Splinterlands has a lot of unique players. With each player comes different strategies as well. Just like any other game, when trying to learn the game, you need want to learn from the best and that is where I come in.
I played Splinterlands since March of 2022, during the late part of the release of Untamed Set. These are the seasons where The Kraken rains supreme, and times where Djinn Oshannus costs $40 per piece and can be obtained from chests. These are the times where collection power is required to increase your rank and the times where monster and summoner levels are limited by each League. I was a former Champion League Player once but I stopped trying hard now and just play casually due to rental cost.
However, even though I had stopped, the experience and the knowledge I learned from these can be seen in each of my articles. I hope I am credible enough for you to trust for the tips I would share in this special article about Lineup and Team building.
In each battle, there are a set of rules and conditions to consider before locking in your team. Considering all of these within three (3) minutes may be tough but will be easier with experience.
1 Elements Active: These are the sets of Splinters you can use. You can choose one of them along with Neutral monsters to complete your team.
1.1 What are the strengths and weakness of each Splinter?
You also need to consider the strengths of each Splinter to incorporate in your lineup. The splinter's strengths can be assumed based on the available summoners for them. For example, Fire Splinter is strong with melee monsters since Tarsa can give her team an extra melee damage and health. They are weak on drawn out fights though due to lack of having monsters with Tank Heal and Triage. Earth Splinter are have strong magic damage because of Obsidian but weak when it comes to Speed as a lot of their monsters with magic damage has low speed. Knowing the strengths and weakness can help you on which Splinter you would use to abuse the said situation tilting the favor in your side.
1.2 Possible opponent lineup
What you can do, your opponent also can. Mastering the strengths and weakness of each element can help you a lot. For example, if Death Splinter and Fire Splinter are both available, I might go for my Lorkus Fire Splinter. This build has strong protection against melee monsters especially Sneak strategies as it uses a monster with Shield ability on the last position. This both counters Fire and Death Splinters as both Splinter loves to use Sneak monsters through Tenyii Striker or Silent Sha-Vi. Therefore, this gives me an absolute advantage on this battle. Lorkus also counters the decreased magic damage by Thaddius Brood through his increased magic damage equalizing the battlefield. These kinds of knowledge gives you total game control which would increase the wins you would have for each season.
2 Mana Cap: This shows how much mana can you spend in the battle. This affects very much what lineup you will be using so you must be ready to adapt on low mana fights and high mana fights.
2.1 Will you choose quantity?
If you chose quantity over quality, this means trying to maximize the number for monsters you can use on that battle. This is good on teams where the summoner gives benefits on your whole team. For example, if you choose to maximize Obsidian's Earth Team, you would get an overall 6 additional magic damage. Using team-wide abilities like Strengthen or Protect increases the chance that you would win the game as well.
2.2 Will you choose quality?
Choosing quality over quantity means using a hard carry. For example, a combo of Kron the Undying and Scarred Llama Mage requires a minimum of 17 mana. You may only use 1 monster but it's enough to destroy a full team of 6 monsters with mana costs of 1-3 due to his increased stats and healing capabilities. When to use quality and when to use quantity is a skill players needed to know in order to increase the chance of winning their games.
3 Rules of Combat: These are the sets of rules that both you and your opponents needed to abide with. Some rules of combat may not affect you significantly while some can. It depends on what your plan is and hopefully your lineup will be affected by the rules positively.
3.1 Will you use it or counter it?
This is the question I mostly have. Some rules of combat can be really strong to skip out. For example, if you have Possibilus the Wise as one of your available summoners, it would be a waste not to use him and focus on melee monsters in a Stampede rule of combat. On the other hand, you may want to use it as a bait in order to predict what your opponent may do and play accordingly to that strategy.
3.2 Will your opponent use it or counter it?
If you can use the rule of combat, your opponent can as well. You have to consider your opponent using the same strategy or abusing the current rule of combat as it has a high chance of winning. For example, if there's Super Sneak rule of combat giving everyone Sneak ability, I would consider using a monster with Shield ability on the back of my team or using monsters with Demoralize ability to reduce the damage. These preparations tend to help if your opponents eventually tried to use the rules of combat against you.
If you have the proper knowledge of the rule sets and skill on your hand, you will easily conquer the battle and easily turn that losses into wins.
Below, I listed a few battles that we can review and I will do a quick deep dive on how I planned my lineup for those games to earn my wins.
In this battle, I quickly see Corrosive Fog. This means a long drawn out battle focusing on armor is not viable. Using monsters with Taunt, Protect and Repair will put me on a disadvantage.
