Welcome Splinterfam, to my weekly submission for the #Splinterlands #CommunityChallenge. This week, the theme is #ComboChronicles -- our favorite card combos or team synergies in action! I've got just the battle for us from Modern Ranked Champion League with one of the recent rulesets added to the rotation: Collateral Damage.
This ruleset gives all monsters reckless, so they deal adjacent units 1 damage per attack. Dual attack means two damage, something to keep in mind when building lineups for this ruleset. You don't want to kill off your own units with a poorly placed Kelan Gaines or Gramel, because that guy is very dangerous with three possible reckless attacks.
But I did want to leverage the reckless trigger to my advantage in combination with the painforge ability to pump my units with Razi Clanktrap. Razi gives all gnomes the painforge ability, and would you looky here -- Gottem is a Gnome! This guy has a huge butt to get reckless all night and still have the swag to tell the opponent about it in the next round, all while building a mighty trample attack!
Talk about a killer combination -- Razi + Gottem gives tons of flexibility to grow your painforge strategy. When all the units deal damage on attack, health evaporates quickly. It is important to stack your lineup with durable, high-health units to endure the slog of Collateral Damage. Gottem is the best of both worlds: biggest butt in the game + gnome bloodline for painforge!
Modern Ranked Replay vs. 
This edition of #TopBattles pits longtime leaderboard and brawl-fray rival Instamental on the other side of the battlefield. With 86 mana to work with, we could basically pick any lineup we fancied with Dragon excluded. They chose Tofu for the thorn defense and played a meta formation of the ulund bloodline lineup, giving triage + scavenge to the healing common hippo, Mystic Mudbinder.
Bad news across the table, Craniax came to town and brought his final rest ability to completely thwart the bloodline strategy. This was key to the battle since bloodline tribute triggers when a unit is defeated, but painforge triggers on attack and still works with a Craniax in play. So my painforge units all got buffed from reckless, while their hippos sat waiting on the battlefield for boosts that never came.
Mindful of Gramel's triple damage attack, I put the self-healing Warborn Shaman in the 5th spot to box it in the back and away from any of my other units. Shaman also has the benefit of ambush, which means an extra painforge on Gramel before Round 1 attacks begin. Let's not forget, with shapeshift, Gramel is all bloodlines and gets painforge from Razi for triple the painforge bonus. Juicy little combos everywhere for the gnome archon!
Up front, Mantaroth also worked like a charm with today's combo crusher: Dar Gottem Gearnut! Mantaroth's armor strike meant two painforge triggers for Gottem on each round the neutral tank rumbling in with both of its true-striking attacks. I really liked the look of my lineup with its durability, outside of the combo nerfer Craniax and its soft backside. Still, the legendary death unit served its purpose well before evaporating to all the painforge damage.
I know this is a combo piece about Gottem + Razi, since the mighty gnome did so much heavy lifting to withstand the recklessness of Mantaroth and the modest opposing attack that slipped through the taunt. All the while, Gottem flanked the mighty armor striking Mantaroth with the ability to attack from the 2nd spot and protect the unit that is so weak to a magic attack. Not Gottem though, whose void ability was especially useful against the magic attack from the ulund team.
Razi has jumped in usefulness in these reckless rulesets! Fingers crossed that dragon or life is available when Collateral Damage is on the board, because Gottem is by far the best unit to play when damage goes flying everywhere! Regardless of this new ruleset, Gottem + Razi is one combination I know we'll be seeing for years to come!
Until next time, Splinterfam...
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