Battle Mage Secrets: ★ Blast!! ★

Hi everyone! finally a new battle mage secrets to write about, I've been waiting for it!
To find out how you can participate in the challenge yourself, check out this post from splinterlands.

This weeks battle mage secrets challenge is about the Blast ruleset.

All units gain the Blast ability, doing additional damage to Monsters adjacent to the target monster. Additional damage is equivalent to main damage divided by 2, rounded up.

Of course, the Splinterlands King of the Blast ability is Yodin Zaku, and while he still is very powerful, he's not as powerful as he used to be since Chaos Legion and Riftwatchers launched, because now he can be countered a lot more using Reflection Shield, Taunt, and Return Fire or a combination of them. But still in this bear market, 1 BCX Yodin will costs you around $160.

Blast can be really devastating to your team if some good damage monsters can land the attacks in the middle of your team, so you want to control the enemy fire by using a Taunt monster with a Reflection Shield monster next to it, to stop the blast damage.
So many synergies here only thinking about this ruleset, because when I think my opponent is probably going to use taunt, it's nice to use a monster with Ferocity, doing double damage against enemy Taunt monsters.

Some monsters having the Taunt ability available at lower level leagues:

• Iidri Fyre (Fire)
• Wave Brood (Water)
• Mycelic Slipspawn (Earth)
• Terraceous Hulk (Earth)
• Shieldbearer (Life)
• Iziar (Life)
• Night Goul (Death)

Some monsters having the Reflection Shield ability available at lower level leagues:

• Corsair Bosun (Life)
• Venator Kinjo (Neutral)
• Kain Hace (Death)
• Tide Biter (Water)

Of course there are some more, like Agor Longtail and Coeurl Lurker but they are pretty expensive and a lot of lower level players won't have them in their decks.
With these available monsters and the available splinterlands for the battle, we can mix and match, it's really fun in my opinion because every battle is just like a puzzle combined with strategy you need to solve.

The First battle I want to share today is a lower mana, no magic / blast ruleset, with only Life, Death and Dragon open. I like to use Djinn Chwalla when magic can't be played, and I decided to use Lily Shieldpaw.

I don't use her a lot because most of my legendary summoners are level 2 with matching card levels, do I'm playing with lower card levels this way. I got Lily out of a bunch of Chaos Legion packs I earned in my chests, I was saving them until all legendary summoners where released and would be available in the packs, and it worked! I had 14 packs to open and one of them had Lily in it 😃.

So without magic, I figured hopefully my opponent would use a lot of melee cards, and instead of using taunt to control the enemy fire, I used the camouflage ability so only Djinn Chwalla could get attacked (of course unless my opponent brought a scattershot monster).

My Line-Up:

• Summoner: Lily Shieldpaw - reason: Camouflage, directing all enemy fire to my tank.
• First position: Djinn Chwalla - reason: Thorns and good armor and HP.
• Second position: Venator Kinjo - reason: Reflection Shield to stop the blast damage.
• Third position: Venari Crystalsmith - reason: to heal Djinn Chwalla's HP.
• Fourth position: Scavo Hireling - reason: to repair Djinn Chwalla's armor.
• Fifth position: Battering Ram - reason: to hopefully hit low level targets in the middle of the enemy team, doing nice damage for only 2 mana.

You can watch the battle unfold for yourself here.

While the battle progressed my support monsters are keeping Chwalla alive, just like I planned, and with each dying enemy monster the total damage Chwalla is receiving is getting lower so it's less likely he's going to be killed now.

At the end of round 4, my complete team was still standing, and none was left from the enemy team, nice win 😃.

For todays second battle I want to share a 29 mana battle with 3 rulesets: Are you entertained / Weak Magic / Blast, with only Death and Dragon available. I love my dragon monsters, and because it's weak magic anyway, I decided to use Quix.

My Line-Up:

• Summoner: Quix the Devious - reason: Access to the extra dragon cards is nice, (but I didn't use any in this fight lol) but mainly to reduce enemy speed and archery damage since it's weak magic.
• First position: Harklaw -reason: Shield, some armor and good HP.
• Second position: Venator Kinjo - reason: Reflection Shield, stopping the blast damage.
• Third position: Whistling Damon - reason: cheap gladiator card with snipe, dropping it's damage in the middle of the team if the enemy doesn't use taunt, when the bloodlust ability takes off it can do massive damage.
• Fourth position: Silent Shi-vi - reason: fast, good damage, dropping damage to the back.
• Fifth position: Shadowy Presence - reason: I was expecting death which have a lot of sneak monsters, cheap card to protect back line from blast.
• Sixth position: Will-O-Wisp - reason: fast, flying, hopefully getting a few dodges against sneakers, same reason and position five, sneak protection.

You can watch the battle unfold for yourself here.

This battle was quickly decided, on round 3 it was already over, Whistling Damon had done it's job and gearing up with it's Bloodlust ability while Will-O-Wisp dodged some attacks.

I love it when a plan comes together! - John "Hannibal" Smith

Well, that's it for this week! I hope you had fun reading, and maybe learned some new tricks to try out in your battles, see you on next weeks challenges!

Thank you for reading!!!

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Have a great day!