In the spirit of the new weekly Battle Mage Secrets challenges, I would like to take a look at a Splinterlands battle with a particular focus on a ruleset. Our ruleset today is one that you may enjoy if you hate playing with (or against) those pesky ranged attackers. That's right - in battles with this rule, all ranged attackers seem to have had a slight...weapons malfunction. Today, we will be taking a look at a battle with the Broken Arrows ruleset!
In Broken Arrows battles, all monsters with a ranged attack are unable to be selected. This includes any dual attack monsters with a ranged attack. The obvious losers are the ranged monsters, while melee and magic attackers will see more play by default simply because they are the only attacking options. Monsters with magic and/or with the Sneak or Opportunity abilities become particularly valuable in this ruleset, because you need to include some of them if your team is going to be getting more than one or two attacks per round.
If you wanted to jump right to the action, the Battle Link is right here. Want to hear some more about the lineup? Read on further!
First up: the ruleset. Clearly, we have the Broken Arrows ruleset, which means that no monsters with ranged attacks will be participating in this battle. We also have Lost Legendaries and Unprotected, which will disqualify legendary cards and remove any armor that may come into the battle from monsters or abilities.
With no ranged monsters available for this battle, the two main options are either melee or magic attackers. On account of the low mana cap of just 18, melee seems like the better choice here - magic attackers tend to cost a little bit more, so bringing a team heavy on melee damage should allow us to get a little more bang for our buck. Tarsa is the perfect Fire summoner for a melee strategy - her buffs to melee attack and health are exactly what we are looking for in this battle!
I started my team with my tank and secondary tank, though on account of the limited mana available to spend in this battle the selections are on the relatively cheap side. Xenith Monk is excellent if you are looking for a tank to stall for some time, as the combination of Heal and 6 health means that as long as the enemy damage output is not too high he should be able to stick around for a while. Radiated Scorcher was more of a space filler - at just 1 mana he shouldn't be very impactful, but the main goal here is to stall for some time and give the monsters farther back in the lineup an extra attack or two.
The middle of the lineup contains the bulk of the damage for this team. Serpentine Spy and Tenyii Striker are both able to attack from the back line, and Opportunity and Sneak also give them a chance to hit some of the weaker monsters on the enemy team. The gameplan for this battle is for the front of the lineup to stall for time, while the midline of Serpentine Spy and Tenyii Striker picks apart the enemy monsters.
This is a low mana battle, so we're just about out of room. Chaos Agent is a great way to provide a buffer for your monsters - in this case, we'll use him to protect the rest of our team from any potential Sneak damage. With Dodge and 3 health, he has at least a fighting chance to be able to soak up a hit or two.
With the lineup set, it's off into battle! When I see the selected teams I am a little concerned. The enemy team has a serious level advantage - they are packing a level 6 summoner, as well as some highly levelled monsters. AT least, high compared to my team! To top it off, they also brought Cursed Windeku, whose Thorns and Heal has the potential to give my melee-heavy team some serious issues.
In the first round of battle my indirect attackers are able to go to work. Tenyii Striker and Serpentine Spy deal some serious damage to my opponent's back line, taking out their Revealer and putting some heavy damage on Veneri Bonesmith. On the other hand, my Xenith Monk is fighting a losing battle on the front line and doesn't look like he will be able to stay in the fight for much longer.
One round later the endgame was in sight. While Cursed Windeku made a very respectable showing for itself, it came up just short against my melee monsters. And in fact, if you go into the battle and see the end you may notice that there was only a single monster remaining on the field at the end of the fight...Chaos Agent. That isn't something you see every day! And again, if you wanted to see the whole battle for yourself, you can see it right here.
This battle ended up being exceedingly close, but my strategy of a stalling frontline and a backline full of indirect attackers ended up being enough to overcome a card level disadvantage and win the day. My opponent brought a great tank for the ruleset in Cursed Windeku, but once my Sneak and Opportunity attacks were able to clear out the rest of his team my monsters were able to - just barely - team up to take it down.
Thank you so much for reading all the way to the end. Interested in seeing some more of my writing in the future? Be sure to give me a follow! In the meantime, if you'd like to see some of my recent posts:
Did the Math - Battling with Up Close and Personal! - A Splinterlands battle analysis, featuring Up Close and Personal!
Splinterlands Economics: Causation - A look at causation, and how we can apply it to Splinterlands!
Splinterlands Economics: Ceteris Paribus - An introduction to the concept of Ceteris Paribus, and how we can apply it to Splinterlands!
Thinking about giving Splinterlands a try but haven't signed up yet? Feel free to use my referral link: https://splinterlands.com?ref=bteim, and be sure to reach out to me if you have any questions!
All images used in this article are open source and obtained from Pixabay or Unsplash. Thumbnails borrowed with permission from the Splinterlands team or made in Canva.