Up Close & Personal (With Some Magic)

Greetings, battle mages!

In this week's Splinterlands Battle Mage Secrets Challenge I have an interesting example battle of quality over quantity. I've noticed that I often hesitate to go out with a team of just a few monsters, but in this case, I made an exception because there were two monsters I absolutely needed to add.

The reason for this lies in the rulesets.

Up Close & Personal ruleset simply means only units with melee can be used in the battle.

I'm normally using a monster with Demoralize ability in these ones but this time I had other plans in my mind.

To make this battle even more interesting, I was lucky enough to have another ruleset in play - Up To Eleven. This will provide monsters on both teams with the Amplify ability.

These two rules together gave some excellent ideas. Let's take a closer look!

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My Team

As a summoner, I picked up HELIOS MATRIARCH which I just recently had upgraded to level 3. The Matriarch will boost the speed of all of my monsters by 1 and being a Soulbound summoner, she will also allow me to choose one Gladiator unit to join the battle.

You'll never guess which monster that'll be...😅

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The tank unit is a level 2 DJINN CHWALA of the Dragon Splinter.

This heavily armoured warrior will also be pretty lethal offensively as she deals a 3-point melee attack damage.

But that's not all. Chwala also has an ability that is more than suited for Amplify battles. The damage caused attacking enemies by Thorns will now be multiplied thanks to the Up To Eleven rule and Amplify ability.

Since only monsters with melee attacks can used in this one, the opponent has no choice but to suffer the consequences of hurting Djinn Chwala.

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You guessed absolutely right!

QUORA TOWERSHEAD is my gladiator of choice for Up Close and Personal battle.

Even though Quora and Chwala are quite expensive for a 27-mana battle, I have a good argument. You see, the rules say only monsters with melee can be used in the battle. Indeed, Quora has a Melee attack but she also has a 2-point Magic attack!

Since she is qualified, she can operate normally from behind Djinn Chwala and reduce the health of their tank using her magic. A real bonus would be if Quara manages to destroy the tank which would then activate her Bloodlust ability. This would obviously make her an even more dangerous killing machine if she had to take the first spot at some point.

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My last monster is URAES.

The main function of this snake is to provide some protection to Quora(like she needs it) while at the same time trying to find a weak spot in the opponent's back-line.

Uraes will use its Sneak ability to target the very last enemy monster. It also has armour which will kind of grant an "extra life" in all-melee battles.

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Entering The Arena

As my summoner and Quara ate most of my mana I walked toward the arena with only three monsters also with a good, simple plan: let waste their health on Djinn Chwala, Quora will then finish off the weak ones that are left and grow even stronger herself!

Here you can see the setup for the battle with all the buffs in play and also the opponent team.

Opponent Team

My foe decided to go with Drake The Arnak who will provide all their units with +1 armour. Not a bad choice!

Their monsters are:

• Djinn Chwala - I knew it. So, my clever idea wasn't that original after all.

• Venari Knifer - Another monster with Thorns. Great backup if Chwala would fall.

• DRAGON JUMPER - Interesting choice with some good abilities. I rarely come across this one in battles. Could be a threat because of the Opportunity ability.

• Mycelic Morphoid - Gladly this is only on level 1 so it doesn't have Thorns.

• Fungus Fiend - Here to fill an empty spot.

• Brownie - This is a fast creature and will cause some trouble for my Uraeus. Also increases the speed of their other units with Swiftness.

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The Battle

So is it quality over quantity? Let's find out! As always, you watch the whole battle unfold HERE, or/and continue reading my battle report below.

ROUND 1

The first one was something like "getting to know your enemy" round as nothing worth mentioning happened.

ROUND 2

Then, right at the beginning of the second round, the extremely fast Dragon Jumper destroyed our Uraeus! After that, their Chwala who was weakened by Quora and my Chwala, was killed in the Thorns.

ROUND 3

My Djinn Chwala managed to remove armour from both Dragon Jumper and Venari Knifer before she was wasted. Now they had to face the wrath of Quora Towershead.

ROUND 4

Quora calmly took some hits, healed herself, and then killed the Knifer with a double attack.

ROUND 5

Her Bloodlust was now activated and in fact, without it, she wouldn't have survived the attack made by Dragon Jumper.

ROUND 6

The Dragon Jumper made one final push but Quora was just too powerful even at this point.

ROUNDS 7 AND 8

In the seventh round, the setup for the rest of the battle was now this.

These three monsters lasted until the 8th round and then they were all gone. The game was over.

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Conclusion

There are many approaches to the Up Close and Personal ruleset. Thorns, Shield and Demoralize are good and even better when combined. My idea of using Quora and magic is perhaps a little bit outside the box in this case and it did work well.

Also, Quora's Heal ability will mitigate nicely the very likely Thorns damage that each monster is bound to get in these battles.

Djinn Chwala is also a great choice with her Thorns ability and good overall stats. One other strategy I've been using is to combine Shield and Demoralize. For this, I've been using Harklaw and Disintegrator as the latter one reduces opponent melee strength making Harklaws Shield and armour almost impossible to penetrate.

What are your best tricks to tackle this ruleset? Drop a comment below 👇.

Thank you for reading!

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Also Playing:

Overline
Terracore
Rising Star
Army of Crypto

Disclaimers:

Thumbnail background image made with Canva
Other pictures are screenshots from Splinterlands

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