Cleanse Rearguard, the ability to survive Poison battles.

Hey everyone, it's been a while since I made a Splinterlands post and it's not that I've been playing less or don't have any topics to talk about anymore, in fact... I've saved multiple battles to still make a post about but managing two guilds, play my modern account and play brawls on five accounts takes a lot of my PC time! 😅

It's a Saturday morning at the time of writing and the rest of the house is still asleep so it's a good time to start typing, I've already depleted enough battle energy to not get to 50 by tomorrow morning because that would be a waste.

The topic for today is Poison battles, or the official name 'Noxious Fumes' in which all units receive two poison damage at the end of every round.

Of course there are some important abilities we can use to try and outlast our opponent because sometimes that's all it takes, just live longer than your opponent does and you will win the battle, sound easy doesn't it? Well, the reality is harder than it sounds of course.

I am making this post with the vision of a Silver level player, I know at higher level more cards receive abilities to adapt to poison but this is made for low(er) level players. 😁

The first ability we can use is the Immunity ability.

Besides the cards I have in my deck, there are some other cards that have Immunity up to Silver level but I don't use them enough and their price is just too high for me because as Splinterlands players we just can't have it all.

Going the Immunity way is just one of the options we have, and it's usually not the option I take because with many cards it has it's disadvantages.
Melee cards with this ability have the downside of being lined up at the front so they die too fast for them to be able to outlast the enemy and the poison while most of the ranged cards don't have a lot of health points so the only really nice ones are Kazira and Quora, but Immunity Quora is not easily obtained and requires a lot of brawl fights and some luck to pull ten copies.

So, what more options do we have?

The Scavenge ability can be helpful, taking up 1 HP per monster that dies on the battlefield but it requires a unit with a lot of HP to start with, like Lord Thanalor, Endless Ape has the drawback of melee again, so it's generally in the front and dies too quickly because of enemy damage.

Then of course we can use the Cleanse ability that just removes the poison from the unit in the first position but there are not a lot of them in my deck.

The drawback with Cleanse is, that once it removed the poison from the unit in the first position, it just stops cleansing until that unit is killed and the next unit gets to the front position and that's only if the unit with the Cleanse ability is still alive by that time.

The beauty with Cleanse Rearguard

I only have one card with this ability in my deck, and for up to Silver level there's only one other - being Jicarilla the Rime which with a price of $21 for a level 2 is too much for me.

The great thing about Cleanse Rearguard is that it doesn't stop cleansing after it cleansed the last unit in the team, it just moves to the next, and the next until everyone is freed of poison!

Building a team and combining Cleanse and Cleanse Rearguard.

Building my team, I started with my front, using a unit with Flank to protects Slade's armor to strike with using Armored Strike my Archon Elias provides. Anasth Soothsayer is at the very back, cleansing the front and Sanctus Vicar is in front of it so it will cleanse himself in the second round, by that time he has taken 2 poison damage but hopefully when my opponent doesn't use Sneak or even worse, Opportunity to take out my backline that's fine. Attacking the rear is much less prevalent than it was when Chaos Legion was still in Modern so this is just an educated guess.

At the start of round 2, my tank has died but Anasth Soothsayer is freed of poison so it will remove poison from Slade this round.

By round 4, most of the enemy team died with poison damage and my team helped them a little bit with expediting their deaths. 😇

My Caravan Guard heals the backline for the poison damage they received before they got cleansed and now the only poisoned unit in my team is Janni Rebel.
By round 5, my entire team is cleansed and the only unit with Immunity is at the front and feeling pretty vulnerable, mind you this battle is against a much higher level opponent.

Of course this all is not to brag because I get losing streaks as well and my win rate most seasons is only average around 50%. Hopefully this can improve when the brackets proposal passes as we won't have to face much higher level decks anymore.

You can watch the battle unfold for yourself here.

This season the rewards are higher, I'm not sure how this is calculated but it could have something to do with the price of SPS being lower than last season.

With the lower price in mind, I thought it was a good long term idea to buy some more SPS 🙂

Well, that's it for today. Thanks for stopping by!

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