Hey Splinterheads, I hope you are all having a great Splinterday!
The Battle Mage Secrets Challenge is a wonderful and effective way to get to know rulesets better and improve your gameplay. Not only do you study and analyse rulesets and example battles closely, you also get to read and see what other Splinterheads are thinking and doing with their little darlings on the battlefield.
With many battles now being comprised of 3 rulesets, it is important to know your rulesets well, how they relate to other rulesets and what corresponding cards work well to either exploit the ruleset or defend against it. We have also seen a number of new rulesets coming into the game lately and a bunch of new monsters have received new abilities.
The game is becoming more and more technical, leaving you with ever decreasing chances of winning battles with sheer brute force and overkill strategies. All these reasons and the clear challenge that players (and bots unfortunately) are getting „smarter“ all the time underscore the need to know rulesets very well. The Battle Mage Secrets Challenge helps and motivates us players further to do just that.
In today's challenge we have the Keep Your Distance ruleset.
KEEP YOUR DISTANCE
Units with melee attacks may not be used
Units with 2 types of attack (which include melee) cannot be used
Use Phase, Void, Void Armor, and Magic Reflect to counter magic attacks
Use Headwinds and Return Fire to counter ranged attacks
Keep Your Distance is a great ruleset in a battle. It takes an attack type away, which enables you some control over the remaining two attack types used by your opponent with various debuffs mentioned above. It also enables you to apply non-melee strategies, where your primary tanks are not the usual meelee monsters.
My first choice in a Keep your Distance ruleset in combination with whatever other rulesets there are with it, is a Close Range brigade. This, of course, works best with the Fire Deck with the added option of Gargoya Devil, who also has the Close Range ability.
Fortunately, the red splinter was available in the battle, which I am going to look at closely today:
The battle stats are the following:
RULESETS: Weak Magic, Explosive Weaponry and Keep Your Distance
MANA: 54
Here is the team I put together:
There can hardly be a better bunch of rulesets than these three, plus high mana, for Conqueror Jacek. Striking faster, piercing shield and scattering fire are already incredible attributes. Add blast in a no-meelee setting and you have a cocktail of offensive techniques to blow away any debuffs the enemy brings to the field, or at least do a good job outdoing whatever your opponent throws at you. Combining Scattershot with rulesets like Explosive Weaponry are a match made in Splinterlands Heaven. It reminds of the Pyromancer/Fire Elemental days, when Jacek first appeared and took over the Fire Deck.
Molten Ash Golem ist not a great frontliner. He is slower than a stoned turtle but has high health. He is here to soak up frontal attacks and take a shot when he can. There are no good no-attack monsters around with that much health and splitting no-attack over two positions is a bad option. Yes, Almo Cambio should have been here...
Lava Laucher is here for obvious reasons but he is also a great tank generally. I consider him one of the better Chaos reward cards. He will do lots of damage through Piercing and defend well. 3 range scattered with Blast? Yes, please!
In third position, we have Tinderlock. He should be last but there are no other Close Range monsters coming after him. 3 range scattered with Blast? Yes, please!
Cornealus simply doesn't want to retire. He has been in my Top-Ten-Cards-Used-List for donkey's years. Well, he is fading away slowly though. He costs too much mana as a neutral card. Yet strategically, Cornealus can use Heal as a secondary front-line defense when necessary, even when he cannot fire from the first position. When situated in the middle of the pack, he has good odds to move to the first position with full health.
Countess Sinash is a perfect pick in a high mana game and likely to be the last one to go down. Her biggest argument beside Opportunity and Camouflage is speed. At 6 speed, she will surely fire first and get those obnoxious little low health attackers or otherwise disrupting the enemy attack strategy. Countess Sinash cleans up nicely there.
I wrote a post about Mantoid. Go read it.
What a beautiful sight. Only 2 shield at the tale end and a level 1 summoner. There will not be much to say about this battle. Let's skip to the end of the round:
easypeasylemonsqueezy, as a Splinterlands Youtuber says. The second round finished early...
There isn't much to say about the battle, except that I jump at every chance to use Jacek. He has become my dominant strategy maker.
I am at a point as a player, where I am finding it more and more difficult to stay in Diamond League without maxing a splinter out. I think the Fire Deck is it and Jacek needs level 4. Tarsa also gets what Tarsa wants so I need to write a few more posts to get the upgrade happening.
I am also still waiting for those elusive soulbound legendaries for the Fire Deck. Once playing in Diamond League more consistently, they should appear more and more in those loot chests.
The other soulbound cards are building up nicely, although it could happen a bit faster...
Seeyaround Splinterheads!
images of model tombstones from myshopify.com
