Hi Battle Mages, 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 are looking at the Target Practice ruleset.
All ranged and magic units gain the Snipe ability
Target Practice is a fun ruleset to play with and needs close attention. The ruleset gives the Snipe ability to range and magic monsters. The ability attacks non-melee monsters that are not in the first position. This is very useful when you want to control which enemy monsters are aimed at and reversely knowing which of your little darlings are going to be attacked.
There is more than one strategy that can be applied here. When playing defensively, you can place heavily armoured or high health non-melee monsters in the first midfield position to smother as much enemy fire as possible. You can go further and use, for example, high speed candidates with Backfire in an attempt to ruin your opponent’s strategy entirely. This is not so easy to do. I prefer playing this ruleset offensively and at the same time placing monsters in the targeted positions that I want to die. I am obviously speaking of Martyrs, most notably the Venary Marksrat. I have seen this strategy used a lot to my detriment by my opponents, therefore this is definitely my preferred strategy plus placing a gladiator next to the Martyr I want to sacrifice. This strategy is also obviously a preferred approach by bots and battle helpers, so that in the end, both sides often do the same thing and the mightier Gladiator wins. This is exactly what happens in the battle I want to show you in this week’s Battle Mage Secrets Challenge.
The battle stats are the following:
RULESETS: Target Practice
MANA: 31
SPLINTERS: Earth
With only the green splinter available it was easy to speculate what monsters my opponent could possibly use and the idea to use 2 martyrs with Quora immediately came into my head. Yet, I also had to expect that my opponent may do the same thing.
Here is the team I put together:
As the plan was to bring Quora to the arena, the summoner to use was LOBB LOWLAND. I still have him a low levels so bringing him here in a silver battle was the way to go.
The idea with Target Practice was to have my opponent fire at the first midfielder behind Quora so the FUNGUS FLINGER was put in first position to be eaten by the opposing tank.
The main actor was QUORA of course and the plan was to place martyrs on both her sides. I was not sure if the opponent snipers would fire at her or not as she had both melee and magic attack. I took the gamble.
The VENARI MARKSRAT came to occupy third position and hopefully be the first monster to die on my team. Technically that was to be the case.
With 5 mana left I decided to go for a single card rather than split 2/3 between two cards. REGAL PERYTON has great speed and the MARKSRAT was supposed to increase his stats further.
So now let's take a closer look at the battle in focus today. My opponent, as expected, had the same thing in mind or rather, his bot did. I was surprised not to see Quora in the opposing team but a gladiator with Double Strike was daunting just the same...
Things moved quickly in round 1. REGAL and QUORA devoured the enemy Marksrat at the outset, QUORA bloodlusted and 2 enemy monsters collected the martyr boost. That didn't look so good from our side. Katrelba missed once to give REGAL a second chance to fire in the next round. Nothing else noteworthy happened at the end of Round 1.
REGAL took a shot, QUORA healed and swiftly toasted the other Flinger. That was another couple of martyr boosts on the opposing team while mine were both still around. Then Katrelba scored a double by first getting rid of REGAL and then the MARKSRAT to do a double Bloodlust. QUORA had her turn to benefit from a martyr boost to immediately be followed by the second one. With both gladiators on a double martyr fix the showdown began.
At the beginning of the third round things were looking good. QUORA took out the Grunt with a double turn to Bloodlust again and the following Double Strike from Katrelba weakened her but couldn't manage to take her out.
It was time for Katrelba to go quietly with one smack and Morphoid had an even faster exit. Meanwhile, QUORA was bloodlusting herself into a spychochick on steroids. The Knifer didn't stand a chance.
QUORA with SNIPE. Lovely sight.
This battle formation was nothing to brag about. It is easily done to line up gladiators with martyrs and blast your way through. On the other hand I have had lots of battles where my Quora got obliterated so I was happy to see her succeed.
Seeyaround Splinterheads!
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