Hello fellow TCG enthusiasts!

This week we have the Haunted Spider for the weekly challenge. I'm entirely thrilled with this and our webby friend is far more appealing to me than the Crystal Jaguar from last week.

If this is the first you are hearing of the Splinterlands 'Share Your Battle!' challenge, check out the official rules and guidelines in this post. If not, continue on to read of my surprisingly not too spooky adventures with our eight legged friend.

Card Overview - Haunted Spider

Haunted Spider is a common Death card with a relatively low mana cost with no base abilities. She obtains poison in Silver which gives her an awesome edge at taking an early round lead.

In my opinion, he is actually quite good unleveled and is a staple for lvl 1 Bronze/Novice decks. That said, I still generally see her primarily as a higher mana set add-on as there are better options in skeleton assassin etc for the low mana fights. The poison from lvl 4 onward though is a major boon. A single hit on a tank in round 1 is a game changer.

Battle Prep and Thoughts

I do tend to play Death on occasion so I opted to rent her for this challenge to take advantage of poison. What I didn't realize at the time, was that I rented the card on my second account which plays with a Bronze deck. RIP that extra 2 DEC in rental costs...

That said, Haunted Spider has a very clear role even without the poison and is relatively easy to throw into comps with just about any ruleset. I was actually able to grab a win on my first attempt with silenced summoners and close ranged as the modifiers.

The Winning Combo

My very first fight I noticed I was going up against a player that spammed water. I normally would have played Owster but didn't have the card today so I honestly though I was going to lose given I knew a full magic lineup was headed my way.

I ended up pulling off a win however due to my lineup choice of high health high speed tanks (not that speed helps against magic) and the silence stopping all of those mages from being buffed. Phantasm at lvl 3 is a surprisingly decent tank at 6 mana. With 5 speed and flying it is incredibly tough to hit for most cards. Nightmare also has high health but more importantly has blast which is generally quite good against pesky mage comps. The rest of my lineup consisted of some ranged units, including our webby girl, to soak and deal damage.

There was a Firefight!

Battle Link

My enemy ran the very meta wavesmith water deck. Nothing special or interesting really other than the included Devil as an anchor.

Round 1

Round 1 went about as expected: Phantasm soaked effectively a round of damage and cleared serpent's shield dying in the process. From here, it was easy to see I had the game in the bag. As long as Nightmare hit, those mages would never get to my backline. She had initiative on Serpent with her 5 speed and had plenty of health to absorb a couple rounds from the mages.

Round 2

Round 2 was a slaughter... Nightmare stomped on that serpent and the rest of the team finished off Medusa. Again, Nightmare is the fastest on the field and would ultimately be able to deal out another solid 3 dmg before succumbing to the mages.

Round 3 & 4

It was clear to me I had won at this point and just enjoyed watching my backline slaughter their targets.

That's a Wrap

I won regardless but I imagine if I hadn't goofed with the rental process and was able to utilize poison, Nightmare would have had the pleasure of taking out some of the mages instead of needing to remove the serpent.

Post Tax

For today's internet tax, ie pet pictures, I wanted to show you Atlas's begging trick. Previously he would do this when really excited. I wanted to teach him to do it on command so whenever he would do it, I gave him a hand signal, praised him, and gave him a treat. On that, this is pretty much the basis for training a dog to do anything.

Disclaimers

Splinterlands images owned by Splinterlands. SL banner designed by @flauwy. All other images and content owned by me unless otherwise noted.

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