In the spirit of the new weekly Battle Mage Secrets challenges, I would like to take a look at a Splinterlands battle with a particular focus on a ruleset. This week's Battle Mage challenge deals with a thorny situation in the Briar Patch, and the ruleset I will be examining in this post is a related one - instead of discouraging melee attackers through counter-damage from Thorns, it straight up bans them. Oh, and I guess while we're at it we'll ban magic attackers too. Today, we will be taking a look at a battle with the Going the Distance ruleset!
Going the Distance ensures that every monster on the battlefield can go long. In other words, that every monster is a ranged attacker. This severely limits the available strategies, making it important to have appropriate monsters and abilities available in your deck. Ranged monsters which are beefy and/or have close range are excellent in this ruleset, as are ones with the Headwinds or Return Fire abilities.
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. Leading it right off is Going the Distance. Ranged attackers only! To go along with it we have Armored Up and Noxious Fumes. This is a little bit of a funny combination - Armored Up will slow the battle down a bit since every monster will have additional armor, but Noxious Fumes will speed it up by applying Poison to everything.
The rulesets are impactful enough that they dictate our strategy for this battle. Thanks to Going the Distance we know that we are going to be using ranged attackers, and thanks to Noxious Fumes we want to bring monsters that can play well under Poison. I opted to go with a Fire lineup, which makes Yodin Zaku a strong selection. Yodin's ranged attack buff and Blast ability are excellent with a ranged attacking lineup, and the Fire splinter has several ranged monsters with plenty of health to survive some Poison damage.
As I mentioned previously, I wanted some monsters with enough health that they wouldn't die quickly to the Poison from Noxious Fumes. Molten Ash Golem was a great option to lead off my team, because its 10 health gives it a lot of bulk, and with Close Range it can even attack from the first position. Venari Marksrat was a sacrificial monster in the second slot. It only had 2 health which meant that it would die to a single turn of poison, but that was the goal - with Martyr, it would buff the monsters on either side of it when it died. And since I knew it would be dying after 1 round, positioning it in the second position gave me a good chance of being able to buff 2 monsters!
My next monster was Lava Launcher. As the third monster in the lineup, it was well positioned to receive a buff from the Marksrat. With 6 health and armor, it had plenty of survivability to hopefully outlast the enemy monsters. And similarly to Molten Ash Golem, it has Close Range which allows it to keep attacking if it happens to get stuck in the front.
Closing out my team was Ash Mirage. Ash Mirage is a great ranged attacker, and is even better when we know that out opponent can only select ranged monsters. This means that Headwinds will get to debuff the entire opposing team! Oh, and 7 health is not too shabby either.
With the lineup set, it's off into battle! When I see the selected teams I like what I see. I have a serious advantage when it comes to attacking power - I have Yodin's summoner buff as well as Headwinds going for me, while the enemy lineup doesn't contain buffs or debuffs of any kind. On the other hand, they ARE packing a fancy legendary gladiator Tatiyana Blayde who could dish out some serious damage if she gets to sit on the front lines...we'll have to see how it plays out!
In the first round of battle everything goes as expected. My team takes out the opposing enemy Marksrat, which unfortunately buffs Tatiana as well as moving her to the front where it is posed to attack. While this means that she'll be able to deal some heavy damage, it also means that she will be first in the line of fire next round.
Luckily, my monsters are able to team up and take down Tatiana before things get too out of hand. She does kill my Molten Ash Golem, but is forced to leave the battlefield soon after. We are left with two teams of heavily damaged monsters, but I like my chances - my monsters still have an overwhelming damage advantage, and my Lava Launcher is about to get buffed by my Marksrat.
One more round and the fight is just about over. The opposing team is whittled down to just a single remaining attacker, and while my own team is also hurting, it still has plenty of armor and enough damage to close out the victory. And again, if you wanted to see the whole battle for yourself, you can see it right here.
My strategy of using a lineup with a combination of ranged buffs and debuffs worked out perfectly in this fight. Yodin lent my entire team Blast, and my monsters used their significant attacking advantage to take down the enemy lineup one by one. This was a slightly tricky combination of rulesets since ranged monsters tend to be more fragile, but several robust options from the Fire splinter were able to carry the day.
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:
The Opportunistic Play - Battling with Equal Opportunity! - A battle analysis, featuring Equal Opportunity!
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!
Thinking about giving Splinterlands a try but haven't signed up yet? Feel free to use my referral link: https://splinterlands.com?ref=bteim, and be sure to reach out to me if you have any questions!
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.
