The dissolving Cheshire kitty
After the season ending and me almost achieving a top 20 rating in bronze - this time it only took 1600 points to get their - it's time for an assessment phase to see which rulesets I could play different and maybe get a pack next season with the deck I currently play.
As this weeks @splinterlands challenge covers a life-splinter monster, I will have a closer look at the white team first. Overall I'm quite happy and can't make out any major flaws, but have a look yourself:
I didn't like to play the life splinter for quite a while, because most of the cards are not incredibly strong compared to other splinters, but at some point I faced recurring matchups in high elo bronze matches, that all featured a very similar and effective lineup.
First of all, unlike all other splinters where alpha summoners have a huge advantage over the current spellbook standards, the summoner choice for the life splinter is surprisingly insignificant towards the overall winrate. Tyrus and Mother Khala achieve winrate of 31.51% and 27.34% respectively [1], which, by the way, sounds rather low regarding the success of the following linups, but is rather close compared to other examples like Malric Inferno and Pyre, for example.
I decided to rent a Tyrus during the season finals, as I prefer some armor on 1-2 HP monsters instead of raw HP, given that it usually guarantees to block at least one hit from an opposing sneak or snipe attack. But this lineup would work almost equally well with Mother Khala.
The following cards depend on the available mana, which should be around the 25 mark for me to choose the life splinter in the first place.
As a tank you usually see the Silvershield Paladin, while the Silvershield Knight is a mandatory backline pick for this to work. This is also the reason we need sufficient mana, as the Knight takes up 6 Mana already, without doing any attacks. It's important for the Knight not to die, as this would leave your entire monsters with 1 attack damage each.
Having the frame of our team set up, it's time for the mid section. And this is where our little kitty comes into play.
What makes this team so disguting are the fast assasins, that can wipe out the entire enemy backline in no time. The Feral Spirit features a base speed of 4, which ensures the first hit and leaves very little chance for the enemy to dodge it's attacks. At 3 mana it is probably the most cost efficient card in this list.
To make it even worse for the enemy's squishies, the Silvershield Assassin completes the Silverhield team with a 2x2 attack, that can take out two valuable cards in one round, get rid of a Chicken/Ooze combo or finish off a high hp archer in no time. Additionally it provides significant tank stats to protect our kitty in case the Paladin goes down.
Now lets pick a few games to illustrate how nice this build works. The following video is just my most recent game at 29 mana, which features 3 sneaky guys. As my opponent made the mistake of playing the squishy fire monsters, it didn't even take me 2 rounds to wipe out his entire backline. Tyrus made sure I dont lose any of my assasins to the opportunity attacks. GG
To show you how well this works and in which cases you might run into problems, here are my last 11 games with the life splinter. The two teams that won against this comp had either a significant level advantage or a healthy amount of magic damage.
Sources:
[1] @jacekw (2020-12-17), @jacekw/usage-win-rate-of-monsters-and-summoners-for-each-league-or-season-51