Ladies and Gentlemen, let me introduce you to our newest dinnerguest, Dr. Blight.
Try to be polite and ignore the Doctor's low attack stats and extremely sluggish speed, because believe me when I tell you that he has 5 abilities that cannot be ignored. While he may look at first glance like a Death Splinter (and thematically I am not sure why he is not) but Dr. Blight is indeed nuetral and available for all Splinters.
Obviously, at max level Dr. Blight really starts to shine with 5 relevant and game altering abilities, keep in mind you will need 11 copies of the card to do so, which will undoubtedly be very expensive. Being nuetral and relatively low mana cost (4) very quickly makes Dr. Blight a consideration in almost every Splinter in many rulesets. Imagine Dr. Blight in slow rule sets, or Little League where Dr. Blight may be the best possibly 4 mana monster on the market.
Let's list his 5 abilities in the order in which he has them.
Level 1:
Affliction: When a Monster with Affliction hits a target, it has a 50% chance of applying Affliction on the target making it un-healable.
Slow: Reduces the Speed of all enemy Monsters by 1. Minimum speed is 1.
Level 2:
Poison: Attacks have a chance (50%) to apply poison, which does automatic damage to the target at the beginning of each round after the poison is applied. Poison does 2 damage each end of the turn and is not affected by shield or void.
Level 3:
Scavenger: Gains 1 max health each time any monster dies.
Level 4:
Weaken: Reduces the Health of all enemy Monsters (by 1, but can't get lower than 1). An exception to this is if the enemy monster than scavenges. If it has less than 1 health and then scavenges, its max health will stay at 1.
Even at Level 1, spending 4 mana to slow down your opponents creatures can instantly turn the table on mirror match ups or speed matters games and I gauraantee those annoying "misses" will start piling up for Dr. Blight opponents. Dr. Blights own speed issues will make his Affliction unreliable, but when it lands it can single handedly ruin a good tank, especially in heal engines (I am looking at you life splinter).
At Level 2 Dr. Blight is a tank melter. The poison ability paired with affliction makes any successful Dr. Blight attack really devastating. As long as you can protect him and give him a few chances to land an attack, it appears Dr. Blight can take over games quickly.
At Level 3 Dr. Blight becomes a little less fragile, and begins to boost his life total. I think this is an extremely relevant ability especially if you can pick off a few creatures in round 1 and yet I think this is the least important ability, because I think pairing the Doctor with armor boosts will already be important. Being resilient is incredibly important in order to give Dr. Blight the most opportunity to land a few shots.
At max Level 4, we see Weaken. Weaken paired with Slow is over powered. Weaken pair with Slow AND Scavenger seems meta moprhing. I watch lots of Splinterland tournament on Twitch, and I can think back to all the high powered match ups and each one seems like if one side had the Doctor, the game would have been completely tilted to that side. If one 4 mana card can tilt the scales that much, pretty much all high level players will need to find a maxed out Doctor to add to their collection.
I would love to hear your thoughts about Doctor Blight, will he be a neutral Meta Morphing monster?
Let me know in the comments below.