Strategy Corner #05 - Lily Shieldpaw - Should we feel scared ? New Kitty level ?

Wow, dragons. Our today's share your battle weekly challenge theme!

We can talk about so many different dragons cards, strategies, line-ups. With the latest expansion Riftwatchers we received really great addition to the dragon team Agor Longtail and promo card Oshuur Constantia. Cards with so great synergy that with some additional help they was almost invincible. We have got quite nice discussion about it in one of the Splinterlands.tv stream with prediction battle game.

But, for today we got I think nice surprise, drumroll please... here she comes:

Isn't she cute? Just joking :) You know me guys, that I got a hard time remembering the name of the card, so I don't pay much attention to the graphical aspect of the card. So let's jump to stats and abilities.

In my opinion on paper, she does not look so scary. Small buff to health points, triage which is useful, but not too overpowered. And I think the most important camouflage for the whole team. What does it mean, you may ask?
It changes a lot, in normal circumstances only the first position monster can be the target of the opponent team. There is one expectation, with the new rules of scattershot, which I think was changed exactly for Lily, now it can target monsters with camouflage. So it's now the only way to try avoid wasting a lot of firepower on the opponent's tank unit.
Ok enough theory, let's see how Lily performs in the battles :).

Yes, correct, battles :) We had no luck for today, we got only 31 regular foil copies :), and unfortunately, it's only a test server :D

Firstly I would like to thank @iamgem005 and @subastechy for giving me the opportunity to make that test. We gather on mav test server and play a few battles in a different league, to see what Lily is capable of. If you like you can watch whole process on Twitch, Youtube or 3speak.

I think this is one of more interesting battle we had. My strategy here was to use the monster with a lot of evasive abilities. In normal circumstances, it's not an easy strategy, because if the opponent will use any monster with different targeting options, he/she just avoids hitting your planned target and just kill rest of your team. With camouflage guaranteed by Lily, now it's possible to try to use it more often. Unfortunately for now in modern play you still need to be aware of Kitty, which could ruin your plan with true strike ability.
Let's see how it worked.

Round 2 started with earthquake damage. This combat rule does not help, but that was the reason why I bring Arkemis the Bear to the table. Our strategy seems to work now. Funny thing we dodged all but one hit, and it was from the slowest monster Goblin Psychic :).

The second round wasn't lucky for us, our Nightmare was hit by everyone, and now it will die with earthquake damage, but we are still in a good shape. Armor protection and triage ability from Lily was very helpful to maintain higher health points levels.

Round 4 just after earthquake damage. The opponent has almost no damage on the battlefield and with so much speed advantage we should be able to finish this fight in the next few rounds. Now it's just a matter of time because the opponent will not able to preform attack with a range unit in the first position.

You wouldn't guess it, the opponent survived until 16th turn. We were still in quite safe positions, our tank monster had flying ability and triage to keep the rest alive. But we missed a lot and finally, we were able to make the final blow :)

Right now I think it's too early to talk about some general strategy for Lily, so let's just analyze this battle. I will give some of my thoughts in the summary section.
Here my plan was simple, go with evasiveness and speed plus some protection to earthquake damage. My choices:

Nightmare is very effective dogder :) With additional help with other monster it could be may be impossible to hit. Overall I don't like to rely on strategy which involves RNG. But if you manage to reach around 80% miss chance, it become reliable and very effective. And you cannot forget about damage, 3 points melee blast damage could surprise many opponents.

Let's group those cards together, because main purpose of them is to provide more speed difference between mine and opponent team. More speed means more dodge, so card with swiftness or slow should be considered. Aditional support abilities are nice bonus: Rust is great with earthquake rules to remove all armor from opponent's monster and headwinds could drastically lower damage output.

In general I like the Arkemis the Bear, here his main purpose was to give armor protection and died honorably :). I don't think he manage to use his damage ability here, maybe I should change the positions. But my second postions choice was Reflection Shield monster. I wanted to have some protection to blast, and additional flier. It was solid choice here.

With only a few battles played it is very hard to evaluate our new dragon summnoer. For sure Lily Shieldpaw is interesting card, I have heard some opinions that she could be so much powerful as Kitty. I think it's big exaggeration. She could be strong, she could be useful, but all Kitty's abilititis combination makes her so far the best summoner available in splinterlands.

I think with Lily we could pay more attention to different targeting rulsets, like snipe, super sneak, opportunity. Camouflage could change drastically the battle's dynamic, and you can use it on your favour.
Another think worth mentioning is scattershot, I am not big fun of this ability and in most cases I try to avoid to play it. Right now sometimes it could be the only option to have chance to win the battle.
It comes for sure interesting times :).

I hope you like today's Strategy Corner. I really hyped to see how Lily will perform in different leagues. Maybe we can check it even this weekend, chaos legion packs sell are almost hit 14M :).

If like this kind of battle and strategy presentation to see more strategy analysis, discussion, and prediction games please join my Wednesday Splinterlands.tv stream. You can check the schedule here

Sometimes as you could see I stream on my private channel, I have no schedule there, and mostly we have some discussion about recent changes to the Splinterlands ecosystem. You can always follow me to see what is happening there: Maxmaka Twitch

If you have any comments, please do not hesitate. Do you think I could improve anything just tell me :)

If you wish to try out Splinterlands you can use my reference link.

All images used in this article are open source. Thumbnails borrowed with permission from the Splinterlands team or made in Cooltext