Splinterlands Social Media Challenge!

Another week, another Social Media Challenge. A few months have passed since CA's release but the hippos are still running wild in the meta as if they have been released from Pablo Escobar's zoo in the jungles of Colombia. So, the way to battle the hippo menace is either to join them and hope for the best in the mirror battle or counter them by using the best hippo weapon currently out there - Craniax.

Well, Craniax seems to be one of the baddies, being a necromancer is not great to begin with (unless you're playing Diablo), and working for Portia is even worse than that, oh boy, poor Craniax will probably not end well. By the way, Craniax really reminds me of Warcraft's Medivh in terms of art at least, and actually partially as a character as well, at least as far as both of them being magicians, and doing nasty stuff goes, so maybe that's why I'm even more attracted to playing him.

Alright, we've got some idea of who Craniax the Quick is, after glancing at his lore. Let us have a look at his stats and abilities at different key levels now.

Craniax the Quick is a 6-mana human Legendary Ranged attacker. This is another dude who reminds me of probably Warcraft's most famous mage - Medivh (the dude who opened the Dark Portal and let the Horde into Azeroth from Draenor (Outlands)), who has basically the same vibe as Craniax - all black and transforms into a raven. At level 1 Craniax has 4 Ranged Attack, 3 Speed, 2 Armor and 5 Health. He also has two abilities - both now at this level - Reckless  and Final Rest https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/ghostlybg/EoCgA83PLv3yGfEETauPaLzU7VSuQKRTPVgBV5HkT3C8tAZCre5Tp285ax5jiyFKLxe.png. We've already seen Reckless on other new cards but this is the first and only card in the set (at least for the time being) with Final Rest. Final Rest seems to be a very good way to ruin your opponent's Bloodline Tribute strategy. At level 2 he gains an additional ability - Impede. At level 3 he gains 1 more HP for a total of 6 as well as his 4th ability - Backfire. Finally at level 4 he has 5 Ranged Attack, 3 Speed, 2 Armor and 6 HP. He also gains his 5th and final ability - Affliction. Craniax seems to be a pretty good card overall, especially with his Final Rest ability. You can literally shut down the whole enemy team if you choose to play him in the right battle.

Okay, so the whole point of playing Craniax, as you might already have guessed after having a look at his abilities, is to stop your opponent from using on death effects to empower their line-up. The Hippo gang rely solely on Moribund Arrowbait to die and get resurrected as many times as possible because that gives a huge boost to the back-line hippo stompers. Once they get pumped up there is rarely any stopping to them so the skip battle button becomes your best friend unless you've seen them coming and you've included out friend Craniax in the line-up. For that to be possible of course, we need to have Death accessible during the battle and that, unfortunately, is not always the case, so if the Death Element is not available and you don't have a hippo herd of your own, you just skip the battle and go on to the next one, at least that's what I usually do. Below I've included 4 very recent battles (from the last 24h) where my opponents came with their hippos but left with no hippos alive. I think Craniax deals with this combo almost flawlessly, which is great for the meta. Rock, Paper, Scissors stuff is not bad at all - definitely a lot better than half an year of Tofu spam.