Good morning everyone, and Happy Easter to all of you! It's been a couple of days since my last post because life has been busy with non Splinterlands related things, mostly cycling related I got distracted with so much that I forgot to join the brawl for this cycle... sorry team! 😔
What didn't help as well was the start of this season being horrible for me, I felt like I was losing 75% of my battles and not even because I was submitting bad teams but the competition was just really fierce with a lot of players having all the right cards.
The thought just crossed my mind in the last day of the previous season I've pushed in to Diamond 3 which usually doesn't happen, so maybe now the system thinks I'm a wonderful player and I am obviously not... 🤣
As for this morning, the situation is improving a little bit and my win rate is going up from the low 30's back to 44% at the moment.
This morning I fought this battle and the outcome kinda surprised me, when I lose a lot I just start to experiment and don't give a f... about my performance and sometimes things actually work. 😆
The battle was a low mana (21) with the Collateral Damage ruleset, in which all units have the Reckless ability, damaging their own team when they attack and I see a lot of players really struggling with this ruleset.
What works for me:
Usually I also try and use some units without attack or units who can't attack from that position, Sea Dog is nice for this, it will just heal it self and outlasts the enemy.
In this battle we only had a low amount of mana to work with, and I figured... I might as well use Slade at the very front, since it's usually the fastest on the battlefield so it will strike first. The 4 mana I had left however I was thorn between using Shock Trooper and the Mana Warden but then I figured the Shock Trooper would do extra damage on top of the Reckless, so I just went with the Mana Warden which sole purpose was to give the Shield ability to Slade, and then it had no use after that.
Since I had no idea what my opponent was going to do, and the battle started my first thought was... 'no way I can win this' but the Reckless damage in a team with small monsters is really devastating!
This time, Slade and the enemy Dragon Egg Forager both had 5 speed and the attack type and rarity are the same, so it's RNG who attacks first and the Forager attacked first, hitting Mana Warden's armor and killing the first unit on it's own team with Reckless damage.
Slade then killed the enemy tank, my Mana Warden was killed which was okay and at this point had been a nice distraction to keep the Forager busy for two rounds, and Slade killed the next unit as well. I still don't understand what the Brutal effect means, it occurs with 4 or more damage I think but there's no side effect as far as I know.
The Caravan Guard is way too slow to have a chance to actually hit Slade, so it's last two attacks missed but that Forager's HP is adding up nicely with it's Scavenge ability. It's a really powerful card beyond Silver level. Too bad my deck is only at Silver level so my Forager only has two attack of it's own.
Things got exciting with a 1 vs. 1 standoff, but there was an ability that I overlooked that made a big difference in this final stage, it's the Enfeeble ability lowering the melee damage with -1 at every successful hit and... Slade attacks twice every round, lowering Forager's attack power with 2, in only 1 round.
This made a big difference in which otherwise would have been a very close call.
The rewards in Gold 3 aren't as high just yet but hopefully later today I will be back in Gold 2, but then again I've been there twice already this season and then I'm getting kicked back down again. 😅
You can watch the battle unfold for yourself here.
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Have a great day!
