This week's Battle Mage Secrets challenge features Broken Arrows! Some rulesets softly discourage or encourage certain strategies - perhaps by providing a helpful ability, or by distributing a bit of damage. Broken Arrows is not so subtle, and gives us a big hard NO - No ranged monsters! This limits the eligible options to melee, magic, and the odd monsters with no attacks at all.
The obvious losers in this ruleset are the monsters with a ranged attack, as they won't be able to see the battlefield at all. Summoners with buffs or debuffs affecting ranged attacks are also quite a bit less impactful in Broken Arrows battles. Finally, the ratio of physical and magic attacks is shifted a bit - instead of (very roughly) 2/3 physical and 1/3 magic, there is more of an even split between melee and magic attackers.
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!
Here is the ruleset for our battle. As you could probably guess from this week's challenge, we have Broken Arrows, disqualifying all ranged attackers. To go along with it we have Odd Ones Out, which limits our options to monsters with odd mana costs.
Looking at the rules for the battle, no obvious strategies jumped out at me. I decided to go with Kelya Frendul, who is a great all-around summoner. Kelya's speed and armor buffs are nearly always welcome in a fight, and the Water splinter has plenty of great monsters to pick from.
I started my team with my tank and secondary tank. Serpent of Eld is a great tank if yo uare expecting your opponent to bring a lot of melee attacks - its Dodge and high speed, coupled with a relatively high 3 attack, make it a hard hitting and evasive monster to have on your front line. Tide Biter was my off-tank. While not nearly as tanky as Serpent of Eld, 3 melee damage with 4 speed and Reach is a bargain for just 3 mana.
I filled my next spots with support monsters. Venari Wavesmith helps the whole team out with some additional armor, as well as contributing a bit of magic damage. Combined with Kelya's summoner buff, this will result in all the monsters on my team gaining 3 armor, which is a rather nice combination. Merdaali Guardian provided even more support with Tank Heal. My plan was for the evasive Serpent of Eld to be able to hold the front line - if I could get the occasional Dodge off then Merdaali Guardian should be able to keep it healthy for a long time.
I was just about out of mana to spend at this point so my team was finished off with some budget picks. Uraeus gives us 2 points of Sneak-y damage per turn for 3 mana, while Creeping Ooze should increase my team's speed advantage even more for just a single mana. That gives my team an even higher chance of getting those critical Dodges, not to mention being able to attack first!
With the lineup set, it's off into battle! When I see the selected teams I am not sure what to think - my opponent has chosen a solid melee lineup with plenty of indirect damage. The all-melee team means that the bonus 3 armor my team has will be particularly useful. On the other hand, most of the enemy monsters will by bypassing my Serpent of Eld at the front, and instead attacking some of my more vulnerable monsters.
In the first two rounds my Creeping Ooze and Uraeus both get taken off the field relatively quickly. My team has managed to do some heavy damage to the enemy Living Lava, but with all of opposing monsters still standing this is not looking so great for me.
One more round and I have a bit of moderately bad luck - my Serpent of Eld goes down, and wasn't even able to get any healing. With Merdaali Guardian also gone, my team is beginning to look a little sparse.
One more round and the battle was just about over - my Tide Biter stood alone against three formidable monsters on the enemy team. My monsters made a good try of it, but in the end came up just a little short. And again, if you wanted to see the whole battle for yourself, you can see it right here.
This fight showed the importance of having a focused plan. My opponent went heavy on indirect damage and was able to pick off my important support monsters. My strategy of using my front line monsters to dodge and get some healing may have done well against a lineup more dedicated to a frontal assault, but was not able to pull off the victory this time - it's unfortunate, but I guessed incorrectly. and as much as I would like for it to be otherwise, you can't win every battle.
Broken Arrows battles have significantly fewer strategic options thanks to eliminating a full third of the available monsters in the game, but as this battle shows you still have multiple ways to go about your teambuilding. Keeping all of these paths in mind can help you to construct more well rounded teams and maximize your chances of victory!
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:
On Shaky Ground - Battling with Earthquake! - A battle analysis, featuring Earthquake!
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.