Welcome my friends,
After a short break, I am coming back with my blog series for Share your battle weekly challenge. This time the theme is about dragons, therefore I thought it’s good to have a closer look into some basic dragon cards available in ghost decks or reward chests. I hope you’ll enjoy this case study where I am trying to verify the pros and cons of the mentioned cards.
Cards analysis
Let’s start from the summoner - Drake of Arnak. Drake is a rare summoner from the Untamed edition. It was initially part of the airdropped cards and now can be only pulled from the remaining packs or bought from the market. It also comes as a part of a ghost cards deck, so to play plain-vanilla cards with Drake, it is not necessary to buy him. However, he is relatively cheap, also in the rental market, so players in higher leagues have many options to utilize him. Let's verify the pros and cons of this summoner.
Pros:
- Cheap in purchase and rental, available for free in ghost deck
- Grants very universal ability (+1 armor) and costs relatively low mana
- Gives access to 3 elements: dragons, selected by player, and neutrals making it hard to predict the lineup
Cons:
- Additional armor is not useful against magic cards and does not grant any advantage in damage to the selected cards
Now, let's move to the tank - Djinn Chwala is an epic card available to obtain from rewards chests. It is not a part of the ghost deck, so needs to be acquired as a reward, purchased from the market, or rented.
Pros:
- Huge amount of health and armor combined with Thorns ability and quite decent damage output
- You can level up it easily due to Epic rarity and a large number of cards in circulation
- You can pull it from the reward chest
- Thorns and Enrage abilities make it very interesting in use in higher leagues
Cons:
- High mana demand
- Relatively weak against magic monsters
The last part of this basic deck is Twilight Basilisk. It has Reach ability as well as Stun ability starting from level 5, making it quite an interesting card for some lineups.
Pros:
- Good damage output for leveled cards compared to mana required
- Low mana cost
- Stun ability starting from level 5
- Decent speed
- Cheap purchase and rental
- Available in reward chest
Cons:
- A low amount of HP makes it usually dead after one-two strikes
Battle lineup and strategy analysis
The lineup for the battle was pretty interesting due to exotic battle rules. First of all, all monsters started battle poisoned and with Enrage ability. Secondly, the battle was limited only to dragons, death, and fire elements and because all of those elements are pretty weak in my collection, I simply decided to use basic reward dragon cards with some death cards as well as one card from neutral which I was hoping will give me an advantage and will survive poison while my opponent won’t.
Therefore I used Drake of Arnak as a summoner combined with Djin Chwala as the main tank. In the second position, I put Twilight Basilisk, another dragon card obtained from reward chests. Then I placed Gelatinous Cube, two death mages with life leech ability( Life Sapper and Venari Bonesmith). For the last card, I have chosen Silent Sha-Vi with Sneak ability as I was during daily quest progression with Sneak monsters.
This was a really interesting battle. Djinn Chwala with its Thorns ability, high armor, and life points as well as a decent melee attack, makes it a very good tank. Before he died, he have beaten the main tank of my enemy and made a serious damage to a secondary one. Twilight Basilisk as a secondary card also made a good job, dying after the first attack due to Thorns, but still weakening the main tank which was my main purpose of using it in the battle. During the battle, all passing away monsters were adding one additional health point to my Gelatinous Cube. Funny thing was that my enemy had almost the same strategy of using Scavenge card. However he used one with the fewer hit points and at the last rounds, my Gelatinous Cube was the last man standing on the battlefield which gave me a victory!
The second battle was restricted to the elements for which I do not own any leveled summoners, hence I decided to use Drake again to verify its usability in combination with other plain vanillas. As usual, I picked Djin Chwala and Twilight Basilisk as a first and secondary tank, then followed by some supports before main damage dealers are placed. Due to the Blast ability for every card coming from the ruleset, I hoped that this lineup will give me a victory.
Unfortunately, even if my strategy was working fine at the beginning when Djinn Chwala and its Thorns helped me to finish the first tank of my opponent, there was also a secondary one with another Stone Skin ability making it very hard to kill by my non leveled cards. In the end, I lost the battle, however, I am pretty sure that it would be a victory if I would use leveled-up Drake and basic dragon cards.
Conclusion
Even basic ghost deck and reward dragon cards can bring you victorious battle when they are used in specific battle rule sets. Djin Chwala is a very powerful tank and combined with cards having Repair and Tank Heal abilities may cause a lot of damage to your opponent and assure enough survivability to other cards in your lineup. Drake is a very generic summoner, with the usage of 4 mana points, it grant always useful +1 armor but what’s more important usually gives you access to at least 2 elements (3 with neutrals) in the battle, making it very hard to predict your potential lineup and pick good counter. Twilight Basilisk is a very undervalued card, especially in higher leagues it provides Stun ability which may be a game-changer in certain conditions. All those cards are available either for free as a ghost deck (Drake) or may be easily acquired from the marketing for a very low price now. You can also simply win them in your chest from daily or season rewards. In my opinion, they are very good choices for new players and if I would need to build my deck from scratch now, I would probably go with dragon cards.
Thanks for reading and until next time!
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