A Few Maneuvers - Epic Battles in Splinterlands!

This week's Social Media challenge features a fun task - share your most remarkable Splinterlands moment! And while pinpointing the MOST remarkable moment is rather difficult, one of the most fun activities in Splinterlands is participating in battling. So today, I will be sharing an epic Splinterlands battle. Our battle for today has a little bit of everything - some fun (relatively) new Rebellion cards, the latest ruleset to join the game, and of course - an epic fight!

One notable part to our battle for today is the Maneuvers ruleset. Maneuvers was just recently added to the possible set of rules, and gives every monster the Reach ability. This may be familiar to anyone who has been using the Possibilus summoner, but it is brand new as a rule. Maneuvers is a ruleset that melee monsters should love to see - instead of only being able to attack from the front position, they can now attack from wither of the first two spots. While it may seem like a small difference, it effectively means that twice as many melee monsters can attack at once without needing Sneak, Opportunity, etc.

If you wanted to jump right to the action, the Battle Link is right here. Want to hear some more about the lineup? Read on further!

Here are the rules for our battle. As mentioned previously we have Maneuvers, which grants all monsters Reach. We also have What Doesn't Kill You, which means that every monster also has the Enrage ability. finally, we have plenty of mana to use, with a mana cap of 41 and two splinters to choose from - Earth and Life. Oh, and I should also mention - this was a Gold league Rebellion only tournament fight!

The Maneuvers ruleset encourages the use of more melee monsters than you might normally see. As a result, I decided to go with Avina of the Wolf as my summoner for this battle. Avina of the Wolf is one of the new tactics summoners introduced in Rebellion, who let you target abilities on the battlefield after monsters are selected. Tactics summoners are slightly less useful in tournament play since you need to select skills without being able to see the enemy team, but they still offer plenty of versatility. Avina offers two very useful abilities - a double speed buff to two monsters, or the Tank Heal ability to a single one of your choice.

Thanks to the Maneuvers ruleset, I plan on going heavy with my tanks at the front. Bera Dallin has a silly amount of bulk as well as the Taunt ability, and should do a great job of attracting enemy attacks. Mantaroth will be able to attack out of the second position with the Reach ability from Maneuvers, and his Shield ability should do well against any enemy melee or ranged attacks. I will also be giving Mantaroth the Heal ability from my summoner, since Shield effectively means Heal will be recovering twice as much health against physical attacks.

With plenty of bulk at the front, I was looking for some more damage from the rest of my team. I stuck Harbinger of Chaos in my midline. Harbinger of Chaos is a great magic attacker - 3 magic for 8 mana is not bad at all, especially once you take into account the bulk of 8 health and Divine Shield.

I finished off my team with some support. Meriput Magician should be able to help out my front monster with the Tank Heal ability, which will buy more time for my team to deal more damage to the enemy monsters. Add in a bit of magic attack, and Meriput Magician is a great all-around support monster that can nearly always make a meaningful contribution to your lineup.

With the lineup set, it's off into battle! When I see the selected teams I am a little concerned - there is a distinct lack of physical damage on the other side of the battlefield. In fact, all of the enemy monsters are packing a magic attack, except for the frontline Mantaroth. This is rather unfortunate, since my lineup was build with countering melee or ranged attacks in mind. The one thing I have going for me is that my team has more sustainability than the other team - while both sides have a healer, my lineup also has a Mantaroth with Heal thanks to my summoner ability.

This battle ends up being a rather long one thanks to the healing on both sides. So we're going to jump all the way ahead to the start of round 7. At this point my team is facing a slight deficit - the front line tanks have traded very favorably for me, but the opposing Snipe damage has also taken out my Harbinger of Chaos which was one of my main sources of damage.

With the majority of the attack damage on both sides knocked out of the fight, we reach a bit of a stalemate, with my Mantaroth facing off against the enemy Meriput Magician, and both teams unable to overcome the healing power of the other side. That brings us to round 20, the start of overtime and Fatigue damage.

With superior bulk on my side, my Mantaroth's Heal is able to finally make progress against the opposing Meriput Magician's Tank Heal. With Fatigue damage piling up, the battle was finally poised to end by round 24. That was a close one! And again, if you wanted to see the whole battle for yourself, you can see it right here.

This battle showed the power of bulk and healing. My strategy was one that I would certainly pick again given the same ruleset, but it was one that was completely unsuitable for the lineup that my opponent ended up using against me. Despite this mismatch and even facing a serious level deficit, my use of bulky monsters backed up with plenty of recovery was able to pull off the win in the end.

Thank you so much for reading all the way to the end. Interested in seeing some more of my writing in the future? Be sure to give me a follow! In the meantime, if you'd like to see some of my recent posts:

• Just the Monster for the Job - Battling with Broken Arrows! - A Splinterlands battle analysis, featuring Broken Arrows!

• Splinterlands Economics: Causation - A look at causation, and how we can apply it to Splinterlands!

• Splinterlands Economics: Ceteris Paribus - An introduction to the concept of Ceteris Paribus, and how we can apply it to Splinterlands!

Thinking about giving Splinterlands a try but haven't signed up yet? Feel free to use my referral link: https://splinterlands.com?ref=bteim, and be sure to reach out to me if you have any questions!

All images used in this article are open source and obtained from Pixabay or Unsplash. Thumbnails borrowed with permission from the Splinterlands team or made in Canva.