Sneak peek at Steem Monsters Battle

The Steem Monsters testnet was made available to Mavericks early today and I had the chance to try out the battles and test out some teams.

Practice and Ranked play

The gameplay for battle is pretty straightforward. You first select either Practice or Ranked battle. In Ranked, you gain points by winning battles, but since this is testnet, the rankings doesn't mean anything.

Choosing a Team

First you choose a Summoner to use and all available monster cards under the same splinter will be available to select. If Selenia Sky is chosen as summoner, you get to select all the Dragon cards too. Mana is currently limited at 20 and all selected cards must add up to be below 20. There can be up to 7 cards selected while not exceeding 20 mana.

Once you are satisfied with the Team, click Battle and the system will search for an opponent for you.

Rumble

The Fighting is automatic and you can even skip the whole animation by refreshing the page. Immediately after an opponent is matched, the battle result is actually viewable on the page.

Round 26 + Fatigue

This is the longest battle that I had played so far, with a whooping 26 rounds. My Hydra and toocurious Peaceful Giant were cancelling each other other with Heal, this goes on from Round 3 to Round 20. From Round 21 onwards, a Fatigue is triggered on every card that drains health. This ensures the battle doesn't go into an infinite loop. Finally at Round 26, with Fatigue killing off all the monsters, Hydra was the last monster standing and won the battle.

Fatigue stats

Round 21: -1 Health for all cards
Round 22: -2 Health for all cards
Round 23: -3 Health for all cards
Round 24: -4 Health for all cards
Round 25: -5 Health for all cards
Round 26: -6 Health for all cards

Hydra, the last card with only 1 Health (after fatigue drains 6 health from it) and I wonder what would happen if my Hydra did not survive this fatigue round? A Draw game maybe?

Thoughts on the Battles so far

Pretty pleased with the battle mode so far. There will some small glitches here and there especially on the UI, but these will be fixed by the team real soon. Death splinter seems to be the strongest and most popular among all the test users. They are cheap (low mana cost) and have really strong buffs and nerfs. Almost every Team are using at least one Neutral card, this is going to put some buy pressure on these cards in the Market. Earth Splinter looks like the weakest color and I could'nt find any good combination out of it.

According to Aggroed, mainnet should be launch for everyone in 1-2 weeks. If you are looking to play this game, start buying some packs or cards from the market now before the price goes up. Use my referral to get your starter pack, I will throw in some free cards for you. https://steemmonsters.com/?ref=jrvacation o