Spineback Turtle - better not touch!

Hello Spltinterfriends,

This is my submission for the weekly SHARE YOUR BATTLE challenge, featuring the thorny turtle from Alpha/Beta cards edition - the Spineback Turtle!

Although my water deck is pretty strong for my Silver league, I did not own Spineback Turtle yet, so I decided to rent 5 level, beta-edition one for this challenge. Just for a little bit more than 5 DEC, I own for the entire 24h beautiful (not!) turtle and so I can test it on the battlefield in the Silver league.

Battle lineup
I took several battles using the Turtle so I tested two strategies: one with a turtle as the main tank, second with the turtle as the last man standing, due to its Thorns ability, which I hoped would stop all the Sneak attempts towards my damage dealers. As a summoner, I was using 4 lvl Bortus to fully utilize leveled-up cards from my water deck. Furthermore, I was also using Level 2 Djinn Oshannus, which in combination with Bortus, makes it pretty hard to kill by magic attack monsters. Before Djinn Oshannus, I was always putting Furious Chicken and Torrent Fiend, to gain extra survivability for my ranged monsters. To make me even more bulletproof from melee and ranged attacks, I was using Venari Wawesmith leveled up to 4 level, so it was bringing me extra armor combined with decent magic damage as well as Elven Mystic which was applying even more magic attack decrease. Check the following battle as a good example, when I am beating a challenging lineup with Byzantine Kitty:

Battle 1

When I felt that I can use a more offensive lineup, I combined Spineback Turtle with Oshannus, Ruler of the Seas, Coral Wraith, and Phantom of the Abyss, making a perfect balance between damage output and defense abilities. This lineup was also working very well for me, as you can observe in the following example:

Battle 2

Conclusion
Due to Thorns ability, relatively low mana cost combined with high armor and HP, Spineback Turtle seems to be a perfect choice for the main tank or anti-sneak card for low mana battles. Probably it won't be very useful as a plain-vanilla card due to lack of any abilities. However, once invested in a leveled-up version, it is a very good companion on the battlefield.

Thanks for reading!

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