The Squid 🦑 Splinterlands Loch Ness

Hi there!

This week challenge is about: GIANT SQUID 🦑

Nice card, wonderful art. We can put it in the category cheap and underused untamed cards, A MUST in certain situations.

Which situations? Lost magic rule set, mainly. I'll now explain you why!

Card analysis

5 mana, average ranged attack and speed. Good defense: 2 armor and 5 health, not bad for a ranged monster.

As an offensive monster, there are several 5-mana ranged ones that are better than him:

The squid is not an offensive monster. Neither a defensive one, actually. I like to define this kind of monster as functional to some tactics.

Let's see its abilities:

We have the only Blind monster of water splinter and the only Blind ranged monster playable with water splinter (Spirit Miner and Gloridax Magus are magical).

Weaken is a pretty rare ability. It is powerful and deadly when combined with a reflective tank and some opportunity monster.

Card usage

I think Giant Squid to be the perfect partner for Serpent of Eld in lost magic matches. In this post I already talked about this symbiosis. Blind ability is useless against magical attacks, but if we want to use it in normal rule sets, maybe Spirit Miner is a better option for us!

Since playing water summoners in lost magic rule sets is not an option we will use dragon summoner, that will also allow us to use Doctor Scale, AMAZING monster for lost magic: rust, repair, triage, strenghten. WOW.

Our tactic is: Serpent of held Misses some attack (blind + dodge give a 40% of missing, to which we have to add speed delta). Ranged attack not missed are reflected to weakened and rusted monsters. Here some opportunity monster can eat the rests.

The Match ⚔️🛡️

Hold fast, this battle is incredible!

So EQUALIZER in HIGH MANA match, quite dissonant. It's not Lost Magic but I think Closed Range will induce my opponent to play more ranged monsters. And even if he doesn't, equalizer will bring some more helth to my Serpent. So perfect situation to try my lineup, with some obvious modifications:

In Equalizer is important the healing aspect, so: tank heal, triage and (mostly) cleanse are essential. At the same time Opportunity monsters are not the best choice.

My opponent placed a frightening front-attacking 50-mana maxed legendary lineup against my strategic 28-mana one. 😨

Just one highlight this time, to entice you, but the whole match deserves to be seen!

Result (spoiler)

YES! 👌 My tactic worked perfectly. Of course Giant Squid is not in the spotlight, but he is the essential maker from behind of this strategy.

Some of you may think I was just lucky. Well without doing the whole calculation considering speed deltas, I can say that yes, but slightly. Serpent had 40% of missing + speed deltas. He missed 14 out of 24 total attacks. The only crucial moment between victory and defeat was the one I reported in the gif.

Well, I think it's all for today. Great battle I think.

Thanks for reading, stay safe, cheers! 🍻

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