Good morning fellow Splinterlands fans! Depending where in the world you are of course, but for me it's a Saturday morning and since I pretty much spent my last entire weekend working, it's very nice to spend my morning playing and managing my favorite game with some coffee, and after draining my battle energy enough and I had managed our two guilds, it's time to start making my second blog post for this week so I hopefully get some nice upvotes so I can spend it on more Splinterlands assets.

I've spent my last liquid Hive Backed Dollar with buying SPS after @bravetofu made a tweet about buying SPS...

So I figured, why not since buying SPS at these low prices is never a bad investment since it will boost my gaming rewards as well as give me a nice 10% APR on it as well, so - time to get going to replenish some of that HBD!

This weeks Community Engagement Challenge:

I always like the Community Engagement Challenges since it's not the same theme every time and it makes us think about what to make a post about, we now have the ability to look further back in our recent battles which is really nice to see what I did in the last days and I came to the conclusion I fight with a lot of standard go-to set ups that are common meta plays, effective but not hidden gems at all such as using Elias with Slade protected by a unit with the Flank ability in the first position.

So, I needed to search a bit because I did want to talk about a card I don't see that often played by other players, and I found one!

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

👉 The challenge:

Pick a card or strategy that doesn’t always get the spotlight.
Show us how you use it to turn the tide of battle.
Share why you think it’s underrated and what makes it shine in certain matchups or rulesets.
Whether it’s a low-mana card that wins clutch battles, a quirky combo that most players don’t expect, or an old favorite making a comeback in the current meta, this is your chance to highlight the overlooked powerhouses of Splinterlands.

💡 Bonus idea: Share a battle link that proves your Hidden Gem’s worth and break down the play-by-play!

Virid Venomancer

Virid Venomancer is a card I don't see played a lot by other players, at least not where I'm playing in low Gold. In fact, I don't think I've ever met it in the enemy team.

At the time of writing this post, I have a Gold Foil card at level 3 so it's only 1 C.C but since it's a pretty cheap card and it's now the main subject for my post, I might as well celebrate it by upgrading this card to max for Silver level!

I'm not using this card on a daily basis, it's a nice support card but there's not an important reason to keep it at Gold Foil, so I decided to buy 60 copies at Elmo Burns, if you haven't used this market to buy your cards, go check it out!

This marketplace has a slightly better fee rebate than Monster Market and it burns SPS with the profit it makes, that's a win win!

When I wanted to combine the cards to level 5, I found out one of the cards I bought has a survival cool down on it for another twelve days, I think it really sucks we can't combine cards when they are on cool down, this has been a topic on the latest townhall so hopefully this will get fixed soon, for now there's no other option than disable all of them for survival and wait it out and I hopefully don't forget I can combine them in twelve days 😅

What about the Gold Foil you might ask yourself? Well, like many veteran Splinterlands players I have multiple alts, supporting my guild and one of them is a Gold Foil Brawler so it will get used there when the survival cool down is over!

Yeah, I know.. I'm drifting off from the main topic!

Stats

The low HP makes this card not really valuable in the first two levels, maybe in the lost abilities rule set, but at level 3 it received the Mana Warden ability, giving Shield to the unit in front of it, and this makes it a really nice disposable support card I use in two ways, to give Shield to a melee unit or to give Shield to Quilliun Legionary in the Ranged Only battles, this way I have a tank with both Shield and Void, and when the mana allows it, I will put a healer in the back which is a pretty good team.

With the addition of the Poison ability I will have in twelve days, I can probably use it in more line-ups and put it more to the back of my teams as well.

Sharing a battle

💡 Bonus idea: Share a battle link that proves your Hidden Gem’s worth and break down the play-by-play!

Yeah totally, every Splinterlands post of this kind needs a battle, don't you think!?

The battle I want to share for this post is a battle I fought three days ago, it's a 22 mana Modern League Heavy Metal / Up to Eleven battle with only the Earth, Death and Dragon splinters available so that severely limits the choice of cards, with the amplify there, I knew I wanted to make use of this by using Thorns... let's see what we can come up with, and more importantly, what my opponent will come with - no Tofu in the recently played teams which will be the most obvious choice so that's nice.

First look at the battlefield:

Ooh damn, that's a max level Archon and also a max level Mantaroth! Hopefully the poison will save me but I don't think I have a lot of chance in winning... let's see!

My Line-Up:

• Archon: Sheng Xiao - reason: Poison Burst saved my butt many times!
• First position: Lioceros - reason: Good tank with Thorns.
• Second position: Virid Venomancer - reason: Give Shield to my spiky tank.
• Third position: Satha Toledo - reason: Heal my tank.

So, this line-up is small and pretty straight forward, not every battle has to be difficult. 🙂

The Battle:

Round 1: The snipe is targeting my Venomancer, which is also silenced, it's main purpose was give shield to my tank so it's ok when it dies...

Round 2: Well, here's the beast.. it's a fight with Mantaroth now!

Round 3: The beast is poisoned, that definitely helps in taking down heavy monsters! it's hurt quite badly already, will I be able to pull this off? Three more turns before my healer is killed but Mantaroth will be dead from poison alone at that point.

Round 4: Oh crap I forgot about the blast, I don't see max Mantaroths a lot so I didn't even knew it had blast, but it's dead now! I DID IT!

Round 5: It's a win!

It's nice to win against higher level teams, I'm seeing a lot of them in Gold, in fact it was the reason why I switched from battles to making my post because there were too many max teams in my last five battles, the odds in beating them isn't very favorable for me, but this time, strategy defeated raw power!

You can watch the battle unfold for yourself here.

That's it for today, I hope you like my post, it was fun making it, and it gave me another card upgrade! 😄

Thank you for reading!!!

If you haven't made an account already, please consider using my referral link to sign up, I'll happily send the amount I get for your signup back to you in DEC or SPS to help you start.

Also, when you require any help to get you started,let me know, I'm here to advice and guide new players and maybe I can help you with card delegations too!

Have a great day!