Strategy Corner #06 - New great combo Spirit Hoarder and Iziar + surprise :)

Finally, time for another Strategy Corner. With today's episode I have a surprise for you, but shhh...you have to be patient :).

Spirit hoarder was one of the most important monster in our previous Strategy Corner about Grund, you can check it here. Today I would like to present quite similar tactics, but this time with the help of the new soulbound card Iziar which can by used with life splinter.

Spirit Hoarder looks quite innocent, but in my opinion is a quite strong card. As a support character he offers triage at first level, so even in bronze. On second level he get dispel, which now become so much more important ability because it can remove martyr and bloodlust buffs. On higher level he additionally gets blind, which could be quite useful depending of the strategy and on a highest level his damage is significant with only 3 mana cost ratio.
In general, I like to use Spirit with magic Obsiadian low mana team, as additional damage dealer. Almost all earth magic monster are very slow, so he fits perfectly, and help burst the enemy in one turn.

The battle I have chosen, is maybe not the best example what this setup is capable of. Opponent completely avoid all traps we try to set up with return fire Ilthain ability, and Iziar with his void magic reduction skill.

In general I try to avoid using only melee attacks with Melee Mayhem ruleset, because opponent could be prepared for it, and can set up complete counter strategy.
Here, our opponent went completely all-in with with only melee type damage, so our only defense for this attack is shield ability of Chaos Knight. Let's see if it will be enough:

Round 2 just started, our taunt tank Iziar is still one the battlefield, despite so many heavy hitters on opposite team. Imagine how situation would look like if opponent will use magic or range :). Unfortunatly Grum is very strong tank, and with void ability almost all our magic damage is significantly reduce. Our only hope is Chaos Knigth with Giant Killer :)

Round 3, despite the heroic task of Spirit Hoarder to keep Iziar alive, he finally was down. Fortunately we still had resurrection, which give us more room for our Knight to do more damage. We luckily got some misses because of speed difference, so overall all monster are still on the battlefield.

Round 4, finally we got some casualties :). We killed Grum, now it should be so much easier for our magic team. Unfortunately, we lost our taunt tank Iziar, so the time of Chaos Knight is limited :).

Round5, our Chaos Knight is the MVP of this battle. We luckily dodge deathblow of Forgotten One :) and manage to kill one more target. Now the battle started to look not so bad.

Round 6, finally our here Chaos Knight is no more on the battlefield. With the help of Iziar he could survive a long time, and now it's just to late for opponent to recover. With some of the armor protection from Truthspeaker we should be able to kill Forgotten One before he can kill us :).

Final 9th round, we got some lucky misses, but it wouldn't change anything for the battle outcome. Finally, we were able to make the final blow. The fight was tough, but we won it :).

As I mentioned above, this fight wasn't a perfect example of what Spirit Hoarder + Iziar can do together. Opponent completely counter almost all of our afford for good defense, but we still was able with some luck win the fight. I'm not big fun of his strategy, because it can be easily countered with one strong monster with thorn ability in the front. Usually, it's just too obvious to go only melee monsters, but sometimes it could be effective. For this fight, we got some help of luck, but overall we almost were prepared for all the different attack. Let's talk about some options and what are the reason we want to use them.

We have already talked about Spirit Hoarder in the beginning of this article. For this strategy his main goal is to keep our taunt tank monster alive as long as we can. Simple right ? :). Unfortunately speed does not help here, sometimes heal could come just too late, that's why we could try to find some boost to it, we will discuss it later.

Iziar , I think I could easily say this is our main dish on the table. The life splinter just needed the card like this. Of course, that was Shieldbearer from Untamed, but the supply of it it's quite limited, so this is quite an expensive option, and it won't be available in modern after rotation. With Iziar we got now so many different option to consider. His so high health and void ability guarantee very high survivability, on the higher level he received additional martyr skills which could boost more our team. In my opinion, it's a perfectly designed card.

Chaos Knight, our today's battle example MVP. Usually, it is quite risky to use it in battle when he can be easily killed with magic damage. He is very well protected versus physical damage, and with the help of taunt Iziar skill now, we can use it more efficiently. The second case when Chaos Knigth shines brightly is the Super Sneak ruleset, where you can put him in the last positions, but this is a topic for another discussion

Ilthain recently become of one my my favourite summoner. From all life splinter seems very versatile. Of course, Rahte guarantees nice bonuses but now with Ilzair void ability you dont need to rely on Rathe and got some other nice options. For this strategy Ilthain suits just perfectly, he gives more crucial speed, and a nice bonus with return fire if the opponent tries this type of strategy.

Depending on the mana available we got a few option: High Priest Darius - resurrect ability is very helpful, Truethspeaker - same with some more armor protection. I mentioned speed is important because we still want to have our taunt unit on the battlefield when any triage instance occurred. We can use any monster with slow of swiftness.

I think the new Iziar card gives life splinter another life :). The strategy, which was presented today seems quite solid, and guarantee nice protection from a most form of attack. Core line-up is 3 monsters, so you have quite a flexible option for the rest of your team. It's for a sure strategy for higher mana matches because Iziar cost 11 mana, but I think he is worth trying. Spirit Hoarder fits perfectly with triage, unfortunately, on lower levels, life splinter does not offer any other monster with this ability. You can still try the new dragon summoner Lily Shieldpaw, we talked about her in our last Strategy Corner. Additional triage could be very useful, I for sure will try that option. Please, If you have any fights where you have used Iziar , let me know how he performs in comments below.

During writing this post I have just received result of one of tournament battle, so here is another example:

Silent summoner was the ruleset, so unfortunately we couldnt use Ilthain abilities, but still it was quite easy battle with our setup.

I hope you like this kind of battle and strategy presentation. More strategy analysis, discussion, and prediction games you can find on my Wednesday Splinterlands.tv stream. You can check the schedule here

Sometimes as you could see I stream on my private channel, I have no schedule there, and mostly we have some discussion about recent changes to the Splinterlands ecosystem. You can always follow me to see what is happening there: Maxmaka Twitch

If you have any comments, please do not hesitate. Do you think I could improve anything just tell me :)

If you wish to try out Splinterlands you can use my reference link.

All images used in this article are open source. Some of dividers created by @mhowii .
Thumbnails borrowed with permission from the Splinterlands team or made in Cooltext

Ok I hope some of you still here, time for surprise :).

I come to some idea, I hope you will like it and participate. Every week I will publish one battle, and your goal is to point out first victim of the battle and who will be the winner. This game is exactly the same as my prediction game which I run on my Wednesday Splinterlands.tv stream. I know that not everyone can attend the stream, so I hope you will still have fun in that way. More about rules you can read here.

Among all participants who get correct answer I will randomly (probably on my Wednesday stream) choose one winner.

The prize of first blog prediction game for lucky winner will be the legendary card:

Here we got the battle, of course with our today's here: Spirit Hoarder:

Game instruction:
Try to point out which monster will die first on the battlefield and who win the battle

• t - top player
• b - bottom player
• number - order counting from the first position

Examples:
t2b = monster on second position of top player die first, bottom player wins
b6t = monster on sixth position of bottom player die first, top player wins
t3t = monster on thiird position of top player die first, top player wins

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