Hello there.

Today I'll share my battle under the Fire and Regret ruleset. But first, I will share some of my thoughts regarding it. With this ruleset, monsters get the Return Fire ability. Monsters that attack a unit with the return fire ability receive damage back, equal to their damage done, divided by 2, rounded up. For example, a monster with 3 Range attack hits a monster with return fire, the attacking monster takes 2 physical damage back from the ability.

Monsters with Reflection Shield do not take return damage from the return fire. Amplify on the other hand increases the returned damage by 1. Since the returned damage is physical, armor can block it and abilities like Shield reduces it. So if the attacker has Shield and 1-2 range damage, the returned damage should be 1, but it is negated by the Shield ability, so it takes 0 damage.

I believe that being flexible in battle is the ideal strategy. Check the opponent's history, check what they are most likely to use, and counter it. But always pick teams that can also counter different strategies. Without further ado, let's get into the battle.

The Ruleset

This was a tournament battle, so it was a Bronze battle with Rise of the Commons, Back to Basics, and Fire and Regret Rulesets. A 25 mana battle is on the normal amount and only Earth is available. I can think of different strategies so I will try to counter as much as I can.

The obvious team is to go Obsidian with magic monsters. The combination of back to basics and fire and regret make range monsters very weak and unusable. Magic monsters can attack from both backline and frontline. Obsidian increasing their damage makes it even better.

The counter to that is using Immortalis. The Void ability halves magic damage, and Immortalis also lowers their max HP by 1. Immortalis is more defensive, and is usually weak to Melee sneak/opportunity, and range attacks. But because of the rulesets, it has become the optimal summoner.

The Lineup

For me, between the lineups I mentioned above, I'd rather go with the Immortalis team. I'm focusing on monsters that have high HP and attack. Armor is not a major factor since I also expect my opponent to use Immortalis. This is my usual strategy when it comes to Back to Basics and it has worked a lot of times.

The Battle

Link to the Battle

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The Matchup

My opponent decided to go with the Obsidian magic team. This is perfect since we can see which team among the two I mentioned is better. Before the battle begins, I immediately notice that their magic monsters only have 1 damage. Obsidian can increase it to 2, but with my Void, they will still only deal 1 damage. Just because of that, I think I am still the favorite to win.

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End of Round 1

My opponent was able to deal 6 damage, while I did only 5. But if you consider Immortalis' -1HP ability, it is also like I did 6 damage to their team at the start of the battle. Their Hill Giant is already close to dying, while my Terraceous Grunt can still take a few more hits.

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End of Round 2

My Terraceous Grunt died after taking the full brunt of the opponent's attack, but not before taking out the Chaos Agent. My Hill Giant hitting its attack against the Regal Peryton even with the 5 speed difference, was like the icing on the cake. I don't think it would have mattered since they would need a minimum of 2 turns to kill my Hill Giant.

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End of Round 3

By this point, there is no way for the Venari Spellsmith to kill all my monsters. This battle is over.

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End of the Battle

I will have to say that I was happy to be proven right. My Venari Spellsmith and Goblin Psychic are still undamaged, so I won that battle by a wide margin. Immortalis was the obvious MVP, and the Void provided a lot of survivability for my team. The -1HP helped make the battle end earlier.

The Result

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Conclusion

In tournaments where there are additional limitations on top of the Rulesets and banned elements, I try to make it a point to look at the possible teams and imagine them fighting against one another. I will then choose the team which I think is best. For this specific battle, there wasn't much choice available. I just went with the counter team and got the win. I am actually curious if there are better versions of the Immortalis team for that battle. It would have been nice to see how my setup stacks up.