Strategy Corner #54- Earthquake Ruleset - Is one flier enough ? :)

Welcome back to Strategy Corner, where we dive deep into the intricate world of Splinterlands tactics. :) Today's topic is Earthquake ruleset, usually something, which cannot be ignored. But does it necessarily mean that we need to use only flying units? Let's try to answer that question in more practical way, but first definition :).

Description:

All non-flying units take 2 physical damage at the end of every turn.

Snared units are considered non-flying. Since the damage given is physical, it can be reduced to 1 if the unit has the shield ability.

Firstly, the description of the ruleset in the game is not perfect, sometimes you get just general information which does not give you all the information you need. Best way to read the full description as above from the game documentation at least once. You can check all here.

I seriously encourage you guys to check this site, here are the precise links to related abilities snare and flying. A lot of useful knowledge, and even more advanced players could find something interesting there.

Earthquake is a ruleset which in my opinion cannot be totally ignored. But there are several approaches that could be effective here.

I will just focus on several ideas, first of course the easiest way to avoid earthquake damage is to use Brighton Bloom. I don't own that card, but sometimes usually for brawls in lower leagues, I rent it, because in bronze level is not so easy to find enough good cards with flying. Yep, the second option are a monster with flying, sometimes is not easy to get the full line-up with really strong cards. The third option is to get regular monsters without flying, but try to get some more armor protection with cards with Protect abilities. Sometimes you can mix some of those options to try to surprise the opponent, remember each battle is a small mind game, so let's see if you could win that in our today's battle.

Today's battle is a Gold Wild ladder match. Again, the opponent's got some card's level advantage, is that enough?

It's not the first time when we've seen that both players use the same summoner and a quite similar strategy.
Martyr cards are essential in the current meta, and if you are certain that they will be dead before your other units, it's so much better to use them. Nothing unusual that both players used 2 of those units. The positioning is so much different, so that could be a good lesson which is better.
And the biggest difference is tank positions, two high HP melee units versus just support ones, which could be interesting. Let's check the outcome.

Round 2, it was exactly as I predicted. Both our martyr units died in the first round, which benefited our rest team. Forgotten One is the beast with the buff from Martyr now,

Round 3, we lost all our support team, and redemption damage was still useful, with double buff our team has better speed, I hope that will be enough :).

Final Blow - Round 4 - it was fast :) A double hit was enough to take care of Forgotten one, and the last round was so close, speed was so important. Let's check the analysis.

I think it was a few weeks ago when we got a similar situation, where the opponent used an additional melee unit as a secondary tank, without the option to attack. Honestly, I'm not a big fan of that strategy, sometimes it can work. Usually, the second tank just sits there, waiting and doing nothing, and in this particular battle with earthquake ruleset is even worse because it gets two damage every round. I prefer to use some more active units, and Lava Launcher is the best example of it. It will not be included in our Core Team section today, but it was close.
Another thing was the martyr unit's positioning. I'm not sure how the battle would end when opponent will use more "sandwich" position, when the buff afflicts both adjacent units. I think it is much more effective tactics, and putting martyr units in front is not the most efficient.

CONQUEROR JACEK, it is so hard to evaluate that card. I remember when I was playing Champion League, and my sustain setup was only beatable with Jacek :), but it was so a long time ago :). Now probably meta has changed :). Jacek is, for sure, a tricky card. It could be useful, but on the other hand that scattershot could be harmful for your setup. The rest of the abilities are just great, speed buff is amazing (remember we have speed meta), and piercing - the same :) (remember we have heavy armor meta :) )

GARGOYA DEVIL I think I heard some voices which declared that card the worst from whole Chaos Legion set. I totally disagree, it's not the perfect card, but I play it very often. The offense abilities of Gargoya Devil are decent at least, high damage, good speed, and even Deathblow could be useful. From the defense side, we got only speed and flying, HP is so low. I still like to play Devil in equalizer or earthquake ruleset, but sometimes it could be useful even in regular matches.

Firecaller, I had to choose between Firecaller and Lava Launcher for the third spot. I think I mentioned several times that I'm a big fan of Lava Launcher (maybe even I overuse it :) ) and we talked about it a few times. So this time we have Firecaller, an interesting card with martyr ability. I think all martyr cards are good, that one is a little more specific because it's still a solid card with good damage and speed. So sometimes we want it to stay longer on the battlefield. But if it died accidentally, it's still not the worst deal for us. Worth to try.

The earthquake ruleset is for sure ruleset that you cannot completely ignore. Recently we got a nice addition of cards with protect ability, so for every splinter, you can use a different strategy. Sometimes stacking armor could be enough to survive the battle even without any flying unit. I totally forgot about mentioning snare ability, for sure it could be useful and annoying, but overall I think it's rather niche ability. In our battle, our opponent used a very powerful snare unit, but overall its impact on the battlefield wasn't so big. But you should always have it in your mind and be prepared. Another thing that recently is so powerful is any kind of martyr cards, and with earthquake damage, you usually got guaranteed that they will be killed sooner than later ;).

As always there are few very effective ways to deal with it, and choosing the right one it's not an easy task, mind game guys :).

I hope you like this kind of report, battle, and strategy presentation. More strategy analysis, discussion, and prediction games you can find on my Wednesday Twitch Channel stream. There will be schedule soon :)

If you have any comments, please do not hesitate. Do you think I could improve anything just tell me :)

If you wish to try out Splinterlands you can use my reference link.

Thumbnails and other pictures borrowed with permission from the Splinterlands team or made in Cooltext

We continue our game from the previous week, today new battle, new card to win :).

I come up with some ideas, I hope you will like them and participate. Every week I will publish one battle, and your goal is to point out the first victim of the battle and who will be the winner. This game is exactly the same as my prediction game which I run on my Wednesday Splinterlands.tv stream. I know that not everyone can attend the stream, so I hope you will still have fun in that way. More about the rules can be read here.

Among all participants who get the correct answer, I will randomly (probably on my Wednesday stream) choose one winner.

The prize of the blog prediction game for the lucky winner will be the epic card:

Here we got the battle:

Game instruction:
Try to point out which monster will die first on the battlefield and who wins the battle

• t - top player
• b - bottom player
• number - order counting from the first position

Examples:
t2b = monster on the second position of top player dies first, the bottom player wins
b6t = monster on the sixth position of bottom player dies first, the top player wins
t3t = monster on the third position of top player dies first, the top player wins

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