Splinterlands Community Engagement Challenge: Conclave Favorites!

This week's Community Engagement Challenge is Conclave Favorites. It involves picking your favorite Conclave Arcana card based or its usability in-game, its art or its lore. There are a lot of cards which I really enjoy the art of, there are also a few cards I really like the lore of, but there is probably just one card that I really like the art of but I also love playing it because it is very impactful when played at the right time and that card is Craniax.

So, let's start with the art of Craniax before going over his stats as a card and the strategy which fits him best. I have been a huge fan of Warcraft for more than 25 years, since the release of Warcraft III in 2000 really, so Craniax reminds me a lot of one of my favorite warcraft characters - Medivh. Medivh is the mage thanks to who the Horde invades Azeroth through the Dark Portal, so just as Craniax, his actions lead to tragic outcomes but what's even more similar between the two of them is their dark mage vibe and the fact that the signature animal for both is a raven. Medivh transforms in a raven, and by the looks of, Craniax might actually be able to do the same. Mevidh's staff - Atiesh has a raven statue on top of it, Craniax has a raven flying right next to him in his art piece, which I also imagine lands on top of the staff when it has the chance to do so.

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 . 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 battles 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.