Battle Mage Secrets Weekly Challenge! Five Alive!

[Source]

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

About the Ruleset

Five Alive

The Five Alive ruleset states that "Up to five Units can be used ". This means that instead of the usual limit of up to 6 units, we are now restricted to using up to 5 units.

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Battle Ruleset(s)

Details of my battle with this ruleset is as follows.

Five Alive: Up to five Units can be used
Mana Cap: 40
Available Splinters: All Splinters can be used
Format: Modern

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Cards & Line Up

The Summoner vs

Summoner: General Sloan - This increases the Ranged attack of my deck by 1.

The Line Up

Position 1	Position 2	Position 3	Position 4	Position 5

vs

Position 1	Position 2	Position 3	Position 4

[Card image source]

Position	Name	Description
1	Drybone Barbarian	It has the Enrage and Retaliate ability and is here to do most of the damage
2	Spirit Hoarder	It has the Triage and Dispel ability and it's main job here is to heal Iziar.
3	Venari Crystalsmith	It has the Tank Heal ability and it keeps the tank alive longer.
4	War Pegasus	It has the Flying and Shatter ability, which is useful against opponents with lots of shield.
5	Iziar	It has the Taunt and Void ability, and is especially useful if the opponent uses magic monsters.

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Strategy

The ruleset here meant that only a maximum of five units can be deployed.

As all splinters are allowed, it's difficult to guess which splinter the opponent might choose. As such, I opted to go for General Sloan with the high damage and heal combination. The Spirit Hoarder and Venari Crystalsmith helps to heal the Drybone Barbarian and Iziar respectively, while the Drybone Barbarian and War Pegasus help to mete out the damage.

The opponent opted to use Thaddius Brood as his summoner. I felt that the attacks are a little "all over the place", and that dilutes the damage. It didn't really matter in this case as their attacks would have go to Iziar in any case. Unless he used monsters with the Scattershot ability. As such, it was a fair easy win for me.

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Thoughts on the Five Alive Ruleset

The Five Alive ruleset reduces that number of cards that you can use to five. This forces you to place the five best most suitable monsters for the battle. There is no good strategy for this ruleset. You'll have to rely on some guesswork as to what the opponent might use and try to come up with a deck to counter.

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Battle

Watch the battle here