Hello, Splinter Warrior and Fan Today I will blog again about Splinterlands contest Battle Mage Secrets Challenge. This Week's Theme is about the Armored Up ruleset.

I play in the Modern Format Diamond league, using my scholar account from Balthazar.

Battle Link

If you want to watch the Battle Link
Video link:

Ruleset

• Armored Up, All Monsters have 2 Armor in addition to their normal Armor stat.

• Target Practice: All range and magic monsters have the Snipe ability.

  • Snipe ability, targets enemy Monsters with Ranged, Magic, or no attack that are not in the first position

• Noxious Fumes: All monsters have started a battle with poison status, starting at round 2 the HP will decrease -2 each round.

• mana cap.

• can use Fire, Life, and Dragon element.

My Lineup and strategy

Some Guidelines for the ruleset :

• With the ruleset Armored Up it becomes harder for the range and melee monster to kill the enemy because we need to destroy the armor first before can decrease the HP. Usually, we start to think of using magic monsters who ignore the armor, but remember the enemy will think the same too. So we better use monsters who are good against magic attacks.

• Usually in the ruleset Noxious Fumes many players like to use :

  • Unit with the Immunity ability monsters (ignore Poison effect) Like :
    
    • Forgottten One, unit from Fire Element.
    • Adelade Brightwing, unit from Light Element.
    • Grimbaldun Smith, unit from Rebellion pack Neutral element.
  • Unit with the Martyr ability when poisoned and dies can enhance the stats of the monster adjacent to it. With the element we can use in this battle, there are 2 types of monsters with Marty's ability :
    • Monster with small HP easy to die.
      
      • Venari Marksrat monster from Neutral element.
      • Firecaller monster from the Fire element
    • Monster with big HP and Taunt ability.
      
      Iziar is a monster from Light Element.

• For this ruleset **Target Practice ** we do not pay too much attention to this ruleset, because we plan to use a monster with the Taunt ability (force the enemy if can attack this monster).

In this battle we decided to use the monster Martyr with Taunt ability Iziar from Light element to make it easier for us to set the direction of the enemy's attacks, and also help our monster in first position by breaking the damage from enemy monsters to Iziar and also our monster in first position. We will use monsters with several support abilities that help us deal with Poison effect attacks, such as Immunity, Heal, Strengthen. And we will also prevent enemy monsters from using the Heal support ability by bringing monsters that can provide the Affliction effect. We will discuss it further in the lineup section and also the conclusion:

This is my lineup :

Summoner or monster	Abilities	Description
	The Grandmaster Rathe(summoner), make all friendly monster have Armor +1, Void Armor, and Amplify ability	This monster will give all friendly monster +1 armor, change the armor to void armor (magic damage will hit armor first before the HP) with the ruleset Armored Up will make the enemy magic attack harder to kill our monsters. Amplify will Increase Magic Reflect, Return Fire, and Thorns damage to all enemy monsters by 1, we don't use this ability in this battle
	Uriel the Purifier, 1st position, attacker and tanker. Has the Ability Flying, Recharge, Heal, and Redemption.	This monster has high armor, and HP, and can Heal (this is the main reason we use this monster) a very strong tanker. The other support ability he has is the Flying ability which increases the chance to evade the enemy melee and range attack by 25%. When this monster dies it will give damage to all enemy monsters by 1 (Redemption ability).
	Iziar 2nd position, Attacker and Tanker. Has the ability Taunt, Void, and Martyr ability	Placed in the 2nd position so the enemy damage can be split with the monster in the first position, and we want this monster Martyr ability to boost the stats of Uriel and Prismologist. This monster has a Taunt ability, which makes all enemy if can will attack this monster. With the Void ability will be half the damage of the magic attack. Apart from that, this monster has a large HP the enemy will need time to kill this monster giving time for our attacker to be safe from attack while attacking the enemy monsters..
	Prismologist 3rd position, Attacker. Has the ability Blast, Forcefield, and Silence ability	Placed in the 3rd position to receive the Martyr stats boost from Iziar. This monster has Blast ability, the attack will give damage to the monster adjacent to the monster this monster attack. With the Iziar stats boost this monster will give great damage to several enemies at once. Forcefield ability, will make this monster only receive 1 damage if attacked by a monster with 5 or more damage. Silence ability will decrease all the enemy monster magic attacks by -1.
	Runeslinger 4th position, Attacker. Has the ability Stun, Affliction, and Cripple ability	All these monster abilities will give a hard time for the enemy monster in the Noxious Fumes ruleset. The main reason we use this monster is Affliction ability. If the enemy monster gets attacked by this monster and gets the Affliction effect it will make that monster can't heal/receive heal anymore. Usually in the ruleset Noxious Fumes the Splinterlands player will use a monster with the Heal ability. The enemy monster who got Stun will skip its next turn. Cripple ability will decrease the maximum health of the monster who got hit by -1. This will decrease the effectiveness of the enemy Heal. The Affliction and Stun effects have a 50% chance to be inflicted upon each attack.
	Adelade Brightwing, 5th position, Attacker and Support, has the ability Flying, Repair, Resurrect, Immunity, and Swiftness.	Placed in the 5th position to protect this monster from the enemy attack with Sneak ability. This monster has Immunity ability which ignores the Poison effect. The Flying ability gives a 25% increase in the chance to evade the enemy melee and range attack. The Resurrect ability which is very useful for reviving our monster Iziar, we use this monster to double the effect of the Martyr ability. The ability Swiftness will help all our monsters to get a +1 speed boost so can increase the chance to attack first, evade the enemy attack, and hit the enemy. Repair ability will help our monster survive, this will restore the ally armor with the most damage.
	Supply Runner, 6h position, attacker and Support. Has Swiftness, and Strengthen ability	We need this monster Strengthen ability to enhance the HP of all our monsters by +1. Swiftness ability will increase the speed of all our monsters by +1. We put this monster in the last position, to protect our Adelade Brightwing.

