This is my submission for the battle challenge using the crypt beetle. As you will see below, I felt this card was valuable and upgraded it to gold. The look of it contrasting the gold and black and blue is pretty great to me. Let us look at the card stats first and then we will examine the battle.
The beetle is a pretty simple card to understand. The shield ability allows it to be more resilient against range and melee attacks. It is also unbreakable against a one damage monster with these attacks which is quite helpful in low mana matchups. The other thing to think about with this card is using it in weak magic matchups where the shields can make the beetle have almost double the amount of health.
Now that we have looked at the crypt beetle in depth, let us examine battle showing off the power of this card. Here is the link to the full battle: https://splinterlands.com?p=battle&id=sl_49bce7f21f76fb9a233077430c3ad0e2&ref=bluedevil0722
Round 1
Equalizer and low mana are great rulesets for the crypt beetle as well as the death team in general. I did not expect a magic play from my opponent for the most part given that the teams available to play are not magic heavy. Consequently, thaddius not giving a magic buff allowed me to try a magic team against my opponent with a snipe strategy while my crypt beetle holds up front as a great tank. The shield ability allows my crypt beetle to only take damage by the time mage in the first round as the gargoya scrapper and harpy will do no damage.
Round 2
At the start of this round, I am able to take out his time mage which is a great help to keeping my beetle alive. My ooze goes down but my main damage dealers stay alive.
Round 3
My crypt beetle has only taken one damage the whole battle so far which is great. In round 3, his armor monster goes down leaving his monsters more vulnerable to my beetle when they drop into the first position.
Round 6
I continued to pick off his monsters through the next few rounds and as you can see in round 6, my beetle can longer die to his harpy and my magic monsters eliminate the harpy with ease. Very easy win with this strategy!
The crypt beetle can be quite powerful as you just saw in certain situations such as low mana and equalizer. This is also a good learning experience that one melee monsters and one range damage monsters can be very dangerous to play as they are easily nerfed by the shield ability.
I hope you enjoyed this recap on the crypt beetle and please upvote or comment on any improvements I could have made on my strategy,