Hi everyone, good to have you back on my weekly Splinterlands blog, where today I'll be making another post for this weeks Social Media Challenge to hopefully earn some extra funds so I can upgrade my deck, and I need it!
last week, I got a nice airdrop on Solana worth $122, with it, I started to upgrade my deck from high Silver to high Gold, and wow it's so much fun playing the cards I'm using for a long time now but now they have extra abilities! It's also learning new things so my wins hasn't been where I want it to be but I'm having fun even when I'm losing, I takes time getting used to the new abilities, possibilities and synergies.
Currently, I'm waiting for some bid buys on peakmonsters to fill, buying 150 BCX takes some time when you don't want to pay the full market price, but I'm not in a hurry 🙂.

This weeks Social Media Challenge is the same as the previous two times:

🔥 Share Your Most Remarkable Splinterlands Moments: Do you possess a battle of epic proportions that deserves to be seen by all? Have you crafted something extraordinary within the Splinterlands realm? Maybe you've got profound thoughts, insights, or strategies related to stats, cards, abilities, or gameplay that are waiting to be shared? We want it all, and we want it to be nothing short of AMAZING!

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

This morning I had a battle that's worth explaining for newer players, so today we're in the strategy corner!

Sometimes the best team isn't the one with the most mana used...

Of course, being able to use high mana monsters isn't a bad thing, on often, the higher mana monsters are quite strong, but what I mean with this is, in some rulesets it's best if you just make a plan with the monsters in your deck, maybe put a few big ones up front but planning and strategy is sometimes more important than just brute force, I saved a battle to further explain this...

In brawls, tournaments and higher leagues you often see 2 or 3 rulesets combined, which deepens the strategy and fun in my opinion, my alt playing in Bronze often has a standard ruleset only, where you litterally can expect anything, this randomness isn't good to sustain your win streaks. This is a 56 mana Wild League battle in Gold 3 but it could have also been in Silver, the cards I used are all at Silver level or below, except for my summoner... working on that! The Magic only combined with blast asks for a very specific strategy, where every card has it's own job, Splinterlands battles are just a puzzle really, and the player who finds the best solution - wins. All splinters were available to be chosen from, and with such a high mana count, we could make a very nice team, of course the same goes for my opponent, when you play Splinterlands daily, and for a longer period your mind already partially solves the puzzle for you - and probably the reason why I lose a lot when I'm tired, just a small tip here, don't play when your tired! 😁

So with magic only, Void, Void Armor, Magic Reflect and Silence are important abilities, so is choosing the right summoner, you would want to pick one that either boosts or nerfs magic damage, or maybe gives void to all your monsters, like Immortalis or Mimosa, options enough. Even before the card selection screen, I had my plan in place:

• High HP monster up front
• Magic Reflect on 2nd position to reflect blast damage
• Amplify the Magic Reflect
• Heal and Triage my monsters in the first two positions
• Nerf enemy magic damage by using Silence

First look at the battlefield:

Yeah.. I thought about the Chaos Dragon also... it's scattershot can do a lot of damage when it lands in the middle of the enemy team, and it IS a danger to my team, Oshannus is a obvious tank, with high HP and void, the rest of the team has low HP so will probably kill themselves with my Spell Reflect.

My Line-Up:

• Summoner: Obsidian - reason: Boost magic damage.
• First position: Mycelic Slipspawn - reason: High HP, the Taunt is a nice extra to control enemy fire.
• Second position: Prismatic Energy - reason: Spell Reflect to reflect to Blast damage.
• Third position: Lord Thalanor - reason: to Amplify the Spell Reflect.
• Fourth position: Goblin Psychic - reason: Heal my first position.
• Fifth position: Mushroom Seer - reason: Silence.
• Sixth position: Spirit Hoarder - reason: Heal my second position.

Note that I'm only using 45 mana of the 56 available mana, and I have bigger monsters to include in my team that have more HP and do more damage than my backline does now, but these lower mana support monsters combined abilities are all part of my battle plan.
My second option would have been to go Dragon / Water with Delwyn Dragonscale, Oshannus, Prismatic Energy, Nerissa, Chaos Dragon, Soothsayer, Spirit Hoarder which hopefully lands scattershot blast in the middle of the enemy team, choices choices... sooo much choices in this game! 😆
Of course it also helped I was facing a lower level opponent 😉

The Battle:

Round 1: Wow, a 40 turns round is pretty rare, it's because of all the Spell Reflect and damn the reflect / amplify worked nicely!! The battle is already decided and the entire enemy frontline is killed, this won't even take another full turn...

Round 2: Half of my team didn't even got to fire in this round and it was already over, a nice win!

You can watch the battle unfold for yourself here.

Wild is earning a lot less SPS, but it's way more fun, being able to use all the cards in my deck, in the last days of the season, I'll hop over to Modern to earn some nice SPS but in Modern I'm at low Silver so back to Silver level cards.

That's it for this post, for the newer players, I hoped you learned a thing or two or maybe you've seen a card you now want to have in your collection, thanks if you sticked until the end, it's now time to get a coffee and wait for the next Battle Mage Secrets challenge, meanwhile, I'll be grinding my ranked battles and submitting brawls battles on a few alt accounts.

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!

Sources: For my thumbnail I used a background from @golemoverlord, when you're not playing this game as a splinterlands player, you're missing out!
I made a post with more info about Golem Overlord here.