Playing in the Modern Champion Two I get to meet the same scholars or professional Splinterlands players. The best scholar in Splinterlands is rukawa.red he is currently playing for the accounts that are number one, two and number three on the Modern Champion Leaderboard:
Most of the times when I play against Rukawa.Red or other top scholars I loose because they obviously are better players and have much stronger decks. But once is a while a moment like this happens! And that is what makes Splinterlands fun, yes the number one scholar piloting the number one account on the leaderboard ranked about two thousand points above me and a less experienced player with a worse deck wins:
When you see a number one player in the game come up and playing for the top account on the Modern Leaderboard the chances of winning are not very high, still it is important to do you best and anything can happen, it is a game of Splinterlands!
In this battle we have a fairly low mana battle with only twenty nine mana available to build my team. That is the reason I have decided to go with a relatively low mana summoner Sheng Xiao. This summoner costs only five mana which leaves twenty four points to build my team.
What I like about this summoner is that it lets me have a couple monsters that apply poison to the opponent once they are killed. When you have only twenty nine mana available it is not likely that your opponent is going to have a lot of high mana units on the field so poison should be very effective.
My strategy here also circles around survivability so I have played two very resilient monsters in the first two positions: Halfling Refugee and Ironwing Juggernaut. The third monster that really contributes to the survivability I have played in the last position: Arachne Weaver.
Arachne Weaver has three very interesting abilities one that applies poison and corrupted healing where he can heal all allied units. And finally his scavenger ability helps him build up health that can come in handy.
Survivability alone is not going to help you win usually there for I needed a major damage dealer and what damage dealer is best at this level of mana, in my opinion it is the Legendary rarity neutral monster: Venka the Vile:
This monster alone can often turn the tide of the battle as she can can kill an opponent in one shot with her seven point melee damage and it can trigger her Trample ability where she can strike the next monster and at this fairly low mana battle it could be a two kill deal in just one round.
We also have a Power of Three ruleset in effect where all units that cost three mana start with plus one power so I have included two units that cost three mana: Ironwing Juggernaut and Broken Earth Thug. Both of these have good damage and are fairly resilient.
And last but not least I have included a promo card Baron Fyatt that has a few very intriguing abilities: Halving where he halves the attack power of the unit it successfully hits, Scattershot that helps him spread halving damage and Ambush that takes an extra turn prior to the battle as well as Blind that increases the chances of opponent missing by fifteen percent. This is a very cool set of abilities that make Baron Fyatt a very interesting card to play.
When I look at the lineup above I am honestly impressed. I don't have six out of seven cards rukawa.red is playing and in a true High Roller fashion Lorkus is playing two black foil cards and the rest are gold foil cards... Including one of only five gold foil Heloise the Hollow, the most expensive card to rent in Splinterlands even in the regular foil if you even lucky enough to catch it in the first hours of a new season...
His lineup is very strong, the likelihood of a win here is not very high, but lets watch the battle:
The first round saw lots of action including Venka taking out Heloise the Hollow as well as Heloise missing a retaliate against Venka thanks to Venka's speed and a Blind assist from the Baron Fyatt.
At the start of round two Venka once again shows here power by taking out Heloise and the monster right after her and Heloise is missing again, now that is luck...
And at the start of round three Venka once again rips through the remaining lineup!
It is a sweet victory against the number one modern league player in the Splinterlands! It also came with over twenty eight SPS tokens for the win and plus sixty reputation points!
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