Strategy Corner #01 - LEGIONNAIRE ALVAR vs Diemonshark + Deep Lurker

Hey guys,

I have been always struggling with every share your battle challenge, because I could not find time to write the post or it was already after the deadline. But this week if I only saw this is LEGIONNAIRE ALVAR I could not resist.

So let's talk about our hero:

Stats:

I try to play all leagues, but recently I more focus on silver/bronze and I think in both of them Alvar shines the brightest. In higher leagues it is useful mostly in Melee only ruleset when you need additional demoralize ability.

The most important thing about Alvar is void ability, with so high armor his survivability is very high and it's the perfect target for any resurrect skill. Otherway any other tanks can be easily kill even with 1 magic attack monster.

Let's jump to battle:

Here we got one of many examples where I have recently played a very similar setup for bronze/silver tournament play, where Kelya mirror is very common.

Some words about line-up: both teams are quite similar and in this kind of battle Kelya is usualy the strongest choice. The main difference which give so much advantage here is tank choice, and Deep Lurker :). If you watched any of my splinterlands.tv stream you should know that I'm not a big fun of Deep Lurker card. Let's analyze this battle and you will see why :) :

Round 2 just started, Deep Lurker use his 3-damage attack to destroy 1 armor from River Hellondale. With lower mana matches, when you used some 0 or 1 mana cannon fodder this is usually the first target for Deep Lurker or any opportunity-skilled monster, and it's always a waste of attack.

On second round opponent tank choice, overall very strong card, but as we can see here with ressurect ability, it was ressurected only with 1 health point and next magic damage would kill it immediately. On the other hand our today's hero LEGIONNAIRE ALVAR is ready again for battle with new 9 points of shiny armor and void abilitiy protection.

Now we got an interesting moment of the fight, because our Alvar has only 1 HP, it become target for opportunity monster of opponent line-up, so our River Hellondale is safe for this round and still able to hit and kill Diemonshark. This is main issue of using this kind of tactics, where you cannot rely on focused targeting and in most cases your damage is just too spreaded.

Let's jump to round 3, where our hero Alvar bravely died already, but we still have advantage. Deep Lurker hit Hellondale second time, but still it did not manage to kill it. Another nice choice with high mana match Sandworm was lucky enough to kill the last monster of opponent lineup and battle is practically over now.

With the next rounds it was just cleaning time, opponent lost main damage dealers and despite quite a similar setup, Alvar and Sandworm instead of Deep Lurker in my opinion is the key to win this kind of battles.

Round 6 - the end :)

Summary:

I hope you could see how valuable is LEGIONNAIRE ALVAR. As I mentioned it's not single battle, I have played very similar match-up with little different setup depend on ruleset and mana available, but still the main core for that was LEGIONNAIRE ALVAR, RIVER HELLONDALE and try to avoid playing opportunity monster. I do not say you have not to play them at all, but it's weapon you need to learn how to use properly. If you want to know more about it or any other strategy for higher level of tournament play, please visit any of my stream on splinterlands.tv, all links below.

Here is some clip with comment from one of this kind of stream with battle described in this article:

https://clips.twitch.tv/MoralNiceMonkeyHoneyBadger-Mnc0BIPh8rutGuVi

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