Social Media Challenge - My Aves Sturgis Strategy

Hello dear Splinterlands enthusiasts, I hope you are having a great Splinterday! Here is this week‘s entry for the Social Media Challenge. Today I want to talk about a Weapons Training strategy for my Life Deck.

There is a soulbound legendary monster, that I like very much: Aves Sturgis. He has Weapons Training and I like him especially because he does not cost a lot of mana and specifically provides magic attack to no-attack cards. Check out his stats:

Aves Sturgis is not fast, does not have high health but has three useful abilities at max level: Weapons Training, Divine Shield and Rust. At gold and diamond levels he has 3 magic attack, which he passes on to his trainees. I also like him, because I have a specific no-attack card in mind to team him up with: Warrior of Peace. He is an Untamed reward card and has largely been off the radar, although he has great stats:

As you can see, this little darling is fast and provides three enemy debuffs at top level: Demoralize, Headwinds and Silence. I cannot think of another monster that is able to debuff all three attack types at once, which makes him unique. To top it off, he hast huge 14 health at max level although he is a little costly at 7 mana. I have been accumulating a bunch of BCX for some time and he is currently at level 8. I am waiting for Aves Sturgis to reach max level before I max out the Warrior of Peace.

So my strategy for Aves Sturgis is to team him up with the Warrior of peace and the Pelacor Conjurer. As one is costly, the other is very cheap at 2 mana for what he brings to the table: Flying, Reflection Shield, Divine Shield and Phase. Together these three monsters bring together lots of enemy debuffs, protection and 6 magic damage all at the cost of 15 mana. In this week's feature battle, I am trying out my strategy, which I am hoping to improve as I level Aves and the Warrior up further in future.

The battle stats are the following:
RULESET: Reach
MANA: 53
SPLINTERS: all splinter available

Here is the team I put together:

Sloan is the summoner to summon the team and lead the battle. Grandmaster Rathe was not available, otherwise I would probably have gone for him.

With plenty of mana to play with, I decided to go with a big fat melee tank to guard the fort. He has beefy stats and hard hitting melee attack every second round.

I really like putting Arkemis the Bear in second place in high mana battles, even when he cannot attack. Here with the Reach ruleset, picking him was almost a reflex.

So here is the Warrior of Peace with Demoralize and Headwinds at level 8. He is ahead of Aves for his high health to shield the weapons trainer behind him.

Aves Sturgis has hardly ever been in one of my battles. At level 2 he is still too weak with only 2 magic. The added Rust ability he receives at max level would also make a great contribution to the already existing list of defensive skills. Also taking shield from the enemy increases the chances of victory even further.

Pelacor Conjurer has great abilities and is fast. With 8 health I often but him at the front in 12 and 13 mana battles.

Iziar is another souldbound legendary monster, that I hardly ever play. I only have 2 BCX so he has been stuck at silver level since the beginning. He is another one that I hope to level up soon. A magic Taunt and Void monster with high health is unusual in the game and I still can't get used to him. I had the mana so why not?

So now let's take a closer look at the battle:

From a strategic standpoint, Round 1 and all other rounds began with a perfect advantage: both weapons trainees fired first before the enemy took its first shot. Both Taunts on each side drew all fire to themselves but everyone survived the round.

In Round 2 the Taunt monsters held out for a bit and both vanished at the same time. Then a Recharge hit from Uriel took out the enemy tank in one go. That was a critical breakthrough to tip the scales of the battle.

Round 3 was comparatively uneventful but Pelacor Conjurer exhibited his anti-Sneak skills. At the end of the round Arkemis took out the enemy backup tank, which exposed the enemy gladiator.

The two trainees wiped out the gladiator and then there were two sitting duck archers left on the enemy team.

It was an Anti-climax but a job well done.

⚔WATCH BATTLE⚔

I like this guy and haven't been motivated to build Weapons Training teams with any of the other legendary cards. The real reason for this writing about him in this post is that I can concentrate on getting him maxed with the new reward system. So I am only spending Glint on leveling up my soulbound legendaries for a while.

Thanks for reading and see ya later alligators!

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WHAT IS SPLINTERLANDS?

Splinterlands is an autobattle digital card game on the Hive blockchain. The playing cards are NFTs, therefore they belong to you and you can trade, transfer or delegate them as you please. All you need to move cards and other ingame assets around is a Hive Keychain login. There are three types of battles you can play: ranked battles, brawls and tournaments. Every battle you win brings rewards, including SPS and/or loot chests containing cards, potions, packs and merits. The ingame currency is DEC and the governance token is SPS. For gladiator packs you need to earn merits through brawls and loot chests. Tournaments can bring you stacks of SPS if you play well. There are several third party card markets, including Peakmonsters.com and the best places to learn to play are PeakD and YouTube.

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