This week's Battle Mage Secrets challenge features the Fire and Regret ruleset! In Fire and Regret battles, every monster receives the Return Fire ability. This means that while you are free to choose ranged attackers for your team, any ranged monsters that you select will be taking return damage every time they attack.
Fire and Regret is a ruleset that is a "soft" counter in that it deals some damage to specific monsters - ranged attackers. The obvious losers here are monsters with ranged attacks. Yodin Zaku in particular gets a shout-out in this category, as his combination of ranged buffs AND Blast mean that his favored ranged attacking teams are a terrible, terrible idea since those monsters will be receiving double, or perhaps even triple return damage.
There are, as you may expect, quite a few winners in this ruleset. Monsters with melee or magic attacks will see some more play, which means that monsters that are particularly good at countering those melee or magic attacks have a better chance of having a strong showing in Fire and Regret battles. And monsters with Amplify will make your Return Fire damage hit even harder.
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. We have Fire and Regret, which grants every monster the Return Fire ability. We also have Fog of War, which nullifies the Sneak, Snipe, and Opportunity abilities.
As I mentioned in the introduction, strong anti-melee or anti-magic cards can be very useful in Fire and Regret battles, since those are the only remaining attack options that won't result in your monster taking counterattacks. Mylor Crowling is an excellent anti-melee summoner, since he gives your entire team the Thorns ability. This means that any opponents looking to load up on melee attacks will soon see their team taking plenty of counter damage every time they attack.
With Mylor Crowling as our summoner, we can go for a slightly more defensive strategy that aims to make the enemy team wear itself out on Thorns and Return Fire damage. With this idea in mind, Xenith Monk and Fungus Fiend are a decent way to lead off our lineup since they will serve as a decent buffer for the rest of our lineup and their low cost allows us to spend more on the back part of our team. If Xenith Monk can get off a Heal or two then that would be amazing, but if they can just stall for a bit then that is more than enough for our purposes.
The middle of our lineup contains the main portion of our strategy - a tanking combination which is hopefully strong enough to outlast the enemy monsters. Unicorn Mustang gives the team a bit of resistance to magic attacks, which perfectly complements Mylor Crowling's heavy anti-melee focus. The idea here is that our front line monsters will weaken the enemy team enough that Unicorn Mustang backed up with Goblin Psychic's Tank Heal will be able to stand up to the remaining enemy monsters.
We're nearly out of mana at this point, so we'll round out the team with a couple of supporting monsters. Queen Mycelia is a solid all-around monster, providing a modest magic attack as well as armor for the entire team with her Protect ability. Venari Seedsmith is a bit of a risk since he will be taking Return Fire damage. But he offers a solid ranged attack, and his Scavenger ability coupled with the extra armor from Queen Mycelia means that he has a decent chance at gaining enough health to stick around for a while.
With the lineup set, it's off into battle! When I see the selected teams I am concerned - my opponent has brought along one of the more annoying card combinations in the game, Scarred Llama Mage and Kron the Undying. Not to mention a Fungus Flinger with Martyr to buff Kron even more. On the bright side this is an expensive pair of cards to bring into battle and the rest of their team isn't very intimidating, but oftentimes Llama-Kron on its own is powerful enough to singlehandedly win a fight anyway...we'll have to see how it turns out!
Over the course of the first few rounds, my front line monsters trade off with the enemy ones. By the start of round 5 we are faced with a situation which may seem rather familiar to anyone who has played with or against Llama Kron. Luckily for me, my front monster is Unicorn Mustang with its Void ability. But Kron is a tough nut to crack!
My team is able to whittle down Kron's health quite a bit, but my Venari Seedsmith eventually dies to Return Fire, and once that occurs it is a stalemate. The battle rages back and forth until full time, round 20. Time for fatigue damage to begin!
This battle ends up being an incredibly close one, but by the start of round 23 it becomes apparent that my team has managed to pull off the victory. Kron is poised to die to fatigue damage, while my Unicorn Mustang will survive to fight another day. Victory! And again, if you wanted to see the whole battle for yourself, you can see it right here.
This battle ended up being an incredibly close one, but in the end my opponent's Kron turned out to be not-so-Undying. The presence of the Fire and Regret ruleset in this battle allowed me to lean heavily into my anti-melee and anti-magic monsters, which in the end helped my team to - just barely! - close out the game with a win.
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:
Missing the Point - Battling with Broken Arrows! - A Splinterlands battle analysis, featuring Broken Arrows!
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!
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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.