This week's Share Your Battle challenge features Tenyii Striker! I was glad to see this week's challenge, because Tenyii Striker is one of my favorite cards in one of my favorite splinters. That's right - I do love a good Fire team and Tenyii Striker fits right in to a good Sneak team, and its stats make it perfect as an off tank.
Despite loving Tenyii Striker and often playing with levelled up Fire summoners, my copy is only level 1. That isn't a massive drawback though, as even at level 1, for 5 mana you get a solid 2 attack and speed, paired with a very respectable 6 health, and (very importantly!) the Sneak ability. Sneak is great because it negates the major weakness of melee monsters - only being able to attack from the first position. With Sneak, you can have additional melee monsters attacking from anywhere in your lineup, and as an added bonus they'll be hitting the back end of your opponent's team, where they may get lucky and be able to attack something particularly squishy and/or important.
So while you might be expecting to see a Sneak battle today, the fight I choose to share today will be showing off Tenyii Striker's other often overlooked role - that of a cost effective secondary tank with the potential to chip in some extra damage. 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!
Here was the ruleset for the battle. This is a little bit of a different ruleset than I would normally look to use Tenyii Striker in. You may notice that there is a high mana cap, and the most common use case for me is usually in low to medium mana battles. In this case, the available splinters, as well as my rentals for the day, led me to choose the Fire splinter - as well as Tenyii Striker.
Love him or hate him, Yodin Zaku has a strong presence in any format where Untamed summoners are allowed. His Blast ability alone is excellent, and the additional health and ranged attack buffs he brings with him push him firmly into the zone of "overpowered". So naturally, we're going to try and use him whenever we can. As you can tell from his buffs, ranged monsters will get the most benefit. However, every monster will appreciate the additional point of health and blast ability!
I started off my team with a pair of tanks. Grum Flameblade is great in any high mana cap battle, and my hope was that he would be able to Blast a few wearer monsters in the middle of my opponent's lineup to get some bonuses from Bloodlust - once you get a few of those then things can snowball quickly. Next up came Tenyii Striker, our guest star of the week. A monster with Sneak seemed like a good choice in this lineup because he wouldn't accidentally steal and of Grum's kills, and would be able to potentially weaken my opponent's back line.
Next up came some ranged damage. I wanted to make the most of Yodin's buffs so I went heavy on the ranged attacks. Lava Launcher and Gargoya Devil both have respectable ranged attacks which will hit even harder with Yodin in play. They both also will be able to attack in the event that they end up stuck at the front of my lineup, thanks to the Close Range ability.
I rounded out my team with more ranged damage. Blood Maker and Lava Spider won't be able to attack from the front, but their abilities will maximize the potential Blast damage - both Scattershot and Snipe have a decent chance of hitting the middle of my opponent's lineup and being able to deal damage to a total of three monsters in a single attack.
With the lineup set, it's off into battle! When I see the selected teams I have no idea how the battle will turn out. My opponent has brought a mix of both melee and physical damage, including a potentially troublesome Serpent of Eld at the front - if it can manage to Dodge a lot of attacks then my team won't be doing much splash damage with Blast. My opponent's cards are also much higher levelled than mine, which means they will have an advantage in card statistics - they brought a level 4 rare summoner in Kelya, while my level 1 legendary summoner Yodin is the equivalent of just a level 2 rare summoner.
The first round of battle does not go well. My Grum gets knocked out almost immediately without being able to get any kills. My ranged damage gets spread out across my opponent's team, which is nice in that it takes out all of the armor, but it also means that I haven't managed to kill a single monster yet.
One more round and things are looking a little better, but the battle is far from over. My team's attacks are able to take down my opponent's frontline tanks, as well as start dealing some heavy damage to their monsters at the back.
The battle actually ended partway through the next round, but it was a close one - all of my opponent's monsters hit extremely hard, with all of the magic attackers dishing out a whooping 3 magic damage, and the Axemaster at the back being able to hit twice per turn. And again, if you wanted to see the whole battle for yourself, you can see it right here.
This was a battle where things did not quite go according to plan. My strategy of having Grum get a couple of easy kills never paid off, and he ended up dying without getting a single one. Luckily, the rest of my team was able to pull out the win anyway. Tenyii Striker wasn't terribly impactful in this battle, but this example goes to show that even when a battle does not turn out the way you think it does, then it is very helpful to have solid stats - even when things went poorly, Tenyii Striker was tanky enough to buy time for my ranged monsters to finish off the opposing team.
Tenyii Striker is a solid Fire attacker, and is capable of turning the tide of battle when the conditions are right for it. It is a staple of my Fire splinter play, and is a card that I will be deploying often in my ranked battles!
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: Markets - A look into markets, and their role in Splinterlands.
Splinterlands Economics: Value - A look into the concept of value, and how we can apply it to our advantage in Splinterlands.
Right Place, Right Time - Using Venari Spellsmith in Battle! - Last week's battle challenge, featuring Venari Spellsmith!
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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.