Hello Splinterlanders :)
I hope that today's article won't be just the post about some strategies and line-ups but as well some appeal to the dev team.
Right now I cannot even remember when was the last interesting tournament, which I was really excited to play. From time to time we got some special events, usually created by one of the community members like Hawks21 or Aftersound, but usually, there are only standard tournaments available. Those tournament hasn't changed for almost 2 years. The prize structure, 24 hours, and same set format are getting more and more boring every day. I was reading and hearing about new ideas from @weirdbeard one year ago, and so far we get nothing new :(.
Today's battle still shows me, how different and interesting could be the game with some innovation, even so, small like Open Tournaments when you get access to a full card collection from every set.
Ok, but we wanted to talk about Equal Opportunity today, so let's see what is it :).
Description:
All units gain the Opportunity ability which allows them to attack the unit with the lowest health on the enemy team.
Firstly, the description of the ruleset in the game is not perfect, sometimes you got just general information which not giving you all information you need. Best way to read the full description as above from the game documentation at least once. You can check all here.
I seriously encourage you guys to check this site, here is the precise link, even more, advanced players could find something interesting there.
For example, you can find a very useful cheat sheet, in my prediction stream, people always forgot how different targeting abilities work with each other. Here is a simple table that could be useful:
Equal opportunity is another ruleset like in the previous week's equalizer, which seems quite straightforward. Of course with a high mana match sometimes you can completely ignore it and just play your best units, you just need to pay more attention to order. I think still the most obvious and often strategy is to play the taunt monster, which just protects any other low-health units. Until the new martyr units were released, I think playing without a taunt unit was a mistake in 95% of cases. But now, I think there are some good setups that utilize martyr ability with very high effectiveness. You can find some of examples in the blog prediction game at the end of this post. Let's see what I chose for today's battle.
Usually, I focus more on bronze/silver leave battles, because recently I play those leagues much more often. But today, I have a very interesting and crazy battle for you. It's from the special event sponsored by NFT Arcade, Wild Gold Open Tournament. I will talk about it more in the Summary section. Let's see the line-up:
In an Open tournament, you get access to all released cards, so it was very interesting to see gold-level Iziar in this matchup. My choice was quite obvious, one of the best taunt units Agor Longtail, and some support units with triage, armor repair, and resurrect. We talked about similar setups in one of my prediction streams a few months ago, let's see if it's still viable.
Round 2, as you can see it seems it will be a long battle. Both players got quite strong setups with solid taunt units, and I think it will be a key moment, which of those two monsters will finally (after resurrections) be dead first. Both tanks got heal abilities so for now it seems quite irrelevant what is going on there :).
Round 3, it seems that nothing changed, but it's an illusion :). We manage to poison Iziar and he will be dead in a few seconds. I don't know if you are aware, but on 3rd level, Iziar has martyr ability. We talked several times about how strong is Iziar, but on a gold level with martyr abilities, I'm seriously scared of how this battle could end. Buffing two of the best units in the game, with an additional chance to do this 3 times? wow :).
Round 4, what a crazy round, I really encourage you to check it at a slow pace. Unfortunately, Iziar has no armor or other type of protection, so it was resurrected only with 1 Health Point. So it was not a problem to kill it immediately after that, but as you can see on the battlefield now, with all martyr buff, Jared Scar has 9 melee damage :). Fortunately, our Agur is so strong, he wasn't even resurrected now, but let's see if Jared could snowball more.
Round 5, as I mentioned above, tank battle is still so irrelevant, everything was happening on back lines. Our Agor is still strong, he was resurrected, but with all additional support units, opposite to the opponent's setup, we manage to get him to almost perfect condition :). Our team seems very solid now, but still, Jared is dangerous.
Round 6, we finally started to target first-tank positions, with the still full squad we got very high chances to kill it quite fast. Even with 10 points of attack Jared Scarred seems beatable now :).
Round 7 - final round. Because of heal abilities of Kitty and Kralus, our monster first targeted Jared Scar, with no protection there was no problem killing him fast. Now we got a clear way to victory.
You have to admit that the fight was so crazy. At first glance when I saw Scared Jar with 3 times martyr activation buff, I thought ok, this is over :). But our Agor with so a strong support team was able to survive all those crazy damage. The crucial thing for this fight was armor, it could block 10+ damage from Scared and give us more chance to win this battle. With the core section, I will rely on units from this battle, but I will try to give some other substitutes in case your choice is limited anyhow.
Today, I think we concentrated more on one presented fight, but mostly because for me it was totally different experience, where you can try some new stuff, new setups new cards.
I am so glad that sometimes you can try something else, unfortunately, this happens not so often. So I would like to (again :) raise the issue about tournaments. We really need new modes, a new structured system, and more open tournaments for beginners and expert players. Now for the recent tournament, there are always the same name in the top 20 and usually the same player among all participant :( The rewards system is really badly designed, and people are just bored with all the tournament experience :(.
Let's back to our today ruleset: opportunity. As I mentioned it seems not so complex in general concept. Usually, you have to use a taunt unit and support for it is usually a good choice. You can compare a battle, where a no-taunt option was deliberately chosen with some martyr units setup. I think it could be a very nice surprise for opponents who expect a standard taunt setup. Let me know in the comments below if you see any other good setup which could be effective here :)
I hope you like this kind of battle and strategy presentation. More strategy analysis, discussion, and prediction games you can find on my Wednesday Splinterlands.tv stream. You can check the schedule here
If you have any comments, please do not hesitate. Do you think I could improve anything just tell me :)
If you wish to try out Splinterlands you can use my reference link.
Thumbnails and other pictures borrowed with permission from the Splinterlands team or made in Cooltext
We continue our game from the previous week, today new battle, and a new card to win :).
I come to some ideas, I hope you will like them and participate. Every week I will publish one battle, and your goal is to point out the first victim of the battle and who will be the winner. This game is exactly the same as my prediction game which I run on my Wednesday Splinterlands.tv stream. I know that not everyone can attend the stream, so I hope you will still have fun that way. More about the rules can be read here.
Among all participants who get the correct answer, I will randomly (probably on my Wednesday stream) choose one winner.
The prize of the blog prediction game for the lucky winner will be the epic card:
Here we got the battle with Equal Opportunity ruleset:
Game instruction:
Try to point out which monster will die first on the battlefield and who wins the battle
- t - top player
- b - bottom player
- number - order counting from the first position
Examples:
t2b = monster on the second position of top player die first, the bottom player wins
b6t = monster on the sixth position of bottom player die first, the top player wins
t3t = monster on the third position of top player die first, the top player wins
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