The Battle

• Round 1 :
  All enemies attack our Iziar except the Bear in the first position while all our monsters in 2nd - 6th position attack the enemy Venari Marksrat. Our Prismologist attacked it and gave damage to the enemy Bear and Forgotten One.

• Round 2:
  The enemy unit Venari Marksrat dies and boosts the stats of Bear and Forgotten One. Our Iziar dies to boost the stats of Uriel and Prismologist, but Resurrected again by our Adelade, because of the Resurrection the Poison effect now disappears. The enemy Firecaller dies attacked by our Prismologist who once again gives Blast effect damaging the enemy Forgotten One and Sorrel the Bale. The Firecaller gives the Martyr effect to the Forgotten One and Sorrel.

• Round 3 :
  The enemy Sorrel Die was attacked by our Iziar, although this monster has a boost from the Firecaller **Martyr ability it doesn't have a chance to attack. With the death of Sorrel all range and magic attacks behind all eliminated so our range and magic monsters will start to attack the enemy in the first position. One again our Prismologist hit the Bear and gave Blast effect to the enemy Forgotten One decreasing the armor. The bear only receives 1 damage because have Forcefield ability.

• Round 4 :
  The enemy Bear die attacked by our Uriel triple damage. Our Iziar dies too attacked by the enemy Tenyii Striker, boosts the stats of Uriel and Prismologist. In this round, the Prismologist hit Forgotten One destroyed the armor, and gave damage to Tenyii Striker which destroyed the armor too.

• Round 5 :
  At the start of the round, The enemy Tenyii Striker and our Prismologist die because of the effect of the Poison. The enemy only left 1 monster Forgotten One against 3 of our monsters.

• Round 6 :
  Without a chance to do anything our Uriel attacks the Forgotten One and kills it. The victory becomes ours.

Did your Strategy Work?

Some strategies that we use and work :

• Using Iziar allows us to carry out several strategies at once:
  • Making all enemy monsters in the 2nd - 6th position attacking Iziar making our attacking monsters in the back and Uriel safe from attacks by many enemies. Even without a healer, the enemy had difficulty killing our Iziar because he had a lot of HP and the enemy lacked monsters that could attack. Iziar was able to survive until the fourth round.
  • Even though in the fourth round Iziar finally died, his death inherited the 2x Martyr effect which gives a big stats boost to our two monsters Prismologist and Uriel.
  • As we wrote above in the Armored Up ruleset, usually the enemy will bring magic monsters, with Iziar having the Void ability make it strong against magic attacks. and also Iziar has a magic attack that ignores armor.
• Our tanker Uriel in the first position cannot be defeated by the enemy Bear. After Iziar died in the fourth round we relied on Uriel in first position to face Forgotten One. Forgotten One had difficulty killing Uriel because he had a lot of HP and armor, also has good dodging abilities (Flying ability) and had support from Adelade Brighwing who provided armor repair each round.
• Prismologist with the Blast effect and Martyr ability gives a lot of damage to several monsters at once, although most of it hits armor so not according to our plan, but is enough to help reduce the armor of Forgotten One, so that when advance to the first position we can easily kill him.
• Adelade Brightwing Immunity helps this monster to stay alive until the end of the round and gives support to our monster with the Repair ability.
• Use Grandmaster Rathe as our summoner to make our unit stronger against magic attacks.

I think the enemy made a mistake by putting Forgotten One at the back because in that position Forgotten One couldn't make any attacks. In the battle with a high mana cap, we needed every one of our monsters to make attacks. The enemy's strategy might be successful if the battle is with a small mana cap.

Do We Need Magic Type Monster?

To answer the question in the title for the Armored Up ruleset, yes we need it but better to bring a magic monster that can debuff the enemy or have support ability to Buff our monster like in this battle Iziar and Adelade Brightwing. But I think we need to mix it with range monsters, usually many enemy players think like us and anticipate the use of magic because they know if range needs to destroy the armor first (which in the Armored Up ruleset got buff) but the magic attack will immediately hit HP.

Thank you, my friend, for taking the time to review my battle report. I appreciate your efforts and would be grateful if you could provide me with feedback on any mistakes you find by leaving a comment.

If you are new and want to try this fantastic strategy card battle game feel free to use my referral code https://splinterlands.com?ref=poplar-22 to join.

Credit

• Thumbnail using Canva.
• Divider took from @kyo-gaming.
• Card description, Image, and graphic were taken from https://Peakmonsters.com and https://Splintercards.com