Hello Splinterlands friends and family! 👋 Today as part of the Splinterlands Community Engagement Challenge I want to talk about one of my favorite strategies when playing with my alt @javiss01!
Lets call it "water team on a budget" strategy.
I. Introduction:
I want to start my post by making a big clarification. 🚨 In this post, I'm not going to talk about the BEST strategy for this game and how to reach top 1 in champion. The idea is that I'll present this strategy without using any of the expensive Meta OP cards. This is not a strategy to get to the top, nor is it a strategy that involves OP beasts like Tofu, Venka, Rage, Grim, Lorkus, and the like. 🏆🛡️
Don’t get me wrong, doing that would be a very valid approach (I might even do it in a subsequent post) but today I want to talk about strategies on a budget 💸😉.
I have a ton of budget strategies that I use with my alt depending on the rulesets and mana. I got quite proficient at making the best of a bad situation. It’s important to note that I’ve been playing with my alt for over a year now and it’s mostly a rental account that sits in high diamond/low champ. 💎🏆 This is not an account I can rank really high with (I do that with my main) and the account doesn’t have any Rebellion and just has a few cheap RWs cards. 🃏
This time I chose a strategy I play VERY often with my alt @javiss01 and the cool thing about it is that it only involves CL core and Reward cards and is a strategy capable of beating the strongest RWs and Rebellion cards if the enemy is not prepared for it. ⚔️💪
First, I’m going to talk about the strategy in general, secondly about some possible variations depending on the rulesets, and lastly, I’m going to show off a fight I won featuring the strategy in question and how it can be adapted to the given ruleset. 🥇📝
II. My Strategy:
The strategy in question revolves around a few principles that we are all already really familiar with:
- A versatile summoner 🌟
- A strong tank 🛡️
- A strong off-tank 💪
- Heavy damage dealers with opportunity or sneak 💥
- A taunt in the backline to protect the damage dealers 🛡️
- Heals for the tank and for the backline taunt 💧
I know that list doesn’t go into specifics and it’s pretty general. But following that archetype is most of the time the best way to build a team in the @splinterlands game.
It’s important to note that this strategy is only usable with the Water Splinter and requires quite a bit of mana. This strategy is for matches with 40 or more mana. 💧⚔️
II. A. Choosing the Right Summoner:
For this strategy, choosing the right summoner depends mainly on the ruleset and mana. The summoner choice in this case isn’t really that important. Either one of these 4 could get the job done. Kelya and Lux Vega provide speed and armor that are always useful. Quix is a good counter if you expect the enemy to use a lot of ranged monsters for some reason, also it’s very useful in a no armor match, and Lily can be useful to add another triage to the team. The power of this strategy doesn’t directly come from the summoner in this case. Also, it’s important to notice all of these summoners are cheap and obtainable for a few DEC. 🪙
II. B. The Tank:
In this game, as with most games, the tank is usually the guy in the first position. Its main goal is to receive damage and not die. For that, I tend to choose any of these 2 cards:
First option: Baakjira🐋:
For only 6 mana, Baakjira is probably the strongest tank in the Water Splinter. We all know how good the card is by now. The card is super strong, 16 life with self-heal and void makes Baakjira a very hard tank to kill, especially with magic. 🛡️✨
Second option: Arkemis the Bear🐻:
Arkemis is very expensive in terms of mana costs. I usually go for Arkemis when the mana allows for it. That’s generally in matches with 50+ mana. The card itself is really strong because of Forcefield and Protect. As a tank, Arkemis can also build up a lot of damage when he gets enraged. This and Baakjira are probably two of the most used cards in the CL set. ⚔️
II. C . The Off-tank:
The job of the Off-tank is to be a damage dealer but at the same time be ready in case the main tank falls. For this spot, I mainly use one unit:
Kulu Mastermind👁️🐙:
One could argue Kulu is the best unit in the CL reward set. This unit has it all. It’s a strong tank because it has shield, it’s a strong damage dealer because it has 5 attack, enrage, and is a great support because it has Weapons Training, which pairs really nice with Baakjira. 💥🛡️
II. D. The Damage Dealer:
For this strategy, the idea is that every unit works as a damage dealer, but if you can manage to introduce Deep Lurker into your team, you will have a great advantage.
