TL;DR: My Offense + Defense > His Defense + Offense.
I know, he has Gorgotha and I have Bone Dragon… but this is the semi-finals so humor me and let’s look a little more closely:
First and most importantly, his team does tiny damage. He’s got Gorgotha’s basic attacks (with no skull generators) and Rock Worm’s 7 spell damage, with good Brown feeding. That’s it. How do I deal with that? My Bone Dragon + Behemoth. My Bone Dragon Freezes him when attacked, and his team is entirely dependent on making Brown matches. Which means if he ever attacks my Bone Dragon with his Gorgotha, his team becomes incredibly slow dealing very little damage very infrequently (since it affects Gorgotha, Rock Worm, & Emperina). His best bet is thus to keep his Gorgotha filled but not use its spell, not make skull matches, and then use Deep Borer + Rock Worm to create lots of Browns and chip away at me with Rock Worm. But I’ve got Behemoth in the back and Priestess (who is 100% safe) right behind it, so it’s going to take his single Rock Worm forever to take Behemoth down between its massive stats and Immense trait plus Priestess’ Armor and Barrier all versus his tiny damage. Literally one four gem match gives me almost as much life as RW does in damage, and Priestess gives more armor than RW does damage with a barrier to boot. It’s basically a stalemate in terms of my sustain vs his Rock Worm, and he has to devote all of his mana to the damage where as mine is relatively passive.
Which leads to the next critical piece: All that Brown he creates is incredibly useful to me. While he’s trying to chip away with Rock Worm his Browns are also filling both Bone Dragon and Behemoth. It’s unavoidable that some of those will benefit me. Yes, Bone Dragon won’t do a great deal of damage to Gorgotha, but he will steal all its Armor, and the Armor of all his troops, making them far less tanky and giving Bone Dragon a nice dose of extra Armor himself. So while Bone Dragon will only do a few damage at a time, it will start to add up. Then there’s Behemoth, which does very solid damage to all troops at once. One bad Deep Borer or Rock Worm spell on his part and I could fill BD & Behemoth in a single turn. Then there’s Wight stealing Life and creating Purples for Bone Dragon (which his team can’t use at all) to make Bone Dragon fill even faster and to dish out even more spell damage.
The combination of these two factors leads to what will be a losing scenario for him: I will both be slowly chipping away his Gorgotha while also hitting his back line with Behemoth and Wight. One Wight + Behemoth combo is almost enough to wipe out Rock Worm or Emperina after Bone Dragon has stolen their Armor. Any additional damage and they would fall. Deep Borer would fall with that combo alone. Yes, he has Emperina to heal, but this is going to lead to very difficult decisions for him. Gorgotha is being assaulted with Skulls from the front, all are taking damage from Behemoth, and then Wight is isolating Emperina/Rock Worm. He can’t heal all of them at once. And he needs Brown to do it, which means he has to keep Gorgotha and Rock Worm filled in order to fill Emperina. Which also means he only has Deep Borer to fill Emperina and thus if he’s healing he isn’t doing any damage whatsoever. His Emperina is actually of very limited use since it’s Brown blocked by two other troops and slows down his Rock Worm even more. It sounds scary on the surface, but actually slows down his slow team even more.
This is basically a war of attrition and the best defense is a good offense. He’s going to turtle up, absorb the onslaught, and try to slowly grind me down. Meanwhile I’m going to be lobbing shots at all angles. Eventually his defenses will crack and a shot will get past him. It’s easy to see how it will play out: He’ll use Emperina to heal a troop when it’s low, in turn exposing his Emperina or Rock Worm to being killed via a fortunate combo on my end. Sooner or later that critical heal won’t be here when he needs it and a troop will fall. Then another. Then another. Once his team is down to Gorgotha and Deep Borer it’s quite manageable. No spell damage, no ability to create skulls. It’s really just the Rock Worm and Emperina I have to worry about and I’ve got very good tools to get to them while being tanky enough to eliminate him before he can get past my troops.
All in all, I’m quite tanky while also doing great damage whereas he’s very tanky but has poor damage. Add to that the fact that his team is much easier to counter than mine: He has no tools to take out my Wight or Priestess and all those Browns he creates will be feeding my Bone Dragon and Behemoth while I wreck his back line.
