Feral Spirit - Share Your Battle! Challenge (2)

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Second challenge of the week!
Theme and card of the week is Feral Spirit

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Thoughts: Before the Chaos Legion update, this is a card/monster which I had thought was pretty decent to use in Life decks, for both low and medium mana requirements. It was especially useful when Silvershield Knight was part of the starter deck, it elevates Sneak/Reach/Opportunist cards, somewhat similar to what the current Water deck with Demented Shark is currently.

Theme	Feral Spirit
Edition	Alpha/Beta
Rarity	Common
Element	Life
Attack	Melee
Abilities	Sneak

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Battle Rules

Symbol	Effect
	No modification to the standard gameplay rules and mechanics.

Mana cost: 23

Usable elements: All elements

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Team Composition

Role: Summoner

The moment I saw the opponent's battle history of playing the typical Death deck with thorns, I figured I had to use General Sloan. I had to make use of ranged attacks in order to deal with the commonly used Cursed Windeku, hence the +1 ranged attack boost from General Sloan will prove to be critical.

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Role: Tank

The first in position and a decent low mana cost tank available. With 3 Armour and 3 HP, it works well against non-magic damage teams.

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Role: Healer

A decent card that will heal our essential tank whilst dealing a decent amount of damage at the same time. The heals buys extra time for the later damage dealers to wipe off the enemy's team before the tank falls.

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Role: Backline Hitter

Our card for the week and also a card I tried to use to clear out the pesky hitters at the back of the opponent's team. With most of my cards hitting the frontline, I always try to include at least 1 Sneak/Snipe/Opportunist just in case to deal with any strong damage dealers at the back.

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Role: (2nd) Damage Dealer

A little damage dealer with the Snipe ability. This allows the Silvershield Archers to deal damage, boosted by General Sloan (+1 Ranged Damage) beyond the enemy frontline tank.

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Role: (Main) Damage Dealer

A very strong damage dealer when coupled with General Sloan, dealing 6 damage in total in a round. Its low hit points would be it's negative, hence why the Shieldbearer with the Taunt skill would have been really good in this case.

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Role: Backline Cover/Shield

A 1 mana cost with 2 HP is already pretty decent by itself. I used Gargoya Scrapper to shield the damage dealers at the backline from Sneak attacks due to a lack of a Taunt within the team lineup.

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Play by play

> Round 1:

Start of the battle. My opponent, too, used up all 23 mana to put out Cursed Windeku (6), Chaos Agent (1), Life Sapper (3), Death Elemental (3), Soul Strangler (3) and a Crypt Beetle (3) in corresponding order.

Feral Spirit, being the card with the highest speed in the battle, struck first and took out Chaos Agent quickly. However, the enemy seemed to be very wary of Sneak focused decks, hence having a Crypt Beetle at the back with the Shield ability to reduce damage taken from melee and ranged attacks. As such, Feral Spirit was likely to be useless in this battle due to its 1 attack damage.

The combined efforts of the opponent's Life Sapper, Death Elemental and Cursed Windeku, my Blinding Reflector and Venari Crystalsmith was brought down to 1/2 and 0/2 (Armour/HP) respectively.

A counterattack began from Pelacor Arbalest and the Crystalsmith brought Windeku down to 1 HP. After topping up Reflector with a heal to max HP, Reflector's armour was shattered by the Soul Strangler. The Silvershield Archers took first blood by taking down the Chaos Agent with Snipe. The Reflector again lost more HP by finishing off Windeku due to the opposing Thorns ability, leaving himself with 1 HP.

> Round 2:

Feral Spirit starts the round off again to get blocked by the Crypt Beetle. The opponent Death Elemental took off another HP from Crystalsmith and the Life Sapper sapped the life out of the Reflector, causing him to leave the board. This, unfortunately, means that the Crystalsmith has to come to the frontlines, which also results in a drop of firepower, as ranged dealers cannot attack at the front.

A quick double hit from Arbalest brought down the beefed up Life Sapper at the front, pushing Death Elemental in front. A clutch heal came up from Crystalsmith to save itself from the upcoming 2 damage from the Strangler. Last efforts from the Strangler only brought the Crystalsmith down to 1 HP, while the Silvershield Archers took the attack back to him, resulting in the removal of the Strangler from the field.

> Round 3:

Victory is at sight. Death Elemental finishes off the Crystalsmith as its Snipe ability fails when it is at the frontline, pushing the Feral Spirit to the front for some action. Arbalest's double hits bring down the Death Elemental and destroys the Crypt Beetle's armour. The Silvershield Archers only managed to get the Beetle down to 1 HP due to the Shield ability.

The Beetle struck the Feral Spirit to no avail, as the Spirit managed to dodge the attack with its high speed.

> Round 4:

What's left was simple as the Arbalest won the battle with his high damage.

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Strategy Talk

Since this was on standard battle rules, all I had to do was to look at the opponent's battle history for clues to win the battle.

Death decks was always relatively hard to play against. With Thaddius Blood the Summoner (-1 Magic Damage, -1 HP), it already half-defeats Earth deck users who typically uses magic. To add on, the commonly used Cursed Windeku with the *Thorns* ability poses some difficulty to most other decks who like to make use of melee monsters.

Since I saw the opponent's last played decks were a whole row of Death decks, I knew I had to look to using the Life deck coupled with General Sloan in order to win.

Feral Spirit had always been fun to use due to its relatively decent stats for a 3 mana card. It manages to outspeed most cards that have a similar mana cost. In this battle, it did not prove to be of much use due to the opponent's choice of backline monsters. An unexpected Crypt Beetle stood at the back, pretty much left Feral Spirit useless due to the Shield ability to reduce damage taken. The only positive move from Feral Spirit was him dodging the fatal blow from the Beetle.

I had tried for a few battles, to make use of the Silvershield Knight to make more use of the Feral Spirit, however, I cannot seem to be able to find a situation to use him as I always seem to encounter Earth magic or Death thorns decks. So this time, I just tried to use ranged dealers again, however, used quantity (more low cost cards, putting a Gargoya Scrapper at the back) instead of using the Shieldbearer with Taunt. If there was a next time, I would use the Legionaire Alvar with the Void Shield to try my luck with using Silvershield Knight and Feral Spirit against some Earth magic teams.

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🤗

Thanks for reading!

It was fun to revisit this card again as it was not in the Life deck meta for a while. We keep on going. Cheers.

Link to the battle: https://splinterlands.com?p=battle&id=sl_0a4a25c640c791d97fa3d1e2a5f7f648&ref=tertius