Splinterlands: My New Escalation Zero Mana Monster, Tilly Gearspring!

Splinterlands recently released their new expansion pack for Conclave Arcana in the form of Escalation. Some of the monsters in the new packs have been some of my favorites I have seen in a long time. There are several that have become absolutely essential in my Modern playbook and without them I would find winning much more difficult. Some of the items that most excited me were the new zero mana legendary cards that were contained within. They are the first ones since Elanor Bravefoot in Rebellion, if you are lucky enough to be able to afford one. A level one starts at $17, but I have to admit it's a great card!

My love affair with zero mana cards started in the Beta cards with Furious Chicken. Fortunately, recently the rulesets contain a new one called Outsider. It allows you to use one card from the old editions in Modern play. That got me very excited because there are some very badass cards I still have from editions past. But it also gives me the chance to dust off my old favorite Furious Chicken. What's so great about this card? It's zero mana and designed to fill an empty slot on a low mana team, and essentially be killed off. At higher levels it has attack as well, I never bought more than the humble level one and have never sold it! I finally get to use it again in something other than brawls!

The Furious Chicken was of course the first zero mana monster that is the grandfather of them all. Chaos had their zero mana cards as well which I've sold off already, and now Escalation has four new zero mana cards. I now have purchased all of them off of profits from card sales and I'm having a lot of fun with them. My latest acquisition is this little guy, Tilly Gearspring.

This zero mana beast starts off very weak at level one. It has one melee attack and one speed. I used it in several matches and all I got out of it was miss after miss, so it hasn't been a huge game changer for me to date. But it does gain speed at level three up to three which is a huge jump. At level four it gains an extra melee attack. Not to forget at level two in picks up Bloodline Pact so that any gnome card on your team gains one power when one of them defeats an enemy unit. However, it comes at a cost, as if one of the gnomes is defeated all the remaining gnomes take one true damage. Everything is balanced out in the end!

So let me share him in action, well, not really any action on his part in this one. But it does serve it's purpose as a zero mana card!

So here we go diving into battle!

You can see the entire battle here at this link.

This is a battle in Modern with a mana cap of 22. On top of that the rulesets include Back to Basics and Amplify. That means all special powers a unit may have aren't available for this battle, and the Amplify is pretty much cancelled out by the second ruleset. Also there is Unprotected meaning no units have shielding. This is a screenshot after the buffs have been applied but before the action has begun.

I chose Aurelia as my archon granting an extra health unit to each monster on my team. As tank I went with Halfling Refugee as the mana cap is so low. Then I put in my new toy Tilly Gearspring to pretty much be cannon fodder, which is kind of the ultimate purpose of a zero mana card! Next up I used Black Moor Jinx followed by a Foundations card Glimmermancer, which is always a reliably good magic card. Then I used Thunderhoof Nomad and rounded things off with Blackmoor Wild Elf.

My opponent brought in a nice archon with Kavorn Skarn that can summon any unit of the bloodline Drakoshan regardless of the splinter. That was a little spooky when I saw that! As a tank he used another favorite card of mine, Kyraseth Nythlarian, which I use all the time. Next up was Thornmaw Berserker followed by Songale which made me worry right away... Then the tail end was Calamity, a tough dragon card! This is a pretty good team to be completely honest!

By round two my opponent's tank has gone down as she was mere cannon fodder.

Not far into round two my tank goes down as well as does Tilly Gearspring as was pretty much the plan from the start.

By round three my opponent's team is showing some weakness, I have some hope that I might actually win this!

By round four I have three card left against the one Calamity with nine health. I'd say I have the advantage at this point!

And in round six Blackmoor Wild Elf delivers the final deathblow. Great game to my opponent, that was a really tough team! In these situations, where everyone loses their abilities, I find the best thing to do is place a lot of expendable cards up front as cannon fodder. That way the cards with the real attackers can do their damage before they are killed off. It works perfectly this time around!

Foundations Packs Opened

As always, I like to share a recent pack opening, this one wasn't too bad as opposed to my last one which stunk...

Here I got an arcon Marlai Singariel and a gold foil Arcane Curator, two pretty good pulls right there!

And nothing special here... Oh well, you can't win them all! These packs can be won by completing daily tasks in Frontier Mode which is free to play. It's a great way to build up a team to transition into playing Modern.

If you don't yet play Splinterlands, it is a fun game and free to play in Frontier Mode. So give a try, if you haven't joined in on the fun of playing Splinterlands you can join here: https://splinterlands.com?ref=thebighigg

That will do it for me for this Thursday. I hope you like seeing my new toy in action, although the action on it's part was pretty much limited to being killed. lol Please feel free to leave any comments or questions below, and as always thank you so much for all of your support, it really is greatly appreciated! It's almost Friday everyone, the weekend is almost upon us. Anyone have any big plans?

Disclaimer

I am not a financial planner and this isn't financial advice. Please always do your own research before investing your money. You worked hard enough to earn it!

Screenshots are property of Splinterlands

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