Hi Battle Mages, I’ve talked about and used cryptic a lot in my battles and posts the past few weeks, but that’s cos I just keep finding new things and ways to use it. It’s literally a gift that keeps giving. Today, I’m going to show you how to use Cryptic as an active counter for monsters who rely heavily on buffing up or generally monsters who have very high attacks. So this will be very effective against bloodlusts. I have to mention though that the strategy works against only melee monsters.
If you’ve ever used Cryptic or read any of my past posts (example) before, you know that aside the Speed and Blind, cryptic has two sets of optional abilities to choose from. Let’s start by talking about speed itself.
Debuffing Speed
Speed is among one of numerous determinants of your splinterlands battle victory or loss. Sometimes, that is all you or your opponent needs to tip the odds of a battle in your favor. You can have the most powerful monsters, but if they’re too slow to land an attack, your opponent will phase their way through all your attacks. This is why cryptic is important in battles where speed is critical.
Cryptic automatically debuffs all enemy monsters, making it easier for your own monsters to land their melee or ranged attacks. This comes in handy when you’re up against an opponent that likes to buff up their monsters’ speed. Or opponents who generally love using very fast monsters.
Remember the two sets of optional abilities I said you could choose from? The important one that concerns debuffing melee monsters attack is enfeeble, and that’s what I’ll be talking about next.
Disintegrator, Demoralize, Enfeeble.
One of the favorite monsters I bring to almost all battles I predict my opponent to be melee-loving is Disintegrator. Its demoralize is a perfect piece of the “counter melee monsters” package, hence, perfect for rulesets like Melee Mayhem. So Disintegrator is an essential part of your line up when you choose to use Cryptic as your summoner, especially if you anticipate them coming with powerful attack power.
You know what’s interesting? You can take your effort to weaken enemy monsters up a notch by selecting the enfeeble and retaliate options for the abilities of Cryptic you want to use. I like to think of enfeeble as a modified form of demoralize. You could even call it an improvise for when you can’t use Disintegrator himself.
Here’s how enfeeble works: You can give this ability to two units on your lineup. Every one of those units hit an enemy melee monster, they (the enemy monsters) loses 1 melee attack power. I haven’t been countered with this technique whiles using Grum before, but I can already tell that if I ever do, I likely won’t be smiling at the end of that battle. The combined power of Disintegrator’s demoralize and a tank with enfeeble would bring Grum to his knees, especially if he hasn’t had the chance to buff up much yet.
Cover image was generated with AI
All other images are from splinterlands.com