Life Sapper is a 3 mana Rare unit that's part of the Death Splinter Chaos Legion weenie brigade that also includes Weirding Warrior and Soul Strangler.
There's a little disconnect between Soul Strangler's art and its abilities, apparently it force chokes its opponents from a distance. Allegedly.
Besides its epic creepy art, Life Sapper is a must-have for small mana battles and Splinter Restrictions / Rulesets where Death is favored. Which ones are those? You figure it out! Figure it oot.
In my opinion Death tends to do well in Bronze/Silver against Obsidian and Mylor Earth in Chaos Legion only battles which it directly counters and then some, negating Obsidian's +1 magic and reducing health by one as insult to injury. It doesn't tend to do as well against the Life Splinter, which is why I was surprised at the outcome of this battle in a recent tournament that I humbly-braggily ended up in first place due to a combination of sheer luck and also some non-sheer more opaque luck.
Here's the lineups and rulesets:
With one of the best smaller tanks in the game, Cursed Windeku shoring up the frontline Death mostly suffers from Opportunity and Sneak decimating it from behind. In Modern you can use the pricier Dark Ha'on to keep attention on it while your DPS does its thing. In this case I threw the moderately tanky Silent Sha-Vi to shore up against Sneak attacks.
I generally like to put Life Sapper in the third slot (in this case, the first snipe slot - I was lucky my opponent didn't go Death and use Magi Necrosi to one-shot snipe it). Its Life Leech helps in no-Heal Rulesets and gives it a little bit of sustain that help it last longer when the first two units get chewed up; it also helps mitigate Magic Reflect battles.
Luckily, my opponent went all in on a Burninate-the-Front strategy and I was able to outflank them from both sides with Silent Sha-vi clearing out their dangerous random shootin Portal Spinner in two turns thanks to Thaddius' health reduction.
Link to the full battle:
https://splinterlands.com?p=battle&id=sm_A3so9qmPAGdicmLKy7GT&ref=anonymouslee
This battle was the deciding factor in my 1st place finish, kudos to the rest of the participants for some fun battles. Cheers!
