Briar Patch Ruleset - Battle Mage Secrets

Winning the Briar Patch ruleset battle: Briar Patch and Counterspell Battle

RULESET: Briar Patch

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

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.

The Strategy

Normally with a Briar Patch ruleset you would want to avoid using Melee monsters leading to the increased usage of Magic or Ranged attack monsters. In this case we have an additional Counterspell ruleset which makes Magic Monsters vulnerable to magic reflect. Therefore the most logical is to go with a pure ranged attack monsters. This becomes way too predictable and vulnerable to a counter.

Considering above and the fact that this is a fairly high mana battle at 54 I decided to go with a counter play using two Melee and three Magic monsters as well as one Ranged Monster. Additionally I chose a dragon summoner that reduces enemy ranged attack as well as speed. I have chosen Queen Mycelia for her triage and rust and protect abilities hoping that two armor will protect from ranged attack and triage would work to heal some of the magic reflect.

The Summoner

Quix the Devious is one of my favorite summoners which reduces by one ranged attack and speed of the whole enemy team. It also let's us use all of the powerful Dragon team monsters that are very useful for the high mana battle like this one.

1st Slot - Tank

Legionnaire Alvar is a neutral monster with nine armor, seven health and three point melee attack that has four other abilities which are great but not crucial in this battle. The primary reason for it here is the high armor and health for his nine mana.

2nd Slot - Secondary Tank, Reach Monster

Carnage Titan is a very strong Dragon monster with four melee attack and double strike ability. This makes him capable of inflicting eight melee damage in a single round. Reach ability is also very useful and Shield ability that reduces damage from ranged attacks and reduces thorn damage that is emitted from every monster under this ruleset are also critical for my counter ranged play.

3rd Slot - Major Magic Damage Dealer Monster

Chaos Dragon is another great Dragon monster that inflicts 4 magic damage with blast ability. He also has a Scattershot ability which is also useful in this context. Blind ability also helps increase the number of ranged attack misses from the opponent team.

4th Slot - Support Monster

Queen Mycelia is one of the best legendary support monsters from the Chaos set which is reflected in her market price and makes her one of the most expensive Chaos Legendary monsters. In this ruleset her Triage ability would be critical in keeping our Chaos Dragon operational despite magic reflect damage he would take. She also has rust ability that reduces enemy armor helping our Melee and Ranged damage dealers. At the same time she also equips our whole team with two armor that is very useful against ranged teams which we expect here.

5th Slot - Healing and Affliction Monster

Goblin Psychic is a great monster that has tank heal, dispel, affliction and silence abilities. He should help keep our tank and secondary tank alive.

6th Slot - Ranged Damage Dealer Monster

Supply Runner is a great monster that speeds up our whole team and deals three ranged damage which is useful in the context of these rulesets. It also increases health of all of our monsters.

The Battle

Looking at the initial lineup it is clear that my opponent went with a pure ranged strategy with Wave Brood acting as a ranged return fire tank counting on me to also go with a ranged strategy.

As we can see by round two we were able to almost take down their Wave Brood tank and our Goblin Psychic was able to land Affliction on Wave Brood so that it cannot be healed by the opponent's healer. The healer is down to one health and is going to die if our Chaos Dragon hits any of the last three monsters in his lineup.

In the round two Supply Runner goes first and takes out their tank and our Chaos Dragon hits their healer directly and Queen Mycelia keeps healing Chaos Dragon almost restoring his health that was lost to magic reflect. We did loose our tank to relentless ranged assault, but we still have our secondary tank with 4 shield and reduced damage from thorns and ranged attacks.

This is starting to look like a victory!

And in round three as they say "Speed Kills" we start with Supply Runner taking out their front monster and Chaos Dragon goes second and eliminates the rest of their team for a victory!

We get a nice boost to or ranking +36 and 2.497 SPS to add to our SPS HODL stash!