Splinterlands | Battle conditions | Noxious fumes (poison)

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In this series I'm discussing the various battle conditions that you can encounter in the game. Having good strategies and understanding the strategical concepts in the game is important, but in order to really get good you will have to be successful at adapting to all the conditions.In this series I'm discussing the various battle conditions that you can encounter in the game. Having good strategies and understanding the strategical concepts in the game is important, but in order to really get good you will have to be successful at adapting to all the conditions. In this post I will cover the Noxious fumes condition.

Basics

The basics of the noxious fumes condition is straightforward: all monsters start the battle poisoned.

Being poisoned means that monsters will take 2 damage at the end of each round. The damage is "true damage", meaning nothing can reduce the damage taken and it ignores armor or even divine shields.

Abilities

Let's take a look at the abilities, is there anything that will prevent the damage taken?

Immunity

The immunity ability will prevent the monster from being affected by poison and will therefore not receive any damage.

Almo cambio is probably the most popular monster with the immunity ability, but there are other options out there. However, only Almo and Kralus get this ability at level 1.

Cleanse

The cleanse ability will remove the poison effect on the first monster in your lineup, making it immune to the poison.

The most popular card here is probably the Scarred llama mage, but there are quite a few cards that gain the ability aswell at a higher level.

Keep in mind that monsters with the cleanse ability do not save themselves from the fumes if they are not in first position.

Other abilities

Cleanse and immunity are the only abilities that can actually prevent the poison damage. However, there are other abilities that can be very important in a noxious fumes match.

The most relevant abilities in these games (at least in my opinion) are healing and cripple. Healing is pretty obvious, but cripple is still very underrated in these type of games in my opinion. The cripple ability is often the reason why an enemy monster dies a round before the enemy anticipated.

How to play

Ok so now you got the facts, but how do you actually use this information in a game? Let's find out.

First thing I want to mention is that monsters and summoners with cleanse and immunity are usually not the cheapest cards. If you have an almo cambio, sure, you should use it in these type of fights. That being said, I'm assuming that most of you (assuming the biggest portion of my readers are beginners) are stuck with the cheaper cards and can't rely on cleanse or immunity abilities.

For those of you, you should focus on high health monsters and monsters with the healing or the cripple ability.

Also, you should prefer odd numbers of health over even numbers of health. Every round your monsters will lose 2 health (at least of they don't receive any damage from the enemy team). Therefore, it doesn't matter if your monster has 3 or 4 HP, it will die after 2 rounds anyway. However, this approach does get countered hard by the cripple ability, this is why it's such a good ability in these rounds. But this also means that going with oddly numbered hp monsters is also a bit of a gamble.

Healing is always good, but it's especially good on backline monsters. A water elemental is a perfect example of a card like that. Also note that there is a big difference between "heal" and "tank heal". A monster with heal will keep itself alive, but a monster with tank heal will die from the fumes eventually.

Conclusion

To survive the fumes you will have to look at high health monsters and monsters with the heal ability.

To prevent your enemy from surviving the fumes you can consider to throw in a monster with the cripple ability.

Obviously if you have access to monsters with cleanse or healing, these are the ones to go with.