Rolling in the Deep - Using Deeplurker In Battle!

This week's Share Your Battle challenge features Deeplurker. This is one of my favorite cards in the Chaos Legion set, so I was super excited for this week's challenge. In fact, I even recently picked up a gold foil version to use!

Deeplurker is a fairly versatile Water splinter card that can fit into most water lineups. Even starting at level 1 it comes with a whooping 3 melee attack and Opportunity, which makes it well suited for picking off any weak monsters in your opponent's lineup. It is fortunate that it is great at level 1, because the battle I am sharing today is from a tournament battle with Novice (level 1) league cap, Chaos Legion and Rewards card sets, and no legendaries allowed. While this did mean that my gold foil Deeplurker got temporarily demoted to level 1, I did still get to enjoy its foil-y goodness.

On a side note, this battle was from an in-game tournament sponsored (and streamed) by Hive account@clove71. If you are looking to get started or continue participating in tournaments, there are a whole series of tournaments with various rulesets that run Monday-Friday that are open to all and only cost 1 DEC to enter - I would highly recommend them!

If you wanted to jump right to the action, the Battle Link is right here. Want to hear some more about the lineup? Read on further!

First up: the ruleset. This ruleset works just fine to bring out Deeplurker because the Water splinter (or at least my particular deck) has a lot of high cost cards. Might as well take advantage of the high mana cap!

Deeplurker is in the water splinter so we have to choose a water summoner. Kelya works great with Deeplurker because the additional speed helps Deeplurker to hit more quickly and accurately, and the extra protection from a point of armor always helps!

I started my team with my tank and secondary tank. Since the mana cap was 99, I brought along the bulkiest tanks I had. Diemonshark and Flying Squid are both super expensive and super tanky. In most other rulesets I can't afford to bring them both, so it's really fun to see the two of them together when they get the chance. With Diemonshark at the front, Flying Squid's Reach allows them both to attack at the same time.

The middle of my lineup had some solid support cards. Merdaali Guardian can help keep the tanks healthy, and Nerissa Tridawn (another one of my favorite Chaos Legion cards!) dishes out a ton of magic damage, and can stand in as a backup tank in a pinch.

The back of my lineup was filled in with more damage. Deeplurker's Opportunity would let it pick off any weak enemy monsters, and Sand Worm with its Sneak can deal massive damage to my opponent's back line. You may notice that between Sand Worm, Nerissa, and my pricey tanks I was really trying to take advantage of the 99 mana cap.

With the lineup set, it's off into battle! When I see the selected teams I have no idea what to think. My opponent has brought a Life splinter lineup with a ton of ranged damage and some serious buffs and debuffs - Djinn Renova's Strengthen combined with Disintegrator's Demoralize will make it significantly harder to attack with melee damage, which makes up most of my lineup. On the other hand, at least a few enemy monsters look very squishy and may be able to be easily picked off regardless.

In the first round of battle my Deeplurker and Sand Worm are able to tag team and strike a huge blow by knocking out my opponent's Pelacor Arbalest, stopping its painful 6 (3x2) damage per turn. Nerissa also starts to put some work in on Renova. Unfortunately, my Merdaali Guardian is taken out before getting to do any healing...so much for that plan!

One more round and the field begins to clear up a bit, and I am able to take advantage of a lucky chain of events. My Nerissa gets taken out, but her last shot brought Renova low enough for Deeplurker to land the last hit and finish her off. And then the loss of the HP buff means my Sand Worm is able to take out the Crystalsmith in a single hit. Things are beginning to look a little better for me.

It actually ended up taking a couple more rounds, thanks to Disintegrator debuffing my entire team's attack, but 2 rounds later I finally managed to finish it off and the battle was just about over - Silvershield Sherriff's 4 attack doesn't look so scary when he's stuck in the first slot! And again, if you wanted to see the whole battle for yourself, you can see it right here.

My overall game plan worked out perfectly in this battle - the enormous bulk of my tanks up front were able to hold off most of my opponent's damage output, while I was able to pick apart the enemy lineup with a combination of Sneak, Opportunity, and Snipe damage. My opponent actually picked a great lineup to counter my melee-heavy strategy, but in the end my monsters just had too much HP and damage output. Deeplurker was outstanding in this fight, dishing out damage which (even debuffed!) was enough to land some key hits that won me the battle.

I was a huge Deeplurker fan before this challenge, and continue to be one going forward - with its stats and versatility it can win many a battle. You can count on it being a key part of my Water deck for a long time!

Thank you so much for reading all the way to the end. Interested in seeing some more of my writing in the future? Be sure to give me a follow! In the meantime, if you'd like to see some of my recent posts:

Splinterlands Economics: Compound Interest - A introduction to compound interest, and how it can help you out in Splinterlands.
A Spider Beside Her...I mean Forgotten One - Using Lava Spider in Battle! - This week's battle challenge, featuring Lava Spider!
Splinterlands Economics: Credibility - An introduction to Credibility, and insights it gives us into Splinterlands.

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