This is a data driven guide to the starting Chaos Legion summoners. The guide includes statistics on which summoner is the best at each mana, how each one does for every ruleset, and how they match up against each other. Based on the data in this guide, you should have a very good idea on which summoner to pick for your match.
In this post, we summarize and combine data from each of the Chaos Legion summoner beginner guides we have posted over the last weeks. This provides a comprehensive guide on which summoner to pick for your match. The guides for each individual summoner can be found here:
Beginners guide - Kelya Frendul
Beginners guide - Obsidian
Beginners guide - Thaddius Brood
Beginners guide - Tarsa
Beginners guide - General Sloan
The numbers in this guide might deviate slightly from those presented in the earlier guides. The reason is that the current guide uses a larger dataset, since there has been more time to collect data. We expect deviations mainly from the numbers in the earliest guides. The dataset used in this post includes 4.3 million matches with the Chaos summoners in Silver League.
When you start a battle in Splinterlands you are presented with all the info about your upcoming battle in a screen like this:
The colored boxes indicate the fields where the most relevant information can be found.
- In the red box, you can see which elements are available for this match. You should use this field to plan which types of matchups you might encounter. There are counter-matchups to learn in Splinterlands, and the element avaiability can be used to identify which summoners have the fewest counterspicks available.
- In the pink box, you can see your opponent's last five matches. You should hover each one to see what they have played recently. Sometimes, you will notice that they primarily play one element (maybe their daily quest is a fire quest?), and you can also identify powerful cards here.
- In the blue box, you have the mana limit for the match. This is the simplest piece of information here, but very important.
- In the green box, the ruleset for the current match is indicated. You should learn the icons and what they mean so that you dont have to wonder how the match is modified.
- There is a final source of information available to you, but it is invisible when you find yourself with the screen above. That is your own recent match history. Try to remember your last five matches if you can. Look them over briefly before you search.
---A crafty and dedicated player might also manipulate their own visible history through practice matches. We have no idea if this is common practice or not.---
The trick to Splinterlands is combining all this information with your knowledge of your deck to make the optimal summoner choice for your match. Next, you will have to construct the team, but very often the match is decided before you press the "CREATE TEAM" button.
How should you best use this information? Well, up to and including Silver League, this guide will give you the data you need to best use each of these pieces of information.
We will cover which summoner to pick at which mana (use with the number in the blue box), which summoners are best for each rule (use with the rules indicated in the green box), and how they match up against each other (use with info in the red and pink boxes).
Win rates for different mana limits
The chart above shows the win rates of the five free-to-play Chaos Legion summoners for all mana levels.
At the lowest mana (12), Thaddius Brood has his very best performance, closely followed by Obsidian. Tarsa is also pretty decent. Up to 15 mana, these three compete for first place.
Between 16 and 22 mana, Tarsa outperforms the other summoeners by quite a margin. At these levels, she can efficiently utilize Serpentine Spy and Tenyii Striker (also Living Lava in some cases) to quickly take down her opponent.
Also at 16 mana and above, Thaddius Brood starts to fall off, and gets progressively worse as mana increases. This continues up to the three highest mana ranges, where he sees a slight increase.
Kelya Frendul becomes playable at 15 mana. Above that she holds her ground solidly, but is never the best summoner. Between 22 and 26 mana, there is fierce competition between Obsidian, Tarsa and Kelya for first place. All three do quite well, and the best one will be decided by the ruleset.
Above 26 mana, Obsidian dominates. Her winrate outshines the others by a good margin. This same range is where poor General Sloan does her best, but she has only a single mana limit where she has positive win rate. 26 mana is the optimal level for her (see the Sloan guide for further discussion).
After 30 mana, Tarsa starts to drop off, and does so quite sharply as mana increases from 30 to 40. This is because her key cards become obsolete as they have to compete against higher mana cost cards.
Win rates in different rules
The table below shows the win rate of the summoners in every ruleset. For each rule, the best summoner will be indicated by a 🔥.
| ---Rule--- | Tarsa | Kelya Frendul | Obsidian | General Sloan | Thaddius Brood |
| Aim True | 0.53 🔥 | 0.46 | 0.48 | 0.52 | 0.46 |
| Armored Up | 0.46 | 0.43 | 0.55 🔥 | 0.44 | 0.49 |
| Back to Basics | 0.40 | 0.50 | 0.58 🔥 | 0.45 | 0.49 |
| Broken Arrows | 0.47 | 0.48 | 0.52 🔥 | 0.20 | 0.48 |
| Close Range | 0.48 | 0.50 🔥 | 0.50 🔥 | 0.49 | 0.46 |
| Earthquake | 0.42 | 0.46 | 0.54 🔥 | 0.35 | 0.45 |
| Equal Opportunity | 0.52 🔥 | 0.51 | 0.49 | 0.45 | 0.44 |
| Equalizer | 0.53 | 0.44 | 0.55 🔥 | 0.53 | 0.42 |
| Even Stevens | 0.36 | 0.53 🔥 | 0.49 | 0.53 | 0.43 |
