Splinterlands, the obvious, not so obvious...

Hi everyone! Time for another explainer for Splinterlands, because it's a great game but with a steep learning curve, but then again... most good games have the same.
In the splinterlands collaboration with the Wasder app, we made a new guild to support and guide new players, and I started writing explainers to refer to, because it's just too much to simply tell people in our discord server.

Are you a new player who wants a nice team to work with and get some advice and support where needed? Feel free to join our Discord server.

In my explainer series I made some posts before:

Getting started in Splinterlands.

Explaining Brawls

The importance of speed.

Battle basics, rulesets and card placement.

Todays subject...

For us Splinter junkies some things are so obvious, while they are not at all for players starting and learning the ropes, so I want to talk about some basics and strategies I'm using in different rulesets to help you guys get some guidance because there's just too much to remember. In my country we have a saying, literally translated it goes: you can no longer see the wood because of the trees 😅.

Shoutout to my new guild mates @byxor and @sifounas43 learning a fighting in our second guild, and @vanchris90 who has build a gold level deck (or maybe even more by now 🤣) in a few weeks and is fighting in way higher leagues than me now and could join our main guild 🙌.

#1: Sometimes, you just need to outlast your enemy and attacking is less important...

This is true for earthquake and poison battles, and sometimes we get strange combinations we have to adapt to, like this one:

Great, right!? 🤣 so melee only but every melee attacker receives thorn damage... cool! NOT!
well, in this case, it's just a matter of surviving longer than your opponent, so missing isn't a bad thing now, and by outlasting my enemy I won the fight:

So, my focus wasn't on attacking at all, but on preventing my cards getting a lot of damage, important abilities for this battle are: Shield, Protect and Demoralize.
By using Demoralize, all but two of the enemy cards attacks are reduced to 1, doing 0 damage against my shielded monsters while taking 2 thorns damage themselves.

You can watch the battle unfold for yourself here.

#2: Wands out ruleset - only magic cards are allowed.

For some ruleset I've bought specific summoners or monsters to have an advantage, for this one, I rented Bortus and will keep renting him, it's only level 1, but it does the job in most battles, maybe I'll buy him some day.

There are basically three ways to play this ruleset, assuming we don't have Llama and kron, my opponent has them and he still lost so yeah 😆... Or you play something like my team, -1 magic damage with void in the first position, make sure you put the cards with the highest health first and the lowest to the back. You really need the pirate captain with affliction to counter the enemy when earth / magic is being played because earth has a magic healer....
The other play is Earth / Obsidian, again put the highest health cards up front, option 3 is Death, Thadius Brood but you need Djinn Muirat for this, and if you're lucky, you earned Usut in your battles, also a nice high HP magic monster.

#3: Make good use of the Martyr cards available to you.

Martyr cards can really make the difference for only 3 mana (or 5 if you have the fire one). In certain rulesets you NEED to use them to win:

• Target Practice: All ranged and magic monsters will target the first non-melee monster they see on the battlefield, you can take great advantage of this ruleset by putting Venari Marksrat in position 2! For example when you play water: Diemon Shark / Venari Marksrat / Djinn Oshannus line-up added by more cards if it fits will boost your cards in position 1 and 3 when the martyr card die, Oshannus will get even faster to dodge archery attacks, and its void help negates magic damage.
• Equal Opportunity: Low HP monsters are being targeted first, Venari Marksrat only has 3 HP, make sure he's surrounded by strong attackers that get boosted when it dies, I like to put Coastal Sentry and Axe Master around him, they both have the Double Strike ability, boosted they become even more lethal!

• Explosive Weaponry (blast ruleset): Cards is position 2 will get blast damage, the same as with target practice put the Marksrat in second position.
• Making a martyr trap with the SuperSneak ruleset: This is a cool trick I found out, play Earth / Obsidian, Unicorn Mustang, Goblin Psychic to heal it, anything in 3, Regal Peryton in 4, Venari Marksrat in 5 and Djinn Biljka in 6, the Djinn has camouflage so I can't be attacked, Venari Marksrat is being killed by sneak, boosting Peryton and the Djinn, Peryton has flying and will become even faster making it very evasive.

4: Find a guild and join Brawls:

With brawls, you earn SPS and Merits which you can use to buy Gladiator cards, you really want them, they are VERY powerful!

5: Find good synergies and write them down:

Some cards really work well together, we all know the Llama / Kron combo, but it's pretty expensive! it's not the only good combination, here's one example for a nice sneak team, the new epic reward card Thane Newsong with the Inspire ability combines great with the Gladiator card Katrelba Gobson

You can watch the battle unfold for yourself here.
And when you find them, write them down 😉, we're not bot's and you will forget some of them.

Well, that's it for this week, I'm sure I forgot some nice idea's which I will write down for another post in the coming weeks.

Thank you for reading!!!

If you haven't made an account already, please consider using my referral link to sign up, I'll happily send the amount I get for your signup back to you in DEC or SPS to help you start.

Have a great day!