Hi everyone, welcome back to my Splinterlands Weekly Social Media Challenge. This week I am sharing a bit of my thought about Legionnaire Alvar, A Legendary Neutral Monster from Chaos Legion Edition.

QUICK INSIGHT ON LEGIONNAIRE ALVAR

Shorten Lore: The Chaos Legionnaires are ruthless warriors and the Chaos Legion's elite fighting force. Alvar Veralyn was conscripted into their ranks at a young age after his family was slain and his world conquered by the Chaos Legion. The harsh conditioning that all conscripts receive nearly broke the child, but in the end, his old, easy way of life was subsumed by the desire for battle and conquest. Alvar dedicated himself to his training, intent on reshaping his mind and his body until he had no equal on the battlefield. Eventually, he rose to the rank of General and now stands as leader of the Chaos Legionnaires.

I don't have a good first impression about Legionnaire Alvar. It's like... oh 2 melee damage only, maxed at 3, another soft hitter tank.. 6 Health Point, he will be gone in 3 turn during Noxious Fumes ruleset. A Giant Killer, but with 2 speed the giant will kill him first. He has a death blow, but I don't think Alvar with no shield or heal ability will survive in a long fight, this kind of tank usually dies first.

It takes a few week until I start to understand how Alvar works. That time I had too many new monsters from Chaos Legion I want to study first, so Alvar had to wait that long until I got some time to look deeper on him. So here are my thought about him

1. HE IS A HOLDING TANK

If you like a swashbuckling tank, forget everything about Alvar. He isn't a killer tank, his attack is weak. Don't expect much on his Giant Killer ability, on certain occasion it works great, but rarely we get that situation. For example, with Giant Killer and Deathblow ability, Alvar can deliver 2x2x3=12 damages to Kron when Kron activates his Last Stand ability. But that kind of situation will rarely happen, Alvar mostlikely will die first too.

His main abilities should be void armor and demoralize. If you need those two abilities in your team, then Alvar is the one of your alternative choice. The way Alvar works should be similar with Harklaw from the Death Element Reward Edition, looks like more on a support tank because they don't hit hard to kill their opponent.

2. HE IS GREAT DURING CETAIN RULESET

In General, he is a mediocre tank. I know it sounds harsh but we have too many great tanks now. However during certain rulesets, Legionnaire Alvar can be a game changer. For Example, Equal Opportunity ruleset. Alvar health point is not high, so during this ruleset opponent will aim Alvar first. Void Armor will help him absorbing as many Magic Damage as he can before he dies. T

Another example is during Up Close and Personal ruleset or Melee Mayhem. Any monster with Demoralize Ability will come in handy during these ruleset. He can replace Disintegrator in this situation, or work along side it which will give your opponent double demoralize debuff.

For an easy explanation, I will share a battle for the example too

Battle Preparation

I had this battle ruleset and I thought using Legionnaire Alvar would be an interesting one

• HOLY PROTECTION ~ All Monsters have the Divine Shield ability.
• HEALED OUT ~ All healing abilities are removed from Monsters and Summoners.
• 30 MANA

First HOLY PROTECTION ruleset, this won't help anything to make Alvar better. however I think to maximize this ruleset, we need to have as many monsters as we can, so getting 6 monsters team should be a priority and hopefully 30 mana is enough to house in Legionnaire Alver with 5 other monsters.

HEALED OUT ruleset was the main ruleset I had been looking for. Technically monsters with Void Armor ability won't have health reduction from direct or indirect attack as long their armors are up. Exception against Poison. Alvar might show he could cheat out this ruleset by replacing tank heal with armor repair

So here was my line up that I could come up with to show that Alvar was going to perform well due to this ruleset.

Position	Card	Ability	Plan and Strategy
Summoner		+1 Magic	I chose Earth Obsidian, my plan was to overload opponent with magic attacks meanwhile Legionnaire Alvar hopefully could hold opponent attacks well
Main Tank		Void Armor	Our main actor for this post. I wanted to display his void armor as an alternative use of healing during HEALS OUT ruleset
Second		Rust	It's not an easy choice whether to go with Sporcerer or Magi of Chaos. I chose Sporcerer in hope I would got a chance to show my Alvar might kill some monsters due to no armor.
Third		Silence	Silence was the key, I needed some protection buff
Fourth		Repair	He would join in with Legionnaire Alvar to cheat out HEALS OUT ruleset
Fifth		none	This was not a strong one but she was everyone favorite. For 2 mana monsters, she could deliver 1+1 magic damage was a good deal
The		Thorn	1 mana left, this monster would come in handy. With Holy Protection ruleset + Thorn, I hope he could guard well against Sneak Attacks.

In general, there are 2 famous approach in building Earth Element Modern Format

1. The first one is using Unicorn Mustang in front, then bunch of healer in back. This is a strong formation with cheap cost of investment or rent cost. HEALED OUT will greatly reduce the effectiveness of this meta, thats why I try to replace the Mustang with Alvar.
2. The second one is using Grund in front and Mycelic Slipspawn in back. I am not using this formation, because it works well if the mana cap is higher than 40. There won't be any necessity to use Alvar anyway if you can come up with these couple.

Let see how this battle went off

HERE COMES THE BATTLE!!!

If you want to see the battle directly, you can see it directly here:
https://splinterlands.com/?p=battle&id=sl_6fe71a5e9bf1d1203c7e7307050b6e5e&ref=dewabrata

It's an Earth vs Earth, both my opponent and I used the same approach/tactic, trying to overload opponent tank with magic attacks. His team used a double anti magic tank, Unicorn Mustang and a Failed Summoner. It's good approach because we knew with no healing that Mustang definintely would die. My tank was Legionnaire Alvar and I would depend on Scavo Hireling to repair him as if it was a tank healing

Round 1

• The game started as both party buffing and debuffing their monsters and opponent's monsters.
• My opponent had 5 magic damage and 3 melee damage. Combined all 8 damage.
• I had 2 melee damage from Alvar, 8 magic damage from my mages behind.
• Based on total damage, I should win this easily. However his mustang had a void ability and his failed summoner had a magic reflect. Anything could happen in this battle

• None died in the first round. Both of our tank was performing well, absorbing those magic attacks

Round 2

• In this round his Unicorn Mustang died. With no healing, it's a matter of time until our tank ran out of Health. Meanwhile my Alvar still survived and this made a big difference in our power balance.

Round 3

• This time it's Failed Summoner who died. This round all his tank were gone.

Round 4-5-6

• I sped up the round, because with no more tank, Earth mage were weak due to low health point. Unless he had Queen Mycelia, Behemoth or something else, this battle was already settled by the time his tank all gone and my tank was still standing there.

Battle Discussion

I was quite happy with this battle, not because this was an epic battle but because both of us came with similar tactic, only different tank, and having same level. So basically everything was equal, only some tactics were different. So here my key points of this battle:

• Legionnaire Alvar could work well under HEALS OUT ruleset, a lot better than unicorn mustang and failed summoner. He seemed not very strong, a cringe maybe, but still perform well and managed to lead his team to get the victory.
• The MVP of this match should be Mushroom Seer. His silence debuff was the biggest decisive point.

So that's all my presentation about Legionnaire Alvar, I hope you all like this and keep supporting this Legendary Neutral Tank from Chaos Legion Edition. He isn't a great one, but still I bet he will be a good addition in your monsters collection.

Thank you for visiting my weekly Social Media challenge, don't forget to leave your comments and feedback below. There are credits in this post for these people:

• splinterlands : for holding weekly battle challenge events
• carrieallen : for ultimate markdown tutorial
• eve66 : for wonderful divider art