Hello hivers,

Welcome to my weekly Splinterlands Post. As usual, during Weekends, I am posting a couple of Splinterlands posts as my participation on Splinterlands Social Media Challenge!. You can take in participating too by making any topic of Splinterlands, as long it is fun, interesting, or maybe seriously deep... As long you are spreading something positive about Splinterlands, you will be welcomed in Splinterlands community.

This week I will share something about a Splinterlands monsters, precisely its a soulbound card, which you can not trade with others. And here she is the Souldbound I will be talking about:

shoten lore: The Drybone Raiders are part of a tribalistic and fractious collective of anarchists led by the llamataur warlord, Eternan Brune. They control the Drybone Badlands in the Wild Northeast of Praetoria and often conduct predatory incursions into neighboring lands, attacking settlements for loot, plunder, and fun.

She is Drybone Raider, a legendary neutral monsters on Soulbound card edition. She is a complete attacking freak, whats on her are all about attacking. Double Strike, Shatter, and Cripple. It seems there isnt any unpenetrable wall that she can not break down.

Sometime I do not understand why people seems not to favor her enough, maybe the 12 mana requirement is too much on a monsters who has only 7 health point. But Before I go deep about her, let see the battle how I have exploited her PROWESS

THE BATTLE

~Click The Image Above To See the Full Battle~

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I was playing this battle on Diamond League using @blackkrrsantan, a scholarship account from bulldog1205 scholar guild. None of us here used max level monsters or a Diamond Level cap deck, but this did not mean both of us were half assed. We both were coming with meta optimized for Equal Opportunity ruleset, which meant all monsters would have opportunity ability.

My opponent even went deeply with the newly introduced ruleset, Are You Not Entertained? ruleset. He brought two gladius cards in his team, Quora Towershead and Palidn Rakk. Both were superstrong, they were gladius of course!!!

How about my team? where, here was my plan:

Position	Card	Ability	Plan and Strategy
Summoner		+1 magic damage	I like Obsidian a lot, she becomes everyone favorit in Modern Format in term of Magic Combats. Honestly in this battle, picking an Obsidian actually was my biggest mistake. I wanted to have a combination of Drybone Raider - Grund, and I did not pay attention that I could go with Drybone Raider - Titan Carnage from the dragon. I had not intention to bring any mage, what benefit would I get from her? Well, sometime we made that silly mistake.
Main Tank		Double Strike, Trample	Grund is the signature of Chaos Legion melee attacker in Earth Element. Speed, Melee Damage and Double Strike are his trademark. I am not sure whether to put him in this position is a good choice or not, because during Equal Opportunity ruleset, having Grund in the backline can be a deadly meta because he will seek the weakest target and that might trigger his Trample Ability if he kills that target.
Second		Martyr	Our First Martyr, I hope he dies fast then buffs up Grund and Drybone Raider. As the first martyr buff, this shroom will make my double strike duo powerful enough to kill their target in one round
Third		Double Strike, Shatter	The master of offense, She will be killing her opponents by delivering 4 attacks per round. I only need her alone to wipe all her opponents, however I must keep my opponents away from killing her quickly. It's quite a challenge her because her health is not great so she will be hunted as soon as my couple tiny martyrs die. I might have to put another buffer, but that buffer won't last long regarding opponent will come with ridiculous fire power too.
Fourth		Martyr	My favorit martyr monster, this rat definitely must die fast. His job is to die, then buffs up Drybone Raider and Pelacor Mercenary. Drybone Raider is the target I want to exploit using martyr and pelacor Mercenary is my last resort in this meta incase my double strike team fails.
Fifth		Fly, Heal	Pelacor Mercenary is my last resort, if my twin double striker, GRUND and DRYBONE RAIDER fail then it will be a contest of duel between Pelacor Mercenary vs their last monsters.
The Last		Amplify, protect, Triage	There won't be strong earth element team without Queen Mycelia. Her protect ability and trige ability will help my backline monsters live longer, right? the answer is no, I use her because she has lower health point than Drybone Raider. I admit this one is an odd move, however I only need 2 rounds to buff up Drybone Raider, then she will kick her opponents' asses. So Queen Mycelia should suffice this role, buying 2 rounds for Drybone Raider

So my team was actually consisted of 3 core monsters only, GRUND, DRYBONE RAIDER, and PELACOR MERCENARY. There would not be a good link up other than Martyr buffs, so this was purely a challenge to DRYBONE RAIDER to show how great she was.

ROUND 1

• The battle started with both of us buffing up our team and debuffing our opponents.
• My opponent came with 5 Melee damage, 1 range damage and 6 magic damage, combined all became 12 damage per round.
• My team had 9 Melee Damage, 4 range damage and 2 magic damage. A total 115 Damage per round.
• Both of us using Martyr Meta. I would buff up my double striker duo and he would buff up his Gladius duo.
• In General both of us used similar approach, brought martyr and heavily depended on a couple of our core monsters

ROUND 2

• Round one everything ran as I expected. I lost both of my martyr, they died and buffed up my core monsters. Now I had 3 powerful core monsters. From these three only, I had 13 Melee Damage and 4 Range Damage, and those number were excluding the double strike effects.
  
• My opponentss lost his Mycelic Slipspawn, in term of number that's better than me, only lost one. However for a martyr meta, that was disaster. Martyr should die first, and this meant I had an earlier run than him. The favor was on my side.

