Doing Splinterlands brawls is my favorite game mode. It is really competitive while staying enjoyable.

Doing brawls give your guild crowns to upgrade buildings and merits to purchase the infamous Gladius packs. When you have a guild store lv1, you basically open an incredible parallel reward system: Gladius packs are free, give you a very good amound of power and airdrop points and can be burnt for DEC if you need some liquidity (but it's a poor idea, see point 2).

I'm lucky enough to belong to two guilds, Wax Street and Wax Street B. The first guild is hovering between the first the second spot after each brawl. I tried to summarize my experience running the guilds to show you how you can improve your brawl performances.

1. Half of the work is showing up

The first point may be obvious but is the hardest to master. You get brawl points for each fight won by your guild.

The most efficient way to improve your performances is to ensure your guild filled all its frays and submited all its teams. Even on this T2 brawl, you have a whooping 47 fights difference between guilds that entered all frays and the others (Hall of Göndul here).

You'll realise over time that a significant number of fights are won against players that don't show up during a brawl. Farm em all!

2. You need more gladiators

Another obvious truth: Gladius cards are overpowered. You should construct your teams around the gladiator you picked. If some of them are bordeline useless at lv1 (Helmet Kharafax, Krash Wanderfoot), they all get interesting skills when leveled.

Gladiators especially shine during fights against players not having them. Getting more merits and enabling leveled gladiators (through barracks and store upgrades) should be your priority as a guild leader.

The Gladius flywheel may take some time to launch if your guild is new (one pack per month or so), but you will never regret it.

3. Assign & delegate

Splinterlands UI has a weird glitch: you can't enter a gold or an Alpha/Beta (A/B) fray if you don't own a few matching summoners and monsters. However, a guild leader or co-leader can assign whoever he wants into them. This feature is particularly interesting if your collection is mostly rented. Feel free to give promotions to players willing to handle frays assignments (big up to @dluxxx doing that exquisite task for us).

Another thing to consider is delegating your cards to other players or alts. I never managed to do a proper card delegations system so far, but I delegate my gold cards to my alt accounts regularly to fill empty frays.

4. Power doesn't matter (until it does)

When you start a brawl, the UI ranks competing guilds based on their power. It's probably the worst performance indicator you can find since power comes from cards playable by a guild members. If you have heavy renters, the rank is misleading.

We regularly beat high ranking guilds with our amazing 140ish ranked Wax Street. Power is however used as a tie breaker when two guilds have the same number of points. We missed a few times the first place (and the rewards coming with it) because of that.

Attracting rich players, expanding collections or upgrading the hall just to improve your rank is quickly costly and shouldn't be your priority. It's way better to improve your guild communication and cohesion.

5. Get Minimum Viable Teams to fill gold and A/B frays ASAP

With a bunch of players and/or alt accounts, this article and a bunch of gladiators, you will be able to fill 8-10 frays and end up on the first half of each brawl. Great, what's next?

Work on filling A/B and gold frays. They're working on a "all or nothing" mode: you either face a maxed, meta GF team or your opponent doesn't show up. Points you get there are really important since the best guilds often fill them.

The key to improve your odds is to build two or three core teams if you intend to do A/B or gold frays. My take here:

• For A/B frays, the two highest damages outputs for low mana setups comes from Alric Stormbringer and the magic monsters (Medusa, Pixie, Sphinx, Mermaid) and the Malric Inferno and melee mobs (Cerberus, Miner, Roc, Cutthroat). The two summoners and the monsters cost around $200 but will give you a lasting edge over your opponents
• For gold frays, the idea is to gather 2-3 summoners and decent matching monsters. There's no killer setup, but I advise you to focus on getting reliable neutral monsters and cheap rewards. You will definitely encounter players with two random GF monsters and "cheap" fillers will definitely help you. The guys below cost around $50 and can complete any setup you have. Doing GF frays are however an expensive game and 2-3 teams can cost around $250+ quite fast.

I hope you liked my feedback and wish you awesome brawl victories! Feel free to share your own tips. We also have a Discord and an Hive community if you want to join our guilds and chill with the Wax Street community.