Heya Splinterlanders :)
Finally, this week we have something spicy :). The Armored Up ruleset is one of my favorites. It's very interesting for me to see how Splinterlands evolve during my not-so-long journey. Before with quite a limited collection and without any newly released cards, one of the best strategies, when you know that will be plenty of armor on the battlefield, was magic. And if you want to minimize the damage output usually Death was the best choice. Thaddius and Mimosa were both great summoners that were quite a challenge for the opponent's team to beat.
These days situation is so much more complex, I usually try to focus on new sets and try to be prepared for the times when modern will be out of untamed cards. So even now we get plenty of choices, Immortalis is always the king, you know that. Shatter in any situation when you expect a lot of armor is great, and Armored Up is for sure one of them. Another option is Astral Entity which has rust ability and removes 2 points of armor. Additionally, we get some new monsters with Protect Ability, so sometimes single Rust is not enough. I think we got armor heavy meta now, and it's quite important to know how to deal with it.
As you can see I think I could enumerate different types of strategies for at least another month :). But today, I would like to take you back to the roots and check if a simple magic strategy still works. Firstly let's check exactly what the Armored Up ruleset means.
All monsters get a +2 armor buff at the beginning of the game.
- Use Void Armor to ensure that magic attacks strike armor first.
- Use Shatter or Piercing to destroy your opponent's armor more effectively.
- See Protect ability.
Firstly, the description of the ruleset in the game is not perfect, sometimes you got just general information which not giving you all information you need. Best way to read the full description as above from the game documentation at least once. You can check all here. .
This is an exact text copy from the help sites directly from the game. As you can see there are a lot of great hints, which you help you to understand how to deal with the specific ruleset. If you haven't checked it out before, I strongly encourage you to do that. The dev team has done a great job there, finally. :)
One more thing which I forgot in original post edition, if you interested in detail information about specific ruleset, which card is useful and which you should avoid please check great posts from @iamgem005. Last one is of course about Armored Up ruleset
Today's battle is like the best old-school battle and the best example of simple strategy, which usually works perfectly with Armored Up. Magic damage monster should be quite effective here, and with Thaddius Brood, I hoped to decrease the damage output of the opponent's team. The opponent chose a different strategy, let's see who will be right :).
Recently I'm more impressed with Possibilus and the melee team, here seems maybe not the best choice. Kelp Initiate is quite an unusual choice but unexpectedly works perfectly with my snipe monster. On my side, I got some traps as well, Chaos Agent as an opportunity target.
Round 2 just started, and my agent avoided any hits, so Deep Lurker (you know what I think about this card) was useless so far. Despite our almost full magic team, we manage to destroy some armor with Thorn amplified damage of Windeku. Accidentally it is quite an excellent counter for the whole opponent's melee team.
Round 3, our Cursed Windeku - the main tank is down. unfortunately, we wasted a lot of firepower with snipe damage of Magi Necrosi. Fortunately our distraction - Agent is still alive :).
Round 4, our firepower is not great, mostly because we are not focused enough. We couldn't destroy any of the monsters on the battlefield. Fortunately, Armor protection for the ruleset helped us not to lose any either.
Round 5, we finally managed to kill the Kelp :), it was great destruction for our one of the best damage dealers. The opponent got only one monster, usually a trample monster with a Stampede ruleset that could be very dangerous, fortunately, we got that armor.
Round 6, it was just a formality, our magic team was victorious :).
A simple strategy just works. Most of the time :). I have to say that Kelp Initiate was a pain in the.. neck. Usually, Magi Necrosi is the best choice for this kind of strategy. Eliminating important support units or damage dealers from the backside of the opponent's team is crucial. Kelp is quite a resistant, our distraction monster Chaos Agent works not so efficiently as Kelp but still did a great job. Maybe if the opponent would use any monster with rust ability to reduce the armor to 0, he could beat our team. As I mentioned stampede could be very dangerous, and having trample on every monster (as a Possibilus ability) is huge. Let's check our team:
I have just presented only one and I think the most simple approach the to Armored Up ruleset. As I mentioned in the beginning now there are so many different way to dealing with armor. In this case, our magic team was victorious, but the overall full magic team is quite easy to counter. And if you see the Armored Up ruleset, you can expect it and be more prepared. One of the more efficient counters builds is, of course, Immortalis, which grants nice protection with Void ability and adds a tool to deal with armor.
For today's battle, the opponent's choice with Possibilus' melee team is not completely a failure as well. You just need to be more prepared to remove the armor, some newer cards like Scavo Techmonancer or Noa the Just are great examples.
Armored Up is for sure one of the more interesting rulesets and one of them, which you just cannot ignore. I really like the small games of prediction, which set up could be better here, what my opponent could think, and how he would like to deal with additional armor in the battles. Of course, this kind of game are usually reserved for tournament battles, for the ladder you usually choose a magic team and go to another fight, at least for lower leagues. I hope dev team finally find the solution to improve the ladder to be more interesting and meaningful.
I hope you like this kind of battle and strategy presentation. You can find more strategy analysis, discussion, and prediction games on my Wednesday Splinterlands. tv stream. You can check the schedule here
If you have any comments, please do not hesitate. Do you think I could improve anything just tell me :)
If you wish to try Splinterlands you can use my reference link.
Thumbnails and other pictures borrowed with permission from the Splinterlands team or made in Cooltext
We continue our game from the previous week, today's new battle, and a new card to win :).
I come to some ideas, I hope you will like them and participate. Every week I will publish one battle, and your goal is to point out the first victim of the battle and who will be the winner. This game is exactly the same as my prediction game which I run on my Wednesday Splinterlands. tv stream. I know that not everyone can attend the stream, so I hope you will still have fun that way. More about the rules can read here.
Among all participants who get the correct answer, I will randomly (probably on my Wednesday stream) choose one winner.
The prize of the first blog prediction game for the lucky winner will be the epic card:
Here we got the battle, of course with the Armored Up ruleset:
Game instruction:
Try to point out which monster will die first on the battlefield and who wins the battle
- t - top player
- b - bottom player
- number - order counting from the first position
Examples:
t2b = monster on the second position of top player die first, the bottom player wins
b6t = monster on the sixth position of bottom player die first, the top player wins
t3t = monster on third position of top player die first, the top player wins
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