Ladder Report - How do the battles look like now ?

Heya Splinterlanders :)

It's been a while since the big change in whole Splinterlands game. The bots were banned in Modern format, so now only human players can play it. For now, any battle helpers still are available, so sometimes you probably could play versus a player who likes to use it, but in most cases, it is a battle between two human brains :).

So for today, my idea was to check what the battles look like, how strong are the opponents and what could you expect there. We will also check what rewards are in silver league for those matches.

I usually still use the bot for ladder play. Unfortunately with so many tournaments, I cannot find time to play modern league manually, sometimes I play it just for fun to see how strong are the opponents.

In these circumstances fighting for the top leaderboard position is rather unreal. There are very strong silver players at top, and it is quite common to buy energy to get more fights and have chances to get higher ratings. It's hard to value the prizes for the top 25 positions, I think for all the necessary effort you need to put in, it seems DEC rewards could be too low right now. Increasing those rewards could be not the best idea, because of DEC inflation. I really like some ideas presented by @bulldog1205 on twitter, when he talks about leaderboard rewards.

Here is the current leaderboard, my position is not great, but same as my battles :) :

So today I played a few matches, and all of them were quite interesting. My rating is quite low, so the opponents weren't the top players, but still, I had 3 fights in a row with quite interesting setups on both sides.

I managed to win all of those fights, so let's jump to battle analysis:

I present you 3 battles that I played in the row to show you a real modern silver ladder.

First battle :

Reverse speed is ruleset that suits some splinters better than others. I think Earth is one of the former, Queen Mycelia is a great card always, but here is much better. Same with Goblin Psychic, maybe healing in the first round could be useless, but later is quite helpful.

On the opponent's side, Captain Katie is the beast, and with an additional martyr, cards could be too powerful. Fortunately, our speed was low enough to kill her before she managed to do anything. I am not a big fun of the last card, giving some protection of sneak monster could be useful, but wasting 4 mana for it and taking so much risk that an opponent (like me here) will not use any monster with sneak is just too big.

Rewards Share Points and SPS for that battle were quite high for this rating, but as you can see I used all gold foil cards so I get some bonus from this.

Second battle :

For the second battle we got Rebirth ruleset, I was considering going with Lily and martyr Cards, but for available splinters I couldn't find any monster with resurrection in my collection. So I finally decided to use some of setup which is quite effective and I use it more and more recently. Feinheart with a combination of martyr and scavenger cards could be a very difficult strategy to beat, additionally rebirth works great with scavenger and in the middle of the fights my monster got around 12-15 HP.

Opponent got a nice setup, nothing fancy, but a solid Chaos Legion Set team. Damage output was quite high, and the Last Stand ability from Tinderlock make the fight closer than I thought it would be.

Only 3 gold foil cards and no focus bonus, for this rating still SPS rewards aren't so bad. My highest number was around 2.5, but my friend could get around 4 :).

Third battle :

The last of today's battle is a duel versus Conqueror Jacek and Franz Ruffmane. For the ruleset, we got Thorn Damage, so I decided not to use any Melee Monster. As I mentioned above in the first fight, Captain Katie is a beast, and here it was a perfect battle for her, with some targets on the backline. I used one of my favorite strategies with taunt monster and triage, but because of Scattershot from Jacek this time it wasn't so much successful.

The opponent had solid team, maybe the Reach monster wasn't the best choice, because he just kill himself. I'm not a big fan of Jacek for the silver league, but the fight was still quite interesting.

We got some win streak bonus here, but just one gold cards, so rewards are lower than in the first battle, but still not bad :).

Banning bots in Modern League for sure was a huge decision for the future of Splinterlands game. I think overall players like that decision, from investor points of view it seems opinion are from negative to neutral. I am still in the middle. I play some manual players in modern, but still, I use the bot to play most of my energy in wild format. I think we really need some changes in the prize structure of the leaderboard or maybe a little redesigned ladder to be more interesting. Fighting so many battles to get top position could be just boring, and for players who still playing tournament battles it is just too much :).

The battles are quite interesting, even among not top leaderboard rating positions. Players used the balance collection, we could see the different lineup, not just Kitty and Yodin which dominates top-rating players' battles.

I hope recent and future changes will go in the right direction when we could see more gameplay features and more incentives to play ladder on higher and higher levels, but still, the road is quite long. And what is your opinions about this topic? Leave comments in the comment section :).

I hope you like this kind of battle and strategy presentation. More strategy analysis, discussion, and prediction games you can find on my Wednesday Splinterlands.tv stream. You can check the schedule here

If you have any comments, please do not hesitate. Do you think I could improve anything just tell me :)