I fought many battles today, won most of them, lost a few. I had a lot of interesting battles, but I’m choosing to write about this one in particular because I went into battle somewhat unprepared, with monsters I typically don’t use, but still came so close to winning. Let’s look at the battle in detail.
Ruleset Status: This battle was not ruleset restricted.
My opponent’s Lineup
| Summoner | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
 |  |  |  |  |
My own line up and strategy
| Summoner | 1 |
|---|---|
 |  |
As you see, my own line up was very simple. That wasn’t intentional. Both the summoner and Monster I used were because I was running out of time and didn’t want to surrender the battle.
I noticed in my opponent’s past battle lineups that he liked using a Katrelba. Since the mana cap of the battle was low, I had a feeling he will definitely bring the Katrelba to battle. So I selected Underboss Fabiano as my summoner so that I could either poison the Katrelba, or choose a thorned Melee monster and buff it’s melee attack up.
This way, the Katrelba will lose health by attacking me, and will take additional heavy damage from my melee monster. With that in mind, I selected Lioceros as my melee attacker because he fits the profile of monster I want. In addition, his health was okay and he had some armor, so even better.
Plans gone wrong
Since Underboss Fabiano has dual abilities to choose from, that meant that after the summoner and monster selection page, I would be led to another page to select which specific ability of his I want to use: Inspire or Poison. Unfortunately, when this screen came on, I lost reception and by the time I connected back, the battle screen itself loaded. Obviously, this is bad, but wait till you see how this battle would’ve turned around last minute if this didn’t happen.
Now the battle
Before the battle began, summoner buffs took effect. Speed and Armor of my opponent’s monsters went up by 1 unit each thanks to Kelya Frendul.
Round 1
In round 1, I killed my opponent’s tank which was meant to stall me anyways. My own tank had his armor almost completely destroyed too.
Round 4
I’m as surprised as you, but for whatever reason, the rounds in the game skipped round 2 and 3 to go to 4
All the while, I didn’t know Venari Marksrat was in my opponent’s line up until this point. Still, I killed him which was both good and bad news considering that it was a martyr. This moved Xenith Monk to the front.
Round 5, 6, 7
This is where I realized how much of a change it would’ve made if I had gotten to use any one of my summoner’s abilities. See, the Xenith Monk my opponent was using was a level 2 Xenith Monk, so it had a heal ability. So even with Licerios’s thorns and melee attack, it didn’t do enough damage to kill it before it could heal. If it had buffed by even 1 extra melee attack, it would’ve been an easy win.
Round 8 & 9
I came this 👌 close to killing Xenith Monk, but to add to all the pain, the attack that was supposed to take him out was dodged because he was faster than Licerios. After dodging that hit, he proceed to knock out Licerios who was now on his last breath.
All screenshots are from my gameplay which you can watch here
Cover image belongs to @ splinterlands