Strategy Corner #22- Going the Distance Ruleset - Ilthain or Sloan ?

Another episode of the Strategy Corner article, so another ruleset to analyze ;). Today I think one of the less popular among players: Going the Distance. Limited cards pool, usually with cards that cannot attack from the first position. And some of the great counters: summoners with Return Fire abilities. Is it really so boring and annoying? Of course, engaging in battles where only ranged attackers are allowed presents a unique set of challenges and opportunities, but sometimes you can be surprised how you could outsmart your opponent.

Description:

Only units with ranged attacks may be used.

Consider including units with the Close Range and Return Fire abilities in your lineup.

Firstly, the description of the ruleset in the game is not perfect, sometimes you got just general information which not giving you all information you need. Best way to read the full description as above from the game documentation at least once. You can check all here.

I seriously encourage you guys to check this site, you can check the links above. Even more advanced players could find something interesting there.

In the official description, we have mentioned two very crucial abilities which have an enormous impact on going the distance ruleset battles. I think you just cannot ignore them both, and try to utilize as many close-range units as you can. Return fire is very helpful, additional damage from it could be very effective to kill opponent's units faster, but is it necessary? Let's check the battles for today and try to answer that question.

After Ilthain was introduced with the Riftwatchers set, I started to almost totally ignore General Sloan. For sure Ilthain is one of the best Riftwatches summoners, but is it unbeatable with a Range-only ruleset? :)

We got a Bronze Level tournament battle, with Going the Distance ruleset. Of course, the obvious choice is Ilthain here, but we got an additional ruleset as reverse speed. After some consideration, I decided to check if this one additional point of speed buff from Ilthain could be enough for General Sloan to take over this fight :). The opponent used quite a nice team with a martyr card and a new promo dual splinter Zyriel card, which is very powerful.

Round 1.5, the battle is quite fast, I mean quite slow, hmm ok you should know what I'm mean :). With reverse speed, my monsters without any boost usually attacked first. We killed the martyr card, but unfortunately, return fire was enough to take our attacker with it. With a few more attacks we managed to kill only the Close Range unit from the opponent's side.

Round 2, we lost only one unit, but all the rest received some returned damage from Ilthain's ability. We still have nice firepower and speed advantage.

Round 3, We could end this battle in the second round, so you can feel how big our firepower is here. Unlucky for us, our War Pegauss just missed :).

Final Blow - Round 3 - it's over, we lost another unit with a suicide attack, but speed was everything here. Let's jump to battle analysis.

The battle was quite fast (in a reverse speed environment it sounds strange :D ), but you have to admit quite intensive. Opponents team seems quite balanced, maybe there was a lack of one more unit with Close Range ability. So what went wrong for my opponent? Of course Reverse Speed ruleset, even with Return Fire abilities my units could eliminate the opponent's monster fast enough to avoid most of their normal attack. With quite a high mana match, units usually have enough health points to survive few return fire damage. It would be optimal to add a unit that guarantees additional armor, but I do not recollect any ranged unit with that ability. With a regular speed environment, our team would be obliterated in the second round, I guess :). Let's check our monster choices, I avoid talking about summoners, there was already some ruleset when we discussed them.

HERO OF BEYOND, I very seldom see this card on the battlefield, and I'm a huge fan of it, even without Going the Distance ruleset. It's quite resilient, Close Combat ability is key here to sometimes have the option to avoid melee monsters. And of course, in Range Only battles this unit is a must. Unfortunately, I own only the basic level of that card, on higher levels it gets quite useful abilities as Last Stand and Shield.

PRISMOLOGIST high damage, blast what else you need more ? Ok, of course, speed is insufficient for regular speed battles. On the other hand in reverse speed that card shines the brightest. Additional armor gives some protection to return fire damage. With a higher level the cards are of course even more useful, but still usually only in reverse speed. For the bronze level, I think it is still usable every time.

GARGOYA DEVIL, last but not least, sometimes people treat that card as a meme :) Close Combat is the keyword here :), not many cards and additionally natural have it. In Going the Distance ruleset and higher mana match that card seems necessary. But if you tracked some of my battles or watched some of Splinterlands.tv stream, you can notice that I used that card on several different occasions :). Which ones ? waiting for your answers in the comment section :)

Going the Distance can be quite annoying at times. You have a very limited pool of cards, some of them cannot attack from the first position. Additionally, when the Life Splinter is available both players usually have access to great counterplay with Iltahin's Return fire ability. Sometimes with some other rules like Even Stevens, only commons and rares you could face the situation that you cannot even get enough cards on the battlefield to fulfill optimal mana requirements.
But I think with more and more cards available we could have quite a nice bunch of fun with it. It changes quite a lot, you can try different strategies and even win versus some very effective strategies as was presented in today's battle.
So what about you guys? Do you like Going the Distance ? :)

I hope you like this kind of battle and strategy presentation. More strategy analysis, discussion, and prediction games you can find on my Wednesday Splinterlands.tv stream. You can check the schedule here

If you have any comments, please do not hesitate. Do you think I could improve anything just tell me :)

If you wish to try out Splinterlands you can use my reference link.

Thumbnails and other pictures borrowed with permission from the Splinterlands team or made in Cooltext

We continue our game from the previous week, today new battle, new card to win :).

I come to some idea, I hope you will like them and participate. Every week I will publish one battle, and your goal is to point out the first victim of the battle and who will be the winner. This game is exactly the same as my prediction game which I run on my Wednesday Splinterlands.tv stream. I know that not everyone can attend the stream, so I hope you will still have fun in that way. More about the rules can be read here.

Among all participants who get the correct answer, I will randomly (probably on my Wednesday stream) choose one winner.

The prize of the blog prediction game for the lucky winner will be the epic card:

Here we got the battle:

Game instruction:
Try to point out which monster will die first on the battlefield and who wins the battle

• t - top player
• b - bottom player
• number - order counting from the first position

Examples:
t2b = monster on the second position of top player die first, the bottom player wins
b6t = monster on the sixth position of bottom player die first, the top player wins
t3t = monster on the third position of top player die first, the top player wins

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