Welcome to my 42nd #BrawlReport as part of the 
I took the top spot this brawl with 5 wins and 2 losses, however 
We earned 14 crowns and 754 merits for finishing in 2nd place in this brawl. This is a slight decline from our rewards in the last brawl for the same second place finish.
We ended up behind the first place team by 5 wins, although we had the same number of losses. The only reason that would happen is that we didn't have all of our frays filled up. I think losing out on a fray with lots of opponents in it is a problem when it comes to racking up enough wins for first place. We may need to get a bit better at ensuring frays with more than 3 or 4 opponents always get filled.
My 5-2 record for this brawl was the result of six full battles with one of my opponents fleeing.
Featured Battles
Battle #2 - Loss
This battle is against the first place team in this brawl. With a rather high mana limit, I decided to combine the Llama summoner with two healing cards - Kron and Quora. Usually I place those two cards in the last position, but this time I decided to tweak things a bit and add a Goblin Psychic to further heal my first card.
Unfortunately, this strategy didn't work as my opponent used four Sneak attack cards to take out my back row. It turns out my use of a Goblin Psychic prolonged the first card's presence too long so the power of the Llama to boost my Quora never happened. This was a tough one to lose and the strategy of my opponent seemed perfectly tailored to disable a Llama-based strategy.
Battle #3 - Win
In this melee-only battle, I decided to go with a Llama/Quora combo. I love using the Quora card during these melee-only battle because she is able to sneak in a magic attack ability too.
My cards didn't do much damage until Quora made it to the first position and the Llama benefits kicked in. Once that happened, her Bloodlust ability took over and made quick work of defeating my opponents.
Battle #6 - Win
This is another rather high mana battle and I really like these since it lets me put my big cards to work. In this case, I'm using a Yodin summoner with a double-Bloodlust frontline of attack. I'm reducing my opponent's melee attack by one with my Disintigrator and throwing in a Lava Launcher in the back to deal 4 damage range attacks.
The 5 speed of my opponent's first two cards was a pain in the ass to deal with, but thankfully my Chimney Wallstop was able to overcome and start building up his Bloodlust powers to outlast the others. This was a win, but could have easily gone the other way if I didn't have my double-bloodlust up front.
This was a pretty good showing on my part, but I'm always a little bummed when I lose to the team that takes first place in the brawl. However, our continued performance of top-3 finishes is really awesome and I hope we can keep it going. We are earning enough merits each brawl to get nearly half of a Gladius case. One of these days I'll need to do a Gladius case opening post to share what I have received so far. Many of my non-GF gladiators have been upgraded to level 2 now.
With the newly proposed game rules that make using higher level cards more necessary, I'll have to start looking at renting higher level summoners for these brawls so I can take full advantage of the higher level Gladiator cards I have now.
@hive.pizza #BrawlReport?kennysgaminglife spearheaded the #BrawlReport project as a way to get PIZZA guild members more engaged in the @Splinterlands community. Here's what he had to say:
*Starting with the brawl that just ended, I've invited/asked members of the #HivePizza guild to publish a #BrawlReport, breaking down their highs & lows, where they need help, questions they have, strategies they love, and so on. The idea is to help us all reflect a bit, learn a bit, share a bit, earn a bit, and connect a bit :-)
Check out the latest update on the Hive Pizza token project. We also have an announcement in there about the newest PIZZA guild! We are up to four Splinterlands guilds now and are consistently well-ranking.
Check out the other recent #BrawlReport posts from the #HIVEPIZZA family:
