Mage’s Bane
If you are unfamiliar with this card, you are in for a pleasant surprise. Owster Rotwell is the most recent death Splinter added to the Splinterlands. He was added along with 4 other summoners from dice packs, each summoner offering an ability to the team instead of a stat change.
The ability that Owster provides your entire team is “Magic Reflect”. As you would expect from the name, it reflects a bit of damage back to the attack if it used magic. Owster Rotwell might as well be named “Alric Stormbringer’s Worst Nightmare”. It is about as hard as a counter as you can get, especially since many magic users tend to be on the squishy side and often die to only 1-2 reflections.
If you are confident your opponent is going to use primarily magic units, Owster is a great choice and a likely win.
Some Risk to Playing
There is a bit of risk to playing Owster though, if your opponent doesn’t have any magic users on their team, then you have put yourself at a disadvantage. Its typically not worth trading off the potential stat bonus if only 1-2 monsters are impacted.
Sometimes even when you make the right predictions, it is not enough. Currently, magic feels to be in a strong place in large part due to low mana costs, inability to miss, armor piercing, and Alric. If your opponent has multiple high hp/ high cost magic users they may potentially be able to melt your team regardless of the magic reflect. This tends to happen mostly on higher mana cap battles and generally isn’t a problem.
Potentially useful cards
There are a number of cards that work pretty well with Owster. If you are playing him you’re probably trying to counter a magic composition, so keep that in mind. Abilities such as void and void armor are extremely helpful and may result in taking no damage, while reflecting some back. There is one card with this ability in the death Splinter starter cards, Bone Golem. Between the “Void” and “Magic Reflect” abilities you should have no trouble crushing those dirty magic users.
Another useful card from the starter cards is “Haunted Spirit”. He starts with “Heal” at level 1, which enables more damage reflected for as long he lives. This card also gets the magic reflect ability innately at level 4, but doesn’t really matter if you are using Owster.
If you feel that those two starter cards aren’t cutting it you may want to try some additional rentals like “Dark Ha’on”, “Lord Arianthus”, or “Chuthulu”. All of them are powerful tank cards that work well against mage when given the magic reflect ability.
The Delegation
I was lucky and managed to grab a few Owster Rotwell before he experienced a similar price jump to many cards. I’m not sure if anyone needs it, but I will offer an Owster delegation to one person who leaves a comment on this post. I will randomly choose a person in the comments in around 24 hours, just leave your Splinterlands name so I know where to send it.
While I can not claim it will be a permanent delegation, I have no intentions of selling,transferring, or combining any Owsters any time soon. I am confident the delegation will last a couple seasons minimum.
