Helping Steemmonsters Beginners #3 - Good Monsters, Bad Monsters

Greetings, again, people and monsters alike!

Continuing my series of posts to help beginners adapt to the game and learn a few tricks.

Today I will be writing a short one about a basic skill that can be honed to to help you in any tactical game.

Evaluating your assets. Or in this case - monster cards.

If you ask me which is the best monster I met, I will put a common in Top 3. By the way, I will not be making any chart today but that may soon come as a contest for you.

The awesome common:

Why is Kobold Miner so good?

Mana Efficiency.

That term you get a lot for the mana you spend. (In Steemmonsters cheap in mana means it takes up less space in your team.) And in this case you do get a lot for very little. Well, relatively. For only two mana you have a sneak who is also on the right team for his melee attack - Fire. Because the usual Fire Shard summoner Malric Inferno would usually give all melee attack monsters +1 attack. So the Kobold Miner will usually deal 2 damage at the opponent's back line. At level 3 he has an early attack increase to 2 (3 with the bonus from the summoner). And that is a lot of firepower for a 2 mana creature at 3rd level. Also, his health soon becomes decent so he would most likely survive a hit. And the Kobold Miner can be positioned so that he takes no hits.

Just beware the Thorns or Retaliate traps for sneaker that some players will put for you.

Do I have examples for bad monsters?

That's the more difficult part. No specific examples, rather a conditional rule - Bad are those monsters who would take a slot but not participate efficiently in the battle. Sometimes you can do nothing but keep monsters lining in the reserves, waiting for those in front of them to die. But if you are not limited to that choice or you don't have a special strategy, you'd better pick team members who fight since the beginning or at least back up your tank line. Now with the new Reach (melee attack from the second position) ability we have better options.

Also, having better options for the role makes otherwise decent monsters bad... in most cases.

As I have mentioned in a previous post, the Hive account@steemmonsters designers have done a good job at making variety possible. There are those who rarely be included in a team but then they will do some work. Here, again, the mana efficiency rule will help you evaluate them. If you can spend the mana on them in high mana cap battles, good. If not... They will have to wait for their time to shine. (Also, at a higher level somebody would develop a useful ability and then that would make that monster better. Slightly.)

But banking on that... is a trap. I like that Double Strike ability but an Undead Minotaur having just 1 attack for 6 mana... Too expensive to normally consider. Or 5 mana for that Exploding Dwarf... A 3 attack, 2 Speed, 1 health dude that is most likely to die before being able to deal damage... We may try and position the Dwarf so that some attacks are happening but in most cases that would probably fail. I may be mistaken, who knows. Retaliate, Blast... The dude sure has abilities. When will they resolve and will the resolve more than even once in a battle, that's the issue. Oh, but when all melee monsters may attack regardless of position, under that condition... That is a serious glass cannon (A lot of damage, but still very fragile).

Finally, there be monsters whose tons of mana pay off. Those are the so called Bombs - the powerful cards in the set. You'll know them when you see them. Saying 'now will not be the time for this legendary, though' is still an important skill.

Well, I may have raised more questions than I have given answers. Please, argue with me in the comment section if you feel like it and you have examples to prove me wrong. Nothing bad in that. See you soon with another guide.