I recently started playing Splinterlands, and I've been hooked for over a week now. Climbing up through novice and bronze, I quickly learned how much people LOVE Alric and Zintar on the bottom levels.
In general, it seems there are a few meta lineups that are common at specific mana costs. You sit there, trying to figure out what sounds fun, and then you get beaten by one of these meta teams. So instead, you make the meta team yourself, and then you draw, wasting capture rate.
I got the water splinter daily for the first time the other day, and I was nervous because I knew that my opponents would all start using magic resistance tanks if they saw all my recent games were blue. But then, I got an idea.
Let's talk about Bortus.
You never see Bortus. Nobody cares about Bortus.
I CARE ABOUT BORTUS.
First, let's talk about why nobody likes Bortus.
The thing to bear in mind with summoners is that buffing your own team is guaranteed, consistent. No matter what you face, your team's buffs will be applied (even if they're brought back down by the enemy). However, somebody like Bortus can just wind up doing literally nothing against a non-magic team. This is why people always use Alric instead.
But I thought, "I'll bet that when people glance at your match history, they just see a bunch of blue waves and assume you're running a bunch of magic stuff." I figured most people probably do a poor job hovering over each team to actually see what summoner I picked, because there's no chance it was Bortus, right?
So I started using Bortus, and started creating heavy ranged attack teams, with not one hint of magic anywhere. It turns out, you can actually use the Water Splinter and not pick magic! Whaaaat.
And sure enough, my opponents quickly started shifting to Lyanna with a Unicorn tank, or some other magic-resistant lineup. Who cared? Not Bortus.
Now let's talk about Water Elemental.
Water Elemental is amazing in the right position. People typically either put it near the front or in the back, so that it can absorb sniper or sneak attacks and heal them off. If the enemy doesn't have enough firepower to kill it, they'll end up wasting a lot of damage. Water Elemental belongs on every Bortus team, in my opinion.
So, in essence, I ended up faking out my opponents into making anti-magic teams, or they tried to counter with their own magic teams. Whenever the latter happened, wouldja look at that, Bortus became relevant and I looked like a lucky idiot genius!
That's not to say I completely swept the floor, but I wanted to share one very specific lineup that has yet to lose, because it hard-counters the most common composition at this mana cost:
Mana 14.
A lot of people hate really low mana cost rules. I kinda love them, but lately I've been hoping to see 14 specifically because of how much success I've had.
See, at Mana 14 in novice/bronze, this is the exact team you're going to see often, in this exact order:
It's strong, it wins, whenever I pick it, I get a draw because it's what my enemy did.
Well, NOT ANYMORE. I WANNA WIN.
Counter team:
So here's what happens. Your Elemental hits the enemy Haunted Spirit for 2. The Jester hits your Elemental, bringing it to 1 health (because Undead Priest lowers from 4 to 3). Your tanks each trade 1 damage. The enemy's Haunted Spirit heals 2, so both your tanks have gone down 1 health.
The next round, your elemental has 4 speed and is guaranteed to outspeed jester, so it heals 2, and the process continues. Their jester's damage is being wasted, and your tanks have the same amount of health (because the enemy Undead Priest has lowered our soldier from 8 to 7). However, as soon as both tanks have 2 health remaining at the end of a round, we enter the next round and Water Ele gets the kill before Haunted Spirit can attack. Once the haunted spirit is killed, it's GG for our opponent, whose jester is doomed to either hit our healing ele or go into melee range and do nothing.
Barring any misses, which are unlikely, we win every time.
I wish I could say I've figured out a perfect 12-mana version or 15-mana version, but things kinda change up there and you start to see more of Malric (Red, +1 Melee), who can mess things up. So I'm only recommending this for novice/bronze at precisely 14 mana.
Beyond that, you can win with Bortus at low 20's pretty often if you've got the Serpent of Eld, Crustacean King, and some additional ranged damage (needs more experimentation before I can do a full recommendation). If the mana cap is 25 or higher, you can get cleaned out by white sneaks killing your water ele before it can do much of anything, so that needs more work too.
Final thoughts:
You might look up into my eyes and say, "But Semicolonkid, now that you've shared this, won't people just switch to doing this instead at 14 mana, leading to just another draw?"
But I'll just put my hand on your shoulder and say, "Lol, less than 1% of players are going to read this."