This week's theme is dragon! Just like the using the Dragon Splinter to battle, this week's theme leaves you very flexible! The strength of the dragon splinter is that when using the dragon splinter, you also pick a sub-splinter. This means you get to use monsters from both the dragon and the selected splinter to build your team comp. This makes it very fun and very flexible.
The Ruleset
The Strategy
With the given ruleset, mana cost was a very big factor. 15 mana lends toward playing 2 ways. Go big with a solo frontliner (i.e. Kron the Undying, Hydra, etc.) or try to patch together a team of low cost cards and hope to out speed/dps the opponent. In addition, this format limited to only life as a supporting or main splinter. Light teams tend to focus on sneak and melee attacks, while dragon is quite limited as most of the cards are large mana bombs.
Given the cards I have at my disposal and the ruleset, I decided that I would try to stall the front and use magic to try and kill off the opponent's monsters.
The Summoner
Camila Sungazer is a 3 mana legendary summoner that has the demoralize (-1 to melee) ability. This card is a good match when you expect to face off against melee monsters (or like me you just lack other dragon summoner options).
1st Slot - Sacrificial Chicken
BBQ chicken! Basically just throwing the chicken out there to hopefully absorb a hit from a high dps enemy. #chickenstrats
2nd Slot - The Tank
For this comp, Lord Arianthus (LA for short) is basically just a huge stall card. With both shield and void abilities, it reduces every type of attack by 50% while reflecting magic (via magic reflect) and dealing thorns damage to melee attackers. I expected the enemy to use primarily melee (light focus) or magic (mirror match with gold dragon).
3rd Slot - The GoAT
Lastly is the DPS slot in this comp. Gold Dragon is one of the strongest monsters in the game. It has an exceptional 4 magic damage with blast (meaning his effective damage is 6 magic per turn with for 4 to the first positon monster and 2 to the 2nd position monster). But that's not all this DPS bomb can do! It also has great survivability with 2 abilities that help it survive against enemy monsters. It also has the heal ability to restore 30% HP per turn and flying to give it some RNG dodge against non-flying enemies. And then, to top it all off, it also has magic reflect to provide some extra DPS against enemy magic monsters.
The Battle
In what turned out to be zero surprise, the enemy decided to use melee monsters (and sneak). Paired with Camila's reducing melee attack as soon as I saw this comp I knew it was a win. The normally very scary Feral Cat can completely wreck your back line with it's high speed and good damage. However, because of the heal ability on the Gold Dragon, it heals the damage each dealt from the Feral Cat completely declawing the Feral Cat.
Round 1:
Round 2:
With no frontline heal in sight, this was just a trivial fight, as the Shieldbearer (insane health against melee/ranged attackers) is dead in 3 turns as it can't mitigate magic damage at all (magic bypasses armor and shield skill does not reduce magic damage)
Round 3:
The frontline falls and that's all she wrote. Gold Dragon just straight solos the entire team dealing the killing blow to all the enemies.
The Wrap
Overall, I think this battle show the strength of the Gold Dragon. The do-it-all DPS monster with huge damage and great survivability is an exceptional addition or main centerpiece of any dragon focused team. Pair it with some survivability and some utility, and watch as the Gold Dragon kills off entire enemies team singlehandedly. The only real downside I see with Gold Dragon is actually the splinter that it resides in. The only really synergistic summoner is the underwhelming Delwyn Dragonscale (same ability as Alric Stormbringer but 2 more mana rather than the standard 1 mana tax the dragon summoners usually see).If this card could have been usable with Valmanor or Alric in water, this card would be so much stronger (increasing the magic attack from 4-5 also increases the blast damage from 2-3 on the 2nd position monster which is a huge boost).
My overall monster rating: 9/10
A build around finisher, limited only by low mana formats and the lack of a cheap synergistic summoner.