Hi everyone! It's time for the weekly Battle Mage Secrets challenge and the challenge this week is the Explosive Weaponry Ruleset.
About the Ruleset
Explosive Weaponry
The Explosive Weaponry ruleset states that "All monsters have the Blast ability". This means that adjacent monsters will take half the damage of that taken by the attacked monsters. It’s a challenge to form a deck for this rule set.
Battle Ruleset(s)
Details of my battle with this ruleset is as follows.
Explosive Weaponry: All monsters have the Blast ability
Up to Eleven: All monsters have the Amplify ability
Only the Water, Earth, Death and Dragon Splinters can be used
Mana Cap: 57
Format: Modern Tournament
Cards & Line Up
Summoner
vs
Summoner: Helios Matriarch - This increases the Speed of my deck by 1 and allows the use of 1 Gladius card.
 |  |  |  |  |  |
 |  | |  |  |  |
| Position | Name | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Djinn Chwala | It is the main tank, has high health and shields and has the Thorns ability. The Thorns ability here will double the reflected damaged from melee attackers. |
| 2 | Carnage Titan | It has the Reach and Double Strike ability, which will help to take opponents down faster. It has a pretty decent amount of health and shields too. |
| 3 | Drybone Raider | It has both Melee and Range attack, and has the Double Strike ability, so it’s great to use with the Explosive Weaponry ruleset. |
| 4 | Distegratro | It's here to reduce the attack of the melee monsters by 1 with its Demoralize ability |
| 5 | Silent Sha-vi | It's here to do some backline attack with its Sneak ability. |
| 6 | Harlaw | It’s in the last position to tank against backline attacks. |
Strategy
The ruleset here meant that:
- Only Melee monsters can be used.
- Monsters that are adjacent to attacked monsters will take damabe
- Reflected damage will be doubled.
Since this was a fairly high mana battle, my strategy was to opt for high health and high shields, with as many Melee monsters with abilities that can attack from backline positions. With this strategy in mind, I chose to use the Dragon and Death Splinter as they have the monsters I need to carry out this strategy. The main crux of this strategy is to have Djinn Chwala in position to deal double reflected damage back to the opponent and the use of Disintegrator to reduce the damage output of the opponent.
The opponent had a similar idea, using a mainly Quora Townheads as his main tank, which can also heal, and Disintegrator to reduce my attacks. I think it was a very good strategy as well. Fortunately for me, the my selection of cards gave me a slight edge over the opponent, with Djinn Chwala’s reflected damage helping to offset the heals of Quora Townshead.
Thoughts on the Exposive Weaponry Ruleset
As the Explosive Weaponry ruleset causes adjacent monsters to take damage, it is great to place monsters with the Martyr ability in those positions. It’s unfortunate that only Ranged monsters have those abilities which cannot be used in this ruleset. Throw in a monster with the Resurrect ability and your monsters will get a double boost in stats. It’s a challenging ruleset but yet also allows for some creative strategies to be used.
Battle