What Doesn't Kill You rules of combat gives every melee monsters Enrage ability. This might be an avenue I could use to abuse tilting the favor to my advantage.
So, what I did was since I saw Water Element Active, and I have Possibilus the Wise, I used a team of melee monsters to use as a base for my strategy. I added Wave Brood and one monster with Triage to serve as a shock absorver since I know that my Xenith Monk will die really quickly if the opponents focused on him with melee attacks since he only has Void ability on him and Heal doesn't happen in an instant and is only strong over the course of the game. I had Deeplurker which has Demoralize to decrease melee damage to help as well while being a melee monster himself.
Some might ask, "Why not use a monster with Shield ability?" because Water Splinter doesn't have a reliable monster with Shield ability. I can use another Neutral monster, Grimbardun Smith, for that but his rental cost is too high and I would also miss a good amount of damage since he doesn't have any melee attacks.
With the knowledge of what I can and opponent can do, this resulted in a win. throught the combined efforts of my melee monsters and defensive capabilities of Wave Brood and Angelic Mandarin.
In this battle, due to the limited mana, I had to choose between quality or quantity. This is a very good example of what I discussed about this topic a while ago because my opponent clearly used the quantity route for their strategy while I used quality.
Since multiple elements are active, it would be hard to focus and predict what he would use. Either way, I do know that he wouldn't use magic damage since he would have disadvantage due to Counterspell rule of combat. Aimless rule of combat can be unpredicted but focusing on Range monsters on a low mana cap battle is hard unless you use Fernheart, an Earth Summoner, that gives his range monsters the capability to attack from 1st position with Close Range ability and there are very few players who uses Fernheart in Modern Ranked Format since the range monsters in Chaos Legion and Rebellion are not that good.
So, what I did in this battle is to use a strong monster with Shield ability. The strongest monster I had, when I did this battle, that had Shield ability is Carnage Titan. I had Xenith Monk and Uraeus sandwich him to try and put him in a safe position as he tries to deal damage to the opponent's team.
I was expecting the death of both Xenith Monk and Uraeus but the extra armor Uraeus had seemed to help survive with 1 health. This doesn't change the result I was expecting though with Carnage Titan doing most of the work and eliminating the whole opponent's team.
In this battle, Corrosive Armor rule of combat is once again a problem. Therefore, using monsters with high armor is a bad move in the long run.
Earthquake rule of combat requires you to have monsters with Flying ability to eliminate the damage. Focusing on Flying monsters may be a good strategy in this battle as well.
This battle has 50 mana cap which can be considered high. Because of this, I expect a long game with a lot of strong monsters on the line.
For the Elements active, Magic damage from Earth Splinter is the only one that concerns me but that Splinter doesn't have a lot of Flying Magic damage monster.
So, with these factors, I decided to use Lorkus and Fire monsters. Tusk the Wide is perfect for countering magic damage due to his high health while supporting the team through Inspire ability. As you may have noticed, I didn't use a lot of monsters with Flying ability except for Gargoya Devil. The idea is to hit fast and hard with melee monsters.
However, I have Tinderlock as a backup strategy. The goal is to have Lorkus give him the Life Leech ability to compensate for the Earthquake damage. Then, when all of my monsters are dead, he'll activate his Last Stand ability increasing all of his stats, increasing the damage as well as the Life Leech gain.
The result of the strategy looked bleak at first as the clock keeps ticking from the Earthquake damage. However, when Uruel the Purifier finally went down, the prepared strategy started to bloom. Tinderlock suddenly had a huge +6 health due to Last Stand ability. The large increased health is because he was farming max health from the start due to Life Leech and even though he gets damage every round by Earthquake, the max health still stayed. This resulted in a win for me as he finally slew the last monster on the opponent's side.
Splinterlands is a very complicated yet rewarding game. Each game can be hard depending on the cards you have at hand but don't fret. With experience, you can overcome the different obstacles you are currently facing.
I sometimes correlate mastering this game to cooking. If you can master the different tiny aspects of a certain dish, the end result will be really good.
Lastly, a small advice to beginners and new players. I know the game can be frustrating at times since some of your were enticed about the promise of playing the game and earning at the same time and the game's economy is on a bad state right now. What I want to say is to just enjoy it as a game rather than investment. If you're treating this game as an investment, 5 years from now is probably a good vision of when you would start profitting from it. So, until that time comes, enjoy Splinterlands as a game instead and I promise you that you will have a better time when playing this amazing game.
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