Hello! This will be my contribution to the most recent edition of the Social Media Challenge, which can be found at this link.
It is a time of excitement as many new cards will soon be available to us! This excitement is only partially diminished by the recent crash in crypto caused by blatant market manipulation 😏
Anyway, as usual for this challenge I will share some interesting and satisfying battles I've had in recent tournaments.
Tidalring Modern Adept Invitational
I have a few battles from this Bronze level tournament that I'd like to share, let's look at them!
The first one stands out because of this cheeky synergy that exists between the Sheng Xiao summoner I recently bought and the unique resurgence unit, abyssal elemental.
LINK TO THE BATTLE : [https://splinterlands.com/battle/sm_Da6O5nxKBnEj7zB05E1k]
The most impact rule we had there was born again, giving all units rebirth.
My thought process here was that with the earth and life splinters open there might have been a good Tofu angle for my opponent that would have destroyed any melee attackers I could have picked.
At the same time water and fire available for play means that he has some options to go for a magic spam strategy as well.
For these reasons I chose Sheng Xiao, which I estimate to be a decent all-rounder, good against a wide variety of approaches. Not only that but the dragon splinter gives me access to the costly, but extremely effective, Rage legendary unit. It has a strong magic attack and void!
I chose to ally myself with the water splinter, giving me access to some other interesting units with unique features.
The abyssal elemental is an effective meat shield that will soak up many of the incoming attacks and between rebirth and resurgence it's sure to stick the poison effect from my summoner to many units of the opponent's lineup.
Water also features the warborn shaman, a beefy magic attacker that boasts some defense against magic of his own through the void armor effect.
Lastly I chose the night reaper. Nothing too specific about this card at this time, just a strong magic attacker that might have been easily replaced by other cards in such a situation.
Now, clearly my opponent didn't follow any of the strategies I was anticipating the most. He chose to for a strategy based around the EMP summoner, bolstering the melee power and armored strike capabilities of his units. An agressive approach that that I've tried myself from time to time.
Sadly this summoner, in spite of his raw power, fails to measure up against some of the other legendary summoners we currently have in rotation.
Commander Slade is the most natural and effective recipient of the Piercing buff from EMP and it's what my opponent went for here. This is a behemoth of a unit but has glaring weaknesses against magic attackers.
In the same way the warwall juggernaut was designed to be played alongside Slade and EMP but he too has but his health pool to fend off magic attackers.
This weakness proves to be too big as I won the game easily and the poison effect almost seemed to be overkill here as my magic attackers tore through the enemy lineup very quickly.
Ultimately, I think there's not too wide a variety of rulesets and splinter combinations where EMP can be used safely. This is the tragic fate of a summoner with a very cool theme and strategy behind it. It might have some fringe uses here and there but will never be "for choice" or at the top of the meta at the Bronze level.
At the same time, all this might change a bit. Soon we will get the new legendary summoner for the water splinter, the weirdly named Loving the Moo. You can find info about this airdop here.
Essentially, this summoner will not give us any "static" stat buffs but instead allow us to bring to the field any canisans or elementals and further enhance them with the poison effect!
In addition, through his "battle tactics" two units will receive some extremely powerful buffs in the form of blast and reflect magic!
The existence alone of this card will make people think twice before trying a cheeky magic cheese with Marlai Singariel and even strong summoners like Lorkus will be a riskier strategy now.
Water was already a very varied splinter and going forward it will be even more unpredictable.
There'll be many more mind games during battles and I expect the power balance between the various legendary summoner to shift around a little bit once this card will be available for play!
This other battle was also very satisfying and it featured Nidhoggr squaring off against Lorkus.
LINK TO THE BATTLE : [https://splinterlands.com/battle/sm_pgdLJ3D1IkH4BzszGlon]
With a mana cap of 52 Nidhoggr definetely deserved to be considered for this battle and because of the restriction to magic units there weren't really that many strong summoners that could compete anyway.
While Lorkus is seen much more often, Nidhoggr has somehow the power to overwhelm just about anything with the right setup of rules and mana cap.
I have been on the losing end of similar battles in past tournaments so I am excited to share this battle to show that by buying this summoner I've turned things around a bit.
It's still very risky to go for this dragon but Rage held up very nicely in the frontline while I worked through my enemy's brittle formation. Even the arachne weaver was of little help for him there!
Lastly, I have an Akane win I'd like to share! 😉
Through a nice simmetry we seem to have covered all the interesting choices for the dragon splinter in the current Modern format.
LINK TO THE BATTLE : [https://splinterlands.com/battle/sm_hZBJryW0FHJQAYsF3HZu]
This is the silliest submission of the three and yet the most satisfying!
As you can see we were allowed to use gladiator cards for this battle and with earth available my opponent was quick to tentatively field Quora.
This is a card that needs no introduction.. with her double source of damage, large health pool and healing ability she can get overwhelmingly strong in just a couple of turns. It's definetely one of those polarizing units that define fights and rarely feel fair.
Luckily, I don't think my opponent had all the premium cards at his disposal and didn't choose a lineup that allowed Quora to power up before becoming an unstoppable monster.
At the same time, my strategy revolved around slowing down the opponent and attacking first and it ended up working as Quora didn't even get a chance to attack. With her out of the way the enemy team poses no threat and the win was very straightforward.
Let's observe one minute of silence for Quora and her untimely demise 😜
Usually I like to share some of my key losses too but this time around I'd rather focus on the positives.
I can tell you that I finished the tournament with a score of 12-10 and ended up in 36th place. The reward was 60 liquid SPS. Very nice!
More importantly, after having spend some money on these strong summoners and cards I've little to worry in the way of season rentals and can just focus on earning. I won't be able to save up money though as I still have some holes in the collection to patch up.
I'm still missing some common and rare units here and there and there's some epic units or rare summoner that would really benefit from being leveled up for Bronze too so it'll take some time to work on all that.
I've also come in 8th in a recent edition of the kryptogamers tournament. While exciting, I don't exactly hold this Conclave Arcana only format in high regard, as I've already shared in my last post.
I really hope we move forward from such a format and more interesting tournaments can be held instead..
In the same way, I still hope changes can be made to the way Ranked works and league restrictions will be put back in place, returning some dignity to the main game mode of Splinterlands 😭
You can find a YouTube video here where I talk about the first battle in my post and also submit some guild brawl battles! SPOILER : I let the timer run out for one of them.. 😏
