Every week there is a Splinterlands challenge to share a battle using a specific card and on this week's post it is the Wave Runner card. I also encourage Splinterlands players to partake in the challenge because you get to try different strategies and earn some crypto in the process.

Featured Monster: Wave Runner

Wave Runner is a water splinter card and it starts off with the reach ability. At level 5, it learns the knock out ability at level 5 and snare at level 9. Both the stats and the abilities doesn't seem that bad so it is definitely a card I use from time to time.

One of the best things about this card is the reach ability since I really like to have it in my second spot since I prefer to have melee monsters in that spot. I don't exactly have any good reach monsters in my neutral list so when it comes to using a water summoner, I do like using this card quite often. My current card is level 3 because I managed to get a gold copy of this card. So this card will also net me more DEC per fight when I win.

Rule set, Battle and Plan

The rule set this time is holy protection and poison. So for this battle, I definitely want some high health monsters and any monsters with self-heal would be really nice. The holy protection makes things a little bit more tankier since the first hit will be ignored but I am more worried about the poison effect. We have 50 mana available so I don't see any point in not using some of those high mana cards I have available.

The summoner I choose to use this time is Lir Deepswimmer. First off the shield will definitely help me if my opponent is not using magic type cards. On top of that, the return fire is a natural counter for ranged monsters. The blind ability will make melee and ranged monsters miss against me more often. So this summoner is a great choice given the 50 mana available.

My plan would be to use a kraken to tank hits in the front. Afterwards, I will line up my monsters to attack and outlast my opponent. The best part is that kraken will have taunt ability so my backline will naturally live longer and deal more damage. My wave runner is a card with a bit of health so it should be able to deal some damage before dying off.

Round 1

First off my opponent's summoner seems redundant since holy protection is part of the rule set already. However I am not liking the Warrior of peace card since it will drop my attack from my melee monsters and they make up for half of my cards. Lir will be useful against their last monster but the divine healer might be troublesome. I am not as worried about my cornealeus dying off because the Kraken has taunt.

Round 2

I am a bit disappointed with my damage from the first round. I have a feeling my kraken will only live for another turn or two but it should be enough time for poison to take out my opponent's backline.

Round 3

My Kraken will be dead once poison kicks in but I have managed to take out my opponent's range monster. The combination of return fire and my sand worm landing its hit killed it off. I don't think I will be able to kill many of my opponent's card next turn but I am more confident about winning this match.

Round 4

After poison kicks in, my opponent will only have his warrior of peace alive. So this match is pretty much over after poison kicks in over the next few turns because my cornealus can self-heal.

After another turn, I win because Cornealus was self-healing the entire match. I felt the match took a bit longer than normal since it took a few times for affliction to land on his warrior of peace.

Conclusion

The battle went as I expected. My Kraken did a good job of attracting all the damage so the poison rule set did its work on both of our parties. The only difference was that I had a cornealus that could self-heal. Lir was a great choice as well since it definitely helped take out my opponent's last card. The only thing I wasn't expecting was the warrior of peace since it reduced the damage of both my ranged and melee attacks. So the fight definitely lasted longer and I had to outlast my opponent.

I don't think there is much I could change around on my line-up since Lir, Sandworm and Cornealus takes up quite a bit of mana. However I guess it might of been a better choice if I decided to change out sandworm for a different high mana card. I just felt like it was missing it's attacks quite often and it didn't leave much of an impact on the field. On my opponent's side, I think he had a solid lineup. My Cornealus might of been in trouble if the Kraken wasn't there.

You can see my entire match here.

What did you think of my match? Was there anything you would of done differently? I think it is quite interesting to see how different players use the same card.

You can find my original post here.