Share Your Battle Challenge Featuring The Spirit Hoarder.
Greetings Splinterlanders and welcome to the latest edition of the Share Your Battle Challenge!
This week’s challenge-feature is the Spirit Hoarder, and with a very special thanks to the Splinterlands team and their Fomo February promotion on Splinterlands TV I am able to submit a battle with the featured card. I was lucky enough to win a Spirit Hoarder in a Fomo February giveaway. Thanks again for the promotion guys!!
The Spirit Hoarder is a very handy monster due to its very handy skill: triage. This skill allows the three-mana-cost Hoarder to heal a monster in its team’s back line, no tank healing but backline healing is rare and very useful. Even better, this card is neutral, so you can slip it into teams from any Splinter. And with that low cost, it’s easy to make it fit.
For the rest of the tale of the tape, the Spirit hoarder weighs in with one point of speed, one magical attack power and three health points. From a cosmic standpoint, those are all low, but with the low mana cost and the aforementioned triage ability, the Spirit Hoard delivers incredible value for the summoning cost. Which is exactly what you expect from a card with legendary rarity.
Looking at the Spirit Hoarder’s level progression chart we see that a card that is handy at level one, gets more handy as it levels up. At level two it gains the dispel ability which will clear all positive buffs applied to combatants that the Hoarder attacks. At level three this healer goes the extra mile and protects your team from getting hurt in the first place with the blind ability which reduces the chances that the enemy is able to land attacks. The Spirit Hoarder doesn’t gain any base stats until level four when it gains one point of magical attack power. Despite the low stats, the Spirit Hoarder comes to battle with a package of legendary abilities that helps protect your team!
My opponent’s last five matches all included high mana cost combatants and therefore gave me no insight into what type of team I might be facing.
Considering the “little league” rule and the absence of the earth splinter (read: obsidian buffed magic,) I assumed that major damage dealers would not be making an appearance. So, I decided to employ a healing strategy hoping I could stay ahead of whatever damage my opponent dealt out to me. I would include tank healing, backline healing, and middle line healing along with all straight forward attacks hoping to have enough power to break through if my opponent chose to use similar tactics.
For my summon, I used General Sloan. I wanted to use the life splinter because its chaos legion tank healer, the Venari Crystalsmith, also has a ranged attack as opposed to water’s Merdaali Gaurdian. But beyond that, the General is also my most leveled summoner and will allow me to use a better leveled Crystalsmith on my team.
For my false tank, I placed the Gargoya Scrapper. I chose this pipsqueak for his void ability. If my opponent stacked up water magic, this one mana cost card could stone his entire team.
Lining up third, I slotted in the Time Mage. With a magic attack and the slow ability to decrease my opponent’s speed, this team-white staple will help me hit them before they hit me.
Coming in fourth is the first of my healers and the star of today’s show, the Spirit Hoarder. This legendary neutral card gives me my middle line healing should my opponent employ a small fry opportunist. It will also provide my anchor additional healing in case I face a sneak-heavy team.
To fill the penultimate position, I choose the Venari Crystalsmith. With a summoner-boosted, two-powered ranged attack my lone archer provides the bulk of my team’s punch and also fills the role of tank healer.
Coming in last and playing rear guard is the self-healing Xenith Monk. Although my Monk’s primary job is to guard my six from sneak attacks, it could even win me the match if it becomes my sole survivor with my opponent so depleted that they can no longer deal more than two points of damage.
Light led by Lorna Shine. I’m happy with that. Facing a team with no offensive buffs plays right into my healing strategy.
Here is the field with all the buffs and debuffs applied.
Looks like my strategy is a winner. My opponent has split their attacks between forward, opportunity and sneak, and with no more than three points of damage going in any one direction, my healers will only allow my team to drop at most one health point in any direction per round. Meanwhile, all of my front facing damage will bring down my foes one by one.
You can see how it played out for yourself here.
By the end of round one, I have lost my false tank and taken three points of damage to my rear guard. But the damage done will be erased before the sneaks attack again.
At the end of round two, the game remains the same; my tank took one point of magic damage, but it was healed, and my Monk was damaged but will be healed anew before the next wave of attacks. The only difference is that my opponent’s ranks are thinning.
More of the same. A little damage dealt to my front and rear, but it will all be healed before I am attacked again. The war of attrition continues.
We can see that the match is all but finished at the end of four rounds.
My Crystalsmith scores the deathblow in the sixth round.
With limited damage coming into play, my healers carried the day, and the Spirit Hoarder certainly played its part. Not only did it help keep my Xenith Monk in perfect health all match long—frustrating my foe's sneak attacks—but it also provided a point of damage per round which helped my team overcome my opponent’s healer.
In the end, my strategy matched perfectly for the team I faced, and in Splinterlands, that’s the surest way to score a win.
