New week, my lords. I come with tales of a battle I fought today in pretoria. I have a monster on my deck I have been renting for a very long time since I came across it doing window shopping for monsters. I use it very frequently for its sheer destructive power, but have never really seen it for much beyond that. Today, I learned about two abilities it has that I’ve been overlooking that actually helped me win the battle I’ll be talking about today. Let’s get into it
| Ruleset | Description |
|---|---|
 Beefcakes | You can only summon units with 5 or more health |
My opponent’s Line Up
| Summoner | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 |  |  |  |  |  |
My Line Up and Strategy
| Summoner | 1 | 2 | 3 |
|---|---|---|---|
 |  |  |  |
When I saw the ruleset for the battle, my anticipation was that my opponent would focus on bringing fewer but powerful monsters with high health. So naturally, my strategy was to bring my own version of what I thought he was coming with, to match or overpower him.
I also noticed that his favorite summoner was Thadius Brood, so my prediction was I'll be facing a melee line up. So my goal was to come with as melee proof a lineup as I could. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, Cryptic was not among the summoner options I could choose from. If you've read some of my older spl posts, you know that my go to summoner for countering melee-loving opponents is Cryptic.
Anywho, since I couldn't use Cryptic, I picked the next best melee-friendly summoner - Tarsa. Lol friendly for me anyways. Can't say the same for my opponent. I chose Tarsa for the melee buff my two melee monsters would get. Also partly so that the 1 health increase would neutralize Thadius Brood's health decrease.
In first position, I put my favorite favorite monster, Grum Flameblade for his sheer strength, high health and good armor. I was praying that my opponent's tank will not be a monster with very high health, cos powerful as Grum is, his slow speed is his bane.
In second position, I had Tenyii Striker. I wanted to be able to sneak on my opponent because I noticed he had a pattern of putting his weaker monsters towards the back. I chose to sandwich him between my tank and last monster because I also noticed my opponent had a thing for sneaking, and Tenyii would not be able to hold out much against it.
In last position, I put Immolation. You could say Immolation is what won me my battle, but when I was selecting my team, I didn't consider any of his abilities that actually contributed to my winning this battle. I only chose Immolation for it's brute magic attack, but if you watch the battle, you'll notice that it's speed and mute ability are actually what won me the battle, especially in the very last minute.
Check out the battle below to see exactly how close I came to losing and how speed (and luck) won me the battle. It was basically the last round and if my opponent had gotten the chance to land even one attack on me, I would've been done. Thankfully, my opponent's last standing monster was a range monster with no flank ability.
https://next.splinterlands.com/battle/sl_2ba6e28b6b1054a179cdfb320ceec555
Cover image belongs to @ splinterlands, and all other images are from splinterlands.com.