Hello! The grind never stops in Splinterlands.
As usual I'll talk talk about some interesting recent battles that I've had and update you on the progress with my collection.
The battle I want to highlight is from a wild tournament and you can find the important details in the image below or watch the battle yourself, following this link.
Both players chose a summoner that amplifies magic damage. Other strategies might have been very effective too but magic is very straightforward and forceful.
We also both decided to partially deviate from the magic strategy by including some melee units as well.
While I don't completely understand my opponent's choice to use the Kraken in his lineup the other wildcard he chose to bring, Kulu mastermind, was indeed a good choice and potentially very deadly.
For this battle I forgot to rent the strong legacy card, Caladuum, that might have been a solid choice, especially when paired with Lorkus. If it had been available to me then my lineup would have looked much different at the front.
For my magic attackers, I chose Usut and Sorriel.
Usut is quite solid and has the potential of scaling fast and be unstoppable.
Sorriel was a greedier choice. It's a good legacy card that pairs up incredibly well with Lorkus, provided it can survive for a couple of turns, but his low health and speed make him a liability.
In this battle specifically he was brought to brink of death with only 1 HP left but thanks to Lorkus's powerful life leech buff he was able to stablize and get back into the game before it was too late.
The rest of my lineup wasn't particularly meaningful but it served me well in soaking up some hits while my magic attackers were scaling.
The MVP title goes, of course, to Lorkus. This incredible summoner is a staple of both the wild and modern format.
The rest of the tournament didn't go too well for me this time around with my score being 2-5 at the end of it. The rest of the battles were forfeited en masse by my opponents which was disappointing because I didn't get to see some exciting ones resolve themselves.
I ended up in the last bracket of the tournament, earning 30 liquid SPS as a reward. Not the best payout but good enough to cover my rentals for the wild cards I'm using for these tournaments.
Here's a few extra battles I've had in the tournament.
This one wasn't as exciting because it was really my opponent doing something wrong rather than me doing something right when selecting my teams but that's how it goes sometimes.
Anyway, here's the link. This was a low mana battle where we both still went with some legendary summoners.
I tried to make up for my greedy summoner choice by bringing a couple of smaller units to the field whereas my opponent chose to use just one big unit.
His mistake was to overlook the Aim true effect for this battle making his otherwise slippery serpent of eld quite useless.
In this other battle it was actually me instead ignoring some key rules for the match.
You can watch the battle here.
With the life and water splinters available I felt the need to defend against magic and chose to use the strong Immortalis summoner as a counter to that strategy.
My opponent chose Tofu and I was expecting that too which is why I tried to pick a few ranged units too but I should have probably stayed away from the melee archetype altogether by finding something else rathen than Venka and the oaken behemoth. My biggest mistake, however, was to ignore the Born again ruleset which my opponent correctly exploited by using cards with martyr.
Had I done that too, and perhaps included a dispel effect in my lineup, I could have been much more competitive there.
All these things look easy in hindsight but especially in the wild format with all these endless possibilities it's hard to think of everything.
I hope to do better in some upcoming tournaments this next week 😉
Outside of the tournaments there have also been some exciting developments as I've upgraded my collection once more. Not too long ago Lorkus was the only summoner that I owned without having to rent.
This recent spending spree was justified, in my mind, by the recent drop of the Hive token price.
The most notable addition is, of course, Eternal Tofu. An extremely prickly summoner that needs no introduction.
Other than that, the most exciting upgrade has been Nidhoggr. If agression is what you're looking for this dragon has you covered! There's a bit of a drawback to him but in the right circumstances it can even overpower Lorkus and Tofu so it's much needed.
I don't own all the dragon units that complement him best but it'll be my focus to work on that now.
Cryptic and Elias Max Pruitt are not as strong in power as the other ones but can still be deadly choices depending on which splinters are available. I'm confident all these summoners will serve me well both in the modern cycle as well as in wild games as they offer highly transformative and powerful effects.
You can find a video at this YouTube link here where I go over one of the battles from the tournament and open up some gladius cases too.
Thanks for reading! Keep grinding in Splinterlands 🤙 🤙