You may be thinking, wow that's a lot to win, you must have got First Mondroid!
Nope, that was for 3rd place! Well, the GF Tenyii Striker was a giveaway they did on stream while covering the tournament but still, the rewards were CRAZY this time around and they were giving out packs all the way to 5th place.
If you read to the end you'll get to see what was in them! (Or just skip ahead but then you'd miss all the great tournament action! lolz)
As usual with the YGG tournament it's Bronze league, Reward and Chaos Legion cards only, with no legendarys.
This time 311 people entered the tournament and can you really blame them with an entry fee of 1 DEC? I don't want to spoil what I got in the packs but I'm pretty sure I made like 50,000% ROI on my entry fee and they weren't the best packs lol.
Let's go over some key cards to have for these rules, for me a lot of them are rentals but you may already own them!
Daria level 2 is probably the most important card to have for this tournament. Because Bronze allows Epic summoners to be level 2 there is a huge advantage to be gained and I'm once again giving up the secret sauce here.
A level 2 epic summoner can field level 3 rare monsters which is normally impossible in Bronze. I'll feature a couple games and explain it in more detail when we get to them.
Prismatic Energy is a card I didn't really like or use much at first but when I kept losing to it I had to respect it and start including it more often. It seems weak only getting 1 magic damage for 8 mana but the power comes from the magic reflect on a big 9 HP body. There are enough situations like the No Melee rule where you're desperate for something "tanky" and know magic damage is coming.
Silvershield Assassin is part of the combo I talked about with Daria Dragonscale. As a Rare it can be played as a level 3 where it gets upgraded to 2 damage and then Daria's summoner bonus is +1 melee damage making this monster 3 melee attack with sneak and double strike, a total beast in the right situation.
Now let's look at some games starting with round 5.
Here's the combo in action, we have our girl Daria and you just want to mix in as much melee that can attack from anywhere as possible. The Celestial Harpy and Silvershield Assassin benefit the most but Twilight Basilisk and Uraeus also fit.
My opponent is playing General Sloan with Archery and there's virtually no way to keep those squishy archers safe.
When I first saw the formations I thought this would be a complete stomp but those archers can really put out some hatred! Remember not to underestimate them and respect what your opponent might field.
It's always good to win the first game of a best of 3 and I'm feeling confident!
For game two I'm able to play a very similar team, though I had to modify it for the odd ones out ruleset. Stich Leech, being a melee monster with sneak replaces the Celestial Harpy and Warrior of Piece replaces the Djinn Chwala.
My opponent has a pretty good team themselves. With the Weak Magic ruleset Venari Wave Smith is a great choice to provide even more armor to the team and I'm a fan of anytime you can sneak a Scavo Hireling in for the repair when you know armor can't be avoided.
Axemaster is also one of the best cards available in this format and has carried me many times in the past. The one good thing for me is that my sneak monsters should be able to get to him before he wreaks havoc on my team. It'll come down to how many times the Flying Pelacor Bandit dodges us.
Pelacor dodged a couple times but not enough to hold us off for as long as they needed for Axemaster to have a chance so I'm moving on to round 6 and Top 8. The packs are given out at 5th and upward so I really need to win one more series to guarantee top 4.
With ranged banned I was thinking "okay I'll just stack magic damage, bring a healer and a silence and the best tank I can" but the problem is with Equal Opportunity the tank doesn't really matter and neither does healing.
Melee units are also, statistically, quite superior to Magic units. The problem with melee is that they normally can't attack unless they're in the first position or they have reach, sneak, melee mayhem, or opportunity. That's why they're typically more cost effective than ranged or magic.
I think mentally, I get equal opportunity confused with Target Practice where all ranged and magic get snipe because this isn't the first time this has happened. It's almost embarrassing to show this game as I feel like I have no chance and didn't even make a competitive lineup.
Yeah... that was a beatdown... Note to self, Equal Opportunity = play high armor and HP melee guys with inspire for extra damage...
It's funny the mental change that occurs when you're cruising through the tournament undefeated until this point only to take a bad loss in game 1. Can I bounce back to survive this round? Find out on the next episode of Dragon Ball Z.... wait just kidding, off to game 2!
Almost written like a Hollywood movie the very next battle is another Equal Opportunity Ruleset, this time with Holy Protection where I get a chance to redeem myself. With that horrible loss fresh in my mind, I actually made a team fairly similar to what my opponent did last time.
I'm not sure why my opponent didn't go for a similar team as they did last time, maybe they over thought it which happens sometimes. Their team looks great if it was super sneak with the double thorns in the back but since those are the highest HP monsters on their team they will simply be ignored till the end.
