Croc Bait

### Text

Swallow a character to get a 10/10 Captain Croc with "**Last Breath**: Summon the character I swallowed."

**Croc Bait** is a spell card. It swallows the character inside a 10/10 Captain Croc, a level 6 Evil character that has a Last Breath to summon the swallowed character in combat.

## Strategy

**Croc Bait** is expensive, but has multiple interesting uses. The most basic example is characters that summon even more characters, such as Three Big Pigs from dying before there is enough space for all the pigs, or protecting The Great Pumpkin to make sure it dies last - in the latter's case, the croc also counts towards its ability!

Some summoning and Last Breath synergies work well with Captain Croc. In particular, Reduplicator will cause him to summon two copies of the character it swallowed, which can be very powerful. Similarly, if the swallowed character is an Animal, Bearstain will double its attack and health (or triple if Bearstain is upgraded), so swallowing an animal with high stats is very powerful in that situation. It can also be combined with Copycat or with either Trophy Hunter's or Muerte's ability to summon the swallowed character multiple times.

Using Croc Bait while having Black Prism causes all your characters to be swallowed. Since Captain Croc is a level 6 character, it can triple normally, giving you a Level 6 Treasure - and it will usually give you multiple in this situation. The upgraded crocs summon all of the characters swallowed! This can be a blessing and a curse - it functionally lets you have more characters on board, but you lose control over their positioning, and can lead to some characters not being summoned if an upgraded croc dies without enough space on the board. It also makes you quite susceptible to transform "scam" effects like Pigomorph and Medusa. If you have both Black Prism and Mimic when casting Croc Bait, all your characters will be swallowed and crocs will combine as described above, then Croc Bait will be cast again on all the crocs. This often results in at least one upgraded croc that swallowed 3 crocs, as well as one or two non-upgraded crocs that swallowed other crocs. Whether or not mimic is involved, the amount of time used by the animation when using Croc Bait with Black Prism is very likely to take up your whole turn, or most of it, so plan accordingly.

## Notes

* Captain Croc is an evil animal and counts as a level 6 character.
* If you somehow get three crocs, they will combine and become a single upgraded croc. When the upgraded croc dies, it will summon the characters swallowed by the three crocs that combined.
* Crocs can be nested. A croc can swallow another croc. In that case, the first croc will summon the second croc, and the second croc will summon whatever it swallowed.
* If an "exact copy" of Captain Croc is created, the copy will summon the same character that the original croc would have. If a "plain copy" of Captain Croc is created, it will not summon anything.
* Characters swallowed by Captain Croc can no longer be targeted by Spells during your shop phase and will no longer "see" events as long as they are swallowed (e.g. a swallowed Wizard's Familiar will not buff when you cast a spell, unless it was cast mid-combat after it was summoned). If Stat changes are applied to the swallowed character mid-combat, they will remain on that character (for as long as they would have otherwise). Characters with calculated abilites like The Storm King will still have their stats based on whatever global state it relies on, even if the state changed while they were swallowed (so e.g. The Storm King will continue to grow with each spell despite being swallowed, and Gingerbread Knight will still become stronger once you drop below 20 Health if in a croc).