Splinterforge is quite competitive, so ranking in the top 150 (a requirement for leaderboard rewards) can be challenging. If you don't want to spend a lot of FORGE on things like potions, you have to make the best use of the energy you have.
One of the first requirements to have a competitive team is to increase the mana limit that you start with. The default is 45 mana, and you can increase that up to 60 on a bronze boss by imbuing equipment with a mana mastery rune:
Since attacking a boss requires a set amount of energy, it's wasteful to attack with anything less than the maximum mana that you can have. It allows you to use tougher units, which is important because bosses deal quite a lot of damage, and if you use weak cards then they can be one-shot and they won't contribute anything to your points other than absorbing one hit.
But of course, in order to imbue the rune, you need equipment. To get full rewards you need to equip some gear from forge crates, or gear that you buy on the marketplace on splex.gg. First person who comments that they want a mana mastery ruin, I will send them one!
Another thing to keep in mind is the attributes of the boss:
There are typically abilities that a boss will have that counter a specific damage type. Because of this, I usually keep two teams of splinterlands cards on favorite. One that does melee/ranged damage, and one that does magic. Sometimes a boss will have one anti-damage type, and then have a random rule that defends them against the other type, leaving them really resistant to damage. That is one of the cases that I would reroll their random ability for 3 FORGE, because then, I will probably make it right back on that round instead of spending that energy to do little to no damage.
