Hey Jealousy: If All HP Is Equal, Who Gets Attacked?

Greetings, Splinterlands warriors. As I briefly mentioned a few days ago about the arrival of a new Valentine-themed ruleset, I finally got to experience one firsthand on the battlefield: Hey Jealousy.

Hey Jealousy—it sounds like a melancholy song, but its effect in the arena is enough to make your head spin a little. The rule is simple yet sly: monsters will attack the monster with the highest Health, regardless of its position.

The catch is that this match paired the ruleset with Equalizer. This means all monsters on both sides have the same Health, matching the monster with the highest HP on that team. And this is where a coffee-stall-level philosophical question emerges: if all HP is the same, who actually gets attacked?

The answer turns out to be… not as simple as theory suggests.

The battle had a 34 mana cap, and I chose the Life element. The logic was straightforward: because Equalizer is active, I can freely include low-HP monsters without worrying that they’ll immediately collapse. So my strategy boiled down to one thing: fill as many monster slots as possible.

My formation:

• Halfling Refugee
• Vengeful Monk
• Happy Quokka
• Janni Rebel
• Olivia of the Brook
• Palimpsest Prophet

Six monsters, mostly melee. On paper, they might look fragile under normal circumstances. But under Equalizer, they suddenly turned into “national athletes” with identical HP.

Meanwhile, my opponent didn’t seem fully acquainted with this new ruleset yet. He only deployed four monsters:

• Ulundin Overseer
• Ironwing Juggernaut
• Shock Trooper
• Warborn Shaman

Under normal rules, I’ll be honest: my team would probably have been wiped out within the first two rounds. On paper, the combination of Warborn Shaman and Shock Trooper is extremely deadly. But thanks to Equalizer, all monsters followed the highest HP from Ulundin Overseer. So my usually squishy monsters suddenly became thick-skinned across the board.

What was interesting—and frankly a bit confusing—was the attack pattern. In theory, Hey Jealousy should always target the monster with the highest HP. But in practice, the attacks felt… random. Sometimes a monster that was clearly at full health wasn’t attacked. Other times, a nearly dying one became the target.

It seems the system itself might still be “confused” about how to read HP: whether it’s based on initial HP before Equalizer, or actual HP after the effect is applied. As a result, on screen it looked like all the monsters were jealous of each other and attacking without any clear guideline. Hey Jealousy—but everyone is jealous of everyone else.

Fortunately, amid the algorithmic chaos and seemingly random attacks, an old-school strategy still prevailed: numbers. With six monsters against four, I had more collective “lives.” Every time one monster fell, there were still others ready to step in. And since all of them had thick HP pools, none were easy to eliminate.

In the end, I won. Not because of some complicated skill combo, but because of one classic principle: maximizing slots and the mana cap. Small, cheap monsters that are usually underestimated—under Equalizer—suddenly turn into makeshift tanks.

You can see the full battle here:

👉 LINK BATTLE 👈

If you run into Hey Jealousy, don’t fixate on a single powerhouse monster. Spread your strength, fill every slot, and exploit Equalizer. Because in this ruleset, the one that stands out too much is often the first to be sacrificed.

In Splinterlands, even jealousy has become a game mechanic. And honestly, that’s what keeps us hooked—because every ruleset forces us to relearn the game from scratch.

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