Splinterlands Weekly Challenge

Hello Everyone,

https://steempeak.com/splinterlands/@splinterlands/5qedvu-share-your-battle-weekly-challenge-win-upvotes

So, here comes the new challenge of Weekly Share Your Battle by @splinterlands team and here goes my blog on the same.

Hope you notice that, there is no particular monster is mentioned for this week's challenge.

Instead, it's an ability Opportunity, which features in this week's challenge.

Opportunity ability:

By now, most of us, have used the monsters with Opportunity, which enables a monster to attack from any position and specifically, it attacks the monster with lowest health.

Strengths and Weaknesses of an Opportunity monster:

Strengths:

It's ability to attack from any position, is definitely a good thing for a melee monster.
Ability to attack the lowest health monster is the other thing which can change the battle in a span of an iteration. How? think that there is an Creeping Ooze in opponent's lineup, which reduces the speed of all my monsters and thus the attacking pattern changes drastically. This can be changed back to original attacking pattern if we have a Screeching Vulture if we are using Earth Splinter, or an Serpentine Spy if on Fire Splinter or a Dragon Jumper with Dragon Splinter. These all changes the course of the game suddenly.

Weaknesses:

Most of the Opportunity monsters comes with lesser health barring Dragon Jumper and that makes it vulnerable when even the opponent also uses an Opportunity monster and his monster has better speed than ours and the first hit will be from opponent's Opportunity monster removing our own.
Barring Dragon Jumper, all the Opportunity monsters are of lesser mana cost and when we go into a battle with high mana cost and definitely need an opportunist monster, then there will be wastage of mana cap given to us although we have the liberty to use other high mana cost monsters.

Few tricks to turn the weaknesses into strength:

We can load one or two 1 mana monsters before the Opportunity monsters so that, we can avoid it getting hit first, but given the limitation of 6 slots, this is not always a feasible solution unless we have a very low mana cap battle.
Other thing which helps us in avoiding our Opportunity monster getting hit early is to use a Taunt monster to taunt all opponent's monsters to attack it.

OK, I hope those tricks works for you and get your Opportunity monster last longer in the battle :).

Battle and Lineup:

https://steemmonsters.com/?p=battle&id=7239c53d570c44e15870c8a26869e7f9b80b9cf7

This was a short battle with 4 rounds only and my intention here is to show the ability of Opportunity from Screeching Vulture used in this battle.

This was a battle with 19 mana cap and involved battle types Aim True and Broken Arrows, former enabling the melee and ranged monsters to always hit their target and latter enables ONLY to use melee and magic monsters.

My Lineup was as below:

1. Flesh Golem:

Used this for being a self healing monster with 3 melee attack and good enough health.

2. Goblin Sorcerer:

This being a low mana cap battle, I wanted to ensure there is something which attacks second line monsters and also battle from front position if the need be.

3. Screeching Vulture:

Used this for it's Opportunity ability and simply because of this week's challenge :).

4. Wood Nymph:

A healer and also a 1 magic attack provider.

5. Furious Chicken:

Used this to just give some extra protection for my Wood Nymph if there is any sneak attack.

Just to tell about opponent's attack, we had a Frozen Soldier, Ruler of the Seas, Medusa and Furious Chicken.

Battle:

As I mentioned, it's a short battle with 4 rounds.

Round 1:

Round one was all about sneak and Opportunity attack from my monsters as Goblin Sorcerer and Screeching Vulture attacked the Furious Chicken and Medusa positioned at the back end of the lineup and Medusa was just hanging in there with just one health left by the end of round 1 and so was the Goblin Sorcerer for me.

Round 2:

As was the case, the Goblin Sorcerer and Medusa were removed in this round and Ruler of the Seas kept on attacking 2 monsters thru it's blast ability.

In the mean time, even Frozen Soldier was also just surviving by one health.

Round 3:

Since Frozen Soldier was with just one health, Screeching Vulture attacked it instead of Ruler of the Seas and magic attack from Wood Nymph ended the battle for Frozen Soldier and we are left with only Ruler of the Seas to be removed.

Round 4:

Ruler of the Seas with just 2 health left at the end of last round, was attacked by Screeching Vulture for being the highest speed monster from both sides and ended the battle!!!