Share Your Weekly Battle Challenge Featuring Grund By affliction

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Hello Fellow Hivers!
It is weekend again and time to relax and rejuvenate ourselves to gear up for the next week.
I personally spend my weekend with family and playing Splinterlands. And today, my post will be about a battle in Splinterlands featuring our card of the week.
If you are not sure what Splinterlands is, make sure to give this articles a read and at the end you will find some information to get started with the game.

ABOUT THE CARD :

Grund has spent his entire life in the lowlands of Praetoria and has grown to love the land and its people. First introduced to the lore of battle as a hatchling, he has studied it ever since with enthusiasm. When he became a juvenile his hands found steel, an old rusting sword abandoned and forgotten in the swamp by some intrepid explorer. Before long it became an extension of himself as he applied all he had learnt, quickly mastering blade work. From then on, he became obsessed with the art of armed combat and he practised with any weapons he could get his hands on.
When he first met Bera Dallin in New Everitt he couldn’t help but marvel at her martial prowess. After having spent some time with her he became proficient in the use of the warhammer. His great strength meant that he could hold one in a single hand and so it wasn’t long before he acquired another and began to dual wield them in combat.
Grund is well loved amongst the people of Praetoria and he is a staunch defender of them, his strong ideals of honour and justice infused within in from a young age. When he heard of the Chaos Legion invasion, Grund took up his hammers in anger and sought them out immediately.

The earth Splinter is very well known for it's magic heavy teams with Obsidian in Chaos Legion and it is widely played across all leagues. However, playing decent tanks with the magic heavy team is also very important. In the Untamed era we have seen an excellent tank in Unicorn Mustang but considering how expensive the card is, not everyone who joined the game post Untamed can afford the tank.
Luckily, we have been introduced to quite a few new tanks for the Earth splinter with Chaos Legion. And when we are talking about tanks for Earth Splinter, our featured card of the week, Grund leads the way for being a top class aggressive, offensive tank.
Before we see this card in action, let us quickly go over the stats and abilities of the beast.

Edition: CHAOS LEGION
Rarity: EPIC
Element: EARTH
Attack: MELEE
Abilities:
Double Strike
Trample
Cripple

Grund is a 10 mana heavy melee damage dealer with 3 melee damage, 3 speed and 10 hp at level 1. Now that might seem a bit meh considering it is a 10 mana card but what makes it stand out is the Double Strike ability of the card at level 1. The card becomes even more dangerous at level 4 as it gets the second ability of Trample. And at the highest level Grund gets it's third ability of Cripple. Grund's base stats are 4 melee damage, 3 speed and 13 hp at the highest level. Now that does not seem meh at all, does it !
For our today's battle, we will be covering a battle in which we are using a rented level 5 Grund because I am poor and only own 1 bcx of the card.

THE RULE SET :

• Mana Cap : 40

• Rule sets :
  Up to Eleven: All Monsters have the Amplify ability.
  Earthquake: Non-flying Monsters take 2 Melee damage at the end of each round.

• Available Splinters :
  Fire
  Water
  Earth

THE LINE UP :

Position	Card	Mana	Level	Description
Summoner		4	6	For this battle, we chose a level 6 Obsidian which will give all of our allies +1 magic damage. This makes Obsidian one of the strongest and most popular summoner in Chaos Legion.
Position 1		10	5	As the tank, we have chosen to play the featured card we have been talking about, Grund. The rented level 5 version of the card is offering us 4 melee damage, 3 speed and 12 hp along with the abilities Double Strike Trample.
Position 2		7	8	In the second position, we are playing the reward card that is perfect for Earthquake with Flying ability, Pelacor Mercenary. Apart from that our level 8 secondary tank is having melee damage of 3, with 4 speed, 1 armor and 10 hp and another super useful ability of Heal.
Position 3		5	6	In the third position, we have a card that the opponent team hates with high speed and Flying, Regal Peryton. The 5 mana card has 3 magic damage, 6 speed and 8 hp at level 6. This indeed is a very useful card is almost any battle.
Position 4		4	1	In the fourth position, we have our placed a level 1 Queen Mycelia. Though the card has only 1 magic damage, 1 speed and 4 hp for 4 mana cost. It's strength lies in the abilities the card has. At level 1, the card helps all allies with Protect.
Position 5		1	3	In the next position, we are playing a level 3 gold foil Mycelic Morphoid. This is our 1 mana Sneak protection with Thorns ability, 1 melee damage, 1 speed and 2 hp. We can not ask for more for only 1 mana.
Position 6		9	6	In the last position, we have placed a level 6 Mycelic Slipspawn with Taunt and Forcefield abilities. For 9 mana, the card also offers quite handy stats of 3 magic damage, 3 speed and 11 hp.

