Avoidng the Thorny Path by Using Magic and Range

Hello there! @Saydie here, playing Splinterlands everyday!

I'm here for this week's Battle Mage Secrets with the featured ruleset Briar Patch. It is a ruleset that gives the Thorns ability on all monsters.

The Battle that I will show to you this week was from @agonyaccepted which is my alternate account playing with NFTY arcade deck delegation and was able to placed ranked 14^th from last season's leaderboard, playing at the Diamond league but before I reveal the battle, let us learn more about this ruleset.

Thorns was an ability that does damage to the attacker when hit with melee attack, an ability that was given by the summoner, Mylor Crowling and has an upper cap of 2.

Ruleset

Conditions	Description
Diamond League Modern Format	27 Mana Cap Available Elements: Fire, Life, Earth, Dragon
Little League	Only monsters & summoners that cost 4 mana or less may be used in battles.
Briar Patch	All monsters have the Thorns ability.
Target Practice	All Range and Magic attack Monsters have the Snipe ability.

Opponent's Line- up

Summoner	1st	2nd	3nd	4th	5th	6th

My Team

Summoner	1st	2nd	3nd	4th	5th	6th

For this battle, we have Briar Patch which is the featured ruleset, giving the Thorns ability together with Target Practice and Little League. With this in consideration, my lineup was consist of:

• Summoner: Quix the Devious - Reduces the speed and range damage of opponent monsters by -1 and allows the use of Dragon Splinters.
  
  

• 1^st Position: Spirit Hoarder - Increases the chance of the opponent to miss their attack by 15% using Blind and Dispel to remove the buffs of the target. When a backline monster receives damage, it can restore the health with Triage.
  
  

• 2^nd Position: Pelacor Conjurer - Has Flying that increases its chance to evade attacks by 25% together with Phase that allows it to evade magic attacks. It also had Magic Reflect which will return magic damage towards the attacker and Divine Shield that will ignore the damage when it was hit the first time.
  
  

• 3^rd Position: Dax Paragon - Increases the damage of reflected attacks by +1 with Amplify and has the ability to prevent the target to heal with Affliction.
  
  

• 4^th Position: Naga Assassin Has Backfire that damage the monster that misses when they attack this cards and have Swiftness which increases the speed of all ally monster.
  
  

• 5^th Position: Time Mage - Reduces the speed of all opponent monsters with Slow and removes their armor using Rust.
  
  

• 6^th Position: Venari Crystalsmith - Restores the health of the tank monster with Tank Heal and removes the buffs of the target using Dispel.
  
  

Round 1:

^11-13/27 Naga Assassin and Time Mage defeats Chaos Agent.

^14-19/27 Venari Crystalsmith and Dax Paragon defeats Venari Marksrat which activates the Martyr ability that increases the stats of Xenith Monk and Madcap Magus.

^20-23/27 Xenith Monk defeats Spirit Hoarder which cost it to lose 3 health due to Thorns.

^24-27/27 Fungus Flinger and Queen Mycelia deals 3 damage on Dax Paragon and deals Affliction which prevents it from being healed.

Round 2:

^1-3/16 Naga Assassin and Time Mage defeats Madcap Magus.

^4-11/16 Time Mage and Dax Paragon defeats Fungus Flinger which activates the Martyr ability that increases the stats of Xenith Monk and Queen Mycelia.

^12-14/16 Xenith Monk heals itself before it attacks Pelacor Conjurer that removes its Divine Shield but at the same time, deals 3 damage on Xenith Monk due to Thorns.

^15-16/16 Queen Mycelia defeats Dax Paragon.

Round 3 and 4:

^1-5/9 Naga Assassin and Time Mage defeats Queen Mycelia.

^6-7/9 Venari Crystalsmith deals 3 damage on Xenith Monk and removes its buffs with Dispel.

^8-9/27 Xenith Monk heals itself but misses the attack.

With only Xenith Monk as the last unit remaining on the opponent team, the attacks from my monsters deals enough damage to defeat without the chance to attack given that it has slower speed although it deals 2 damage on Time Mage due to Magic Reflect.

When Briar Patch was an active ruleset, one must refrain from using melee monsters as much as possible in order to prevent receiving unnecessary damage when they attack. Given this situation, it is either they attack with magic or range where we can now choose on possible counter attack against the opponent which by this case was to reduce their range my my summoner ability and by placing monsters with Magic Reflect ability though did not work as much on this situation. But regardless, I still won this match which is kind of important during this time as that win increases my chance for the leaderboard for the current season.

That was it for this post. Thank you and see you at the next one.