Battle Mage Secrets: CLOSE RANGE COMBAT

This week's edition of Battle Mage Secrets(TM) covers CLOSE RANGE, a ruleset that lets your favorite archers let loose even when they are in the front tank position.

In high mana situations, tanky ranged units like your favorite monstrous ranged attacking eyeball that at max level hurts to touch in any way Cornealus do solid work up front where its sustain heal, relatively high health and All The Reflects can wreak havoc. Hey there Runemancer Florre

DPS units with both ranged and melee like War Chaang or the new Rewards soulbound Drybone Raider can do well also if you can keep them alive in that top slot with a well-placed Taunt elsewhere in your lineup and for Drybone Raider at least, its speed isn't a liability.

The Gladiator soulbound Tatiana is sexy and has Close Range baked into her skills, so she mostly benefits from melee everywhere or supersneak.

So you might anticipate your opponent will also be playing a lot of ranged units, and try to take advantage of that fact by going all in on a melee sneak / opportunity team. Or go with beefy protection, sustain, and anti-range tech to go for a long drawn-out battle where you take out their dudes one at a time. Or go with all magic dps and burn the front line units out faster than they can replenish. So many variables!

But what if they anticipate that you anticipated that they will be playing a lot of ranged units, and counter your counter lineup? You could anticipate their anticipation of your anticipation and counter their counter. Has that timer run down yet?

Moving on, today's battle is from Modern Silver Ranked with only close range and meh high mana.

Let's evaluate a few of the different splinters we have available here:

Fire has lots of strong ranged units that also synergize well with Yodin. It also has a solid Martyr ranged unit, Firecaller, so you could field two martyr units in your team. Ash Mirage reduces ranged damage, Tinderlock reduces magic damage and has Last Stand which lets it go beast mode when it's alone, and there's a plethora of other lesser mana Ranged units that I don't want to list here because there's just too many. In Chaos Legion these include Lava Spider, Scavo Firebolt, Molten Ash Golem, and Lava Launcher as staples. In Untamed Ferexia General, Pyromaniac, Pyromancer, Pyrofitbit etc. Damnit, Janet, I ended up listing.

Earth also has some solid Ranged units as well as the S-tier summoner Immortalis. Uloth Dhampir is tanky with a stun, Beatrix Ironhand has great damage, speed and thorns, Hunter Jarx snipes with high damage and low speed, and the Riftwatchers' Runemancer Florre is a 100% stat beast.

Water is also a strong contender as always with overall solid units. Kelya is A-tier, Bortus negates magic, Possibilus is great for all-Melee trample teams especially with the new Coastal Sentry reward card crushinating with double strike, in the second slot Reacharound position. Plus Axemaster for another double strike, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Armor Repair guy, and Igor Darkspear, Angelic Mandarin, and the legendary 1-mana Two Gun Pete to fill in low mana spots with additional utility, health, and DPS as needed.

Finally, Life is also strongly positioned with the Riftwatchers summoner Ilthain who adds Return Fire and always-helpful-except-in-reverse-speed Speed. Return Fire scales better than Thorns as it scales with damage dealt, similar to Magic Reflect, whereas Thorns just reflects 2 damage every time.

Life tends to have great sustain as expected, with Repair, Tank Heal, and high health units aplenty. Venari Crystalsmith is a great ranged unit with Tank Heal, the Hero of Beyond has close range baked in as well as Last Stand at level 3, and the Silvershield Sheriff is a solid tanky ranged that hits hard, snipes, and pierces.

So that gives some slight inkling of all the stats, data and information human players are expected to keep in their heads when coming up with a new lineup. There's a lot too it eh?

I think the central challenge for SPL and similar games is to find ways for human creativity and flourishing to overcome the statistically brute force bot powers that exhaustively find all solutions and discover optimal pathways after analyzing all possible combinations. With the advent of GPTs / Large Language Models like Chat-GPT, DALL-E, etc., it's going to be an even harder space to plumb, for sure.

In any case, I for one welcome our new bot overlords, which in their deterministically finite wisdom selected a hybrid sneak/sustain lineup that has for the record also been selected by human players manually, guaranteed. The positioning here is pretty solid though could be easily countered; Adelade is vulnerable to Snipe which would negate her resurrect and remove an essential Repair and so might be better if replaced with Djinn Renova or Venari Crystalsmith, etc. That said, the positioning expects a full frontal assault; Adelade doesn't need to repair anymore if the first unit goes down, and so better for Renova's harder hitting magic attack to keep going and let Adelade possibly tank a few melee / ranged hits and get lucky with her flying evasiveness should Uriel go down.

What do you think the outcome of this battle will be based on the starting lineups?

At the beginning of the second round, our Uriel is still holding on to dear life and we haven't even damaged our opponents Martyr ranged card that's gonna make Cornealus even more nasty besides taking out its armor. We have put in a bit of work against Uloth Dhampir who hits hard and is a unit we definitely want to get rid of as its Stun can be game-changing.

Which way is this battle trending? Us or them? So far our Uriel is still holding up and Adelade is still holding her res in her pocket though Immortalis' Shatter makes her resurrect less impactful as the resurrected Armor will go away after the first hit.

Here's the start of round 3. We've got a pissed off Cornealus and an almost dead Uloth guiding things and here is where our overall DPS takes over the match.

Cornealus' Thorns is not as effective against a unit that hits for 9 every other turn which on average causes 1 damage per round vs our 9 which flattens that cursedly expensive eyeball.

In the end the sustain / sneak combination is too strong for the opposing team despite the relative strength of Immortalis vs. Lorna Shine whose Divine Shield tends to be better suited to faster one-and-done battles.

Full link to battle:

https://splinterlands.com?p=battle&id=sl_fa381fafa03edd267ad159c19aa7fe1c&ref=anonymouslee

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