Last week was very dense in the Splinterlands realm, with two presales, both sold out, one after a little over 1 minute. They were 2 days apart. And after another presale sold out the week before in under two minutes.
That's very impressive when you think about it. A tour de force by the Splinterlands team and the community which loves and invests in this game (soon to be games). All in a prolonged bear market, as I remarked in a previous post.
Now, is that all that happened recently? Nope. Tranche 1 of the SPS validator node licenses sold out too, the same day as the Riftwatchers packs. I believe almost half of them were still available and flew off the shelf in a matter of hours. What hasn't happened in months happened in hours.
Is that all?
Not really. Another million sold Chaos Legion packs milestone was reached, and that meant another airdrop for purchasers of packs from the primary market (i.e. Splinterlands).
The second legendary Chaos Legion summoner was airdrop last week as well.
The first one, Grandmaster Rathe, has been a very useful addition to my collection of cards. So, I was very anxious to see Conqueror Jacek in action as well.
I only received 2 regular Jaceks in the airdrop, so I bought 9 more from the secondary market to make sure I have it maxed. I do this early with important summoners, to avoid the disappointment of not being able to buy them later on if the price jumps. That's what happened with most of the legendary summoners from the Untamed edition, and I still regret not maxing them when they were cheaper (relatively speaking).
After maxing it, the next thing was to test it in battle.
Now, that's where things got a little too... random.
Jacek adds three buffs and abilities to his team:
- +2 speed
- scattershot
- piercing
The +2 speed is awesome in 99% of the cases except in the Reverse Speed ruleset.
While I am a fan of scattershot when you intentionally add one card (rarely two) to the lineup that has this ability, to have 4 or 5 cards with scattershot is a pure gamble.
You may not know, but scattershot only affects Range and Magic attacks, so a way to make scattershot from Jacek less of a factor would be to use more Melee monsters.
Piercing compensates to some degree the lack of focus of scattershot, by allowing range and melee monsters with high damage to go through the armor and take hit points as well.
The problem is, so far my win rate with Jacek is deplorable. It's true, I overused it even when I shouldn't, and tried different strategies, but I'll need to find suitable niches for it.
One could say it's perfect when the enemy has a Taunt monster. But not necessarily. If the enemy has multiple Triage monsters too (and/or Resurrect), and good-enough health in the backline, the randomness of scattershot is often countered by them.
I've tried to use the speed to my advantage and boost it further. This could be a better use case but need to find the right lineups not to be taken back by the randomness of scattershot.
Have you played Jacek so far in high leagues? How do you find it?