Hello! 👋👋 This is my submission for this week's challenge.
If you want to watch the battle unfold at your own pace you can find the link here!
It's a battle from the second round of the recent Tidalring Modern Novice Invitational.
Most of my other battles from this second rough were tough losses where the opponents were able to leverage strong cards such as Tofu and Venka but in this one it was fought on an even ground since we both had Lorkus and I was able to barely come out on top.
It was an exciting battle, let's discuss it!
These were the rules for this match. Almost all the elements were available and the mana cap was 32.
Most notably we had:
- the Heavy Metal modifier allowing us to only use armored units, this is the most restrictive ruleset of the tree
- the Earthquake modifier, making it highly desirable to use cards with either flying or snare as effects
Both me and my opponent picked Lorkus. No surprises there, he can be extremely strong coupled with magic attackers!
Our lineups however were completely different.
He chose Barashkukor, a very strong unit. Perhaps he predicted I might use this flying demon with taunt.
He also picked the warborn shaman, a very strong promo card that I'm still missing and it already spelled doom for me on some occasions in the past. Very strong magic attacker.
On the other hand, I chose the molten elemental which will turn out to be the MVP of the match.
Situational card but quite good in some cases. Here it couldn't really attack with both melee and ranged simultaneously so not the most efficient use of it but because of the void effect as well as flying it turned out to be an ideal choice.
I also picked the cavewise wayfinder in order to ambush the frontline and tank some damage.
It has reckless which is not great but I was counting on it dying before it could impact me too much. He did get a second attack off so that's basically as good as it gets in such cases.
Afterall it's very tough for units to last too much when there's the cripple effect at play too.
After the first round there were already some casualties. Of course my taunter died right away so I wasn't too optimistic about the outcome here.
However the shaman is also almost dead and after a few exchanges it came down to the two key units.
I wasn't too hopeful here but the math was surprisingly working out in my favor.
We can both leech off of each others but Barashkukor doesn't have flyinh so I managed to outsustain him and win!
Interestingly I learned that the affliction debuff, which we inevitable both got as we kept fighting, wasn't really preventing the leech effect. I would have imagined it was considered a heal but I was wrong. Something to keep in mind for the future..
It was a win for me but it was very close. Some things went in my favor while others didn't and it really came down to the last few hit points. What a nail biter!
What could have been tried differently?
Perhaps some lineups with Akane could have been tried too.
Ambush is very strong and I'm sure there's a few flying units that could have worked well here.
Otherwise Risqruel Drath is a card that is often overlooked, overshadowed by Tofu, but it can be strong in earthquake battles, of course.
Tofu himself is quite decent, it has all his strong natural benefits of making the units last longer and snare can completely ruin the opponent's strategy in these matches..
As for the units, I don't think there were necessarily too many that could have been used to great effect here.
I could have tried Barashkukor myself, perhaps with chaos animator to replace the frontline.
I think my decision to use the wayfinder paid off, though. I could have used the chaos orc or Executioner Kraan in his place but they probably would have lasted just as long but without doing as much damage. So a good decision, in hindsight.
You can find my comments about this battle also on YouTube, just go here.
I recently started blogging on Hive again but my first attempt at it was actualyl a couple of years ago and I still have a couple of videos from that period.
I remember I published a few both on YouTube as well as 3speak.
If there's interest I will try to keep up a bit with the content on those two platforms, but there's definetely many things to do already.
Let me know what you think of this battle and what could have been done differently.
If you're curious about Splinterlands here is my referral link. You will automatically get an Hive account, free of charge, and some cashback on the purchase of the 10$ spellbook required to start earning in this interesting game 😉