Weekly Battle Challenge: Silvershield Bard

Hello and welcome to my newest Splinterlands post after an eight month hiatus from posting. Well, it didn't take too long for my previous idea to fail but I will talk about it in a future post. This one is all about the weekly challenge and we are talking about Silvershield Bard.

As someone who is mainly playing around the Bronze and Silver league, I will be covering about Silvershield Bard at the Silver level. The beauty of Splinterlands is that you need a different approach in every level as the monsters have different power level in different tiers.

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As a rare card, the maximum level you can play her in the Silver level is level 4. So, she will not have Swiftness and merely Cleanse. As a support card, I will be blunt her, I don't find her to be very useful in the lower league. There are various reasons but the two biggest factors in my opinions are:

1. Stat-based Fights: If you play Football Manager before, you will know that there's a tips that said something like physical attributes are more important in the lower leagues and the technical and mental attributes are more important in the higher leagues. This is also kinda true in Splinterlands. With lower amount of abilities in the lower level (which is good game design to give newcomers an easier time getting into the game), it's more about stats than fancy combos and etc. As such, a support card like this card has lower value as it doesn't provide attacking stats at all.
2. Lower Amount of Debuffs: And the most important factor, to me, is that there are not a lot of buffs and debuffs in the silver level and below. This makes her Cleanse much less valuable. As I explained in points 1, there are not a lot of abilities among monsters in the lower level and the more complex and powerful abilities are largely reserved for the higher levels. As such, you don't really need to spend 1 mana to have the Bard just to cleanse the first monster. Most of the time, investing that 1 mana on a better monster(like instead of a 5 mana + bard, you go for a 6 mana monster) is usually better.

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Of course, there are some ruleset who makes her more valuable, like:

The most obvious one would be Noxious Fumes. Put up a huge tank up front and then cleansing the poison away will make this matchup so much easier for you, especially at around the 20-30 mana range where a huge tank up front is very hard to break.

Another ruleset that makes her more valuable is Melee Mayhem. There's not a lot of ruleset where you can make use of her 1 melee attack and this is one of the few she is able to actually deal damage. Also, the first monster is expected to be taking a lot of hits and everything, so having her cleansing the first monster might make your team takes more hits on the long run and win with better sustainability.

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So, with all that said, in what scenario would I play Silvershield Bard in the Silver level? I'd say I would play her if I want to focus on my first monster being great. I don't see a lot of scenarios where I am very happy to play her otherwise, but if I want to build a scary bruiser up front and my plan is to keep that monster alive as long as possible? Yeah, I will try the Bard.

After several battles, I think this is the one I would like to talk about.

There are not a lot of great stampede monsters at the lower levels so the first ruleset is usually moot. We can only play melee monster only so I decided to put bard into the mix.

The plan is very simple, I have Shieldbearer up front as the tank and damage soaker. I have Silvershield Bard at the second position as I want her to tank as much as possible after the Shieldbearer's down. I then put the **Armorsmith third as he is not useful anymore after the first two are down. His job is to armor them up and have them tank more hits. He should be taking hit before any of the damage dealers. And then I have the three damage dealers at the back end as I want them to not get hit for as long as possible. I pick them and place them this way: Silvershield Assassin(4th), Cave Slug(5th), and Feral Spirit(6th) for very specific reasons.

Firstly, I want the three of them to cut down the backline before anything else. Two sneakers ensure that I have the firepower to break the backline and then Cave Slug will either finish off another dude from the back or hit the support monster at the middle. The whole idea is to take out everything and leave the frontline for last. Even though the Shieldbearer's Taunt will make sure that the opponent cannot use sneak on my attackers in the first few rounds, I have Feral Spirit on the 6th and Assassin on 4th cuz I want to make sure Assassin is the last to die in any scenario. Even with Shieldbearer going down, the opponent will need to sneak through Feral Spirit and Cave Slug to hit Assassin. If they come from the front, I have two fodders before Assassin. The summoner providing +1 Armor ensures that Armorsmith have all the target in the world to fix up the armor and increase the amount of hits the opponent will need to go through my whole team.

I can easily admit that this is not the most competitive battle as my opponent is likely a F2P2E with a full level 1 team, but I do believe that my idea is executed fairly well.

The Shieldbearer goes down by the end of Round 2, which is more than enough for me considering that the opponent actually runs a damage buffer in Silvershield Knight. My team has done enough damage to the opponent's backline by then.

This battle is already in garbage time at this point, but I just want to show how valuable Armorsmith is in providing extra hits for the opponent. With correct timing, Armorsmith can fix the shield of a fodder and making the opponent needing to go through an extra hit to kill off a fodder -- in this screenshot, the shield was broken and then fixed up. Heck, the Bard might even deal that 1 damage and make further impact to the battle (It doesn't though in this one)!

I really want to show the cleanse but none of my opponents really put up any debuff even in the other battles I want to try to use as footage. This just shows how invaluable cleanse is at my level and why I rarely use Bard. In these battles, my ideas are always to make the tank last for a very long time. I run Hydra, Tyrus Paladium, and level 5 Lone Boatman (w/ Repair) to create a monstrous bruiser. With the trinity in place, the Hydra will have 1 armor, can heal itself, and the Boatman will repair the armor on his turn. This makes the Hydra very hard to kill off and its thorn can really hurt a melee-oriented lineup. The bard's role is to cleanse the Hydra up to make sure he isn't affected by debuffs and then to tank some extra hits after the Hydra is down.

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So, do I like the Bard? Not so much in the lower level, but I can see her being very useful on the higher level. She is far from bad, but I am just not there yet.

And that's all from me today. I will see you in the next post...or on the battlefield!

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