One of my favorite cards in Splinterlands is a Death card, Nightmare. It has the characteristics that I really love in a monster, and it fits my style of play, but that's not just it. It is a highly underrated monster, and if you put it in the right battles, it is a freaking beast.

Nightmare is a particularly strong creature at Diamond/Champion League, and I'm sure you can make it work well in Gold too, but it does not seems to be a great one for lower leagues, and we'll see why not ahead.

As you can see above Nightmare has a 3 melee attack, 13 HP and 7 Speed, which makes it the highest Speed monster in the whole game. It costs 8 mana for all those stats plus the Phase ability and the Blast ability.

What makes Nightmare such a good creature is its insane speed combined with the phase ability, which allows him to dodge magic attacks, plus the fact that Nightmare can tank very well and do a lot of damage.

Take this match against @Lackaffe for instance. It is a Unprotected plus Explosive Weaponry rule set, meaning there's no armor and everybody has Blast.

My read was that in such a case Kitty would be the perfect fit, it provides a lot of speed for my team and that is a deciding factor. I'll be focusing in Speed, giving my team +2 with Kitty and giving my opponent -4 speed with a combination of cards.

The main reason is pretty simple, I'll make sure to attack first, with Blast and my enemy has no armor, on top of that I'll have a tank that has a lot of chance to dodge and I'll attack first in the second round as well, and that is pretty much game. There's almost no way that you can find a composition that can take 2 barrages of damage from a 40 mana Cap team with Blast and without any armor. In this match I kill his team pretty easily, and he misses every attack but the last one. In the end you can not afford not to play speed in battles such as these, and specially against a card such as Nightmare.

Let's take a second example. This one is against @Infinityx22, and the man loves his Yodin Zaku, so it was no surprise he went for it in this battle.

Here again I combine Kitty with Nightmare, this time with Octopider which provides blind, giving another 15% missing chance for my opponent. Fire is a very high speed Splinter by nature and Infinity even plays a little bit of speed himself on top of that, so it is not a very clean victory. This match is pretty much all about trying to survive enough time so that I can kill his little monsters, and that only happens because Nightmare dodges a lot of attacks. Playing against Yodin, dodging is one of the best policies since you're pretty much dodging two attacks, the front row and the second row that was going to take the blast.

Nightmare Enraged

The theme of this Theory Crafting is not only the Nightmare card, but an application of it in an specific rule set, Spreading Fury. If you add Enraged, which multiplies both the attack and speed of any injured monster by 1.5, always rounding upwards. This mathematical formula has an interesting consequence in Splinterlands.

Nightmare is the lone detainer of 7 speed in Splinterlands, and that makes all the difference. If you take a monster with 6 speed enraged, it will go to 9 speed. Now if you take a monster with 7 speed, a.k.a. Nightmare, it will go to 11 speed. Because the speed is rounded up, every odd number gains one speed in the process of rounding, while even numbers don't. Nightmare has not only the speed as an odd number but its attack too, which goes up to 5, transforming Nightmare in a creature that has 5 attack with Blast and 11 Speed with Phasing. The scariest thing about Nightmare is that he does not have flying ability, because if he at least got that, you could counter with Snare. When you have a Nightmare playing Enraged, it's almost impossible to deal with.

The usual way out of it is playing Kitty, that's the easy way, and probably the hardest counter to Nightmare. Kitty gives true strike for its team so they can't miss, ending all hopes Nightmare might have had.

The reason why Nightmare is not as strong in lower leagues is that he loses his main strength, which is his uniqueness in speed, and his Phasing ability too, making him just a high mana card with Blast.

The last remark I'll make is that the ultimate combo you can possibly make with Nightmare is, the Nightmare + Kitty + Enrage. This is impossible to play against if you your enemy does not play Kitty, and I mean it. Nightmare gets up to 9 speed without enrage, and freaking 14 speed enraged. To put in context, it means that a 7 speed monster would have a 70% chance of missing, that's insane. Kitty would keep healing Nightmare if it was to taken some damage, and realistic it wouldn't take that much damage at all. The ideal places to play this kind of Nightmare combo are battles with medium mana caps, around 20 mana or something like that. It is unlikely that your enemy will play Kitty, because in lower mana caps it's just too much commitment, and if you play Nightmare + Kitty, you don't actually need anything else.

Conclusion

This is one of the most overpowered combos in the game if you can find the right gaps to use it, and you win over teams that are a lot more expensive than yours by using a common, very cheap card such as Nightmare. I hope that you try it at your games, and see you around the Hive!

Thanks for Reading!

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