In the Splinterlands Crypto Game, Life Splinter relies on armor and concentrated physical attacks to achieve victory, making it very strong against a host of strategies based on Melee and Physical attacks, like Sneak, Opportunity, Ranged and even anti-melee such as Thorns.
On the other hand, Life Splinter has a terrible time against high magic damage, since it pierces right through its monsters' defenses even though it's always trying so hard to work on them. All we have to look at is The Peakrider as the best example of how Life Splinter works: it adds a lot of armor and reduces physical damage.
Although Chanseus the Great tries to repair this by adding Ressurect and Triage to team compositions, it falls short when protecting the frontline tank, which is exactly the one that's going to take a huge chunk of magic damage since it's where strong magic teams target their attacks.
Again, Life Splinter becomes a terrible pick for battles in general, staying in the nice matches when we can't use magic or it's weakened.
However, down the road comes Grandmaster Rathe! This Legendary Summoner fixes all problems we could imagine within the Life Splinter, turning it into an untouchable force.
For any matches outside of the specific anti-magic rules, which is most, you can just use Grandmaster Rathe and proceed to buiding a standard Life Splinter team.
This is specially true because now you can build a balanced team in 30+ mana matches without ever worrying about getting shutdown when your opponents focus on magic. You also don't have to worry about that one magic sniper constantly sniping your glass cannons. Your armored monsters will tank, period. This is increasingly obvious when there's a vast amount of monsters with the Repair ability in this Splinter.
For every match that allows magic damage, we can pick Grandmaster Rathe. The current meta using white cards already asks for Prismatic Energy, Pelacor Conjurer and other magic-repel variations, so Amplify is always useful with Grandmaster Rathe. Life Splinter has never been so strong, but most players haven't picked up on it yet. It's our chance to make the best of it while we can.
Remember, it's not just strong in the Modern format. Now that a lot of bots moved into Modern, it's much easier to climb in Wild, specially when most players use modern cards anyway. A bit of knowledge in which older cards are powerful let you get win streaks like no tomorrow.
Old monsters that team up well alongside Rathe include Silvershield Knight for 20~ sneak attack strategies, Clay Golem in no-ranged attacks matches, Enchanted Defender which really shines in Little League and Goblin Mech in high Mana matches since its weakness has also been covered like Enchanted Defender. Even good old Lord Arianthus receives an incredible buff to its sustain when commanded by Grandmaster Rathe.
Interestingly enough, the only direct counter to Grandmaster Rathe is the Qid Yuff summoner, but who the heck uses him anyway? The only other strategy that effectively destroys Grandmaster Rathe is abusing the Shatter ability, which, again, no one does.
Images sourced from the Splinterlands crypto game website
