Novice strategies - What is Opportunity, Sneak or Snipe good for? Abilities overview

When I started to play Splinterlands I had in my mind the easy RPG rule. Have 1-2 tanks in the front and some range attack in the back and the damage will pile up for a win. The first few matches clearly showed me how wrong I was.

I quickly discovered that the type of range attack can influence the win rate a lot. In the first fights I was mixing up ranged fighters, and was only looking on health and attack power. What happened was, that while 1 hit on multiple enemies rarely lead to a victory, in case of multiple hits to the same enemy is a winning strategy. This is logical now, but I had to understand the mechanics first.

The information in this section can be found https://www.splintercards.com/abilities.php
You can skip to the next section if you know these already.

Here is a short overview of the mentioned skills:

Monsters with the Opportunity ability may attack from any position and will target the enemy Monster with the lowest health
Like ninjas, who sneaks into enemy territory, and attacks the weakest enemy.

Targets the last Monster on the enemy Team instead of the first Monster
With great maneuvers these units got behind the enemy line, and are attacking them from there, until they are the next line of defense, when they will have to retreat.
Exceptions are: if there is a monster with taunt on the field or if the last monster has Camouflage.

Targets enemy Monsters with Ranged, Magic, or no attack that are not in the first position
These troops have a longer range and as troops who don't have melee weapons are usually weaker, these troops are targeting them. Taunt affects these cards as well.

So now let's look into a few tactic tips:
The goal is to kill as many enemies as possible. If you are using any monster with these abilities, then try to use multiple monsters with the same ability. One of the biggest issues I had was, when I tried to Sneak on a Water Elemental with just a Kobold Miner. Even with Malfric Inferno as my summoner my damage output was only 2. As Water Elemental has self heal, he came without a scratch making my Kobold Miner useless for the battle. So it is better to have at least 2 monster with Sneak, or a monster with higher damage. Feral Spirit with the Elven Cutthroat is a popular combination if Silveshield Knight can be also used in the fight.

There are a few exceptions, like Death Elemental, who can sometimes do wonders against a Water splinter team, which is focused on magic as he is bypassing the tank and attacking the magic wielders right away (even bypassing their shields). A few more snipe monsters are helpful as well behind a few tanks.

From all these skills, my favorite is opportunity. The sooner you kill an enemy the better, so a card which targets the enemies weakest links is more then welcome. Unfortunately only very few cards possess this ability, and they are usually very weak and are melee characters (emphasizing my imagination of backstabbing ninjas). But there are special rule sets starting on the Silver III rank, where all the monsters can receive opportunity attacks.

A fabulous combination with the opportunity and snipe abilities is the Blast ability. With this combination you can attack 3 cards at once.

To demonstrate the Sneak and the Snipe actions here is one of my fights.
This game came with 2 special rules:

• all characters have the blast ability
• all characters are poisoned and loose 2 health at the end of each round

In the enemy team there are 3 sniping cards: Mantoid, Centaur and Fire Beetle who target my Lava Launcher as it is the first card, which is not a melee character. Unfortunately my Fire Elemental is killed by the blasts of the Snipe attacks.
After this my Mantoid sniped the enemy Fire Beetle.
Watch how the Sand Worm (middle card in the top) is attacking the enemy at the back. It would move forward one by one after each kill.
As a bonus you can see, that the strength of the Blast ability depends on the attack power of the attacking monster :)

Watch the fight here

I hope you enjoyed this small intro into these abilities.
In the next post I want to look into the different types of dodging attacks.
In case you are new to Splinterlands, then feel free to reach out to me, and you can also buy a spellbook using my referral link https://splinterlands.com?ref=arkasz
Let me know if you did so, and I will send you 100 DEC.