Good morning all Splinterlands fans! It's a Saturday early morning for me, it's still dark and 1 degrees Celsius outside so it's a great time to make my second Splinterlands Challenges post for this week to earn something extra to prepare for the arrival of the new set Conclave Arcana!

This is sure to change a lot, many players including myself will be forced back to lower leagues again when they want to play in Modern, or they have to make the change to Wild.
With the earnings from my blog posts, I've started to buy Rebellion cards for this purpose, I'm trying to get to Silver level eventually, hopefully by the time Conclave Arcana launches, SPS is worth more than it is now, and I can sell some of my bag to fund the new set.

Also, with the launch of the new Survival mode hopefully this will bring value to Chaos Legion cards and I can sell my gold level summoners by that time so I have more funds to put in to Conclave Arcana.

Summoners are the bottleneck for this game, and the Rebellion summoners market is pretty thin, the 'cheap' summoners have between 44 and 109 copies of them for sale at the moment, most of them are singles so even when one player comes in to buy them to play at gold level, he sweeps the entire market!
The legendary summoners have even less available but they have a much bigger price so it's not for everyone.
For me, when I'm aiming at Silver level, the common summoners will costs $8 - 10 and the cheaper legendaries Akane, Risqruel and Elias around $45 each, of course Conclave Arcana will have it's own Summoners too, but more cards is always better, so best to start working on this now!

Okay, enough small talk, let's get on with this weeks main topic...

Splinterlands Community Engagement Challenge: Favorite Strategies

So, this weeks Challenge is about making a post about our favorite strategies, and with all possible rulesets and combinations there are numerous, so much even I sometimes forget about them! 😆

I like to use the element of surprise in my battles, thinking outside of the box can be done in multiple ways and is all about hitting your opponent in a way he or she doesn't expect it, for example go heavy magic in a 'Melee Mayhem' ruleset or, like the in the battle I'm going to share with you for this post, hitting them in the back in a Briar Patch ruleset.

To find out how you can participate in this challenge yourself, check out the splinterlands post here.

I like to save battles to use in my posts later and it hasn't been long since the game updated to the new tech modernization, the battles now look different and it's the first time I'm using the new look in my posts, it's a bit small compared to what we had, of course that's because it needs to fit on mobile devices screens too! The battle I want to share for this post is from a Brawl I fought this morning, I fight in a Wild Silver level fray with this account, it's fun using the older cards I have in this account! This fight is a 34 mana Even Stevens / Briar Patch / Silent Summoners ruleset combination with only the Water, Death and Dragon splinters available to be chosen.

Since this is another strategy post, let's talk about the rulesets first.

Even Stevens

The Even Stevens ruleset isn't one we can use certain strategies for I think, it's one of these rulesets that limits the usage of our cards, this is favorable to players with big decks, and with this account I have quite a collection to choose from so that's good!

Brair Patch

The Briar Patch ruleset gives all monsters the Thorns ability, damaging melee attackers for two damage on every hit, this gets halved for melee units that have the Shield ability. In this ruleset, melee attackers with the Reflection Shield ability are very nice, in general you will see a lot of magic attackers in the front with ranged attackers in the back.

Silent Summoners

The Silent Summoners ruleset takes away the buffs or nerfs a summoner would normally bring for the team, so choosing high mana legendary summoners is just a waste of mana points here. Tip: whenever the Dragon splinter is available, go for a Dragon summoner if you have one, now you can make a team with more available cards because Dragons always combine with any other splinter!

So, now we've individually looked at the rulesets, let's think about what option will be possible here... a void monster up front will be the most obvious play, so probably Oshannus or Baakjira because Void Dragon is 5 mana and unable to use with the Even Stevens ruleset... My opponent will probably use a lot of magic because it's able to fire from the first position, and with one or two powerful ranged monsters in the back, let's make a nice team for this ruleset myself and see what my opponent has came up with!

First look at the battlefield:

Well, using a 6 mana summoners is quite a waste of mana but I think this is an account that uses only reward and gladiator cards, so basically a free account to farm brawl rewards with. I see these quite a lot and mostly they are easy targets for players with a bigger deck. I was mostly right with the magic play and one archer in the back, the tank however I did not expect, but it's not a bad choice, 6 mana for 12 Health Points, it's the same as my Baakjira.

My Line-Up:

• Summoner: Quix the Devious - reason: Access to the Dragons.
• First position: Baakjira - reason: 12 HP for 6 mana with void is a nice meat shield.
• Second position: Djinn Oshannus - reason: Fast and evasive with void.
• Third position: Coral Wraith - reason: Magic sneaker.
• Fourth position: Sergeant Grauzral - reason: Ranged opportunity.
• Fifth position: Dragonling Bowman - reason: Ranged sneaker.
• Sixth position: Igor Darkspear - reason: Ok attack and Health Points for only 2 mana.

So, Opportunity and Sneak attackers are primarily melee monsters, so in rulesets like this, players will make a team thinking that their back line is perfectly safe and just make a heavy front line to protect them, often having heavy damage low HP 'Glass Cannons' in the back, let's take advantage of that! 😈

The Battle:

Round 1: Hmm, although my Baakjira has void and a large HP pool, it's almost killed in the first round, not the best start. Oshannus is a lot harder to hit though and opposed to my adversary, my backline is perfectly safe to pick the small monsters off one by one!

Round 2: Oshannus dodged one attack but is still taking a lot of damage, hopefully he can outlast next round, the enemy Will-O-Wisp is a big meat shield so hopefully I'll get trough it in time. I tend to underestimate my own team a lot, so let's see how this goes 😉

Round 3: With only magic attackers left, Oshannus's void ability is pretty nice, looking at the speed of my team and the attack order, Oshannus and the Sergeant will attack the Will-O-Wisp, the rest will attack Skok Duskblight, leaving them both alive for next round...

Round 4: OK, Skok died anyway, I'm glad to be wrong about that! 😁 My front is almost gone but with only one attacker left, I'm ok, another win for my guild!

Round 5: Igor made the kill shot, it's a win!

You can watch the battle unfold for yourself here.

Nice timing, at the moment I was taking screenshots for this post, this Brawl ended with my guild in 4th place because we're missing some active people unfortunately.. So, when you're reading this and don't have a guild, or maybe your guild isn't very active... please and come join us!

A 7W 2L is pretty nice, but my other account did a lot better!

Well, this is it for this week guys, thanks for stopping by, back to ranked play, earning as much SPS and glint as I possibly can!

Thank you for reading!!!

If you haven't made an account already, please consider using my referral link to sign up, I'll happily send the amount I get for your signup back to you in DEC or SPS to help you start.

Have a great day!