Splinterlands - Beginner's Guide - Thorns Ability

Are you new to Splinterlands and searching for some advice then you found the correct series! In this Beginner’s Guide Series, we are discussing things that new players of Splinterlands should know or try to learn. In this specific episode I want to highlight the Thorns Ability and how to utilize it to be more successful in your battles. If you found this article but are not playing this game yet, then feel free to join over the following link:
https://splinterlands.com?ref=ga38jem

Thorns Ability

Let’s talk about the Thorns ability first. This ability allows you to deal damage without attacking your opponent. Each time your opponent attacks your monster with in a melee way, the attacking monster will suffer 2 extra damage. If the attacking monster has the Shield ability, the damage will be cut in half. Why is this ability so cool? Well, the simple reason is that it gives you a chance to increase your total damage during a battle because you still have your own attack yourself. Just see it as two extra damage to your opponents monster.

This ability gets its shinning moments especially in cases where a lot of melee attackers are attacking our monster with Thorns ability. This is the case when the battle has the Melee Mayhem ruleset. This means that Melee monsters can attack from any position which leads to a lot of attacks on our tank. This will lead inevitably to a lot of Thorns damage! Another very popular ruleset is the fog ruleset where every Sneak and Snipe attack is disabled, meaning that all monster have to attack the first position monster which again leads to tons of melee damage in the case of melee attackers. A very similar ruleset that is benefiting our strategy is Super Sneak which lets Melee monsters attack the unit in the last spot. This is basically the reverse logic compared to Melee Mayhem: Just place your Thorns monster in the last position and watch your enemy’s monster suffer!

Monsters with such an ability could be found in almost every element. My favorites are the Cursed Windeku in the Death Splinter as well as Djinn Chwala from the Dragon Splinter. In my opinion these two cards are the most used thorns cards and are available on the Bronze level which is where we are focusing our guides on! Both monsters have a great amount of health on them which results in a lot Thorns damage to the enemy. Additionally, Djinn Chwala has 5 armor which makes this card a little bit better than the Cursed Windeku but both cards are fine to use!

Strategy

Now that we know which cards we are going to use primary, we need to build a team around them. A very common strategy is to keep the selected tank alive as long as possible in order to deal as much Thorns damage as possible. With this in mind I immediately think of abilities like tank heal and repair!

Cards that have this ability are also in many elements which makes this strategy so fun to use! Examples are Scavo Hireling, Adelade Brightwing, Venari Crystalsmith or Merdaali Guardian but there are many more!

Furthermore, we need to fill up our board with monsters that are still doing damage on their own. Here, you can select and Ranged or Magic attacker that fits the mana criteria. I always prefer mana attackers rather than Ranged attackers as they can attack from the first position as well but it is up to you to utilize the rest of the space adequately. Last but not least I want to mention that in order to use Djinn Chwala, it is required to select a dragon summoner which what my favorite selection is for this kind of strategy. This also allows us to gain an additional armor point which is with out a doubt beneficial.

Example Battles

With our outlined strategy, we can jump into our example battles. While in the first one I tried to use the water element, the second battle shows the advantages of using the Life element with this strategy. Both ways were successful and it is really up to you to decide which strategy you like to use more. In the first battle we had the case of Melee Mayhem and because water has some alright attackers I chose to go with this element. The opponent had the same idea but because we were smart enough to select our tank with a Thorns ability, the winner was really soon determined!

In the second battle we chose the supporting approach. Due to our clever positioning and amount of supporting units we were able to make our tank last until the last round. This was only possible due to the three support units that were constantly healing and repairing our Djinn. In the end we were able to defeat our opponent thanks to the Thorns ability.

Battle 1

Battle 2

I really hope that I was able to show you a new side of this amazing game. It surprises me every time how many different strategies this game has to offer and I encourage everyone who has not joined the game yet to give it a try. If you missed the previous beginner’s guides, feel free to check them out down below! 😊