In the spirit of the new weekly Battle Mage Secrets challenges, I would like to take a look at a Splinterlands battle with a particular focus on a ruleset. Our ruleset today is one that is one that you may enjoy if you like to use melee attackers, or like to pop up where people may least expect it. Today, we'll be looking at a battle with the Super Sneak ruleset! Today's battle also features a peak into the current Silver league meta, and shows how sometimes selecting powerful cards occasionally carries an even greater weight than playing to a battle's rulesets.
Before we get into the battle, a few words about Super Sneak. Super Sneak gives every melee monster the Sneak ability. This means that any melee monster in a lineup will attack the back monster on the enemy team, other than the front monster which still attacks the opposing front position. Clearly, melee monsters are a big winner in Super Sneak battles. Sneak allows them to attack from any position in a lineup, rather than just the front spot. Since melee monsters tend to have more stats for their cost, Super Sneak battles are likely to see more melee attackers than usual. This leads to the second category of winners - more melee monsters means that anti-melee cards are also great in Super Sneak. Monsters with Shield, Thorns, or other anti-melee abilities could be just what you are looking for in these fights.
If you wanted to jump right to the action, the Battle Link is right here. Want to hear some more about the lineup? Read on further!
Here are the rules for our battle. It is a relatively simple set - just a single ruleset, Super Sneak. To go along with it we have a relatively low mana cap with just 18, and 4 different splinters to choose from.
In Super Sneak battles, if I see the Earth splinter available then I will often go with a Mylor Crowling summoner selection, since Mylor is so powerful against melee attackers. However, for this battle I noticed the somewhat low mana cap and decided to go with another strategy. You may already be familiar with it if you play in the Bronze or Silver leagues, since it is a common play there - instead of playing the hardest counter to the ruleset, I opted to play the most powerful card available. We'll get to that card next, but using it required me to select Lobb Lowland as my summoner. Lobb is a decent Earth summoner, giving the enemy team a speed debuff and (most importantly!) allowing us to use a gladiator card.
So here it is, (debatably) the most powerful card available in lower leagues. Quora Towershead is a menace, packing dual attacks and healing along with plenty of health. If she can get a kill or two and trigger her Bloodlust then she can quickly snowball and singlehandedly win you a fight. I have been lucky enough to pull myself a gold foil copy out of my Gladius cases, which means that not only is she level 2, but also that she gives me a bit of a FP bonus when I use her in my lineups.
Quora and Lobb used up nearly all of my mana, and I just had a bit left to kill in the rest of my team. Halfling Alchemist offers a bit of attack, as well as the very useful Halving ability. If he could land a hit then he had a chance at putting a serious dent in the enemy frontline monster's attack.
I am completely out of mana at this point, so I threw in Fungus Fiend as a buffer. This is a super sneak battle, so I had to put it all the way at the back in order to intercept any enemy Sneak damage.
With the lineup set, it's off into battle! When I see the selected teams I feel pretty good about my chances. My opponent has selected a decent lineup for the ruleset - Djinn Chwala is bulky and has the very useful Thorns ability. But the team lineups look like they should work out well for me - there are some weaker enemy monsters at the front, which means that my Quora has a good chance of being able to pick up a Bloodlust activation or two before having to face off with Chwala.
The battle starts off about the way I expect - the enemy monsters nibble away at my back line, and Quora makes slow but steady progress the enemy Venari Heatsmith at the front. And it looks as though I may be in luck - Quora is lined up perfectly to gain a Bloodlust trigger off of it!
Over the next couple of rounds Quora continues to do Quora things - she is able to pick up another Bloodlust, which means she is hitting for a whooping 8 damage per turn. By the start of round 4 it is down to a duel between Quora and Djinn Chwala. And while Djinn Chwala's Thorns ability essentially gives it a second attack, Quora still has the advantage in speed, bulk, and firepower.
It ended up taking a couple more rounds, but by the start of round 6 the outcome was clear - Quora's healing and high damage output were more than the enemy Djinn Chwala could handle. Victory! And again, if you wanted to see the whole battle for yourself, you can see it right here.
My strategy for this battle worked out perfectly - the sheer power of Quora overcame my opponent's well thought out, but slightly less powerful lineup. Slightly less strategic? Perhaps. But gladiator cards have become a part of the ranked battle metagame since the new soulbound cards were introduced, and using them is significant part of ranked play.
Thank you so much for reading all the way to the end. Interested in seeing some more of my writing in the future? Be sure to give me a follow! In the meantime, if you'd like to see some of my recent posts:
Small Ball - Battling with Little League! - A Splinterlands battle analysis, featuring Little League!
Splinterlands Economics: Causation - A look at causation, and how we can apply it to Splinterlands!
Splinterlands Economics: Ceteris Paribus - An introduction to the concept of Ceteris Paribus, and how we can apply it to Splinterlands!
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All images used in this article are open source and obtained from Pixabay or Unsplash. Thumbnails borrowed with permission from the Splinterlands team or made in Canva.