Monster's Week: Olivia of the Brook

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^{The tips and possible advises in this article are designed for Silver League, in which I am in right now.}

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Introduction

After a few weeks after the Rewards card was released, there are quite a few monsters that standout. Coincidentally, most of these monsters are Epic monsters making it easier to pull in the Glint Shop.

Olivia of the Brook is one of the most unique monsters in the game right now. Once you unlocked the new ability, Mimic, not only it gives her new abilities, she has a chance to gain new abilities every round.

This new ability is a game changer as it can make or break your games. Fortunately for the users of this card, she cannot get the new debilitations abilities that would give her negative abilities instead of the positive ones, although, that would be a good and funny situation if the devs decided to turn around and allow Olivia of the Brook mimic those debilitation abilities.

Wood Nymph Smug Divider.gif

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Olivia of the Brook's stats are decent. She isn't that strong despite being one of the best Rewards card for this season. She has very low damage and cannot act as a tank either due to low health and armor. Her strength comes from her Mimic ability that can be game changing depending on which ability she would get each round. If she get abilities that boost her stats like Life Leech, Scavenger or Bloodlust abilities very early, then she might be a force to be reckoned with at by Round 6.

Olivia of the Brook's best ability is her Mimic ability. This allows her to gain extra abilities every round. While the chance if only 1 of 4 times, based on how skewed Splinterland's RNG is, I think this would happen more often. I had bad experiences with Splinterland's RNG being my 9 speed monster being hit by an opponent's 2 speed 3 consecutive rounds, that means if there's a good chance that since 30% hit chance happens 3 consecutive rounds, having an ability Mimic'ed for 3 consecutive rounds isn't in the realm of impossibility as well, in my opinion.

💊 Abilities 💊

Opportunity: [Target Modifier] The attack priority of this monster's attack is changed to "The opponent's monster that has the lowest health"

Mimic: [Support] At the beginning of round 2 and each following round, gain a random ability from the enemy team. 25% chance to gain a random ability from an attacker when hit. Dispel removes one mimicked ability in the order they were gained. Debilitations, Targeting abilities, Ambush, Weapons Training, Flank, Reach, Charge, and Taunt cannot be mimicked.

Reflection Shield: [Defense] Any damage from Thorns, Blast, Magic Reflect and/or Return fire are negated and becomes 0.

Pros

Mimic ability is currently overpowered. The reason I said that it was overpowered is because there is no limit. If you're lucky enough, you can get 20 abilities by turn 21 making your Olivia of the Brook very strong. I think there should be a limit for these sort of abilities for it to be balanced. You can also make it change the abilities once it gets its maxed ability cap allowing for some counterplay on this card. However, since this was already live, I don't think they would change it anymore.
Mixed damage with Opportunity ability. Olivia of the Brook has both melee and magic damage. Mixed damage with Melee and Magic or Range and Magic are really good so your attacks won't be blocked by Shield alone or Void alone and required for both abilities to block your entire damage. This also opens the options for multiple strategies such as using monsters and summoners that has abilities that increases melee or magic damage to boost this monster's melee damage.
Reflection Shield counters a lot of offensive abilities. Reflection Shield is very useful than others think. This is important for rules of combat such as Explosive Weaponry or Briar Patch or other rules of combat that gives other monsters the chance to inflict indirect damage to certain monsters. Reflection Shield completely negates those damage.

Cons

Only Decent Stats.
Despite being a new card and history of having overpowered new released cards, Olivia of the Brook is surprisingly fair. Her stats are not that great even for a 6 mana cost monster but this is balanced by his overpowered Mimic ability.
Mimicked abilities can be remove using Dispel ability.
Dispel can remove the mimicked abilities reducing Olivia of the Brook's effectiveness. The downside of using Dispel is it only removes one mimicked abilities at a time starting from the last ability mimicked. However, take note that Dispel has a 100% chance of activating when hit while Mimic only has 25% chance of copying other's abilities per round putting Mimic at a huge disadvantage.
Expensive to level up.
Epic pulls need 7500 glint each. With this, you have a 1 out of 7 chance to get Olivia of the Brook. Given that Olivia of the Brook needs 46 cards to max out, you would need a minimum of 345,000 glint for that to happen. This, of course, would be larger as not all your pulls are guaranteed to get this card since, as I mentioned, you only have 1 out of 7 chances per pull to get an Olivia of the Brook card.

