Hello everyone, this is my first time doing a weekly challenge, so it probably won't be very good. Have to start somewhere though :)
This weeks challenge was using the animated corpse, you can see the challenge here: @splinterlands/share-your-battle-weekly-challenge-animated-corpse
I'll begin with my thoughts on the card.
Animated corpse at level 1 is a 4 mana card with 6 health, 1 speed, and 2 melee damage with no abilities. In almost all situations, I would usually never use this card, as there is an alternative that is so much better and only costs one more mana: haunted spirit.
For only one more mana, it has an additional health and speed unit, and the heal ability(heals for 2 health every round). But this isn't a post on haunted spirit, so I'll get back to animated corpse. The only situtations where I see this having real value over other cards such as haunted spirit is in the little leagues game mode, where only cards that cost less than 4 mana can be used, and in this scenario animated corpse can be very useful.
Now on to my battle: https://splinterlands.com?p=battle&id=sl_8f0d75abbbb4f20ab9443251711a859c&ref=blueberrr
I would usually not use animated corpse in this situation, but it's nice to use cards you wouldn't normally would every once in a while. It adds some more variety to the game making it more enjoyable, so even if it isn't very useful I thank the dev team for adding such great variety.
The parameters for this battle were: 18 mana limit and the armored up ruleset(all cards get +2 armor added to their stats). Now in this situation, most people are going to use magic as you see below, so the most effective way to win this mode is to try and counter magic. In a normal battle where I wasn't trying to use animated corpse, I would have went with bortus, torhilo the frozen, and wavesmith. Bortus to reduce the opponents magic attack by 1, torhilo the frozen since he has void and paired with bortus can nullify most magic card's damage on him, and wavesmith in case they did use melee.
However, since I was planning to use dark, my best option here to counter magic was Owster rotwell(gives all friendly units the reflect ability: deals reduced magic damage back whenever the unit takes magic damage). I placed animated corpse in front to serve as a tank. I used a death elemental to pierce through my opponents armor, two melee units with sneak right behind my animated corpse(I did not have any more dark magic cards. I had a twisted jester in the back to tank any sneak attacks used by my opponent, which probably was a mistake due to it having snipe. I spread out my attack too much as shown here, it would have been better if my ranged backline card did not have snipe, so that both my animated corpse and that card would target the same monster in front. It is good to have some melee in this situation attacking the frontline card of the opponent, due to them probably anticipating you might use magic and therefore using a card with void(this scenario was quite unusual for a lineup). Probably the most important card here to have alongside Owster Rotwell was undead priest. In this situation it did not have much benefit, but most of the time it will be an amazing card to pair with owster rotwell. Something I will emphazise in winning these unique ruleset battles is anticipating your opponent, but the key is not to just anticipate your opponent, it is to anticipate your opponent anticipating you.
I would like to say that I am still a relatively new player, so if you are in silver 1 or above then it's probably a good idea you don't follow my suggestions, as I am only aware of the effectiveness of this in silver and bronze.
Credits: screenshots from splinterlands: https://splinterlands.com/
Link to the challenge: @splinterlands/share-your-battle-weekly-challenge-animated-corpse
Discord: https://discord.com/invite/splinterlands
Thank you for taking a look at my first challenge post, any comments you have or suggestions you have on how I could improve this would be very appreciated =)