Splinterlands: Increasing my melee damage with inspire to wipe out my opponent

Splinterlands is a complex game, and it allows for various different cards and strategies. Each fight is different as there are various different rulesets applied, and this can give specific cards an advantage depending on how you use them. In this post, I talk about a great battle where I won because I used as many melee monsters as I could, combined with Portly Cannoner.

Featured cards

Portly Cannoneer is a fire splinter that costs 4 mana. It starts with inspire. It learns return fire at level 5, and fury at level 9. This card can still be used in modern, and I think it's a decent card to use. I don't use it too often, but I like increasing my damage sometimes.

Overall, I think this card is limited, and with its low health, I don't see it being too great. However, if you combine this with multiple different melee monsters. The inspire increases melee damage, and this card also doesn't have a high mana cost. I only have this card at level 1, though, but if I had this at level 2, I would use it more. Its low health makes it hard to stay alive if there are opportunity monsters on my opponent's side.

Rule Set, Battle, and Plan

The rulesets this time are Melee Mayhem so that melee monsters can attack from any position. There is also 25 mana available, and I can use fire, life, or dragon splinter.

For this type of fight, there aren't many limitations. There are no damage debuffs, so it depends on the strategy people prefer. You can opt for a larger number of cards with lower stats, or for a few strong monsters with high stats and abilities. It just depends, and I have had success in both scenarios from time to time.

Splinter	Mana Cost	Position	Reason
Dolfar Darflak	3	Summoner	Duo fire and dark
Halfling Refugee	1	1st	Weary
Thraghun	9	2nd	Reach and Cripple
Surly Drunk	1	3rd	Opportunity
Grifzi	1	4th	Sneak
Portly Cannoneer	4	5th	Inspire
Chaos Jailer	5	6th	Opportunity and Poison
Total Mana:	24

My strategy is built around killing my opponent before he kills me. That is why I filled up my lineup with melee monsters that will be buffed by Portly Cannoneer. It's a simple strategy, but with 5 melee monsters and 1 inspire monster, it means 5 extra damage per turn.

The focus of this lineup is trying to keep as many monsters alive so I can take advantage of the increased melee damage. My summoner gives me access to both dark and fire splinters, and it gives me lower mana cards to pick from. I also use the useful Chaos Jailer card that I talked about in a previous post, and I like the ambush ability because it would give me an extra 2 damage, and if the poison lands, it's even more damage.

Round 1

At first glance, I think that this match is my win. My opponent went with a few higher mana cards in his lineup. I don't think its a bad strategy, but it limits the amount of monsters my opponent can use. I am also worried about the speed, but I still have the damage advantage so I will kill off a few monsters.

Round 3

I did lose one monster, but there is nothing my opponent can do anymore with that monster.

I ended up winning this match later that round.

Conclusion

The battle this time played out exactly like I planned. Since I used Portly Cannonner, I decided to use low mana melee monsters to make the most of my mana, and this was definitely the right choice. All that damage added over time, and my opponent just couldn't do enough damage against me. I felt that my opponent was prepared to fight against magic monsters, but I didn't use any. So my opponent couldn't do much as they got destroyed.

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.

Posted Using INLEO