As I'm grinding my battles in the early morning and having a good time just like it used to be years ago in Splinterlands, after a couple of wins I entered Division 3 and I noticed a new liquidity bot entered the arena, before that Archmage bots were alone, guarding the divisions but now there's also the komcbots and they're quite strong as well, the 'problem' I have with playing the bots with my playing style is that I try to anticipate what my opponent is going to play, based on the previous battles and the rulesets for this battle but against human players that's a lot easier, they mostly rotate two or three strong strategies or just spam one really strong one but the bots are much more random.

Then, I met another human player and it was a name I memorized because they play a really strong strategy a lot, one that I haven't seen from any other player, it's a Bloodline Tribute play with El Jefe using Soul Siphon to activate the Bloodline Tribute over and over, if you don't know what I am talking about, check one of their previous battles.

This strategy was used in the last two fights and the current fight had the Born Again ruleset, a great combination for the Bloodline Tribute, activating once more so I was certain @caloiskie was going to play this again so I tried to make a strong offensive team while bringing two key support cards, one to block this play with the Final Rest ability:

This blocks both Rebirth as well as Soul Siphon and with 6 mana left, I picked Olivia of the Brook hoping she would be able to steal strong abilities on the other team but the team reveal surprised me with a completely different play!

It was a Mancer play, based on speed and the tank received Phase so once it got hit and got enraged it would be very hard to hit, even for magic attacks.
That, combined with Corrupted Healing and Bloodlust, I was sure I was going to lose this fight.

But then, at the start of Round 2 Olivia steals the Corrupted Healing ability. This will be a game changer this early in the fight! The enemy tank now has 8 speed so my team will be missing a lot, Slade has two attacks so hopefully he's able to hit.

And Slade did! He didn't only kill the tank, but with it's second attack it killed Zarin as well. The entire back row in the enemy team has Scavenge, but all Rebirths that can become a problem later...
And then look what Olivia's second steal was... Bloodlust!!!

OMG she completely stole the enemy archons play! 😍

Later in the fight, she stole Scavenger and Life Leech and the enemy team wasn't able to break through my front line because of the Corrupted Healing, Olivia truly was the Most Valuable Player in this fight!

A very surprising and overwhelming victory, with my full team still on the battlefield. Olivia ended the battle with a total of 9 attack but her support role was much, much bigger.

You can watch the battle unfold for yourself here.

Thank you for reading!!!

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