Hey everyone, it's been a while since I made my last Splinterlands post so let's not lose the momentum and keep going, today I found an interesting 'new' strategy I had only seen once before but now in two battles from different players in a row I faced this same strategy, and it's a really nice one I must say... I'll explain in this post what I'm talking about. 😃

So, four days ago my guild mate @untilwelearn messaged me, asking me to explain why the Endless Ape resurrected with such a high amount of Health Points, I had not seen this before so kudos to him for finding this nice synergy!

So, apparently, a unit with the Scavenge ability will resurrect with the full amount of HP it scavenged in the battle, pretty nice! I would definitely try to put a healer behind the Endless Ape to sustain it by the way. 🙂

A couple of days gone by and suddenly, I started facing this new Archon Elowen myself, this player made a capital mistake to spam a similar team, all commanded by Elowen over and over so when in my battle the Earth splinter was open, I knew I had to counter for a melee team.

It doesn't happen a lot I am matched against a lower level opponent, in Gold 2 I'm usually facing Gold or Diamond level opponents so this was nice for a chance and I started the battle with another advantage, the first advantage was anticipating what my opponent was going to play (and being right).

My plans in short: Drop poison from my Archon so the Lurking Puffer was just a meat shield meant to die, the Quilliun Legionary received the Shield ability to mitigate the incoming melee damage.
Virid Venomancer is a great support card for this and it drops Poison as well, this is going to be a pretty toxic fight for my opponent! 😁
The Blackmoor Wild Elf is there to amplify the Thorns damage, unfortunately I couldn't get a healer behind it because my Earth healer is an epic card and there wasn't enough mana as well, so hopefully this would be enough to kill that Ape TWICE...

Some more cards with the 'Death has no power' ability will be a nice addition to counter now I know this, as far as I know I only have one on the Death team...

The Thorns combined with the Poison really did a number on the enemy team but without a healer, I still needed to face that Ape with a lot of HP again upon death, good thing it's only doing 1 damage because of my shield, and the Amplified Thorns are returning 3 damage so that's a nice trade off!

That thorny tank my opponent used also had Resurgence, when this line-up would face a melee team it would be very effective! It was also feeding the Scavenging Ape, and upon it's death it came back with 14 HP, at least not as bad as in untilwelearn's example!

Everything stands or falls with my tank, when it dies my weak back will get destroyed soon but it looks OK since my team is doing 6 damage while the Ape does 1, and it will probably get poisoned somewhere along the battle again as well.

Well, that even went faster than I thought and the Ape killed itself with Thorn damage, so, after Frankie this is another melee team to enter the ranks.

You can watch the battle unfold for yourself here.

A solid Glint reward and although the SPS reward isn't really high in Gold 3 I'm happy with every single shard while I'm building up to my 250k goal.

Match making is funny sometimes because after I had a losing streak earlier today, I stopped and had a coffee for about twenty minutes and I watched @nanixxx cycling video in her latest post, it's not at all related to Splinterlands but I like seeing how people live in different parts of the world, Hive is great for this. 😀
And some day, she will get curious enough to start playing herself. 🤣

Well, back to Splinterlands... when I resumed playing, this happens:

I like the way this looks!

Well... with 33 energy left I still have some grinding to do before leaving on my cycling ride but at least I have pushed to Gold 2 now, the promotion rewards were not that great but at least had a couple of merits in them.

Speaking of merits

With the launch of a new mini set soon... will that Gladiator set EVER get replaced???
For a while now, I've got most of my Gladiators up to Silver level, and because I use Silver Archons since Gold is just too expensive there's no point on getting them higher... so I have saved up a nice stack of merits as well, let the new batch of Gladiators come in to the modern arena please!

Thank you for reading!!!

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Have a great day!