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When you are new to splinterlands it might be difficult to come up with some decent low level strategies. The "Bronze strategies" series aims to help new players out with coming up with good strategies resulting in higher win rates.
In this post I will cover the water splinter, with Alric stormbringer as the summoner. It's a rare 3 mana summoner that gives every monster +1 magic attack. It's available as a free 2 play card, which makes it perfect for a bronze (or even novice) strategy. At the time of writing, Alric is actually the most expensive free 2 play summoner available. The only downside is that once you want to level him up, it will become quite costly.
Stats
I was able to maintain a win rate of around 67% last season with Alric. It's important to note that all monsters are level 1 and I was mainly using only the free to play cards, which makes this a strategy that you can get into without even owning a single card, great news for beginners!
In fact, I actually still use this strategy with only level 1 monsters (but not only free 2 play) at +2000 rating and it still performs pretty well.
What's the game plan
It's not overly complicated, Alric buffs the magic damage of our monsters so we tend to use as many magic monsters as possible. The more magic monsters we use, the more impact our summoner buff will have.
In very low mana fights I often don't even use a melee creature (who would be our frontline tank). Instead I would use a chicken, albatros and or ooze as the frontline. These low mana creatures can buy some time for our damage dealers to get the job done. And even after that, you would have at least a 4 health magic monster after that. Usually you will kill the enemy fast enough. Remember, every creature will deal at least 2 damage + they ignore armor, making them real killing machines. If you don't have cards like "ooze" or "furious chicken", the spinback turtle is also a good option in.
What are the core cards
Literally all the free 2 play magic monsters! Also, the spineback turtle is often good as a frontline tank, he won't deal a lot of damage, but all he has to do is buy time for your damage dealers.
For higher mana battles, the free 2 play water strategy becomes a bit more tricky because most of these monsters are rather low mana. You could use serpent of eld instead of the turtle, but even then you will struggle with high mana battles. The strategy does not become useless for higher mana battles, but it will be less efficient if you are limited to the free 2 play cards.
Let's go over some improvements you could make for each role:
Frontline tank
Start by getting the sea monster, this is a better tank for high mana battles and the card is not that expensive since it's a common card. It's an 8 mana melee card with 4 damage, 8 health and most importantly, it has the heal ability.
Torhilo the frozen can also be a good alternative if you expect the enemy will also play with magic monsters. However, this should be a lower priority card to get.
You can always consider adding a healer to make the frontline tank even harder to kill.
Damage dealers
This part is actually a bit harder because this depends on your budget and on the battle conditions. For example prismatic energy is great if you fight against a magic team, Lobstradamus on the other hand is great against melee and ranged attacks, it can even fill the role of frontline tank. In time you might get better at predicting what your opponent will bring to the battlefield, use this information to create an optimal setup.
Some cheap cards you can get to become better at high mana battles are Captain's ghost and Sea genie. After that I think you might want to consider "saving up" for Lobstradamus.
Other monsters
Let's shortly cover what other cards you might consider using, you can use the furious chicken in first or second position (or even in the last position if you think that they will use sneak monsters).
The ooze can be used to fill a spot if you have 1 mana left and sometimes even throwing in the albatros can be a good decision.
As a healer you can go with the crustacean king, who is mainly useful if you have one or multiple high health creatures in your setup.
When to play this strategy
As I already mentioned, if you are relying mainly on free 2 play cards, this strategy is mostly useful in low mana battles.
Also, you should be careful for counters (setups with a lot of magic reflect or void abilities will be difficult to beat). You can take a look at the battle conditions and at the previous battles of your opponent to get some information here. Also, if they think that you are going to play a magic setup it's likely that they will try to counter you. That being said, in bronze people are not doing this too often.
Conclusion
Alric is a very strong summoner, even when you only have the free 2 play cards. However, you might consider switching to another strategy for high mana battles until you get some higher mana monsters, but feel free to try it out in multiple situations!
I highly recommend you try out different stuff and see what works best for you. Also, as you get higher in the ratings you might notice that you should adapt your strategy once in a while. This is why you have to keep thinking for yourself, using strategy guides like these is great to get started and give you some direction, but that's it.