Today, I'm going to talk about battles and strategies around acid shooter. Acid shooter is a 2 mana earth card with archery attack. It has scattershot ability from level 1.

Let's check the stats of acid shooter.

Scattershot ability is not very popular in the community. A lot of youtube content creators talked about how they don't like the ability. I totally understand why. Generally, spreading your attack doesn't lead you a good result.

Today, I'd like to talk about how it is not always the case. I also like to talk about how acid shooter is a great card in total especially in diamond/champion league.

Example battles

vs Kron Last Stand

15 mana, explosive weaponary, target practice ruleset
https://splinterlands.com/?p=battle&id=sl_b8c27ad250ba8f32b12ece07fadc20da

This is one of my recent battles. In this battle, the opponent has only one monster, Kron and it has the ability last stand. Because of the ability, kron has 8 magic damage, 18 health, 3 speed.

It makes sense that they used only kron because it is blast damage because it does 8 damage + 4 blast damage = 12 damage per turn. That's a lot for 15 mana. Also, kron can heal 6 hp per turn because of 18 max health.

Even though kron last stand is so strong, it gets a lot of damage back from failed summoner reflect. Failed summoner reflected 10 damage back in 2 turns before it died.

The star of this battle is acid shooter in my opinion. It poisoned kron right with the first shot. It is also crippling and reducing kron's max health. It ends up reducing how much kron can heal. It did a total of 12 damage including poison to kron.

Now, let's look at how top champion players use acid shooter!

vs Kraken sustain build

28 mana heavy hitter, melee mayhem ruleset
https://splinterlands.com/?p=battle&id=sl_07803403c3cd6a4afc4ef604997459b4

Accounts named like sub-[number] are always on the champion leaderboard. Let's see how they uses acid shooter.

I made a post about wavebrood sustain build around 20 mana. I talked about how it is hard to do enough damage to wavebrood. If you haven't read that, please check it from here

In this battle, they used kraken, instead of wavebrood. Kraken + tank heals and triages are very popular. Kraken naturally has armor, demoralize, retaliate in the highest league. It is a tough opponent to beat.

In this game, acid shooter is the key card that changed the game because his archery attack and poison slowly took down the tank healers that were hiding behind kraken. Once kraken lost the healers, Mylor earth team's win was obvious.

vs Wavebrood sustain build

22 mana, armor up, lost legendaries

Most of us know who gank is, a great content creator. Gnarkada1993 is always on the champion leaderboard.

Gank chose archery with Prince Renynn. Gnarkada chose wavebrood sustain build.

In the last post, I talked about how wavebrood with tank heals are strong in lost legendary ruleset that are around 20 mana. This is the exact situation where it can be very hard to beat.

When you take the first look at it, Mitica headhunter seems to be the strongest monster in the field. It seems easy for mitica to take down wavebrood.

However, that's the exact opposite of what happened because of 3 tank heals in the back. Mitica couldn't do enough damage to kill wavebrood. Wavebrood has return fire, so it was reflecting 4 damage every turn after mitica attacked. Eventually mitica dies because of the return fire.

The key card here is again, acid shooter. It was spreading poison slowly, and took down almost all of the monsters in the back by itself.

Strong points of Acid shooter

• scattershot ignore taunt
• 2 mana, 2 archery is very good mana to damage ratio.
• poison can slowly take down monsters
• it is the lowest mana monster with poison
• it is a great addition to the low mana eath team (failed summoner, epona, khmer princess, queen mycelia)
  
  

Great video about scattershot

Even though this post is about acid shooter, not all about scattershot, but I thought of a great video about scattershot made by bulldog1205. I recommend watching it if you haven't checked out.

Closing thoughts

Scattershot is not good in that it spreads the damage over multiple targets. However, it is the only way to ignore taunt completely.

Chaos legion introduced great taunt monsters like wavebrood, mycelic slipspawn on top of taunt monsters like Kraken, Magnor, Shieldbearer, Dark Ha'on. As those taunt monsters get popular, scattershot would be more useful.

Now that I learned scattershot is very useful against taunt, I am thankful that we have this ability.

Acid shooter is very special in that it has scattershot and poison. Even if backline monsters hiding behind a taunt monster have triages, it still can take down those backline monsters slowly.

Let me know your thoughts & experience on acid shooter in the comment section!

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