How do you deal with low mana restrictions when you have a 12-point limit?

Best regards Splinterlovers 💚

Something I’ve really enjoyed sharing are posts where I highlight some tricky gameplay situations that most of us players have faced. That’s why I want to make life a little easier for new players—because sooner or later, these challenges will come their way, and these are the kinds of things you have to face in order to learn. But having some theory under your belt isn’t a bad thing before putting it into practice. So, if you’re facing battles where your maximum mana cost is 12 points, you’re in the right post—because here I’ll explain several things that nobody else out there covers.

So, I’ll explain how to play a certain way in these types of battles where the mana cost is at the minimum—12 points—which, for those who don’t know, is one of the most complicated conditions to play under, since you have 6 slots to play 6 cards. Therefore, choosing which ones to play and in what order is quite a challenge, given that many of our cards cost more than 3 mana points; and there aren’t many cards that cost just 1 mana point. Therefore, knowing how to respond in these types of conditions and/or situations is essential for improving as players, because believe me, someday you’ll face a very important battle—perhaps even one to win a tournament—and the conditions could be exactly the same: a battle with only 12 mana points.

So, if you want to know how to handle these kinds of battles, you'll need to stick around until the end of this post to learn and improve your game—because, as I said, you'll likely face a major battle under these very same conditions.

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Technical Explanation and the Strategic Challenge of the 12-Point Mana Limit

To start, I need to explain what happens when we have the minimum mana cost to summon cards to the field, which is 12 points, because in these types of battles, the way we build a team presents a rather critical problem, and practically everything revolves around the decisions we must make. Because, even if we don’t like it, we have to play a “Summoner/Archon,” which in most cases consumes a significant amount of our available mana, thereby greatly reducing the remaining points we can use to play the rest of our units.

To give a simple example: if we play a Summoner that costs between 6 and 7 mana points, cards like “Elias Max Pruitt,” “Conqueror Jacek,” or “Elowen Sylphie”—playing any of them would leave us with only 5 or 6 points remaining to determine our offensive/defensive balance, respectively, which is quite little, because the idea is to have room to maneuver—that is, enough leeway to maintain a strong offense without neglecting defense.

To make this easier to understand, I'll present two scenarios:

Breakdown of the Budget for 12 Mana Points

• Option A (Heavy Summoner, 6–7 Mana): This is the scenario most new players will relate to, since they see they have 12 mana available and play a 7-mana summoner, leaving only 5 mana remaining. Assuming we find a 3-mana “Tank”—which is almost impossible— we’d only have 2 points left to choose either a 2-point unit or two 1-point units—neither of which will defend or attack effectively, because we don’t have anything capable of supporting a balanced combination.

• Option B (Economical 3-Mana Summoner): Here, everything changes because when we face these kinds of challenging conditions, the idea is to manage our available mana as efficiently as possible. With that in mind, we should start by carefully choosing our summoner—in this case, one with a maximum of 3 mana points. If we do this, we’ll have 9 points left. In this situation, we can play a 4- or 3-mana Tank, for example, leaving us with about 2 or 3 points for the rest.

Strategies and Examples of Functional Teams

For this to work, as I mentioned earlier, the idea is to avoid using expensive monsters. Every now and then, this will work—depending on the modifiers you draw—where you can play a single card as an “Offensive Tank” and it’ll be effective, but most of the time this will backfire, since you’ll face an opponent who knows how to manage their cards and mana correctly, and you’ll struggle to win this way because they’ll have a balanced deck.

To shed some light on this, I'll give you an example of a functional alignment:

This is the “Mobile Swarm” with the “Water Splinter”

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• Archon/Summoner: Here we’d play Kelya Frendul, who grants our cards +1 Speed and +1 Shield. This helps us build stronger defense—which is necessary because mana is limited—and control the attack order thanks to the Speed bonus.

• Tank: Here, for example, we’d play “Cruel Sethropod,” which costs 3 mana points. It’s one of the best choices for these conditions since it has 6 Shield points and 7 Health points. Plus, thanks to Kelya, we’d have 7 Shield points, allowing us to absorb many of the opponent’s attacks while also dealing significant damage with 3 melee attack points.

• Fast Attacker: Here we’d play “Pelacor Bandit” with the Flying and Sneak abilities, providing not only offense but also defense thanks to its ability to fly and its speed—which is boosted by Kelya—so we have a very fast attacker who breaks through the opponent’s back line and can also dodge attacks thanks to his high speed of 6 points, 5 health, and 4 melee attack points.

• Support Attacker: Here we’d play a “Hardy Stonefish” with a mana cost of 1 point, featuring +2 melee attack, +2 shield, and +3 health. As such, it would be positioned second, behind the tank, since it would essentially serve as the tank’s backup—a safety net to prevent damage.

• Support: Here I’d play an “Albatross,” an excellent card that would help us heal our tank with the “Tank Heal” ability while protecting the rear with +3 health and +4 speed.

Conclusion

This way, we can tackle one of the most challenging situations in the game: a battle with a minimum mana cost of 12 points, where the decisions we make and the cards we play are crucial to securing victory. If this happens to you, leave a comment and let me know if this information helped you solve that problem.