When Shock Trooper is the Star of the Show in Modern Ranked

Introduction

Rebellion reward cards that came with negative abilities, especially Shock Trooper always give me a pause before I choose to play them. And the reason is obvious these negative abilities sometimes do more harm to the team than what they bring to the field.

It is almost like you have a star player on the team that can make the team win or make the team loose and you have to evaluate each time if it is worth it to play this card or if the risk is too great that Shock Trooper will mess things up.

To Play or Not To Play

Shock Trooper has a really interesting set of abilities, and for only two mana his basic specs are outstanding. He has six health, four speed and a whapping five magic damage! His abilities are good and bad, he has swiftness that adds one speed to all friendly cards and he has a really negative ability: Electrified.

Electrified deals one damage to all allied units starting in round two and in each of the following rounds. I find it that some rulesets make Shock Trooper be more playable than others, for example the armored ruleset is good for Shock Trooper because when all units get two armor it doesn't impact health of the allied units until round four and magic damage is great to use against shielded enemy cards.

Another ruleset that make Shock Trooper more playable is when Aimless ruleset is in effect. Since Shock Trooper has five magic damage at a gold league level it means that it could fall victim to the force shield that is really common on tanks or taunt units, so having a scattershot modifier in effect is actually beneficial for that reason and for the reason of being able to hit some of the hidden "glass cannons" units on the enemy team with lots of damage and very weak health that are usually hidden in the back or protected by the camouflage ability.

Another good ruleset to use Shock Trooper in is back to basics where all units loose their abilities so Shock Trooper becomes no longer a risky choice and is a card with superior stats for the four mana it consumes.

The Battle

Link to the Modern League Ranked Battle Featuring Shock Trooper
The link above features my recent Modern League battle where shock trooper played a crucial role in defeating my opponent.

As you can see from the image above the ruleset in this modern league battle includes Scattershot which as I have explained above is beneficial for using Shock Trooper. It also limits our unit selection to fire, water, death and dragon splinters. The less splinters are in play the less choices I have for picking cards in my fairly limited modern card collection so it becomes more likely that I would play a Shock Trooper.

As you can see from the image above my opponent is playing a more leveled up team than I am as one of my legendary cards is only level one while I can play up to level three with my common level eight summoner.

As you can see here Shock Trooper is one of my main damage dealers with five magic damage. Let's see how this battle will play out...

Round one was basically an exchange of blows and as you can see my opponent did a really good job nerfing my magic and ranged damage dealers!

After round two my team is starting to look a little low on their health and at the start of round three you can see how the negative ability from Shock Trooper is being applied to all of my cards.

By the start of round four our team is starting to look really low on health, will we make it?

Round five and the outcome of the battle still seems to be kind of up in the air...

And then in the round six the Shock Trooper scores an absolutely crucial kill taking out their Commander Slade and just like that it is game over for ILuvWVMountains as he has no attack units left!