ROUND 3

• Round 3 started by 3 on 3 condition. I should have led and left him far behind however his Regal Peryton managed to dodge 3 of my attacks in round 2.

ROUND 4

• The last round. With those 3 core monsters I had, the damage was overwhelming so I could wipe out 2 monsters in one go.
• Quora Towershead was very powerful, however in this round, my team killed her in one go too, not letting her any chance to heal herself.

DEEP DIVE ON DRYBONE RAIDER

The battle above showed us that Drybone Raider can compete against Quora Towershead. By all means, we know that Quora Towershead is the strongest Gladius card / monster. Everyone when opens their gladius packs, always hope they will get Quora Towershead. She is not a legendary one, however her stats and abilities makes her exceed any Gladius Legendaries strength.

Individually as the strongest, she can live up on her reputation, carries the team alone beating up all opponents. Heal herself every round, and with her Bloodlust ability, she buffs herself up each time she makes a kill. A complete package in one monster. However the strongest monster sometime doesn't mean will make a strongest team too, there are cases that in order to be a stronger team, we need to ditch our our strongest monster.

That battle showed us that Quora could get 5 magic damage, and 5 melee damage making her delivering 10 damage per round. She had 7 speed too, she hit first and dodged several incoming attacks. She had 5 armor and 15 health, with her heal ability, she generated 5 health per round... And Drybone Raider still able to kick her out. This proves that Drybone Raider is one of those Overpowered monsters too. A monsters that can compete with the strongest and build up a better team.

1. The Cost of 12 Mana : GIANT KILLER Vunerability

There is nothing wrong with having big mana requirement for a strong monsters, however when the mana requires breach 10 mana, things will be a whole different matter in the battle. Above 10 mana most monsters have a gigantic health point, although some are low too such as Goblin Mech and our Drybone Raider here.

However is not the health point that becomes the major issue, its the giant killer ability, the anti 10+ mana monsters ability. These monsters become vunerable to this Giant Killer ability and they will suffer twice the damage the normal monsters should get.

These 3 mages for example, they can easily kill Drybone Raider in a single attack. I already rule out Suidae Shaman because he uses Giant Killer + Recharge so there is a debatable condition that you might have 1-2 round first to kill the shaman before he launches the Recharged Magic Attack.

We haven't talked about the non magic giant killers. Bottom line low health big monsters are tend to be not favorable because they can be killed super easily. For this sole reason, using Drybone Raider in the first position or main tank position

2. Dependency on Certain Ruleset

Defense is not her forte at all. She has some armor and quite good health in general however those are bad for a 12 mana monsters. So the best way to play her definitely is to put her away from main tank formation.

This means we need some rulesets that can exploit her ridiculous OFFENSE POWER. We are talking about exploiting her attacking force, not just some ruleset that can make her perform betters. So here are those ruleset that make her heavily depended on them:

1. Equal Opportunity; In this ruleset, Drybone Raider will spread her terror greatly because she will keep delivering 4 attacks per round. You might not need a trample ability, because if she kills her target on her first or second attacks, she will deliver the rest to the next target. However there is a big issue you need to solve in this ruleset, its Drybone Raider health point. Because her health point is so so, she will be easily become opponent next target when the lower health teammates die.
2. Super Sneak; The same concept as Equal Opportunity however in this ruleset all melee aim the back line. I do not know why but Drybone Raider range attack are aimed on the backline too, which I think they supposed to go on front. Having Drybone Raider in this ruleset speed up greatly your rate of killing opponents backline.
3. Melee Mayhem; Every Melee Monsters attack opponent main tank, this is where Drybone Raider becomes very scary. She will deliver 4 attacks with each having Shatter ability. She will break all the armor in front of our team. THe same concept as Equal Opportunity and Super Sneak, however in those two ruleset, we usually see the armor one standing until the end. In This Melee Mayhem, it will be reversed so In My Opinion this is where Drybone Raider performs best.
4. Up Close and Personal; During this melee only ruleset, Drybone Raider can cheat a little by using her Range Attack with her double strike ability from behind. So this kind of having two Melee with Reach ability attacking on the same round. Most condition during this ruleset, people aim the backline using Sneak abilities or Opportunity, having Drybone Raider might be an unpredictable variable here.
5. Going The Distance; This is the only exception where Drybone Raider can perform well on the main tank position. At the front she can launch double strike Melee attacks, which kind of cheat during "Range ATTACK" only ruleset.

3. SPEED Concern

Some might not realize this yet, but the biggest issue on Drybone Raider is her speed. From start to the highest level, her speed is 2. No growth at all.

From This battle too we can see she has missed so many of her attacks. Quora and her team mates managed to dodge some of them, not only 1-2 misses.

This make Drybone Raider works like a bulldozer or a heavy tank. Super strong, can not be stopped, but all you need to do is just walk aside or move sideway, then all solved. You need to think twice if you are planning to go with Drybone Raider against an opponent who relies heavily on speed and evading abilities

When you can solve those 3 concern in a battle, you going to see Your Drybone Raider kicking opponents asses easily.

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Thank you for visiting my SPLINTERLANDS SOCIAL MEDIA Weekly Challenge, don't forget to leave your comments and feedback below. There are credits in this post for these people:

• @splinterlands : for holding weekly social media challenge events
• carrieallen : for ultimate markdown tutorial
• bulldog1205 : for his scholarship, the blackkrrsantan
• thepeakstudio : for wonderful divider art