Splinterlands - Beginners guide to General Sloan

This is a data-driven beginners guide for General Sloan. General Sloan is the Chaos Legion summoner that has had the lowest overall win rate so far. But that does not mean that you should never play her. She is very powerful in the right circumstances, so learning a little bit about how and when she should be played is worth the time.

This guide is based on match statistics that we have collected since the launch of Chaos Legion. We will use data from Silver league, because strategies in Silver league are more refined than in Bronze, while still primarily based on level 1 free-to-play cards. So using this as a basis is ideal for creating a beginners guide, which is the purpose of this post.

The current dataset for General Sloan consists of 180.000 matches. Currently, her win-rate in this dataset sits at 47.5%. That makes her the least successful Chaos Legion summoner, but there are many situations where she is a good choice.

Introduction to General Sloan

General Reega Sloan was a powerful healer that turned to the chaos legion and was corrupted by chaos energy. She enhances the chaos legion’s army by enchanting their arrows with chaos magic. To quote from the lore: “Cloaks of defensive energy that had been cast above the city hadn’t even stopped her soldiers attack because she’d enchanted each and every missile, giving it the power to break through the veil and strike the defenders beneath.”

The chaos enhancement of missiles is reflected ingame by a +1 ranged attack boost. When you play General Sloan, all your ranged monsters will get their attack increased by one. By selecting more ranged units in your team, you maximize the benefit you gain from selecting General Sloan

Starting deck comments
Currently, the starting deck consists of common and rare cards from the Untamed and Chaos Legion editions. These are the ranged attack monsters you have at your disposal

Ranged units are often fragile, and the most difficult part about playing General Sloan is to provide enough protection for your ranged monster without spending too much mana. The most relevant cards for achieving this are

Generally, you want to place a melee monster or two in front, and then fill up your team with ranged units. Sometimes, you can include Truthspeaker if you expect melee or ranged damage based opponents, or use Time Mage to get in your attacks before your opponent does. This is the general thought process behind playing the starter deck with General Sloan. Next, lets look at when you should play her.

Win rate at different manas

The figure above shows General Sloan’s win rate at different manas (in Silver league, and also note that win rates might change over time). The first important thing to note is that General Sloan is terrible at low mana. This makes sense, because her ranged units can’t attack in the first position. At very low mana, you can not afford any substantial front line to buy time for your ranged units to do the work.

26 mana is the critical mana needed for General Sloan to be effective. At or above 26 mana, she can use a tough frontline along with the more powerful ranged units, and you can get great value from her +1 ranged buff. As mana increases above 26, her win rates varies slightly, but is generally above 50%. This statistic is likely the most important takeaway from this post. Play General Sloan primarily from 26 mana and up.

Win rate in different rules

Of all the rulesets, General Sloan has the best time in Even Stevens. The reason is that many of her most used cards are even mana cards: Shieldbearer, Venari Crystalsmith, Pelacor Arbalest, Herbalist, Xenith Archer, and more. So Even Stevens works in Sloan’s favor, since many other summoners have more of their core cards unavailable.

Equalizer is also good for Sloan. In this mode, she can play many cheap low-hp ranged monsters without concern for their health. Chosing many monsters instead of a few larger ones takes maximal advantage of Sloan’s ability.

Most of Sloan’s monsters start out at 1 or 2 speed. So Reverse Speed is great for her. Aim True also fixes the related speed issue where her monsters might miss hits because of their low speed. So both these rules works in favor of General Sloan.

Next, Weak Magic and Lost Magic are also great for Sloan. Shieldbearer becomes much more effective if magic damage is not of concern, and she can also play Truthspeaker to provide armor to her whole team, making it that much more sturdy in these modes.

These rules are where Sloan does well. The ones that she does worst in are obviously where ranged monsters cannot be used: Up Close & Personal, and Broken Arrows. Also, since she does well in Even Stevens, she does terrible in Odd Ones Out. She is also pretty bad in the modes that favor few large monsters, such as Noxious Fumes and Earthquake.

