This week's signature card for Share Your Battle was Temporal Master. Life is one of my least played splinters (maybe next to Death) so I'm a little out of my element this week.
Time to see if we can learn something new!
Temporal Master is an odd card that I really struggled finding a place for in battle. At 3 mana it's a decent body of stats with 1 magic damage at level 1. Unfortunately Temporal Master's ability starting at level 1 is Recharge causing it to not attack every other turn in exchange for 3x damage. This means the card needs to survive at least one round before payoff really begins. If Life Splinter had an easy way of increasing magic damage (such as a summoner) we could have a 6 damage magic attack on round 2. Unfortunately the magic options are very limited in life making it hard to build a proper lineup around this card.
To be honest I struggled finding a way to make Temporal Master work in most situations. I believe we might find success in very specific battle rulesets that aren't friendly to more powerful magic-based teams such as water or earth lineups. We are looking for low mana battles where melee won't be able to blow out our small team early.
You can watch the battle replay here
The ruleset for this battle seemed the best situation I could find. Low mana (15) and thorns (which I believe was added to the pool of possibilities recently). The thorns should handle any melee-focused teams while our magic lineup will ignore armor.
| Card | Notes |
|---|---|
| Lorna is a very underrated summoner (as indicated by the current rental prices) that provides us the key divine shield ability to all cards. This should allow our Temporal Master to survive and strike for 3 damage on Round 2. Unfortunately, my Lorna rental is only level 1 so I will be really restricted with the power of my cards in Silver league. | |
| Our low mana tank of choice is going to be Blinding Reflector. It has high health and stats for only 3 mana which leaves plenty of room for other cards. Note - in retrospect, a better choice would have been Pelacor Conjurer as a frontline tank to not tank additional damage from thorns and 1 extra mana for another card like Chaos Agent | |
| Dax Paragon in my opinion is a better version of Temporal Master for 1 less mana. It only does 1 less damage after 2 rounds which is a good trade off. | |
| The second last slot will go to Time Mage, a fantastic support card that slows the enemy team and has high speed. | |
| The signature card of the week will go in the last slot. I debated putting it in the second last slot in case of sneak enemies but I felt most people wouldn't run low health melee in a thorns ruleset. |
Our opponent chose earth splinter and went with Mylor (an odd choice for a ruleset that already has thorns). Unfortunately they did choose to slot in a Goblin Thief as well as a Uraeus for sneak damage. The Queen Mycella will protect them against the thorns damage so it's not looking good on the initial preview.
The battle opens with a merciless sneak onslaught on our Temporal Master. I was hoping for a lucking dodge but our backline gets shredded (without the Recharge ability the 1 damage attack would have gotten off and killed the enemy Mycelic Morphoid.
The second round looks a little better for us as our tank absorbs a hit from the Goblin Thief and Mycella. The thorns damage is really stacking up on our opponent now, both remaining melee will die and we still have divine shield left on our Dax.
Time Mage gets a quick kill at the beginning of Round 3 and Uraeus dies to thorns leaving only Mycella left standing. Dax has full health left so the remaining rounds are just cleaning up from here.
Even with a great ruleset, Temporal Master didn't really get a chance to shine. I'm not really impressed with the card as it seems very hard to build a team around when you could slot many other magic/ranged options in as replacements. Recharge is such an awkward ability in lower ranks as most cards have too little health and most matches end in 4-5 rounds.
I could see some fringe cases in higher leagues where Temporal Master might make a great backline especially when it picks up stun. Overall, I think there are just too many better compositions for Life Splinter to play.
Images in this article are all taken from splinterlands.com
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