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Rank	Rules of Combat	Description
	^{Wands Out}	During this battle, only monsters with magic damage type are allowed: Your opponents won't be expecting a monster with Melee damage to be in a Wands Out rule of combat which can be a good way to counter monsters with Void ability. Mimic can also copy Void ability which gives huge advantage in this rule of combat.
	^{Silenced Summoners}	During this battle, all summoner abilities are disabled: Sometimes, summoners can be a detrimental factor in your games. Applying Poisoned status to Olivia of the Brook through the summoner Underground Fabino can take out a lot of your strength if you relied on her. Summoner Tactics are also a problem since your opponents can add things like Taunt ability through Risqruel Drath to their monsters and if Olivia of the Brook copied that Taunt ability, she might die earlier than you wanted.
	^Equalizer	The Max Health of all monsters on the board will be equal to the Max Health of the monster with the highest max health: Long games are Olivia of the Brook's strongest. The longer the game, the higher the chance she gets multiple abilities. This puts you on a huge advantage the longer the game goes.

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Rank	Rules of Combat	Description
	^{Fog of War}	Removes the Snipe, Sneak and Opportuniy abilities for this battle.: Since Opportunity ability will be lost during this rule of combat, Olivia of the Brook's capability to attack with her melee damage is also removed. Magic damage still works, however.
	^{Noxious Fumes}	All monsters on the board are given the poisoned status at the start of the battle. Poisoned monsters take 2 damage at the start of every round.: Olivia of the Brook's Reflection Shield does not stop her from being poisoned or taking poison damage. She likes a long game which this rule of combat disallows.
	^{Back to Basics}	During this battle, all monster's abilities are disabled: Your opponents won't be expecting a monster with Melee damage to be in a Wands Out rule of combat which can be a good way to counter monsters with Void ability. Mimic can also copy Void ability which gives huge advantage in this rule of combat.

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Rank	Monsters	Description
	^{Spirit Hoarder}	Not only helps Iziar survive to further delay the battle but can also help Olivia of the Brook itself survive from random damage through Triage.
	^{Commander Goff}	Commander Goff has Inspire ability that complements with Olivia of the Brook's melee Opportunity attacks. He is also a range monster allowing you to position him in a safe position to abuse this ability.
	^Iziar	Olivia of the Brook loves long battles. Iziar is a good Taunt monster with high health and Void ability, similar to Water Splinter's Wave Brood. These combination allows her to buy time for Olivia of the Brook's Mimic ability to copy the opponent's abilities making your Olivia of the Brook a good carry the longer the game goes.

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This lineup is quite strong in my opinion although, unfortunately, I didn’t have two components, which is having Iziar in my team to act as their guardian and my Olivia of the Brook's level is still too long to unlock that Mimic ability. I'm missing 2 more cards for that. However, I still think this lineup is strong with high damage coming from Djinn Renova and Adelade Brightwing allowing me to easily takeover this game.

Lineup

^{Prunda Undervesch}

She's one of the good summoners from Rebellion Series. Even though Prunda Undervesch doesn't have any abilities, her dual summoning capable of harnessing both Water and Life Splinters are really strong as those two Splinters really complement each other.

^{Time Meddler}

I really like Time Meddler as a backup tank. While his armor isn't useful here since everyone uses magic damage, it's still pretty useful on other conditions.

^{Djinn Renova}

I believe if you use Djinn Renova, you should use the max level. She gets insanely strong at max level. She gets to 4 magic damage at level 6 which is really strong, if not the strongest, among mages in Life Splinter.

^{Adelade Brightwing}

A really good support monster with magic damage. Her Repair and Resurrect abilities are really great when combined with monsters utilizing their armor. In this battle though, she works as a damage dealer since the good magic damage for Life Splinter is fairly limited.

^{Spirit Hoarder}

A low mana cost monster with magic damage. Her Triage ability is strong if your opponents have a way to deal damage to your back line. Other than that, she's still a good source of magic damage for Life Splinter.

^{Aves Sturgis}

As I mentioned, my options in this battle are quite limited so I added him as an additional magic damage.

^{Olivia of the Brook}

Really good in these kinds of rules of combat. Even though she doesn't have the Mimic ability unlocked, she's still a good addition to my team due to her Opportunity ability.

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This battle was really close if not to my two wonderful Triage monsters, Adelade Brightwing and Spirit Hoarder. The Triage was quite useful in reducing some of the damage allowing my units to survive another turn. Adelade Brightwing's Immunity ability was also the key ability this game. Her, not being affected by Noxious Fumes rule of combat, gave me that chance I needed to take all of opponents down with 1 health.

^{> > Click here to view the full battle < <}

Olivia of the Brook is a really good monster. Her Mimic ability can be unlocked pretty early if you grind enough games and get lucky enough to get her multiple times. Even though her stats are quite subpar, her Mimic ability still makes up for it. Players normally use combo cards in their lineups and you, copying those combo plays can give you the advantage that they initially have. I think Mimic ability is really good with one downside, it doesn't copy debilitations. I think it was a huge loss for not allowing this to happen. It can make pretty funny clips and good strategy to add Debilitations intentionally to bait the Mimic ability. Imagine if your opponent is winning, then suddenly, their Olivia of the Brook mimicked Incendiary debilitation. I wonder how many views would that get when I titled it, "Saved by my opponent's card"?

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