Novice Tournament Experience

• Big thanks to my brother @saviib for showing me the tournaments section on Splinterlands. Be sure to check out his account @saviib on Hive. It’s full of nonstop beautiful scenic pictures and he’s also started playing Splinterlands too!

• By clicking Events, players are taken to a list of upcoming Splinterlands tournaments. It costs around 2 or 3 Dark Energy Crystals to enter the Novice Tournament. After checking in around the starting time, 100 players battle for the top 30 spots ranging in rewards from 20 to 500 Dark Energy Crystals.

• Due to usually being clobbered by the Water Summoner Alric Stormbringer and a bunch of magic monsters, I rented the Earth Summoner Mylor Crowling and Earth Monster Mushroom Seer.
  
  

• Some cards are rather expensive so Splinterlands has a feature that lets you rent cards for a specified amount of day for very low prices. I chose to rent Mylor Crowling and Mushroom Seer for one day for about 150 credits—another form of currency in Splinterlands that can be bought with crypto.

• Mylor Crowling plus some Earth tanks and Mushroom Seer against anyone, who uses magic monsters a lot, proved to be a good combo. Mylor Crowling’s Thorn ability causes enemies to take damage whenever they attack ally monsters and Mushroom Seer’s Silence ability reduces damage from magic attacks. I won the first tournament match but the next round had the condition of only Fire Splinter cards being allowed—a group I rarely use.

• For my 2nd match I used Living Lava as my front tank, Charlak Minotaur as my back up tank, and lastly Cerberus. I chose these three because of Living Lava’s Shield ability that reduces melee and ranged damage, Charlak Minotaur because of True Strik ability which means his attacks can’t miss, and Cerberus because of its Heal ability which restores a proton of its own health each round. My summoner was Qid Yuff whose Piercing Ability lets the point difference between ally-monster attacks and enemy-monster shields spill over into health.

• I thought that was a decent line up for a 19 mana battle but was soon shown the errors of my ways by my opponent’s line up: Living Lava, Fire Elemental, Serpentine Spy, Goblin Shaman, Creeping Ooze, and Furious Chicken.
  
  (Covered opponent’s username for privacy)

• Their monsters line up of abilities was Shield like mine, Blast which does additional damage to monsters adjacent to target monster, Opportunity which lets a monster attack from anywhere and target the enemy monster with the lowest health, and Slow which reduces the speed of all enemy monsters.

• Long story short, I got pulverized by superior strategy and quickly took a screenshot as a lesson on what and how to copy or counter in the future.

• Even though I lost, it was exciting and fun to take part in a tournament and educational to see where I ranked in the 100 players who competed—60th. I look forward to improving on that and hopefully making it to the top 30 contestants next time so I can win a generous amount of Dark Energy Crystals.

PS: Next time I battle [name redacted] hopefully I put up more of a fight and win lol

Till next time!

• shortshots out