Beginner Battle Diary: Taken by surprise, yet victorious

Hey guys, your favorite splinterlands newbie here again with fresh updates from my splinterlands voyage today.

After losing my first 3 battles in Bronze III, I thought to myself maybe I just wasn’t ready to join the big boys yet, and I curled my tail back to Practice. However, seeing this week’s social media challenge theme, I thought to give a battle a try again after such a long time away from battles and in practice instead. This was also largely influenced by my friend @yahuzah’s encouragement that I should keep losing and learning, because the real learning is in real battle.

The theme I’ll be focusing on will be sharing a surprising battle moment I encountered today with a ruleset I experienced for the first time – Reverse Speed. This meant that the slow monsters will actually be the ones attacking first in this battle, and are more likely to dodge attacks. Since I started playing splinterlands, I’ve always focused on using monsters with the best stats. Come to find out today, I would need to do the opposite today.

Some extra info about the battle

The new ruleset was just one aspect of the challenges of this battle. I faced another – The battle was a low mana battle with a mana cap of 27. This meant I had to be selective with my cards. I feared I would lose because I felt like everyone else belonged to a guild and so are playing with non-starter cards.

To my surprise, my opponent used a summoner that allowed him to use an extra gladiator card in battle. And what this Gladiator’s abilities you ask? Well it seems my opponent anticipated that I’d use shielded monsters in battle, so both his summoner and Gladiator card were heavily focused on un-armoring me and armoring himself more instead. But little did he know I had I was going to emplore a monster heavy strategy. Hehe expet

My Line Enemy’s Lineup

summoner	1	2	3	4

My card line up and strategy

Card Line Up

summoner	1	2	3

Strategy

Since I planned to use a magic-heavy strategy, I used Obsidian as my summoner for the +1 magic attack to all magic attacking units.

For my position one monster, I selected Mycelic Infantry because it had a combination of the features I was looking for - high melee attack damage, low speed, good armor and health.

In the second position was the Moxian Rebel. I this card for it’s weapon-training ability. This was the secret and the backbone of my attack, with it’s weapon training ability, I can get an extra magic attack if I chose a monster with no attack ability right next to it. Which was why I chose….

The Ulundin Overseer for the last position. Now this card, I chose for 3 reasons. First one being the fact that it has no attack, so I could weaponize it with a magic attack simply by placing it next to the Moxian Rebel. This is a mana cost-efficient way to get more attack and health. Second reason I chose it was because it had high health (obviously). This made it perfect to place in the last position, in case there is a monster that attacks the last monster on my line up. Equipped with a shield, plentiful health and magic attack, the only missing element was speed, which thanks to the Reverse Speed ruleset, even became an advantage.

Battle

The Moxian Rebel’s weapon training took effect, followed by summoner buffs and de-buffs before the battle begun.

Round 1

Both teams dealt some damage to each other in the first round of battle. However, no monster was eliminated from either teams. My enemy suffered greater health damage to his position one monster though, thanks to the magic monsters on my team and high speed attacks.

Round 2

This was where cards started getting eliminated. I killed my enemies first card at the end of round 2 because my magic monsters were able to deal heavy attacks to it beneath the armor directly to their health.

Round 3

No card was eliminated in this round either. But my enemy's position 1 monster took good damage to health. My position 1 monster was living on borrowed time at this point with a health of just 1 remaining. I'd say it had a great run...

Round 4

...But what if I told you my first position monster made it to round 4 with just 1 health and no armor? Hehe that's right. Thanks to their magic attack and high speed, I was able to take out my opponent's first and second position monsters without them getting to touch my first position at all!

Round 5

It gets better. My first position made it to and through the last and final round without getting his hands dirty at all! With all my cards intact, I killed my enemy and won the battle!

Some closing comments

It seemed like my opponent did not really understand the ruleset, because I expected they’d select cards with much lower speeds than they did, considering the ruleset, but to my surprise, they selected average speed cards, which although isn’t as bad using high speed cards, is still a disadvantage. I believe this hurt his chances a lot especially also considering his strong focus on armor. If I made the mistake of selecting all melee monsters, the outcome of this battle would've been very very different. So if suffices to say I owe my victory to following the battle's ruleset, and the upper hand of more monster attacks.

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_{Cover image by @splinterlands, battle screenshots are from splinterlands.com, andcard images are from splintercards.com}

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