Battle Mage Secrets Weekly Challenge! Armored Up!

[Source]

Hi everyone! It's time for the weekly Battle Mage Secrets challenge and the challenge this week is the Armored Up Ruleset.

About the Ruleset

Armored Up

The Aimless ruleset states that "All Monsters have 2 Armor in addition to their normal Armor set". This means that Magic attack monsters have an advantage as their attacks ignore armor. Useful abilities to have for this ruleset includes Void Armor, Shatter and Piercing.

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Battle Ruleset(s)

Details of my battle with this ruleset is as follows.

Armored Up: All Monsters have 2 Armor in addition to their normal Armor set
Back to Basics: Monsters lose all abilities
Mana Cap: 19
Available Splinters: Fire, Water, Earth and Death
Format: Modern

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Cards & Line Up

The Summoner vs

Summoner: Obsidian - This increases the Magic attack of my deck by 1.

The Line Up

Position 1	Position 2	Position 3	Position 4	Position 5	Position 6

vs

Position 1	Position 2	Position 3	Position 4

[Card image source]

Position	Name	Description
1	Fungus Fiend	This is a 0 cost sacrificial monster to take the initial damage. Great for taking 2 attacks if the opponent doesn't use Magic attacks
2	Mycelic Morphoid	This is the second sacrificial monster to take the initial damage with a low mana cost of 1
3	Hill Giant	This is the main tank to take damage, as it has a fairly high health of 7
4	Regal Peryton	This provides that main attack as it is fast.
5	Spirit Hoarder	It's low mana cost and here to provide magic damage.
6	Djinn Biljka	This is the secondary attack as it is low mana cost and has the same attack power as Regal Peryton. It is a lot slower though.

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Strategy

The ruleset here meant that (1) monsters will get 2 additional shields, putting ranged and melee monsters at a disadvantage, (2) abilities from monsters are useless.

As mentioned earlier, the Void Armor, Shatter and Piercing abilities are great in the Armored up ruleset. Unfortunately, it's lined up with the Back to Basics ruleset in this battle, which means that the abilities are all useless. In such a ruleset combination, the best strategy for me is to use a Magic based deck to bypass the shields from the ruleset. I chose to use 2 sacrificial low cost cards to take a potentially higher damage from the initial hits, and placed my magic monsters behind my Hill Giant, giving me at least 5 hits before the opponent will attack my magic monsters.

The opponent opted to use a four card deck of magic monsters. While the damage throughput for this is higher, the first two cards are taken out within the first round, and the next two in the subsequent round. This shows the importance of having sufficient tanking health in such a ruleset!

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Thoughts on the Armored Up Ruleset

The Armored Up ruleset is a that favours Magic monsters. The use of Grandmaster Rathe (which I do not have) with the Void Armor, would have neutralised the advantage the Magic Monsters have and taken advantage of the added shields in this battle. Other nice abilities that would have stacked well with Void Armor would be the Resurrect and Repair abilities. Having a monster with a high amount of shield would help greatly too!

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Battle

Watch the battle here