Hey Folks!
With this Series I want to make a couple quick pointers towards individual rulesets for beginners to itch out those extra few niche wins within those particular rulesets. In Splinterlands the slightest adjustment - for example positioning of your card - can have the biggest impact. Today we want to start with poison - my favourite one!
To begin its not perfectly clear what the poison ruleset even does as a new player. It doesnt magically deal 2 damage to everyone.
Each of your minions gets a negative status effect asigned to it at the beginning of the game. This status effect has as a result that said minion receives two pure damage at the end of each round (damage that goes through armor).
So much for the basics - what can we do about it.
There are two obvious and two...less obvious "abilities" to counter this ruleset.
The obvious ones are the **cleanse **ability on a monster or summoner - such as this little fella - which results in once its his turn taking OFF the negative status buff from the first monster in your lineup essentially saving that monster from 2 damage each round.
And the **Immunity **ability - which can be found in our good friend Almo - who is arguably not the most beginner friendly card being an expensive legendary.
While you can use Bard really early on and rent him very cheap - lets look at the two other counters, which I tend to use most of the times, especially when playing low rank poison battles.
The more obvious one in my opinion is the brute force solution. HIGH HP. The more health your minions have the more Poision damage they can take - makes perfect sense. But remember, we still play regular rounds, meaning we get attacked and do attack damage. So its up to you to find a good balance between stacking HP and dishing out damage. From my experience it makes sense to flood the board up front with low HP minions and try to keep the high HP minions in the back - so they dont get butchered by the attacks, but only take poison damage and are ready to fight once the opposition has been widdled down by the poisionous decay.
This leads us to my favourite strategy. The healing ability. This sucker wins games over and over and over for me when used in this ruleset. And you can use it for very cheap in almost every colour. Here are a couple examples (They all got 1 HP too much in the picture for their lvl 1 version - point still stands):
Many of these cards tend to be used as tanks - due to the healing ability (other example would be Sea Monster). In Poison I love to put them all the way in the back / second to the last position (to be safe from sneak). The healing ability completely negates the poison and your full HP healing tank will stand strong in front to crush everything thats left from your opponent.
Here is a great example of how strong a healer in the back + high HP can be. My opponents minions where WAY higher level - and I am therefore assuming his summoner as well.
https://splinterlands.com?p=battle&id=sl_7d9476fcd0c92d11a7b7acac5193b134&ref=glubski