Hi everyone! It's time for the weekly Battle Mage Secrets challenge and the challenge this week is the Ferocity Ruleset.
About the Ruleset
Ferocity
The Ferocity ruleset states that "All Monsters have the Fury ability". This means that all your monsters will do double damage to monsters with the Taunt ability. As such, monsters with the Taunt ability will not be as effective since they will be killed off faster.
Battle Ruleset(s)
Details of my battle with this ruleset is as follows.
Ferocity: All Monsters have the Fury ability
Only the Water, Earth and Life Splinters can be used
Mana Cap: 18
Format: Modern
Cards & Line Up
Summoner
vs
Summoner: Obsidian - This increases the Magic attack of all my Monsters by 1.
 |  |  |  |  |  |
 |  |  |  |  |  |
| Position | Name | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mycelic Morphoid | It's here to reflect some damage with its Thorns ability, if the opponent uses melee monsters. |
| 2 | Hill Giant | It is the main tank with its decently high health of 7 and low mana cost of 3. |
| 3 | Queen Mycelia | It has the Protect ability, which gives 2 shields to all my monsters, and is the key card for this strategy. |
| 4 | Spirit Hoarder | It has the Triage and Dispel ability, but its abilities are unlikely to be useful given the low mana cap battle. |
| 5 | Djinn Biljka | With its camouflage ability, it will only be targetted when it's at the first position. |
| 6 | Fungus Fiend | I placed this at the last slot so that it'll help take some backline damage first, away from my magic monsters. |
Strategy
The combination of rulesets here meant:
- Monsters maximum health will reduce by 1 each time they take damage. This also makes any heals less effective
- Fury will have no effect if no Taunt monsters are used. Taunt monsters usually have a fairly high mana cost and are unlikely to be used here with the low mana cap
My strategy here was to beef up the shields to even out the effects of Cripple, and to use magic monsters to bypass shields. So my deck has 3 magic monsters. Queen Mycelia is extremely important here as its shields allow my monsters to take an additional one or two physical attacks. And given that it's a low mana cost battle, monsters are unlikely to have very high health.
The opponent used a backline attack strategy, with 2 monsters with the Sneak ability. The shields from Queen Mycelia allowed the weak Fungus Fiend to fend off one round of attacks from this pair of sneak monsters. This also allowed my magic monsters to take out the opponents frontline before the Sneak monsters did any serious damage. I won fairly easily as a result.
Thoughts on the Ferocity Ruleset
The Ferocity ruleset is only effective if Taunt Monsters are used in the battle. This ruleset can be easily bypassed by simply not using Taunt monsters. You'll have to tweak your strategy accordingly though if it is one that relies on the Taunt monster. Taunt monsters can still be used if you think it's a workable strategy. However, you'll also have to note that they'll be taken out fast, so your strategy will need to hit hard and fast.