Hello there.

A few posts back, I discussed what I learned after playing the Survival mode early on in the season. With a little under 4 days left in the season, I would like to follow it up with any additional information I have learned. I decided to do it now in time for the challenge, and because I am pretty much done for this season. Most of my teams have been defeated, and I have very few Archons left to use.

Here is one of my battles using the Death Archon Octavia. Mind you I don't have a lot of confidence with my Death team, but at this point, I am almost scraping the bottom of my barrel. To give an idea of it, Death is the only element where I have leveled summoners left.

Replay of the battle

Tip 1: Archons are the most important cards in survival

Having gone through a full season, I think the quality, and quantity of Archons are very important. Not just from the availability of archons in battle, but the discrepancy in the number of monsters to archons. For me, I have more than a thousand available cards, have only depleted 165 and have very few archons remaining.

Sure I will have less monsters once I combine more of my duplicates, but even if I can cut it by half, or even a fourth of that, I will still have a large shortage of available archons. That is why I think that to be better in Survival, one needs to invest more into their available Archons.

Tip 2: Have more options in your teams

In my last post I mentioned how I have 2-3 set of teams per element. But I learned that it wasn't enough. I encountered some close battles, and some of my core monsters died, some where even only one monster was left [Earthquake and Noxious fumes rulesets are really bad]. After that, I was sometimes left wondering how I can use my summoner once a team has missing pieces. I ended up submitting suboptimal teams, which resulted in losses.

That is why it is ideal to keep track of what monsters are still available, and which ones can be used as a replacement. If there are none, then there is a need to come up with a competitive team out of the remaining monsters.

Tip 3: No point in delaying to play for too long

I still think that playing on the first three days is a bad idea, but I believe waiting for the strong teams to get out of your rank/league is a fruitless endeavor. I have checked the Top Battles frequently and there are a lot of max level teams everyday. Even now, four days before the EOS, I am still seeing and facing max level teams.

It might be better to just play slightly early, and have a chance at a card's revival in the same season. Since bots are allowed in Survival, I think they can just cycle their cards between accounts and have those that reached high rank decay for next season. That way they are in the Bronze leaderboard and reach gold and up rank, and earn the leaderboard rewards.

Tip 4: Be careful when you play with few archons left

Even though Death was my only competitive team left, I tried playing some games to try to max it out. Bronze is usually lax in rulesets and frequently allows all elements to fight. To my surprise, I was hit with a very restricting availability in elements, and I didn't have any Archon left to use.

After the battle, I checked the result and I found out what happens when you can't put out a team. It seems the game chooses a random archon and one monster to kill. So even though only water or dragon archons are available, I lost a Death archon and monster. So if you are running low on archons, especially on a specific element, it might be risky to keep on playing and you might lose a high level one as a result.

Tip 5: Try to put in a team instead of outright surrendering

In one of my battles, I encountered a player that had max level teams in their history. Like usual, I just put in a low level archon and one monster. To my surprise, I actually won that battle. When I checked the result, it seems the opponent surrendered, or more like wasn't able to submit a team in time [They lost a max level Thaddius and Broken Earth Thug, I think they have cards for the three elements available].

If I had surrendered, I wouldn't have won the battle. I don't think this will happen often, but the fact that it happened means I won't be surrendering my battles in the future as well. I am curious on how the monsters are chosen when surrendering. I assume they have a lot of archons in Water, Earth, or Life, but Death was chosen. I would feel bad for my opponent if they were like me and had mostly Death left available, and it was killed due to surrender.

Those are my additional learnings from playing an almost full season of Survival. I have only played for one full season, so I know there are more things to learn. Don't hesitate to let me know what you think, and if you have suggestions.

And as always, these are Not Financial Advice, and Do Your Own Research.

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