Hello Splinterlands warrior, we meet again, after December 5, many people started using Rebellion cards. For this week I want to discuss the specific Mantaroth card this card is a mascot for Rebellion cards presale by Splinterlands. This monster 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. If you want to buy this card here is the price for 1 bcx/card :

We need 11 bcx/card / approximately 385$ for max this monster level :

To take part in the Rebellion contest by Splinterlands this week I will discuss several battles against Mantaroth so we can see how to use this monster and how powerful this card in battle.
This monster at max level has 4 damage, 2 speed, 4 armor, and 11 HP.

Ability	Description
	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.
	Armored Strike ability, the unit gets additional melee attack from the armor stats.
	True Strike ability, this monster attack can't miss .
	Repair ability, restores some armor to the friendly monster whose armor has taken the most damage.
	Blast ability, does additional damage to monsters adjacent to the target monster, additional damage is equivalent to main damage divided by 2, rounded up.

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 Mantaroth card and later give a conclusion :

• 1st battle, you can watch here the Rebellion card the enemy use :
  
  • Ulundin Overseer, a monster from Neutral element, have ability Flank.

Ability	Description
	Flank ability gives Mantaroth/monster in the 2nd position Reach ability, and this make Mantaroth can attack from the 2nd position. This makes Mantaroth harder to kill we need to kill Ulundin first before can attack the Mantaroth.

As we can see in this battle, Ulundin has extraordinary armor and defense stats. After getting the buff, he got total stats of 12 armor and 17 HP. With the defense/tanker support from this monster, Mantaroth freely attacks Uriel, even though Uriel's defense can face Mantaroth's attacks but not the monster behind him. With the Blast ability, and also melee attacks and Armored Strike dealing quite severe damage to the monster behind Uriel. In the fourth round, we can also see when Mantaroth loses his armor because * Ulundin* received an attack from Prismologist and Mantaroth was affected by Blast. Here Mantaroth loses the attack ability of its armor. This means the opposite also applies if there is a ruleset that adds armor or a monster/summoner that can provide armor that will increase the attack power of this monster.

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• 2nd battle, you can watch here The Rebellion card the enemy uses beside :
  
  • Akane, a new summoner from the Dragon element, has 2 abilities you can choose before the battle begins. Lookout ability for 1 unit and Ambush for 2 monster units. In this battle, the enemy chooses Ambush's ability.

Ability	Description
	Ambush, 2 Units/monsters who the summoner give this ability start combat before the first round of the battle even starts! During this bonus Round Zero, only Ambush characters may perform any actions.

In this battle, the enemy chooses the ability Ambushand chooses 2 monsters Mantaroth and Carnage Titan to attack first. The high speed of the Void Dragon, the Flying ability, and also the Slow debuff from Baakjira make all enemy monsters have low speed, this makes the attack of the Carnage Titan not manage to hit it, while Mantaroth with its True Strike ability made this monster's attacks always hit the target, with its Blast ability it made this monster's attack hit Carnage Titan which was in second place. In this battle, if there were no Mantaroth, maybe the enemy would have difficulty killing our monster Void Dragon, and give our attacking monster more time to attack and kill the enemy monster. The Ambush from the enemy makes the situation more difficult for our monster.

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• 3rd battle, you can watch here The Rebellion card the enemy uses :
  
  • Akane, a new summoner from the Dragon element, like in the 2nd battle, the enemy chooses Ambush's ability.
  • Runeseer Sevaya, a monster from Dragon element, have ability Cleanse, Protect, Blind, and Repair.
  • Skyspire Yak, a monster from Life element, have ability Armored Strike and Heal.

in this battle, melee monsters can attack enemy monsters in the first position from all positions. Because of this, the enemy also used the same strategy as us by placing the Pelacor Conjurer monster with 2 mana with good HP and hard to hit at the front as a tanker to protect the main attackers at the back. The ability Ambush is used again, this seems to be the ability of Akane that will be used most often in the future, this time the enemy chooses the monsters Mantaroth and Skyspire yak to carry out the initial attack (Ambush). Here we see that Skyspire Yak's attack misses, but not Mantaroth whose attack cannot miss. The enemy easily killed our Pelacor Conjurer. Mantaroth in this battle was backed up by 2 monsters Runemaster Sevaya and Scavo Hireling who restored their armor, so it was difficult for our monsters' melee attacks to penetrate/reduce the HP of Mantaroth. Even though the damage from our monster Jared Scar is very large, the Shield ability from Mantaroth reduces the attack of our mainstay monster by half. The Mantaroth attack with the Blast effect is very troublesome. When Jared Scar finally advanced to first place because Chaos Knight died, he only had 3 HP left due to being hit by the Blast effect. After Chaos Knight died, the enemy easily won the battle this time.

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• 4th battle, you can watch here The Rebellion card the enemy uses only Mantaroth:

Here the enemy uses Junker as an attack and support monster that can restore armor from Mantaroth, they prioritize attacks on our monsters in the first position. We did not expect that in this battle the enemy would use Mantaroth because in the Odd ones out ruleset, we cannot use our flagship monster in the Fire element the Forgotten One, we think the enemy will use a monster with the same or almost the same damage/ability as us, not a monster with Blast effect like Mantaroth. We are quite lucky because with Scattershot from our summoner, it causes our range and magic monster to attack randomly and coincidentally our magic monster Djinn Inferni has the ability Giant Killer (this ability will give damage of 2x when hitting an enemy with mana 10 or more, and Mantaroth needs mana 11) managed to hit Mantaroth, reducing his HP from 12 to 1. Unfortunately our monster the Forgotten One didn't have time to hit him because In a hurry, he was stunned by the enemy Djinn Inferni and hit by the enemy monster The Junker which caused double damage due to the Heavy Hitter ruleset, leaving his HP at 3 and died being hit by Mantaroth. Normally in a battle like this, we don't bring many magic monsters, because we guess that the enemy will use monsters that have anti-magic abilities like the one we used Grum Flamblade which has the ability Void (reduces magic damage by 50% ). Using Mantaroth surprises unprepared enemies with the Blast effect of Mantaroth.

Those are some battles against the Rebellion Card which I think show the strength of Mantaroth.

Conclusion

• Mantaroth is very difficult to beat in certain rules, for example, melee only or when there is a monster with a taunt ability that helps it (all monsters will attack this monster if they can) as seen in 2nd battle when the enemy brings the monster *Agor Longtail *.

• When Mantaroth can attack from behind and has support monsters that function as tankers, such as in round 1 when there is Ulundin Overseer in front of Mantaroth or battle 3 when there is Pelacor Conjurer in front, with no monsters attacking Mantaroth, Mantaroth's armor does not decrease and it can attack with maximum damage.

• When standing alone as seen in round 4, Mantaroth not that strong itss almost died, unfortunately, our monster's range and magic attacked randomly our Tanker in front of Grum Flameblade had no chance to attack because he was stunned.

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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.