Hi! I'm new to the Splinterlands blogging ecosystem. I hope this post doesn't violate any rule but does open some room for gameplay discussion.
So the new reward cards are out, and I have yet to have all of them. Of the first ones I got, the Ever-Hungry Skull really caught my eye. It's so weird seeing it have such a considerable amount of armor with only 1 HP. I play mostly in Silver League, and here are the stats at maxed Silver League levels:
At first I thought it's a pretty useless card, seeing as "magic is might" (well, mostly) here in the lower leagues and one hit at the Ever-Hungry Skull is all it takes. But then, as for most other cards like this, there's always that niche where Ever-Hungry Skull will work wonders.
Don't worry, if you don't wanna watch this battle, all good.
The Weak Magic and Equalizer rulesets essentially address Ever-Hungry Skull's weakness against magic monsters. I paired this famished thing with Scavo Hireling in that battle and what a tank it has become! Maybe I got lucky that the enemy wasn't using more magic monsters [1] (or strong, non-snipe ranged monsters) and also didn't focus their monsters' firepower in the frontline (much to the chagrin of my Screaming Banshee who fell quickly to the sneak attacks). Still, the idea of using Ever-Hungry Skull as tank or secondary tank in these rulesets [2] is still worth looking at.
How about you? Have you thought about other situations where we can effectively use Ever-Hungry Skull (apart from the Lost Magic ruleset, of course)? 😀
[1] It's understandable that some players would refrain from using magic monsters in the Weak Magic ruleset since magic attacks hit armor first, not unlike melee and ranged attacks. Many magic monsters are also on the slow side. Where magic monsters differ though is that their attacks always land so the armor is always going to be damaged, unless of course the enemy has Phase or Void... However, as I just realized while writing this, even if magic attacks always land, using magic monsters with Life Leech (such as Ancient Lich and Venari Bonesmith, as my opponent and I respectively played in the battle above) is not ideal in a ruleset that basically tells you to finish off the enemy monsters' armor first before their leeching ability may be of any use. Lesson learned for me - no more Life Leech in Weak Magic!
[2] While Weak Magic per se is certainly a good ruleset for our poor, deprived skull, Equalizer on its own is 50-50 simply because the enemy themselves will likely play low-health monsters and Ever-Hungry Skull will perish fast if these low-health monsters happen to be magic attackers as well.