Strategy Corner #13 -Counterspell Ruleset - Don't be afraid to play magic

Today we have another ruleset to discuss amongst that which was introduced recently. In my opinion, is a good thing that the dev team adds some new things to the game. It's still not enough, of course, I would like to see new tournaments mode, achievements, etc, but I guess this is a topic for another long discussion. A new ruleset is for sure something new to the game, but still, they usually rely on abilities that are already in the game. Maybe next time we could see something completely new? I hope so :)

Description:

All monsters receive the Magic Reflect ability at the start of the battle. Enemy monsters that attack with magic receive damage back.

Additional information:

• Damage returned is equal to the damage of the attacker divided by 2, rounded up.
• Magic monsters with the Reflection Shield ability do not take damage from reflected magic attacks.
• The Amplify ability increases damage.

Firstly, the description of the ruleset in the game is not perfect, sometimes you got just general information which not giving you all information you need. Best way to read the full description as above from the game documentation at least once. You can check all here.

I seriously encourage you guys to check more information about reflect magic, here is the precise link. I think even more, advanced players could find something interesting there.

Counterspell is another ruleset that relies on some ability from the game which gives back damage to the attacker. It's a very similar case to the Briar Patch ruleset, which we discussed earlier. So we could approach it with similar ways: first just avoid playing magic monster, easy and predictable :), another way is to play some kind of defense to protect our monster from returned damage, a good example here is Immortalis, the third option is just using magic to try to surprise the opponent and try to survive long enough to wipe out the enemy team before our team will kill themself :).

As always I encourage you to check @iamgem005 article, where he tries to analyze some key cards which could be useful for this strategy.

Another nice approach is to get the almost full counter team with Ilthain, you can read it in @queen-silvia article. We will talk about it more in battle section :)

Today's battle could be a perfect example of a full-counter team. In the ruleset we got already reflect magic and thorn damage, with Ilthain's ability we could get return fire. I cannot remember now if Ilthain was available for me in that fight, probably not, other way it would be a perfect choice here.

Franz Ruffmane is still a solid choice here, it gives us some protection and allows us to play Captain Katie which is a very strong card. Let's see if our team could survive all that reflect magic damage.

Round 2, Iziar is a strong card, but the opponent team has a lot of damage. Fortunately, Coeurl Lurker doesn't have Phase ability at this level, so our magic team was able to kill it in the first round and kill perfectly went to Katie, now she is even more dangerous.

Round 2.5, let's stop it here for a while, the battle seems quite fast with a lot of strong damage monsters. Now we can see how crucial was this bloodlust buff, our Katie could get one-hit kill and managed to eliminate the strongest opponent's monster. Even getting reflected damage seems to not matter in that case.

Round 3, we are almost there, Katie should get another kill in this round, fortunately for us there is no close combat ruleset and healing is disabled, so Cornealus is not so powerful here. But I think even with full power, Captain Katie now is unstoppable :)

Round 4 - it's over, so far we lost only our tank monster, Captain Kate just applied the final lethal blow :). Let's jump to the analysis and discuss our line there.

I still wonder how this battle could go with Ilthain instead of Franz. There are two obvious conclusions that we could learn from this battle: don't be afraid to play a magic team in the counterspell ruleset and second Captain Katie is a beast (yes @holoz0r I said it :D ). Of course for example, if the opponent played some of amplify ability monsters or Grandmaster Rathe it would be the slaughter for our team. But as I mentioned before for this kind of battle we always try to outsmart our opponent with those mind games at every step :). Sometimes we just choose wrong :).

IZIAR, was our hero card in Strategy Corner #06, you can read more about that card and some good combo here. In our today's battle, we use him in a different role, as I main tank for two reasons: thorn damage ruleset (I know it has its own name :D), and some protection with void ability to magic and reflected damage. It was a solid choice, even versus very high range damage opponent's team.

CAPTAIN KATIE as mentioned above, is a beast :). I not so often put gladiator cards in the core team section, but Katie is definitely the card for which you want sometimes to resign with more powerful summoners and play for example Franz Ruffmane instead. For counterspell ruleset it's quite important that the bloodlust ability gives the monster additional HP, so survivability is much better. Of course, sometimes you need to have more luck to get that final blow with her.

DAX PARAGON, is another card which we already discussed before. As you can see some powerful cards should be used in every battle :), but definitely any reflecting damage ruleset is a perfect condition to play Dax. Here even with magic reflect ruleset, he could survive till the end of the battle, and provide some additional damage every turn. Very useful card, please don't forget about him.

All those rulesets, which rely on some of the reflection damage in-game ability are very interesting. Theoretically, they limit our choice of the damage type which we should use. But theoretically is the key word here, as I presented above, you sometimes shouldn't be afraid to use the monster with damage, which is the ruleset reflection damage type.
One thing which could be very interesting is the statistic after every battle with the highest damage dealers, most healed points, etc. I wonder if those small support monsters like Dax Paradon could be in the first position of dealt damage table from time to time :). I think I will try to propose this idea on some Town Hall :).

I hope you like this kind of battle and strategy presentation. More strategy analysis, discussion, and prediction games you can find on my Wednesday Splinterlands.tv stream. You can check the schedule here

If you have any comments, please do not hesitate. Do you think I could improve anything just tell me :)

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Thumbnails and other pictures borrowed with permission from the Splinterlands team or made in Cooltext