Share Your Battle: Lava Spider

The Lava Spider is featured for this week’s Battle Challenge. It is one of the new Chaos Legion cards in the Fire Splinter. The monster costs 3 mana and has the snipe ability.

It is very similar to the Fire Beetle from the Beta cards. Buying this card is a good opportunity for those who don’t already own the much older and more expensive Fire Beetle.

For this week’s challenge, I went with a 16 mana match with a Standard: No modification to gameplay ruleset.

Here is a link to the battle:

https://splinterlands.com?p=battle&id=sl_04b894cac97cd30fff5094a098666924&ref=ninjamike

Sometimes in small mana matches, I focus on trying to defeat my opponent’s backfield first. After all the backfield monsters have been defeated, my monsters will then converge on my opponent’s tank. I chose this strategy for this match.

I selected the Fire Splinter and chose Tarsa as my summoner who adds 1 to melee attacks and 1 health.

At the front of my lineup, I place several small mana monsters to act as a buffer for my monsters who will be attacking the backfield. I started with a Furious Chicken and then a Creeping Ooze. After that I put in an Ant Miners which gains 1 health every time a monster dies. Finally my last three monsters consist of one sniper, one opportunistic, and one sneaker. The sniper is of course the Lava Spider.

Start of Battle / Round 1

The first thing I noticed is that my opponent used a summoner which added shields to all their monsters. This will slow down my backfield attack since all my attacks are melee and ranged. Magic attacks are the only ones that can bypass shields.

Round 2

My opponent and I both managed to defeat one monster in the first round. This has boosted my Ant Miner to a health of 4.

Round 3

In the second round, I took out another one of my opponents backfield monsters and they are now down to one in the backfield. Meanwhile, my Creeping Ooze is gone and my Ant Miners is in first position.

Round 4

I successfully cleared my opponent’s backfield and now their tank is the lone monster remaining. My backfield monsters can now focus solely on the Cursed Windeku.

During the 4th round, I won the battle by defeating my opponents last monster. Though the battle ended up being closer than I expected since the Cursed Windeku has thorns which killed my opportunity and sneak monsters after they attacked.

Even though I won, my opponent was well set up for my melee and ranged attacks. They gave all their monsters shields and chose a tank with thorns. This is why whenever possible I employ magic attack monsters, if I decide to use the strategy of going after my opponents backfield first. Not many backfield monsters have defenses against magic like reflect or void. After the backfield monsters are defeated you do not have to worry about thorns though you do have to worry about a tank with reflect or void.

The problem is that there are not very many magic monsters in the game that attack the backfield and those that exist are expensive. So most of the time I use cards like the Lava Spider for employing my backfield strategies.

Keep Battling