Breaking the loop – spectacular battle
having “loop breaker” of some kind when using low mana “immortal” tank compositions.
Battle I want to showcase happened during Sunday tournament in second match in Bo3.
Let’s quickly go through 1st battle versus this opponent to give context.
When spying on opponent before start of the match I noticed that my opponent
REALLY likes to use very durable tanks with monsters to heal them, which is important
observation because second thing I noticed was that his cards are significantly higher level than mine.
Time to do some unconventional strategies…
That’s very low mana match! Chain golem is quite obvious choice here, but
question is how to spend remaining 5 mana on summoner + rest of mosters.
I decided to go with Flame Monkey to armor-heal my Golem and Chicken behind,
spending whole 4/5 mana on Daria for her +1 melee buff, which allows
Monkey and Chicken to deal damage to Shielded Units.
Plan was to out damage opponents healing and it worked well. Here is battle replay.
Let’s get to main battle of this post, rules are quite restrictive:
Like in previous match these rules clearly favor one tank and this time it’s Lord Arianthus.
From pre-match spying we know opponent have his Lord A. on lv 3.
That’s challenge because he will return damage to melee and magic attackers so we can’t
use them and we don’t have ranged attacker with Affliction that fits rules.
Our Lord A. is still just lv 1. Which means that if we use him and make stalemate we will
likely lose during fatigue phase and our Lord A. also does not reflect damage.
Can we use another tank? Very limited options due to Keep Your Distance rule.
Situation seems grim, but crazy plan is born.
We plan to win in fatigue phase with 1 health left if everything works well.
Summoner of our choice is Alric Stormbringer.
+1 magic damage buff will go long way as we will
need to execute our strategy quickly because if
we don’t lose conditions are quite numerous:
Stalemate and Fatigue Phase
Taking too much damage from
Snipe/Sneak/Blast/Opportunity
Affliction ability preventing our healing
Lord Arianthus will be our tank.
If our expectation is correct and opponent plays Lord A.
plus some healer we should be able to keep him healed.
Having both shield and void provides good protection
and mana remaining after placing Lord A. + healer
is not enough to brute force through.
Lord A. is one of the best tanks for Keep Your
Distance matches, Cube or Prismatic Energy can
be better from situation to situation, but Lord A. is
universal and reliable in most cases.
Reverse Speed increases his tankiness even further.
Albatross is our decoy target against snipes or
opportunity attacks. He can also shield our
healer from blast damage targeting our tank.
Nearly universal protection for 1 turn is pretty good deal
for our remaining 1 mana after placing essential units.
Flying is always nice to have on sacrificial unit because sometimes lucky dodges can win matches,
it is obviously unreliable, but still very nice
bonus on top of being 1 mana decoy target.
Our healer will be in next position.
It is essential to keep him alive with at least 2 health.
1 point of armor is nice because it means extra turn
against possible non-magic snipes or blasts.
We don’t expect Crustacean King to deal damage, but
he also won’t die to return damage from expected Lord A.
Our only monster capable of dealing damage to opponent.
Sneak and magic damage is perfect, because
it ensures opponent’s tank will be hit last and we
know that opponent likes to play heavily armored
compositions, which is bypassed by magic damage.
Low speed will help her strike faster and
extra damage from summoner harder.
Our plan relies on Coral Wraith cleaning up opponent’s backline and doing exactly enough damage before dying.
here is link to battle.
Plan worked perfectly and we scored spectacular 2-0 win against opponent with much higher level cards.
This match also provides learning lessons:
Playing predictably is really dangerous, especially in
pokersplinterlands tournaments. Mixing things up from time to time prevents opponent from making tailored response to your compositions.
When there is a possibility of “immortal tanks” mirror match always make plan how to break the loop of healing. It can be monster with Affliction ability, it can Snipe monster to kill healer, it can be just brute force or anything else, but it’s important to have a plan.
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Well, that battle was a bit insane.
Based on just fire power and levels, it looked like you were going down... but your predictions were true. So awesome to see a baby Lord A beat a bigger one. You got skills.
I always look at my opponents past teams too. On mobile it's awesome cause it shows you their attack (rather than having to think of the card name from the tiny pic and then remembering its attack). I think many don't do this yet, this is a great reminder!
And... EXCELLENT post! There's so much useful info packed in here!