After December 5, many people started using Rebellion cards. There were 2 cards that I think were used as mascots for Rebellion by Splinterlands because of their abilities or powers, namely Grimbaldun Smith and Mantaroth. These two cards are difficult to fight, especially with the right combination of summoners and monsters. These two monsters can only be obtained by purchasing the Rebellion pack when there was a presale a few weeks ago.

For more details, you can read here. When I checked at Peakmonster no one was selling it, maybe everyone who get it used it to battle in Splinterlands or just as an investment tool.

To take part in the Rebellion contest by Splinterlands this time I will discuss several battles against Grimbaldun Smith so we can see the power of this card.
This monster can't attack, has 1 speed, 3 armor, and 10 HP, with a mana cost of 6. This is neutral element monster. The abilities of this card:

Ability	Description
	Immunity ability, immune to negative status effects.
	Void ability, reduced damage from magic attacks, attack damage gets halved (rounded up), except attack 1 which deals 0 damage.
	Shield ability, reduced damage from melee and ranged attacks. Attack damage gets halved (rounded up), except attack 1 which deals 0 damage, reduces the Thorns damage to 1, and cancels Redemption damage.
	Repair ability, restores some armor to the friendly monster whose armor has taken the most damage.

For all the battles I'm using my Splinterlands Scholar from Balthazar, which battles in Modern Format, Diamond/Champion League.

I will briefly discuss a few battles that I think show the capabilities of this Grimbaldun Smith card and later give a conclusion :

• 1st battle, you can watch here The Rebellion card the enemy uses :

• Moxian Rebel, a monster from Neutral element, have ability Weapon Training and Camouflage.

This is an ideal situation to use Grimbaldun Smith, Mana cap 29 is a situation where we cannot use monsters with too much damage because of limited mana. with this monster's defensive ability which reduces all melee, range, and magic attack damage assisted by Heal from Merdaali Guardian behind and the summoner Lily Shieldpaw which means we can only attack the monster in the first position, we cannot win this battle. We also brought monsters with Cripple, Stun, and Poison abilities but they were all useless because Grimbaldun Smith was immune to all negative statuses.
The enemy brings many monsters that can give negative status to our monsters, starting from Cripple, Stun, Aflliction, Weaken, and Aflliction effects. even though our tanker monster Baakjira is a very strong monster that can Heal we also brought Merdaali Guardian a monster with the ability Heal to help restore Baakjira's HP assisted by River Nymph which can eliminate all negative status on Baakjira, but the Cripple ability of the enemy Merdhampir cannot be removed, this will reduce Baakjira's maximum HP every time it is hit by an attack from this monster. Meanwhile, Grimbaldun Smith's HP and armor recover to normal (after recieve Heal and Repair) at the start of each round.

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• 2nd battle, you can watch here The Rebellion card the enemy uses beside :
  

• Avina The Wolf, Life element summoner with the dual ability you can choose between +2 speed for 2 unit monsters or Heal for 1 monster.
• Anachron Bolter, a monster from the Life element. has dual attack magic and range, the enemy brings level 8/10 of this monster, and has the ability Headwinds and Repair.

This battle is a high mana battle so we choose to use the monster with the highest damage we have, even though in this battle there is a Ferocity ruleset, we still use monsters that have the ability Taunt the Wave Brood to give time for our highest damage in the 1st and 2nd positions to kill the enemy first before being attacked. But in this battle, the enemy uses Double Heal from the summoners Avina and Venary Crystalsmith as well as Repair (restore armor each round) from Anachron Bolter and Grimbaldun Smith itself.
Our monsters in first and second positions have a total of 14 damage (Coastal Sentry has Double Strike) and all of our monsters have a total of 19 damage, in the 2nd round we almost managed to kill Grimbaldun Smith, unfortunately with death * Wave Brood*in round 1 all enemy monsters attack Arkemis the Bear and in round 3 Arkemis the Bear dies. Here we see the combination of enemies Grimbaldun Smith with other Rebellion monsters making it difficult for us to kill Grimbaldun Smith :

• Avina The Wolf summoner who can give the Heal ability to Grimbaldun.
• Anachron Bolter which reduces the damage from our monster range so that every time it attacks Grimbaldun it only causes damage of 1, this is also what causes our Bear attack in the third round to only hit the armor and fail to kill it.

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• 3rd battle, you can watch here The Rebellion card the enemy uses :
  
  • Moxian Rebel, a monster from Neutral element, have ability Weapon Training and Camouflage.

