Splinterlands Community Engagement Challenge: Decked Out — Show Off Your Favorite Battle Lineup!

This week's Community Engagement Challenge is to show off one of our recent favorite line-ups. I don't know about you, but as someone who has not yet leveled the most of the rares and commons of the CA set (I've leveled all epics and legendaries), apart from the BFs I have, I've been kinda tired the past few days of getting stomped by the VERY ANGRY HIPPOS. Yeah, they are mean, even though they are not very lean. But you know what? I've found an even meaner and leaner! way to deal with this annoying menace. That's right. Craniax has entered my CA Ranked line-up and is probably here to stay for a while (or for at least as long as it takes for the hippo craze to go away.

Let's have a look at Craniax's stats before we look at the rest of the cards in my usual line-up and the battles I've picked using the Craniax team.

Craniax the Quick is a 6-mana human Legendary Ranged attacker. This is another dude who reminds me of probably Warcraft's most famous mage - Medivh (the dude who opened the Dark Portal and let the Horde into Azeroth from Draenor (Outlands)), who has basically the same vibe as Craniax - all black and transforms into a raven. At level 1 Craniax has 4 Ranged Attack, 3 Speed, 2 Armor and 5 Health. He also has two abilities - both now at this level - Reckless and Final Rest . We've already seen Reckless on other new cards but this is the first and only card in the set (at least for the time being) with Final Rest. Final Rest seems to be a very good way to ruin your opponent's Bloodline Tribute strategy. At level 2 he gains an additional ability - Impede. At level 3 he gains 1 more HP for a total of 6 as well as his 4th ability - Backfire. Finally at level 4 he has 5 Ranged Attack, 3 Speed, 2 Armor and 6 HP. He also gains his 5th and final ability - Affliction. Craniax seems to be a pretty good card overall, especially with his Final Rest ability. You can literally shut down the whole enemy team if you choose to play him in the right battle.

I've found Heloise very useful against the hippo menace, of course, you definitely need enough mana to support her with enough teammates to leech life from throughout the battle. Kelan is a card which can be thrown in any battle right now basically as he's become such a staple in the current meta. Baron Fyatt is another card I play a lot and like a lot. A few strategic Halvings of the enemy attacks can definitely spoil their day really quickly. Other card I tend to mix in if there's enough mana for that are the Warborn Shaman and Mantaroth. They are also cards that can definitely stand their ground, and when Heloise is there to take the punches, they can also cause a lot of troubles for the enemy units.

Okay, so the whole point of playing Craniax, as you might already have guessed after having a look at his abilities, is to stop your opponent from using on death effects to empower their line-up. The Hippo gang rely solely on Moribund Arrowbait to die and get resurrected as many times as possible because that gives a huge boost to the back-line hippo stompers. Once they get pumped up there is rarely any stopping to them so the skip battle button becomes your best friend unless you've seen them coming and you've included out friend Craniax in the line-up. For that to be possible of course, we need to have Death accessible during the battle and that, unfortunately, is not always the case, so if the Death Element is not available and you don't have a hippo herd of your own, you just skip the battle and go on to the next one, at least that's what I usually do. Below I've included 4 very recent battles where my opponents came with their hippos but left with no hippos alive. I think Craniax deals with this combo almost flawlessly, which is great for the meta. Rock, Paper, Scissors stuff is not bad at all - definitely a lot better than half an year of Tofu spam.