Every week there is a Splinterlands challenge to share a battle using a specific card and on this week's post it is the Time Mage card. I also encourage Splinterlands players to partake in the challenge because you get to try different strategies and earn some crypto in the process.
Featured Monster: Time Mage
Time Mage is a life splinter card that costs 4 mana. It starts with the slow skill and learns the rust ability at level 5. This is a fairly good card as more speed is always nice and it will give you an edge over your opponent. The rust ability is also quite powerful as it reduces the armor on the opponent's side by 2 so long as the card is alive.
I don't really use this card very often and it's because it doesn't have much attack. I tend to prefer having more offensive over defense so this card is usually used when there is little league. At that point, there are fewer cards available for me to pick from and the ability to slow and attack is nice.
Rule set, Battle and Plan
The ruleset this time is little league, 44 mana available and all splinter choices open. As we are in the little league ruleset, 44 mana is enough to play any card without any limitations and the choices for my cards are the cards with a mana cost of 4 or less.
The summoner I choose to use this time is Mother Khala because it's the highest level light summoner I currently have. The extra 1 health helps a lot more in the little league matches.
My plan can be found above but I decided to do a combination of heal and repair armor for my line up. So my plan this time is to outlast my opponent while dealing enough damage to take out the cards on my opponent's side.
Round 1
At the first glance of my opponent's lineup, I think this will be a tough fight because my opponent has quite a few mages. So I think this match will end up relying on who can take out the opponent's tank first.
Round 2
The first round is over and I think I won out on this exchange. With my Venari Crystalsmith healing in the back, I can deal damage for another 2 turns before my Crystal Jaguar will die. It's a bit unfortunate that there are no other melee monsters outside of his tank.
Round 3
With his front-line tank out of the way, I am starting can get started reducing the damage I take per turn. So it will be me and my opponent trading off monsters until the end. So I will fast forward a few rounds.
Round 6
A few rounds after, I have reduced my opponent to 2 monsters left and this means I can't lose anymore due to the healing ability on my Venari Crystalsmith.
After another few rounds, I am the winner without too many issues.
Conclusion
The battle this time around did not go as I expected. I was building my lineup for a more physical or ranged build from my opponent. In the end, Time Mage did not help as much as I expected it would. My opponent's summoner canceled out my slow and my opponent was using decently fast cards in his frontline. While I wouldn't say that I came out with the worst lineup, I think my strategy of having Venari Crystalsmith as my healer worked out in my favor. The light elemental was supposed to help dodge attacks from sneak monsters but none were used in this fight.
On my opponent's side, I feel like he was lacking damage. The self-heal on his tank wasn't enough because I had all my cards focused on the same target. I am guessing my opponent threw his ranged monster in the 2nd spot as a backup tank but it dropped his damage enough that I could trade off cards. The MVP on my side would have to be Venari Crystalsmith with it's heal ability.
You can see my entire match here.
What did you think of my match? Was there anything you would have done differently? I think it is quite interesting to see how different players use the same card.
