This week's Share Your Battle challenge features Portal Spinner! Portal Spinner is a ranged monster in the Life splinter, and while I often use a ranged attacking strategy with Life, Portal Spinner is usually riding the bench, rather than getting sent into battle. So this week was a great opportunity to get some play time in with one of the less-oftenly used cards in my collection.
As previously mentioned, Portal Spinner is ranged attacker. At level 1 (the level I was working with this week), for 5 mana you get a solid 2 ranged damage to go with 2 speed, a point of armor, and 3 health. Portal Spinner's combination of decent damage with more tankiness than you normally get from a ranged attacker meand that it can fit well into the middle of your lineup.
The thing that makes Portal Spinner really interesting is its Scattershot ability - it will attack a random monster each turn! This is a love it or hate it card - either you love the Chaos (hmm!) it injects into the battle, or you hate that it gives you one additional way to get screwed over by the RNG gods. As may be expected from such a chaotic monster, today's battle was an interesting one. In this case, interesting mostly because of how close the battle ended up being!
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!
Portal Spinner is in the Life splinter so we have to go with a Life summoner. You may look at this and think that Grandmaster Rathe is a strange choice for this battle...and you would be correct. General Sloan is usually the summoner of choice to go with a ranged attacking lineup, but for this battle I was slightly concerned about the possibility of my opponent selecting an Earth magic lineup. Also, the day this battle occurred was the very first time I got the opportunity to play with the Grandmaster, and I wanted to give it a try here - it's always fun to get to try out a new toy!
I led off with my tanks. Shieldbearer is a solid all-around tank with its Taunt and massive 4 armor 9 health stat line. Thanks to Grandmaster Rathe, it gets even more armor, and will be able to block magic attacks to boot. Gargoya Scrapper was partly filler and partly just in case my opponent had more magic damage.
Next up came my supporting monsters. Time Mage is pretty darn useful in any battle that doesn't involve reverse speed - that extra speed advantage from Slow is always welcome, and it pitches in a bit of magic damage as well. Our guest star of the week, Portal Spinner, is there it provide some ranged damage. My hope was that it would be able to hit some of my opponent's weaker monsters thanks to Scattershot and maybe take out something important.
I filled in my back line with as much damage as I could fit in. Prismologist is super solid with a 3 ranged attack stat plus Blast, and Pelacor Arbalest only hits for 2, but it hits twice! My overall plan was for these two monsters at the back to go to work on my opponent's front line, while the Portal Spinner maybe gets lucky and knocks out a weaker monster in the back.
With the lineup set, it's off into battle! When I see the selected teams I am not very happy about it. My opponent has definitely not brought an Earth magic lineup in. In fact, they went with ranged attackers, just like me. And with General Sloan, my opponent's monsters will be hitting harder than mine. To top it off, there aren't a whole lot of squishy targets for Portal Spinner to kill - other than my opponent's Pelacor Arbalest, everything else will take multiple hits to finish off.
The fight begins and there are plenty of arrows flying! Unfortunately my Portal Spinner spends the first 2 rounds attacking my opponent's Lone Boatman, leaving it on a single point of health but still in the fight. Things are looking not so great in the front - both of my tanks get taken out pretty quickly. On the bright side, I am also nearly done with my opponent's tanks and my team has some extra armor thanks to Grandmaster Rathe.
One more round and the battlefield is almost entirely cleared out - you can see here that there is just a single monster left on my side, against 3 of my opponent's. Luckily this is a Close Range battle, so my Prismologist is still able to attack. And while all of the remaining monsters have 2 speed, my Prismologist will be able to attack first thanks to winning the tiebreaker with its higher rarity - 3 attack plus blast means that it will b e able to score a double kill!
And here we have reached the end of the battle - it was a squeaker! Luckily, Prismologist will win the tiebreaker again and be able to strike first for the win. And again, if you wanted to see the whole battle for yourself, you can see it right here.
My strategy for the battle worked out, if just barely! My ranged damage was narrowly able to edge out my opponent's and I walked away with the W. Portal Spinner was not able to get the lucky hits that I was looking for, but it did weaken my opponent's backline monsters enough that my Prismologist was able to finish them off. Though, next time I'm thinking that maybe I should just go with General Sloan.
I'm not the biggest fan of Portal Spinner, though it does have its uses - Scattershot is great for getting around Taunt, and if you get lucky you can easily kill something important and turn the tide of a battle. Potentially fun, but it is a little bit more towards the RNG side for my taste. I don't expect to use it extremely often, though I do plan on bringing it into battle from time to 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:
Setting Your Goals for Fun and Profit - A few simple steps to help you set and achieve your goals.
Splinterlands Economics: Appreciation - An overview of the concept of asset appreciation, and how we can use it to our advantage in Splinterlands.
Things that go Bloop in the Night - Using Flying Squid in Battle! - Last week's battle challenge, featuring Flying Squid!
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All images used in this article are open source and obtained from Pixabay or Unsplash. Thumbnails borrowed with permission from the Splinterlands team or made in Canva.