Hey fellow Splinterlands battle mages, welcome back to another episode of my weekly Splinterlands blog, where today I will be making my first of two weekly blog posts to take part in the challenges hosted by the Splinterlands team, to spread to word about this awesome game and reward the authors at the same time, a win-win!

For players or interested people not yet playing, some context first - there are three weekly challenges but you can only take part in two, there is the Splinterlands Social Media Challenge first, in which the theme is mostly the same but can be interpreted very broadly so that's great because we have a lot of freedom what to make our posts about.

Then there is the Splinterlands Community Engagement Challenge, this challenge varies most weeks and are generally a bit harder with more need of thinking trough what you're going to make in your post but it's still a lot of fun.

And then there is the Splinterlands Art Contest for our artistic members, well.. for me the choice isn't hard because my artistic skills stopped developing somewhere around the age of 8 years old so I'll stick to making blog posts like these to try and let the rest of the world know about this revolutionary game and hopefully get some upvotes along the way so I can invest half of that in to my Splinterlands account, while the other half is growing my Hive account, another win-win because with dedication it can really grow to something big, and by now my up votes are at two cents at 100% already. 😊

So, like most times, the topic for this weeks Splinterlands Social Media Challenge is the same as last weeks:

Here's how you can join in on the excitement:
🔥 Share Your Most Remarkable Splinterlands Moments: Do you possess a battle of epic proportions that deserves to be seen by all? Have you crafted something extraordinary within the Splinterlands realm? Maybe you've got profound thoughts, insights, or strategies related to stats, cards, abilities, or gameplay that are waiting to be shared? We want it all, and we want it to be nothing short of AMAZING!

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

Wow, that was a lot of rambling just for some context 😅 I'm already over two-third for the required 600 word count lol, not that that's a problem on any of my posts 😆 so let's get on with today's main topic.

Fighting the Meta

The problem I face in Modern League Ranked Play with my Silver deck is the two obvious kings of the current meta keeps dominating a lot of my battles, Lorkus and Tofu and in some situations I just can't make a team that can counter it, for example Lorkus is very strong in the no abilities ruleset, the +1 buff to both melee and magic is just too powerful when I can't match this, and that's exactly my problem: I don't own either Lorkus OR Tofu.

There's one more very annoying summoner I have yet to find a good answer for, and that's Nidhogr - but so far, I don't have a lot of success when fighting Nidhogr teams, probably because those teams generally have very strong cards in the rest of the team as well, like Rage.

Now we have had a couple of weeks of playing in the new Modern format, the cards have landed in my brain and I can make combinations in my mind again and think of what options I have with the rule sets at hand, plus think of counters when my opponent spams a certain card, and this happens a lot - players just spamming Lorkus or Tofu teams over and over, just depending on their strength, and while I can fully understand this is a effective way in farming rewards I don't think this is the most enjoyable way of playing Splinterlands but that's just me, it just is the current situation we have to deal with and while I don't own these two kings, simply because they're too expensive, I do own some of the other legendary summoners like Elias Max Pruitt, Akane and Cryptic to counter them.

A good counter to Lorkus teams are these two bad boys that both have the Silence ability at Silver level and because most Lorkus teams rely mostly on magic damage, it's very effective.

If You Can’t Join Them, Beat Them!

So we all know the current meta, but there are also some big differences between the current Modern League and what we had when Chaos Legion was still around, I feel it is less important to protect my back line very well simply because - for now - sneak teams are less prevalent.

For this post I want to share a battle I had against the other king, Eternal Tofu which was also spammed by my opponent, if they had better rotate the summoners and not use Tofu in every single battle when Life or Earth was available, they would do better I think because now I knew what was coming, so I could make a specialized team against the Thorns and don't use melee without Deflect.

The battle I saved to share for a blog post is from yesterday or the day before and it's a 42 mana Modern League with the Up to Eleven / Tis but Scratches / Holy Protection rule set combination with everything but the Life splinter available to be chosen from. And because my opponent was very predictable, I knew I was fighting Tofu with Earth alone...

First look at the battlefield:

And what do you know, a Tofu team, what a suprise! 😀 So, to counter the Thorns I made a magic heavy team with an evasive, hard hitting tank that couldn't be harmed by the Thorns, the Void from the Quillin Legionary can be a problem though, but the other team is mostly non-magic and slower than my tank which is nice, this is looking good!

My Line-Up:

• Summoner: Cryptic - reason: Versatility with tactics and he brings even more evasiveness.
• First position: Commander Slade - reason: High damage, fast, deflect, dodge - he's just awesome!
• Second position: Kelan Gaines - reason: This was my 'what if my opponent does use a lot of magic' fail safe.
• Third position: Daigendark Surveyor - reason: Cheap mana card with reflect to receive Weapons Training.
• Fourth position: Daarg Deadblast - reason: Weapons Training as well as extra speed.
• Fifth position: Ahna-Chei Botanist - reason: Another cheap mana card to receive Weapons Training.
• Sixth position: Anasth Soothsayer - reason: Heal and Cleanse.

The Battle:

Tactics Stage: My opponent choose to give the Quillin Legionary Scavenge and Triage, I choose to give Kelan Gaines and Anasth Soothsayer the Poison and Expose abilities because one is a Sniper and the other one is targeting the front line to spread around the Poison, and Kelan can expose the Void from Quillin Legionary.

Round 1: Speed is everything, it's been like this since I started playing Splinterlands in 2021 and probably it was like this before that as well and will always stay important, not much has changed for now besides both attacks landed Poison and the enemy tank is about to die already.
Notice there is a lot of speed difference, the other team is mostly at 1 - 2 speed and my tank is at 6 speed with Dodge and Blind, good luck in hitting that!

Round 2: Another Poison landed on Endless Ape, which is pretty nice considering it's a 50% chance of landing the Poison, Slade is dodging a lot of attacks, as expected.

Round 3: The magic attacks are of course hitting Slade, and the cripple is pretty annoying.

Round 4: Slade's health is getting dangerously low but then again there are less and less attackers targeting him, my Botanist will probably die next round.

Round 5: O lol, Slade's health got low enough to draw the opportunity attention, and he dodged the attack.

Round 6: More misses... you can't kill what you can't hit! Is this going to be a victory with my entire team still alive!?

Round 7: DAMN RIGHT! Tofu got his hairy ass handed to him! 😃

A nice reward, not as high as last season when Wild was free, now there are more players in Modern sharing the same reward pool plus maybe it's more competitive as last season I don't know, I will know when I make my next season overview in a couple of days though, things like that can really make things clear for yourself.

You can watch the battle unfold for yourself here.

With four more days left in the season if still have some grinding to do, I have just passed the 130k total glint for this season and I think I will start saving just all of it for the upcoming new reward set in Q3 this year, this was @artofkylin's idea so shout out to her for this tip, sometimes we just need the wisdom from women!

Well.. on with battles after getting another coffee and before I'm getting on another mountain bike run again, I'm just waiting for the rain to pass, perfect time to play Splinterlands!

Thanks for stopping by, and hopefully I see you on my next post or maybe we meet on the battlegrounds of Praetoria!

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!