A Spider Beside Her...I mean Forgotten One

This week's Share Your Battle challenge features Lava Spider! I wasn't sure what to expect with this challenge since I had some mixed feelings about it - Lava Spider is in the Fire splinter, which is one of my favorite splinters. However, it also seems like it would work well in a ranged damage lineup, while I usually play melee with Fire.

Lava Spider is a pretty cool card - for the relatively low cost of 3 mana you get a ranged sniper with a decent amount of HP. The downside (at least for me) is that my favored fire summoner, Tarsa, won't give Lava Spider an attack boost. On the plus side, my Fire deck does have a few levelled up cards now! I recently starting playing with them after the Chaos Legion launch and it is a huge (huge!) improvement over playing with the base level starter deck.

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!

First up: the ruleset. This was a decent ruleset for using Lava Spider because it has a medium mana cap, which is pretty good for Fire. Lava Spider's slightly higher HP also means that it won't instantly die to poison. Finally, with these conditions I may think that the water splinter is a better choice, but luckily it's banned with this ruleset!

Lava Spider is in the Fire splinter so we're going with a Fire summoner. I really have been enjoying using Tarsa in ranked battles, and have her at level 2. On a side note, I think this may be the first time I got to use a levelled up summoner in the battle challenge! She won't increase our Lava Spider attack, but she'll still help out the rest of my team, and everyone is going to get that HP boost which will be very helpful in the poison ruleset.

I started my team with my tank and secondary tank. Or more accurately, I might say primary tank and meat shield. Forgotten One is huge in the poison ruleset since its Immunity protects it from poison. I stuck the Scorch Fiend up front before it to try and soak up a little bit of damage.

Up next came the indirect damage portion of my lineup. Serpentine Spy's Opportunity and Tenyii Striker's Sneak can both pile some damage onto my opponent's back line.

Last (but not least) is out guest star of the week - Lava Spider! Lava Spider synergizes well with indirect damage because it also hits monsters that are not at the front. My hope it that Lava Spider can stick around for a while and do some additional damage to my opponent's back line.

With the lineup set, it's off into battle! When I see the selected teams I am not quite sure what to think - my opponent has gone with a death lineup, and their Cursed Windeku with a whooping 10 HP will stand up to poison and my monster's attacks for a while. It isn't looking so good for my Lava Spider either - there's a lot of Sneak damage on the other side with Silent Sha-vi and Undead Badger.

The first round of battle is carnage - my poor Lava Spider died in the very first round, but did do an admirable job of tanking some hits and gave Serpentine Spy and Tenyii Striker a bit of protection. Oh, and quick note here - curious why the Serpentine Spy hasn't died to poison yet in this screenshot? Apparently the game applies poison at the START of the next round before any attacks occur. (Maybe I'm just unobservant, but this is the first time I noticed that)

round 2.png

Another round in and the field is beginning to clear up as the poison damage takes its toll. My opponent did a great job of placing their Riftwing to protect the Windeku from my Tenyii Striker's Sneak attack, so it's a faceoff between my Forgotten one and the Windeku. As you may notice by the HP totals, my Forgotten One managed to miss in round 1, and proceeded to miss AGAIN in round 2 despite only having a 1 speed disadvantage. That's a 10% chance to miss each time, which means there's a 1 in 100 chance of this happening. Thanks, RNG.

round 3.png

My Forgotten One finally got its act together and managed to hit in Round 3. So the battlefield you see here is already decided - poison will finish off the Windeku and the Striker at the start of the round, and I'll have the only attacking monster on the field. Thanks to Immunity, it won't going anywhere! And again, if you wanted to see the whole battle for yourself, you can see it right here.

round 4.png

With the way this battle played out, Lava Spider played more of a supporting role. By which I mean the Lava Spider didn't do a whole lot and ended up just buying some more time for my other monsters (looking at you, Forgotten One) to do the job. I decided to share this battle anyways because the lineup showcases how the Fire splinter has a wide variety of ways of dealing damage straight to the back line - Lava Spider plays an important part in this by providing a Snipe option.

Based on my current Fire deck, Lava Spider will probably only see occasional play. But it is a solid Fire card that can synergize extremely well with some other summoners cough Yodin cough, and if I ever happen to be lucky enough to have those at my disposal I'll be sure to remember Lava Spider!

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: Credibility - An introduction to Credibility, and insights it gives us into Splinterlands.
Djinn Chwala, I Choose You - Using Dragons in Battle! - This week's battle challenge, featuring the Dragon splinter and Djinn Chwala!
Splinterlands Economics: The Gini Ratio - An introduction to the Gini Ratio, and insights it gives us into Splinterlands.

Thinking about giving Splinterlands a try but haven't signed up yet? Feel free to use my referral link: https://splinterlands.com?ref=bteim, and be sure to reach out to me if you have any questions!

A Spider Beside Her...I mean Forgotten One - Using Lava Spider in Battle!