Splinterlands is a game of strategy. A good Battlemage needs to think carefully about which summoners and monsters they will bring to battle and how they will be positioned on the battlefield.
However, luck also plays a big role in the game, and it can dramatically change the outcome of a battle. In Splinterlands, luck can manifest in many ways, especially because there is a random component to the game, but that is something I will approach in another post.
The kind of luck I will talk about today is not directly related to any game mechanics or random events. It's just luck in its purest form when something you were not counting on happens and changes the outcome of everything.
Before we get to the actual battle and the particular situation I want to discuss, it's important to define and explain a couple of in-game abilities that were central to determining the result of the battle.
Blast and Taunt
These two abilities, Blast and Taunt, really made this battle interesting. I would also make an honourable mention to Martyr, which also played its part, but the other two really took the spotlight on this one.
So, before moving on, let me quickly explain the implications of each of these two abilities.
Blast
The official text for this ability says:
Does additional damage to Monsters adjacent to the target Monster.
Adjacent is a very key word here. Notice that it doesn't say "next to"; it says adjacent. What that means is if you hit the first or the last monster in the enemy line, the monster next to it will also be damaged. However if, for any reason, you hit a monster that is in the middle of the line, the monster that is immediately after and the one that is immediately before the target will also be damaged. That means you can damage up to 3 monsters with a single attack!
Taunt
The official text for this ability says:
All enemy Monsters target this Monster (if they are able to).
This one is pretty straightforward. Basically, it means that all enemy monsters will attack this monster if they can, even if it would not be their primary target otherwise. There are some exceptions, such as, for example, the Monster in the first position, which will still attack the enemy Monster that is also in the first position.
Now that we have a basic understanding of these two abilities, we can get to the battle itself.
The battle
This was one of my most recent battles and it happened in Modern Silver I League.
As usual, let's analyze this step by step.
The Ruleset
Starting with the ruleset, this is what we had in place for this battle:
I'm not going to provide a detailed explanation of these rules as this is not the goal of the article but to summarize, the rules were: Born Again, which means all monsters will resurrect after they die for the first time and Stampede, which means that the Trample ability can be triggered multiples times. This one had no effect in this battle so don't worry about it if you don't understand it.
Additionally, the mana cap was 31, which I consider to be medium-range, and the available splinters were Fire, Death and Dragon.
Summoner Selection
This was not an obvious choice to me because I really like playing with all these splinters and I had many options of Summoners to choose from: Tarsa (Fire), Yodin (Fire), Thaddius ( Death) and Quix (Dragon). I actually have other summoners in my deck, but they are more situational, so I'm not listing them here.
I must be very honest here and say that I didn't really give much thought to my summoner selection. Yodin is really fun to use and he can be devastating in Silver and Gold leagues so I try to use him whenever I can and therefore he was my choice here.
If you are not familiar with Yodin, he is a very good summoner in the middle leagues. He will buff your monsters range attack and health by 1 and also give them the powerful Blast ability.
He costs 7 mana to play but, it's definitely worth it if you can afford it.
The Lineup
As usual, I built my lineup around Yodin. My plan here was quite simple: bring some heavy hitters and try to overwhelm my opponent with brute force and Yodin's Blast ability before the enemy could react.
However, there is a twist to my strategy because of the Born Again rule. This rule had a good synergy with the Martyr ability, as it means a card with Martyr will apply its buff twice because the ability triggers on both times the Monster dies.
With that in mind, I picked Venari Marksrat for the first position, and its only role there was to die quickly two times and buff the monster next to it.
For the second position, I chose Lava Launcher, which is a ranged unit, so it benefits from Yodin's ranged buff and also has the Close Range ability, meaning it can still attack even in the first position. That, combined with its decent health and armour, makes it a very decent tanker, even more so when buffed twice by the Marksrat's Martyr.
After the Launcher, I put Djinn Inferni for a couple of reasons, the first being that I recently acquired this card and wanted to test it in the field and also because, even though it doesn't benefit from Yodin's ranged buff, I wanted to have some magic damage in the mix as well to ignore armour if needed and, at 3 magic damage, Djinn Inferni fills that role quite nicely.
The next and final Monster in my lineup was Firecaller. I really like this card here because I believe it's very mana efficient and it also benefits from Yodin's buff. Moreover, it also has Martyr and, even though I wasn't really counting on it, the resulting buff would be a nice side effect in case it died.
A few considerations about my lineup: I'm somewhat satisfied with how it turned out but I do believe I took some risk by concentrating so much power on a few cards. Perhaps it would have been safer to spread it out a bit and get more bodies on the field. I knew that before starting the battle but I decided to take the chance anyway.
So let's see how it went.
The battle
To make this part more interactive, you can click here to watch the battle as you read.
As I mentioned before, this time, I really didn't think too much about what my opponent could choose so I was genuinely curious to see his composition.
As the battle screen loaded, I noticed he decided to go with Tarsa so we were both fighting fire with fire (pun intended)!
His composition was the following: Living Lava as the tank, Iidri Fire, Scavo Hireling, Uraeus, Serpentine Spy and Tenyii Striker.
Except for Hireling, which is a bit unusual in my opinion, it's a pretty standard Tarsa composition and in another situation, I wouldn't have any particular comment about it. BUT in this case, there is one particular card in that composition that had a huge impact on the outcome of this battle. If you haven't guessed, I'm talking about Iidri Fire.
You may have noticed that, even though I mentioned that the Taunt ability was very important in this battle, none of the cards in my lineup have it and the reason is because that ability was in one of the enemy's monsters which is Iidri Fire.
Taunt can be a great ability depending on the context but, unfortunately, in this case, it did not work in my opponent's favour. Thanks to Yodin's blast ability, my monsters now had a perfect target that would allow them to hit 3 enemies at once! Combine that with having 2 cards buffed twice by Martyr and you have the perfect storm!
The enemy had a numeric advantage, which can be very good in some situations but I had way more power and was able to hit and take down multiple enemies with one shot, which completely nullified the fact that I was outnumbered.
It's true that the enemy could have predicted that Yodin was a potential opponent and planned a bit better but he could not be certain so I don't think his strategy was bad. If anything, it was unfortunate for him and I got really lucky as things went way better than I expected.
In the end, I was down to 2 monsters on the battlefield but they were so powerful that the battles turned out as an easy one.
Conclusion
There is a saying that goes like "It's better to be lucky than to be good". While I think that's debatable, I was very lucky in this particular case and it did feel very good!
If you also want to take part in amazing battles such as this one, click here and join Splinterlands!