This week's Share Your Battle challenge features Gargoya Scrapper! This is another one of the cards that is in the starter set, and it's always fun getting the chance to pick out a card that many people take for granted and give it the chance to shine. Gargoya Scrapper is a kind of workhorse card that usually won't make a huge impact, but it is cheap enough that I will usually fit it in as a meat shield. It is one of my more frequently used cards, enough so that I own a gold foil copy of it to get some of that juicy bonus ranked play DEC!
I have to say that this week's challenge did not get posted at the best time for me. I had just finished my battles for the day, and most of the cards I had rented out for the day were in the Dragon splinter. On the plus side, I could use Life cards (and therefore Gargoya Scrapper) with my Dragon summoner, but I only had a few Life splinter cards sitting around to complement it.
So I jumped back in to ranked battles bracing to have to slog through a lot of losses before finding a good battle to share. But then, something occurred that almost never happens - I got lucky. First battle in and I get this gem that I will be sharing with you today - one shot, one kill. That's right, this is the very first battle I had while trying to find my game of the week and it turned out to be a great one. On to our battle!
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 is the ruleset for our battle. To be honest, it is just a so-so ruleset to be using Gargoya Scrapper. Usually you would want to bring some bigger monsters when there is a high mana cap, and 60 mana is as high as it gets, besides the 99. In this case there are some things going for us though - that Equal Opportunity ruleset means that I may want to bring a low health monster to shield some other low health monsters further towards the back of my lineup.
As I mentioned at the start of the article, my daily focus for the day was the Dragon splinter. So I had several Dragon splinter cards rented out, including a gold foil Quix the Devious. My opponent's match history had a lot of Death lineups so I was expecting to see a Death splinter lineup with some ranged damage. Quix is the perfect counter to that, and was the natural choice for this battle.
I started my team with my tank and secondary tank. Djinn Chwala is an amazing front line tank, with plenty of armor and health, not to mention 3 attack and Thorns. Gargoya Scrapper (our guest star of the week!) may seem at first look to be an unusual choice, especially given the high mana cap for this battle. However, I wanted to use it as a shield for my Pelacor Arbalest at the back of my lineup. Gargoya Scrapper was one of the the few monsters with a low enough health total to get attacked before my Arbalest in the Equal Opportunity ruleset. It also has Void which usually doesn't do much, but as you'll see in a bit it came in handy for this battle.
The middle of my lineup was straight support monsters. Disintegrator was there to try and make my opponent's monsters hit a little less harder, and Time mage would slow everything down a bit. Having the speed advantage is particularly important in the Equal Opportunity ruleset - weak monsters can get picked off quickly so attack order makes a big difference.
The back portion of my lineup had every bit of damage that I could squeeze in. Pelacor Arbalest gets two attacks per round, while Prismologist hits for a massive 3 damage, and has Blast to boot. My plan was for Gargoya Scrapper to buy some time for this duo to deal heavy damage to my opponent's lineup.
With the lineup set, it's off into battle! When I see the selected teams I can't believe my eyes - it looks as though Gargoya Scrapper is set up to be the biggest 1 mana tank I have ever seen! My opponent has brought a back line consisting entirely of 1 damage magic casters, and their front line should be picked off relatively quickly with my entire lineup getting to attack first thanks to the dual speed debuffs from my Quix and Time Mage.
As I am writing this now, I also just noticed that they seem to have brought a lineup which is considerably lower than the 60 mana cap. But they were playing on the ranked ladder and had managed to get to around 2.2k rating so I'm sure they had a good reason for picking the monsters they did, and to be fair my lineup also came in significantly below 60 mana. Anyways, let's see how it played out!
The first round of battle went just as I expected - my opponent's entire lineup gets debuffed to 1 speed, and my Arbalest and Prismologist are able to knock out my opponent's Crypt Beetle. With the Xenith Monk stuck at the front matched up against Djinn Chwalla and the rest of my opponent's monsters dealing 1 magic damage, this game is all but over. This is Gargoya Scrapper's moment to shine, as the Void ability means that it will negate all the magic damage and its positioning will ensure that all of the enemy monsters will be attacking it. It really won't have to, but if necessary it could tank all day! Or at least until exhaust damage starts, anyway.
It only took half a round more - with all of my team's debuffs still in place, my opponent's monsters were fresh meat for my lineup's ranged damage. A few more hits were enough to send the last of the enemy monsters packing And again, if you wanted to see the whole battle for yourself, you can see it right here.
Gargoya Scrapper player a huge role here, as the (potentially) infinite tank. It served its job perfectly as a lightning rod to draw all of the enemy fire while my back line remained unscathed. While that had been my general plan, it is safe to see that it worked out better than I had ever hoped it would. At just 1 mana Gargoya Scrapper fits into most lineups, and I plan on using it regularly going forward - though I'm not counting on it being as much of an immovable object as it was in this showcase battle!
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: The 10,000 Hour Rule - An introduction to the 10,000 hour rule, and how we can apply it to Splinterlands.
Lining 'Em Up - Using Venari Knifer in Battle! - Last week's battle challenge, featuring Venari Knifer!
Splinterlands Economics: Chunking - An introduction to chunking, and how we can can use it to our benefit in Splinterlands.
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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.