This week battle challenge is about the serpentine spy so let’s review this card.

Card overview

This card is quite cheap, with a cost of only 3 mana. It comes with 2 melee attack strength which is a good strength/mana cost ratio. It as the opportunist ability, which is always nice to disturb the enemy line up.

But this card comes with only 1 HP. This makes it pretty vulnerable to attack. Ironically the card is at the mercy of opportunist attacks.
However this card has high initiative, which can even be boosted if you take Pyne as summoner. This gives you a good chance to strike several time before been attacked. You can increase the number of time the serpentine spy tricks by putting few expandable units in front of it. For example if you place a furious chicken in front of the spy; the furious chicken will be the target of the first opportunist attack, buying some time for the spy.

When to use this card

This card is mainly interesting for low mana cap games. In fact in can bring you two attack strengths for only 3 mana of investment. In High mana cap game it is usually wiser to buy several tanks instead.

The card will excel in setups which mitigate its vulnerability :

• Armour up setup will gives it 2 valuable extra armor (to my knowledge no magic units have the opportunist ability)
• Equalizer setup is perfect for this cards as it will get extra HP. You can check my article about this topic
• Fog of war can indirectly increase the durability of this card. It can grantee that furious chicken you place in front of your spy won’t die from a snipe attack (and therefore bravely die protecting your spy from any opportunist attack)

This card is also interesting in Up close setup. As the opportunist ability let the card be active even if it isn’t on front line. In game combining Up close & Fog of war, opportunist monsters are nice to have.

When to avoid this card

This card become more vulnerable in target practice setup. Target practice gives all long range monster the snipe ability which makes almost impossible to deploy some expendable monster to protected your spy from opportunist attacks.

True aim & reverse speed will make the spy lose it’s speed advantage.

Example of battle

Let’s take this game as example.

setup

Equalizer
Up close
Mana Cap : 27

This is a dream setup for this card. Up close limits the choice of cards to mele monster and the equalizer will bring its HP counts to 11.

My lineup

Summoner Drake of Arnak lvl 2
Exploding Dwarf lvl 3. With 11 HP this is a really nice tank dealing 3 damages to the enemy tank and 2 damages to the next monster in line
Molten Ogre lvl3. This monster will give 11 HP to all my monster. It is also a decent backup tank. Cherry on the top its demonize ability is devastating on enemy attack strength in Up close setup.
Serpentine Spy lvl 1
Flame Monkey lvl 1 : I had 1 spare mana, so why not ?
Cerberus lvl 1 : the healing ability is nice to protect the rear of my battle line as I don’t expect my enemy to have much sneaky monsters. Also if it end up to be the last standing monster it can easily win if at that point the enemy attack strength is less than 3.

line up :

The initial line up was as follow :

The outcome

I won the game facing only one loses. Last strike was actually give by the serpentine spy.
The Cerberus plays perfectly its role keeping the 2 enemy sneaky monsters busy. It took 2 damages per turn and right away healed those wound. This is a nice example of how healing can protect the rear guard.