Splinterlands challenge - Target Practice | A low mana battle with luck

6 months ago

Hello all Splinterlands friends,
This is my entry for the Battle Mage Secrets challenge.
This week's theme is the Target Practice ruleset, so I would like to share a battle with it.

https://images.ecency.com/p/2gsjgna1uruvGBHDnRaj2z6FsL6XEQR3pnqa26GnV8nQwKUzQmMzpBfj5TEqvyt8Mpp1uAT4Ywute29hKKJ77vhq2znEe8rpfaFZV5GUH2fNAaZdZg.webp?format=webp&mode=fit

The battle ruleset

16 mana cap - a very low mana battle
Ruleset - Target Practice and Keep Your Distance
Splinter - Only Fire and Life Splinter can be used

Fire Splinter is stronger with melee monsters but Keep Your Distance doesn't allow me to use melee monsters. So I only could choose Life Splinter in this battle.

My lineup

Summoner	![](	General Sloan - I have several low-mana range monsters so I chose him to get +1 range attack for my monsters
1st position		Chaos Agent - he is only 1 mana with *Dodge* ability. I put him as a tanker because my 2nd position monster is the target in this battle. So I didn't want to spend to much mana for the tanker
2nd position		Pelacor Conjurer - he is the best choice in this position with 6 HP and *Magic Reflection* ability. If my enemy uses any magic monsters, they will be hit by this ability
3rd position		Venari Crystalsmith - a strong low-mana monster with *Heal* ability and 3 range damage (+1 from General Sloan) in this battle. She will be my main attacker in this battle
4th position		Halfling Alchemist - 2 mana monster with *Halving* ability to reduce the attack of hit monsters by half. I think this skill is very useful in this battle
5th position		Venari Marksrat - just to use up all the remaining mana with a range monster

Another strategy is to change Venari Marksrat by Spirit Hoarder to heal Pelacor Conjurer with Triage skill. However, I'm concerned that my enemy also can put Pelacor Conjurer in the 2nd position, and Spirit Hoarder will be killed by Magic Reflection

The battle

You can click on the image to watch the battle

My enemy chose Ilthain as the summoner to equip all the monsters with Return Fire ability. It's not good for my team because I only chose range monsters. Ilthain and all monsters are at max level.
With the enemy lineup, I could see he/she wanted to reflect all the damages from my monsters with Amplify skill from Dax Paragon
However, my Venari Crystalsmith could kill Dax Paragon in the round 1, after Dax Paragon got the reflected damage and removed Amplify out of the battle. Right after that, Venari Marksrat eliminated Time Mage.
In round 2, my team continued blowing away Venari Crystalsmith but my team also got a lot of damage from Return Fire skill
In round 3, only Pelacor Conjurer remained in the battle from the enemy team while I had 2 range monsters that could deal the attack. Each time my monsters hit Pelacor Conjurer, Pelacor Conjurer lost 2 HP and my monster lost 1 HP because of Return Fire. Pelacor Conjurer has 6 HP and my range monsters still have 4 HP in total. So it's just a matter of time until I get the winning of this battle. There is 1 scenario in which I could lose this battle - my range monsters continuously missed the attacks to Pelacor Conjurer until round 20 and Tie-break happens. Pelacor Conjurer has more HP than my every monster and I definitely lost the battle. Luckily, Tie-break did not happen.