Splinterlands Weekly Challenge Battle! MOLTEN ASH GOLEM

Every week there is a Splinterlands challenge to share a battle using a specific card and on this week's post it is the Molten Ash Golem card. I also encourage Splinterlands players to partake in the challenge because you get to try different strategies and earn some crypto in the process.

Featured Monster: Molten Ash Golem

Molten Ash Golem is a fire splinter card that costs 6 mana. It starts with close combat, learns weaken at level 5 and demoralize at level 8. It's a tanky card that is meant to take hits while the rest of your monsters attack. With the close combat ability, it works well as a backup tank. I do use thise card quite often because it works well for it's mana cost and ability to be a secondary tank. The only downside is the low attack and speed.

Rule set, Battle and Plan

The ruleset this time is fog of war and counterspell. This means that all monsters lose sneak/snipe and all monsters have magic reflect. There is also 56 mana available and I am left with the choice of fire, water and death splinter.

The summoner I choose to use this time is Yodin Zaku. In a match like this, I prefer to use ranged monster and I know that most of the attacks will hit the front monsters first. The blast ability works well to deal damage.

Splinter	Mana Cost	Position	Reason
Yodin Zaku	7	Summoner	+1 ranged, health and blast ability
Chain Golem	8	1st	Tank with Shield
Molten Ash Golem	6	2nd	Close range and back up tank
Lava Launcher	9	3rd	Close range and back up tank
Mantoid	6	4th	Damage dealer
Cornealus	10	5th	Self heal
Countess Sinash	8	6th	Opportunity
Total Mana:	54

My plan is to tank the damage with chain golem. It works better because I don't expect a lot of magic monsters due to the counterspell rule set. The rest of my team is to deal damage and the blast ability will whittle away the health in my opponent's team.

Round 1

At the first glance of my opponent's lineup, I think I am in trouble due to the return fire ability from his summoner. This means that my ranged monster will continuously take damage from their attacks and it only gets worst due to the return fire ability as it could be up to 3 reflects.

Round 2

All of my team took damage but I was able to take out a few monsters due to the blast ability. It looks like this will be a tough match and about half of my team is already almost dead.

Round 3

It's looking quite dangerous but I still think I can win this match if I am able to land both hits from my Lava Launcher and Cornealus because they will move first.

Since I did not miss, I was able to take out both of his monsters and I was able to win the match. it was a really close match as I would have lost if I missed with either cards.

Conclusion

The battle this time around did not go as I expected. His summoner directly countered my setup and I am just glad that I did not miss because he had blind and return fire on his summoner. However, I was able to outdamage my opponent and this allowed me to finish off my opponent in time with the blast ability.

Yodin Zaku was still a great choice but it was probably not the best summoner for this fight. It was still able to win though but the blast ability does not work well with the return fire ability. My opponent had a pretty solid line up but I am not sure why he decided to use Captain's Ghost when there is magic reflect. I guess it could help if I was using some healing ability in front but I was not. I also didn't see a good reason for the void magic tank because I don't think magic works well with this line up. The rest of the cards are quite strong and he did have a good line up.

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 use the same card.