Every week there is a Splinterlands challenge to share a battle using a specific card and on this week's post it is the Goblin Shaman 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: Goblin Shaman

Goblin Shaman is a fire splinter card and it is a card that starts off with zero attack. It starts with weaken which decreases the health of all opponent monsters by 1 and later learns slow at level 5. At level 3, it also earns 1 magic attack so it can deal damage then.

I don't own this card but it is part of the starter deck for all users. Since it is level 1 and doesn't have much attack, I don't use this card often but I can definitely see it as a useful card because of the weaken ability. When I do use this card, I tend to use it with Yodin Zaku because the blast ability will make it easier to finish off my opponent's monsters.

Rule set, Battle and Plan

The rule set this time is armored up and rise of the commons. This means all monsters get +2 armor and no epic or legendary cards can be used. There is 38 mana available and everything except for earth splinters can be used. It's a tricky rule set to deal with but there are a ton of different setups people can use under this set up.

The summoner I choose to use this time is Yodin Zaku (same as last week). With it's +1 range attack, +1 health and blast ability, it makes it a very powerful summoner. With the weaken ability, my blast

My plan this time is to use Living Lava as my physical tank and Fineas Rage right after it so I can tank more hits. After that is my ranged attackers to take advantage of my +1 ranged attack.

Round 1

At the first glance of my opponent's lineup, his summoner removes my ranged attack bonus but I get to keep my +1 health and blast ability buffs. At least with the current setup, I don't see a lot of high health monsters. His 2nd monster has thorns but I think the blast ability will just slowly deal more damage so long as my front three cards survive.

Round 2

I didn't take too much damage and I have already removed his armor for the first four monsters. I also realized his octopider is decreasing my melee damage. My Living Lava also got poisoned so I think it will be dead on the very next round. The good thing is that my ranged monsters won't be targeted at all for a while so I believe I can take out his monsters faster than he can take out mine.

Round 3

My Living Lava is dead now but I managed to take out two cards from my opponent's side. At the same time, my spark pixie should clear out two more cards if it doesn't miss. Assuming that is the case then only his octopider can attack. So I think I have a very good chance of winning this match.

Round 4

I didn't miss a single attack last round and I think the match is over for my opponent. At least from what I see, his octopider needs three rounds before he can stop my cards from attacking (ranged monsters moving up to the front). At the same time, he needs to ensure that most of my cards will most which isn't likely because both spark pixie and Fineas Rage both have high speed.

As I expected, I managed to finish off the rest of the match without much issue after an another round.

Conclusion

The battle this time around went as I expected. My front-line tanks did a great job of tanking the hits while my damage dealers slowly wiped out my opponent's health. One of the biggest factors that helped me was the use of the blast ability since it allowed me to chip away the armor and took away my opponent's ability to deal damage (after they die). Most of my attacks did either 1 or 2 damage so that blast damage really added up during the match.

I think my lineup was fairly good and I don't really see a need to change it. However my opponent's lineup was a bit risky in my opinion. First off, most of the monsters in the front only had 4 or 5 health in his middle lineup and his high health octopider was in the last spot. As I did not use any sneak monsters and Yodin has blast, I was quickly able to take out his monsters one by one. I feel that having a few higher health monsters in front is always a better option and that is especially the case when you are using a ranged damage setup.

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.