Splinterlands is a pretty complicated game with interesting battles with all the options available. This is a part of the weekly social media challenge for Splinterlands. This week is about a ruleset, and how to battle against this ruleset. I will explore the Earthquake rulesets, and the different strategies that you can employ against your opponent to give yourself an advantage.
Featured Ruleset
Above is the ruleset that I will be discussing, and the picture above can be found here. In this
ruleset, flying monsters have an advantage as they do not take extra damage per turn. The damage can be reduced by half if they have the shield ability, and the damage will hit armor first since it is physical damage. If a flying monster is snared, then it will lose its flying ability and take damage per turn.
Strategies
There are a few different strategies you can use in this ruleset, and I will lay out some of the options below. You can mix these 3 three together if you want.
Flying Monsters
First off is the use of flying monsters because they can negate the extra damage every single turn. This can be a valid strategy to keep your monsters alive. This can increase your damage per turn if your attacks stay alive, and keeping your tanks alive can help the rest of your backline survive a bit longer.
Support Abilities
Another way to stay alive longer is to have support abilities such as healers, repair, or protect. These abilities can help your lineup survive longer. The last ability to consider would be martyr, and placing it between your stronger monsters or flying monsters to buff their stats when they die.
Other abilities such as slow, swiftness, weaken, and strengthen also help out as they buff your team or debuff your opponent. Rust can also be useful to remove armor so the physical damage hits your opponent's monster earlier.
Offensive Abilities
The last thing to consider is the snare ability, because it removes the flying ability and wingbreak which targets flying monsters first and deals extra damage.
Example Battle
You can find my example battle here. This was a battle from my most recent guild brawl, but I made use of flying monsters to reduce the earthquake damage. I was a bit worried at the start due to the level difference, but the reverse speed ruleset probably helped me out this time around. I didn't use any snare monsters, but I did have a support monster with martyr to buff up Chaos Dragon and Screeching Vulture because they can attack from the backline.
My opponent was more focused on trying to outlast me, as he had 3 monsters that could only attack from the front. My opponent also used a snare monster, and that monster did cause some of my monsters to die faster. So, using a snare monster can also be a good strategy.
In this case, I focused more on trying to outlast my opponent, and the earthquake did help me out quite a bit, as my opponent only had 1 flying monster. In the end, I won with just Chaos Dragon alive, and that only worked out because of the way that I set up my llineup.
Conclusion
Earthquake is an interesting ruleset to deal with, but there are ways to improve your chances. I did so in my fight by employing some of the strategies that I discussed. It's always good to consider how you can get the advantage over your opponent, and this allowed me to overcome the level advantage that my opponent had to win the match.
What do you think about my strategies for the Earthquake, or my match? Was there anything you would have done differently?