The Death splinter is awesome, and I feel like it is the most underappreciated splinter in the game. So when I saw that this week's 
The Card
Dark Ha'on starts at base with 2 abilities, taunt and flying. I love the taunt ability. It forces all enemy minions to attack that one monster, allowing your other units to go about their day unimpeded. Controlling the flow of a match can really swing the battle in your favor, as it can prevent your opponents from taking advantage of sniping off a key utility or DPS monster from your lineup. The downside is that you either need to negate or heal that damage or else your taunt will go down super fast. Dark Ha'on gains some protection with the void ability at level 3 to reduce magic damage, and the ability to return fire with magic reflect at max level.
With the abilities it has, it is a great taunt minion, although a bit susceptible to melee and ranged attacks. The flying ability does help by giving it +25% dodge chance against units without flying, but that is quite unreliable along with opening you up to the snare ability. Never hurts to get some of that RNG love on your side though. It tends to work best when you can properly anticipate the enemy using primarily magic for damage and/or reducing melee/ranged with the demoralize/headwinds ability.
I wanted to highlight an interesting Death v Death match. Fighting against a fellow man of culture, the opponent also used his Dark Ha'on for the double showcase!
The Ruleset
The ruleset was 48 mana cap with reverse speed and even monsters only. Only water and dark splinters allowable.
The Strategy
With the given ruleset, mana cost was only a minor factor. 48 mana gives you significant flexibility to focus on whatever strategy you prefer. Given the pool of splinters, it came down to guessing where the DPS would come from. I guessed that magic was most likely, since the water splinter focuses dps into magic types. Death monsters tend to be a bit more spread out, but magic tends to be a focus. My focus was to diversify DPS types while trying to round out my defense and win the war of attrition.
Summoner:
Mimosa Nightshade is a 7 mana summoner that has 3 abilities. Headwinds, void, and affliction. These abilities pair together nicely to be exceptionally strong against enemy teams that focus on ranged/magic over melee. The affliction ability is a nice bonus that helps a ton in drawn out battles as it creates a 1 sided healing effect. Notably, it is also the only way to inflict affliction on a non-frontline monster (without specialty rulesets like all monsters have sneak/opportunity/snipe)
Dark Ha'on should typically be used in either the 1st slot or the last slot of the lineup. The reason for this is because splash damage from the blast ability will be reduced to hitting only 1 additional target instead of 2.
2nd slot:
Corrupted Pegasus : This legendary monster is great because it gives a ton of sustain to the death splinter where normally it is quite lacking. Death has some great frontline monsters (Lord of Darkness and Dark Ha'on), but they don't have much tank support outside of neutrals (i.e. no cleanse, protect, or swiftness ability is native to the Death splinter). Corrupted Pegasus grants 2 strong abilities for team support, with tank heal (heal 30% of the frontline monster health) and strengthen (+1 hp for entire team). With flying and reach to round out the skill set, it is an excellent 2nd slot monster. It pairs really well with Dark Ha'on to provide sustain and allow it to keep protecting your team for longer.\
Rounding out the backline (3rd-6th slot):
With a taunt team composition you usually just die if the taunt falls, so the exact ordering of the team doesn't matter in these slots too much.
Prismatic Energy is a nice magic DPS that has a beefy 11 HP and the useful void ability to give further tankiness against magic attacks.
Parasitic Growth is a melee type with the ability of opportunity. This allows the monster to attack the enemy with the lowest health. This is useful for targeting those pesky low health DPS or utility units that hold the enemy team together. A very useful ability that can help turn the tide of more drawn out battles.
Elven Mystic plays the role of doubling up on the strength of the void ability. The silence effect reduces all magic attack by 1. By game mechanics, if you have a magic attack of 1, the void effect will round this to zero damage (oddly it only works with 1 damage, the void damage from 3 magic attack is rounded up to 2 instead of down to 1 with void)! Pairing a strong void monster like Dark Ha'on with the silence effect is amazing.
Octopider provides a nice bit of ranged DPS paired with survivability. It has the Demoralize effect to reduce melee damage by 1 and blind for some global 15% dodge chance to all melee/range.
The Battle
In somewhat of a surprise, the opponent decided to also use Dark Ha'on , but instead used it as a trailing damage soak (since it only eats hits and reflects magic, but will not attack). Their comp consisted of a 4 tank set up with 2 ranged attacker lineup. A pretty scary lineup, but Mimosa's damage reduction abilities combined with Dark Ha'on 's tankiness carried the day.
It got a bit hairy by turn 4, as consistent stuns from the Cyclops let the knock-out combo with the Elven Defender push massive damage, but the healing from Corrupted Pegasus came in clutch to heal out of range.
In the end, the frontline Dark Ha'on proved to be the victorious one in a near flawless victory.
The Wrap
Overall, I think Dark Ha'on is a great monster to have and use whenever it is possible. Unfortunately, the high mana cost of 10 does limit the usability in mana formats, but it is definitely a build around piece to any ruleset where you can afford the hefty mana cost. I personally don't use it that often in mana pools of less than 30, but when I can use it, I find that I win most my matches with it!
My overall monster rating: 7.5/10
A build around and strong card, but too situational to garnish top tier rating due to mana restrictions.
