This week's Battle Mage Secrets challenge features the Healed Out ruleset! Healed Out is one of those rulesets that removes one aspect of battles from a particular fight. In this case, (as you may be able to tell from the name) that aspect is healing. Thinking of bringing along a monster with some sort of healing ability? Well, you're free to do so...but they won't be doing any health recovery or any kind!
The obvious losers in Healed Out battles are monsters with those healing abilities - Heal, Tank Heal, or Triage. Similarly, any beefy monsters that tend to rely on some sort of healing are quite a bit less useful in these fights. On the other hand, with healing off the table, that leaves Repair as the only form of recovery usable in the battle. While Repair does have some shortcomings compared with health recovery, something is often better than nothing.
If you wanted to jump right to the action, the Battle Link is right here. Want to hear some more about the lineup? Read on further!
Here are the rules for our battle. We have Up Close and Personal, which limits monsters to only ones which have a melee attack. There is also Holy Protection, which gives every monster a Divine Shield. And finally, we have Healed Out. Healed Out is debatably the least impactful rule out of the bunch, but it still plays a role here - in Up Close and Personal fights, bringing along a monster with Heal is often a solid play. Thanks to Healed Out, that option is not available in this battle.
In Up Close and Personal battles, Mylor Crowling is a very strong summoner choice. The Earth splinter is available here so we're bringing Mylor. Thorns is great in battles with a lot of melee, and with Up Close and Personal we know that every monster will be melee! Of course, with Healed Out we also know that any Thorns damage will be permenant.
Mycelic Infantry and Disintegrator make a powerful two card combination, because Disintegrator debuffs enemy attacks and Mycelic Infantry reduces attacks even further with its Shield ability. In some battles, that may even be enough to reduce the opposing monsters' damage output to zero. But we'll settle for getting some serious tanking from Mycelic Infantry - remember that with Thorns, the more attacks we can force the opposing monsters to have to make, the better.
In the spirit of increasing the amount of enemy attacks, Arkemis the Bear is our next monster. Arkemis has great stats to be the third tank in our lineup, and his Protect ability essentially gives all of the monsters in our lineup an extra two health. Venari Scout was up next as an Opportunity attacker to potentially take advantage of any particularly fragile monsters on the other side of the battlefield.
We're a little short on mana by this point, so we'll close out our team with some cost effective monsters. Fungus Fiend is the king of cost efficiency, for the unbeatable price of free. Hill Giant doesn't pack any cool abilities, but for just 3 mana we get a monster with plenty of stats who should do a great job of being a meat shield and dealing Thorns damage to any enemy Sneak attackers.
With the lineup set, it's off into battle! When I see the selected teams I feel pretty good about my chances. My opponent has brought some solid monsters of their own, including a Harklaw with Demoralize. But other than their Djinn Chwala at the front, they have a distinct lack of Thorns damage.
This battle gets off to a slow start, thanks to Demoralize on both sides of the battlefield. But over the first few rounds of the fight the enemy monsters slowly kill themselves on my team's Thorns. By the start of round 4 all of the opposing Sneak and Opportunity attackers are dead.
It continues to be a very grinding fight, but by the start of round 7 all that remains on the enemy team is Harklaw. Granted, it is a very powerful card - it is packing the combination of Shield and Demoralize in a single monster! Luckily for me, it will still be taking Thorns damage.
This was a long one, but Harklaw finally ran out of steam all the way at round 16. His Shield could protect him from my monster's attacks, but not his own counter-damage. And again, if you wanted to see the whole battle for yourself, you can see it right here.
This battle was a grind-fest, but thanks to Mylor's powerful summoner ability my team was able to prevail in the end. With all of the Demoralize debuffs in this fight, it is certainly for the best that Healed Out was also in play - if either of us had been able to bring a little bit of healing then we might have been fighting all day! Luckily for me, that was not the case - Healed Out made all of that damage from Mylor's Thorns permanent, and that allowed my monsters to close out the fight.
Thank you so much for reading all the way to the end. Interested in seeing some more of my writing in the future? Be sure to give me a follow! In the meantime, if you'd like to see some of my recent posts:
Adding It All Up - Battling with Equalizer! - A Splinterlands battle analysis, featuring Equalizer!
Splinterlands Economics: Causation - A look at causation, and how we can apply it to Splinterlands!
Splinterlands Economics: Ceteris Paribus - An introduction to the concept of Ceteris Paribus, and how we can apply it to Splinterlands!
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All images used in this article are open source and obtained from Pixabay or Unsplash. Thumbnails borrowed with permission from the Splinterlands team or made in Canva.
