Hey everyone, it's a Saturday already and I'm long overdue for making my first Splinterlands posts for this week, so let's get going, I'll probably make two posts back to back with a couple hours of launching them in between, don't want to be too late and miss out on those nice upvotes from the team!

So, the first challenge for this week is the Social Media Challenge, which has the same theme as always.

🔥 Share Your Most Remarkable Splinterlands Moments: Do you possess a battle of epic proportions that deserves to be seen by all? Have you crafted something extraordinary within the Splinterlands realm? Maybe you've got profound thoughts, insights, or strategies related to stats, cards, abilities, or gameplay that are waiting to be shared? We want it all, and we want it to be nothing short of AMAZING!

To find out how you can participate in the challenge yourself, check out the Splinterlands post here.
Especially for new players, I really recommend doing so because it's a very cool way to be active in another way with the game, and maybe learn a thing or two about how to make good looking posts and pictures, and earn something while you're doing so, win win!

So, if you have been following me you already know my land commitment has doubled in the last week, and for those who don't, I made a post about this last week where I talk about how my progress in owning land suddenly accelerated, to follow this up I already made some tiny bit of progress because buying the plots of land is of course the easy part, with an average buying price below $20 but to get it up and running it takes another $80 or so for each plot so that's going to take some time.

So first, I made some calculations about what kind of card would get me the most Production Points (PP) per Dollar, and my conclusion was this was Chaos Legion rare reward cards, so looking at the Synergy for my first plot of land I needed to get online which is of course a Grain plot, can't do anything without food, I bought cards to make five max level workers for my first plot of land in Region 81 to become active. On my other account I already have a couple of plots up and running in region 23, so maybe I'll swap some workers between them later because I have some rare lands and totems there.

So for a max level rare Chaos Legion reward card, each card gives 1100.5 PP but the amount of DEC you need to stake for it is at maximum, so 50k DEC for every plot of land.

For this post I was just checking the price of DEC to find out it's dropped a little from ~ 0.00095 to - 93, good moment to swap some HBD to DEC again and you can do this very easy within the Hive Keychain app in case you didn't know!

So I've just send it over from my Hive wallet to my in-game account and staked another 16k DEC on land, and went from 23% to 52% efficiency, it's not much but it's honest work! 19 more days for my grain farm to be ready, by that time I will need 15k grain to feed my workers and finish the building to start producing my own grain, hopefully I will have enough on my other account to spare to cover this! (I just checked, yep I have enough! 😁)

So, this was just a side topic to share my progress and maybe get other people interested in Splinterlands Land, let's get on with today's main topic which was quite a surprise to me!

Defeating Heloise the Hollow

So for readers who don't know, Heloise is the first (and so far only) card that went into auction, only 95 regular foil and 5 gold foil cards have been printed so it's truly a collectors item and a very powerful card in battle, I play in Diamond mostly until the rotation happens and I faced her a couple of times and always got my ass kicked hard.

Because she's so rare and powerful, she's a very expensive card - the cheapest for sale at this moment at $3000!

Basically what she does is because of the taunt, she will get attacked by my team, die eventually, counterattack with her 8 melee damage, siphons life from her team mates to resurrect and rinse and repeats this process until all her team mates are siphoned but probably you won't survive this process before that happens, but you can see this is action for yourself in my battle link I will share later in this post.

This is NOT a card for regular players like myself and this was truly one of those battles that every Splinterlands player has from time to time, seeing the enemy team and just press SKIP BATTLE because there's no chance in hell that's a win, and then seeing the outcome of the battle and it's a victory! 😂

So let's take a closer look at this one because it was definitely the most amazing thing that happened for me this week, and it was even more amazing because it wasn't even with my Diamond level account, it was with my Gold account B-team. 😆

So, when the enemy found screen appeared I could see the 6.2 MILLION power vs. my 700k power, most of this currently being delegated to my other account I knew I had a very small chance on winning against a player like this, but I can always try!

The battle I'm talking about is a 50 mana 'standard' ruleset battle, with all but the Fire splinter available, with a boring standard ruleset you can expect everything, and I love my water team so I figured I would just make an awesome team. On this account I'm missing legendary summoners but it makes up for that with pretty high level reward cards.

First look at the battlefield:

Seeing the enemy team, it only took like 2 seconds before I pressed the skip battle button because these are some very nice cards!
The only thing that works in my favor is my tank counters the Thorns Windeku brings, and my OShannus works good against all the magic guys, but I don't have an answer against Heloise...

My Line-Up:

• Summoner: Kelya Frendull - reason: Fast team with extra survivability with the extra armor.
• First position: Commander Slade - reason: I'm starting to love this card more than my Diemon Shark, the Deflection Shield and Enfeeble are really strong, and it's really fast and evasive with the Dodge.
• Second position: Oshannus - reason: I've put him there in case of a magic heavy team that would wipe out my Commander Slade really quick.
• Third position: Kulu Mastermind - reason: Great card even when it doesn't train other units, it's fast with high damage and Opportunity and has Shield.
• Fourth position: Deeplurker - reason: Great Opportunity team up together with the Mastermind.
• Fifth position: Riverboat Captain - reason: Counter heal with blast.
• Sixth position: Swamp Spitter - reason: Repair and Giant Killer, great card for high mana battles, where you usually see Giants as a tank so it does double damage against them.

The Battle:

Round 1: So, Heloise is drawing all attacks to her with the Taunt ability, and died really fast and counter attacked my Mastermind, the +1 armor Kelya brings really helps, stopping all of that 8 damage, she siphons life from Usut, making him lose half his HP and he gets Weary (but he can heal himself), Deeplurker was right after that to kill Heloise again, and again she struck the armor so not a lot happened, she siphoned Windeku this time. So, looking at the battlefield, it seems like not much has happened but actually it did, and already two enemy team members are weary so can't be siphoned from again.

Round 2: Oshannus killed Heloise again, but her counter attack missed! She siphons from Magi of Chaos, Mastermind killed her again, and her counter attack only did half damage because of its Shield ability, Heloise siphoned from Arachne Thug, leaving one more member left to siphon from, Magi Necrosi and my team is still complete! Not for long though, Deeplurker killed her again, and died because of the counterattack already doing 9 damage now, no more siphons left so next kill and she's finally gone.
Usut missed its attack against OShannus, with the whole enemy team weary the chance of them getting exhausted gets more likely every turn.

Round 3: Swamp Spitter killed Heloise to give her the final rest, and her counterattack hit armor again. Usut is exhausted, but it was a low chance he's able to hit OShannus anyway with that much speed difference. Without Heloise the playing field is somewhat even now but still the enemy team is doing a lot of damage.

Round 4: And then things are getting in to higher gear, killing the two units on the front, and Usut misses its attack again.

Round 5: Usut is all that's left now, and he actually managed to hit OShannus, my counter heal is still alive so that's nice, he's counted as a giant with 10 mana so Swamp Spitter will do double damage.

Round 6: Wow, two missed from my fast team against a 1 speed monster..

Round 7: And another miss, 5 vs. 1 speed with flying, how is it possible 😅, Usut exhausted again, he won't survive another round.

And it's a win, against all odds!!!

You can watch the battle unfold for yourself here.

That's it for this post, it was a great moment in grinding my battles and shows why you have to never give up!

A cup of coffee, some battles to drain my energy a bit and on to my second post for this week!

Thank you for reading!!!

If you haven't made an account already, please consider using my referral link to sign up, I'll happily send the amount I get for your signup back to you in DEC or SPS to help you start.

Also, when you require any help to get you started,let me know, I'm here to advice and guide new players and maybe I can help you with card delegations too!

Have a great day!