Strategy Primer - Card Positioning and Abilites

Hi everyone,

it has been some time since I did my Noob Error series when I started playing Splinterlands back in November. So I decided to share some of my learnings since then based on a usefull tool I have found. This post will focus on the importance of card positioning in your battles.

@splintertools Thanks for your development of this tool. It is very helpful in learning what went right and what went wrong

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The Basics

• Cards with low health need to be protected from attacks to stay in the fight

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• Cards with Sneak always attack your last monster first. This is true except for special abilities of your other cards like Taunt or Camouflage which will adjust the targeted monster of Sneak

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• Cards with the Opportunity ability will always attack the monster with the lowest health first, again except for your other cards having abilites like Taunt or Camouflage.

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• Cards with Snipe will always attack Magic or Ranged or Monsters without attack that are not placed in the first position, , again except for your other cards having abilites like Taunt or Camouflage.

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• Magic Attacks hit health directly ignoring armor except for the Weak Magic Ruleset or Monsters with Void Armor where the Magic attack needs to wear down the armor first

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Tipp: You can look up which cards have the abilites you search for here

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• Cards with high Speed, Flying and/or Dodge have a higher chance to avoid Melee and Ranged attacks therefore prolonging their life

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The Application - Sneak

Let´s take one of my battles appart to understand how the abilites impact your battle:
https://splinterlands.com?p=battle&id=sl_2837ff773a94f02f8abab8363bcbd4b0&ref=timoremoti

The starting line-up

You can see that my opponent selected Failed Summoner, Goblin Thief and Magic Nymph in this Equal Health ruleset battle while I went with Hardy Stonefish, Igor Darkspear, Ice Pixie and Coral Wraith

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The battle progression

You can see that my Coral Wraith manages to constantly damage the enemy Magic Nymph Healer while his frontline gets healed constantly wearing my Hardy Stonefish and my Coral Wraith down.

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The battle conclusion

If my Coral Wraith did not have the Sneak Ability he also would have had to attack the failed summoner which would have lost me the fight as the healer would have kept the summoner alive while the enemy Goblin Thief picked my backline appart.

@quangdai Thanks for this battle

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Using Splintertools to keep learning

This tool allows you to simulate how your battles would have worked out against a particular opponent based on changes you can make in your Line-up.

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Let´s take a short look at the battle simulation from above

You can see that I selected to exchange my Coral Wraith with a Elven Mystic and the projected win rate of this match-up dropped directly down to 0%.

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I learned quite a lot about my battles from this tool so feel free to check it out and learn about positioning as well.

Let me know if you found this helpful. I might be willing to invest some time to include additional abilites for these simulations to help you understand the importance of positioning and abilities.

Thanks for reading and have a good time playing