Deep Lurker🐡: This unit is a very good damage dealer because it has 5 damage, opportunity, and poison. Its main weakness, just as Kulu, is if the enemy has the Forcefield ability. But even if you are attacking a Forcefield enemy unit, you can still poison it and eventually kill it. 💣🐍
II. E. 4th and 5th Positions:
Since this is a general strategy, you always need to adapt it to the circumstances. Most of the time the 4th and 5th spots are the ones that are adaptable.
For these 2 spots, you can pretty much choose anything that fills a support or damage dealer role. It really depends on the ruleset. As you can see in the fight I’m featuring in this post to showcase my strategy, I ended up using Venator Kinjo in the 5th spot, but that was very situational because the blast ruleset was active and I needed a way to stop blast from hitting my units adjacent to my taunter. ⚔️🛡️
The best options for a budget strategy
Of all of the options I listed, most of the times Angelic Mandarin is probably the best unit because he synergizes really well with the rest of the team. Angelic Mandarin has 2 main functions. He heals the taunter with triage and he lowers the enemy magic attack with Silence. When you combine Silence + Void (both Baajkira and Wave Brood have it) you really put the enemy team in a bad spot if they choose a magic damage strategy. 🐸✨
The other 3 are also strong options. Swamp Spitter is probably the best option if it's a really high mana match (+50 mana) because of its Giant Killer ability and it's a good support with repair. 🐸🔧 Merdaali Guardian is a good option if you are using Arkemis as the main tank, and Supply Runner is a good support overall because it provides +1 speed to the team. ⚡
II. E. Last position: The taunt
I’ve been talking and referring to the taunter for a while so you guys can probably guess who’s going to be:
Wave Brood 🕷️💧:
We have been using this guy for a long time now and we all probably know what his strengths and weaknesses are. As weaknesses go, it's important to remember that this is a very slow unit with a really low ranged attack. But we don’t really care if our taunt doesn’t have good attacks. The only important stats on this unit are its high life pool (14) and Void. The high life pool really helps with triage and Void helps deal with magic attack users. 🛡️🔮
This is pretty much the core principles and options for my strategy. This is not a secret strategy or anything like that; it’s actually a setup we see very often. The reason we see it often is that it is a good strategy that doesn’t require a crazy budget to make it work. I know I’ve been talking for a while now and the post is getting quite long, but still, I would like to finish the post with an example of the strategy in action:
III. The fight
When analyzing any fight, the first thing you have to take a look at is the rulesets and the mana cap. In this case, it was 38 mana with Explosive Weaponry active (meaning all units have blast), no magic monsters, and stampede (which I generally chose to ignore and the enemy did the same). The only "peculiar" thing about the changes I made to the lineup because of the ruleset was the inclusion of Venator Kinjo. Kinjo has reflection shield which means it's immune to blast, and that's why placing it next to the taunter was a good idea. He will soak up all the blast damage by itself. 💥🛡️
This fight is actually a really good example of this strategy in action. I wanted to showcase it especially to prove that even if you don’t have one of the most expensive cards in the Rebellion set (Manthroth) and one of the best tanks in the RWs set (Sea Wreck), you can still walk out with a win if you follow the principles of this strategy. 🏆
This is how the fight looks at the start of turn 2. You can probably notice that my team suffered almost no damage. That’s because all the damage was divided between the taunt and the tank and was later on healed by triage and heal. That’s the idea of this strategy. That’s how it should work. You build up such a big wall that the enemy can’t do enough damage to kill your tanks in time. 🚀🛡️
This was probably the crucial moment of the fight. Deeplurker was able to take out with a single hit the enemy Supply Runner. This is a perfect example of how the DPS works in this strategy. Since you are using 2 big DPS with opportunity most of the time the enemy won’t be able to survive the damage. 💥⚔️
After turn 2 starts, the enemy can’t really do much at this point. He chose to have a really strong tank and a really strong off-tank, but since he chose Posibilitus as his summoner and I opted for a backline taunt, his damage is too spread to cause any impact at all.
This is basically the main idea of this strategy. If you manage to divide the enemy damage to 2 different points in your team while independently healing both points, you will probably find success because your enemy won’t be able to do enough damage to kill both your tank and your backline. 🌟💪
IV. Conclusion
I hope you guys liked this post as much as I enjoyed writing it. I also hope you can find this kind of content useful and entertaining. I’ve been a gamer my entire life so I love discussing meta and battle strategies. Even though my main has all the key cards and it’s very fun to play with, I really enjoy playing with my alt and feeling like the "underdog" trying to beat stronger opponents. Since I don’t have the best cards, I need to find clever ways to still do well in the battlefield. 🎮🔍
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