Strategy Corner #47- Armored Up Ruleset - Armor is everything

It was a long Holiday Break for me :) A lot of friend meetings, and travels and on top of it, I was sick half of that time. I hope you had a great time and a crazy New Year's Eve party :).
But hopefully, I'm coming back to live and next week I will try to catch up on anything new related to Splinterlands Ecosystem.
Today's ruleset for Battle Mage Secret is one of my favorites because is related to armor. So let's check the definition and my thoughts about it :).

Ruleset definition from the official site:

All monsters get a +2 armor buff at the beginning of the game.

• Use Void Armor to ensure that magic attacks strike armor first.
• Use Shatter or Piercing to destroy your opponent's armor more effectively.
• See Protect ability.

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.

You know I'm so big fan of armor, so additional armor from the ruleset is just another piece of puzzle to solve :). There are a few options for that: Immortalis is always the king, you know that. Shatter in any situation when you expect a lot of armor is great, and Armored Up is for sure one of them. Another option is Astral Entity which has rust ability and removes 2 points of armor. Additionally, we get some new monsters with Protect Ability, so sometimes a single Rust is not enough. I think we have armor heavy meta now, and it's quite important to know how to deal with it.
Let's check our battle:

Today's battle is a ladder match with silver-level cards. Let's see how it looks:

I choose Immortalis, of course, the King :), with that ruleset where melee monsters can attack from any position, you can risk using them more. Why? Usually, opponents are more prepared for magic attacks, and with shatter from Immortalis and fast units executing it before the physical monster's attacks, it seems a reliable strategy. But we need to check it :)
The opponent, on the other hand, focused mainly on melee. That one magic unit could be dangerous. Possessed Puppet seems so strong, and we cannot deal with it immediately.

Round 2, shatter on high-speed magic units is so strong :). We still did some damage, but the opponents lost a bunch of armor every time and our melee team had an easy way to do damage. We lost our Agent, but opponents already is 2 monster down.

Round 3, another good round, our flier dodged some attacks but finally was killed. Opponent's got no casualties this round.

Round 4, we finally killed that annoying Pelacor Deceiver but still Possessed Puppet is alive and did enormous damage every round. We got some buff from Martyr, so hopefully we could have some misses next round.

Final Blow - Round 6 - Pelacor Mercenary with additional speed was enough to stop some of the attacks from both opponent's monsters, we managed to kill Puppet in round 5. And even 11 points of armor was nothing in connection with the use of shatter.

Immortalis was just too strong here. As I mentioned that single magic unit was so annoying, additionally with poison damage. Void from Immortalis blocked some damage, but still poison was lethal here. The opponent didn't have any sneak monster, so our Vampire Bat as sneak defense with flying and high speed seemed a waste, but still, it dealt nice damage during the fight. The martyr cards are always strong, so buffing our main damage dealers was very helpful. The opponent's Thadius was a good choice to lower the magic attack, but Regal Peryton's main function was just to destroy the armor. And it worked perfectly.
Let's check our team:

IMMORTALIS, the King, of course. We talked about this card so many times, but for anything related to armor, Immortalis is always a great solution. Shatter is a powerful ability and it works even without doing any damage. The really important thing to remember. I haven't check the new summoners from Rebellion, but Immortalis still is the number one summoner for me in new modern format. Bye. bye Kittie :).

REGAL PERYTON the card is so versatile, that I used it almost in any battle when earth is available. High speed, and flying makes it a great defender against any physical damage. If you combine it with Immortalis we have some magic defense as well. For today's battle, the main function of that fellow was shatter, with so high speed usually attacks before any physical monster, dealing some damage but most importantly shattering the armor.

VAMPIRE BAT, may seem like it doesn't fit in the core team section. Sometimes it's worth mentioning less powerful, but still very useful card. Vampire Bat, in our example, was the answer for any sneak attack monster. High speed and flying guarantee enough defense to be annoying for the opponent for a few rounds. Additionally, it is still 3 mana and 2 damage, so great deal. Do not ignore that card, it could be useful :).

As I mentioned in the beginning now there are so many different ways to deal with armor. In this case, our magic team was victorious, but the overall full magic team is quite easy to counter. And if you see the Armored Up ruleset, you can expect it and be more prepared. One of the more efficient counter builds is, of course, Immortalis, which grants nice protection with Void ability and adds a tool to deal with armor.
Armored Up is for sure one of the more interesting rulesets and one of them, which you just cannot ignore. I really like the small games of prediction, which setup could be better here, what my opponent could think, and how he would like to deal with additional armor in the battles. Of course, this kind of game is usually reserved for tournament battles, for the ladder you usually choose a magic team and go to another fight, at least for lower leagues. I hope dev team finally finds a solution to improve the ladder to be more interesting and meaningful.

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

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