It can bring some victories, but Maw is an optimal choice because:
Once he casts he is not blocking Yellow for IK. While Jarl still blocks red for Sheggra and since the A.I will take all 4 or 5 gem matches it can run out of reds for Sheggra’s Spell to create a 4 or 5 skulls match.
Having devoured one troop he is bigger than Jarl and keeps getting bigger with each skull match. Sometimes you don’t even need to devour someone, just spamming skulls will finish the battle while Jarl has no self-buff or deals extra damage.
I find this team is pretty easy to face, you just play mana denial and kill them one by one and they can’t ever cast. Even if they get one, the AI is usually terrible about what troop to cast it on.
Yes, that works really well until it doesn’t. One goofy run of brown and yellow cascades and your strategy is blown. Thankfully, at my level, I’ve only seen one player with multiple full trait maws and I beat him two out of the three times I saw him. I didn’t back down from the challenge and did everything right, but that third time I had no chance.
IMO the bigger issue, and the reason the Maw, IK, Mercy, Sheggra team is so dominant right now is because of two fairly major bugs:
5-matches sometimes yield 20-24 mana instead of the 10-12 that they are supposed to. This results in Mercy (and all transformers) being more effective than they ought to be.
Big skull matches frequently trigger Hunger multiple times, resulting in a single explosive kill-all, instead of a massive overkill of only the first troop. I don’t believe this is the way Hunger was intended.
Anyway, if you take away those two bugs, you are still left with an imposing team, but more so because of the amazing synergy between IK and Sheggra. You could build a great team using two copies of each. Maw and Mercy are just the most convenient companions because of their efficiency.
FWIW, I think other troops are more worthy of a rebalance (Bone Dragon anyone? How does his spell only cost 14 mana when Kerberos’s cost 16?)
