Hi Splinterlanders, today we have another Battle Mage Secrets Challenge and today’s ruleset is one of those new ones, Five Alive.
RULESET: Five Alive
Up to five Units can be used.
This ruleset restricts you to using no more than 5 monsters in your lineup. It is similar to another new ruleset, Fab Four, which featured in a previous battle challenge. HERE is the article I wrote about Fab Four and my general strategy for Five Alive is similar: try to increase the number of attacks your team can inflict on the opposition each round. It does not suffice to simple load your team with a bunch of big hitters. So again I look for abilities, like Double Strike, Retaliate, Trample, Poison and others.
In Five Alive you have one more monster to field than in Fab Four, but I have noticed that the battle conditions with 4 or 5 monsters in the lineup are very similar.
In today’s challenge, I have selected a battle to illustrate my general strategy as outlined above with the added tactics of using a Taunt and including monsters with the Protect/Repair combination.
The battle we are looking at today is another water war from my alt account. The rulesets are Five Alive, Magic Reflect and Target Practice. The mana cap is 60 and the available splinters are red, blue, white and purple.
I went for the double strike/trample strategy again and also chose a Taunt and made sure to include monsters with the Protect and Repair abilities to provide added protection. This is the team I put together:
Possibilus the Wise is a great summoner to use for the Five Alive ruleset. He gives all monsters Trample and Reach. It means that every monster in the second position is able to attack and any monster getting a kill will automatically Trample and get another turn. This is the ideal situation when being able to use only a limited number of monsters.
Arkemis is probably the best candidate for a Five Alive tank lineup. He has high health and provides Protect. He can also hit pretty hard.
Coastal Sentry takes center stage in this ruleset with Double Strike. Add Trample to her repertoire and she will spread some carnage.
Swamp Spitter is also an important actor for this ruleset, as he comes with Repair, which will provide added protection to the team.
Supply Runner is here to do some range damage. He is not so exciting at level three but he is still very useful here and I didn't have many other choices. I wanted to bring Deep Lurker, but for some reason, he was not available for this battle. Supply Runner will do.
Wave Brood is here to divert all attention to himself in order to combat Target Prectice. Hopefully Swamp Spitter will repair his shield more than once to give him increased chances of survival.
So now that the team has been put together and the strategy is in place, let's take a look at how this battle plays out:
Round 1 showed immediately, that my opponent had the faster team. His entire midfield and backline fire at Wave Brood before my team could react. Coastal Sentry took a double swipe at the enemy tank and Target Practice didn't work so well for my guys, because Oshannus had a lot of speed.
In Round 2, again the enemy was faster and wiped Wave Brood out pretty quickly. Things were not looking good at this point. Then came a Double Strike by Coastal Sentry to reduce Baakjira to 2 health to then be toasted by Arkemis, which triggered a Trample.
Round 3 saw the demise of the Swamp Spitter, as he was in the Target Practice position but Coastal Sentry did well to weaken Kulu Mastermind. Then came a supreme move by Coastal Sentry to get rid of Kulu Mastermind and did a Trample on Oshannus to reduce him to 1 health. Sweet victory was nigh!
In Round 4, Arkemis took out Oshannus and Trampled Nerissa Tridawn.
In Round 5 Coastal Sentry did another Trample and in round 6 it took one shot at the enemy Swamp Spitter to end the fight.
COASTAL SENTRY
Another great performance by Coastal Sentry with 22 damage and 2 tramples! She is turning out to be the master of Five Alive (and Fab Four). The strategy to use monsters, that can attack more than once each turn, is very effective. Other defensive abilities, Protect and Repair also come in very handy to preserve as much health in the team as possible.
I was skeptical at first when these 2 new rulesets, which restrict the number of monsters one can use, came in, because I thought restricting the number of monster would reduce strategic flexibility. After some practise and experiments, I worked out that heavy hitters don't necessarily win these fights. Of course you also need to consider the other rulesets. In this fight, it was important to look out for Target Practice, so positioning was vital. Magic Reflect also helped Wave Brood to return some fire and weaken the opponent. All in all, I will always lookout for Double Strike monsters, when playing Five Alive!
Seeya in the next post, splinterheads!
WHAT IS SPLINTERLANDS?
Splinterlands is an autobattle digital card game on the Hive blockchain. The playing cards are NFTs, therefore they belong to you and you can trade, transfer or delegate them as you please. All you need to move cards and other ingame assets around is a Hive Keychain login. There are three types of battles you can play: ranked battles, brawls and tournaments. Every battle you win brings rewards, including SPS and/or loot chests containing cards, potions, packs and merits. The ingame currency is DEC and the governance token is SPS. For gladiator packs you need to earn merits through brawls and loot chests. Tournaments can bring you stacks of SPS if you play well. There are several third party card markets, including Peakmonsters.com and the best places to learn to play are PeakD and YouTube.
