Splinterlands Engagement Challenge: Ruleset Riddles! Thick Skinned

Splinterlands is a pretty complicated game with interesting battles with all the options available. This is a part of the weekly social media challenge for Splinterlands. This week is about a ruleset, and how to battle against this ruleset. I will explore the Earthquake rulesets, and the different strategies that you can employ against your opponent to give yourself an advantage.

Thick Skinned Ruleset

The Thick Skinned is an interesting ruleset because every single monster gains the shield ability. This means that any physical damage (ranged or melee) will be halved. It also reduces counter damage by half as well (thorns and return fire). The shield ability is very powerful, and I like using tanks with this ability. However, under this ruleset, every monster can be a tank.

Strategies

There are a few different strategies you can use in this ruleset, and I will lay out some of the options below. You can mix these 3 three together if you want.

Magic Monsters

The first strategy is to use magic monsters because they can avoid the halved damage from the shield ability. Using this, you will be able to outdamage your opponent depending on how you set up your lineup. This is my preferred choice of monster, mainly because I think that damage is an important part of getting an advantage over your opponent.

Support Abilities

Another way to stay alive longer is to have support abilities such as healers, repair, or protect. These abilities can help your lineup survive longer. Other abilities, such as slow, swiftness, weaken, rust, and strengthen, help out as they buff your team or debuff your opponent.

Magic Defensive Abilities

The last thing to consider is abilities that reduce magic damage or counter it. Void and Void Armor are both abilities that make it harder for the opponent to kill off a monster. Since the magic damage will be the primary concern, it's hard to say no to these cards. There is also counter damage from magic reflect, and this damage can also be boosted by the amplify ability if you have a card in your lineup with it.

Example Battle

You can find my example battle here. This was a battle from a recent modern fight that I had. In this fight, I used my summoner to increase the magic damage. I had Thanalorian Scion as my backup tank with void armor, and Daigendark Surveyor as another backup tank with magic reflect. These two monsters fit the magic defensive abilities. At the same time, I had weapons training to add magic damage to my monsters, and a support monster with tank heal to heal up my tanks. Overall, I used all three of the strategies that I suggested above, which let me have a stronger lineup than my opponent.

My opponent was using a similar strategy to mine, but I had good enough tanks or backup tanks that my opponent couldn't do much. The weapons training allowed me to get some extra magic damage in, and there wasn't much my opponent could do when I had the damage advantage. My opponent did have some scary magic monsters, but that electrify ability worked against my opponent as his monsters lost health due to it.

Conclusion

Thick Skinned is an interesting ruleset to deal with, but there are ways to improve your chances. This is a new ruleset added, so it will take some time to get used to. However, I highly suggest you use magic monsters so your damage is not nerfed. Add in a few more support abilities, and you will also have a solid lineup because physical damage isn't as powerful.

What do you think about my strategies for the Thick Skinned, or my match? Was there anything you would have done differently?

Posted Using INLEO