Imagining dragons! (Splinterlands Share Your Battle Weekly Challenge)
The Dragon Lore
What's up, Splinterlands community? This week's share your battle challenge features monsters from my favourite Splinter: Dragons.
What's the story behind the Dragon Splinter? As the lore goes:
The Dragon Splinter of Draykh-Nahka is the home of the Dragon people. Also known as the united Gloridax, the people and Dragons of this Splinter will stop at nothing to protect the Fire Blood. The Gloridax are themselves ruled by rigid bureaucracy, and they attempt to rule the Splinterlands through a web of power, treachery and financial control.
Dragons are amazingly powerful monsters, and the Splinter always fights with another one - as if it was needed. It is the Splinter with more legendary cards than any other rarity: as of today, while there are just three common cards (amongst which the only common summoner in the game - see below), there are 25 legendary cards (not counting the Alpha/Beta duplicates), six of them being summoners - including the mighty Byzantine Kitty:
Be not distracted by cuteness and fluff,
Byzantine Kitty is cuddly but tough,RDS
If you dare to think kitty is merely a pet,
You haven’t faced kitty in battle just yet.
OK, enough with the Dragon lore, let's talk Dragon strategy!
The Dragon Strategy and Lineup
There are plenty of summoners and monsters to chose from the Dragon Splinter. I own eight of them, including Brighton Bloom and three legendary from Chaos Legion. Dragon is the go-to splinter if the ruleset includes Earthquake.
Non-flying Monsters take 2 Melee damage at the end of each round. | As explained in Splintercards: Using monsters with Flying or Heal is the trick for this ruleset. |
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When available, most players will pick Brighton Bloom in the earthquake ruleset, as his buff is to give the flying ability to every monster in the lineup.
Has an increased chance of evading Melee or Ranged attacks from Monsters who do not have the Flying ability. | The flying ability gives a 25% chance of evading melee and ranged attacks from non-flying monsters. Flying monsters also survive earthquake. |
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As most dragons already have the flying ability - naturally! - then it´s no use in choosing Brighton Bloom. Instead, I tend to use common summoner Delwyn Dragonscale, who increases magic attack by one, whenever I can and it makes strategic sense to use Dragon. This week I decided to complement my own Dragon cards with a selection of legendary rentals. Let's look which cards I used in the different battles for this week's challenge:
Card | Lore | Role and strategy |
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Delwyn is Daria's brother who was kept alive by her sister and had his soul transferred to a golem. | My favourite summoner for increasing magic attack in any Splinter. Most dragons I use attack with magic, so the choice was obvious. Rented at level 4 to summon level 2 legendary monsters. | |
- | - | - |
Resulting from a genetic experiment gone wrong, the Chromatic Dragon features five heads - each from a different element. | At level 2, the Chromatic Dragon acquires the enrage ability and an extra melee attack point to begin with. Therefore, it is my tank of choice. | |
- | - | - |
To be sure, Basilisks are a snake - the largest poisonous one in the Splinterlands, yet older residents of the Dragon Splinter think of them as Dragon relatives. | This reward card starts to become effective at level 2, when it gets an extra attack point. With the reach ability, it is an auxiliary or support monster if your have mana to spare. | |
- | - | - |
These new, uncatalogued sub-species of dragon are huge bat-like creatures with incredible speed. | The Void Dragon as the name says have the void ability to resist magic and are fast to evade melee and range attacks: a resilient monster well positioned in the front row. | |
- | - | - |
While actually not made of diamonds, it has nearly indestructible exoskeleton (thus the ten-point armour). | The Diamond Dragon's abilities are amazing: at level two, it slows down the opponent's monsters and cleanses your own tank: useful in any battle, it is a must in the lineup of noxious fumes ruleset. | |
- | - | - |
Not Dragons themselves, these Gloridax soldiers are trained to literally jump off of Dragons’ backs and into battle zones. | I love this card! Usually, I will rent it gold foil to get the 50k CP to play gold or diamond. As I'm still in silver, I rented regular foil at level 2: incredibly fast, featuring opportunity to kill weak opponents and snare to nullify opponent's flying. | |
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Chaos Dragon's lore is poetic: it portays the most potent monster of Uul which spread fear in Praetoria and the Splinterlands. | The Chaos Dragon is as expensive - 14 mana - as powerful: already at level 1, it has three-point magic attack and scattershot ability, targeting random enemies: better positioned in the back. | |
- | - | - |
Naga come in many different varieties, sizes and cultures depending on where they live. Naga Assassins are so quick and deadly at their work that there is rarely a need for a fight. | Naga Assassin is another fast support monster that fits in the lineup in low mana battles or if there is mana to spare - at level 3, it becomes stronger with 4 health points. |
Battles
I used Dragon when the mana cap is high - above 40 - so I can exploit the synergies of all these cards. For this week's challenge, I will share two battles: the first one featured the earthquake and stampede (which I could have taken advantage of with the [Desert Dragon], but didn't) rulesets, with a 50 mana cap. The second had an armoured up ruleset with a 52 mana cap.
First battle
In this first battle, I played all dragons with Naga Assassin in the back - my only monster without flying. My opponent made the obvious Brighton Bloom choice, grating flying to Death monsters. In silver I noticed that the Death Splinter is played a lot, usually with Ancient Lich and Cthulhu (and also Dark Ha'on) in the lineup. While Naga survived the attack from Sand Worm, she died with the first Earthquake. But those powerful legendary death monsters were no resistance to my Dragons!
The last surviving monster - Cthulu - died with an earthquake, as it lost the flying ability to Dragon Jumper's snare. Check out the battle!
Second battle
The second battle featured a complete lineup of dragons! OK, Delwyn is a Golem and Basilisk is technically not a dragon - but the former's surname is Dragonscale and the latter is seen by some as a type of dragon. So, this is the battle for this week's theme!
Unfortunately, my opponent was weak: Tarsa at level 1 summoning only level 1 monsters is nothing for those dragons, even if it featured legendary monsters Chain Golem as tank and Cornealus in the far back. In the end, all my dragons survived till the end, because they were so fast they evaded most hits from the slowed down fire monsters. Check out this battle here!
Reflecting on the battles
Playing these monsters in Silver is OP, but not always is it a certain victory (I lost a few when I overplaying Dragon for this post...). Yet, these two battles demonstrate the strategies, even if the opponents were not that strong...
Splinterlands
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Great Post!
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really nice post here ! A few days ago I played against Delwyn Dragonscale and got completely demolishd by this summoner. It is infact a really strong line up you got here !
Delwyn is my favourite, as I can use it as a wildcard to summon magic from other splinters. Indeed, the line-up is overpowered in silver, great for gold and competitive even in diamond (but then there are many counter strategies).
ficou ótimo 😁
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Thanks for sharing! - @cieliss
Thank you, @cieliss!