The 10 Most Brutal AEW Matches In The Promotion's Short History

If you're looking for things that differentiate AEW from WWE, the level of violence is one of the biggest. While modern WWE has largely done away with blood, AEW embraced it from day one. You don't even need to pay for a PPV to see the difference, as AEW has never shied away from pushing the envelope in terms of the level of gore you can show on basic cable. When Vince McMahon took a shot at AEW for doing "Blood and Guts," Tony Khan's promotion wore it like a badge of honor, adopting the phrase as the name of their new version of the WarGames match.

AEW also hasn't been afraid to showcase weapons, types of matches, and even wrestlers that would be too extreme for WWE. While the resulting style isn't for everybody, it's hard to deny that in just a few years it's produced a lot of jaw-dropping matches. Whether your gasps were in joy or disgust, they created moments that stuck in your head. Even though AEW has only been around a few short years, they've already created a huge library of matches that are far more savage than fans are typically used to seeing on big-budget, mainstream wrestling. We've combed through them all to present to you here the ten most brutal we've seen so far.

It didn't take long for fans to see just how hardcore AEW was willing to go. The first Fyter Fest was just AEW's second event and it was headlined by what would become a staple of the promotion, a Lights Out match. Always taking place as the last match on a show, a Lights Out match is basically an unsanctioned bout that does not count towards the record books, one where anything goes. Here, for the first time, we got to see what that would mean in an AEW context. If there were two men on the initial roster that were up to the challenge, it was Jon Moxley and Joey Janela, two men who had both competed in incredibly violent matches on the indies and were no strangers to deathmatches.

In the match, you saw the usual tables and ladders, but AEW also showed that in the right circumstances, barbed wire and thumbtacks would be allowed too. Did anyone expect to see a prosthetic leg though? Well, we did. This was Moxley's first match in the promotion and he was clearly enjoying the chance to go back to his hardcore roots that his newfound freedom from WWE afforded. He marched to a win after using Janela as a human pin cushion, but the pin didn't end the night. Kenny Omega came out and got some revenge for Moxley attacking him at Double or Nothing, putting him through a table and even hitting him with an electric guitar from the show's set. It was just a taste of things to come.

Over a year later, the Moxley/Omega feud would be reawakened when Omega turned heel on the way to dethroning Moxley as AEW World Champion at that year's Winter Is Coming. At Revolution, we'd get the rematch, but how do you add juice to a match that promotion had run multiple times before? You make it AEW's first-ever Exploding Barbed Wire Deathmatch. It was a gimmick that had been used in Japan from time to time, with the ring ropes being replaced with barbed wire and explosives set to go off after a countdown expires — in this case, 30 minutes after the start of the match. Once the match was announced, people's imaginations ran wild at how this would top the 2019 Full Gear encounter.

The very end of this match, a small, pitiful explosion after Moxley had lost, has overshadowed everything that happened before it. It shouldn't. Yes, this explosion match did not deliver on the final blast, but it came through on everything else. The final bomb was a dud, but the explosions that took place every time Omega or Mox hit the barbed wire? Pretty good, as was the one that resulted from a little bomb being strapped to a barbed wire bat. This was a match that lived up to both the standard of match quality and the standard of brutality that these two had previously set with each other, it just whiffed on the landing.

Another great example of how a wild stipulation can elevate a feud comes from Best Friends and Satana & Ortiz. They're two good teams that are often relegated to the midcard. They're also more than capable of having good traditional matches against each other, and indeed have had some. But put them in a Parking Lot Brawl and you get a match that is a career-best for both teams, far better than most people could've ever predicted. Surrounded by vehicles and onlookers, these four men put on a match unlike anything AEW has seen before or since.

Watch enough wrestling and you'll see all manner of weapons get used, but in this match, seeing wrestlers bump on car hoods, roofs, and windshields, it's clearly a different experience. We all know how sturdy they can be and can imagine how unforgiving it would be to land on them. Just those kinds of unique visuals alone would've been enough to make this match memorable, but we got other weapons too, as well as hardway blood, covering all the bases of No-DQ matches. You might not expect a team like Best Friends, one that pals around with Orange Cassidy (who even joins in the fun of this match), one that gets driven to matches by Trent's Mom, to be capable of a match that can make this kind of list. You'd be wrong.

If you've never watched this match before and view it after reading this list, for most of its runtime you might be wondering why it was even included. You'll see a very good No-DQ match, but nothing too notable compared to other matches here. Then somewhere along the way, you might wonder why Cody Rhodes is wrestling with a weird clear substance smeared all over his back. Then near the end of the match, you'll see Brandi Rhodes set a table on fire. Then you'll see Cody superplex Andrade through it. Then you'll see Cody take the brunt of the fire, and the flames linger on his leg for a while. Then you'll get it.

Fire is one of the most dangerous things wrestlers occasionally play with, It can be unpredictable and turn very quickly from a fun prop to a real danger. There's a reason why it's used far less in wrestling than things like chairs, ladders, and even thumbtacks. Photos came out in the days after this match, and despite taking the precaution of prepping with fire-resistant gel, Cody's back had some significant burns on it. Cody had wanted to give Atlanta fans another indelible memory, like his moonsault off the cage against Wardlow, and with this performance, he had succeeded.

If you want the most brutality by volume for your buck, this match, AEW's second annual Blood and Guts, is the one for you. Two teams of six men apiece went to the greatest of lengths to live up to that match name over a whopping 46 minutes bell to bell. AEW's take on the classic WarGames featured some deviations from the original version, with wrestlers climbing the closed roof cage, as well as weapons getting into the mix. The match produced all sorts of incredible visuals, whether it was Claudio Castagnoli giant swinging Chris Jericho on the top of the cage, or Angelo Parker hanging upside down from a support beam, drenched in his own blood.

In terms of highlight reel moments, there was one that clearly stood above the rest, and that's Eddie Kingston throwing Sammy Guevara off the roof of the cage. Thankfully he was given a somewhat soft landing, aided by a crash pad, but it still had us on the edge of our seats nonetheless. When the match ended shortly after, we had just seen a sequel that topped the original, upping the ante in terms of sheer spectacle, action, and yes, blood. Wrestlers like Jon Moxley and Eddie Kingston were naturals for this kind of battle, but even wrestlers you might not expect to thrive like 2.0 and Wheeler Yuta ended up doing well. A legitimate leg injury to Santana was the only thing that marred an otherwise amazing night.