I do like that the Octo Spider has Demoralize and the Gloridax Soldier has shield but because of Kelya I'll have the speed and armor advantage and Demented Sharks inspire will cancel out the Demoralize.
Sea Monster is also very strong in Equal Opportunity because he will always be in a 1v1 situation with the enemy front liner and his heal will sustain him for quite some time.
As you can see, my opponent essentially had the same problem I had last battle where the high damage archers end up being the focus of my entire team and once isolated, the tanks can't really deal with Sea Monster backed up by Axemaster and Flying Squid.
I'm thrilled to tie the series up and take it to a game 3. It's important not to lose your composure after a game 1 loss and now I feel like I'm right back in the drivers seat for game 3.
We end up getting a very restricting set of rules here. Not only are their only 2 splinters to work with but we can only use Melee monsters and to make matters worse sneak is out of play as well.
With options so limited, I was really focusing on building the optimal earth team and seeing what I could come up with. Then scratch it and build a fire team, analyze which one would win by simulating the battle out in my head. The result was that I thought the Fire team would win and I couldn't really see how my opponent could throw any curve balls so I locked it in.
Earth doesn't have any great reach monsters while Fire has two and so I employed a really strong tactic here by having a shielded tank backed up by not one but two reach monsters. The point is, when Ant Platoon falls, Finease Rage will move up and Radiated Brute will slide over to the second spot. This way, I always have 2 monsters attacking to my opponents one.
With no sneak, we both put Disintegrators in the back to nerf melee attack by -1.
You can see how effective this double reach strategy was, we win the battle and our Disintegrator wasn't even touched.
This win also brought a huge amount of relief locking up a spot in the top 4 and guaranteed to get those Chaos Legion Packs. Even though the rewards from here on are basically the same I still want to win this tournament for bragging rights!
This next series puts me up against Fudou, another great Japanese player. I told my friend in twitch chat who got knocked out by Fudou in a previous round that it would have been a huge accomplishment to beat him but he lost the series 1-2 which was still a good showing.
We get everyone's favorite rule set 99 mana! Oh but silenced summoners and little league LOL.
We make virtually identical teams but I have a Twilight Basilisk cause I own one and didn't think about renting a Manticore. The Manticore has +2 hp and flying versus 1 armor on the Basilisk so it's definitely better.
The other difference is he remembered to go with the Celestial Harpy while I played Uraeus. It's easy to assume that the 3 mana epic card is better than the 2 mana rare but in this case it's probably not.
The Celestial Harpy with Opportunity is assassinating every enemy that gets low while my Uraeus is wasting all of it's attacks on the Fire Spitter that survives anyway.
It sucks when one little mistake like that makes all the difference but the gap is so small between the top players that any little thing adds up.
Let's see if I bounce back in game 2 or if this is the end!
For Melee only battles Tarsa has really come through for me so I'm going back to the well one more time. Fudou plays a Disintegrator which makes sense but at the same time, it's really only negating my +1 attack summoner bonus and it's kind of an otherwise useless monster.
Deep Lurker has to do a lot of work so let's see if it can?
Almost!
What ends up happening is the Tenyii Striker gets a couple free shots on the Disintegrator near the end and we clean up the remaining monsters.
I'd be curious to see who wins if that Hardy Stonefish was in the very back? Hard to say but we're moving on to a game 3!
Unfortunately this match is going to have a huge RNG factor to determine who wins. In Grund Vs Grund with Spreading Fury you actually want to go second because your Grund will survive and then hit back twice while enraged for far more damage.
With both our tournament life's on the line...
The enemy Grund goes second and wipes my full health Grund out lol! Brutal way to end it but that's how the cookie crumbles!
Fudou went on to win the tournament and I always have a weird feeling whenever I lose to someone who wins the whole thing. Like, had I just got past this round then I feel like I would have won it. Of course that's no guarantee as another great player awaited in the finals and everything would have gone differently. Better luck next time!
And here's what I got in the two packs I won!
Overall I had an amazing time playing in this awesome tournament and hanging out on the stream, talking to the friends I've made in chat. Splinterlands is a smaller community so you see the same faces in all the streams and you get to know who's who.
Thanks again to the YGG guys who make this happen every Saturday and if you're a splinterlands player and not taking advantage of tournaments like this what are you doing! Even if the tournament isn't your thing there are usually giveaways as well so come hang out!
Man I love this game and the awesome community it has!
Start Date January 7th 2022 Initial Investment $3,500 Estimated Account Value $2,992 Card Power 83,715 Target Account Value $10,000 Target Card Power 250,000 End Date : Unknown
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Cya next time!