Splinterlands Community Engagement Challenge: Battlefield Breakdowns!

The topic of the Community Engagement Challenge this week is one we've only had once before I believe, namely - Battlefield Breakdowns. The task is to feature a battle where where the odds are stacked strongly against you and you basically managed to pull off the victory by pure strategic prowess or sheer luck a.k.a. one of those battles where you hit the "Skip" button as soon as you see the two line-ups and you get truly surprised when you see the "Victory" screen, and then you have to go back an watch it. :D

So, the mana limit for it is 32 and there are only two available Elements - Water and Death. The available rulesets are Weak Magic (Magic damage hits armor before reducing health) and Armored Up (All units gain +2 armor). Since I saw the name of my opponent and that it was one of those liquidity bots with maxed cards lurking in high Silver/low Gold, I already knew what I was going up against. I figured it would definitely come at me with a magic spam line-up, most likely powered by the Water Archon, I knew I didn't have much of a choice but to go for the Death element and hope for the best. So that was what I did.

I went for my standard set-up with the Death Element - Nim Guard Captain at the front, followed immediately by the Spellmonger (acting as an off-tank), then we have my favorite Death card - Sorrow Harvester (because of its ability - Weaken (Reduces the health of all opposing units)), and finally the line-up is wrapped up by the Black Widow. This line-up works very well specifically against players who like to fall into the what I call "Vengeful Monk" trap. The Vengeful Monk seems to be very potent, and he is, however, when you play Death and reduce his health by 2 right off the bat, then he dies to just 1 hit against the Spellmonger due to her Thorns ability inflicting 2 damage to him. Once you take out the Vengeful Monk, their line-up quickly falls apart in most cases. Of course this is true mostly for battles in the 20-30 mana range.

My opponent decided not to go for the Vengeful Monk though, the bot instead chose to play Death and bring two Magic attackers to the battle. That, of course, is a big mistake since the Void (50% less damage (rounded up) from Magic attacks or 0 damage from Magic attack of 1 power) on the Nim Guard Captain absolutely mitigates their 1 Magic attack per turn, so essentially they will deal 0 damage to my tank while its tank will take 1 damage from my Nim Guard Captain, 1 from my Sorrow Harvester and 2 from the Black Widow.

As you can see even though I was up against a fully leveled team from the same element, my automated opponent failed to take down even my main tank, and had to take a decisive L against my level 1 Death team. This is generally not the normal outcome when level 1 Archons face off against level 4 Archons but there is definitely always the opportunity for the opponent to mess up their line-up because they are not paying attention or they had a short-circuit right before the battle begins, so you should never give up when faced against overwhelming odds and always bring your A game to the battlefield. Yes, you will most likely lose most of these battles but the ones you do win will definitely be very satisfying to experience.