Strategy Corner #58- Fire & Regret Ruleset - Avoid range at all costs.

The last Strategy Corner article was 21 days ago. I finally managed to find some time to get back to it. But as always, still not enough to catch up with all the news around Splinterlands ecosystem :). There have been a lot of changes recently and some good/bad news around.
So let's just check today's ruleset definition and battle that I want to present:

All units receive the Return Fire ability at the start of the battle. Enemy units that attack with ranged attacks receive damage back.

Damage returned is equal to damage of the attacker divided by 2, rounded up.
Ranged attack units with the Reflection Shield ability do not take damage from reflected magic attacks.
The Amplify ability increases damage.

Firstly, the description of the ruleset in the game is not perfect, sometimes you got just general information which not give 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, here is the Return Fire description link, even more advanced players could find something interesting there, below are some examples:

I don't want to repeat myself, all rules regarding other types of return damage ruleset apply here as well. So the best way is just to avoid playing range units at all. There are not many options to get more protection against range damage, so some strategies that could be viable for magic reflection damage don't work so well here. Of course, as I always state, Splinterlands is a mind game, you need to be more clever than your opponents. So sometimes thinking outside the box and using units that your opponent is not expecting could be a good idea. And I know, it's already boring, but we are in the martyr cards meta. And here martyr cards are nice targets for themself (all of martyr cards so far are ranged units), so if you use them right, that can buff your team without worrying about some tricky targeting problem.

Today's battle is a Wild ladder match. Now, where there is no division to leagues you should expect everything :). It was an interesting ruleset, so let's check both setups.

No magic, additional armor, return fire, and only Fire Splinter available? I think it was the obvious choice of ETERNAN BRUNE - One of the best Fire Summoner now (I don't count Yodin who is in a different league). The rest of the team was specific, some Sneak monsters, additional armor + repair from Ferox Defender, and Orc with his retaliation ability. And of course some protection from the back: cannon fodder plus Clockwork Aide.
The opponent followed a similar strategy but with Tarsa - more power but less defense. I think he counted on getting a lot of armor from the Armored Up ruleset and Ferox, but he miscalculated some debuff and fragility of the Ferox in the first position. Let's see how it ends.

Round 2, we lost our cannon fodder, but with some luck in retaliation, we killed quite a dangerous opponent's unit. This taunt is very annoying :(

Round 3, nothing spectacular happened here, we got another retaliation attack. The opponent got a nice nut to crack with Clockwork Aide :).

Round 4, both players had a lot of luck, we got poison damage from Uraues, that killed our Clockwork, and we got another retaliation attack :).

Round 5, RNG as always is crazy in SPL, another poison status, and another retaliation. Still no new casualties.

Round 6, Finally we managed to kill that crazy taunter unit, we got redemption damage, but all our units survived. Another retaliation :), really ? :), but this time normal attack was unlucky with a miss, so still no kill.

Round 7, Opponent's Ferox Defender is finally dead, no more repair. We got another retaliation :)

Round 8, ups, not good, another poison status eliminating our Orc. And our Gladiator unit is dead as well without getting any bloodlust buff. It doesn't look good :(

Round 10, it's a long battle, let's skip round with so much luck for us. Two attacks without poison, and we managed to kill that crazy Uraeus.

Final Blow - Round 17 - it took us a while, a few misses, but with our repair ability opponent's chance to win that fight was only to stay alive till 20th round and have a lot of luck :). It was not a case here :).

The battle was very close, fortunately, the armor repair is so good with only 2 monsters :). As I mentioned in the prologue to the battle, Ferox Defender was an amazing choice here, but after we finally managed to kill him, the opponent lost any defense and it was just a matter of time. Of course, both sides had some ups and downs, with some crazy luck of poisoning and retaliation abilities. Clockwork Aide was a great defender at the back, of course not perfect, because of the high level of Uruaes, which normally does not have poison on the level I regularly play.
As I mentioned last time I'm not a big fan of the secondary tank, but this time Ferox Defender is so important, and additionally Orc is so good card as a target of opportunity and any front damage dealers. He was MVP of this fight, so let's check more info about the chosen cards:

FEROX DEFENDER, is recently one of my favorite card for fire team. For the lower mana battles, much better unit than Arkemis The Bear. Of course, in the bronze league the damage output is almost non-existent, but still granting that armor protection, and quite nice defensive stats is enough in my opinion. On higher levels, Ferox has amazing abilities, armor repair, and shatter, I haven't played it there, so I'm not sure how strong he is, but on paper looks crazy good.

DUMACKE ORC another great soulbound card, of course it's much better in ruleset where armor is available. Without equalizer ruleset, I don't recommend to use that card in first place, magic damage is able to kill that card immediately. There are few other options: in silver and higher after the card receive retalation skill it's quite nice option to use that card as sneak defense.

CLOCKWORK AIDE, it's so great, and now even better with updated Weapon Training abilities. But even without any damage Clockwork could provide plenty of advantages to the team. First Speed boost is so important, secondly on higher level Rust - reducing armor is even more important in the Heavy Armor meta. And of course its defense ability in many cases are just great, of course you need to be careful about magic and poison, but overall it's great card.

We have already talked about some of the strategies if you have some limitations to the damage type. Of course, it's not a hard limit, sometimes it's a good strategy to use monsters with damage type which could kill them.

I haven't mentioned Amplify ability which is another good way to punish the unexpected or too audacious opponent. Unfortunately, I haven't got any battle for a presentation where I used martyr card as a fast buff for other cards, I hope I will still have occasion in another Strategy Corner article :).

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:

92	91	90	89
88	87	86	85