Battle Mage Secrets | Explosive Havoc Unleashed!

Hello guys! This week's Battle Mage Secret featured ruleset is one of my most favorite ruleset due to a lot of strategies you can employ different strategies. What's more is that depending on the other ruleset, it can really be more exciting.

	EXPLOSIVE WEAPONRY - All Monsters have the Blast Ability. BLAST - Does additional damage to Monsters adjacent to the target Monster. Adjacent monsters on both side will deal damage equivalent to main damage divided by 2, rounded up.

As much as possible, we want to maximize the BLAST ability. There are a lot of abilities that will benefit when combine with BLAST and there are also abilities that can counteract the BLAST effect.

Countering Blast

Let's first start with discussing on how we can counter the EXPLOSIVE WEAPONRY or the BLAST ability.

Reflection Shield - This Monster doesn't take damage from Blast, Magic Reflect, Thorns, or Return Fire. This ability directly counters the effect of Blast ability. Having this ability ensures that adjacent monsters won't get killed by the Blast effect. This is a new ability just released same time with Riftwatchers card edition and the new Chaos Legion reward cards. This ability is also available to the new soulbound cards.

These are the cards with Reflection Shield, including the level when will they got access to this ability.

**source: This screenshot was taken from splintercards.com

In order to maximize the effect of Reflection Shield, there are abilities we can combine with it. But again to formally list the counter strategy, let's go with the list below:

1. TAUNT + REFLECTION SHIELD combo:
   Having a monster with Taunt ability to force all the attacks to go to this monster, then placing a monster with Reflection Shield to contain the damage and prevent it from damaging other adjacent monsters. This is the number one strategy to counter this ruleset.

2. Utilized SHIELD or VOID:
   Shield reduces the damage from melee or ranged attacks while the Void reduces the damage from the magic attacks. Since the damage from the Blast effect is effectively halved already, having another ability like Shield or Void can reduce it further by half, and can be even reduce to zero damage.

3. Minimize the Attack Power:
   If you don't have the Reflection Shield, or even the Shield and Void ability, you can still survive longer if you can reduce the damage from the opponent's attack. Abilities like Demoralize, Headwinds, or Silence to reduce the melee, ranged, and magic damage respectively will help you achieve this strategy.

4. Healing for everyone:
   Healing is an important part of countering the Blast especially if you will go with the Taunt strategy. You must have enough healing abilities whether it is a Tank Heal, Triage, or self Heal abilities. Now if you don't have the Taunt and Reflection Shield ability, healing will still allow you to recover from the Blast damage effect.

5. Armors Armors Armors:
   Having a high armor will help you absorb some damage. Similarly for magic, you can use it with Void Armor ability. Protect ability can give you two additional armors while Repair ability will help you regain your damage armors.

Utilizing Blast

In this section of the blog, we will now discuss the ways on how we can utilize the Blast ability. There are a number of strategies and I may not be able to share all but atleast some important one will be here. First and foremost, the way to utilize the Blast effect is if the targeted monsters have monster on each side, which means dealing damage to three enemies at once.

Adjacent monster on the left side < Target monster > adjacent monster on the right side
This is the most ideal scenario for us if we want to maximize the Blast ability. Now, how can we achieve it?

1. Snipers will rule!!!
   Monsters with SNIPE ability can allow you to target monsters at the middle position, provided your opponent follows the melee-no_attack_magic_ranged arrangement. So knowing this is crucial during the Explosive Weaponry ruleset, you might arrange your monster position with this in mind. Opportunity ability can probably help you as well since it will direct their attacks on low health monsters, but it still not guarantee that you can maximize the Blast effect. In terms of Sneak, this is something I will not prioritize since it will make sure that you are hitting the last monster on your opponent's sides, which can only have 1 adjacent monster to it.

2. Speed is everything!!!
   For me, this is also one of the top priority for the Explosive Weaponry ruleset. With speed, you can dictate who can attack first. Attacking first and dealing extra damage from Blast ability is definitely a deal breaker. You can easily kill one or two monsters even from the Blast effect. If all your monsters attack first before your opponent, that is a high chance that we can eliminate atleast half or probably a third of their monsters on the battlefield.

3. Scattershot, a dual edge sword!
   Since Scattershot is the only ability that can negate the effect of Taunt ability (which we describe in the first half of this blog as the most effective way to counter Blast), using it may give us some advantage. I consider it as a dual edge strategy since it can also work against us. Attacking random monsters compare to focusing on one monster may not be a good idea, but the high risk of doing it is also worth taking. You maybe get lucky hitting low health monsters randomly with this ability.

