My thoughts on Ancient Redwood

By Pinkman45 | Splinterlands Journey | 8 Dec 2022

Hi guys,

the second Riftwatchers Airdrop card was revealed a couple of days ago and I want to go over its stats. You can check out the full article here.

The Card

Stats
With 11 mana it's a very expensive card. We get a lot of damage and high health, both of which scale up as you level up the card. The speed always stays the same at 1, though.

Abilities
Level 1 - True Strike
Level 2 - Reflection Shield
Level 3 - Fury
Level 4 - Piercing

True strike is very strong on this card as it ensures you'll always hit your target, even with the low speed. Reflection Shield is nice to have so it can't kill itself when hitting monsters with the Return Fire ability and also for explosive match ups. Fury can come in handy in certain scenarios to take out taunt tanks with potentially one attack. Piercing is extremely powerful as it won't allow all that damage to be blocked from a single armor.

The card is obviously very strong in high mana match ups. With Fernheart it might be a strong level 2 spot card, because of the Blast Shield and high health. Even though it can't miss due to True Strike it will always attack least which isn't optimal for a high attack card, because by the time it hits the target they might be at low health already and just need finishing off. That being said Reverse Speed is where this card will truely excel.

Once it gets Piercing I think it can be quite strong and rack up kills, however before that I feel like the high attack and low speed will result in enemies being able to shield against it with armor and repairs, possibly rendering the card useless.

Best Rulesets

Unprotected - Without any armor we can make perfect use of the high base attack

Close Range - Good for any ranged card, but with the high health of Redwood especially strong

Explosive Weaponry - Higher base attack means higher Blast damage, combined with Reflection Shield it's obviously very impactful in this ruleset

Back to Basics - While it's abilities are good and True Strike is needed to hit high speed targets, in back to basics the high base attack often makes the difference. Redwood can probably shine here,

Conclusion

All in all I think Ancient Redwood can be strong in certain rule sets, but is not a must have card. Without Piercing, which it only gets at max level, the chances of its attacks being blocked by armor are too much of a risk for a card that expensive in mana.

That being said I don*t think you need a copy for your earth deck unless you play in Diamond league or above.

Overall I like the artwork and idea of the card a lot, though and think that for a mini set like Riftwatchers its very balanced. Not overpowered, but also not useless.

Disclaimer

None of this is financial advice. These tips are for educational purposes only and might all fall out of date as both Splinterlands and the Crypto Market in general are subject to constant change.