Welcome back to another fresh and juicy Splinterlands post, and I hope all of you are doing pretty well in your lives and enjoying a calm and pleasant day with your family and friends. For those of you who are actively and powerfully grinding this amazing web3 strategy game on Hive and trying to strengthen your NFT card and other asset collection, I believe all of you are currently busy pushing your trophy count in the ranked arena at the moment, before the season slowly approaches to its end. If we take a quick look at the ongoing ranked season timer, there are still around 2 days and 17 hours left before the reset happens. So this is the perfect time to make that final push toward your season goal and try squeezing out as many rewards as possible before the timer hits zero.
Now talking about my own progress in the frontier mode of the game, I am currently playing in the highest Gold I league tier with a trophy count of around 4,100. This season, my immediate target is to reach the 4,200 trophy mark first and then try for the leaderboard if things go smoothly from there.
On the other hand, the new weekly Frontier raffle has already started today, and right now I have collected a total of 6 entries. In the previous raffle, I managed to collect 66 entries, a bit more than usual this time and fortunately, luck was finally kind to me. As I ended up winning a very nice reward card called Ember Roast Sow. It was a black foil rare card with print number 30, belonging to the Fire element and costing 4 mana and not to mention that it is definitely a cool little reward to add into the collection. Now for the current raffle, there are still around 5 days and 16 hours left before the next draw, and I will try to push my entries up to somewhere around 57-60 this time as well.
Now moving forward, let us come to the main topic of this post, as today I will be discussing another interesting monster from the newest Escalation mini card set edition. As you have already seen in the title and thumbnail above, today I will be talking about the Earthwork Sentinel. So if you are interested in learning more about this monster card, let us take a deeper dive without any further delay.
The Earthwork Sentinel is a monster type card that was introduced in the game with the newest Escalation mini card set edition. This monster belongs to the Earth element and it comes from the Elemental bloodline. By rarity, this card is a Rare monster, so you will require a total of 115 CC cards in order to upgrade it to its maximum level. Now, if you want to use this monster in battles, you only need to spend 3 mana, which already makes it a very flexible choice for low and medium mana limit matches. Now, at your interest, this monster comes with no direct attack power at all, but it compensates for that with several highly useful support abilities along with decent defensive stats. At its maximum level, this monster gains a total of four abilities, making it more of a strategic support tank rather than an attacking unit. Let us now take a closer look at its league-wise stats and abilities below.
At level 2, this monster starts with decent stats that consist of 3 speed with 2 armor and 5 health. Apart from these stats, it already gains the Slow ability. This ability helps your own monsters attack earlier and also increases the enemy’s chance to miss attacks.
SLOW – Reduces the speed of all enemy units by 1.
When you upgrade this monster further to level 4, its stats improve slightly and it now holds 3 speed with 2 armor and 6 health. At this level, it also gains another useful ability called Reveal. This ability acts as a direct counter against hidden camouflage monsters.
REVEAL – Each round, applies Revealed to an enemy unit with Camouflage ability. Revealed units can be targeted by direct attacks.
As this monster gets upgraded further and reaches level 6, its stats improve again and it now carries 3 speed with 2 armor and 7 health. At this level, it also unlocks another support ability called Shield Ward. This can significantly increase the survivability of your frontline monster against melee and ranged attacks.
SHIELD WARD – At the start of battle, the unit in front of this unit gains Shield ability.
Finally, when you upgrade this monster to its maximum level of 8, its stats improve further and it now possesses 3 speed with 2 armor and 8 health. At this level, it also gains another powerful support ability called Triage. This ability continuously heals your damaged backline monsters and can become extremely useful in long battles.
TRIAGE – Each round, restores 1/3 of max health (rounded down) to the allied backline unit that has taken the most damage.
Last but not least, I think this monster is a very impressive support tank considering it only costs 3 mana. First of all, it comes with a solid combination of armor, health, and decent speed, making it surprisingly durable for such a low mana cost. Another great advantage is the Slow ability, which reduces the speed of all enemy monsters and allows your own lineup to attack faster and more efficiently. The Reveal ability is also very useful because it acts as a direct anti-camouflage counter. Whenever you expect the enemy to hide strong monsters using camouflage, this card can expose them and make them targetable again. On top of that, the Shield Ward ability provides Shield to the monster placed in front of this card, making your frontline even tougher against physical attacks. Finally comes the Triage ability, which I think is the biggest highlight of this monster. It continuously heals damaged backline monsters every round and can keep your important support units alive for much longer. Overall, I think the Earthwork Sentinel is a very strong defensive support monster that brings huge utility despite having no attack power at all. What do you think?
