Fly Like a Butterfly, Sting Like a Bee

Introduction

It is a classic matchup: Speed versus Power. The battle I am sharing today demonstrates why power is only good if you can hit your target. As they say speed kills. This Modern Champion battle is demonstrating that concept quite clearly: TQ24 had loaded up his team with lots of power hitters like Venka, Commander Slade with Armored strike from Elias Max Pruitt, but they just couldn't land a hit on my evasive Commander Slade.

The Strategy

The strategy for this battle was all centered around making my main tank Commander Slade un-hittable.

First up we have our summoner Cryptic. This is a great summoner and it is key to our strategy of making Commander Slade more evasive. It gives us two main abilities: it nerfs the speed of the opposing team by one and makes their entire team blind. Blind basically increases the chances of the opponent missing their hit by fifteen percent.

Cryptic also allows us to give Poison and Expose abilities to two of our monsters, there is also an option of giving Retaliate and Enfeeble abilities to two of our monsters, but I really prefer to use poison.

Next up we have Commander Slade which is the most critical card in this play. The whole strategy is centered around making Commander Slade almost impossible to hit. Out of the box Commander Slade has great specifications: Five Melee damage, Seven Shield, ten health and six speed for a total of ten mana.

It also has great abilities: Enfeeble, Dodge, Deflect shield and Backfire. Backfire is great in this strategy because every time our opponent misses Commander Slade delivers two physical damage to them. Dodge is also great as it makes it harder to hit Commander Slade. The only vulnerability that Commander Slade really has at this point is that it is not very good against magic attacks, and that is where our next key card comes in:

Jicarilla the Rime is critical to making Commander Slade protected against magic attacks. She has a Phase Ward ability. This ability gives the unit in front of her a Phase ability which now means that Commander Slade can avoid magic attacks as well.

She also comes with other useful supporting abilities such as Cleanse Rearguard that cleanses the last allied backline unit, it also has a tank heal ability which would come in useful in the cases where Commander Slade does get hit and an Echo ability where all repair, cleansing and healing abilities trigger twice per round.

Next I played Ironwing Juggernaut a three mana neutral new reward card. I played him mostly for his true strike ability in case our opponent also has a hard to hit card upfront.

Next we have a trio of speed control monsters with other great abilities: Yaba's Pickle that slows all opponents as well as having a self heal, dodge and shield abilities, Daarg Deadblast that provides speed up to all of our units as well as weapons training to units around it such as Yaba's Pickle and Daigendark Surveyor as well as triage. Daigendark Surveyour slows down the entire enemy team as well as having magic reflect and stun abilities that sometimes come in quite handy.

The Battle

Link to the Battle

As you can see my opponent TQ24 made his bet on the Power, but as you can see in the next screenshot the speed of his units is really slow compared to my Commander Slade:

At the start of the round two there were still no hits against my Commander Slade and heavily armored Commander Slade from the TQ24 is already off the field.