After opening chests after years of not playing Splinterlands, I finally got some of the new Soulbounds cards and decided to test them in battles to discover their uses since they have new abilities. Remember that the Soulbounds cards were released months ago, but only now after 10 days of returning to the game that I managed to get some because I was collecting Glint to open Loot Chests from the rewards store.
The card I'm going to talk about today is the Shock Trooper and although it seems very powerful, it has an ability that is very disadvantageous to all your monsters in battle.
As it is an epic card, it has 6 levels and a total of 3 abilities. Each ability is unlocked at a certain level and in the case of the Shock Trooper, they are unlocked as follows:
The ability Eletricfied is unlocked from level 1 of the Shock Trooper.
The ability Swiftness is unlocked at level 3 of the Shock Trooper.
The Magic Reflect ability is unlocked at level 6 of the Shock Trooper.
These are the 3 abilities that the Shock Trooper has, now I will explain how each of them works.
The Eletricfied ability will cause 1 damage to all allied monsters from the second round onwards, this means that while the Shock Trooper is in battle, all of his allies will receive 1 damage per round and this damage is neither physical nor magical, it is a fixed damage caused directly to the monsters' health, ignoring even their armor.
The Swiftness ability will increase the speed of all of your monsters by +1 while the Shock Trooper is in battle, so if the Shock Trooper is defeated, all of your monsters will lose the speed increase.
The Magic Reflect ability will cause the Shock Trooper to cause half of the magic damage received back to the monster that caused magic damage to him.
My opinion about this card is that it has more risks than benefits, it may have a low mana cost and a very powerful attack but on the other hand all your monsters will receive 1 damage from the second round while Shock Trooper is in the battle and this may cost the lives of some of your monsters, so I don't consider it a good choice for the battle unless it is a battle in which you are guaranteed that it will end quickly.
Although Shock Trooper is not a good choice in my opinion, it will be very useful when the Back to Basic rule exists in the battle, so it will lose all its abilities, including Eletricfied and will be just a low mana cost card with a powerful attack, which in my opinion is perfect, especially in battles with low mana cost or with the Little League rule.
In the battle above I was testing the Shock Trooper and having it in my battle cost the lives of 2 of my monsters and this made me depend on the damage caused by fatigue to win the battle.
This was an easy battle and if I had chosen another monster instead of the Shock Trooper I would have won more easily since my other monsters would be alive and causing damage to my opponent's monsters, so I will just save the Shock Trooper for the right battle and avoid this happening again in my future battles.
In short, even though Shock Trooper has very useful +2 abilities like Swiftness and Magic Reflect, it is still a card that is not worth using in battles because of the curse of the Eletricfied ability.
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