The Magical Forest Fight

Greetings, battle mages!

I hope your week in Splinterlands has been victorious and lucrative. Unfortunately, I cannot say the same since I feel I have lost my flow a bit, opponents feel tougher and I'm struggling to even advance from Silver I to Silver II. Still, I finally managed to upgrade all my Soulbound summoners to level 2 as I finally got the missing Lobb Lowland cards. As it happens to be, Lobb will be featured in my example battle today!

This week's Battle Mage Secrets challenge features the Wands Out ruleset which means it's all about the magic Splinters and magic monsters. As for those "magic Splinters", I consider Water and Earth. This is just something that is stuck in my brain and you might very well disagree since there are so many monsters and preferences.

Nevertheless, this battle happened to have both available and even though I'd usually go with Water(got level 3 Alric rented!), this time I decided to try something different and chose Earth instead.

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The Summoners

So, wands are out for this 22-mana battle and as I mentioned, I chose my recently upgraded LOBB LOWLAND as a summoner. Some of you might wonder why not save some mana and choose a cheaper summoner such as Obsidian who on top of that will boost the magic attacks of all friendly monsters.

Then again, some of you might guess where I'm going with this choice...patience. You will see her soon enough.

My opponent, who is an annoying bot that can read my mind, chose IMMORTALIS(they often do) as their summoner.

Legendary Immortalis is a real pain in the battlefield as he will provide Void as well as Shatter ability to all of their troops. This means that Imoortalis is an excellent choice against magic teams and teams that are well-armoured.

Oh, and he will also reduce the health of all my units by one health point. What a douchebag.

The Monsters

Immortalis and the evil forces controlling him indeed read my mind and copied my strategy by choosing a strong tank unit with plenty of health and a tank healer. Yes. We both ended up going with a level 3 GOBLIN PSYCHIC even though mine is more shinier.

This unit has a magic attack of 2 and 5 health points. Goblin Psychic is very slow with a speed of only 1 and therefore it won't be using the tank heal ability until the end of the round. In the worst-case scenario, the tank that is supposed to be healed might already be dead.

Goblin Psychic costs 6 mana-points making it bite a quite big chunk of the available mana.

My opponent's tank unit was MYCELIC SLIPSPAWN, a high-mana cost monster with plenty of health(11). A little bit faster than Psychic, but also having a strong magic attack, this unit's perhaps best attribute is its Taunt ability.

Taunt will force all of my monsters to target Slipspawn instead of their usual targets. This can be very useful in case you want to keep some key monsters safe like in this the tank healer.

Personally, I'm not a big fan of this ability since the Taunt monsters can be destroyed very fast, even in a single round. It can also be countered with the fury ability which makes fury monsters do double damage to their target.

However, this is not how I'm gonna beat them...

...But this is. QUORA TOWERSHEAD is an overpowered Gladiator unit with Heal and Bloodlust abilities.

She costs 10 mana points and doesn't leave that much space for other monsters in these low-mana battles. Still, in my opinion, that is mana well spent and I've sometimes won battles with just Quora and no one else.

Only monsters with magic attack may be used in battles.

This is what the Wands out ruleset says. The trick here is that Quora has double-attack including melee in addition to magic. So it is the magic attack that'll make her qualify for this battle while we still get to enjoy her melee attacks as well!

Now let's see if the bot took that into consideration.

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The Battle

Here is the complete setup for the battle with only 4 monsters:

As always, you can watch the whole battle HERE or/and continue reading my battle report below.

ROUNDS 1-9

As I suspected, this one turned out to be a tank healing competition since neither team had any reach for Goblin Psychics. So, the healers healed and the tanks gave hits to each other. Quora's magic attacks were reduced to 1 because of their summoner buff, Void.

They had full magic attacks but still, the crucial factor was Quora's melee attack. We were able to deal a total of 5 damage while they were left with 4. Also, Quora was healing herself so we never really had anything to worry about here.

It was in the ninth round when Mycelic Slipspawn was down and from there we had an easy job to remove their healer as well.

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Conclusion

All in all, this was another good experiment with Wands Out ruleset and I actually think I might have lost with my usual Water magic team.

I don't know if this is just something inside my head but I feel like the easiest way to defeat these bots is to use Gladiator units like Quora Towershead. I've won quite a many battles with them and it's like they are bringing that extra edge the bots don't have or can't counter with.

Also, for some reason, I have noticed that the battles are much easier in the morning compared to afternoon or evening battles and yes, this includes the bot battles as well. What's your experience with bots? Do you have any special strategies to help defeat them? If you do, let me know in the comments section below.

Thank you for reading!