Like half of all Exploding Dwarf on Exploding Dwarf battles, this one was incredibly frustrating. I’d had a good win streak going and . . . well . . . see for yourself.
https://steemmonsters.com?p=battle&id=034a288856bb65c90b4f5df59a65cffea9f0f496&ref=digital-wisdom
I had two pieces of bad luck. One was that my Dwarf lost the coin flip for going first. Second, he didn’t retaliate. And with those two occurrences, the battle was over.

An interesting change to Splinterlands would be if all monsters with identical speeds were allowed to attack (or perform their actions) before the results were applied. Retaliate shouldn’t happen in cases where monsters have identical speeds and trample not occur if a monster dies at the same time as his attack. Retaliate should happen normally if monsters have different speeds.

The battle above would have ended in the same way if my Dwarf had missed and his didn’t. But a far likelier outcome, as opposed to a coin flip, is that both Dwarves would have died and both second row monsters injured by blast but neither killed by trample. The battle would then have been decided by the skill of selecting the rest of the line-up rather than a single random coin flip.

On the Future of SplinterLands

I have to say that I’m concerned about the future of Splinterlands. The value of my card collection is down over 14.5% since the beginning of the year and my rental income is 2/3rds of what it was before – and this is while Steem is steadily rising by 50%. I think that it is absolutely critical that the cost of entry be brought down somehow -- and some of the advantages of the wealthy and early adopters removed in some of the venues. I’m curious as to how well balanced Untamed is by itself. If it is reasonably well balanced, maybe there could be a parallel league ladder for Untamed only. If it isn’t well balanced, maybe it could be balanced by the addition of a very small number of cards. So . . . What do you think? Until next time -- may you always hit, retaliate and poison when you need to – and may your opponent not be so lucky.