Hello, community!
For this weeks's social media challenge, which can be found here, I want to submit a recent battle from a wild tournament.
Link to the battle : https://splinterlands.com/battle/sm_LLQQceGIsxhaS2nBRPNw
This was a rough wild tournament for me compared to the previous ones.
Perhaps partially because I didn't rent any wild cards. Now that survival mode's been finally reinstated the rentals for some of those key cards have gone up again so I didn't feel like going through the trouble of min/maxing with the rentals.
Especially in the second round opposition was tough and I couldn't get many wins, but this was one of the few exceptions.
Most splinters were available and the mana cap was 27, which would put this match in mid-to-low mana range.
We had the following restrictions:
- Up to eleven: the damage from thorns, magic reflect and return fire is increased by 1. With this in mind I could have perhaps chosen at least one unit with magic reflect to counter my enemy.
- Heavy hitters: meaning that all units will deal double damage to stunned targets. Not the most meaningful modifier since it still relies on randomness and there's not too many units with stun anyway, especially at the lower levels.
- Lost legendaries : perhaps the most meaningful modifier here, taking away the possibility of using legendary units.
This is what we fought with.
The battle is largely unremarkable but I felt it was still worth sharing not so much because of the battle itself but rather what lead up to it.
As I said, the tournament wasn't going too well for me. I was largely outclassed by most opponents and this one was no different.
However there's a tooltip before summoner selection that shows the opponent's recent matches and I saw he was quite partial to this strategy with Alric.
Thinking I had not much to lose I simply decided to counter the magic strategy and it worked quite well!
The MVP for this match was of course Tusk, the wide. This large man was able to take all the magic attacks on the chin while the rest of my team did the heavy lifting.
A simple strategy but it makes sense that a simple attack requires a simple defense.
I think the takeaway should be not to rely on the same strategy for too many times in a row as some opponents might take notice and decide to counter you.
Like it or not, these little mind games are part of the competitive experience and can be a deciding factor in battle.
This is not to say that Splinterlands is a glorified rock, paper, scissor simulator.
There's still many vary strategies that one can adopt, especially in wild, and nuance is often required to field the optimal team.
I hope you found the discussion interesting and I'd like to hear of more cases in competitive games where someone was able to just "read" the opponent in order to win. It's a fun part of the game.
I made a YouTube video about this battle, you can find it at this link :
What else have I been up to?
Tournaments are still my priority in the game as the current state of ranked games doesn't make the game particularly exciting, I talked many times about this.
In order to be as competitive as possible I need to buy many key meta cards which is what I did just a few days ago.
The value of my modern deck, as per PeakMonsters, was 183$ if we discount the reward cards.
I spent about 80$ to increase my stake in the competitive side of the game.
Most notably I bought cards such as Venka, Mantaroth, Lord Thalanor and others.
I wanted to finally get Tofu but it went from 60$ to 70$ again so I decided to sit on it.
Lorkus is still my only owned legendary summoner and even though I'm extremely satisfied with it I can't rely on him all the time if I want to be as compettive as possible.
Here's some of the stronger cards I now own.
Can't wait to try the new additions in tournaments!
I'm also looking forward to the next batch of reward cards which shouldn't be too far away, realistically. That will, for sure, shake up the game quite a bit.
I've also been spending some of my glint to buy gladiator cards.
Those are the "proof-of-time" assets of the game and they're quite strong.
Sadly I don't have all the legendaries yet from the Gladius set and that's something I need to fix.
I've been playing for a while but I also did take some pauses of a few months at a time so I'm behind with the progresss. Hopefully I'll get some of the missing ones soon 😉
