This week's Share Your Battle challenge features Flying Squid! The Water splinter is one of my favorite ones to use and Flying Squid sees plenty of play in my lineups, so I was pretty excited to see the subject of this week's challenge - Flying Squid is one of the starter cards and is free to use, but I use mine enough that it was worth it to be one of my earliest gold foil purchases.
Flying Squid is a melee monster of the Water splinter. Contrary to its name, it does NOT have Flying. It does, however, have Reach, along with some solid stats - even just at level 1 you get a robust combination of 8 health and 3 speed, along with 2 melee damage. It gets a very nice upgrade going up to level 3 (the level we'll be playing with today), when it gets a third point of melee damage - this Squid hits hard!
The end of the season was earlier today so that means our battle today comes from the very first day of the season, which is always a little hairy - those fights to climb out of the Bronze league are tough, especially at the start of the season! The battle I am sharing today was actually one where I guessed slightly incorrectly on my opponent's strategy, and had to hope for the best.
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 our battle today. This was a good ruleset for using Flying Squid because 24 mana is the perfect middle ground mana cap that gives us enough space to spend the relatively high 7 mana to bring along Flying Squid as the secondary tank - any lower and we would have to be cutting some corners on our main tank or neglecting a back line!
There is no Earth splinter allowed in this battle and my opponent didn't appear to have a history of using Water magic recently, so Kelya seemed like a safe summoner pick. Kelya is a great all-around summoner - that speed buff makes your monsters hit harder and be more likely to dodge attacks, and her armor upgrade is always welcome, particularly if you suspect that your opponent will be using physical (i.e., melee or ranged) attackers.
I led off with my primary and secondary tanks. Serpent of Eld is an outstanding Water tank - it has a great combination of durability and evasion, not to mention hitting hard with its 3 melee attack. My off-tank was our guest star of the week, Flying Squid! One of the things I love about Flying Squid is its versatility - you can change up your front line main tank to suit whatever you think your opponent will be bringing into battle, and Flying Squid will pair well with pretty much anything. In this lineup, it can hit just as hard as Serpent of Eld with a matching 3 melee attack, while still being protected from harm.
I spent the majority of my mana cap on the front line monsters, so I went with a pair of cost effective monsters that could help to boost my damage output to fill the middle of my team. Pelacor Bandit and Ice Pixie are both super affordable, deal a bit of damage, and are extra evasive thanks to the Flying ability.
I finished off my team with a pair of meat shields in Torrent Fiend and Chaos Agent. Based on my opponent's match history I was expecting to see a Fire splinter lineup, and if they choose to bring Sneak damage into battle, both of these guys would help to buffer my more important (damage dealing) monsters in the middle of my lineup.
With the lineup set, it's off into battle! When I see the lineups I am slightly surprised - instead of Fire, my opponent has gone with a Life team. On the bright side, my evasion and armor will work just as well against ranged attacks as it does against melee, but it does mean that my back line buffer monsters are completely out of position.
The battle starts off slowly, in part due to my opponent's Shieldbearer Taunting all of my monsters in addition to getting heals from my opponent's Venari Crystalsmith - that is a solid combination, and one I often use myself when I play with the Life splinter. The combination of my Serpent of Eld and Flying Squid is putting out a solid 6 points of damage though, and after two rounds of battle my monsters have managed to heavily damage the Shieldbearer - it is about to go down!
One more round and things are beginning to look up, the Shieldbearer is gone and my team is starting to go to work on my opponent's secondary tank, Pelacor Conjurer. All of that melee damage is adding up. My Serpent of Eld is also putting together a rather nice string of dodges.
One more round and we're nearly done - my team is able to take out the last buffer protecting my opponent's ranged attackers and is poised to finish them off. While my Serpent of Eld is heavily bruised, I manage to close out the battle without losing a single monster! And again, if you wanted to see the whole battle for yourself, you can see it right here.
Despite my opponent bringing a completely different team from what I was expecting, my plan for this battle still worked perfectly - I was able to use heavy melee attacks from my tanks to take down my opponent's monsters before they could do any serious damage to my lineup. Flying Squid played its role to perfection as one half of my frontline melee damage output.
I would also like to take a moment here to thank the random number generator, as my Serpent of Eld managed to pull off TEN consecutive dodges during this battle. Those misses were with a 3 speed advantage plus dodge which means that each individual attack only had a 55% miss chance - the odds of that happening are approximately 0.253%, or 1 in 394, definitely not something you see every day!
As I mentioned at the start of this post, I am a big fan of Flying Squid. It is a relatively affordable way to boost your frontline damage output, and is outstanding as a secondary tank in many Water lineups. It has been a staple of my Water splinter play ever since Chaos Legion was released, and will continue on as one in the future!
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: Money - An look into the concept of money, and how understanding it can help us in Splinterlands.
Ant Got Nothing on This - Using Antoid Platoon in Battle! - Last week's battle challenge, featuring Antoid Platoon!
Splinterlands Economics: Rent - An overview of the concept of economic rent, and how we can use it 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.