BATTLE MAGE SECRETS Weekly Challenge! - Taking Sides Ruleset

Hi Guys! In this post we are exploring on another Splinterlands ruleset. The ruleset we are focusing on is Taking Sides.

In a Taking Sides ruleset the rule is very simple, no Neutral units may be used.

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Lets take a look at a Wild Silver ranked match with Taking Sides as one of the ruleset. The battle restrictions are:
Taking Sides and Armored Up with a max mana of 36. Only Fire, Life and Dragon splinters are allowed in this battle. The Video for the Full Battle can be seen here:
https://splinterlands.com?p=battle&id=sl_93de7391e36227c2c3d80b2d7e191e43&ref=genming

Splinter	Mana Cost	Position	Reason
Daria Dragonscale	4	Summoner	Daria Dragonscale is a Dragon splinter summoner that gives +1 melee to all melee units. The reason I used him here is because I am going for a full melee attacking lineup. Daria Dragonscale being a Dragon summoner also allows me to use another splinter units which is extremely helpful since I have less units option due to Taking Sides ruleset.
Pelacor Conjurer	2	1st	Even though I am expecting to face a melee lineup, I still like having Pelacor Conjurer in the front as it is a flying unit with decent health. It also has Magic Reflect and thus if the opponent did put up some magic units, it will reflect damage back to those units. What is also important is it only costs me 2 mana to deploy. Another low mana tank I like to use is Lord Arianthus (it would more mana to deploy) but it is a Neutral unit so can't be use in this match.
Carnage Titan	11	2nd	This is my heavy weight secondary tank. It has Double Strike with a base melee attack of 3 with Reach ability. The melee attack would be further boosted by my summoner to 4.
Silvershield Knight	6	3rd	Silvershield Knight has Inspire ability that will boost my melee units damage by 1. So together with my summoner, now all my melee units' damage are boosted by 2.
Dhampir Infiltrator	4	4th	My low health DPS unit with Double Strike. With the melee boost, Dhampir Infiltrator now can sneak attack the enemy backline for 4 damage 2 times per round. Only issue with this unit is it has very low health but the Armored Up ruleset would allow it to survive a bit longer unless there are more than one Opportunity units from the enemy side.
Silvershield Assassin	7	5th	Another Sneak melee unit with Double Strike. As you can see I am going out with a full offensive lineup.
Vruz	2	6th	My last Sneak unit with Martyr. The reason why I put it in the last position is I need to tank and then die so that Martyr would further boost my Silvershield Assassin's stats.
Total Mana:	36

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Opponent Lineup:

My opponent went with almost a similar line with Daria Dragonscale as the summoner and a team full of melee units with Sneak ability as well as Silvershield Assassin to boost the melee further. Difference is my opponent has a huge tank with Thorn at the front. I am very familiar with the opponent name as it is a well known bot name so there is a big chance I am facing a bot here (unless someone bought over the bot account)...

End of Round 1:

My Vruz got killed even though it managed to dodge an attack. But in return I killed off 2 of my opponent back units. All this happened within one round due to the fact that both of our lineups are heavily focused on offensive. I also managed to destroy my opponent Djinn Chwala's armors with my secondary tank.

End of Round 2:

Because my Silvershield Assassin got a stats boost from Vruz's death, it is now faster than my opponent Silvershield Assassin and proceed to destroy it before it can do any attack. My Carnage Titan followed up killing the opponent tank and Dhamphir Infiltrator killing off the enemy Dhampir Infiltrator and suddenly the opponent is left with just 1 unit standing. That was an amazing round with my opponent unable to do anything.

End of Round 3:

The game was won in round 3. Extremely fast for a 36 mana match.

KEY STRATEGY
My strategy was simply to overrun my opponent with as much melee damage as possible. This is why I chose a summoner that gives +1 melee damage and added Silvershield Knight for another +1 melee damage to all my melee units. And then I chose melee units that do Double Strike because I know every units has additional armor due to Armored Up ruleset so the first attack would be to remove the armor and second attack to hit the health. I was happy and confident with my lineup before pressing the submit button, which isn't always the case.

SUMMARY
Taking Sides do give the inconvenience of not able to use Neutral units but a lot of time you can still make do with existing non-neutral units. Using Dragon splinter, if its available, also helps since it gives you 2 splinters to chose your units from.

To any new players who wish to explore the world of Splinterlands, do feel free to sign up with my REFERRAL LINK 😊.

My guild, The Guild of Kingshaven, is also looking for new members. For added incentive to joining us, our guild leader will also be assigning Runi to any new member that can actively participate in brawl battles and give donation to our guild buildings. Runi is extremely powerful and is the only unit that has the Rebirth ability.
Our guild link is https://splinterlands.com/?p=guild&id=07ab9325eea386c3570db41f53fd991e78806485&tab=