Strategy Corner #04 - Magi Necrosi - Is death splinter underestimated ?

I think Death was one of my main splinter for a long time since I started playing Splinterlands. In my first few months before Chaos Legion was introduced, I played using rented cards, and I was a fan of all debuff death team, with Mimosa Nightshade and all those annoying monsters with demorlize, silence, and headwinds. I really liked to watch the opponent team could not do any damage to my monster.

With new Chaos Legions I tried to build strong death team as main splinter collections. I have bought some older cards Dark Ha'on, Death Elemental and some others. Unfortunately in lower leagues, that death team was not so efficient, but I still played death a lot and adopted to the new meta.

Even for some time I was classified as Death splinter player , because if I played a more serious tournament battle opponent should be prepared for unorthodox death team :).

The death offer so many different strategy which you can be use depend of the batle rulset. So let's go to our today's hero and later discuss some other options.

Magi Necrosi is very versitle card, six mana monster mean that it could be use in higher mana match, but it still valuable asset in lower mana, especially with camouflage ability. I will try to explain this strategy later.

Magi's stats looks quite solid, 3 damage from silver level, high speed, lacking some Health Points, but got some protection from camouflage.
Second main ability of Necrosi is snipe. I get the impression, that snipe is not very popular ability among the players. The main issue is that it may lead to the situation that our team will lose all focus fire, especially when we will use any other targeting options like e.g. sneak. In my opinion, this weakness can be turned into an advantage, where we can kill some of the sensitive and important monster from the opponent team.
In higher league Magi Necrosi cannot offer more damage, but with additional abilities like oppress and stun he becomes more like distruction monster. And in some cases when opponent try to protect his line with non-attack monster he becomes so deadly doing double damage.

The battle I choose to demonstrate one of the use of Magi is very simple. It was brozne Chaos Legion and Riftwatchers cards only. I hope in near future the format will extend to Chaos Legion Set, so all releated rewards and promo cards should be also included.

There is no additional rules of combat, 36 medium range mana. For this kind of battle Keyla is very popular choice. The opponent used lower level cards, and my line-up was not perfect, that's why splintertool, an additional tool which caluclated visible winrate give me only about 30%. My main purpose to choose this very battle was to show how strong Magi Necrosi could be. At the and of battle's analysis I provided much better setup which I should use here.
After first round situation on battlefield looks like this:

Our today's hero Magi Necrosi was able to eliminate scavo, first non-melee monster in opponent lineup. As I mentioned above, my setup was not perfect, all Lira the Dark hit was blocked by armor, so overall she is quite useless so far. In opposite to opponent oportunity monster which precisly kill all our small guys with one hit. But we don't lose all hope :).

Third round, Magi got another sniped victim on his account, we lost our tank, but our second position Djinn Muirat is quite reistant monster. Finally we could use some damage of Lira in next turn.

Round four still not final :). Our Djinn still standing. Unfortunatly now we can feel the weakness of snipe ability. We need focus fire to eliminate threat as fast as we can, but snipe doesn't help. If our magi could not survive this round we are dead (range unit cannot attack from first position).

Round 5, no, no final :), but the last for our batle analysis. As mentioned above without focused fire we wasn't able to kill any monster, but good thing is we have not lost any either. Now with speed advantage we could kill deep lurker and in next final round last monster Nerissa Tridawn.

Overall Magi Necrosi is so versitle and useful monster, that it is difficult to find specific strategy. In this battle one of thing I try to counter was armored fragile monster, but execution was far from perfect. Below I think it's so much better line-up, which I should use, thanks to splintertool, where you can check different tactics for every battle you played or simulate any two setups.

Cursed Windeku is denitely one of the best death creature availabe in modern. He is maybe lacking any resistant abilities and armor, but for six mana 11 heath and thorn ability compensate that. As you can see on some other battle's example I used it very often for low to medium mana matches. It's difficult to go wrong with him in most battles.

Second monster which is worth mentioning is Djinn Muirat. Nine mana is a lot, but with void armor ability you can virtually count for at least 11 life. For sure you can find some better resiliant monster for second postition with reach ability, but Djinn offer magic damage which could change whole balance of battlefield especially if you face Kelya opponent.

Below I present two, much different, battle's examples, where Magi Necrosi play main role:

For low mana matches camouflage could be very useful, here opponent haven't use any sneak monster. But can you predict what could happen if he will ? Please comment below :) Best comment will win some reward :D.
Battle link here.

Here we can see very interesting battle where you can very effectivly take advantage of ruleset. We could analyze this battle for another hour, but whole article is already quite long. There is info and link below to twitch.tv channel where we have option to discuss deeper different strategy.
Shortly, snipe + blast damage is the king, and with magic damage which avoid armor we just devastate opposing team. You can check whole battle here.

Time for few words of summary. As I presented above Magi Necrosi is definitely the monster with high potential. Even when first line-up was not perfect, with some luck I was manage to win the fight. I think it's worth mentioning again, how additional tools like splintertool could help to analyze and improve your game and tactics. Of course it is easy to choose team which can beat opponent's team which is fully presented, but I think the tool should be treated as additional and valuable source of information.
Last words about Magi and death splinter, I think in general players underestimate the power of death. It's not easy color to choose, because many cards are reactive. So the key element is try to predict how opponent could play, or try to be prepare for every variation :). We could talk and talke about it, so come and join splinterlands.tv to do this :)

Finally we come to the end :), is anyone still not bored to death ? :D

If you have any comments, please do not hesitate. Do you think I could improve anything just tell me :)

I hope you like this kind of battle and strategy presentation. More strategy analysis, discussion, and prediction games 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