This is my second article reviewing a battle setting for Splinterland. You can find the one there.
Today I’m going to review a fairly new setting the Equalizer which make all monster have the same life count. This is pretty crazy setup but it is super fun.
Tactic 1 : Invest in armor
The first tactics you can use for this setup is to invest in monster with armor. At the start of the game all monster get the same life, but the armor is not equalized. Therefore monster with armor end up with more resilience.
Perfect card to show case this technique is the Enchanted Defender. This card is normally quite week as it can be one-shot by a magic attack. But with the equalizer boost in HP it might become your most resilience unit.
The obvious counter move for this tactics is to invest in monster with magic attack (given that the setup doesn’t include weak magic too).
Tactic 2 : Reconsider all your 1 HP monsters
Usually I avoid playing with monsters who has only 1 HP as they are vulnerable to attacks with opportunist feature. You can check my article article about Spark Pixies for more detail about the topic.
The equalizer setup completely redistribute the cards for those single HP monsters and even make some of them pretty OP:
In fire family:
- The exploding Dwarf can become a wonderful tank
- The serpentine spy will provide you 2 extra melee attack for only 3 of mana cost
- The Spark Pixies become a nice long range support unit
In the water family:
The Ice Pixie can become rely interesting low cost card
In the life family:
- The Truthspeaker become far less vulnerable and can bring you a nice boost in armor.
In the death family:
- The Fallen Specter become ever more legendary… seriously with 10 HP this card is OP
- The Vampire become less vulnerable in early game and therefore can leach big among of HP before it get to the front line. It become a wonderful unit to put as first long range units.
Tactic 3: Long line is better than tall line
The equalizer setup give free HP to all your units therefore it is better for you to use all the monster slots available. In other-word you want to deploy a long line of monster rather than few powerful monster.
Moreover you usually want to use non-expensive monster. In this setting some normal week 2 to 4 mana monsters can become OP, like the Fallen Specter for example. Death splinter actually has many cheap monsterd which become super interesting in the setup.
The fact you should prefer cheap monster bring me to the most important tactical point: choosing the tank.
Tactic 4: The prisoner dilemma and the tank
You do not want to deploy an expensive heavy tank in the setup! In fact the HP is equalize between both team. So the team bringing the more expensive tank is offering free HP to the opponent…
For example if you bring a Kraken to the fight you are offering all your opponent’s monsters 14 HP…
This is basically a prisoner dilemma setting:
| Your opponent bring a heavy tank | Your opponent don’t | |
|---|---|---|
| You bring a heavy tank | You could have save mana on the tank and bring more small monster | You give free HP to your enemy and likely lose |
| You don’t | You are getting free HP for you small monster and likely win | You both have small monster, not great but not terrible |
The best option for you is your opponent bring in a heavy tank and you only bought low mana cost monsters. This means all your monsters get free HP from the enemy tanks and your numerical superiority has high chance to bring you to victory.
So you should logically not invest in a tank. In case you opponent invest in a tank you will be in the best case scenario. If you opponent don’t invest in tank you are still in a better situation than if you invested in tank and don’t give your opponent free HP.
However I would recommend you to ask yourself: what would be my situation if I don’t get free HP from my enemy? Look at the monster with the most HP in your line. If all monster get this HP count, will you be happy? If yes go ahead into battle. If not you want to bring a monster to boost you HP count. As a rule of thumb in this kind of game I never spend more than 30% of my mana cap on the tank.
Other points to considers
Opportunity attacks get a bit weaker as they don’t disturb the enemy by targeting weak units (all units will have the same HP count). However all monster with opportunity ability will by default attack the front line which is not bad, that increase your melee strength.
Healing & tank healer become ever better than usually.
Scavenger and life leach ability become a bit stronger.