Blasting Your Opponent Out Of The Park

In this week’s Battle Mage Secrets, we look at the Explosive Weaponry ruleset and see what strategy works when all units gain the Blast ability. The blast damage is equal to the main damage divided by 2 and then rounded up. The new ability Reflection Shield will help you absorb blast damage but not that many units have it.

For this battle, I've gone with Lobb Lowland as my summoner because I wanted the option of choosing a Gladiator card in my lineup. Particularly Katrelba Gobson because her double strike ability would mean an extra blast with each attack landed.

1st position - Mycelic Infantry - A tank with shield to absorb melee and range attacks. It is slow, though, which can be a disadvantage.
2nd position - Furious Chicken - A cheap 0 mana buffer between the front and back lines.
3rd position - Creeping Ooze - Slows down the opponent and hopefully get my attacks in first.
4th position - Fungus Fiend - Again, a 0 mana buffer unit that I'm not expecting to do much in battle.
5th position - Katrelba Gobson - My main attacker in the lineup. Counting on her bloodlust, doublestrike and the added explosion to do lots of damage.

With the Explosive Weaponry ruleset, one general strategy is to use speed to your advantage, in order to land your units' attacks first and also do lots of explosive damage. That's what my opponent seems to be going for, with a +2 speed boost and a -1 penalty for me.

Looking at the lineup, I could tell that a win depended highly on whether Katrelba could survive the initial rounds.

By the second round, all my buffer units had been killed. Now, another problem with Explosion is that even though my tank was able to absorb damage, the unit that is just behind it still gets the full effect of the blast. That is, the front unit doesn't absorb any blast for the unit behind it.

There were definitely times when I looked to be on the ropes. Like this time here when Katrelba was down to 1 health. Luckily she got to attack first and thereby get a health boost from bloodlust. Also, my opponent had the chance to finish the battle off but he missed Katrelba. Phew!

Finally, after many misses by my opponent thanks to Katrelba's fast speed, I was able to finish him off. Definitely closer than I would have liked but I was eventually able to finishe my opponent who was hiding behind his reflection shield.

You can catch a replay of the entire battle here: https://splinterlands.com?p=battle&id=sl_7b06d4bfdf3deb5598686c0e719c453a&ref=charcoalbuffet

That's all from this Explosive Weaponry ruleset edition of Battlemage Secrets. I hope you saw the power of doublestrike combined with speed and bloodlust when a unit has the Explosion ability. Reflection Shield from my opponent was also an interesting one to stem the damage at the front. Too bad it didn't work for him.