Blights are a pretty good group of monsters for any creepy forest. They can be the sign of druidism gone horribly awry, or evidence of a despoiling of the natural world by dark forces.
However, in 2014, they were all quite low CR. With none CR 1 or higher, it was pretty hard to find a use for them beyond tier 1, except in truly enormous numbers (granted, there's some fun to be had in Curse of Strahd with a massive horde of blights attacking).
Now, the new Monster Manual introduces two new, much-higher CR Blights - the Tree Blight and the Gulthias Blight.
The Tree Blight (which did actually show up in Curse of Strahd) is CR 7. This huge, evil plant can grab people with roots, bludgeon them with branches, and then can gnash the creature grappled by the roots with a bonus action.
I think you could have a pretty satisfying tier 2 fight against a Tree Blight with several lesser Blight minions - indeed, I think that is actually how the fight goes in Curse of Strahd (though the stat blocks likely have changed). If you had a group of, say, five 7th level characters, you'd have budgets of 3750 for low difficulty encounters, 6500 for moderate encounters, and 8500 for high difficulty encounters.
Thus, with a single Tree Blight taking up 2900 xp, you'd have 850, 3600, and 5600 xp left over for lesser blights. To be totally honest, that's still a ton of blights even at the lower difficulty, so I might try to pop this at level 5. At that level, we'd have xp budgets of 2500, 3750, and 5500. A moderate encounter for 5th level players would leave 850 xp for Blights, which could leave us with, say, 4 Vine Blights (100 apiece) 6 Needle Blights (50 apiece) and 6 Twig Blights (25 apiece).
Now, when we look at the Gulthias Blight, two things occur to me: first is that it's a more complex stat block. It actually has some parallels with the Tree Blight, but still works a little differently.
The other thing is that it's CR 16 - over twice the CR of a Tree Blight. While in theory you could introduce this at just a high enough level to allow for a few minions, I almost feel like if we want to keep this in the Blight tribe, we'd actually give it Tree Blights for minions, which would probably mean a very challenging encounter indeed.
To be clear, I think both the Tree Blight and Gulthias Blight would work well as non-legendary solo monsters. Not exactly a climactic fight, but perhaps a sign that you're in some very spooky woods indeed.
However, if we want to amp up the Gulthias fight to something a bit more climactic, we should look at its lore:
The first Gulthias Blight is said to have grown from a stake that was put through the heart of a vampire called Gulthias. The living green wood of the stake was able to grow into a tree, but that tree was suffused with the vampire's necrotic essence. Indeed, if you look at this monster - a plant that grapples creatures and then drains HP from the creatures it has grappled, it's more or less a vampire tree.
Thus, you could probably actually have vampires - maybe Vampire Spawn or Vampire Nightbringers - as part of the same encounter.
In fact, the Vampire Familiar - the humanoid servants of vampires - could be a big part of this: what if you have a Vampire Familiar who is kidnapping people, keeping them alive with their Umbral Blades, and then bringing them to a Gulthias Blight in order to feed their paralyzed master? Perhaps they believe that feeding the tree the victims' blood is going to ultimately mean feeding their master.
This also creates a potential conundrum: the blight might be a terrible danger, but its existence could be the only think preventing the vampire from returning. Maybe the party doesn't realize this until they've already killed the thing.
I will say I might have liked some in-between Blights to bridge the gap in CR here - maybe some CR 2-4 options. Still, these are some great spooky monsters if you want that gothic vibe without necessarily making everything undead.
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