4. Repel those rangers and mages!!!
   Return Fire & Magic Reflect are the two abilities you can use as a way to deal damage back to the attacking monsters. As you know, both Return Fire and Magic Reflect can be triggered even from the Blast damage. This means that if the monster with magic damage hit three monsters because of the Blast effect, those three monsters can fire back using Magic Reflect ability.

5. Double Strike and Trample:
   Since the damage from Blast takes effect after each attacks, having a monsters that can attack twice using Double Strike will make sure a deeper cut. And now imagine a monster triggering the Trample ability, this means it can deal more damage due to the Blast effect. Well I should say that the Blast damage can make the Trample trigger easily since it can reduce the health of the adjacent monsters. Although killing the adjacent monster will not trigger the Trample, its still a good idea to use monsters with Trample and with Double Strike. Aside from those abilities, there are also monsters with two attacks like melee+magic, melee+range, magic+range that we can use with this ruleset.

Featured Battle

https://splinterlands.com?p=battle&id=sl_06c5277325d26174be054e1d04a9cf33&ref=jpleron

Ruleset
	Born Again - All Monsters have the Rebirth ability.
	Explosive Weaponry - All Monsters have the Blast ability.
	Briar Patch - All Monsters have the Thorns ability.
Mana Cap	49
Allowed Splinters	Water, Earth, Death, Dragon
My Line-up:
Summoner
	Immortalis is an Earth splinter Legendary summoner which has the ability to reduce the max health by 1 to all enemy monsters, and provides Void and Shatter ability to own monsters. Since there will be Thorns ability from the ruleset, this only means that either magic or ranged attacks will be use. I chose Immortalis to counter the possible magic line-up in case my opponent uses a heavy magic line-up. Immortalis is one the best Summoner to counter Magic line-up
Monsters
	Grund is a melee monster with Double Strike ability. Even though there is a Briar Patch ruleset which gives all monsters Thorns ability, I still used this monters since it has a high melee damage and can attack twice which is good for the Blast rule
	Queen Mycelia is a legendary magic monster with Protect, Triage, and Amplify abilities. Protect gives us two additional armors which can help us survive longer from Blast effect. The Triage is a good skill to help our Taunt monster to regenerate health and survive the barrage of attacks from the oppoenents. While the Amplify can increase the damage from the Thorns ability. Queen Mycelia is a perfect monster for this ruleset.
	Goblin Psychic has the Tank Heal ability which helps our Grund survive both from the attacks of Diemonshark and from the return damage from Thorns. It also has the Silence ability which reduces the damage from magic attacks. Combine this with the Void ability provided by our Summoner, Magic damage can be greatly reduce to zero or minimal to 1 damage.
	Spirit Hoader is a legendary monster with Triage ability and Dispel ability. In this ruleset, we utilize its Triage ability to help heal our Taunt monster at the back. This monster also has the Dispel ability which can remove the buff from opponent monsters in case they utilize Martyr or Bloodlust ability in this battle. Martyr can easily be triggered because of the Blast damage while Bloodlust can be trigger easily as well since it can damage more monsters making it a higher chance to kill monters. Also, this monster has the Blind ability which gives us 15% chance for opposing monsters to miss their attack. This maybe low but still a great help when monster missed their attacks.
	Venator Kinjo is a legendary monster with the Reflection Shield. This monster will help us to negate the Blast effect leaving only Mycelic Slipspawn the only monster to be damage. Aside from the Reflection Shield, it also has the Slow ability which can make our monster attack before our enemies. As I mentioned earlier, the one who attacks first can flip the battle in your favor.
	Mycelic Slipspawn is our monster with the Taunt ability. It has high health which helps it to survive longer and makes the heal more effective. Aside from that it has Forcefield ability which can somehow reduced attacks greater or equal to 5 turns to 1 damage.

Conclusion:

In this battle, I utilized the TAUNT, REFLECTION SHIELD and TRIAGE ability to contain the Blast effect. This is a crucial one since I negated the Blast rule already with this strategy. Aside from that, I also give additional armors to my monsters with the help of the PROTECT ability from Queen Mycelia. And then uses VOID and SILENCE ability to reduce the damage from magic attacks. Although I did not have monsters with SHIELD or HEADWINDS to reduce the damage from ranged monsters, this is still enough to help me survive from my opponents magic monsters. From the Countering Blast section, I managed to check all 5 points.

In terms of Utilizing Blast section, I only managed to use the Double Strike ability. Also I mentioned in that same section to use monsters with high speed, although as you can see in my line-up compare with the Kelya line-up of my opponent, they were the fast one. But since I managed to survive even after their barrages of attacks, I was able to counter them with heavy magic and anti-healing ability.

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References:

• card images are owned by Splinterlands.io
• divider used was designed by @freeztag