THE OPPONENT LINE UP :

Position	Card	Mana	Level	Description
Summoner		6	3	The opponent is playing a level 3 Possibilus The Wise, one of the new airdrop summoner from Chaos Legion. The summoner adds +2 hp along with Trample and Reach to all allies. Certainly a summoner that goes quite well with the strong melee team of the water splinter.
Position 1		8	3	At the first position, the opponent decided to play a level 2 Baakjira, the mammoth tank with no attack but insane abilities like Void Slow Strengthen at level 2. This is one tough card to take down because of it's whopping 12 hp combined with these abilities.
Position 2		7	8	In the second position of the deck, we are facing a level 4 Diemonshark that goes pretty well with the summoner as now it is able to able from the second position with he stats of 3 melee damage and 4 speed. The card also has quite good defensive statistics as well with 6 hp armor and 8 hp. And on top of impressive stats it also comes with Trample and Enrage.
Position 3		6	3	In the third position, we are facing a level 6 Deeplurker which is undoubtedly one of the best Opportunity cards of the water splinter from the Chaos Legion set with 4 melee attack, 3 speed and 7 hp. What makes the card even more deadly is it's Poison ability at level 6 and above.
Position 4		7	3	Next, in the fourth position we are facing a level 3 River Hellondale which is one of the most played cards with the water splinter's melee heavy team because of it's Resurrect Inspire combined with Dispel which got buffed up nicely in the last update. And, for the base stats, it has 2 magic damage, 2 speed, 1 armor and 4 hp.
Position 5		3	8	In the fifth spot, we will be facing a level 6 Gargoya Devil. The reward card is having 3 ranged damage, 3 speed, 2 armor and 4 hp along with the abilities of Flying and Deathblow. This card is a bit underappreciated I feel.

THE HIGHLIGHTS :

• Round 1:

In the first round, none of the teams were able to draw the first blood as the match was pretty evenly poised. However, on a positive note with 2 heavy hits from our Grund, we were able to bring down the hp of Baakjira to 2 which means it will go down at the start of next round because of the
Earthquake ruleset.

• Round 2:

The round starts of eliminating 2 armor/2 hp from all non Flying monsters and as expected the Baakjira from the opponent line up was eliminated. However, it again got resurrected by the River Hellondale to be finally eliminated for good by our Regal Peryton. Later, in the round, we too loose our Mycelic Slipspawn who was taken out by River Hellondale. Just when it seemed that the opponent was about to come back in the battle, our Queen Mycelia took out the Diemonshark to spoil the party and we were in the front foot again.

• Round 3:

At the start of the round our Mycelic Mophoid is eliminated by Earthquake. Later in the round, our featured card, Grund shows us why I have rated it to be one of the best offensive tanks in game when it took out booth the Deeplurker and River Hellondale with it's Double Strike and the follow up attack courtesy of Grund's Trample wipes out the armor from the Gargoya Devil.

• Round 4:

Unfortunately we loose both Grund and Queen Mycelia at the start of the round because of Earthquake. But, this does not concern us much as we still have Pelacor Mercenary and Regal Peryton standing strong. And surely, they take us to victory taking out the Gargoya Devil as Pelacor Mercenary hit the killing blow.

THE BATTLE LINK : Interested to watch the full battle ? You can watch it here

Did My Strategy Work?
My strategy was to have our card of the week, Grund go berserk and clear out the front line monster. Since Grund is more of an offensive tank like I have highlighted numerous times, it is prone to taking damage and therefore we decided to protect him a bit with our Mycelic Slipspawn with Taunt which worked out pretty well as all monsters were targeting Mycelic Slipspawn instead of Grund buying him enough time to get the kills.
Our strategy also was to play both Pelacor Mercenary and Regal Peryton with Flying to survive the Earthquake rule set while the other monsters are bought some time with Queen Mycelia's Protect.
All in all, we can see that everything worked out quite well in the battle.

Do I like Grund? Why or why not?
Grund is undoubtedly one of the best offensive tanks we have n the game and I really like the card and I feel, it's combination of Double Strike and
Trample is quite deadly to melt opponent deck. Unfortunately I only own a 1 bcx copy of the card and it is one of the ore expensive epic monster in game. That is why I do not get to use the card as much as I would like. In future when I get a chance to level up the card, it will definitely find it's spot more often on my teams.

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Until you come across my post again ...