Social Media Challenge: A Surprising Big Rank Reward

In our Splinterlands journey, sometimes we get some surprising wins. And since there's still around 2 days for the season end, I opted to share a battle for this week's Social Media Challenge and look into one of my favorite legendary earth monsters - Queen Mycelia.

The battle I'd like to share this week is just a recent win in the Wild Gold Tier. Here's the link to the battle.

The reasons I feel compelled to share this battle are three:

1. I'm still new to the Gold league and have only been battling it for three seasons. It's already difficult to reach the Gold tier from Silver II. It usually takes me around half of the season to get to Gold III.
2. I rarely win at low-mana battles.
3. Due to the high rank of my opponent, the rank rating reward I got from the battle was +72. I think this was one of the biggest, if not the biggest, rank rewards I ever got.

I hope those reasons are enough to pique your interest.

Looking at its stats, it has the triage (heals the friendly backline monster that has taken the most damage) at level 3 and rust (reduces the armor of all enemy monsters) at level 4.

Although I have yet to discover on timings to use these abilities, for this battle, we'll just focus on its amplify ability at level 2.

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The Strategy

As mentioned in the post's introduction, this was a low-mana battle at 16. And looking at the active rules, we have three:

1. Armored Up - gives all monsters +2 armor
2. Keep Your Distance - removes all monsters with melee attack
3. Fire & Regret - gives all monsters Return Fire ability against rage attacks. It works similar with Briar Patch (which give thorn ability to all monsters), but returns damage to all range attacks.

The active elements are water, earth, death, and dragon. Given that it's a low-mana battle, we only have a choice whether to choose monsters with magic damage, range, or monsters with no attack.

Since we have Fire & Regret active - we need to be careful not to choose monsters with range attack. As such, I assumed that the most probably damages we'll be receiving in this battle are magic attacks and we should strategize given these factors.

The approach we'll take is one the recent strategies we did in one of our previous battles - make magic attacks void by reducing magic attacks to 1 and using monsters with void and magic reflect, and combine it with Queen Mycelia's amplify ability. These factors also came into sync with our daily focus - Anti-Magic.

Now that we've determined the strategy we'll take, it's time for us to come up with our lineup.

The Summoner

Since our strategy to void magic attacks, we'll choose one of earth's legendary summoners - Immortalis - due to its void ability which gives all friendly monsters the void ability which reduces damage from magic attacks.

1st Slot - Magic Reflect Failed Summoner

We're combining Failed Summoner's magic reflect with Queen Mycelia's amplify. And we'll also be using void from Immortalis. For any magic attack it receives, it'll amplify the damage back.

2nd Slot - Protective Amplify Monster Queen Mycelia

Although it has two abilities, the ability we're really putting into use in this battle is its amplify ability. Since the battle also has the Armored Up rule, the probability of opponent to use range is very low, as such the damage we need to consider are damages from magic attacks.

3rd Slot - Magic Silencer Elven Mystic

Another crucial monster for our strategy to work because of its Silence ability. Combining these three monsters's abilities completes our lineup and strategy.

Let's see how the battle pans out.

The Battle

After buffs and debuffs applied:

The ability that really surprised me in this battle was Venari Smith's Poison at level 4. Although there are other monsters in the death element with this ability, this was something we weren't able to anticipate.

Let's see how round 1 goes.

End of Round 1

Our amplify+void+magic reflect strategy paid off. At round 1, we were able to take down the opponent's Life Sapper at third position and did significant damage to Venari Smith. One thing I also realized that pretty much put the battle in our favor is our summoner's -1 to health against our opponent's monsters. If it wasn't for it, Life Sapper would have lasted another round but I think wouldn't have made a difference because its magic attack was voided.

However, Failed Summoner got poisoned in Round 1.

Let's see how round 2 goes.

End of Round 2

Failed Summoner's amplified magic reflect took down Venari Smith in round 2. However, since Failed Summoner's been poisoned, it will be taken down on the next round. It did however serve its purpose.

And now, our opponent only has one monster with no attack left. Since we have 2 magic damage, it'll eventually be taken down after a couple of rounds.

Fast Forward to End of Round 5

As expected, it was just a matter of time before the opponent's last monster is taken down.

Battle ended at round 5.

Battle Result

As mentioned at the beginning of this post, the +72 boost into ranking was one, if not the biggest, rank rewards I ever got.

I've also been purchasing some cards at the market to level up some monsters. Hopefully, I'll be able level up Queen Mycelia if not to max level, at least to level 2.