Hey everyone, good morning! It's time to make another Splinterlands blog post, already two days ago the new Social Media Challenge has launched but unfortunately on workdays I don't have time to make a good post, so let's go!

When you're a Splinterlands player but not yet making blog posts, I encourage you to do so to make our awesome game more visible to the players outside of hive, so be sure to also post it on X and platforms like Publish0x because on hive, everyone knows Splinterlands already and it's like preaching in your own church.

Posting on Publish0x won't get you rich, but when you've already made the post it's only copy pasting to get in somewhere else, so it won't take you longer than one or two minutes, and every little bit of earnings counts!

These are my earnings on Publish0x for this month.

So, on with the topic for this week, which is the same as last weeks:

🔥 Share Your Most Remarkable Splinterlands Moments: Do you possess a battle of epic proportions that deserves to be seen by all? Have you crafted something extraordinary within the Splinterlands realm? Maybe you've got profound thoughts, insights, or strategies related to stats, cards, abilities, or gameplay that are waiting to be shared? We want it all, and we want it to be nothing short of AMAZING!

And while it's the same the topic is very broad so we can go many ways with it, when I don't have anything important to discuss I mostly share a cool battle to talk about, but with the New Player Experience getting started, I think it's a nice moment to discus tactics some more, and while new players probably don't start at the highest level, tactics are the same in all leagues, the choice for your monsters isn't however, some monsters really dominate in the higher leagues but are not particularly strong in low leagues sometimes, this ways it's fun playing on all levels.

To find out how you can participate in the challenge yourself, check out the splinterlands post here.

Let's talk tactics!

When you're a starting player, all the different strategies, abilities, rulesets and possibilities can be quite overwhelming, I remember when I first looked at splinterlands, I passed it because I didn't understand the game, it wasn't until almost a year later splinterlands got on my radar again, and this time I invested more time in it to learn about the gameplay and I got addicted pretty fast! 😅
So, when you're in need of assistance, you should definitely join a guild so the more experienced members can help you, most (if not all) guilds communicate in their own Discord channels so you can get 1 on 1 advice this way, also, if you require a bit of guidance, let me know in the comment and I'll be happy to help you out!

In lower leagues, you're starting easy on the rule sets and you won't get many combinations with two or three different rulesets you have to build your team around, you can see every battle as a kind of a puzzle to make the best team with, the player who does the best job, wins and the strategy is VERY deep sometimes. In this low mana battle I got three rulesets, so let's take it easy and talk about them one by one.

Keep your Distance is a rule set that limits the choice of your cards to magic and ranged only, so no melee units are allowed to be played, in low mana battles like this one, considering most ranged units won't be able to fire from the first position, it's obvious to expect magic monsters up front, so we have to prepare for this...

Taking Sides is a rule set that limits my options to choose monsters from even more, no neutral cards can be used, so when we look at the combination of these two rule sets already that limits me both, it pays of to have a large deck of cards to choose from.

Deflection Shield is a fairly new rule set, giving all monsters the Reflection Shield ability, now all units doesn't take damage from Blast, Magic Reflect, Thorns, or Return Fire. And because it's fairly new I actually made a little mistake in my battle but I didn't have many other options because of all limitations.

For me, the most obvious team for this battle would be to choose either Kelya or Quix, Kelya gives +1 armor and +1 speed, the armor gives an extra hit against ranged units so that's nice but on the other side, Quix nerfs the enemy range damage by -1 and also lowers the speed -1 and it also gives more flexibility in the cards to use because Quix is a dragon summoner, the dragons can be used in combination with any other splinter, so now I basically have the cards from TWO splinters to pick from, in this battle of limitations it's the best option I think.

After choosing the summoner, the most obvious choice would be to go for Djinn OShannus and put a healer in the back, Merdaali Guardian, let's count the mana so far...

