Climbing up the ladder in the new Brackets Divisions

The battle system in Splinterlands has finally been changed, many players left the game - or so I heard - when leagues were removed, I wasn't one of them and always kept on playing but in the last months after over four years of playing every day with the exception of my yearly summer holiday, the grind got too much for me and the fun wasn't there anymore. Not because the gameplay changed, in it core it was still a great game but because of the way the ranking system was.

With my Silver level deck, worth about $450 at the time of writing this post I was able to push all the way to Diamond 3 or even 2, with it came nice rewards when I was able to win but also players that belonged in Diamond, players with max level decks, decks with a lot more fire power and abilities.

And while it's a great feeling when I was able to win against such a player, especially in the second half of every season my time in the game started to feel like a waste of time, starting every battle with a big disadvantage, and I tried to continue the grind, believe me... my heart was (and still is) with Splinterlands but eventually the feeling of wasting time and the losing streaks took their toll and other interests started to take up more of my time, I even returned to playing World of Warcraft on a private server after many, many years 😅

But then, the long awaited update in the battle system came, not the exact same return of leagues - which had it's own shortcomings (like not being able to get out of lower leagues, it was a real struggle back then 😅) but Brackets, at the start of every season you're able to choose a bracket which is much like the old leagues ranging from Novice to Bronze to Silver and all the way up to Champion, good to know: you can switch Brackets as long as you haven't promoted to the next Division, each bracket has 9 of them.

With my Silver level deck, I choose the Silver bracket - I could have chosen for Gold for better rewards (and better opponents) but then I would have the same disadvantage then before, just not as bad but because I don't have all my Legendary cards at level 2 I won't be able to play them in Gold since it's the first bracket that has minimum card levels higher than level 1, so for me the choice was simple, Silver it is!

In the lower divisions, 9 and 8, players magic spamming is real 😅 seasoned players with good decks will punch right through that so probably - hopefully they're newer players, one of the early splinterlands lessons I learned many years ago is that spamming the same strategy over and over WILL get you countered hard. 😆

The answer is simple, stacking monsters with the Silence ability. The magic spam happened so many times I have different versions of counter magic teams, starting with the same line-up and then added monsters depending on the mana cap.

Climbing the ladder of divisions from the bottom is something you have to only do once, at the start of a new season you will only go down 2 divisions.
Yesterday I entered Division 7, and there are definitely more capable players here so fight are getting more interesting, especially because I was away for a couple of months and only doing my brawls so I see new cards as well, even new Archons!

With better opponents I am able to rotate strategies more because I don't have to counter magic spam every single time and with it, with rotating teams I'm hopefully getting unpredictable for my opponents what my next team will be.

It's now early morning in Europe, the time of writing this post and apparently there's low player liquidity at the moment, out of the four battles I played this morning, three where against Sakurakko and although I won two out of three, I figured I would wait a couple of hours spending my remaining energy and not go one on one every battle, after all it's a game and FUN is the most important thing, plus... they have a pretty nice deck especially with Death available.

A new really cool synergy was in the battle against Caloiskie, the new Archon from the Escalation set gives the Soul Siphon ability we only know from Eloise the Hollow, to two units of choice.

I figured with everyone having 4 HP, magic is the fastest way to kill the other team so I went for the Frontier Archon to see this new synergy in action: the first card on the enemy team resurrecting over and over and giving the bloodline tribute every time it dies and once it died, the damage output was DANGEROUS. By then, the second card with Soul Siphon didn't have any more souls to siphon so I only had to punch through the Void Armor once, in the Anemic ruleset, Void Armor is really helpful - just a tip if you hadn't figured that out. 🤗

You really have to see this synergy in action for yourself so check out the battle here.

So far my win rate is at a whopping 85% but this will definitely won't stay like this when I face more experienced players with stronger decks, I'm happy to be back... I'm just curious how much SPS we will earn in a season, we will find out when it ends.

It will probably be much lower so it's a good thing I've been stacking enough of it in the past years.

Thank you for reading!!!

If you haven't made an account already, please consider using my referral link to sign up, let me know if you have done so and I can help you with any questions you have and personally guide you.

Have a great day!