Splinterlands weekly battle challenge - CHAOS KNIGHT!

Thanks to Min An on Pexels for the image!

Hello everyone, it's time for another weekly battle challenge.

This weeks theme monster is Chaos Knight. Lets check out her stats:

Quite a durable tank in my opinion. She has the Shield ability right off from level 1. I still have her only on level 3 for the +1 damage and +1 speed from the base card. I plan on leveling her up some more as she is quite suseptible to magic damage given her low base hp. She gets quite alot stronger on higher levels gaining Monster Slayer and Inspire, but as a new-ish player of 3 months they are way outside of my reach.

Feel free to click this link to check the battle out for yourself if you dont feel like reading my wall of text.

Moving on and lets dive into the battle!

Rulesets:

As the battle pops we are presented with the following rulesets:

• Every splinter is available except for Death;
• Close Range: Ranged attacks may be used in the first position;
• Equalizer: The initial Health of all monsters i equal to that of the Monster on either team with the highest base health;
• 40 mana cap.

When the battle popped up, enemies selection was all-over the place and there wasn't a clear go-to strategy in my head. For the presented rulesets there are a lot of choices to make for a team, but in my opinion for these rulesets the best is Life splinter with General Sloan as they have some of the highest damage in the game, but lower health. Low health won't be an issue because we have Equalizer and I plan on using Cornealus to have him boost our base hp. Also we will be able to utilize the other ruleset - Close Range. Given that Cornealus has 12 hp and heals on him will be 4 each round, and adding a Venari Crystalsmith on top of that we should be able to withstand a lot of damage.

Setup:

Monster:	Why I picked it:
	For a summoner my best choice is General Sloan just because the raw damage boost he provides is much more valuable for me in an Equalizer matchup, than Mother Khala's +1 hp. Thus I will be using my level 2 General Sloan.
	As a main tank I, ofcourse, decided to go with my level 3 Chaos Knight. Her Shield ability will make her tank even more melee and ranged damage, and with the 4 hp heal each round it should be more than fine. We dont have a Taunt, but back-line damage shouldn't be much of a problem as we have high hp boost from Cornealus and the Equalizer ruleset.
	Perfect fit for our second position. 2 base damage, 12hp to boost all our other Monsters, 3 speed and the Heal ability to make him sustain more rounds and soak up Snipe attacks.
	A great next pick to help sustain the fronline. I only have a gold foil level 2, but I plan on leveling her up some more to get her to atleast level 4 for the 2 damage and 1 extra hp.
	Great addition to the archery team, 3 base damage, only 2 speed, but her Blast ability is strong in getting rid of shields for the upcoming assault.
	Not much to comment on him, 2 base damage with Double Strike, low-ish speed of 2. Another great pick for this battle.
	For my last pick I decided to go for the rented Halfling Alchemist. His Halving ability is very strong and he will also benefit from General Sloan's +1 ranged damage. Also 1 armor to help soak up a sneak attack. The trade-off is his 1 speed, which kind-of sucks overall, but make him very good in reverse speed matchups, or in normal when he hits and cuts the enemy attack.

Round 1

Starting the battle we face off Alric Stormbringer and, as expected - a heavy magic team with a total of 13 magic damage with the Venari Taskmaster's protect aura for +2 shield to all units, with Legionnaire Alvar's very high base asrmor, and River Hallondale's ressurect and I was like "Oh S!@t". On second glance he has the Dwarven Wizard's Snipe and the Coral Wraith's Sneak which gives a glimmer of hope for our team after all. He will have a scattered damage across our team and this should buy us enough time to kill him before he kills us.
In this round we deal heavy damage to the enemy tank, while surviving alot of damage to our Chaos Knight, but we have the Venari Crystalsmith's tank heal ability coming again early in the next round, right after Djinn Oshannus's attack.

Round 2

Okay so all is well as Legionnaire Alvar has 4 hp left and we have a decent amount of damage incoming. As expected he dies, but gets ressurected with the full 10 armor points, but at least he deals 0 damage to our Chaos Knight. Some attacks are exchanged and the Legionnaire Alvar dies for the second and last time and next up is Djinn Oshannus, whose 5 speed might be a problem. Sadly the last monster on our team in this round to attack is the Halfling Alchemist whose halving ability is very strong, but only if he lands his attack, which is kind-of 50-50 against Oshannus' 5 speed, aaand he misses.

Round 3

We start round 3 with our Chaos Knight dieing to Djinn Oshannus' 3 magic damage, and next for us is Cornealus. Time for the real strategy to kick in with his high hp pool, self-heal and another heal from Venari Crystalsmith. He starts off with healing the 2 damage he suffered in the previous round from the Dwarven Wizard's Snipe ability and lands 3 damage on Oshannus leaving him at 5 hp. In the following two attacks from Prismologist and the first attack of Pelacor Arbalest take him down and next up is River Hellondale. He suffers a hit from our Halfling Alchemist and gets his damage cut down from 3 to 1, which should help us survive.

Round 4

We start round 4 with River Hallondale at 10 hp, and he should easily die this round. Not surprisingly just this happens. Cornealus gets healed to full. Unfortunately for us this round our Halfling Alchemist dies to Coral Wraith's 3 magic damage sneak attack. Next in the frontline is Venari Taskmaster.

Round 5

So far everything looks perfect. Venari Taskmaster will die easily and from now on its free win. Coral Wraith end the round with only 6 hp left.

Round 6

Coral Wraith dies after 3 attacks and the last enemy monster - the Dwarven Wizard is in the frontline. He ends the round with only 4 hp left, 2 attacks and everything is done.

Round 7

As expected he dies even before hitting after Cornealus and Venari Crystalsmith's attacks.

Results and post-game thoughts:

The battle went pretty much as planned. Only thing I didn't plan for is to reduce eventually a full magic damage team, but I wanted to have more damage for myself instead of putting Crystal Werewolf with his Silence ability to just stand there and wait for Chaos Knight to die just to hit with 1 damage.
Luckily for me our enemy chose to split his damage across the board when he picked Snipe and Sneak which are generally very good in non-Equalizer matches, but for this one they failed him quite a bit.

If there are any tips you have for the specific battle or if I have made a mistake I would love to let me know in the comments below!

Thanks for reading and have a great weekend, everybody!

P.S.: Big thanks to @kyo-gaming for the dividers. Check his awesome peakd post on creating them here.