Thanks for coming to my daily #Splinterlands Battle of the Day #BOTD for your reading and watching enjoyment. All hail the #ageofthebattlemage!
BATTLE LINK -- July 3, 2024 -- Day 185 of 366 vs. 
Welcome to another Modern Champion 3 battle from ranked play Season 138. In this 99-mana encounter, the dragon, fire, and earth elements were available and the three rulesets were: Earthquake, Keep Your Distance, and Fire & Regret. I made the easy choice and chose the dragon element using Lily, pairing it with earth for access to a pair of powerful monsters, Runemancer Florre and Ancient Redwood.
The featured card of the battle is a rare dragon monster from Riftwatchers, Runic Skyclaw. It is a literal giant killer in 99-mana rulesets, inflicting double damage on the frequent 10+ mana "giants" my opponents choose for battle. The flying is perfect for the Earthquake ruleset to avoid taking damage, and the high speed means it will typically attack ahead of my opponent's monsters. Finally, Skyclaw can take advantage of its range attack without taking return fire damage due to its handy reflection shield.
Also in the running for the featured card was Skyclaw's neighbor, Ancient Redwood. Its high-powered range attack with reflection shield meant it also wouldn't take any return fire damage. While Redwood has piercing and true strike to ensure its attacks deal full damage through armor, Skyclaw strikes faster and inflicts double damage on giants, so it took the honor for today's battle.
Notably, my opponent and I chose the same summoner and three identical monsters: the dual-attacking Runemancer Florre, and the two powerful flyers Rage and Chaos Dragon. But my weapons-trained Grim Smith withstood much more damage than their tank Nalara, and the aforementioned duo of reflection-shielded range attackers outperformed their recharge and triage strategy.
The win made me 45 SPS richer and added over 2000 more Glint to my season stash. I went on quite a bit of a run yesterday, but sadly only one battle can be the battle of the day. However, I've got a little bonus content planned for later today showing off three more interesting battles since the action was too good to keep to myself.
Enjoy the content? Leave a like/comment and check out BOTD 184 from yesterday!
If you're curious about any of the guilds I belong to, I've linked the pictures below with an invite to each guild's Discord servers.
Come by, give me a shout, and check us out!
Proud member of the original KoG alliance guild, Tier 5 Brawlers, and the Top-ranked guild in Splinterlands: 
Proud member of YGG Brawlers (Niðavellir), 1 of 7 elite Brawler guilds within the Yield Guild Games Splinterlands alliance: 
Proud member of my 1st guild and a recent YGG member,
the always affable YGG 420 Fam, on Hive as 
Templates were used, AI was not!
Your thoughtful comments are valued!
What did you think of the battle?
Reactions?? Suggestions??
Let me know about it below!
Image Credit: @Splinterlands