Social Media Challenge - The oaken behemoth gets the job done 🐷🌳
Hello! As usual I want to talk about some exciting tournament battles. This time around in particular I feel like I'm really spoiled for choice as there's going to be many cool highlights.
Let's start with this battle featuring the unique blood moon halloween effect, giving all units bloodlust for free! Just from that you know it's going to be a showdown of some heavy-weight units.
With a 58 mana cap I almost felt obliged to pick Nidhoggr and I decided to go for the battle tactic that gives speed and the execute ability to my units, anticipating perhaps a Nidhoggr mirror match.
What my opponent went for instead was the much more passive Lily shieldpaw, maybe hoping to capitalize on the night reaper staying safely in the back. However his lineup wasn't optimal and this battle ultimately showcases nicely the disparity in power between these two summoners.
The MVP title should be split between Rage and the oaken behemoth. The giant pig is the one that got the job done, in the end. With his double damage type he landed many execute attacks and the bloodlust effect, coupled with the void armor, allowed him to survive for a long time and go berzerk. He ended up doing a nice impersonation of Quora 🤣
Rage was just as important, however. Soaking up all the magic damage with his void ability while dishing out strong magic attacks! This unit, along with the new dragon summoners, is making already a strong impression in both the Modern and Wild meta at the Bronze level. An entirely amazing card.
This was another amazing battle that I won and I want to share it also because of how thematic it felt. It's almost as if the spirits of the forest were rising up to put out Lorkus's fire 🍁💪🌳
From a strategic perspective it was fairly straightforward to predict and prepare against Lorkus.
The "keep your distance" and "deflection field" rules made it so that Tofu wasn't for choice here.
It ended up being another nice showcase for Immortalis. This incredibly useful Chaos Legion summoner held his own against Lorkus and his fancy battle tactics.
It would have been much more scary if my opponent had gone for Yodin this time around, but at the end of the day you can't prepare for every scenario so I'm happy to have been lucky here and gotten away with the win!
And.. just to follow up on that thought here's a battle that I actually lost against Yodin!
In hindsight there would have been better things for me to go for here, at the very least in terms of units. I was hoping to overwhelm my opponent with the ambush effect but as it turns out if the battle drags out for long enough Yodin has a much stronger effect than Akane. Should have seen it coming!
Nothing too crazy in this next one as my opponent's lineup was all over the place.
I still like it as a showcase of the Immortalis and Mantaroth combination. Quora definetely did not get the win this time.
From a strategic point of view I want to highlight how my solid frontliners held up while I used some very effective damage dealers in the back to close the deal without too much fuss.
Mitica headunter, in particular, fit the bill quite well here thanks to the "fog of war" rule.
That does it for my most memorable battles from the first round of the tournament. Let's now look at what happened in the second part!
The first battle was already extremely exciting as I got a second chance to fight ueyuey!
In my other post I lamented how lame the ruleset was in my battle against him in another tournament but we definetely got something different this time.
I'm proud to say that I won this time and this was one of his only three losses in the tournament.
Here's what happened.
As you can see we got the "counterspell" rule, making a magic strategy much more risky.
In spite of this my opponent went for a strategy heavily reliant on the magic attackers!
Now, I think what happened is simply that sometimes you've got to take risks to win and that's what my opponent chose to do in this battle.
It's not too farfetched an approach either since many of his units had the void effect anyway.
We both chose the dragon splinter and allied with water to get access to Baakjira, a very strong reward card! Most of the time this unit cannot attack but gets "weapon trained" to either use magic or melee attacks. Looking through the weapon training cards my eyes landed on Berix Snakeye, a card that I don't actually like that much and have used only sparingly in the past.
However it was the perfect choice here and I doubled down by picking another unit with no attack value.
Commander Slade does not have much to fear at the front, thanks to the "counterspell" effect.
I'm not sure if Akane was the optimal summoner choice here but it was definetely good enough to leverage the magic reflect buff against my opponent's risky lineup while my units dished out tons of ranged damage!
In the end, in these wild battles you can't always prepare for everything and even extremely strong players will have to make concessions. Anyone can win if they make the right choices.
I didn't exactly reinvent the wheel for this other battle, anyone who played in the old days knows how effective the mustang unicorn can be when coupled with Mylor!
Along the same lines, I earned a particularly undignified win against this opponent.
It felt very cheesy but all's fair in war and in love.
The trample attacks were particularly deadly for my lineup but thankfully my big ranged units in the back were enough to take care of the stragglers.
It really came down to some lucky stuns there for me to survive, otherwise the anasth soothsayer would have defeated me!
This was another loss for me, sadly.
I'm noticing I'm really struggling with some of these new, chaotic rules.
My opponent managed to win with ease with a combination of Kron, the flesh-eating golem and the llama summoner. These are cards I'm actually renting myself too yet somehow I always forget about them and fail to recognize good opportunities to use them.. not good!
Speaking of chaotic rulesets, here's another one. This time I managed to win although it was a close one.
One small detail here was that the true damage from the reckless effect goes right through the divine shields, ignoring them!
I thought I was going to win this next battle but in the end my opponent came out on top!
This strategy with Owster Rotwell might have worked, if only I'd modified my lineup slightly.
The scavo hireling, for instance, wasn't a good choice and felt particularly out of place.
On the other hand, in a ruleset that very strongly invited the use of magic, my opponent correctly spotted the opportunity to use a very strong card from the death splinter - the chaos animator!
For only 3 mana that card can do a lot in the way of soaking up magic damage so it perfectly fit the occasion and thanks to the weapons training and the battle tactic from Lorkus it grew to be unstoppable against my lineup. Gotta remember that important resource for my next battles.
And lastly I want to showcase a nice, cheeky win I had while using Prophet Rosa.
This is not the best summoner but it can have its uses, especially in wild.
This was an extreme case but the synergy with the axemaster might just blow some opponents away!
I ended up the tournament with a score of 13 and 9. Very sadly this earned me 35th place which is just stlightly off the next bracket of rewards. One single loss here could have made a big difference! I still earned 60 SPS and more importantly, I genuinely had a lot of fun in this tournament. That cannot be understated.
Ranked and Tournaments are completely different game modes these days. It's a very sad state of affairs. Budget players like myself that want to experience the game in its purest form are not welcome in Ranked as pretty anything goes there, without league restrictions. I hope that will change at some point..
For the sake of the Social Media Challenge I made a YouTube video where I go over some of my favorite battles from this tournament. You find it here.
Many exciting new things are coming to the game soon so let's keep grinding 👍
Thanks for sharing! - @yonilkar
