate any language being viewed as boring. Despite his negative reputation, Cypher's power is a lot more useful than the common fan perception.
While Cypher's mutant power is more useful than what fans give it credit for, he is nowhere close to being a Wolverine-level powerhouse for the team. But here are five reasons that Cypher is an underrated member of the X-Men, and five reasons why, despite him being an underestimate member, he's not a major powerhouse for the team.
10 Underrated: Can Interpret Body Language
After being resurrected during the Necrosha crossover, Cypher was able to unlock his power's full potential. That full potential being he can now translate a person's body language. The power's usefulness is apparent in that Cypher can act as an excellent negotiator, now that he can figure out a person's true motives.
This ability to read a person's body language has also allowed for Cypher to become a better hand to hand fighter. The reason being that he can now understand an opponent's moves in terms that he can easily develop a move to counteract it. This new use of his power allowed Cypher to beat his fellow New Mutants in hand to hand combat, shortly after developing this power.
9 Useless: Couldn't Use His Powers To Their Fullest Extent Initially
A reason that Cypher can be consider useless is the fact that Cypher could not read body language for most of his publication history. Initially, his power was just limited to just him being able to translate any written or spoken language. While useful, this power is not particularly useful in combat.
This power's perceived useless is increased by the fact that every other member of the original New Mutants could use their power in combat. This is likely why he was killed off by the fact that some artists on New Mutants found him a boring character to draw.
8 Underrated: Can Translate Alien Languages
Despite his initial power's being perceived useless, Cypher's language translation power has saved the New Mutants and the Earth a couple of times. These occasions were the result of Cypher's language translating power extending to the language of non-earthly origins. The first time was when he convinced the alien Warlock to stop attacking the New Mutants.
Later Cypher saved the Earth by being able to translate the instructions on an alien stargate. This allowed Cypher to figure out how to prevents Earth from being destroyed by an alien race's effort to teleport Earth from its proper place.
7 Useless: No Counteraction Against Superpowers
While Cypher's ability to translate body language makes him a threat in hand to hand combat, it does have one particular weakness. That weakness being that Cypher can't reasonably counteract an opponent using their superpower. This is the result of the fact that is Cypher is an average human and cannot deflect an energy blast.
This means that while Cypher can take on opponents that are threatening through their combat skills like the Hand Ninjas, he is useless against super-powered villains like Exodus. This makes Cypher's usefulness to a team in a combat situation vary by if the opponent is superpowered or not.
6 Underrated: An Excellent Hacker
Cypher had the misfortune of being introduced in the 1980s, because he would have been perceived better if he was introduced in the 1990s or 2000s. The reasoning being that Cypher's ability to translate any language extends to programming languages, making him an excellent hacker.
The extent of his hacking ability would be on display when he decoded the entire Internet allowing him to easily pool any bits of information found on the Internet. This easily accessible method to pool information made him a useful aid for Daredevil and Misty Knight in their hunt for Wolverine.
5 Useless: Has Normal Levels Of Strength
Another weakness of Cypher's body language reading ability is that Cypher is about as strong as an average human. This makes Cypher useless against certain kinds of opponents. One type of opponent that Cypher is useless against is opponents with super strength.
4 Underrated: Can Fuse With Warlock
The first attempt to make Cypher more useful in combat was by allowing him to fuse with Warlock. Warlock's techno-organic nature and close friendship with Cypher allows the two New Mutants to fuse and combine their strength. Most often Warlock would form a suit of armor to protect Cypher in dangerous situations.
More recently Cypher's new combat-oriented power has allowed Cypher to use his fusion with Warlock to overcome some of his power weakness, by allowing him some access to the strength and protection to fight superpowered foes. Warlock can also transform himself into any sort of weapon for Cypher to utilize in combat.
3 Useless: Can Be Mentally Overwhelmed By His Power
While Cypher's power allows him to translate any language and decipher any code, there are limits to Cypher's power. Mainly that he can suffer from information overloads if he tries to solve too large of a problem. This overload appears in Cypher often becoming addicted to solving the problem.
An example of this can be seen by Cypher's effort to decode the internet leaving him with an addiction to decode the trends of the internet. This left Cypher with the appearance of being addicted to the internet to the point of nearly starving himself to death.
2 Underrated: Can Solve Problems Sub-Consciously
Cypher's power to decode any sort of code or language is particularly useful in that Cypher can decode something fast. The reason why Cypher's power works quickly is that Cypher works a problem subconsciously to solve a problem rather than solving it step by step. This allows Cypher to quickly solve any problem before anyone else can.
It's particularly useful if Cypher needs to decode something quickly in a short amount of time. For example, Cypher can sub-consciously translate the alien language on the stargate shortly after first looking at it. This allowed him to quickly stop it from teleporting Earth to its destruction.
1 Useless: Better As A Support Team-Member Than An Active One
While Cypher's power has a ton of uses, it's apparent that he works better as a support member of the X-men than being an active part of a field team. The reason being that Cypher combat abilities do not make him any more powerful than the rest of the X-men. However, Cypher's power is very useful for aiding the X-men from a supporting role.
It's very telling that most of Cypher's appearances over the last decade have seen him being brought in to help the X-Men with his decoding powers. Most recently Cypher helped the X-men communicate with a race of techno-organic beings hiding out in the X-mansion's basement.