So, as a regular competitor of Guild’s Brawls, I own many Gladius cards; and with the arrival of the new Reward Summoners, which allow you to summon Gladiators, I’ve been using them much more in Ranked battles. That means that a rare effect which was limited to Brawls, which is Bloodlust, now is being used in most battles.
Another relevant effect for this post is the Martyr effect, which was introduced with the most recent Reward edition. Everyone knows what it does, right? Said Monster dies and by doing so, it increases all adjacent Monsters stats, by one.
Now, the Martyr effect can only be used once, however, if the ruleset of a certain battle involves Rebirth, or if you have cards with the Resurrect ability, and you are able to position your Monsters strategically so that the Martyr effect only affects the Monsters you want, then you can create a similar effect, such as Bloodlust and create a Mega-Monster.
This is all nice and good, until it’s done against you with better Monsters and the reason of this post is to try to deal with that. Not fully, unfortunately, but something is better than nothing.
The Dispel Effect
Dispel is an effect that was introduced in the Core Untamed Edition, but only in one card, I think, I could be wrong, the Goblin Firemage. Then, with the arrival of the Chaos frame cards, we were able to see said ability in both the Reward and Core Monsters of the Chaos Edition.
What Dispel does is to remove positive status effects from an enemy Monster. It would be like the Cleanse counterpart, which removes negative status effects from your Monsters. Now, before the arrival of the new Reward Summoners, which allow you to summon Gladiators, and before the Martyrs, I didn’t see much use for these Monsters.
Of course you could use their ability, maybe to reduce a tank’s boosted Speed or supress their Enrage effect, for example, but you would never summon a Monster with Dispel specifically for that purpose. Well, at least not me…
You can probably see where I am going with all this… yep, Dispel can remove the benefits of both the Martyrs and Bloodlust, and considering how much these two effects are used right now, I would say that Monsters with Dispel shine in a new light for me.
My favourite one is the Spirit Hoarder, a Neutral Monster which gets Dispel at level two. Here’s an example of him removing the Bloodlust benefits from Quora Towershead, one of the Gladius that motivated this post, since it has made me lose over and over again.
In this other battle you can see Dispel in action against the Martyr effect, which was being used repeatedly on a Monster through Resurrection. Battle Link
Weak Points
Of course, this is not a flawless strategy, since there is no way to target Dispel to the desired Monster, you can only attack the enemy’s tank position. So, you can deal with very strong Gladius which usually assume the tank position, like Quora Towershead, Chimney Wallstop or Marisol Contuma, however, those Gladiators who can attack from the back line, like Katrelba Gobson or Captain Katie are still a problem.
It would be nice, maybe the creators of the game are already having this conversation, if we had new cards with a “Gladius Killer” ability or something like that, considering that now we see them in almost every battle.
