This week's Battle Challenge is dedicated to the Carrion Shade, an Common Death Splinter card with a 1 mana cost. In my Battle Challenge, I used a level 1 card because I don't have access to a higher Summoner. Starting at level 3, the card gets the Flying ability, which improves it quite a bit. Here you can see the stats of the Carrion Shade:
Carrion Shade often serves the purpose of a meat shield in my eyes. Due to its low mana cost, it's a good choice to use as a defence against against sneak & opportunity attacks. In my eyes, it is suitable for the rule sets Equal Opportunity, Equalizer, Melee Mayhem and Super Sneak. After level 3 it’s also really good in Earthquake. He is a real no-go due to it’s low life in Noxious Fumes except you place him in the first spot. Explosive Weaponary can also be quite hard for Carrion Shade. All in all he is very versatile and useable in the most rule sets and a must-use for bronze and silver play.
And here is my entry for this week:
Here you can analyse the battle yourself :)
The fight you see takes place with the rule sets Melee Mayhem and Back to Basics with a 14 mana cap. This is a really good rule set and mana combination, cause sneak and opportunity aren’t available, while every melee monster can attack the first position. It’s a perfect usecase for low mana low life cards with melee attack like the Carrion Shade and Cursed Slimeball. You can see very well how much damage those cards can deal without taking damage. We both had the same amount of damage at the start of the battle (both 5 damage to deal in a round). I focused the mana use on a tank with high hit points so he can be the meat shield for my low life cards. My enemy on the other side used his mana splitted on multiple cards and doesn’t have a real tank with great hit points.
 | Cursed Windeku is always a great tank with his thorns ability. In this rule set he had to do fight without his greatest strength. But he is still a great meat shield for 6 mana and still provides 9 life and 2 dmg. His 3 speed also became pretty handy in this battle. A very cost-efficient meat shield indeed. |
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 | Undead Badger also had to fight without it’s main strength the Sneak ability. But he provides 1 dmg which is enough for 2 mana. |
 | Both Carrion Shade and Cursed Slimeball had the benefits that I have already described in detail above. Normally they are great meat shield but in a low mana Melee Mayhem battle they can be great damage dealer too. Combined with Corpse Fiend they would be a top trio team of low mana Melee Mayhem battles. |
My strategy worked very well in my opinion. The low mana attackers and the high mana tank have done their job and won the battle without one card dying.
Carrion Shade is an absolutely great card for certain rule sets and okish in most of the other ones ^^ He is best suited in low mana battles and battles where he can attack from any position.
I like him very much but since every splinter got a 1 mana card he is not that unique.
