Sniper, No Sniping! ~ Splinterlands Share Your Battle Challenge

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(Edited)



I think Sniper cards are strong. That's partly why Twisted Jester of the Death Splinter is one of my favorite cards ever. It's an ace up on my sleeve that won me several matches.



The Water Splinter's Pirate Captain though ...

I can already feel this week's Battle Challenge won't be as easy as the previous weeks 😅


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The Case Against Water Sniping



Snipe skill is lethal when it synergizes with other skills. The strongest would perhaps be its combo with Splash that'll allow the card to strike three enemy monsters with one hit. It's possible to get the combo on Explosive Weaponry ruleset where each monster on the board gets a Splash skill, or when you have Fire Splinter's Yodin Zaku as a summoner.


Though it may not be as OP as with the Splash combo, other skills such as Weaken and armor debuffs synergize quite effectively with Snipe too. These skills allow a faster Snipe kill, possibly eliminating one monster preemptively even before it gets to attack.


Sniping is great within specific team compositions and battle conditions. So what about Water splinter's sniper, Pirate Captain? Unfortunately, I don't think there's any Water or Neutral card that coordinates effectively with Pirate Captain. Perhaps, that's why Water Splinter opponents I fight against often employ magic-focused or ranged-but-never-sniping strategies.


I'll be purposely using Pirate Captain much more than usual today for this week's Battle Challenge. It doesn't bode well for my already mediocre win rate ... but challenge accepted 😅




The Pirate, Captain of the Defeated


Man, my battles with Pirate Captain were disastrous. I'll be shielding everyone's eyes from the atrocity of my plays, so no battle links are shared here. It's defeat after defeat. It may have been the Pirate Captain's curse because I was hating on it even before I started lol.


Or my play is just that bad. The Pirate Captain sticks out like a sore thumb among my usual magic-heavy Water lineup. I tried mixing it up, but I just can't make it work. If anyone got tips for future plays with Pirate Captain, kindly leave them in the comments section. Thanks!


It would have been much easier if I was lucky to get Explosive Weapons or Unprotected rulesets. The condition Unprotected nullifies all armor from monster stats or skills. That would have allowed successful Snipe hits. But alas, no such rulesets came.

And speaking of armor ... Pirate Captain's arguably worst enemy belongs to its own Water splinter family -- the Venari Wavesmith. I've had several Blue against Blue matchups. And every time, there'll be a Venari Wavesmith that raises all its teammates' armor by two. The extra armor effectively cancels out my Lv 4 Pirate King's two-point range attack. The overwhelming counter-force to my sniper -- Venari Wavesmith inspired the image you see as the post thumbnail. The card felt like Poseidon ravaging my pirate ship with its waves.








That One Battle I Won


I finally won! The opponent also used a Wanter splinter team but they didn't have Wavesmith on their lineup. But I did! Woot!

It was a battle with a Reverse Speed ruleset. So I paid careful attention to the Speed stat; looking for monster cards with Speed at one or two points. Check out this link for the full battle.


On Reverse Speed ruleset, the lowest Speed stat is transformed as the "fastest". So I choose the powerful Frost Giant as the tank with a one-speed attribute. A perfect fit for this match.

Next, I opted to add a tank healer, Crustacean King, which, fortunately, has a slow one-speed point too.

Magic is always good with this ruleset since it never misses. So I got two magic attackers. And Venari Wavesmith was one since I was recently re-acquainted with how debilitating its Fortify skill is.

That's the order on how I chose the cards for this battle. Then positioned them accordingly.


Oh, I almost forgot. Lastly, I added Pirate Captain because I had to haha.




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Interestingly ...

The Venari Wavesmith that I counted on was sort of useless for this specific match. There were no melee or ranged attackers on my opponent's team except for that Spineback Turtle with one attack point. The extra armor wasn't necessary at all since Frost Giant shrugs off one-point melee attacks.

And the Pirate Captain that I had zero expectations of had a few lucky breaks that won me the match.




That Albatross, a flying monster with one speed, is a brilliant inclusion that I wished I adopted too. At Reverse Speed battles, a one-speed flying monster is virtually un-hittable with melee or ranged attacks. That's why I cannot fathom how did my three-speed Pirate Captain hit it in one try. My opponent is probably as dumbfounded as I am XD


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The Pirate Captain shows off again by delivering the battle's winning hit at Round 4, against a legendary monster even. That last round boils down to a standoff between the enemy's Ruler of The Seas and my Pirate Captain. The first monster which launches the attack would win the battle. The two combatants had the same speed so it's purely random luck whichever gets the first move. I do have a slight disadvantage since I got a ranged attacker that may miss even if I got to go first.


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Fortune smiled on the Pirate as it landed a successful hit before the opponent attacked. The Captain has led the team to victory with two decisive (yet coincidental) moves.


To End


So is Pirate Captain a good card to play? ... Sorry Captain, but ... no. Play it only if you have no other cards on your Water Splinter team to take up the slot. There are other cards that synergize better with each other within the Water team. And there doesn't seem to be a lot of good, proven plays that include the Pirate Captain. ¯_(ツ)_/¯


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Attributions:
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Splinterland assets are owned by Splinterlands. Images are composite work from premium and free assets Designed by Freepik. Post image text and gif created with Adobe Spark and Gifmaker.



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12 comments
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At least the pirate could shine in one fight. Seems like I will rarely use my pirate. Thanks for sharing your pirate fights.

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Thanks for dropping by. Though, I might have been just incredibly biased because I like Magic on Water team 😅

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We all have our favorite cards. I started learning the game recently and used more or less only earth 🌎 cards. Now I like also the death ☠ and fire 🔥 cards and I try to check other cards too.

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Indeed, we all have favorites. That tends to shift depending on what shiny new card we get :) Splinterlands has too many reliable and likeable cards so it's easy to get swayed.

It's great that you got to join right before Chaos Legion. The new edition seems like a restart -- changing the current established meta gameplays. Perfect time for newbies to get acquainted with the game.

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Yes.. I already have 11 chaos packs in my wallet. Can't wait to open them.

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Nice analysis of the battle, and great gif at the end! I loved it!

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Thanks for checking out and curating my post. You guys at 1UP are doing an amazing service for the Hive gaming community. Thanks for all your hard work.

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That GIF is amazing! Congrats!

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The GIF took me some time to do but it was fun. Thanks for appreciating it :D

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