Briar Patch! Weekly Battle Mage Secrets!

mochilub(65)

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Welcome back to our Weekly Battle Mage Secrets!
This week, we are featuring the Briar Patch ruleset.

Briar Patch: All monsters receive the Thorns ability at the start of the battle. Enemy monsters that use melee attacks receive damage back.

Briar Patch or what I usually call the Mylor ruleset can be understood more as follows:

Damage returned is equal to damage of the attacker divided by 2, rounded up.
Melee attack monsters with the Reflection Shield ability do not take damage from thorns.
The Amplify ability increases damage.

Some other key points to take note of are:

Try to avoid using melee on your side unless they have the Reflection Ability. Key monsters like Tide Biter are important since they don't get affected by thorns
Use ranged and magic damage wherever possible to override having to go against thorns
Armor can play a critical role to tank against thorns if you need to be forced into using melee without Reflection Shield
Same with Armor, extra HP is key to outlast your opponent as much as possible
Do not underestimate amplify. I've already mentioned it above but if both sides are equal and you have amplify when the opponent doesn't, it becomes the deciding factor in many matches

This week's feature is from a regular match in diamond league. Rulesets are as follows:

Little League
Briar Patch
Rise of the Commons

The high mana cap isn't really applicable in this particular match due to the little league ruleset and even more so due the the rise of the commons ruleset on top of that.

Round 1

I mentioned that for thorns, we want to limit having melee monsters as much as possible. If that's not an option, we opt to use them at the tank and secondary tank position but also make sure there's extra armor to throw around. This is why the Tower Griffin is key here due to the protect ability by giving everyone 1 extra armor to help tank that reflect as needed.

The enemy opted to try using an Exploding Rats as their front line to see if they can squeeze in one big attack with blast. Unfortunately for them, the combo of my -1 speed from the Time Mage and the +1 speed from the Naga Assassin ensures that I am able to hit first thereby negating that initial hit (not that it have changed the game, but still). Redemption is also tanked by the +1 armor as mentioned earlier.

Round 2

The start of round 2 sees us eliminating the enemy's secondary tank being the Twilight Basilisk. The extra armor from the Blinding Reflector made sure to tank a lot of hits and the reflect magic ability is cherry on top as it helped soften up the Elven Mystic for extra reflect magic damage.

Round 3

Round 3 is the culmination of all the advantages we've had since the previous rounds. We didn't even lost any of our monsters as the good balance of melee, ranged, magic, extra armor and speed made a solid combo to ensure that we'd dominate this match.