| Explosive Weaponry | 0.47 | 0.54 🔥 | 0.48 | 0.47 | 0.47 |
| Fog of War | 0.45 | 0.50 | 0.55 🔥 | 0.47 | 0.42 |
| Healed Out | 0.49 | 0.50 🔥 | 0.50 🔥 | 0.46 | 0.48 |
| Heavy Hitters | 0.48 | 0.50 | 0.51 🔥 | 0.47 | 0.47 |
| Holy Protection | 0.45 | 0.46 | 0.54 🔥 | 0.48 | 0.48 |
| Keep Your Distance | 0.38 | 0.46 | 0.55 🔥 | 0.45 | 0.51 |
| Little League | 0.55 🔥 | 0.50 | 0.48 | 0.45 | 0.50 |
| Lost Legendaries | 0.48 | 0.50 | 0.52 🔥 | 0.47 | 0.48 |
| Lost Magic | 0.50 | 0.54 🔥 | 0.19 | 0.50 | 0.43 |
| Melee Mayhem | 0.51 🔥 | 0.48 | 0.50 | 0.44 | 0.46 |
| Noxious Fumes | 0.52 | 0.49 | 0.47 | 0.32 | 0.55 🔥 |
| Odd Ones Out | 0.54 🔥 | 0.51 | 0.52 | 0.33 | 0.46 |
| Reverse Speed | 0.56 🔥 | 0.33 | 0.51 | 0.53 | 0.44 |
| Rise of the Commons | 0.49 | 0.49 | 0.53 🔥 | 0.47 | 0.48 |
| Silenced Summoners | 0.43 | 0.46 | 0.48 🔥 | 0.43 | 0.44 |
| Spreading Fury | 0.48 | 0.51 | 0.53 🔥 | 0.41 | 0.46 |
| Stampede | 0.49 | 0.49 | 0.51 🔥 | 0.46 | 0.46 |
| Standard | 0.46 | 0.52 🔥 | 0.51 | 0.44 | 0.50 |
| Super Sneak | 0.54 🔥 | 0.48 | 0.48 | 0.43 | 0.46 |
| Taking Sides | 0.46 | 0.50 | 0.52 🔥 | 0.45 | 0.46 |
| Target Practice | 0.50 | 0.51 🔥 | 0.50 | 0.47 | 0.46 |
| Unprotected | 0.51 🔥 | 0.39 | 0.51 🔥 | 0.42 | 0.54 |
| Up Close & Personal | 0.53 🔥 | 0.50 | 0.25 | 0.19 | 0.44 |
| Weak Magic | 0.48 | 0.52 🔥 | 0.49 | 0.50 | 0.43 |
Summoner vs. Summoner stats 🧱📄✂️
The table below shows the overall winrate in each matchup. Each ROW in the table is the chance of the summoner in the leftmost column to win against the summoners specified at top of each COLUMN. So the first entry shows that Tarsa wins 37% of the time against Kelya Frendul. Entries above 50% win rate are marked by 🔥.
| Tarsa | Kelya Frendul | Obsidian | General Sloan | Thaddius Brood | |
| Tarsa | 0.37 | 0.46 | 0.48 | 0.65 🔥 | |
| Kelya Frendul | 0.63 🔥 | 0.29 | 0.63 🔥 | 0.61 🔥 | |
| Obsidian | 0.54 🔥 | 0.71🔥 | 0.60 🔥 | 0.27 | |
| General Sloan | 0.52 🔥 | 0.37 | 0.4 | 0.62 🔥 | |
| Thaddius Brood | 0.35 | 0.39 | 0.73 🔥 | 0.38 |
Some takeaways
- Tarsa struggles against Kelya, crushes Thaddius
- Kelya Frendul stomps Tarsa and General Sloan, struggles against Obsidian
- General Sloan has a good matchup against Tarsa, and very good against Thaddius Brood
- Thaddius Brood should only be played against Obsidian
- Obsidian wins against everything apart from Thaddius Brood.
Closing Remarks
This guide covers how to choose which Chaos Legion summoner you should choose for Splinterlands matches up to and including Silver League. The guide is based on match statistics sampled since the launch of Chaos Legion. At the time of writing, the dataset includes 4.300.000 matches with Chaos Legion summoners. The numbers in this guide is representative of the state of the game when the guide was written. Over time, the game might change, new strategies will evolve etc.
Let us know if this guide has helped you, and if you have any other comments or suggestions please let us know.
Please also check out our other content:
Beginner Guides
Beginners guide - Kelya Frendul
Beginners guide - Obsidian
Beginners guide - Thaddius Brood
Beginners guide - Tarsa
Beginners guide - General Sloan
Summoner and Card statistics
Best Legendary Cards of Chaos Legion - Week 1 statistics
Chaos summoners - Week 1 statistics
Rule set strategies
We are also creating guides for specific rules. You can find them here:
Strategycorner with Mammuter #5: How to WIN in Reverse Speed
Strategycorner with Mammuter #4: How to WIN in Melee Mayhem
Strategycorner with Mammuter #3: Noxious Fumes
If you would like to see more of this content, please let me know, like and share the post. Also, if you have not yet started playing Splinterlands, you can join and support me and the same time with the following link
Another way to support us is through card delegations or donations. If you want to do that, we are @kalkulus and @mammuter.
Best of luck in Splinterlands!
Kalkulus
This is a lovely post, such high effort! The stats can be really helpful on where to start, awesome job!
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Great breakdown, I love how you included the head to head stats - it helps a lot when you can see your opponent's match history!
Another fantastic post. Keep up the great work on researching and presenting these analysis.
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Great info. I like the graphics which let me know which summoners to look at first for each mana range.
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Thanks for sharing! - @ashikstd
Very good! Thanks for sharing this type of analysis. Just one remark: statistically, some of the win-rate differences (for instance, obsidian vs kelya in heavy hitters) are likely not significant and might be attributed to chance. To say they are statistically/significantly different would require a hypothesis testing, which is quite easy to do as there are online tools for it - I'm happy to help if you want. This does not detract from the value of your analysis though. Thanks again and keep on sharing these, please!
You are absolutely right of course. When I use these terms (significant, statistically) in the text it is not in the scientifically accurate sense, but simply as a common language adjectives. Uncertainty will always be a thing to keep in mind with these posts, and I have not included any uncertainty estimates. I know a miniority of players might appreciate uncertainty, but if I include that it clogs up the post and makes the results less accessible for many players. That is my reasoning anyway.
Great information