This is for the Splinterlands Community Engagement Challenge: Hidden Gems. The challenge this week is to uncover Hidden Gems in the battle strategies that don't always get the spotlight and may be relatively unknown.

The Hidden Gem (Night Reaper + Low Mana)

My Hidden Gem is using the Night Reaper for low-mana battles.

The Night Reaper is an epic reward card from the Rebellion set. This card can still be obtained from Gwen's Glint Shop by purchasing either Epic Draws or Minor, Major, and Ultimate Chests.

At max level (6), the Night Reaper has 4 magic damage, 4 speed, 2 shield, 10 health, and several abilities. The abilities include: flying, wingbreak, deflect, and most importantly, last stand.

Last Stand

When the Last Stand ability is activated, the Night Reaper now has 6 magic damage, 6 speed, 3 shield, and 15 health. This is because Last Stand gives +50% to all stats and current health (rounded up) if no other allied units remain on the team.

Last Stand is the key ability that makes this hidden gem strategy work for low mana battles.

This is the description of Last Stand from the Splinterlands abilities list. I believe the (rounded down) is in error and have reported this to the team.

The Hidden Gem Strategy

If you played during the eras of Untamed and Chaos Legion, there was a commonly known strategy in 17 mana battles to use the infamous Llama-Kron combination. There were several other iterations of that combo, including Llama-Flesh Golem, Llama-Cube, etc. Depending on the mana limit and modifiers. The key was to use only one unit with the Llama summoner (now Archon) to immediately activate the last stand ability.

In this new battle meta, there have been many counters developed to stop the Llama-Kron strategy and it is not used as commonly anymore.

However, the Night Reaper already has last stand and is only 11 mana. This allows it to be used in battles with a lower mana cap and only common or rare archons. Instead of requiring a high mana legendary archon, you can use less mana and achieve the same impact with 13, 14, or 15 mana.

The hidden strategy is to use only night reaper in combination with a Dragon Archon to immediately activate Last Stand. I'll show you what I mean in the battle example below.

Showcase Battle

Here is a battle link showing off this hidden gem strategy used in a brawl. Note that the battle is only 13 mana, allowing the dragon and fire elements, with two ruleset modifiers.

The first modifier is Heavy Metal.

The second modifier is Briar Patch.

Because of the Heavy Metal modifier, the options are limited for unit selection. Because of the briar patch modifier, I'm expecting both sides to use magic damage. There are no low-mana units with deflect and it's too risky to use ranged attacks because they won't be able to attack when they reach the front line.

Because of the modifiers, I've decided to use Sthispa (anyone know how to pronounce that?) as my archon which costs only 4 mana and gives my unit(s) the phase ability. The phase ability allows magic attacks to have the same chance to miss as physical attacks. This is important because I am expecting my opponent to use magic attacks.

Because this is a brawl battle and our guild has a barracks at level 9, I get to use 15 mana instead of 13. Note that my opponent has the same advantage, so we are both using 15 mana. With my remaining 11 mana, I decided to use Night Repear.

As I showed in the earlier screenshot, with Last Stand activated and the addition of the phase ability, my Night Reaper becomes practically untouchable.

Here is a screenshot of the final blow. Notice that my opponents' cards all had less than 6 health, allowing my Night Reaper to one-shot kill each of them. Every attack from my opponent was a complete miss. My Night Reaper ended the battle with the same health and armor as it started with.

In my opinion, this is a devastating strategy that I do not see used very often and it's one of the hidden gems I like to use when the situation allows it.

Text divider is from @freeztag.