Giant Squid – flawless dragon slayer

Giant Squid – flawless dragon slayer
Weekly battle challenge showcasing Giant Squid and some dragon torture...
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Dear splinterlands fans, in this weekly battle article I want to show interesting Untamed card:

Giant Squid

Giant Squid is interesting monster and her role changes as she levels up. Everyone should have at least lv 1 “phantom” Giant Squid because it is part of starter set. At level 1 her role is damage dealer plus secondary tank and/or sneak/snipe countermeasure.

2 damage for 5 mana is good average for starter decks and 4 health + 1 armor is very tanky for non-frontliner. As levels progresses her damage compared to competition starts to be low and tankiness average at best. What changes though are 2 important abilities – Blind is gained at lv 4 and Weaken when maxed. Weaken might not be super impactful when cards are maxed (still good just not as good as weaken at lower leagues)

Blind, which is gained at silver league (lv4) is very impactful.

And if used under right circumstances it might be really devastating ability. When compared to +speed blind does not improve how fast your unit attacks, but always works even when your defender is way slower than attacker. Evasion Buff is also 15% instead of 10%, which makes Blind lot better than +speed.

We can improve effectiveness of Blind even further - Rules that restricts or bans magic damage are great because they ensure all incoming damage will get a chance to be mitigated. Blind have natural synergy with good speed and other evasive abilities (dodge, flying) so this makes quite a few mini-combos possible. Notably Serpent of Eld with his Dodge + high speed will benefit a lot. Kraken works well too and for reverse speed matches Torhilo will become very powerful well rounded tank.

Another synergy is with turtle strategy and healers, which will be showcased in this battle.
Most important powerspike is clearly at level 4, where Giant Squid unlocks Blind ability.

Let’s get into match analysis, it is ranked match from diamond league:

Oh who do we have here? A dragon… and this is strong one collection-wise.

No magic means there will be no shenanigans and Equalizer guarantees longer
battle so support units goes up in value.

This makes it ideal for full turtle strategy – instead of going straight for processor we
will chew him one limb at a time till there are monsters left and instead focus on
defenses to ideally prevent opponent from doing anything meaningful.
This is effective anti-dragon strategy quite often

Daria isn't ideal choice, that would be Camilla Sungazer, but she wasn't available at the time of battle. Both Alric and Bortus will do nothing since magic dmg is prohibited by rules so our choice is either slightly useful Daria or Summoner with effectively no ability for bit less mana.

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Lord A. will play essential role. Even though Void will do nothing in this battle Lord A. have one feature that other possible tanks don't have. That feature is no attack. It's important because when he does not attack he will not take any retaliation damage and our healers will have easier job keeping him alive.

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Secondary healer with two important tasks - Her Triage will need to negate any damage that bypasses our tank, could be snipes, sneaks or blast she will also need to keep our melee damage dealer healthy in case it takes some retaliation damage. This is very important because opponent might have opportunity attacker(s) and our damage dealers don't like being focused.

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Primary healer with just one job he's really good at - keep our tank alive. Place after Mermaid because if lord A. falls he will buy us some time by healing mermaid and later himself before oppoent gets to our damage dealers.

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Only pure damage dealer and only melee monster we have. Gets buff from Daria and is supported by Mermaid's Triage ability to mitigate possible retaliation damage.

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Support with Blind ability + secondary damage dealer

Blind is extremely powerful here because it can make any incoming attack miss and opponent will try to race with his damage against our healing. Even single miss can cause setback worth even entire turn or two because our healer will keep healing.

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Support debuffer + secondary damage dealer

Headwinds is great ability to have here because it reduces "surface area" our Lord A. will have - weak ranged attackers wouldn't do a scratch now. Perfectly fits into our plan - opponent will have to kill our shielded Lord A. with reduced attacks from blind monsters faster than our healers keeps healing him.

here is link to battle.

It worked even better than expected! It doesn’t happen very often to get flawless victory, where your monsters finishes with full health against opponent with higher level cards. Actually this was first time it happened to me.
Team composition is solid and only thing I would like to change is Camilla Sungazer instead of Daria Dragonscale because Camilla would be much better summoner here. She wasn’t available to me at the time of battle though.

Do I play Giant Squid often? Too early to tell. I bought my copies for silver level Squid at the start of this challenge (and got few extra copies from packs later too) so I haven’t had many opportunities. Giant Squid is still bit of a niche card (but nothing too niche) so I guess I will play her from time to time, something like once or twice a day.

How to get Giant Squid? You can get her from opening untamed packs or buy on market. And I have 2 extra copies so let’s do a sneak giveaway – total two 1 BCX Giant Squids will be given out to those who respond to this post on hive with any comment starting with letter G. Deadline & drawing 3 days after posting.
If you want to buy on market current price is $0.083 per 1 BCX regular card or $1.672 per 1 BCX gold foil card. That’s reasonable fair price for rare card still in print.
I recommend using Monstermarket.io ( owned by @reazuliqbal & @zaku) where you can get packs with 10% discount (does not count toward airdrops) or 3% instant cashback on card purchases.

Thank you for reading and good luck in the @splinterlands.

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