Belated Stonesplitter Orc Challenge - From a Total Beginner's Point of View

I decided to buy the Summoner's Spellbook and join the Splinterlands playerbase. The game is a lot of fun and I would recommend it to everybody who likes collectables, TCGs or the play to earn model.
Anyway, it was time for me to enter my first weekly card challenge - Stonesplitter Orc.

I recently bought the Unicorn Mustang card

to use as my main tank for Earth decks.
For this reason I have not tried using Stonesplitter Orc yet, the challenge made me play him - and he is surprisingly good as first card.

It's skill Retaliate makes it fun to play => when it is hit by a melee attack there is a chance it will strike back.
3 melee damage is quite good in beginner leagues.
Adding 1 armor to the card's stats lets it take an extra hit, which means an extra opportunity to strike back. Even as an Alpha card, the Stonesplitter Orc has a great design mechanically in my opinion. Simple and great.

Here is one of my first games with him
As a new player I got kind of scared seeing a golden card against me, meaning that the other player is probably more invested in the game as me.

This game was nothing special, but a quite fun experience for a new player :)
I have played a lot more since, reaching ~900 rating and I plan on investing all my online incomes on new cards haha - Splinterlands is that good!

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I started writing this article during the Stonesplitter Orc Challange but did not have time to finish it, so I am a bit behind schedule but now onto the current Water Elemental Challenge :)