Splinterlands - Share Your Battle - Flying Squid Edition!

In this week’s “Share Your Battle” competition, we will be talking about the Flying Squid. This water element card is very interesting to use and if you do not have a great water tank a good replacement. We will talk about the pros and cons of this card, how to best use it and which cards to use in addition to the Flying Squid in order to achieve the perfect strategy. Last but not least, we will take a look at our battles against two different Elements and discuss our approach there.

Flying Squid

Let’s start talking about the main card here: Flying Squid. Although the name would suggest it, this card has actually no flying ability. This is a little bit weird but would also make sense in the general point of view: What water creature can actually fly? Nevertheless, the name gives something different away: This card is freaking fast! With 3 speed in the basic level and up to 5 speed in the top levels this card can be very hard to hit, especially by very slow cards! Combined with the Strike Back Ability on level 10 this common card can start to be a very nice addition to every Squad.

This card costs us 7 mana to play and brings 2 melee attack and 8 health on the base level. Combined with its 3 speed, this card makes an excellent tank. The big advantage of this card is that it can be played in second position because of its Reach Ability! It is certainly a great second position card as well and will serve you well in both situation. In the battles below I used this card twice as tank because it is the cheapest version and just makes sense to use in the current state of the game.

Damage Dealers

Now that we selected our tank, we need to put together the rest of our team. First, we want some damage dealers that can secure us some good amount od dealt damage. For this I always like to use magic attackers as they always go immediately for the skin and do not get hold back by a minimum amount of armor. For this case, there are two exceptional cards in the water splinter with Nerissa Tridawn and Djinn Oshannus. With a magic attack of 3 and 2 and health point of 9 and 10 both cards are excellent for the long-game.

While Nerissa doesn’t bring any special abilities, Oshannus has the Void Ability to protect him against magic attacks. This can be extremely powerful when battling a magic heavy opponent as we will take less damage along the way. In higher levels the Djinn even develops Abilities like Phase which allows him to dodge magic attacks as well! All in all both of these cards are on the more expensive mana end but certainly are worth it in order to secure a good amount of damage.

Support Cards

Next up, we want to support our cards with some extra stats. In this case I always like to use either a additional Armor Card in the form of the Venari Wavesmith or an extra healer in the form of the Merdaali Guardian. It depends what strategy you are following and how much mana you have left. I usually use the Guardian in lower mana games and against Magic heavy opponents. On the other hand, I really like to use the Wavesmith when the opponent like to play Melee or Ranged attackers and when we have a good amount of mana to spend.

Furthermore, the Wavesmith has the advantage of being a Magic attacker himself which gives us additional flexibility in the damage dealing. All in all both cards are very vulnerable to quick blind sight hits which is why we always have to protect our support cards. This means to never put them into the back of the field as they could be attacked by a Sneak attacker as well as having a good and big tank in front.

Backline Attackers

Finally we need to talk about our options in the backline. While the Water Splinter has some amazing Ranged attackers, I want to shift the focus on the Melee attackers. With the Deeplurker the Water element has probably the best Opportunity card in the game and it would certainly be a shame not to utilize this ugly but powerful creature. With 6 health and 3 attack for only 6 mana, this card is perfectly used to destroy the opponents backline and is even able to take on some hits by itself. With higher levels this card obviously gets stronger and is getting the Poison Ability along the way.

This is also the case for Uraeus. With its Sneak ability, it can make quick procedure with the opponents support units which are usually placed in the back line. Furthermore, this card gets stronger very quickly which is why I think it is very useful to level it up fairly quickly. In ccombination with the other Sneak attacker, Pelacor Bandit, we trio down below can tear apart every backline in the game if given the opportunity. What’s more is that the Bandit has the additional Flying Ability which makes him also very valuable in Earth Quake Battles.

Example Battles

Now that we talked about our strategy, let’s take a look at the battles that we have been taking on. Frist up we had a battle with a lot of mana to our hands. Furthermore, the opponent made the impression of always using the Life Splinter which is why the choice on the Wavesmith was an easy one. We used the Squid as Tank and placed as much damage dealers as possible into our team. Because the support cards in a Life Splinter are rather rare, I only chose the Deeplurker which was the right choice looking back. Because of our great amount of magic damage we were able to break through his tank fairly quickly and once he only had ranged attacker left, the battle was already over.

https://splinterlands.com?p=battle&id=sl_2760e7a0aff7ee73929ab58a793f772e&ref=ga38jem

The second battle was against a very mixed opponent. He used the magic attackers but chose the Dragon summoner in order to provide more armor to his team. Because we only had 28 mana to spend and I was assuming that we will fighting a magic heavy team, I chose the Sneak way. With this strategy, we were able to get rid of all his cards from the back until only his tank was left. With only his Unicorn on the field, we had a fairly easy battle to win and were successful in the end.

https://splinterlands.com?p=battle&id=sl_4a144f5edf05aa5045daf10800af0ef2&ref=ga38jem

Published by ga38jem on
LeoFinance
On 15th July 2022