Share Your Battle Challenge - Pirate Captain

Hey everyone and welcome back to yet another weekly Splinterlands Battle Challenge! Before we get into the details of this challenge, I wanted to announce that this is my first time completing a share your battle challenge in the Silver League, so I'm super excited for that. Anyway, in this week's challenge, we have been tasked to fight a match using Pirate Captain and the Water Splinter. Will Pirate Captain help us conquer the seven seas, or will we be more of a ship without a sail? Find out in this post!

The Lineup
This match was fought with 21 Mana and both the "Explosive Weaponry" and "Lost Magic" ruleset which meant that I couldn't use my usual Water strategy of Venari Wavesmith + as many magic monsters as possible and was forced to rely more on a Melee heavy team. In first position, I decided to play Sea Monster. I felt that the healing ability would allow Sea Monster to deal damage while also staying in the fight and absorbing damage while Pirate Captain and Wave Runner were able to deal damage from the rear of the formation with relative safety.

In second spot, I played Wave Runner because it has the "Reach" ability which allows it to attack from second as well as first position. It also has relatively good spee which gives it a decent chance of dodging attacks from especially slow monsters like Stone Golem.

In third position, I decided to play Kelp Initiate. For only 2 Mana Kelp Initiate has 5 health which makes it a nice tank to prevent my ranged monsters from moving into first position.

In last spot, I played Pirate Captain. As Pirate Captain is a ranged monster, he can't attack from first position, so the majority of my strategy focused on keeping him out of harm's way as long as possible and dealing damage from the safety of the rear of my formation.

The Match
To be fair, I knew this match was going to be difficult as the "Lost Magic" ruleset really stands at odds with the current Water Splinter theme of strong magic monsters. Given that magic monsters were not allowed in the match, neither of my Water Summoners (Bortus or Alric) were able to give a useful buff or debuff. If I had my free choice, I would have played Earth and Mylor as my summoner to counter the heavy use of Melee monsters in this game, but for purposes of the challenge, I had to choose Water even though I knew I was playing a sub-optimal strategy. At the end of the day, my opponent easily crushed my team without loosing a single monster.

Analysis of Pirate Captain
Although I lost this match, I simply can't blame this on Pirate Captain as I couldn't field a strong team to support him. Although this match wasn't reflective of his capabilities, I do think that he is a good monster can be used effectively in the right circumstances. For only 3 Mana, you can play a monster with 3 health, 2 speed, and a ranged attack with the Snipe ability. By contrast, Silvershield Archers (Life Splinter) is also a "Snipe" capable monster, and although it only costs 2 Mana, it only has one health and one speed. In the vast majority of situations, I think that additional 1 Mana would be well spent on Pirate Captain.

Summary
Win or loose, it is always nice to enter into the challenges and try new strategies and cards. Although the primary purpose of this post is to share my battle, I always like to remind players that Splinterlands rewards players for EVERY SINGLE match that they win with cryptocurrency. Players also win from daily quests, end of season rewards, and even get free airdrops of the SPS governance token based on their card collections. It's not financial advice, but if you like trading card games or just earning crypto and NFTs, then feel free to check out Splinterlands or watch my battle replay here

https://splinterlands.com?p=battle&id=sl_321f02683a682a8dff3f6090ac41ec6d&ref=parttimeeconon