Hey everyone, happy New Year to all of you and hopefully this years brings you good health and happy times as well as many victories in the game!
After a short holiday break, skipping ranked play and the making of this weeks Social Media Challenge post I'm back to the game but match making was NOT working well for me this morning in ranked battles so after a 8 losing streak, I felt it was a good time to stop trying and start working on my post! 😅

Community Engagement Challenge

So, I'm making this post to take part in this weeks Community Engagement Challenge, and the topic for this week is to talk about a defining moment that made us better players, this can be interpreted in many ways but for this post I will talk about a specific rule set I had troubles with mastering until I changed the way I looked at it...

To find out how you can participate in this challenge yourself, check out the official Splinterlands post here.

Collateral Damage

The Collateral Damage, or just in simple terms 'The Reckless rule set' is (was) one of the hardest rule sets our there since our own units damage each other, so my first strategy was simply to use a couple of high HP units to hopefully not get killed too soon but after a while I started experimenting with another view on this...

'Units damage one another when they attack, so WHAT if I use units that don't attack from that position or can't attack in the first place?'

So, I started to experiment with this, either by using units with no attack or perfectly capable units to attack but just not from that position, like the Sea Dog of Eight, just healing the damage it takes and biding its time to get to the front before it can attack, just outlasting the enemy....

I found out there are multiple ways to use this so I will share one of these battles and break it down step by step for the sake of this post. 🙂

Sharing a Battle

The battle I want to share for this post is a 58 mana Modern League Ranked Battle with only the Water, Life and Death splinters available to be chosen from, with these options two teams come to mind for my deck: either Cryptic, with Arachne Weaver in the back, healing everyone or Elias with some units that can't attack in the middle to outlast my opponent...

I have no idea what my opponent is going to play so I will just focus on making my own team.

First look at the battlefield:

Nice choice using the Archon giving Painforge to Gnomes, but there are only two Gnomes in the team of which one can't attack, it's a damn nice team though with two Corrupted Healers (the archer is quite an expensive one!) plus the team is fully maxed.. this will be a tough one!

My Line-Up:

• Archon: Elias Max Pruitt - reason: Combining Water and Life and Armored Strike with Piercing is awesome.
• First position: Ulundin Overseer - reason: Big meat shield with no attack so it won't damage Slade.
• Second position: Commander Slade - reason: He hits like a truck, combined with Elias' tactic.
• Third position: Nimbledook Explorer - reason: Another unit with no attack but it does give Slade MORE attack power and protection.
• Fourth position: Tidal Tsunamist - reason: Good sneaker, the repair will help sustain Slade's Armored Strike.
• Fifth position: Bera Dallin - reason: Taunt with a lot of armor and HP, can't attack from this position which is intentional.
• Sixth position: Calabash Sage - reason: High damage (but slow) tank healer.

So my strategy here is to simply outlast the damage the enemy team is doing to themselves and isn't focused on attack power, let's see how this goes!

The Battle:

Round 1: Wow, first round with 49 moves and both teams already have a member killed, my taunt is already badly hurt so I'm not sure my strategy will work against such a strong opponent...

Round 2: Well this round, things look much better with the enemy front at low HP numbers, my Tsunamist will probably die but Slade will tear through that front line and soon both Corrupted Healers, sustaining each other are killed.

Round 3: That Gramel is a tough one and my tank is low on HP, good thing Slade is faster so it will attack first and kill the Explorer, leaving Gramel on its own.

Round 4: Too bad my slow Ulund missed the attack, but it would have only destroyed 1 armor anyway, Slade will easily tear through that with the Piercing.

Round 5: And it's a win!

You can watch the battle unfold for yourself here.

Well, that's it for this week! Only one Splinterlands blog post this week but that's OK. There's little reason to make the Social Media Challenge post this late although it's still within the deadline, I've noticed when I make it this late it won't get up voted anyway so let's spend that time on something else. 😁

Like making cool cycling posts about my adventures in the woods, sharing some pretty pictures!

I've got another one coming for this weeks Cycling Sunday ChitChat!

Thank you for reading!!!

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Have a great day!