Splinterlands Social Media Challenge: Bortus is great in Thick Skinned ruleset

Splinterlands is a pretty complicated game with interesting battles, with all the options available. This is a part of the weekly social media challenge for Splinterlands. This week is about a great fight where I won because I used Dread Tafarian.

Featured cards

Bortus is a water summoner that costs 3 mana. It reduces the enemies' magic damage by 1. Increasing the level will increase the level cap of the cards you can use on your side. I have this card at level 2 as a gold foil, and it's an Untamed card. So you can't use it modern, but you can use it in brawls, and that is where I use it. Depending on the ruleset and splinter type, I use it from time to time because I take part in gold foil brawls. I mainly use it when I think that magic is more likely compared to the rest of the cards.

Rule Set, Battle, and Plan

The ruleset this time is Holy Protection, Thick Skinned, and Back to the Basics. This means that all monsters have no abilities, and they start off with divine protection and shield ability. There is also 21 mana available, and I can use water, life, or dragon splinter.

Splinter	Mana Cost	Position	Reason
Bortus	3	Summoner	-1 Magic
Diemonshark	8	1st
Chaos Agent	1	2nd
River Hellondale	7	3rd
Argarux Magus	3	4th
Total Mana:	22

I use Bortus as my summoner for the -1 magic. Diemonshark is my tank and Chaos Agent is my backup tank. After that is River Hellondale and Argarux Magus as my magic damage dealers in the back.

My plan is to have my first two monsters tank as much damage as possible while my magic damage dealrs kill off the monsters. I used Bortus because the Thick Skinned ruleset favors magic damage monsters. With every monster having the shield ability, any melee or ranged damage will be halved. It makes it hard to kill much without using magic monsters. So Bortus is the perfect counter against this because it reduces the magic damage against me.

Round 1

At first glance, I think that this match can go either way. My opponent has two magic monsters in the back, but his monsters aren't as tanky. It will depend on who can kill faster. The good thing is that my summoner will reduce the damage by 1. So it gives me slightly more chances. I do think that the magic monsters that my opponent had are tankier than mine, though.

Round 5

My Diemonshark is dead, but it did it's job by dealing damage along with my magic monsters. So my damage during that time period was 5 versus 2 from my opponent. This match is still close as it could go either wya, but I think that I have the advantage due to having more monsters alive.

I ended up winning a few rounds later as my damage piled up.

Conclusion

The battle this time did play out as I expected. My plan was to use Bortus to reduce the magic damage, and I have to say that Diemonshark did a great job while it was alive. I don't think I would have won without that, and reducing the magic damage by 1 helped out quite a bit. I knew that magic monsters were more likely, but I just didn't realize how useful Diemonshark would have been compared to using other filler monsters. Either way, I still think the match was too close to comfort, but my strategy worked out and I could overcome the level advantage that my opponent had.

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