Splinter Strategy Battle Analysis - Decision making breakdown

This is the first post of a new series I'm planning to do, where I will go over my Splinterlands battles and analyze them to the best of my capacity. Maybe I will include battles from other players as well but for now it will be my own.

Before proceeding I should also add that I'm not a great player and this is not meant to be a strategy guide or anything like that. I'm just looking to share some fun battles, exciting combats and, why not, major mistakes, as well as my thinking process when it comes to picking my lineup.

I hope other people may find it entertaining, maybe learn a little and also provide feedback on what they would have done differently so I can also improve my game.

With that being said, let's get this show on the road!

The battle - Overwhelming the mighty Oshannus

I picked this battle because I had to make a choice that proved to be the correct one so I wanted to share a little more of my thought process.

I will approach it step by step in the same order I usually follow when I'm picking my lineup for a battle:

• Ruleset analysis
• Splinter availability and mana analysis
• Summoner selection
• Monsters selection

I will share the link to the actual battle later on so let's get started.

Ruleset analysis

So this was the ruleset for this battle:

I'm not going to provide a detailed explanation to these rules as this is not the goal of the article but, to summarize, the rules were: no healing, all monsters get amplify and only magic summoners are available.

Splinter availability and mana analysis

The second step in my decision-making process is checking what splinters are available and how much mana I can use. In this case, we had:

I probably should have mentioned this before, but this battle happened in Modern Gold league, which is where I play most of the time. I'm saying this now because, in this league, with a magic only rule, an obvious choice would be using the Earth splinter with Obsidian but, alas, that splinter was not available.

Knowing my cards, as any player should, it was clear to me that my best choices would be either the Water splinter or the Death splinter.

The Water splinter has some decent magic monsters including Djinn Oshannus, which excels in that arena. It has a decent magic attack, void, which reduces magic damage on him and starting at level 2 it also gets phase, granting it the ability to dodge magic attacks.

I thought the death splinter was also a suitable option here. I don't have in my collection a death magic monster to rival Oshannus but I have Thaddius Brood, a death summoner that debuffs the enemy's magic attack and health.

Just one note about mana: while it's a very important thing to look at, in this case, I had 51 mana to use on Magic summoners only and, for my current collection, I knew it wouldn't be an issue because I would not be capped by it so that's why, in this situation, it didn't matter much.

Summoner selection

So it was pretty much between Water and Death in this case. Time to pick a summoner!

My best summoners in this case (I'm talking about level here) would be either Kelya Frendul, if I wanted to go with the Water splinter or Thaddius Brood, for death.

After some consideration, I decided to go with death because the magic and health debuffs could be a huge advantage, while Kelya wouldn't add much.

Monsters selection

As I anticipated that my opponent could go with the water splinter because of the mighty Oshannus, I wanted to have some heavy hitters on my side because Oshannus is literally immune to monsters that have only 1 magic damage.

For that reason, I picked Magi of Chaos, Magi Necrosi and Revelaer because all of them have a magic attack of 2, Venari Bonesmith for its poison ability, Life Sapper, which has life leech and finally, Spirit Hoarder, for its dispel ability.

Confident that was the best I could do, I started the battle.

The battle

To make this part more interactive, you can click here to watch the battle as you read.

Unsurprisingly, my opponent went with the Water splinter. However, their Kelya was only at level two, which was great for me as I was going with a level 4 Thaddius.

What was surprising, though, was their lineup, not in terms of the composition itself but in positioning.

They chose to go with River Nymph, Elven Mystic, Venari Spellsmith, Venari Wavesmith, Riverboat Captain and Djinn Oshannus.

Oshannus at the back?! That really surprised me. Oshannus is a good damage dealer and his high health combined with Void, make him a very good tank, especially on a magic-only battle so I did not understand at all this strategy.

There were only two cards on the enemy lineup that worried me: Riverboat Captain, because of its blast damage and Oshannus himself. The rest didn't really matter much.

When the battle started, my monsters made short work of the enemy front line and I only lost Magi of Chaos in the process, meaning that, when I got to face Oshannus, I had most of my army still intact.

This was not over yet as I only had two monsters that could actually damage Oshannus. Or so I thought.

I almost forgot about Bonesmith's poison and, even though he could not actually damage Oshannus with his magic attack, his poison ability triggered right on the first blow!

Another ability that really shone was Revealer's stun. It triggered every time, rendering Oshannus completely useless so my enemy could do nothing but watch his mighty djinn being overwhelmed by my troops until his unavoidable defeat!

Conclusion

I really liked the outcome of this battle. I took a chance by going with the Death Splinter instead of Water, which is my favourite, and it paid off.

I believe my opponent made some mistakes regarding his composition and monster positioning but I still like my reasoning and strategy. It was a good case to show that one great card is not always enough to carry your team.

If you also want to take part in amazing battles such as this one, click here and join Splinterlands!