Water Mages are Back! (Silver League)

_{Edited in Canva Pro.}

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This was one post that I should've done a few months back. I remembered about talking about this and then everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked. Only the avatar master of---

Nope, we're not going there. Seriously, this was one topic I would've post then but Rebellion came and changed everything.

First, the announcement that Untamed cannot be used anymore was detrimental for this strategy since a lot of the main components were Untamed cards. This turned me off on posting this since it would be then irrelevant after 1-2 weeks.

Second, the theme for the Social Media Challenge also was implemented. Before, in social media challenge, you can share anything. But now, there's themes, which, while I appreciate since I don't need to think of any topics, also limits me because I can only post about that week's topic if I wanted my work to be upvoted.

But since this week's topic is Share Your Battle, then I can pull this out from my magical chest of content and share it. Be warned that this one's only usable now in Wild Format as... Well, as I said, the components are mostly Untamed cards but I can assure you that this is strong and, if not, stronger when combined with the older cards you can hear in this post.

Old Water Mages vs Upgraded Water Mages

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Alric Stormbringer is a really straight forward card. He's Obsidian but a mana cost lower. He gives an additional damage to all friendly magic damage. I found out that it was a strong build but it doesn't work in the new Modern Format because a lot of their components are in Alpha and Beta series, including Alric Stormbringer, which is unusable in Modern Format.

The Wild Water Mages, the Water build before and during Chaos Legion that I found online, are composed of small fast magic damage monsters with Alric Stormbringer as summoner. It's kind of like Obsidian Earth Summoner but with lower mana cost and higher speed. Some examples of the monsters used in this build are Djinn Oshannus, Medusa, Ice Pixie, Enchanted Pixie, Elven Mystic and Venari Wavesmith.

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The Pre-Rebellion Modern Mages:

This is the one I am using right now. This is my own version of Water Mages. This build works best on Silver League because Djinn Oshannus requires the Phase ability to fight against other magic damage builds like Obsidian.

Unlike the Wild Mages, this requires a lot of mana cost to work. The benefit is it retains the Wild Mages idea which has high damage and high speed. This build works against a lot of builds as well but not 100%. Right now, it has around 90% win rate at full build, only finding myself losing to my other original build, the Zombie Dragon Build, which I found quite a bit recently in Silver League.

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Strength and Weakness of the Core Lineup

Pros

1. Flexible, Balanced and Good Match Against Silver Meta. This build is composed of high health monsters. This means, it can counter quite a lot of builds. You can easily add bait monsters for the Opportunity monsters since the lowest health of your is 7. It's good against Sneak monsters because of your Phantom of the Abyss with high speed, Flying and Dodge abilities. It's good against other mages because your Djinn Oshannus has Phase and Void abilities. It's good against straight front to back team since your Djinn Oshannus has high speed. You can remove Nerissa Tridawn for any needed monsters if you need them such as Merdaali Guardian in Fog of War matches. This is one of the easiest composition to run, in my opinion, and really strong at that.
2. Consistent Damage. All of the monsters have magic damage types, meaning they cannot miss. Unless your opponent has Phase ability, then this team would never miss their attacks, which is one of the main strengths of any Mage builds.
3. Cheap to Rent. While it has a lot of strong monsters, the rent is actually quite cheap. The most expensive is probably having a level 2 Phantom of the Abyss for the Demoralize ability, in which, isn't really part of the core strategy. You can rent a level 1 Phantom of the Abyss, which is very cheap for 4.29 DEC per day.
   
   
   

1. High Mana Cost.
   I was able to work around this disadvantage and was able to come up with just Djinn Oshannus and Phantom of the Abyss for 22 mana. However, it's still bad and would probably lose against a full 6 monster 22 mana build. The core build itself requires 38 mana so I wouldn't really want to run this unless you have 38 mana or more.
2. Works Best in Silver League.
   As mentioned before, this build requires Djinn Oshannus's Phase ability to survive against other mages. Yes, he has Void ability at level 1 but the build doesn't have any Tank Heal supports so he would eventually die. Also, running this in Silver and above is better because of the higher mana cap in Silver. If I am not mistaken, the higher the league you have, the higher the chances of you having higher mana cap battles and this build certainly requires high mana.
3. Lots of Unfavorable Rule of Combats.
   This, once again, is associated with mana cost. There are a lot of rules of combats that plays with mana costs and other rules. Little League won't allow you to play this. With Lost Legendaries and Odd Ones Out, you loses Djinn Oshannus and Phantom of the Abyss. With Even Stevens, you lose Nerissa Trisdawn and Captain's Ghost. With Rise of the Commons, you lose Nerissa Tridawn, Djinn Oshannus and Phantom of the Abyss. There are a lot more rules of combat that needs you to adjust this build. However, if everything checks out, you will have a reliable team to fight against anything your opponent would throw on you.

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Top 3 Best Rule of Combat

Unprotected: The core build doesn't have any armor so they won't be affected by Unprotected rule of combat. While it affects you very little since you loses the armor from Kelya Frendul, you still won't lose the increased speed so you're still fine. In addition to that, this would eliminate your opponent's Void Armor abilities, which gives any mage team compositions a hard time.

Keep Your Distance: The core build is full magic damage and doesn't uses any melee monsters. While you can use melee monsters to add as a tank, since you have 2 more free slots, it is not part of the core build and can go without them.

Taking Sides: The core build doesn't use any neutral monsters. While this doesn't bring you any advantages, this certainly affects your opponent to an extent. There are strong anti-mage monsters in the Neutral category such as Legionnaire Alvar, Chain Golem, Coeurl Lurker and Onyx Sentinel. At least, your opponent won't have any chance to use these monsters against you.

