Strategy Corner #02 - Grund, monster which need your attention.

So we have another battle weekly challenge and another card which recently is one of my favorites. Unfortunately, last week I was busy and I couldn't make the post about Nerissa Tridawn, very useful card for high mana Keyla matches for modern play. This time I don't have any video related to today's battle, After Immortalis was available around month ago I prepared special Splinterlands.tv stream about him and battles like one below. Like our last Share Your Battle Weekly Challenge I will try to present you not only a specific battle, but rather general strategy line-up which can you use in many different situation.

Grund, as you can see, it is not the most resistant monster for first tank position. It's lacking any of survivability skills like a shield, void etc. But even on the bronze level his attack potential is huge. After gold league level with trample ability, he become the beast for sure. With the addition of new earth summoner: Immortalis, who grants shatter for all monster, he starts to bright even more.

Let's back to survivability, or better saying lacking of it. You cannot just use Grund alone and hope to survive enough that his damage matters. He definitely need some protection, so let's disscuss some option with battle I have choosen.

Here is quite a usual battle line-up, which recently can be use successfully versus most of other modern setups.

Let's talk about some of core choices here, of course besides Grund:

Immortalis, summoner mentioned before, it is a great addition to any earth line-up. All his skills are useful, but most important is void. Now all our monster are quite resilant to magic damage which helps a lot with earth splinter mirror versus Obsidian. Shatter helps a lot with any armored opponent's unit, and works as a charm with Grund where first attack destroy all armor and second attack do just a lot of damage to the victim.

Mycelic Slipspawn the card which make this whole strategy viable. Now with void ability from Immortalis, armor from Mycelic Queen and forcefield on his own, which blocks every higher damage attack, Mycelic becomes monster very difficult to kill fast. It gives in most battle enough time to let Grund do his work. With additional healing options it's going to be nightmare for opponent.

Did I mentioned healing options ? Right, here comes **Spirit Hoarder**. Very useful addition to this kind of line-up. With great resilient capability of Slipspawn, this little fellow could use his triage ability for at least 1 round, but much more often 2-3 rounds. So together they buy us a lof of time to make a salat from opponent team :)

So what about other choices ? In our example I used Goblin Psychic, quite useful card to heal our Grund, provide some additional damage plus can destroy some of the opponent's healing strategy. For other options we definitely need more firepower, so you can use any of big damage dealer, depend of the rulese and card you have. In this example I choose Uloth Dhampir with high range damage and stun. Below I will present another similar setup with different cards.

Round 2 just begins. Look carefully, with all our protection and healing abilities opponent manage to destroyed only 2 points of armor from our taunt and tank monster. We manage to destroy one of his main damage dealer, and we are on the good way to do more damage to the next monster.

Round 3, you can check whole battle here, how unlucky we were on second round. Opponent missed almost all of our attacks, but still we have advantage. Djinn Oshannus is very strong card, and with speed boost from Keyla quite difficult for our quite slow team to hit.

Round 4, we had lucky shot from Uloth and finally killed Djinn, still we haven't lost any monster on the battlefield. Now it's clear that the battle is our :). Now it just the time to clean out.

Grund is a great card, it was strong before but with some addition with a new summoner and some support cards, it is not easy to beat. For sure he is not all around a card that you can use it alone and count for an easy win. It's not a card for low mana matches as well, wasting 10 mana for one monster with so low survivability is not a great idea. As I mentioned above you need to use it smartly with other cards.
Let's talk a little bit about card order. Mycelic Slipspawn is a card which in most cases you want to use as last in case of any blast damage options. And because taunt is the first target rest of the line-up order is not so important. I try to use more HP cards first with some of the healing opportunities from Golbin Psychic.

Here is another example of a similar line-up, on my next stream I will prepared some of battles with Grund and Immortalis as my predicition game, so please come and join our game.

Thank you so much for reading all the way to the end. I hope you like this kind of battle and strategy presentation. More strategy analysis, discussion and prediction game you can find on my Wednesday Splinterlands.tv stream. You can check the schedule here

If you wish to try out Splinterlands you can use my reference link.

All images used in this article are open source. Thumbnails borrowed with permission from the Splinterlands team or made in Cooltext.