Quix: 4
Oshannus: 8
Meerdali: 3

this is 15, so there's 4 mana left, this could either be used to put a martyr card in front of Oshannus to boost his stats, or to put a heavy damage archer in the back like Igor Darkspear or Merdhampir which would put the mana usage at 18 or 19, either way in this most obvious team, where there aren't a lot of enemy attackers and the void ability is probably used on the tank the most obvious team isn't always the best.
With the very high possibility of a tank with the void ability (the other option would be Void Dragon) it's better to use ranged monsters and not magic monsters, also, Oshannus is a 8 mana card on it's own, that's already half of the total mana allowed for this battle!

Don't play the obvious & might of the many

That was the tittle in my thumbnail, I already discussed the obvious choice now, my team for this battle is 'the might of the many'.
Many times, using a lot of smaller monsters is better in your battles and they can kill one giant monster really fast, the big monster maybe has a lot of Health Points, but it can only attack once every turn, when we put three or four smaller attackers against it they will all have a shot at the big monster every turn so when they work together their damage output is far higher, so let's take a look at the battle!

First look at the battlefield:

Hmmm.. the summoner isn't what I expected, I get the 'why' because now there's no way to kill the healer behind Oshannus because it's camouflaged, this summoner however costs 6 mana instead of 4, and the only way to kill the healer is using opportunity units or snipers, not a big chance in a low mana battle.
I was right in the tank and the healer, so let's see how it goes.

My Line-Up:

• Summoner: Quix the Devious - reason: Nerf both speed and ranged damage, access to the Dragons.
• First position: Daigendark Surveyor - reason: Magic Reflect doesn't work in this ruleset so it's only a meat shield.. this was my little mistake but it's fine...
• Second position: Void Dragon - reason: Fast, Void, Flying and Phase, makes it very evasive against all attacks.
• Third position: Kra'ar Xoc - reason: a little fail safe for when my tank dies, the scavenge ability gives some more health points to make it another meat shield, buying some extra time for the rest of my team.
• Fourth position: Naga Assassin - reason: Fast, good damage for 2 mana and speeds up my team, making the Void Dragon extra evasive.
• Fifth position: Angelic Mandarin - reason: Silence to nerf the magic damage in the other team.
• Sixth position: Igor Darkspear - reason: Great damage for only 2 mana and he has a 50% chance on stunning the target.

The Battle:

Round 1: As you can see, my team is lowering both magic as well as ranged damage by one, so now my team is killed a bit slower which is nice 😄 my meat shield up front even survived the first round and Oshannus has taken 3 damage, but he will get healed next turn (heal is one third of his starting health, rounded down so in this case it's 12 / 3 = 4)

Round 2: So Oshannus almost got killed, having 1 Health Point left, but for now the healer saved him... however my team is doing 8 damage every turn when all attacks hit their target, the healer won't be able to keep up with this.

Round 3: Whoops! The enemy tank died, using 1 big monster isn't the best thing as you can see, losing his ONLY line of defense and it's over for him, to make things even worse the enemy archer missed his attack on my Void Dragon. It's now only a matter of time to kill the rest, there's no chance in winning for my opponent.

Round 4: Archers can't fire from the first position so Igor is just waiting to be killed in the first position, and he even got stunned 😅

Round 5: Void Dragon made the kill shot and it's over! over 500 Glint and 5 SPS is a pretty nice reward for me, earning money while having fun? yes please!

Conclusion

As you can see, almost my entire team is still alive except for the meat shield, in fact they're not even damaged! So in many cases, it's better to use a team of many smaller monsters instead of 1 mighty larger one.

When you're struggling to understand the basics for the Splinterlands gameplay, it helps to read this post I made a before, it's already a bit out dated but the basics remain the same and can be an eye opener for you, and again, if you fail to understand certain things about this game, don't give up but ask for help it's so much fun once you get the hang of it! 😃
@untilwelearn is learning the game also and reached out for help, don't give up mate!

Well... with just over 5 hours left in this season... it looks like I've got some work to do!
I hope to see you on my next post or maybe we will meet on the battlefield!

Thank you for reading!!!

If you haven't made an account already, please consider using my referral link to sign up, I'll happily send the amount I get for your signup back to you in DEC or SPS to help you start.

Have a great day!