Carrion Shade ~ Splinterlands Share Your Battle Challenge

This post was originally drawn from my previous Battle Challenge post that missed being curated. I revised the content of the older post, and talked about a different, but related, topic to keep the content unique.

I hope people won't mind too much that I'm refurbishing this content. It took some effort to create and I'd want to try re-submitting it. lol 😅 The OG post is a lot different now, so I think it wouldn't count as spam. Or maybe, this will be the very first time I get flagged for spamming 🤓 Kind of exciting in a way.

Also, I don't have that ill feelings with the missed upvote, since I intimately know how difficult manual curation is. But I do hope, the curation team will get some tool or helper to automate some of the processes, and make it easier for them to track and upvote challenge submissions.

Carrion Shade: New Chaos Legion One-Mana Monster

Carrion Shade is Deaths Splinter's new Common-type, low-mana monster. Its primary selling point is that it only requires one mana. Not much is going on with the stats. Its melee attack, health, and speed are expectedly low.

But, it at least learns to fly when it reaches level three. Here are some of its level milestones:

😒	😕	🤨	😐

As with other one-mana Common monsters, there are level upgrades where the stats don't increase. For Carrion Shade, the stats remain the same when it breaks through levels 4, 6, and 8. Take note of these levels so you won't have to make the extra effort to surpass them. For instance, if you have a Carrion Shade at level 3, better let it stay at that level if you don't have an additional 46 cards to upgrade it to level 5.

For the purpose of this week's Battle Challenge, I am renting out a level 5 Carrion Shade for 1.434 DEC a day. I wanted it at level 5 because it's the highest possible level for Common monsters in the Silver League. The rent is cheap, but I was kind of expecting it to be a bit lower, to be honest.

My Lineup: Optimizing for a 20-Mana Cap Battle

I had to wait a long while to get a battle with a low mana cap that allows a Death Splinter team. I explicitly waited for a low-mana battle to make the use of Carrion Shade more significant. Imagine how crazy it is to use a one-mana monster in a 50+ mana battle 😂. But at last, I finally got one low mana cap match. And it had the Equalizer ruleset to boot.

Equalizer ruleset raises every monster's health to make it equal to the highest health on the field. It incentivizes players to fill up the team as much as possible since every monster gets a free health boost. The skill Life Leech becomes advantageous, netting double health bonuses for monsters.


With all those considerations, I've arranged my team this way:

Summoner	1st	2nd	3rd
	4th	5th	6th

[Summoner] Zintar Mortalis serves as my default Death Splinter summoner, being the one with the highest level among my Death summoners.

[1st Position] Carrion Shade helps me fulfill my battle goal to fill up all slots. The battle has a 20-mana limit, so I have to be efficient with how I use it up. I've placed it in the first position since it's a melee attacker. I'm not really a fan of monster placements where they can't attack. If I place it elsewhere ... sure, it will still serve as a meat shield, but the slot would seem underutilized.

[2nd Position] Creeping Ooze is another one-mana monster to fill up my team. Its Slow skill is always useful (except with the Reverse Speed ruleset, of course), so it has been my go-to team filler. My level 2 Ooze has no attack so I've let it sit in the 2nd spot.

[3rd Position] Undead Priest starts my back-line attacker lineup. I got my Undead Priest leveled up to 3 so it has unlocked its magic attack. It uses up only two mana and casts a Weaken debuff on all enemy monsters.

[4th Position] Venari Bonesmith becomes a key player in my lineup. I had to allocate more mana since it needs 4, but its Life Leech and Poison skills make it worth it. Note that the Life Leech skill works nicely with the Equalizer ruleset.

[5th Position] Vampire functions as one of my strong attackers. It has 3-point range damage and, originally, a single health point. Good thing the Equalizer solves that health problem. The monster has Life Leech too, so I now got two with the ability to increase its already Equalized health.

[6th Position] Twisted Jester takes up the last spot. It holds no advantages within the current ruleset, but it's always a reliable monster. It's one of the strongest attackers in my Death Splinter deck, which comes with a relatively cheap mana cost at 4. You may wonder why I didn't place Vampire in the last position since it's there where it has a chance to rack up more health. But I thought the enemy may have Sneak attackers, so I decided to keep Vampire slightly protected from the rear.

The Battle

Catch the live battle here


It seems like my opponent had the same idea as I. They used a lot of low-mana monsters, too, to fill up their team. But, fortunately for me, they got one spot short. Since we both used mostly monsters with low-to-moderate stats, we only had five health points as the highest on the field. Equalizer didn't do much boosting this time 😅


Round 1 was quite eventful; sparks were flying as the bout started. My opponent made a wise choice of including Exploding Rats on their team. It had high speed and decent 3-point damage with a splash attack. Its main drawback of having only one health was resolved by the Equalizer ruleset.

I lost both Carrion Shade and Creeping Ooze in the first round, but I was able to send off my opponent's Exploding Rats too. I am slightly worried that two of my monsters were cleared out pretty early.

As Round 2 begins, my Vampire and Bonesmith stand with a few points increased in health. My Undead Priest is on its last breath and was knocked out by Scavo Firebolt. But my Twisted Jester drops a solid three-point hit on Scavo that avenges my Undead Priest.

On Round 3, my opponent's Antoid Platoon holds their line. Its Shield skill helps it resist my attacks. But by Round 4, I was able to finally knock it out with Vampire's persistent attacks.

By Round 5, Venari Bonesmith falls, but not before it successfully inflicted Poison on the enemy Scorch Fiend on the previous round. Scorch Fiend will only have two rounds left at most.

The match ended with my 🥳 Victory 🥳 in Round 6, with Jester dealing the final hit. It's a bit amusing to see that my Vampire is still in its full health, which totaled to 9 points after leeching health from its enemies.

Reflections After the Match

One major flaw I discovered in the middle of the match was assigning feeble monsters in the first few positions. It would have been dangerous if my opponent had managed to finish them off a lot faster since my leeching monsters would have had less time to boost up their health.

What I'd do differently is to place at least one formidable tanker in the first position. It should have at least some points in armor or a defense skill such as Void or Shield. While it may cost more mana, which further limits my backline options in a low-mana cap battle, I think it's a good compromise. I could exchange my Twisted Jester with a low-mana attacker to beef up the frontlines a bit.

Then there's one other significant flaw I observed in the match that may have caused my opponent to lose. Their lineup had two melee attackers in the 2nd and 3rd positions that weren't able to attack. I mentioned earlier in the post that I wasn't a fan of placements like these where monsters are unable to do anything. Had they placed ranged or magic monsters in those spots, they may have been able to attack my team in full force. This would have exposed me to a huge disadvantage since I had a frail frontline.

To End: Do I Think Carrion Shade is a Good Card?

No, I don't. It's not an irredeemably terrible monster, but if you have limited funds for rentals or purchase, just look at a different one-mana monster 😣

Carrion Shade has Flying, but the skill doesn't contribute much to team plays. Perhaps it could be useful in the Earthquake ruleset, but even then, it still seems too fragile and undeserving to take up one precious slot. Since it's a melee monster, the only place where it can launch attacks is on the first spot (unless a special ruleset lets it attack from any position). But its health is way too low to hold up the frontlines.

I think if you really need to fill up that final one-mana slot in a Death Splinter team, it would be better to use the Neutral monster, Creeping Ooze, which has Slow, or Death's Cursed Slimeball which has Retribution skill on level 6 and above. Carrion Shade would be my last pick.