It's been an interesting week in the Splinterlands universe with the Runi mint ending today (and being even rarer than expected)! The battle challenge this week is to use the Gem Meteor. Much like the Temporal Master Challenge, I'm not a huge fan of this card.
While it's an epic neutral monster, the Gem Meteor can be a bit of a wild card. Its scatter shot ensures that you really don't know where it'll target. At 5 mana, it's a hard sell to take on that uncertainty in all but high mana cap battles with favorable rulesets. In those cases though, sometimes a wild card is exactly what's needed.
The Battle
The battle we'll take a look at is a 42 mana cap battle with both Opportunity and Magic Reflect abilities applied to all monsters. This is interesting as any monster can now attack from any position (except ranged from first position, assuming they don't have close range). In this scenario, magic attackers are much less favored, given the potential for damage to be bounced back, meaning concentrating on speed may be useful to aid in hitting first and potentially dodging melee/ranged attacks. With the Equal Opportunity ruleset, sometimes monsters with Taunt will be used to help control the flow of battle. Everything except those with Scattershot would be drawn to attack it, hence the utility of having a wildcard like Gem Meteor here.
 | Knowing that magic isn't favored, but speed and armor are, Kelya Frendul is a natural fit here. There's also a good number of Water monsters that would complement this strategy. | ||
 | This is a monster that got a lot more play time from me prior to Chaos Legion. It's a fast monster with 4 speed by default at level 3, with Dodge. The speed bump from Kelya ramps it up further, and then chained with the Supply Runner's Swiftness and the Flying Squid's Blindness means it'll be challenging to land a hit here. | ||
 | While the Reach ability is overridden by Opportunity here, the Blindness and high speed of the Flying Squid aids in my overall strategy of hitting fast and being hard to hit back. | ||
 | Even though the Deeplurker doesn't benefit from the Opportunity ruleset as it has Opportunity, it's a hard hitting card with poison. At a default speed of 4, this is one of the slowest cards here, which means it's still quite fast by typical standards in gold and even faster with the current buffs. | ||
 | The Supply Runner's real strength here is its Swiftness ability. While it can deal out some ranged damage from the back, being able to buff the speed of all of the units here is a great reason to fit it in to a lineup. | ||
| With a reasonably fast base speed of 4, the Gem Meteor is included as an "anti-taunt" mechanic. If this was properly leveled to Gold league, it'd be more effective in the damage per turn, but for now it'll suffice. | ||
 | A staple in my line ups, Uraeus is here to deal out sneak damage, with poison. Being the lowest health creature here, I expect it to be targeted first with the Equal Opportunity ruleset. Forcing the damage towards the back allows the faster creatures up front to keep dodging and dealing out damage. |
Taking a look at the field, it seems my high speed strategy will pay off well here:
The speed disparity (compounding with Dodge and Blindness) was so great, that only one hit was landed on my team throughout the battle - aside from Uraeus losing its armor, everything else was unscathed due to misses.
Unfortunately, it seems my wild card strategy was largely not needed here. The Gem Meteor didn't contribute much to the win, perhaps if it was leveled higher it would, but the real use would be to ignore taunt.
Final Thoughts
The Gem Meteor still won't be a card I play much, unless in very specific circumstances. It seems as though the best fit for it is an anti-taunt insurance policy, but the trade off is it's hard to control/predict where it'll hit.
Am I wrong here? Is there a better scenario where scattershot would be useful? I considered the case of the Explosive Weaponry ruleset, but that still falls under the anti taunt strategy for the most part. Let me know in the comments, thanks for reading!
