Splinterlands: Healing my way out of a Little League and Thick Skinned Match

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 my opponent used Xenith Monk to outheal my opponent in my most recent brawl.

Featured cards

Xenith Monk is a life splinter that costs 4 mana. It doesn't start with any abilities. It learns heal at level 2, void at level 6, and it learns magic reflect at level 8. This card has been moved out of Modern, so I only use this in brawl fights. It's a fairly good choice as a tank in lower mana matches when I can't play some of my tankier cards. I am limited in my card choices, so just having this as an option is great.

So my opinion of this card is that it's a good option to have. There are better choices, but the heal at level 2 makes it useful as a tank when we are in a low mana match. During fights with debuffs such as earthquake or poison, the heal can help this card outlive your opponent. After all, taking 2 damage and healing it off means that it won't die until it starts to get targetted by other monsters.

Rule Set, Battle, and Plan

The rulesets this time limit us to cards with a mana cost of lower than 4, and all monsters gain the shield and corrosive ward ability. There is also 54 mana available, and I can use fire, life, or death splinter.

For this type of fight, magic monsters are the preferred monsters to use as they don't suffer any disadvantage. Melee monsters are at a disadvantage due to the reduced damage, and the corrosive ward will also slowly deplete any armor they have. Ranged monsters also suffer from the reduced damage.

Splinter	Mana Cost	Position	Reason
Thaddius Brood	4	Summoner	-1 Health and Magic
Xenith Monk	4	1st	Heal
Chaos Animator	3	2nd	Amplify and Void
Venari Bonesmith	4	3rd	Life Leech
Dark Arborist	4	4th	Demoralize
Venari Marksrat	3	5th	Martyr
Whistling Damon	3	6th	Snipe
Total Mana:	25

My strategy is built around keeping my monsters alive, while the rest of my monsters deal damage. I keep a mix of ranged and magic monsters as my main damage dealers. There are too many monsters that can't deal damage in my lineup, but I only have so many gold cards to pick from. It depends on what level monsters my opponent has, because if they aren't using higher-level cards, then I won't take much damage.

The major point of my lineup is the debuffs. I have -1 magic from my summoner, and -1 melee damage from the demoralize ability. Additionally, I have Xenith Monk up front as my tank, and if that were to go down due to magic monsters, I have a backup monster with void. The combination of -1 magic from my summoner can keep it alive if my opponent doesn't have any physical monsters.

Round 1

At first glance, I think that this match is my win. My opponent only has 1 magic monster as damage dealer. This makes the card unable to kill off my tank at all. So my monsters are given free reign to demolish my opponent.

Round 5

It's no surprise, but my lineup is fully healthy. Xenith Monk just healed up any damage taken while the rest of my monsters wiped out my opponent's monsters.

I ended up winning this match a few rounds later.

Conclusion

The battle this time played out exactly like I planned. The combination of the debuffs plus heals made it impossible for my opponent to beat me. I was lucky that it was an easy match where my opponent didn't have leveled-up cards, but even if they were, I still think my lineup was solid. I felt that my opponent wanted to just outlast me using repair, but I had magic monsters that would continue to do damage without having to worry about it.

I made some changes to the way that I presented the fight. Instead of talking about the lineup, I talked more about the reasoning behind my choices. I am not sure if that is the best way to present things, but I wanted to give it a try.

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