This is my submission to the Splinterlands Weekly Battle Challenge. This time it is featuring the "Grim Reaper".

About the Card

The Grim Reaper is one of the newer edition reward cards with lower burn value and the Untamed card frame. The card is still in print, so you can earn it buy just playing the game and doing your daily quests. In fact I did not buy a single BCX of this card, so my level 6 version was earned entirely by playing, which is pretty neat in my opinion.

With Affliction (prevent enemy from healing) and Oppress (double damage to enemies without attack) the card has two niche abilities which are better than none but not too powerful. On max level the card also gets the Piercing ability which does leftover damage to the enemies HP when its armor gets destroyed.

While its abilities are certainly of the weaker sort it comes with a nice 4 ranged attack points that can do serious damage to your opponent.

Card Use-Cases

To be honest I found this week's challenge really difficult and considered not submitting an entry because I really don't use this card often. The six mana are expensive and the abilities are sort of random which makes it hard to use the card when following a consistent strategy, especially if you have better ranged alternatives.

I reconsidered, though, and viewed this Weekly Battle challenge also as a challenge to find new strategies and use-cases for this card. I came up with these two:

• Keep your Distance: This is a ruleset where players often expect you to use a lot of magic creatures and thus will try to counter with Lord Arianthus. Since Onyx Sentinel came into the game this is also an obvious choice should your opponent own one (since Onyx has Return Fire, the Grim Reaper would prefer Lord A. for sure). I have also seen many Gelatinous Cubes and Peaceful Giants in this ruleset, played from people who do not own the Legendary and Epic alternatives. The Grim Reaper cuts in perfectly here with its Oppress ability dealing double damage to those passive tanks. In case of Gelatinous Cube it would also disable its Healing ability.
• Armored Up: You'd have to own a maxed version of the Grim Reaper for this ruleset but in that case it could be used for its Piercing ability. The Reaper's 4 ranged attack will easily destroy enemy armor and then apply excess damage to their health.

This week's match

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

While I was waiting for a "Keep your Distance" match to pop-up, I was suddenly confronted with the new "Noxious Fumes" ruleset. I considered for a second, then I thought "Hey, if every monster is losing health due to poison each round, my opponent may try to counter this with healing." So, as counter for the counter I started packing my team with Affliction monsters.

I usually try to have a back-up strategy up my sleeve and this time I chose to also use Redemption monsters to make my opponent lose even more HP over the first rounds.

This week's line up:

1. Cursed Slimeball: In the front row to trigger Redemption as soon as possible. I like keeping this card at level 6 by the way to keep its health low and have Redemption trigger sooner. The more enemy monsters are still alive when it triggers, the more you get out of it.

2. Haunted Spirit: This is the tank I chose (not considering the Slimeball as it will be gone soon), for the obvious reason that it has the Healing ability to cope with the Poison.

3. Furious Chicken: The free-to-use monster (I had no mana left). Placed directly behind the tank to prevent the monster after that from potential blast damage.

4. Grim Reaper: Here comes this week's theme-monster. I chose it as the first of my Ranged monsters because it has the highest health. So should it move to the front it can stall my opponent for a bit while the Ranged monsters behind can continue firing.

5. Undead Archer: Another Affliction monster to support the Grim Reaper. As affliction triggering is subject to luck I thought it a good choice to have two monsters trying.

6. Halfing Alchemist: Placed in the back-row is another Redemption monster. My team is now enclosed with Redemption monsters. Especially in an "All Sneak" ruleset like this it makes sense to include one in the backline.

Conclusion

In the end the Affliction turned out to be a failure. While my opponent did have a healer in their team and thus my affliction should have been a nice counter, it did not trigger until the last attack when the healer died anyways. I had some hope it would also work against Scavenge but it turned out it doesn't.

Once again it was a good idea to have a backup plan with Redemption up my sleeve. That one worked out pretty well and diminished my enemies team enough in round one to finish wiping them out with the Grim Reapers strong ranged attack in rounds two and three.

Want to join the fight?

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