Brute Force Dragon! - Splinterlands Battle Challenge

Splinterlands is a fast paced card game played with NFTs on the HIVE Blockchain. Each week the Splinterlands team encourages a special battle challenge to be shared on HIVE and on social media. This post is for this week's challenge, featuring DRAGONS!

Why The Dragon Splinter Is Awesome

The challenge for this week was to share a battle fought using the Dragon Splinter. Dragons are unique in the game in that you can choose your team from among Dragons, Neutral, and any one other Splinter when you use a Dragon Summoner.

In this battle, I chose to pair Dragons with the Water Splinter. Let's go over the battle!

The Ruleset

In this battle Mana was set at 30 Mana. All Splinters were available for use, and the ruleset was Normal rules.

This gives lots of options for both teams. And for a Novice level battle, 30 mana is fairly high.

My Lineup and Strategy

I chose Drake of Arnak as my summoner. Drake of Arnak gives all of my monsters an extra +1 Armor. My strategy was to outlast my opponent by tanking damage and focus on picking off their front line monster with magic damage.

I chose Naga Brute for my tank. The Brute doesn't do damage at this level, but has plenty of armor with additional help from the Drake and Venari Wavesmith. Since there are plenty of ways to use Thorns in the current meta, I wanted a tank who wouldn't proc Thorns. Naga Brute has extra tankiness from its Void Armor which causes magic damage to hit armor first instead of bypassing it. This came in handy.

The Water Bois

I chose Water to pair with the Dragons for the fantastic magic attack options. Hiding behind a good tank and slinging spells at a single target was the plan. Here's who I chose.

Captain's Ghost is a favorite of mine when I have the mana to use for it. 2 magic attack and 7 hit points make it a fair choice for second spot. If the tank falls, at least there's a monster with some health to take the spot.

More importantly, the Affliction ability can help keep the enemy tank from being able to heal. A particularly nice ability, but it didn't really come in to play in this battle.

Sea Genie takes 3rd spot. Its Flying ability helps it to avoid melee hits. An important skill should all else fail and it finds its way to the first position and under attack.

Venari Wavesmith is one of the cooler new water cards, not only attacking with magic, but also providing a +1 Armor buff to all friendly monsters. The wavesmith helped keep my whole lineup alive. This is an important ability, so I like to keep the wavesmith near the back, but not all the way in the back and vulnerable to sneak attacks.

Ice Pixie is another Flying magic attacker I placed towards the back. This card was meant to attack for a little, but also be a bit of a sacrifice to any sneak or opportunity attacks. It fell as expected.

Honorable Mention: Furious Chicken If you have room for the chicken, especially if it's armored, you use it. In this case, it was to protect the back from Sneak attacks.

Did It Work?

My opponent didn't play the team I anticipated, so having to worry about proccing thorns wasn't an issue.

They played a Water team with Kelya Frendel as their summoner. So, instead of thorns I was faced with a team of mixed attackers with +1 Speed and +1 Armor buffs.

The armor buff really wasn't an issue, though since all my attacks were magic. Sometimes you go all in on a tactic and it works. This was the case here.

But their mixed attacks, particularly from the cards they selected with Opportunity abilities that worked away at my back line gave me a bit of a potential challenge.

They had a healer in their ranks, and if I weren't able to dispatch of their first position monster as fast as I did, I'd be reliant upon Captain's Ghost's Affliction ability to proc to keep the battle going. I don't like taking that chance if I can avoid it.

But in the end our water magic users protected by dragons won the day. It's always fun when the battle allows enough mana for each player to really build a team. Here's a review of the battle you can watch.

Final Thoughts

I really enjoy the Dragon Splinter. And there are some great cards and some versatile team building options there.

But for some reason I always forget that Dragon is an option. I tend to focus on my favorite splinters, such as Death and Earth, and working out the best teams with them.

So I'm always grateful when a battle challenge like this comes up and reminds me of the possibilities with Dragons. One of these days I'll remember to actually play dragons in a ranked match without prompting!

Thanks for reading this far. If you're not already playing Splinterlands, getting started on this awesome game is easy. Just click here and have fun!Just click here and have fun!