@michele-mitchell
[quote] Now I can be pitted against someone 30 flock points below me and still lose even if I use all five spells AND the extra video bird. [/quote]
I agree with @mike-fairclough — up your game. If you’re not earning 8 or 9 stars with ease when using spells, you’re not optimizing your birds. Here are some hints:
1) If you have the spells, always bring FOUR or FIVE in. There’s a very good reason for this. Four spells is 8 cards “behind”, and 5 spells is a “full deck”, 9 “behind” those on deck. When you fling a bird, you will NEVER get the same bird as one in your deck (even the unseen “behind” ones).
Best case scenario for me is bring everything but the blizzard (which is harder to come by anyway), and (usually) use my MOST POWERFUL CARD SHOWING first. Why? Because played correctly, this will score 4+ million points, and award two bonus cards — the powerful one I played, and the blizzard I didn’t bring. You start the game essentially with 4 million points and a full deck — a huge head start.
2) Your goal is *not* to clear all the pigs. Your goal is utter destruction of all elements — ice, stone, wood and pigs. The non-pig stuff is worth MASSIVE points, way more than the pigs, in fact. It’s the difference between knocking a pig off the top of a tower left standing, for 300,000 points, and taking the tower out at the base, and causing all the bricks to fall off the cliff, for 2 million points.
3) Note that doing #2 above has a side benefit — more “bonus birds”. Yes, they come fewer and farther between as the score racks up, but maximizing points can easily be the difference between three or more birds that you wouldn’t have had without all the above “max points”. It’s WAY easier to win when you have not just the “5 bird” advantage from bringing spells, but three MORE birds from playing spot-on. With an 8-bird edge, you can’t lose. (I can’t remember the last time I flat-out lost an arena match.)
4) You want to do this with as few birds as possible, of course, so plan shots well. Use Red to push towers over on one another. Use Silver to undercut a tower to make it fall the direction you want it to (to take out another tower). Use the spitting flowers to their full advantage — they can often help you one-bird a room that would take three birds without them. Ditto the portals, and the gravity wells. Spaceman pigs can help if strategically popped as well. Think your way out of wasting birds taking out a construction pig or magic pig (those that will block your shots), and find a way to take out the structures they are standing on, rather than directly. Combine this strategy with #2 to REALLY make things hum.
5) Endgame: If you’ve saved a Mighty Eagle toward the end, and have two birds left, ALWAYS elect to clear the room with the Mighty Eagle, and take your chances with the regular bird in the next room…. unless you are 100% certain you cal clear that room with the regular bird. There’s nothing worse in the endgame than having an Eagle and a bird…. and not making it to the next room, where one bird is potentially a final 2-3 million if it’s a “good” room for that bird.
Hope this helps.
Jester
