Strategy Corner #40 - Target Practice Ruleset - Tricky ruleset - another time for mind games

For the last few weeks, I usually started those articles with sentences that we need to be patient and just wait: for lands, for new cards for any new things. And recently with some help from the broader crypto market, we finally got some movement around assets, tokens, and hype. Finger cross to see the lands tomorrow, but besides that, we receive the stats of the last Riftwatcher airdrop and we finally started to see SPS burning to get DEC. It's even crazier because afaik still DEC wasn't in a profitable price range to do this. But the hype is real, so I hope we can easily wait a while to see new Rebelion cards.

Description:

All ranged and magic units gain the Snipe ability.

Firstly, the description of the ruleset in the game is not perfect, sometimes you get just general information which does not give you all the information you need. The best way to read the full description as above from the game documentation at least once. You can check all here.

I seriously encourage you guys to check this site, even more advanced players could find something interesting there.

I'm not so big fan of Snipe ability, I usually used only Captain Katie, which is just too good The rest of the card usually Ranged units have a similar problem to opportunity: usually, there aren't enough good units to use it, and at the end we spread our damage too much. But this is not an article about just snipe ability, but about Target Practice ruleset which guarantees all range/magic monsters that skill. And now we have so many different rules of games, where usually all your monsters have one target, and mind games just begin. There are several approaches to take advantage of that fact, one of them is not to use any range/magic monster which could be quite surprising to the unprepared opponent. Another nice recent trick is. of course. martyr card, everyone is supposed to know how strong they are now. You can also use the unit with camouflage around two martyr cards to get an even better buff from them. The most standard tactic is to use the unit with strong defense ability as a snipe target, and if you can add some healing ability it could be a tough nut to crack. And that kind of battle I want to present today, so let's check it.

Today's battle is from special YGG guild tournaments where we can compete around all YGG guilds for the higher tier tournament. This is exactly from the Bronze Level.

Rulesets here made a lot of difference. I wonder if the positioning was right here, more we will talk in the analysis section. I brought all good water non-melee monsters and of course Baajira as a target for the snipe ruleset. I usually don't rent Doctor Blight, but some affliction is very handy in that kind of battle, triage is strong, so deny healing is important. It wasnt the case in that fight but it's worth remembering.
The opponent got a quite similar team, with some differences in the unit's order and summoner. Let's see who was right :)

Round 2, the opponent lost the cannon fodder unit, but still, we did quite a nice damage to annoying Djiin Oshannus. Our healer with triage did an amazing job here, and we survived that round without any casualties.

Round 3, this round was even crazier than the previous one. We got perfect heal before Nerrissa launched her attack, so Baakjira survived another round. And it was just a matter of rarity, our spirit Horder has the same speed, but legendary rarity so its inicitative is faster than epic cards. We managed to kill Djiin, all looking great now.

Round 4, Baakjira did its job, but finally, we had to say goodbye to it. We almost killed Narrisa, and with so low speed it would be no problem to finish it without giving them an opportunity to attack.

Round 5, after Baakjira, we got another unit for snipe target - Runemancer Kye, with leech ability and additional healing from Spirit, it can survive a lot of damage. I don't see any option to lose that fight now.

Round 6, we missed the opponent's Runemancer, but another heal and our Runemancer jumped to 10 health points. Let/s jump to the final round, nothing unpredicted can happen here.

Final Blow - Round 7 - finally we targeted Baakjira, which survived the whole fight, our team did a great job, but we didn't avoid some mistakes here. Let's discuss it.

Even the teams were quite similar with won that fight by a huge margin. Of course main reason was the unit with triage and different monster positioning. I think a few weeks ago we analyzed a similar ruleset battle, and at that time we had quite a nice setup with the triage unit in first position. Usually, as we can see here it's not so easy to kill the tank unit, most damage is targeted to the second unit from the line-up. In that case, using Djinn Oshannus in the front position was a mistake, we lost nice damage here, and we couldn't use defense ability from Djinn. The opponent on the other hand made a bigger mistake, putting Baakjira in that place. As we could see it was even more waste of defense capabilities, and Baakira survived till the end of the fight without any bigger impact on the game.
As we can see any healing ability could be a game changer, so that's why I mentioned affliction, which sometimes is a matter of winning and losing the fight. Here actually it wasn't, but not bringing triage to that ruleset is a mistake IMHO :). Let's check the core units:

BAAKJIRA, I have heard that some players don't like cards like this (IINM one of best champion Truls was one of them). In the beginning, I had some doubts as well (especially in lower league), but recently I played it more and more. And of course, it's an amazing target for Snipe ruleset, void is a great defense versus all magic monsters, and slow is just amazing and could be the element that wins you a battle. In higher league that card is a beast: heal and strengthen and up to 16 HP ? Seriously ? :) I really miss higher-level leagues :(.

AXEMASTER I'm happy I bought this card at some point of my Splinterlands journey, because it won me so many games. The damage is just excellent, of course, you need to try to cover it from any other sneaky tactics to get your backline monsters, but usually 6 HP (in bronze) is enough to avoid opportunity monsters. I think Axmaster shines the most in Silver League with an additional 1 point of damage (it doesn't change later) making him a beast and usually people get more protection versus magic damage so that unit could surprise a lot of line-ups.

RUNEMANCER KYE, I remember that I always had some problem pronouncing the name of that card during my Splinterlands.tv stream. And I still do not know what is correct pronouncement :). After Ilthain it's my favorite Riftwatcher card, and I usually rent it every time. It's another great card for Target Practice, and it is best as the second target when she could already get some additional HP from Leech ability. Then with some support of triage units, when the opponent has no affliction is usually game over. if you are able to give her some damage buff, from Martyr for example, sometimes you can see a hilarious amount of HP.

I really big fan of every ruleset that changes some combat and targeting rules of the battlefield. The same was true with Super Sneak when you got many other options to outsmart your opponents. Target Practice is quite a similar case, it's all about small mind games, something which still is exciting after more than 2 years of playing Splinterlands. More about my journey can read in the last article here :)
I think and hope that the near time will be finally more exciting than the last months. The community has been waiting so long to finally see something more interesting about lands. You know I'm not a big fan of that idea, it's just nor my cup of tea, but I'm happy to finally see some results. And I hope we can see some improvement in other aspects of the game, draft mode would be a blast.

I hope you like this kind of report, battle, and strategy presentation. More strategy analysis, discussion, and prediction games you can find on my Wednesday Twitch Channel stream. There will be schedule soon :)

If you have any comments, please do not hesitate. Do you think I could improve anything just tell me :)

If you wish to try out Splinterlands you can use my reference link.

Thumbnails and other pictures borrowed with permission from the Splinterlands team or made in Cooltext

We continue our game from the previous week, today new battle, new card to win :).

I come up with some ideas, I hope you will like them and participate. Every week I will publish one battle, and your goal is to point out the first victim of the battle and who will be the winner. This game is exactly the same as my prediction game which I run on my Wednesday Splinterlands.tv stream. I know that not everyone can attend the stream, so I hope you will still have fun in that way. More about the rules can be read here.

Among all participants who get the correct answer, I will randomly (probably on my Wednesday stream) choose one winner.

The prize of the blog prediction game for the lucky winner will be the epic card:

Here we got the battle:

Game instruction:
Try to point out which monster will die first on the battlefield and who wins the battle

• t - top player
• b - bottom player
• number - order counting from the first position

Examples:
t2b = monster on the second position of top player dies first, the bottom player wins
b6t = monster on the sixth position of bottom player dies first, the top player wins
t3t = monster on the third position of top player dies first, the top player wins

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