This is my submission to the Splinterlands Weekly Battle Challenge. This time it is featuring the "Enchanted Defender".

About the card

The Enchanted Defender is an out-of-print card belonging to the Wind of Change collection that can be unpacked from Orbs. Orbs are out-of-print by this time, but can still be bought from Hive-Engine. Like all Orb cards it is considered a Promo card, which does not make sense in my opinion. Especially now that the successor dice packs got their own collection.

What makes this card so special is that it only has 1 HP, even when maxed out. It has a strong armor, though, and the Thorns ability.

Card Use-Cases

• Weak Magic: The card shines in the weak magic ruleset. Unlike in other rulesets magic monsters can not take it out with a single shot, but have to overcome its armor first.
• All-Sneak: There are few magic monsters with the Sneak ability, so the risk of having the Defender killed by one is quite low. Melee monsters, however, will have to target the Defender in this ruleset and hurt themselves on its Thorns. Note that this is one of the cases where All-Sneak differs from Melee Mayhem. In Melee Mayhem do not use the Defender as your opponent may have a magic monster in their lineup targeting the tank!

This week's match

Click on the video ^ to play or view the original match on Splinterlands.

This was one of the first matches I played with the new Equal Opportunity ruleset.

Equal opportunity means that all monsters target the enemy monster with the lowest health.

My line up:

1. Molten Ogre: It was a high mana-match, so I used Plado as a summoner and as many strong Melee monsters with high HP. The Ogre is great because it brings Trample with it. Therefore, if it kills the lowest HP monster of my enemy, it may strike again.

2. Goblin Mech: A problem with low HP monsters is that they often come with armor. The Goblin Mech has the Piercing ability that could penetrate that.

3. Pit Ogre: Just another strong Melee, high HP monster to join the ranks.

4. Enchanted Pixie: With the Inspire ability the Pixie is a great match for a Melee line up. It gives each Melee monster an additional ATK point!

5. Enchanted Defender: I meant the Defender to be the designated target of my opponent. I wanted them to attack the Defender with melee monsters who would suffer from its Thorns.

6. Serpentine Soldier: As a melee monster, the Serpentine Soldier benefits from the Plado and Pixie buff. It also comes with Thorns to hurt enemy monster who target it with the opportunity ability or even better, may miss it, due to Dodge and its high speed.

Conclusion

Well, this did not work out as I expected. I am sharing this battle to share my learning curve rather than brag about my usage of the Enchanted Defender. I was under the assumption that the Opportunity ability from the Equal Opportunity ruleset would only apply to melee monsters, because as of now only melee monsters have this ability inherently. However, it turned out that it also applies to other attack types and so my Defender was my first monster to die as soon as the first magic attack hit it.

It is a great thing that the Splinterlands team keeps adding new rulesets and abilities to the game to spice things up. Learning about them and how they change the meta is an awesome part of the game. For example check out how I really leveraged the new Stampede ruleset.

Want to join the fight?

Create an account at the Splinterlands today and fight me in next week's battle challenge!