Strategy Corner #44 - Weak Magic Ruleset - Armor FTW

I know, sometimes I'm in a complaining mood. We have had a lot of great news recently, I think the Rebellion release is a success, and a few other things I mentioned in earlier articles. And I guess I need to put a pinch of tar in this jar of honey because it's not the first time. I'm talking about postponing the new airdrop system release - Conflicts. usually, all those delays are correlated with bigger hype around Splinterlands, and I think it's usually the best time to tighten the screw. If the team has limited resources, maybe hire someone for a short time. In my opinion, having Conflict before Holiday Time would be the perfect ending for a whole year of game development.
Ok, enough salt :). Let's check our ruleset.

Description:

Magic hits armor first before hitting health.

Add another layer of Protection to extend the life of your units.
Shatter or Pierce any armor your opponent dares place.

Firstly, the description of the ruleset in the game is not perfect, sometimes you get just general information which does not give you all the information you need. The 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, even more advanced players could find something interesting there.

Armor for the win is the title. And you know, in my opinion, there is never enough armor. And of course, when we have a ruleset where magic damage hits armor first, that sentence is so much stronger. Stacking armor is always a good idea, but you need to be careful. Many different strategies could punish you for it. One obvious one is Immortalis the King, which guarantees shatter ability for all the units. We will see a mirror Immortalis fight and analyze it later, so now let's check what else could be expected.
Another strong tactic is units or summoners with rust ability (-2 armor), recently we had the example of battle with soulbound fire summoner.
Generally, I think the ruleset is quite straightforward, stack armor and get some anti-armor tools, so let's check our battle:

Today's battle is a Modern Gold Foil silver lever tournament. It's not so easy to compete in that environment, where all those OG players have a full collection, but I do my best :).

It's not so rare to see the mirror of Immortalis when we have a Weak Magic ruleset. So both players had similar ideas with the summoner, but the line-up was quite different.
Unfortunately, my Marelic Slipspawn is just second level, so without Forcefield ability, it's not so great. I chose a more defensive strategy with double Protect, some healing, and mixed range and magic damage.
Opponents chose different monsters but in general similar ideas with more offensive options. Let's check who got a better setup.

Round 2, no casualties in this round, but most of our damage was blocked with void ability from Immortalis :(

Round 3, finally we killed that nasty taunter, but we lost our tank instead. Fortunately, our next first-row unit is so fast flier - Regal Peryton. For quite a low-speed opponent's team, it could be a challenge.

Round 4, we got some luck with the misses, but unfortunately, our bird just fell from the sky :(. And we still didn't kill that double striker, which killed almost half of our team already.

Final Blow - Round 6 - we skipped the whole round 5, it was already too late for our team to counterattack. That tank heal was enough to keep the front damage dealer long enough, but the fight was closer than it seemed. Let's jump to the analysis.

Was the opponent right here? Not exactly. I mean he won the battle, but you need to remember that Splinterlands is still a card game where luck is a big factor. I hope to see some in-game tools that allow us to analyze the battle. Now, we need to use 3rd party site, like battle vision from xbot. The tool shows that the fight was really close, with 100x battles simulation it gives winrate around 45-55%, so it could end both ways.
But it's not just that, now we have the opportunity to improve our skills and check which setup could work. You can change all the cards or just move the current one in a different order. Of course, changing the cards if you know already the opponent's setup can teach you something, but I think it's better just to work with the setup you used.

Here, that small change in monster order gives us 75% chance of winning. I need to remember that the last position of Runemancer Florre it's not always the best.

RUNEMANCER FLORRE, 13 mana is a lot, but the card is just strong. Double-type damage gives her more flexibility, but more importantly, with shatter ability from Immortalis, guarantees that she will make damage to the unit. And it is so crucial in Weak Magic ruleset. I'm not sure, but it could be the only card without any abilities for all levels. Am I right ?

REGAL PERYTON on paper Peryton could not look as strong as it is. Five mana, just two magic damage, but the devil is in the details. Flying ability and high speed give him a lot of survivability. And Immortalis with void adds another brick to the equation. So we could see during today's fight how difficult is to kill that bird. Additionally, that high speed usually gives the rest of the damage dealers a clear way to deal damage due to shatter again. It's my one of favorite cards with the Immortalis team.

QUEEN MYCELIA, so far I think this is just the best card in the game, so versatile, and useful almost in every situation and every league. In Silver League, she has just Protect and Amplify, and she is still strong. Later with the addition of Triage and Rust usually must must-play card in any lower, medium mana fight. I still remember I was using Queen in 40-50 mana matches in Diamond/Champion, now I'm not sure if it is still a viable strategy.

It's not often I publish the fight when I'm a loser :). Maybe I should. to show you that usually, you can learn more from them. If you just put the team and got the easy win, you usually don't try to analyze the battle and find maybe a better solution for it. And for losing it's usually the opposite. I mentioned that a few times, but we really need more in-game tools for analyzing the meta, cards' strategic value, etc. I know there are/were some services that offer that, but usually, the data is full and you do not know how they calculate all the information.

I hope you like this kind of report, battle, and strategy presentation. More strategy analysis, discussion, and prediction games you can find on my Wednesday Twitch Channel stream. There will be schedule soon :)

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 up with some ideas, 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 dies first, the bottom player wins
b6t = monster on the sixth position of bottom player dies first, the top player wins
t3t = monster on the third position of top player dies first, the top player wins

Previous articles:

69	68	67	66
65	64	63	62