Battle Mage Secrets Weekly Challenge: Counterspell | Splinterlands

Man oh man do I have the perfect battle for this week's Battle Mage Secrets.

The theme is Magic Reflect, where units that deal Magic damage get reflect damage inflicted back onto them. And the secret? Well, it's that even in a Magic Reflect ruleset, you can still play Magic ;)

Ruleset

Here are the rulesets for my feature battle:

When I saw this I immediately thought of going for Water with some Triage-abuse, but then I thought of the Magic Reflect and started to second guess. However with the Equalizer ruleset I thought I could make it work if there was enough health on the board.

Thinking that the enemy wouldn't expect Magic, I figured I could obliterate his cards while keeping myself alive with Triage. I went with Daarg as the centerpiece, and stuck Spirit Hoarded in the back instead of the Mandarin because of this idea that magic damage would be unexpected. While I initially had Kelya in the lineup, I switched to Possibilus for extra health and then went with that nifty dual-hitter SB card in the Reach position.

The lineup was set, time to enter the battle:

I'll admit, his lineup surprised me a bit. Seeing Baakjira up from meant my unis had 19 (NINETEEN!) health each, so that was awesome.

then on the first round, Daigendark Surveyor stunned the Baakjira, causing Coastal Sentry's Knock Out ability to trigger and destroy Baakjira. Well on our way!

Spirit Hoarded was the one getting all the damage - this I admittedly didn't really expect, but it didn't matter because he was getting two Triages per turn, which meant 12 (TWELVE!!!) healing given his 19 health. Although the bandit, deeplurker, and Uraeus tried their best, all they could muster was 12 damage / turn themselves, plus 2 for the eventual poisons, and the frontline just got widdled down too fast.

The melee fighters didn't stand a chance against magic attacks, and the 1 damage each attacker was receiving from the Magic Reflect didn't matter at this point. The battle was over.

The lesson is: play the player. When a ruleset comes up, think about what's most likely, and least likely, to be played, and act accordingly. In this combination of rulesets I knew magic would like be unexpected, and that Triage could render the disadvantage of using magic nearly irrelevant, so I was able to catch my enemy offguard and neutralize the disadvantage.

Here's the link to the full battle: https://splinterlands.com/?p=battle&id=sl_365c6f7f6efb99ece5db1cc1f271f27d. Enjoy!