Strategy Corner #03 - Dax Paragon, small fellow who could destroy whole opponent's team

As I mentioned in the last post from our new series Strategy Corner I will try to go deeper into some strategies around card which are a weekly battle challenge. In splinterlands I always try to cover the whole spectrum of game, I play in lower league with my own collection and in a higher league with rented cards. Here in this cycle of article, I try to focus on lower league, where I have bigger experience. In diamond/champion league strategy I feel you should have different approach to the battles, more thinking using patterns than choosing single cards. If you want to see more about the higher league let me know in the comments.

Dax Paragon is quite a useful monster in every league. His cost is great, in the highest league he has a very effective cost/damage ratio. He is still more a support monster, amplify turned out as a very effective ability.
So every magic reflect , return fire, thorn damage are very deadly with him.
Obvioysly is you see any ruleset which guarantee above ability is clear choice for Dax.

For sure Dax Paragon is not a monster which can win the fight on his own, he really needs some good teammates to start to shine. Right now he is most useful with quite a new summoner from Riftwatcher expansion: Ilthain.

So let's see an example battle and then we will discuss more options.

As mentioned above any rulest where you can use amplify ability is a consideration to use Dax. Unfortunately in this battle, there is silence summoner, so our Ilthain return fire ability is silenced. Otherway we would have covered all types of damage: melee, ranged, and magic with the option to reflect it with amplification from Dax :).

Let's shorty analyze the battle, after first round we almost didn't lose anything. Our armor was repaired, damage almost fully healed. The only problem is the poisoned healer at the end, but he should still be able to use his ability and apply thorn damage :)

Round 3 just begun. We have lost healer, but it was resurreced. His sneak damage monster is almost dead and we did not hit him with any of our attack monsters even once :). Next turn it should be dead, we could have hope to avoid poison to our Venari Crystalsmith, but even if it would happen we still should be fine.

Round 4, we should be sure to have this battle. Pelacor Conjurer has done a great job here, killing all magic monsters and apply a lot of thorn damage to the opponent tank Mycelic Infantry besides his shield ability.

Round 5, his little Scavo Hireling have done a lot of work with that armor repair, otherway battle would be over much earlier, but still he was not enough. We ended with all monster on the battlefield, one was resurrected, Dax was excellent here with all those magic reflect and thorn damage. Clean victory and worth to mentioned opponent used some of gold level monsters versus our silver league line-up.

In previous post from Strategy Corner we had clear vision about line-up, Grund is high mana monster which forces to use him with higher mana matches where we could use almost every monster. With Dax Paragon situation is different, it is only 2 mana monster with useful but rather niche ability. I think we cannot use just the same line-up everytime and count for easy win. We have to adopt to ruleset and mana, but still there are some obvious choices which could help win us the battle.

PELACOR CONJURER is one of most effecitve tank option for low level life team. He is fast, has flying as additional and of course magic reflect from 4 level. For higher level match he received Phase ability which makes him even more hard to hit. He is obvious choice for our today's here Dax Paragon. As we could see with battle above he become very effective weapon.It can be even more interesting with new Weapon training ability, but I still have no option to test it yet.

Second card which I think it's very useful with Dax is ILTHAIN. He guarantee more speed for our team, and which is more important Return Fire ability. With additional amplification of Dax when you face ranged team it should be rather easy win. He is so much better than General sloan, who is now very easily countered. Other option of white summoner Grandmaster Rathe is more expensive, has already amplify ability, so it's not great choice with Dax. There is one more very good summoner Lorna Shine, but as untamed/dice set card it's not so cheap, and I try to focus more on the modern play where in near future she wont be avaiable.

I think I would consider VENARI CRYSTALSMITH as a core card for general line-up with Pelacor/Dax combo. He provides additional survivability to our tank position, it is quite strone with 2 additional damage, I like to use that card on last position where he can usually survive 1-2 sneak attacks. It is still 4 mana card, which is quite high for setup with Dax. We will talk in the next chapter more about it.

For sure there is no one perfect setup for using Dax Paradon, you need to be flexible and adapt to any specific ruleset, pay attention and try to predict what opponent can play. There are few cards which I use with him more often: some sneak options which provide quite nice damage avoiding opponent's pelacor: STITCH LEECH, URAEUS, opportunity small guy: CELESTIAL HARPY. Sometimes if for example, you cannot use even monsters, BLINDING REFLECTOR could be a nice replacement for Pelacor Conjurer.

Dax Paragon is for sure very useful card. Now where we have more ruleset I use it even more often because there is a much greater chance to have specific rule. where amplify could just shatter the opponent team. It's still not a monster to play and forget. He have to predict which damage type will be main of opponents team. Additional there are some monster with reflection shield ability which guarantee fully immunity to any type of reflection damage, so our Dax at that situation is not very useful. There are plenty of nice setup where you can use Dax very effective, one of them is versus General Sloan full ranged team, where it so easuly countered.
Line-up from above battle is a very good example how you should try to adapt to ruleset and situation. With reverse speed I try to use monster with low speed to have some advantege. Pelacor was great defender versus magic attacks and additional armor from TRUTHSPEAKER save us a lot of phisical damage. This is great example how you can use Dax with different sitation. I will try to present and discuss more battles with Dax setup on my next Splinerlands.tv stream, more info below :).

This is the end :), Thank you if you got it here. If you have any comments, please do not hesitate. Do you think I could improve anything just tell me :)

I hope you like this kind of battle and strategy presentation. More strategy analysis, discussion and prediction game you can find on my Wednesday Splinterlands.tv stream. You can check the schedule here

If you wish to try out Splinterlands you can use my reference link.

All images used in this article are open source. Thumbnails borrowed with permission from the Splinterlands team or made in Cooltext