🐲Dragon Battle Challenge!🐲 - Yodin Zaku Who?

This week's @splinterlands Share Your Battle Challenge focuses not on a single card, but on an entire splinter, the DRAGON SPLINTER!

The Dragon splinter is unique in that you can team your Dragon cards up with any other splinter. So the opportunities for making creative teams are abundant. Along with the team flexibility being a big perk to using Dragon summoners, Dragon cards in general are fairly strong. So, this is an exciting challenge.

For this match, I put together what I thought was a good, strong team from my low level card collection. In spite of all of my cards being level 1, I figured I'd do ok.

And then...

Yodin Zaku happened!

Let's Talk About The Battle

This was a 27 Mana battle with the Heavy Hitters ruleset and Life, Fire, Water, and Dragon splinters available.

In Heavy Hitters, all monsters have the knockout ability. Since knockout requires stun, and there aren't a lot of monsters with stun at lower level battles where I'm at, this ruleset doesn't really impact team choice much.

At 27 mana, I'd have some options for powerful cards, but would still have to make prudent choices.

My Strategy

I chose Delwyn Dragonscale for my summoner to give my magic attackers a +1 magic buff. Essentially I was planning on running an Alric Stormbringer lineup, but with dragons!

Speaking of dragons. ..

Diamond Dragon is one of my favorite cards. And while it has fairly low health for such a beefy card, it's armor gives it a lot of survivability.

Flying Helps it to stay out of harm's way a little bit, and Slow puts the enemy at a -1 speed disadvantage. Both of these abilities are available at level 1, which was the card I was using. Being a magic attacker, the dragon got +1 attack from Delwyn.

Diamond Dragon gets even more powerful at 2 and 3 gaining the Cleanse and Last Stand abilities respectively. When Last Stand shines, it really shines, buffing a monster's stats when it is the only one left on your team. This can turn the tide of a battle.

I put the Dragon in the back row to keep it well out of harm's way so it could attack and possibly tank any sneak attacks to the rear.

Serpent of Eld was my choice for tank. It's not the best tank. But for the mana it can Dodge and take a little bit of a hit while also having fair melee attack and speed. I didn't want to opt for a better tank, because I needed the mana for more attackers.

Between the summoner, dragon and the serpent, I had already spent 22 of 27 mana. So I chose 2 magic attackers: Ice Pixie and Enchanted Pixie

I stuck the Furious Chicken behind the serpent to add some extra buffer to the squishy magic attackers.

So, having my pixies protected on both sides by a serpent and a dragon, I figured I was ok.

But like I said. Yodin Zaku Happened.

Did It Work?

As the battle began, I saw Yodin Zaku load up in the VS. screen and thought I was done for.

Yodin Zaku is one of the most powerful summoners in the game at the moment and grants all monsters on his team +1 ranged attack, +1 health, and Blast. Nothing to sneeze at.

With every one of the opponent's attacks having blast, I knew my pixies wouldn't survive round 1. And spoiler alert... They didn't.

But they got off a couple of attacks, and the dragon and serpent hit hard enough to start chewing into the opponent's Living Lava tank. Living Lava is one of the more challenging tanks commonly seen from Fire. So, I was a little worried. Once that was gone and Ranged attackers like Ferexia General found their way to the first position and couldn't attack, it was smooth sailing.

Here's the link to the battle so you can watch it yourself!

Reflections

I'm usually so focused on doing a daily quest, or sticking with my favorite Death and Earth splinters that I all too often forget that Dragon is such a fun and powerful splinter to play. I really need to make an effort to play it more often and to get some more dragon cards.

If you want to harness the power of the dragons too, you should be playing Splinterlands. Click here to get started on this fast paced and fun NFT card game!

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All pics are screenshots taken by me, or images made by me in Canva.