I feel like I under-utilize dragon. It's not that I don't like the dragon splinter, but more that the summoners I have usually do not provide the utility of the current Chaos Legion summoners. If I had a larger supply of the powerful and often expensive dragon units It much be different, but as is there are only a few situations I'll use dragon. These are included below.
If it wasn't for the pile of "rare" reward cards Naga Assassin and Twilight Dragon, I would only 2 dragons, the Fire Spitter and Djinn Chwala. Honestly, I don't remember why I even bought the Fire Spitter. As Ranged units go, Naga and Fire Spitter are pretty competitive. For example, Comparing Nara to Fire's Goblin Fireballer or Life's Herbalist, we get great speed and ok hit points. It gets even better at Gold levels with a backfire that could significantly increase effective damage. However, there aren't any Modern format summoners with + ranged to pair with like there is for the other two.
As for the Twilight Dragon, see my -rant- post about single damage reach arounds..
There are some powerful dragons. Most are expensive legendaries, that surely make for interesting teams with the many options to choose in support splinters. At one point I had a rental Black Dragon that I found many uses for. But for now I don't have a large enough selection, or a Byzantine Kitty, so I don't use Dragon splinter much.
Here is a bronze match where Drake of Arnak is used to provide Djinn Chwala as a tank and some armor to the water splinter.
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The Torent Fiend and Albatros add some sneak/snipe protection while the scavo tries to get in a few repairs. With Chwala's thorns each repair is both defensive and offensive. The opponent plays a very common low-mana team in Bronze, Cursed Windeku as a tank and a few low mana back-line attackers. The reason to play Chwala against this team is the higher thorns damage Chwala will have with all the armor. The backline survives a few extra hits with the summoner provided armor. The magic snipe damage nearly undoes the team, but the scavo gets just enough repair to keep Chwala alive to the end.
This is my go-to lineup for situations like this It's rare for the team to go down. In particular these low mana battles rarely have much magic or ranged attacks, so the thorns are likely to come into play. If I had the leveled dragon summoners, I would really like to play this with a level 2+ Dax Paragon to get Amplify and make the thorns more effective.
The death splinter has a good number of counters if you have a good guess about your opponent's plays, but is often lacking in armor. Drake can provide some armor for times you think this will help.
Here I and my opponent both chose to give a little extra armor to the death splinter, which often lacks it. This is a great alternative to the anti-magic summoner Thadious Brood if you suspect your opponent will not spam Obsidean.
I don't claim to be a death splinter expert. The idea here is to reduce all the melee coming into Harklaw with the shield ability. Since most backline attacks at this low mana in bronze are 1 or 2, Harklaw should last a while. All the backline attacks the opponent has here are shutdown by magi's camouflage. Since camouflage can't be targeted in the backline and there are no other backline units, all the attacks go to Harklaw and magi survives to the end.
Now we come to the poor man's Alric. As many players are likely aware, magic is often a powerful damage type in bronze and silver and using Alric Stormbringer with water magic teams was a very common strategy in low-level play. After the release of Chaos Legion, Alric was removed from the starter card deck, so anyone like myself who didn't think to buy a copy sooner were looking at the loss of that strategy without paying a high fee. Alric is $150/bcx as of this writing. An alternative with higher mana costs is Delwyn Dragonscale. At only $10/bcx as of this writing it is a much more reasonable option. Here is an example.
Though it is possible that this team could beat just about any similarly leveled team, the idea here is to load up with magic damage. Venari Wavesmith provides some extra armor, which proved useful here while Merdaali Guardian keeps the tank alive. Captains's Ghost plays a crucial role as both a main damage dealer and looks to block the opponent's heal with Affliction. There are only a few units that have Affliction at low levels and none are starter cards, so adding this to a starter deck provides a significant utility that is less common in opponents.
There was nothing too special about that team, with a few changes it would have been common pre- Chaos Legion, but is much cheaper to run with Delywin vs. Alric.
One final situation that I always play play dragon, if allowed is in earthquake battles. The summoner Brighton Bloom gives all friendly units flying. One could run this with a fast team normally to dodge a lot of attacks, but I personally don't like leaving that much to chance and use Bloom for earthquake battles where flying is immune from the earthquake damage.
In this match I intended to use a few meat shield units to wait-out the earthquake damage. It worked, but not aw well as I had hoped. The opponent played several flying units so the earthquake damage was minimal. Fortunately, Sea Monster was able to heal through all the damage the opponent had by the end and won the match with little trouble. I think If I had this one to play again, I might have added a little more damage up front rather than a few cards that did little more than get hit.
Response to the weekly Splinterlands theme Share your Battle: Dragon
