The battle challenge monster this week is the Temporal Master. It is an Epic card released with the Chaos Legion edition of cards. The Temporal Master adds a low mana magic attack monster to the Life Splinter and features the ‘Recharge’ ability at all levels. The 'Recharge' ability makes it so that a monster only attacks every other round but when it does attack it inflicts increased damage.
I do not own a Temporal Master, so I rented a level 4 one to test out for this weeks challenge. The only two monsters I own with the recharge ability are the Ifrit Rising and Uriel the Purifier. I use the Ifrit Rising frequently with my Conqueror Jacek summoner and find that it is often quite effective with scattershot. Uriel the Purifier is a very beasty tank and extremely effective in certain rulesets.
The battle I chose to showcase is a Wild format 14 mana battle with the new ruleset ‘All monsters have thorns’.
https://splinterlands.com?p=battle&id=sl_b6e44ad59370eff726768b0b2f1acaa3&ref=ninjamike
For low mana battles, I generally create a team of entirely low mana cards. Most of the time, I find this to be better than relying on one or two higher mana cards. Exceptions to this would include the ‘Poison’ and ‘Earthquake’ rulesets. All of the splinters have a decent selection of low mana cards.
For this battle, I chose the Life Splinter. I did not want to have any monsters with melee attack in my lineup to avoid having any of my monsters taking on thorn damage. I picked the Pelacor Conjurer with no attack as my mini tank. I put the Temporal Master in fourth position and the Venari Crystalsmith with its healing and range attack in fifth position. The rest of my lineup was filled up with small mana filler cards.
My opponent's summoner has nerfed my Temporal Master’s magic attack from two to one. This means it will do three magic attack every other round instead of six. They have chosen a medium sized tank with self heal and a magic attacker with life leech meaning it can increase its health with each attack. They round out their team with a halfing attack monster which will not affect me much because my small tank has no attack anyway.
I defeated my opponent's Furious Chicken but not much else progress has been made.
I have gotten in some damage in to my opponents tank with self heal. Tank heal and speed has kept my Pelacor Conjurer alive.
My opponent's tank is down to one health.
The battle is pretty much over at this point.
During Round 6, I was able to declare victory.
Overall my strategy of using no melee attack monsters worked. However, the Pelacor Conjurer and Venari Crystalsmith ended up being the stars of the battle for me. The Temporal Master ended up playing a minor role.
By renting a Temporal Master, I got the opportunity to experiment with it for a bit. I now do not think that it would be worth it for me to purchase a Temporal Master for my collection. I can only afford so many cards and having too many cards to chose from is not necessarily a good thing. In this battle, I could have used a ranged card to provide a range attack of two or three for about the same mana cost.
Currently, I believe that the Recharge ability has limited use in the game. The ability works well with the Ifrit Rising and Uriel the Purifier because it gives them the potential to wipe out even a fairly high health monster with a single shot. The Temporal Master simply has too low of an attack to begin with especially with the risk of magic being nerfed to justify using it very often.
