Splinterlands Battle Breakdown: Be Like Jello
As Bruce Lee said, "Be formless. Shapeless. Like water." The insight from this wisdom comes from a very special property of water: it becomes the shape of its container.
Well, I'm not as wise as Bruce Lee so I only got this about half right. I put gel into a cube, and I became the noxious fumes. The battle I'll showcase here was a fun result that came from this new game rule.
Battle Breakdown
Noxious Fumes means all the monsters played get the Poison debuff at the start of the battle. This is going to cause everything on the board to lose two health every round. This also happened to be a low mana game (12), meaning you couldn't play many mid or high level monsters.
I'm not a fan of low mana battles typically, so I channeled my inner Bruce Lee. Well, kind of... I became gelatinous. Like a noxious cube.
The Gelatinous Cube can be a pain in the ass card to fight sometimes. It has a lot of health, and anytime a monster on the board dies, it gains one health. Knowing my opponent would be poisoned - just like I would be - and probably not able to play any big attack cards, I threw my Cube into the first spot hoping it could stay alive long enough for my foe to rot away from the inside. For good measure, I threw a healer out to help keep the Cube going a couple more turns, hoping I wouldn't get snuck up on from behind. My summoner gave each of my cards an extra bit of health too.
Now water can flow, or it can crash. But a Gelatinous Cube can jiggle even when poisoned. And it jiggled all the way to the end as my opponent choked out from the fumes. My two cards did a total of two damage this fight and took down my fellow summoner who had five cards and much more opportunity to attack me. I would like to think we can all celebrate this sneaky win since it was against a bot too.
This is what keeps Splinterlands interesting. The different rule sets give you myriad ways to play your cards and test your skill. You have to be flexible, understand what you have available and find a clever way to make it work.
Be like water my friends.