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Top 3 Worst Rule of Combat

Weak Magic

: This team is an F2B or Front to Back team. This means your damage will go mostly on the front. Void Armor punishes this build so much and Weak Magic acts like a Void Armor ability for all monsters on the board. While it is hard to beat, it is still not impossible to defeat.

Reverse Speed

: One of the core strategies in this build is abusing speed. The 1st and 6th position monsters, namely Djinn Oshannus and Phantom of the Abyss, relies on speed to evade opponent's attacks. While you still hit your opponent, no problem because of magic damage, with high speed, your opponent will likely hit you as well due to the rules of combat. This is a big problem especially since you don't have any way to restore the lost hitpoints since you are not running any Tank Heal or Triage monsters on the team unless you have extra mana left.

Counterspell

: Worst rule of combat for a full mage team. Against this, it's almost unwinnable. Whenever your monsters attack, you get hit back which is really hard to play against and I suggest using a different build intead during Counterspell Rules of Combat.

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Core Lineup

This is one of the strong lineups that I am using currently. As an example, here's a recent battle where I used it.

^{> > Click here to view the full battle < <}

This Pre-Rebellion Modern Water Mages are very strong against a lot of match ups and you are surely win a lot on this. This allowed me to break through Silver 3 and pushed me up in Silver 1.

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The extra armor given by Kelya is good but it's just a bonus. The increased Speed, though is very important since this build relies on Speed for defense.

Abilities:

+1 Armor. Increase the team's armor by 1.

+1 Speed. Increase the team's speed by 1.

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The main tank of the team. Has high health and high speed to protect himself against melee and range attacks while the ability takes care of the opponent's magic damage attacks. A level 2 of this monster is required and important for this lineup to work.

Abilities:

Halves all the opponent's magic damage. Any damage that is 1 before the effect applies are negated and blocked.

Allows this monster to evade magic attacks. The calculations are the same with how range and melee attacks are calculated.

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High damage monster with high health. She also serves as a secondary disposable tank. You can change her to other monsters if needed to work with the available rules of combat.

Abilities:

None.

Nerissa Tridawn has no abilities at any levels.

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An underrated monster with 3 magic damage at level 4. He has 7 health which is good enough to tank but his main purpose is his ability to counter lineups such as one focusing on Quora Towershead.

Abilities:

Has a chance of inflicting the Affliction status to opponent. Opponents with Affliction status cannot heal or be healed by other monsters. Players normally don't add monsters with Cleanse ability unless they are in much higher league or it's Noxious Fumes rule of combat. You can use this to your advantage by shutting down their Heal and Tank Heal abilities with this monster's ability.

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Phantom of the Abyss's main purpose is to deal with Sneak monsters. His high speed and abilities allow him to evade most of the attacks coming from melee sneaks. The combination of the two initial abilities he gains at level 1 can cut the opponent's hit chance by 50%. So, even if they have both the same speed, the opponent only has half a chance to hit this card unless they have True Strike ability or is a magic damage monster. A level 2 of this monster is appreciated but not required. A level 1 Phantom of the Abyss will work as well without any problems.

Abilities:

Increase the evasion chance of this monster against other monsters without Flying ability by 25%. Flying ability also negates any damage from Earthquake rules of combat.

Increase the evasion chance of this monster against other monsters by 25%.

Decrease opponent's melee damage by 1 with a minimum of 1. Monsters with 1 damage before the effect applies are unaffected.

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You can use Runemancer Rye to add in this lineup if you have the funds or mana left to add her. You can also trade Nerissa Tridawn with Runemancer Rye for a better lineup.

The main reason why I didn't add Runemancer Rye in this lineup is because she is too expensive to rent. A level 2 can be rented for 19 DEC per day and you need 133 DEC to rent her for a week or 285 DEC for a whole season.

Nerissa Tridawn can be rented for 3.57 DEC per day for a level 3, which is the max level for Silver. That's 24.99 DEC for a whole week or 53.55 DEC for a whole season. That's 231.45 DEC per season difference when renting Runemancer Rye.

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Sample Battle

^{> > Click here to see the full battle < <}

This is a sample of the full battle. The rule of combat is not related, though. This is just to show the full build of this lineup.

Favorite Battle Moments:
In this battle, I combined another strategy which is using Venari Marksrat's Martyr ability to increase Djinn Oshannus's stats and revive it using River Heliondale's Resurrection ability for you to use Martyr twice. The important part of this is increases Djinn Oshannus's damage and speed.

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I was really happy to find this build and I hope not many would copy this because, to be honest, it's hard to beat with my current cards and rentals. If my opponent uses this and I don't, I would surely lose since I don't have the Zombie Dragon Build rented right now due to its price.

At the time of this article, I am at 1726 rating and this build boosted me up from 1100 rating. Also, this is a last minute discovery so I will add it here instead. I found out that you can also use Lobstradamus level 3 as an additional tank if you have extra mana.

It went under my radar since no one uses it but it's currently strong in Silver due to its abilities. He's a bit like Djinn Oshannus in a sense that he can deal with all damage types but in a different way. He has Shield ability to reduce opponent's melee and range damage while the Magic Reflect ability deals with any Magic damage. He's a really good card in Silver league once you unlocked both abilities.

Additional Notes: This article was done before the release of Rebellion Series. Once the Rebellion Series is released, Untamed Series will not be usable anymore. This means that the components for this build may not be available for Modern Format in the future and can only be used in Wild Format after the release of the Rebellion Series.

• This post is an entry for Splinterlands Social Media Contest.
• Other sources that I do not own are cited under their respective photos. Photos and drawings without cited sources are mine and made for this post.
• Animated Banners and Dividers are edited in Canva Pro.
• Some of the fonts used are from instafonts.io

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ℋ𝒶𝓋ℯ 𝒶 𝑔ℴℴ𝒹 𝒹𝒶𝓎!