Introduction
One of the criticisms of Splinterlands that I hear is that it is basically a pay to win game. While spending more money is Splinterlands definitely gives you a clear edge over the competition and increases your chances of winning, you don't always have to have the best Archons or highest level cards to have fun and win in Splinterlands.
Today I am going to illustrate how to build a perfect team in Splinterlands and show how I was able to defeat a team that is a full league higher than my team. It is battling with gold tier cards against diamond tier cards in Modern League.
Paying Attention to the Ruleset
In Splinterlands you can have up to three rulesets in effect and you have to pay attention to all of the rulesets in effect. In this case we have only one ruleset in effect: Up To Eleven. Under this ruleset all units have Amplify ability so thorns, return fire, magic reflect and other retaliate and punishment abilities are increased.
For this ruleset we want to use monsters with thorns and I am using a tank that has thorns Drybone Megalodon:
This monster has a good amount of shields at three and nine health as well as four speed and four melee damage. It also has a fifty percent chance of retaliating, which could come in handy.
We also have four splinters available: fire, earth, death and dragon. My summoners are limited in the modern league, I don't have any legendary summoners for example so I like playing common summoners that give me ability to pick units from two splinters.
Since water and life splinters are not available my best choice of a summoner here is Dolfar Darflak that lets me play cards from death and fire splinters:
Yes this summoner doesn't have any abilities, but the ability to play cards from two splinters is an important ability, particularly if your modern collection is very limited like mine.
Architecting the Perfect Team
To build a perfect team you have to pick cards that have complimentary abilities and that try to nerf as many of the opposing team specs as possible. You also have to have a basic structure of a strong tank upfront followed by a secondary tank or at least a high health monster so that when your tank is defeated the team doesn't just fall apart. In the case of the battle I am featuring I have Drybone Megalodon as my tank and a legendary rebellion reward card Emberguard as my support monster and a secondary tank:
Emberguard is a great candidate for the second position because it comes with a shield and seven health, it also has magic damage of three points as well as a couple great abilities one that nerfs the melee attack of my opponent and one that serves as a shield from the amplified magic reflect damage.
It is also important to have great support monsters, in this battle my most important support monster is Aracne Weaver.
His most important support ability is key to winning this battle, Corrupted Healing restores seventy percent of the maximum health of all allied units on every round. It is also a negative ability as each time it restores the health it reduces the health by one point, but don't let it scare you, most of the time this works in your favor overall.
Another Important support monster and also one of my main damage dealers is Meriput Slinger. It comes with an impressive for ranged damage, but it's main support value is in his abilities it has a shield to protect it from the return fire that is amplified in this battle and it slows the whole opposing team as well as has an Impede ability that slows the enemy unit it hits by one every time it lands a hit on the opponent.
I am also playing Chaos Evoker that has ambush ability and magic attack with blast damage as well as Grove Doomblade that has good health, high shield and five melee damage.
By combining lots of abilities and structuring my team in an optimized way I am hoping to achieve a victory in the battle despite having lower level cards.
The Battle
Link to Modern League Battle Gold Tier Cards Beating Diamond Tier Cards
As you can see my opponent has clearly higher level cards a whole league above my team.
In the first round our Arachne Weaver was instrumental in restoring health of a couple of our units and particularly our tank that got a little low on health. And we are starting to work through the health of their tank and triage monster.
The second round was really good for our team despite our tank missing a retaliate and falling under the enemy relentless onslaught.
We were able to take out their tank and their triage monster as well as one of their melee attackers. Our Arachne Weaver continues to play a crucial role in keeping our team on the field.
Round three was the decisive round where it became clear that we have won this battle in a very convincing way despite having lower level cards.
The opponent has a single card left of the field with only one magic damage, that card has no chance against five card team that we are still fielding:
And we easily win this battle without letting their last card to take out any more of our monsters:
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