Hey everyone and welcome back to my Splinterlands blog where today I will be making my second post for this weeks Splinterlands Community Engagement Challenge and the task for this week is to make a blog about powerful combinations, it's a coincidence because just before reading about this weeks specific challenge, I shared my battle within my guilds Discord, about an awesome combination so let's look into that.

To find out how you can participate in the challenge yourself, check out the official Splinterlands post here.

Finding combo's that work within the new meta.

At the start of a new rotation it's difficult to make good teams, especially with the release of Conclave Arcana where we not only had a lot of new cards to learn but also quite a lot of new abilities, plus the fact that I was using 95% Chaos Legion before the rotation so I also needed to learn how to play with my prepared Rebellion deck, I think it's now the third season that's about to end in one more day and this is the first season I'm able to make nice teams in my mind and also important, make counters to players that like to spam powerful summoners like Lorkus and Tofu.

I really like the fact that the use of Gladiator cards is now limited to Brawls and the only time we see them in ranked battles is when the 'Are you not entertained' rule set is active and we can prepare for them, and it's the combination of a Gladiator with the tactics of a legendary Rebellion summoner.

Transforming from good to awesome

So we all know the Relenor Cleaver, a nice backup tank with the reach ability from the Water splinter but in the old modern format when I could choose one Gladiator, Isgald Vorst was mostly my go to so I didn't use the Cleaver a whole lot, until now I got it up to a level 4, and with 27 total CC it will take a lot of time before I can get it to max Silver level, where I am playing at and probably by then we have another Gladiator set...

But, a new rotation is always exciting and forces us to relearn everything, if this wasn't like this, the game would probably get boring at some point so I really like this and it is also a good brain training exercise on top of the normal thinking we have to do to play the game.

So when you combine the Cleaver with Elias Max Pruitt, or EMP like many players call him and give the Cleaver the Armored Strike with Piercing ability, it suddenly transforms from an okay to awesome card, transforming from a 5 attack strength to 6 attack PLUS TEN Armored Strike attack strength, making him a real killing machine, getting more powerful with every kill thanks to the Bloodlust while it's safely tucked away behind a strong tank, wondering how this looks like?

Let's take a look!!

Sharing a battle

The battle I fought just this morning is a 38 mana Modern League, High Five / Are You Not Entertained / Heavy Hitters battle with only the Earth and Fire splinters locked out. The funny thing is when I started playing, for long I ignored the Heavy Hitters rule set because at my level there were simply no monsters with the Stun ability, and now this is the same again, I think I only have ONE Rebellion archer that is able to stun, so I was ignoring this and concentrating on the fact I needed to prepare against the most obvious available Gladiators with the available splinters, Isgald Vorst, the Cleaver and Captain Katie were the most obvious choices in my mind, since the new modern league, my Gladiator go to is always the Cleaver with EMP when there's enough mana available.

First look at the battlefield:

Well at least it's an even playing field against another Silver level player, because I am playing in Diamond 2 about half of the time I face players with higher level cards than me so that's a big disadvantage. The problem is rating inflation and the remedy to this is more active players in the lower leagues I think, I mean... I'm an experienced player with a good deck of cards but with a Silver level deck I shouldn't be able to go higher than Gold 2, I'm not complaining because the rewards are nice although I now still need to rent additional SPS but that's fine - sorry, I'm digressing here!

I was right in the anticipation of Katie, it was one of the options I was expecting, bringing a Triage unit hopefully delays her killing my team enough for me to shred to the front line.

My Line-Up:

• Summoner: Elias Max Pruitt - reason: Combines Water and Life and brings great tactics.
• First position: Giant Alpine Skink - reason: Great all rounder against both melee and magic.
• Second position: Relenor Cleaver - reason: This dude hits like a truck with EMP.
• Third position: Venka the Vile - reason: She's simply awesome.
• Fourth position: Shock Trooper - reason: More speed for my tank.
• Fifth position: Caravan Guard - reason: Triage

The Battle:

Round 1: The front line was dealt with really fast and the Cleaver already made its first kill, giving it even more damage, the increased speed is also nice because that's its weakness to start with only 2 speed.

Round 2: Okay, pay attention now because this is a fast battle, at this point the Cleaver is up to TWENTY damage, with piercing every round, good luck in stopping that!

Round 3: Wow 😅 it was awesome for me to watch but I guess my opponent was less excited with this 😂 Venka made the final kill, winning the battle.

You can watch the battle unfold for yourself here.

Great rewards too!

That's it for this weeks blogging for the Challenges, hopefully until next week!

Thank you for reading!!!

If you haven't made an account already, please consider using my referral link to sign up, I'll happily send the amount I get for your signup back to you in DEC or SPS to help you start.

Also, when you require any help to get you started,let me know, I'm here to advice and guide new players and maybe I can help you with card delegations too!

Have a great day!