In pre-Chaos Splinterlands, Altric Stormbringer and Water magic is one of the most frustrating deck to beat in the Bronze leagues. Throw in Venari Wavesmith there and you might as well quit the game before even starting the rumble.
But now that Chaos is here, there is another new mage isin town to bring magic havoc to everything. Say hello to Obsidian and her maniacal magic firing minions. In many of the Bronze leages (especially when Chaos first came to Splinterlands), Obsidian and Earth magic quickly became one of the most commonly played deck.
Having lost many sucessive matches against this Earth Magic deck, I eventually found a good counter go this. My strategy is using a Thaddius Brood deck (which I am giving the coolest name - Death Dealers - no relation to the Underworld movies of course).
Even in pre-Chaos, I was still using Death Dealers deck to counter Alric's Water magic deck. The overall strategy very effective, for as long as Venari Wavesmith is not there. Using Bone Golem as tanker due to the magic damage resistance, my usual go to minions are Undead Priest, Skeleton Assassin, Death Elemental and Twisted Jester. If more mana is avaibable, then I'll throw in Mantoid as well. So the strategy is pretty clear here, use Bone Golem to tank the hits while the rest of the gang clears the board with Snipe and Sneak. Here is an example:
Death Dealers vs Water Magic (pre-Chaos)
Now I am very sure that I am not the first person to thought of this strategy nor am I the only one using this strategy so I won't take credit for this. Even I got this idea from continuously playing the game.
Anyway, things have changed with Chaos. Undead Priest, Skeleton Assassin and Twisted Jester are no longer available as the starter cards so this makes it harder to assemble a well synchronized team to deal with Obsidian Earth Magic deck. So most new players might struggle in Bronze league when dealing with this earth magic maddness. So after having many losing streaks, even with Thaddius Brood, I finally found the missing link to make a working Death Dealers strategy. The missing link is Twisted Jester, a very simple card with 2 range Snipe damage for the cost of 4 mana only. The other Death Dealers are Bone Golem (tank), Death Elemental (snipe), Undead Badger (sneak) and Silent Sha-Vi (sneak and last position). Check out my Death Dealers deck in action:
If more mana is available, I'll swap Undead Badger for Riftwing in 2nd position and then throw in some other sneak or snipe to fill up the gaps or heck, some filler to take a first hit for the tanker as you see here:
Death Dealers vs Earth Magic II
This Death Dealers strategy works in general for mid 20s mana battle in the Bronze leagues as anti-Obsidian Earth magic deck. The only downside, new players have no choice but to rent Twisted Jester, which at the time of writing is about 0.6 DEC/per or 2.5 credits (at cheapest).
It could be used against other decks as well, where you can switch out Bone Golem for Cursed Windeku. But I don't have enough data to determine the effectiveness of this strategy.
Let me know if you guys can think of other strategies that could work against Obsidian Earth Magic.