Mage Battle

In a hypothetical situation, if all the various mage classes had a battle, who do you feel would come out on top? To make this more interesting let's not count summoners/evokers or Sages.

If they were all having a battle with each other at the same time, I feel like whoever cast Invisible and waited for everyone else to kill each other before coming out of hiding would win.

Definitely blue mages, if only because of their sheer versatility

I'd say the Red Mages because they're particularly strong and could do pretty much everything.

Blue Mages! They've got a versatile list of spells, and somewhat high combat stats, though I think Red or Black are possibly close.

Blue has access to Mighty Guard and White Wind. Can even learn stuff like Bad Breath.

I guess I lean a bit towards the White Mages.

Looking at the defensive side of things, they are almost always magically hearty and have enough damage prevention / reduction in their kits throughout the series to survive most physical attacks, especially from Blue and Red mages. They additionally have the ability to rapidly heal off whatever damage and status ailments they do take, and even if they fail to do so they are the only ones that can revive fallen comrades both pro and reactively.

On the offensive side of things, Aero and Holy are more uncommon elemental resistances than the big three, so most specialized elemental resisting gear other mages might be running wouldn't be especially effective against their options, and, if their FF1 weaponlist is included, they have access to both Hammers and Masamunes for respectable physical damage, and one of those hammers chucks lightning bolts for free. They also have the advantage of many Time Magic spells having appeared on their spell lists at one point or another, so while they completely miss out on meteor they do still have access to haste and whatnot.