This week's Battle Challenge is dedicated to the Disintegrator. In my Battle Challenge, I used him at level 1, since I don't have a Summoner at a higher level yet. Disintegrator has the Demoralize ability. From level 5 he gets Trample and from level 8 Knock Out. In the following you can see his stats:
Disintegrator is obviously predestined for Melee matchups. With his 2 attack, 2 shield and 5 life he is averagely good for 7 mana. However, his ability Demoralize makes him the absolute meta in most (anti-) melee setups. All these melee rulesets like Melee Mayhem, Super Sneak and Up Close & Personal make him extremely good and give him a big advantage in all mid-mana to high-mana games against players who don't use him. In combination with a shield tank and e.g. Mylors Thorns ability, a team is created that is almost unstoppable in said rule-sets.
And that's exactly what you'll see in the following fight:
Here you can analyse the battle yourself :)
As I described earlier, we are in an optimal scenario for Disintegrator. With 27 Mana we are in the middle range. The rule set combination Equal Opportunity & Up & Close Personal benefits the Disintegrator a lot.
By Up & Close Personal only Melee monsters are allowed. These attack through Equal Opportunity the monster with the lowest life points. The combination behaves somewhat similar to Super Sneak for the Disintegrator.
Mylor Crowling is always a very good choice for Melee setups. His Thorns ability is extremely good. It mirrors 2 damage on an attacking Melee monster (1 damage on monsters with the shield ability).
Mycelic Infantry is used in my setup to intercept the Front Tank's attacks. He receives halved Melee damage because of his Shield ability and, in combination with Thorns, will probably last longer than the enemy tank, even if it also has the Shield ability, as it did this round.
Mycelic Morphoid serves as a Meat shield as it so often does. It is very cheap for its 1 mana and for the rule-set equal opportunity it is perfect to keep the damage away from important cards.
Xenith Monk and Hill Giant are relatively cheap Melee monsters that can also serve as a Meat Shield with their 6 lifepoints. In this round, another choice might have been better, which I will explain later.
The Disintegrator's role is to lower the opponent's Melee attack by 1. Thus he counteracts Tarsa. In addition, he has a relatively high stamina due to his yet relatively high combination of shield and life. His 2 Attack are also essential, because he inflicts at least 1 Damage on cards with the shield ability (in contrast to Xenith Monk or Hill Giant for example).
My strategy worked okish. Sure the combination of Mylor, Disintegrator Mycelic Infantry is bonkers. But I made some huge mistakes in this round, which could’ve been punished. One area of improvement I see is that I should have chosen monsters that have lower life points than the Disintegrator in order to support it optimally in the Equal Opportunity rule-set. So I should have replaced either Hill Giant or Xenith Monk with 2 cards that cost less mana and have less life points.
Fortunately, my opponent used a monster with the Sneak ability that round, which seems to get a higher priority than Opportunity. This lowered the life points of my Xenith Monk below those of my Disintegrator, so the opponent's monsters did focus on my Xenith Monk. Until he died, my Mycelic Infantry's life was reduced enough for Opportunity to focus on him. Very lucky.
In the end, the combination of Shield, Thorns and Demoralize was sufficient, even if there was a need for optimization.
I like Disintegrator very much, because he works very well with Mylor (and he’s my favorite summoner). Because of this I use him quite often, especially in Melee setups.
