This week’s Splinterlands Battle Challenge stars the Dragon Splinter. Out of all the splinters, it is the one I use the least. The reason is because I am a player who primarily focuses on completing the daily quests as opposed to trying to reach the highest ranking. The Dragon splinter no longer ever comes up for me as a daily quest. I assume that it has been removed as a possible daily quest. If you are simply trying to win, the Dragon splinter is a great choice because it can be combined with one other splinter and features some powerful cards.
For this week’s challenge, I decided to use the Dragon splinter for a 14 mana match with the ‘Summoners do not give any stat buffs or debuffs’ ruleset.
https://splinterlands.com?p=battle&id=sl_a5380abf696649073ccef411e2320f69&ref=ninjamike
For my summoner, I chose the Dragon summoner Kretch Tallevor. It is a summoner which does not add any buffs or abilities which is perfect for this ruleset. The card is the lowest mana Dragon summoner at 3 mana which is advantageous in a small mana match.
For my lineup, I started off with Djinn Chwala which is a Dragon tank with Thorns. Next, I put in two neutral cards, the Furious Chicken and Creeping Ooze. I finished off my lineup with the Dragon ranged monster Naga Assassin. I hoped that its speed of 5 which means a hit probability of 50/50 would cause potential sneak monsters from my opponent to miss.
My opponent has a tank which is difficult for melee and ranged monsters to hit. After the creeping ooze removes 1 speed, it has a speed of 3 plus the dodge ability. This means that my attacks have a 55 chance of hitting it and a 45 chance of missing. In addition, my opponent has a tank heal monster.
Most of the time this would be a near impossible combination to beat without some magic attack monsters. Luckily my tank has the Thorns ability with only a speed of 2 which means my opponents tank will take 2 damage every time it attacks my tank.
In the first round, I was able to destroy the shields of my opponents tank. Hopefully, in this round I can get in at least one hit. One hit along with my tanks thorns will make it so that the tank heal cannot heal the tank back up to the full health of 5. Thus, I will be making some progress.
I was able to get in one hit and reduce the health of my opponents tank to 3 after the tank heal. Meanwhile, my tank still has 9 health remaining.
One hit plus my tanks thorns were enough to destroy my opponents tank. The battle is pretty much over at this point.
I won the match at the very beginning of Round 5.
The small mana summoner I picked ended up being important in this small mana match. No other Dragon summoner would have allowed me to use the 2 Dragon cards I picked while also fitting in the Creeping Ooze. This made hitting an elusive tank a little more manageable.
I was a little lucky in that I just happened to chose a tank with thorns. As it turns out, I needed either thorns or a strong magic attack to win this game.
