Splinterlands Community Engagement Challenge: Shock Trooper

Every week there is a Splinterlands challenge to share a rule set using a specific card and on this week's post. I also encourage Splinterlands players to partake in the challenge because they get to try different strategies and earn some crypto in the process.

Featured Card

Shock Trooper is a water splinter that costs 4 mana. It starts off with electrified ability and this will
start damaging your team over time. It learns swiftness at level 3 and magic reflect at level 6. I have this card at level 1 right now and it's one of the newest cards to be released. I don't like this card too much because of the negative effects but the stats do make this card stand out. If the match ends fast, I think this card could be quite helpful, or if it is used in a back to the basics battle where the negative effects don't happen. It's quite interesting to see where this card can be used because it is quite powerful for just being 4 mana.

Rule set, Battle and Plan

The ruleset this time is Weak Magic and Back to the Basics. This means that all attacks have to go through armor first and all abilities on monsters are removed (including Shock Trooper's electrify). There is also 30 mana available and I am left with the choice of any splinter except for earth.

The summoner I chose to use this time is Helios Matriarch| for the +1 speed and the gladiator card.

Splinter	Mana Cost	Position	Reason
Kelya Frendul	4	Summoner	+1 armor and speed
Diemonshark	8	1st	Plenty of armor
Djinn Oshannus	8	2nd
Musa Saline	3	3rd
Spirit Hoarder	3	4th
Shock Trooper	4	5th
Total Mana:	30

I plan to use Diemonshark as my tank due to its high armor. It will be able to tank a few damage all the monsters and it can also deal decent damage. After that is Djinn Oshannus as my backup tank. I have some more magic monsters after to use up the mana and act as fillers for my last monster which is Shock Trooper. I will be relying on Shock Trooper to help me finish off monsters if the match lasts long enough and my tanks die.

Round 1

At first glance, I think that this match is going to be a close match due to the level advantage that my opponent has. I do think that I have an advantage in terms of monsters because I have more monsters and if I can take out the first monster, I will have taken out a lot of the damage.

Round 3

Both I and my opponent lost our tanks, but I am glad that I took out that 5 damage magic monster out of the way. I still think this match will be close but if I can move up that ranged monster up front, I will win.

Round 4

Both me and my opponent lost another monster but I think I have the win already. My magic monsters won't miss and I do have a speed advantage. So it will just take a few rounds to win the round. I only have to kill the magic monster to win this match.

I won a few rounds later as I expected.

Conclusion

The battle went exactly as I expected. The only thing that I wasn't expecting was a maxed-level opponent because all those magic monsters had a lot of damage. Shock Trooper did its job of dealing damage and killing off my opponent. I left it in the last spot so that I could deal more damage. Without the negative effect, Shock Trooper was well worth the 4 mana and it gave me enough damage to take out my maxed level opponent.

You can see my entire match here.

What did you think of my match? Was there anything you would have done differently? I think it is quite interesting to see how different players play in a ruleset.