Splinterlands Battle Mage Challenge - Explosive Weaponry

Hey!

Welcome to another Battle Mage Secrets Challenge, this time featuring the Explosive Weaponry rule, which grants Blast to every Monster in the field.

Explosive Weaponry

Because of the Blast effect given to every Monster, this is one of the most fun rules to play with. When a card has Blast, it does half damage, rounded up, to the units adjacent to the targeted Monster… so a lot of damage being dealt in this kind of battles.

From an offensive point of view, just having Monsters that deal a lot of damage is not enough, you also need to be faster than your opponent, so you can take advantage of that Blast effect and take down some enemy cards, before the other team has a chance of attacking.

So, Monsters and Summoners that increase or decrease Speed are a great asset in this kind of ruleset. Talking about offense, strategically positioned Martyrs, could be a great way of using your opponent’s attack against him, by improving your Monsters stats. Gladiators also thrive in this environment, since they have much more chances of killing and feeding their Bloodlust.

At last, regarding offense, Monsters with a mixed attack or a Double Strike attack, greatly improves your chances of taking down many enemy cards in a single round as well as using Monsters with Enrage and/or Retaliate, since the first one improves your stats, causing greater damage and the other has a chance of attacking back, when receiving a Melee hit, and hence causing even more damage.

Now, talking about defense, besides the typical use of Healers and Armor, you can try to isolate the damage in a particular area, by using a particular combination of abilities, which include:

• Taunt: to draw attention to a particular Monster, preferably placed as a tank or in last position.
• Reflection Shield: to bottle the Blast. Cards with this effect don’t suffer Blast or returning damages, like Thorns.
• Tank Healing/Triage: to heal the Taunt Monster and keep the lineup still.

Isolating the Blast allows you to control the damage to your team and gives you time to take down the enemy team. Here’s an unorthodox example: Battle Link

• Anticipating Alric’s Magic buff, I used Thaddius to both debuff Magic and Health, which by the way helps a lot in a Blast ruleset.
• You don’t have healers in the Death Splinter so I positioned the Helheim Demon in last position to control, not only the Opportunity rule, but also the Blast, while at the same time using the Hoarder, a Neutral Monster to heal him.
• I didn’t have the option to use a card with Reflection Shield, so I just used the Magical card with the highest amount of hit points and magic, in this case the Magi of Chaos.
• Here I was lucky, because of my Venari’s Poison effect, but the strategy helped a lot.

Of course, this is not perfect; Taunt can be bypassed by Scattershot and in some cases the damage received can be too great for a Taunt Monster to handle, even with two healers, so I’d rather create a fast lineup, with Double Strike Monsters. Here’s an example, without Blast though: Taunt Monster with triple heal, but not enough Speed to apply any healing. Battle Link

Battle

Ruleset

Lineup & Analysis

Both, my opponent and me had the same level, give or take, Silver level, so it was an even battle from the Wild Format ladder. Plenty of Mana to assemble whatever team we wanted and only Life, Death and Earth were active. Besides “Explosive Weaponry”, there were two other rules, but there weren’t important.

In this case I chose an offensive approach, not caring that much about controlling incoming damage, so I picked the Life Splinter, which allows me to use physically weak cards, but relatively fast and strong card Ranged attackers.

• So as a Summoner, General Sloan, to buff my Ranged attackers.
• As a tank, the Drybone Barbarian. It doesn’t have any kind of protection against attacks; however, it has plenty of health and its Enrage and Retaliate effects allow him to return plenty of damage, four points with the Blast, actually.
• Next, Djinn Renova. She deals a good amount of Magic damage and improves my whole team’s health by one point. Besides, her good amount of health allows her to withstand the Blast, a couple of rounds more.
• In third place, the Time Mage. She’s weak, but her Slow effect helps a lot to get my team to attack first.
• Next, the Venari Crystalsmith, as a single Tank Healer. The Barbarian, as said, has no protection, but his amount of health, allows him to heal by four points.
• Then, the Pelacor Arbalest, as one of my main offensive cards, with its Double Strike, boosted by Sloan’s Ranged attacks buff.
• At last, the Supply Runner, to further increase my team’s Speed.

Battle Link

Even though my opponent had a good team, with strong cards, with Lorna Shine protecting them with the Divine Shield effect, which is a great thing for this rule, their lack of Speed allowed me to take them down quite easily.

My superior Speed allowed me to take down three enemy Monsters before they were even able to perform their first attack, those were Iziar and the Dumacke Exile, and also Uriel the Purifier, but he had Recharge. You can also appreciate how abilities that give you extra chances of attack, like Double Strike or Retaliate, help you a lot when there is a Blast effect. For example, the Barbarian’s Retaliation to the Corsair Bosun, took down the Sand Worm.

This is it, thank you for reading!

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