Underdog Victory!

Today I am responding to the Splinterlands Community Engagement Challenge: Underdog Victories. The challenge from Splinterlands is to share a battle where I pulled off a win with lower mana that I thought I couldn't beat.

For this challenge I have a perfect battle from Tier Five brawls where my opponent is an Arena host, which means he gets one more mana and Legendary Wyverns Have Surge 2 which means they have two added to their mana cap. They also have tier nine Barracks which means that they also get to impose -1 Speed on all monsters on my team for their Home Arena battles. They also have Home Advantage meaning that their units go first and they win if there is a draw.

So as you can see I was a total underdog in this tier five brawl. Additionally, when I saw the lineup I immediately felt that I am going to loose this battle due to a major speed disadvantage. Their summoner would nerf my speed by one and the minus one from their Arena tactics would bring all but one of my monsters to the speed of one.

They on the other hand have two big health monsters: Rage and Night Reaper that have a lot of health and have the speed of four. I was afraid that my big hitters would miss their shots and without those five melee hitting monsters my magic two damage and nerfed ranged attackers will not do enough damage to get through.

The Battle

Link to the Battle

Without seeing the lineup above my strategy was to use big hitters in the first two positions with mostly ranged attackers in case my opponent uses the same summoner as me Immortalis. Immortalis usually is a very effective play against magic attackers that you are likely to encounter in the Back to Basics ruleset that we have here.

Therefore I loaded up on ranged attackers and was surprised to see the legendary summoner from the dragon splinter: Quix the Devious on the other side. Quix really nerfed my ranged attackers in the back and made the likelihood of hitting with my slow melee monsters as we as ranged attackers much lower.

It looked like I will never be able to hit their second and third monsters in the lineup. Let's see how this would work out:

In the first round I was able to hit every shot and take out their tank. My tank took quite a bit of damage as well and is down to only four health points. Now comes the hard part will my slow team be able to get through the Rage?

The first two shots from my opponent take down my tank before it has a chance to strike. Then both of my ranged attackers missed their shots and un-expectantly my Terraceus Hulk lands a big shot for five on their Range!

We might actually be doing better than I have expected!

As you can see we have pretty good amount of health left on our Hulk at the start of round three, maybe he can score another big hit?

To my surprise all three of my slow attackers were able to hit and as a result we are starting to get an upper hand. I just need to be able to get through this Night Reaper and the other monsters are definitely slower.

At the start of round four my opponent goes first and lands all three shots, the first two take down my Terraceus Hulk and the third shot takes out the armor on my Uraeus. My Uraeus scores and important hit on their Night Reaper

Then all three of my hitters hit the target after Uraeus, but Night Reaper is still standing at the start of the round five!

In round five they strike first again and take down my Uraeus and armor from Blackmoor Wild Elf but my team comes back and lands all three hits on my opponent and as a result at the start of round six it is finally starting to look like a win!

And finally at the start of round eight with the shot from my Gargoya Devil we finally take home an important victory for my guild YGG Legion in the tier five brawl!

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