@Arc7icWolf 17 October 2021 edited more from that month

Dragons Are Coming! Are You Ready for This Week Splinterlands Challenge? I sincerely believed that my "**Cheap Edition**" would have standed unbeaten for a long time... but I was wrong! This week's challenge was simply too much to handle and, in the end, I had to knee and admit my defeat. Why? Because the Splinterlands Challenge of this week is not about a card... it's about an **element**! And what an element! This week we have to battle each other, training in the shadows of the approaching "Chaos Legion", improving our skills with... **DRAGONS**! So, while we set the arena for the fight, first give a look (and a like!) to the new Chaos Legion official trailer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0MgCZC2-CQ Now we are ready, let's start the fight!

The Dragon element is all about versatility, as it allows you to play with the cards of one of any other element. So, you can choose **Delwin Dragonscale** as your splinter

Image source https://splinterlands.com/ and pair him with some magic Fire cards to create an unusual combo! But, as a novice player, the first Dragon Splinter you have available for free is **Drake of Arnak**, a dragon itself!

Image source https://splinterlands.com/ Personally, I really like this splinter and I even played it in my first ever Splinterlands Weekly Challenge, pairing it with the Death element: the results surprised me and I tried to replicate them with this challenge! https://peakd.com/splinterlands/@arc7icwolf/splinterlands-weekly-challenge-but-is-the-cheap-edition Let's see how it went. **CARD ANALYSIS** Drake of Arnak gives +1 to the armor of all friendly monsters, increasing their survivability against melee and ranged attacks. It costs (4) mana, so it is slighty more expensive than the other "basic" splinters, but it has the versatility of the dragon element, allowing us to give +1 armor to monsters which, usually, don't have the chance to get this bonus. **THE TEAM** **28 Mana - Standard Rules** As anticipated, **Drake of Arnak** was the summoner chosen for this battle, while **Death** the element paired with it: the bonus armor given by this summoner can be incredibly useful when used with low health monsters without their own armor, as it basically allows them to survive **one extra shot**. As monsters my lineup was made up by: **Bone Golem**: my opponent played his last three matches with **water**, so a tank with the **Void** ability looked like the optimal choice **Skeleton Assassin**: the **Sneak** ability makes it ideal at taking down key enemy monsters with low health **Undead Badger**: same as Skeleton Assassin, but with lower speed and health **Undead Priest**: reduces the health on the enemy monsters, making them more vulnerable to my Sneak monsters **Mantoid**: ranged monster with a lot of health and the **Snipe** ability, useful to increase the damages to the enemy baklines **Twisted Jester**: an other ranged monster with **Snipe**. **THE BATTLE**

Thanks to the **Sneak** and **Snipe** abilities and to the higher speed of my monsters, the first round saw three of my opponent's creatures falling without the chance of casting their magic attacks. Meanwhile, my Bone Golem exchanged some hard hits with the opponent's tank, while countering Alric Stormbringer with its **Void** ability. What an awesome start!

During the second round the music didn't change and it was the time of both the tank and the last magic monster of my opponent to fell under the hits of my creatures, while my team barely receive any scratches. Heavy fire rained above the battlefield and the fight approached to its end!

The third and last round wasn't even a fair fight: the Spineback Turtle was quickly overwhelmed and the match ended in a great victory! **POST BATTLE** The **Drake of Arnak** and **Death** combo keeps being one of my favourites, mixing the strengh of Death cards in killing backline monsters with the increased survivability given by Drake of Arnak. In this particular match the increased armor didn't give me any particular advantage, as the majority of my opponent's creatures were magic ones, which attacks ignore armor: *nonetheless*, the Dragon Splinter helped me hiding my strategy to my opponent (as he couldn't see what element I used the most in my previous matches) and would have also given me extra winning chances in the case that my opponent didn't choose what I was expecting. The Challenge is over Link to the ***battle****.* https://splinterlands.com/?p=battle&id=sl_53b3dbe59097c262ae4ee8cc2f24ee98&ref=arc7icwolf Article also available on: **Publish0x** https://www.publish0x.com/cryptogaming2/dragons-are-coming-are-you-ready-for-this-week-splinterlands-xvyjlom?a=pmbkZ9YKaz **Peakd** https://peakd.com/hive-13323/@arc7icwolf/dragons-are-coming-are-you-ready-for-this-week-splinterlands-challenge Check the battle and drop a follow on **FruitLab** https://fruitlab.com/video/lhXkPhEyON8S1tYV?ntp=cp Card Games meet NFTs: Splinterlands! Play to Earn (My Referall ID: arc7icwolf) https://splinterlands.com/?ref=arc7icwolf Get some ZEN, ZEC, MATIC and 1FLR in seconds directly to your wallet GetZen | PipeFlare | Global Hive https://getzen.cash/auth/register?ref=462243 https://pipeflare.io/r/ad1b https://globalhive.io/r/163008 Get paid just for browsing the web! Presearch https://presearch.org/signup?rid=2595637