Some of the less favourable rules are those that provide more power to melee or magic monsters, These include Melee Mayhem, Super Sneak, Equal Opportunity and Target Practice. Target Practice might not be that obvious, but it is of greater benefit to magic monsters since they rarely have snipe available. Standard mode is also not great for General Sloan.

Win rate against other summoners

The table below shows Sloan's win rate against the other free-to-play summoners:

Sloan has the best time against Pyre and Bortus. It is somewhat expected that Pyre is the easiest opponent, as his ability is not that great with the fire starter deck. Bortus also gains very little advantage against Sloan with -1 magic damage, since Sloan doesn't really rely on magic damage. It is more interesting that Sloan does well against the death summoners, even against Contessa L'ament, who negates the +1 ranged ability.

Sloan struggles against Tarsa, Drake of Arnak, Obsidian and Kelya Frendul. Tarsa very strong at low mana, where Sloan is very weak. For the most part, one can get around this problem by just not playing Sloan at low mana. Obsidian and Kelya Frendul are larger problems, as they are both good at the same mana ranges as Sloan. Magic damage can shred through Shieldbearer or the other tanks very quickly, leaving your ranged units crippled as they get placed in the front of the team. Consider renting a Clay Golem if this is something you face often. Against Kelya Frendul, it can be effective to use a Disintegrator if she plays a melee based version of the water deck.

Team Setup

We have established the situations where you want to play General Sloan: More than 26 mana, and one of the favourable rulesets discussed above. You should also have an idea about which summoners you can expect to beat and who you have less chances against.

Now, lets look at which monsters you want to use when you decide to play her:
We will not consider every single mana option, but provide an set of examples that should be sufficient as a basis for selecting teams for the remaining mana options. The following team suggestions are based on win rates at each specific mana limit. For each mana limit, we set up the team by exploring which monster combinations have the highest win rates. Positioning is the authors’ suggestion based on examination of a selection of matches, so it is not set in stone. In most cases, our general positioning strategy will be based around protecting the Pelacor Arbalest.

20 Mana

26 Mana

27 Mana

30 Mana

36 Mana

50 Mana

At 50 mana, the data is insufficient. The team does not use mana well, and can be significantly boosted by renting a few more powerful cards. But even so, the win rate of this team, at roughly 2000 matches played, is pretty great. This speaks to the potential power of General Sloan at high mana. The reason for the poor mana usage is that the f2p deck does not include more expensive ranged attack options (Mantoid can be used, but has worse win rate). Thus, to play at 50 mana it is important to supplement the starting deck. The author's suggestion would be some combination of Evangelist, Prismologist, Silvershield Sheriff and Venari Crystalsmith. At the time of writing, all four of these are rentable for less than 1 dec/day.

99 Mana

or

99 Mana teams suffer from the same issues as we discussed earlier, and rentals can significantly improve the team power here. The two setups suggested here are both focussed around facing melee teams, which is highly likely at 99 mana because of Kelya Frendul’s strength at high mana. If we borrow some stats from Gold League to help us at 99 mana, a pretty successful setup is

This closes out the team setup examples. Hopefully, these examples are sufficient for getting a basic understanding of how to build a team with General Sloan for your matches

Closing Remarks

We hope you found this guide useful. We have tried to provide a comprehensive guide for General Sloan. Match statistics were used in all parts of this guide. Very little information has been based on the authors' opinions. This makes the guide reliable at the time of writing, but it will also mean that the statistics and best teams presented here can change over time.

Let us know if this guide has helped you, and if you have any other comments or suggestions please let us know.

Please also check out our other content:

Rule set strategies
We are also creating guides for specific rules. You can find them here:
Strategycorner with Mammuter #5: How to WIN in Reverse Speed
Strategycorner with Mammuter #4: How to WIN in Melee Mayhem
Strategycorner with Mammuter #3: Noxious Fumes
If you would like to see more of this content, please let me know, like and share the post. Also, if you have not yet started playing Splinterlands, you can join and support me and the same time with the following link

Join Splinterlands

Another way to support us is through card delegations or donations. If you want to do that, we are @kalkulus and @mammuter.

Best of luck in Splinterlands!
Kalkulus