This week's Share Your Battle challenge features Gem Meteor! This was an interesting challenge for me, because thinking back right now I'm not sure if I have ever used Gem Meteor in a battle. Despite being a relatively accessible card as a Chaos Legion epic, I never pulled a copy in any of the Chaos Legion packs I opened and never bothered to try renting one out. So this was a great learning experience to try out something new!
Gem Meteor is a neutral monster with a ranged attack. Neutral monsters tend to cost a little more for their stats, as do ranged attackers, so Gem Meteor isn't the most cost efficient monster in the game. At level 1, for 5 mana you just get a single ranged attack, though it is paired with a respectable 4 speed and 5 health. One interesting thing about Gem Meteor is that it comes with the Scattershot ability, meaning that it will hit a random target each turn. On one hand, it injects quite a bit of RNG into the battle. On the other hand, that also means that it is immune to Taunt and can also have the potential to hit some of the weaker opposing monsters.
If you wanted to jump right to the action, the Battle Link is right here. Want to hear some more about the lineup? Read on further!
Here is the ruleset for today's battle. We have a high mana cap of 52 with the Equal Opportunity and Stampede rulesets. Our splinter choices are also extremely limited, with only Fire as an option.
I went with one of the more infamous summoners in the game - Yodin Zaku. Yodin is great in the ruleset, since he gives all of our monsters Blast. Thanks to Equal Opportunity it is likely that our monsters will be attacking the middle of our opponent's lineup, meaning that we could be dealing out double Blast damage. My plan was for my monsters to be able to quickly knock out the weaker enemy monsters with Opportunity and boosted ranged damage thanks to Yodin's buff, while simultaneously weakening any adjacent ones. This should theoretically allow my team to quickly take out all of the monsters on the other side of the field.
I started my team with a pair of tanks. Living Lava is a solid melee tank, with plenty of health and Shield, to go along with a hard-hitting 3 melee damage. Molten Ash Golem was my secondary tank with plenty of bulk in its 10 health, plus its Close Range ability ensured that it would still be able to attack if it ended up in the front position.
Lava Launcher came up next as my kind-of sort-of third tank. Similarly to Molten Ash Golem, it combined ranged damage with decent tankiness. Blood Maker was up next as my insurance policy. The Fire splinter doesn't have many monsters with Taunt, but if my opponent did happen to have any Taunt, then Blood Maker could still potentially hit any squishy monsters on the opposing team.
I finished off my team with some more ranged damage. Our guest star of the week, Gem Meteor, was there as an additional insurance policy just like Blood Maker. With boosted ranged damage and Scattershot, Gem Meteor has twice, or maybe even thrice as many chances to hit something important. Last but not least was Tinderlock, another hard hitter whose Last Stand ability meant that he wouldn't be going down without a fight.
With the lineup set, it's off into battle! When I see the selected teams I am hopeful - my opponent has brought quite a variety of attack damage to the battlefield, but I don't see anything that is particularly worrisome in their lineup. If my monsters can land their hits and start piling up the Blast damage then this battle could quickly turn in my favor.
The battle starts off with a bang - in the first round my monsters are able to quickly knock out my opponent's Djinn Apprentice as well as their Tenyii Striker, taking a significant portion of their firepower off the field before they are able to do much damage to my team.
Equal Opportunity battles where the Blast ability comes into play can often be quick ones, and this one was no exception - after one more round the battle was nearly over. Thanks to a hail of ranged attacks and Blast damage from my team, my opponent's lineup were whittled down to 2 heavily damaged monsters by the start of round 3. Two more quick attacks and my victory was sealed! And again, if you wanted to see the whole battle for yourself, you can see it right here.
My strategy for this battle played out perfectly - the ranged monsters I brought into the fight were able to hit extra hard thanks to Yodin, quickly finishing off the opposing team. Gem Meteor fit in perfectly with the ranged portion of my lineup, adding in some serious firepower to help my team to victory.
As I mentioned at the start, Gem Meteor is not the most cost-effective monsters out there. As such, it isn't the kind of monster that I will be sending in to battle all the time. However, with Scattershot and high speed it does have a niche, and it is certainly an option that I will have to keep in mind going forward!
Thank you so much for reading all the way to the end. Interested in seeing some more of my writing in the future? Be sure to give me a follow! In the meantime, if you'd like to see some of my recent posts:
Splinterlands Economics: Equity - An overview of the concept of equity, and how we can apply it to Splinterlands!
Shaking Things Up - Using Dragons in Battle! - Last week's battle challenge, featuring the Dragon splinter!
Splinterlands Economics: (Financial) Contagion - An introduction to the concept of a Contagion, and how we can apply it to Splinterlands!
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All images used in this article are open source and obtained from Pixabay or Unsplash. Thumbnails borrowed with permission from the Splinterlands team or made in Canva.