Splinterlands: First Check Out Your Opponent!

Ever since the new rewards update, battles have become tough!

As bots are discouraged and more people start to play with better cards to achieve higher win rates (which is key to getting points), it is making the game much more challenging. But actually it is also more fun as well. I mean sure, it sucks to lose a battle, but that's the whole point of my post: it now requires skill and strategy to win! :)

One key information that I think many players are not utilizing enough is the preview to your opponent's last battles. This is possible just after a match has been found. You can check the last 5 battles. Together with this information and the rule set for the game you can build a strategy.

Example

This was my opponent: He basically used pretty much always the same setup. Nowadays many are playing the same splinter in a row because of the FPs, but I'll tell you why it might be better to alternate.

Strategy

My opponent was probably going to use:

• Summoner with +1 ranged attack and monsters with arrows, sneak and heal

To counter my opponent I had to choose the water splinter instead of my daily focus. But this payed off since with this splinter I get the Naga Windmaster which gives -1 ranged attacks. In addition I chose the Wave Brood since it counters the Sneak monsters somewhat. Finally, I chose the Supply Runner which gives +1 Speed. Speed is often neglected in battles, but it is actually really important. I knew that if I could on average get my shots first, the chances for his monsters to get into the first row were higher since I wanted to target his first monster to go down quickly. If so, his/her monsters would become useless since ranged monsters cannot attack from the first position!

Already at the start I could tell that this would be a good battle. 5 of his monsters had a reduced attack damage, so -5 to damage (even -6 for one of his double attacking monster)!

And.... that was fast. His/She had no chance. My strategy worked perfectly :)

Don't always play with your focus

The chances of winning would have been drastically reduced, had I played with light to gain FPs. The -1 to ranged attacks is way to powerful to not play it here when you can be very certain that your opponent will use it. Of course not playing with your Focus splinter doesn't give you FPs, but it increases the chances for winning in general as your opponent in turn will have it much harder to develop a strategy against you when he/she cannot be certain which splinter you will play! Therefore, you will get more SPs which is of course great as well!

Here is a link to the battle!

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