Even though it looks like the Rebellion monsters used are the same as our first battle, now there was Keep Your Distance ruleset where melee monsters cannot be used, but we can use Grimbaldun Smith (although this monster look melee enough for me 😀), a monster whose strength as a tanker is almost close to Grimbaldun's only Baakjira is in the Water element, in this battle this element cannot be used, so Grimbaldun is the strongest tanker in this battle. The enemy has guessed that with the ruleset Even Stevens and also Keep Your Distance it is almost certain that there will be no attacks in the rear, all enemy monsters will attack Grimbaldun. With a Mana Cap of 22, the enemy will also have difficulty using a fire summoner who has the Scattershot ability Jacek the Conqueror, who has many monsters with high mana. In this battle, that's what we did according to our enemy's expectations, our monsters all attacked forward. And we were easily defeated by the enemy because our magic monsters had their damage reduced by the summoner they used Thaddius Brood while our ranged attacks had their damage reduced by Riftwing so that all our monsters only had 1 damage. With the Grimbaldun ability, all of these attacks produce zero damage.

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• 4th battle, you can watch here, the enemy only bring 1 Rebellion Card on this battle Grimbaldun Smith.

The Fog of War ruleset is a ruleset where all monsters lose their ability to attack enemy monsters behind, this is an ideal ruleset for using Grimbaldun, you can be sure that all enemy attacks will be aimed at the first position. In this battle we were again easily defeated by the enemy, the enemy used several support abilities to help Grimbaldun deal with the opponent's attacks, such as Headwinds from Scavo Chemist which reduces damage from our monster range by -1, Blinds (increase the enemy chance to dodge the range and melee attack by 15%) from Scavo Tecnomancer, which makes our attacks miss even though the speed of our monster Supply Runner and Venari Crystalsmith are higher than Grimbaldun (we can see in round 1) the enemy also cleverly uses the Scattershot ability which allows ranged and magic attacks to attack our monsters in the back position, coupled with Queen Sinash's Blast ability which can attack several monsters at the same time, and also the Poison ability of the Lava Spider.

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• 5th battle, you can watch here , this happen at this last Brawl, the Rebellion card the enemy use :
  
• Commander Goof, monster from Life Element with the ability Dodge, Inspire, Divine Shield, and Resurrection. In this battle, I think the enemy used this because can't use Adelade Brightwing to Resurrect an ally monster and boost the monster melee attack with Inspire ability. The Adelade Brightwing can't be used because of the ruleset Lost magic, all monsters with magic attacks can't be used in this battle.
  
  
  In this battle we saw that the enemy replaced Adelade Brightwing's Repair ability with Grimbaldun Smith and Resurrect ability with Commander Goof. The weakness of Grimbaldun and Goof in this battle is that they do not have the Flying ability so they will be affected by the Earthquake ruleset which gives damage of 2 each round, but with large armor stats and HP these two monsters can survive for a very long time. The addition of these 2 monsters makes it possible for a new effective formation to emerge in the Earthquake ruleset.
  In this battle we can see that the enemy's strategy is quite effective, with random Portal Spinner attacks and hitting War Pegasus causing it to lose its Flying ability, Resurrect ability from Commander Goof, and Repair ability makes the enemy's front defense very strong. There is also a combination of Corsair Bosun which disables the effects of Venari Marksrat Ensnare and is immune to the effects of Thorns, Even though the damage from our monsters was greater than the enemy's, our tanker at the front couldn't survive when faced with the enemy's last tanker Grimbaldun Smith. We can see a very good Rebellion monster ability combination with the old monster.

Those are some battles against the Rebellion Card which I think are very interesting.

Conclusion

Alone this monster is already strong enough, but with good support and the right ruleset, this monster is almost undefeatable. Team Splinterlands still needs to maintain balance in this game, so that no single monster can defeat all the monsters in all battles without using the right strategy. It's just that having strong monsters will of course make it easier and increase our chances of winning the battle, otherwise, it will certainly be detrimental to people who have bought the Rebellion pack 😇. From several battles this time, the weaknesses of this Rebellion monster, using old monsters/summoners:

• Scattershoot ability (attacks enemies randomly, only applies to range and magic monsters). we can use the summoner Jacek the Conqueror to give Scattershoot to all our range and magic monsters. Thus allowing us to kill the monster behind Grimbaldun Smith.
  

  

• Piercing ability (If a melee or ranged attack damage is more than the target's armor, the remainder will damage the target's Health) and of course need high damage monster, you can see the example in the 2nd battle, Piercing from our Coastal Sentry almost killed the Grimbaldun.
  

  

• The Oppress ability (which does double damage when attacking an enemy that has no attacks) for use of this ability is still being planned because it has just been thought of and not yet tested or seen anyone use it. The problem is if Grimbaldun gets the ability Weapon Training and can attack, is it still included in the category of monsters that can't attack? The monster that has this ability and can be used in almost all battles is in the neutral element, the magic monster Magi of Chaos :
  

  
  With this Oppress ability, this monster does full damage to the Grimbaldun HP.

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Thank you, my friend, for taking the time to read my post please give me any feedback or correct me if I'm wrong. Thank you and have a nice day.

If you are new and want to try this fantastic strategy card battle game feel free to use my referral code https://splinterlands.com?ref=poplar-22 to join.

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Credit

• Thumbnail using Canva.
• Card description, Image, and graphic were taken from here and Splinterlands game.