Hello Splinterlands Summoners and welcome to my blog. In today's Community Engagement Challenge I will share how I improved my strategy in the Collateral Damage ruleset. Collateral Damage is a new ruleset that grants Reckless to all units. Each successful attack also deals damage to all adjacent units so we have to be careful of friendly fire.

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How to Deal with Friendly Fire

The Reckless modifier changes how we should build our lineup because every attack damages the attacker's allies. I used to focus on damage before but I lost a lot of battles so I had to change my strategy in order to win. There are several ways to deal with the ruleset.

Choose Units with High Health

We have to deal with a lot of damage coming from the enemy and our own units. We focus on survivability rather than damage. It's not the player who does more damage that wins but who lives in the end.

Choose Units with Healing Abilities

Units with Tank heal, Heal, Triage or Corrupted healing will be a good strategy. This is another way to focus on survivability by outliving our enemy rather than dealing more damage.

Choose Units with Armor and Repair Abilities

Another variation of survival strategy. Units with armor can take more hits and outlive the enemy. It would be better if we will have units that repairs armor that will add to their survival.

Use Less Damage Dealers

Rather than filling our line up with damage dealers, it would be better to use non attacking units to decrease the damage we receive. It would be better if our non attacking unit has Taunt to draw attacks from our units.

These are some of my strategies to deal with Collateral Damage. There are others like using units with Painforge ability to make their attacks higher. Next, I'll show a sample battle on how I dealth with this ruleset.

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Featured Battle

The battle occured in the Frontier. I used my usual Water magic team to focus on damage but I tweaked it a bit to decrease my damage dealers and used a non attacking Taunt unit instead. My line up is as follows.

Port Guardian

Port Guardian is a decent tank that deals two melee damage, has three armor and seven health. It's not the best tank in the Frontier but he is good enough for his role.

Great Bear Druid

The Great Bear Druid is a great second tank especially in rulesets like Melee Mayhem. It has dual attack of magic and melee making it a great unit to use with the Water magic team.

Saltwater Mage

The Saltwater Mage is the second highest damage dealer in the team with two magic damage. It has high health and Sneak ability to harass the enemy's back line.

Lunaki Howler

The Lunaki Howler does not deal much damage. It's a magic unit thought that benefits from the additional magic attack buff given by the archon.

New Beluroc Aegis

The usual unit I use in this line up is the Water Logged Wizard. However, it doesn't deal much damage so changed it to New Beluroc Aegis. It has Taunt ability that draws attacks away from my other units while not attacking and therefore not dealing damage to two of my units. A unit in the middle with one attack deals one damage to the enemy while two on my own. So better to use a non attacking unit instead.

Mystic Scaleweaver

The highest damage dealer in the team is Mystic Scaleweaver with three magic attack. I decided to preserve it by placing a non attacking unit adjacent to it.

My enemy focused on high health and also placed a non attacking unit with healing in the third position. This is also a decent strategy that could work if I used a different line up. In this battle, the combination of using a non attacking Taunt unit with high damage units proved to be the better strategy.

Link to Battle

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Come Play Splinterlands!

Start your Splinterlands adventure today with my referral. You can play the game for free in the Frontier Mode or take your game to the next level by purchasing a spellbook. Buying a spellbook allows you to earn SPS tokens and use the market to sell in game assets. Also, we will both get 500 Credits which can be used top purchase cards once you buy a spellbook.