Beating Heloise the Hollow Using Thornmaw Berserker Reward Card

Introduction

Beating a team with Heloise the Hollow in Modern always feels like an accomplishment. It feels especially sweet when you beat a top scholar like asdfghjkiraaa using it. This scholar is piloting top accounts on the Modern Champion leaderboard every season. This season he is piloting #21, #22, #29, #39, #47 and number #90 on the Modern Champion Leaderboard! He is also piloting #115 in the Modern Champion League, so we have a real Professional Splinterlands player here: asdfghjkiraaa.

The Strategy

My strategy here was to use Nidhoggr summoner because we have a ruleset where we are allowed to use a high mana of fifty and Nidhoggr works well with mana over forty. Another reason to use Nidhoggr in this battle is because the ruleset includes Collateral Damage where each successful attack deals one damage to adjacent units.

Second part of the strategy was to place significant buffer units upfront and major damage dealers in the back. So I played my favorite damage dealer: Venka the Vile in the very back, the second from the last I placed Dragon Egg Forager that also deals a good damage of five and in front of Dragon Egg Forager I played Rage that deals five magic damage and leaches life making it a very resilient unit just like the Dragon Egg Forager.

Upfront were my buffer units: Halfling Refugee which provides self heal as well as five melee damage and eight health for just one mana. Followed by the Solace Ashinach which for only four mana has ten health and one shield and has some very useful abilities: Return Fire, Deflect and Magic Reflect.

And finally sandwiched in the middle I have Thornmaw Berserker reward card that has a very important ability Final Rest that eliminates unit abilities that trigger on defeat. Berserker also can attack with melee from any position due to his Charge ability. It is also a very resilient unit due to the Life Leach ability. And it also has a Deflect ability that came in quite useful against my opponent's Lorkus summoner and his magic heavy team.

So now lets see how the actual battle went, it is actually quite fun!

The Battle

Link to the Battle

As you can see from the image above I also got a +40 to my ranking in Modern Champion by beating this scholar because he is rated more than 500 points above me, which is a new thing in Splinterlands. It used to be that you only get +20 for a win in Champion no matter what.

In the first round Heloise the Hollow was actually quite annoying as she eliminated all of my major damage dealers on defeat due to her Spite ability. And she is immune to the Final Rest ability due to her Last Word ablity:

Yes this is a very powerful card that is worth a whole team of cards. As you can see after the first round I lost half of my team. The good part is that a lot of the monsters on my opponents team have sustained heavy damage.

So let's see how the second round will go:

As you can see in the middle of the round my opponent went first and lost a couple monsters due to the Collateral Damage impact and low health of his monsters.

But as you can see when my Rage took out Heloise she once again used Spite ability to eliminate Rage!

And even after that she came back full health!

Round three starts with our team at a heavy disadvantage. It looks like this is pretty much over for our team. But notice that the remaining units are now Weary so the might stop firing...

So at the start of round three Kelan Gaines eliminates our secondary tank and deals some damage to the Thornmaw Berserker, but then our Berserker comes back and finally puts Heloise to rest.

She does deal one last strike for nine melee damage to the shield of the Berserker, but that is too little too late...

The weary Kelan fails to fire twice and Berserker executes him

Shadowfey Sheik is also Exhausted and despite getting one hit off against Berserker fails to dispatch him.

And finally in round ten the Thornmaw Berserker wins this battle!

And that is how the new rewards card Thornmaw Berserker became the star of this battle earning an important win for my team at the Modern Champion Level against a professional Splinterlands player.

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