This weeks Battle Mage Challenge is about the Lost Legendaries rule.
Splinterlands tells us the following about this rule:
Legendary units may not be used.
- Legendary summoners are still available.
This is a relatively simple rule, but it affects strategies quite a bit. Legendary cards generally have a lot of abilities and are often the defining cards in many strategies.
There are currently 135 legendary cards in Splinterlands, out of a total of 557 cards. Out of these 135 legendary cards, 24 are summoners. So the Lost Legendaries rule excludes 111 cards from play.
| Splinter | # Excluded in wild | # Excluded in modern |
|---|---|---|
| Fire | 14 | 11 |
| Water | 14 | 11 |
| Earth | 15 | 13 |
| Life | 15 | 13 |
| Death | 17 | 14 |
| Dragon | 23 | 17 |
| Neutral | 14 | 11 |
So Dragon is definitely the splinter that suffers the from this rule. By coincidence the number of legendary monsters follow the sorting of the splinters in the match screen: Fire-Water-Earth-Life-Death-Dragon (or is there a conspiracy here!?!?)
Without any additional considerations, we should therefore be most tempted to play Fire when we see the Lost Legendaries rule, simply because we will have more cards to work with.
Incompatible Rules And Tournaments
Lost Legendaries is incompatible with the Rise of the Commons rule. It is also incompatible with Alpha only tournaments.
Disadvantaged Summoners
Dragon has an disproportionate amount of legendary cards compared to the other Splinters. Therefore all Dragon summoners have a hard time in this rule. They still have access to more cards than the other splinters, but since they are balanced around acccess to the powerful dragon cards, they are not as attractive when most of the dragons can not be used.
My Battle : Lost Legendaries battle
My battle had the following configuration. Tier 4 Brawl, Gold league, All cards fray. 33(+1) Mana. Rules: Lost Magic, Lost Legendaries, Fog of War. Water, Earth and Life available.
With lost magic and Fog of War, my first thought is "Which Shield tank should I go for here?". A shield tank makes so much sense here, because it has to take all the hits (except Scattershots), and it is safe to include some support monsters in the backline.
Secondly, we need to secure enough damage to take down a Shield tank. This means we have to go for ranged damage here. General Sloan is my option for this, since I did not rent Prince Rennyn for this brawl. So my strategy is pretty clear, it is just a matter of finding the right balance between enough frontline tankiness, enough support, and enough damage.
Alternatively, since ranged damage is so obvious here, it could be effective to play Ilthain or Lir Deepswimmer. Both of them provide Return Fire, which could let us just focus on supporting the tank in order to take down their backline.
My lineup
My setup consisted of the Chaos Knight as my tank, with Venari Crystalsmith to support it, and Blinding Reflector as a backup tank. For damage I included War Pegasus, Ajax Lightfoot and Pelacor Arbalest. The War Pegasus is a great card that comes with Shatter, which is particularly useful in Lost Magic matches. It can also serve as a backup tank because of its high health, decent speed and Flying ability.
Opponent's lineup
My opponent, as expected, also went for a Shield tank. They included a lot more support than I did, with 2x Protect, Repair, Tank Heal and Headwinds. Their damage is rather low though. They are only going to do 5 damage per round to my tank, while I have enough to do 9 damage to the tank and Shatter its armor.
Battle progress and Result
First round is more or less as expected. The rangers do their damage, but in the end my Chaos Knight misses its hit. The protects are dispelled by my Venari Crystalsmith. In the end, both tanks take exactly enough damage to run out of armor by the end of the round.
Round 2: Alva the Crushed is brought down to 1 health, before being healed and repaired and is ready to tank more damage. The Chaos Knight misses again, and Alva is healed further up. At the end of the round it looks like there is a possibility that my tank could drop first.
In round 3, it is my turn to have the tank drop down to 1 health before being healed. Then Alva finally perishes, and I can begin dishing out the full damage my team has.
In round 4, my tank drops. Luckily I do have quite a bit of tankiness left in the Blinding Reflector. The Flying Squid, even though it has quite a bit of health, is not able to withstand the damage and dies in the end of the round. So going into round 5, we have this situation:
The Merdaali Guardian delivers a respectable attempt at tanking, but in the end it is not quite enough, and she is also taken down in one round. By now it is very clear that this is going to end in a victory for me. Round 6 starts like this:
The Crustacean King drops, and now it is simply a manner of waiting for the final monsters to perish. There is clearly not enough damage left in my opponents team.
Round 7 is the final round, and I can secure that brawl win for Peakmonsters [Legion].
Alternative lineups
Kelya Frendul
Ilthain
Prince Rennyn
Lir Deepswimmer (Support based)
Lir Deepswimmer (More damage oriented)
I hope you found this post interesting. If you did, you might also enjoy my other content.
Battle mage challenges
Battle Mage Challenge: Little League
Battle Mage Challenge: Keep Your Distance
Battle Mage Challenge: Holy Protection
Battle Mage Challenge: Healed Out
Battle Mage Challenge: Going the Distance
Battle Mage Challenge: Ferocity
Battle Mage Challenge: Fog of War
Battle Mage Challenge: Fire & Regret
Battle Mage Challenge: Explosive weaponry
Game system analysis
Optimizing Soulbound card farming
A problem with the staked-SPS reward system
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Best of luck in Splinterlands!
Kalkulus