This week's Splinterlands Share your Battle Challenge was to use Lava Spider from the Fire splinter. Lava Spider is an interesting card that I often overlook. Here is my battle share for the week, enjoy.

Fire

I favor the Fire splinter, but I don’t often turn to Lava Spider. I lean, as I assume many do, to heavy melee attackers to take full advantage of Tarsa’s plus one melee buff. I love the art (I feel this would make a great Halloween themed share your battle), snipe ability, and with Tarsa’s health buff a beefy five health for three mana. If ever there comes a day that I achieve the ability to play level ten monsters, the poison ability would be a choice benefit as well. As it stands I share a battle with a level one Lava Spider.

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Lava Spider

• Fire
• Level 1
• 1 Range Attack
• 2 Speed
• 4 Health
• Snipe

Lore

Few explorers dare to go deep within the volcanoes of the world. Tales are told of great spiders that weave threads of fire and trap their enemies in webs of flame. An inescapable and painful death...

Follow the Entire Battle HERE

My Lineup

Summoner - Tarsa

• Level Two
• Plus One Health
• Plus One Melee Damage
• Strategy - It was Death or Fire. I have a level two Tarsa and felt I had a better chance to win going in with some leveled up backup. Plus it allowed me to use my Gold Foil Radiated Brute, resulting in a 10% DEC bonus for a win.

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First Position - Living Lava

• Shield
• Six Health
• Three Melee Damage
• Two Armor
• Strategy - The choice of splinters was Death or Fire. I guessed my opponent would also choose Fire and lean melee heavy. For that reason I placed Living Lava up front to reduce possible melee damage with its Shield ability

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Second Position - Radiated Brute

• Reach
• Six Health
• Two Melee Damage
• Strategy - This is where having a level two summoner comes into play. Brute gains an additional health and speed at level three. Reach allows it to attack from the second position and the high health allows him to take a few hits and still stay in the game.

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Third Position - Lava Spider

• Snipe
• One Ranged Attack
• Four Health
• Strategy - Snipe allows Spider to attack from my back line, but also target pesky monsters in the enemy back line. Its higher health will also protect Brute for a couple of extra hits from any of my opponents back line attackers.

Pre-Battle Stats

My team has a slight edge on paper with a slight health, range and armor advantage, and my opponent having a two magic damage advantage. My concern, as I quickly scan the battlefield, is that I will be forced to take out two more cards than my opponent.

	ME	OPPONENT
	16	14
	5	5
	0	2
	1	0
	2	0

Results

More is not always better 😀 I had two less cards than my opponent, but was able to stay in the game one hit longer. That being said, I had better options.

In a normal battle condition, that I wasn't trying to specifically use Lava Spider, I would lean toward using Uraeus when I need a back line, three mana attacker. It is an unfair comparison in that I have a level two Uraeus, but even at level one Uraeus' one armor would allow for similar results to Lava Spider's higher health.

Add to that the fact that Uraeus is a neutral card that can be used with any splinter and it tends to come to mind first. All told, Uraeus offers an additional melee attack, on top of Tarsa’s plus one to all melee monsters, sneak, and one armor. It is too strong a combination to pass up. Even comparing a level three lava spider I would still have chosen Uraeus as the one armor would have given one more round of attack to do damage.

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I say that, and as is often the case when I think I know what I'm doing, Splintertools told me I was wrong. Using Uraeus in place of Lava Spider actually would have resulted in a 2% less chance of victory. I think it is a small enough percentage to call a wash, but it is not what I would have initially thought.

So back to my earlier better options comment. To increase my odds more, I could have selected Flame Monkey, Radiated Scorcher and Chaos Agent instead of Lava Spider. Each of these are one mana monsters. Basically I would be adding more meat to place in the back line, allowing Radiated Brute to get in the most hits possible.

Bottom Line

All this being said I see a great value to Lava Spider that I hadn’t considered before. A level three version would offer six health, with Tarsa’s buff, for the low cost of three mana. This would be an awesome benefit in lower mana battles, when the opposition may not be able to deal a lot of damage, or the noxious fumes rule set battles to stay alive just long enough to cause more trouble. It could even make a solid tank in close range rule set battles.

Credits:
Battle studies done using Splintertools
Card images from Splinterlands
Thumbnail created by me using Canva

Thanks for reading!

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