Hello all. How is your Splinterlands grinding? I've just reached Champ III In Modern Format and still struggle to win. Today I will make a blog again about Battle Mage Secrets Challenge. This Week's Theme is about Up Close and Personal ruleset.

I play in the modern format, Gold League, using my scholar account from Balthazar.

Battle Link

If you want to watch the Battle Link
Video link :

Ruleset

• Heavy Hitters, all monster have the Knock Out ability.
  • Knock Out ability, the monster will get double damage when attacking the monster with the Stun effect.
• Even Stevens, only monster with even mana cost can be used in this battle.
• Up Close & Personal, only melee monster can be used in this battle.
• mana cap.
• can use all Water, Earth, Life, and Death.

My Lineup and strategy

With Ruleset Up Close and Personal and Even Stevens we can predict that the enemy will focus on attacking the monster in the first position. Because many monsters who have Opportunity (attacking monster with the lowest HP) and Sneak (attacking monster in the last position) abilities have Odd mana costs.

We decided to use a water element because our best melee attacker with high damage in that element.

This is my lineup :

Summoner or monster	Abilities	Description
	Possibilus the Wise, summoner. Has the buff of +2 HP, and gives Trample and Reach abilities to all friendly monsters	Make all of our monsters stronger against attack by adding +2 HP, with this summoner Reach ability all melee in the 2nd position can attack the enemy in the first position. Every time our monster kills the enemy, it will immediately attack the monster behind because it has the Trample ability.
	Arkemis the Bear, 1st position, Attacker, Support and Defender. Has the ability Protect, Halving, Forcefield, and Slow.	We put this monster in the first position because it has a High HP. Halving ability will make the monster we hit will decrease the damage by half (round down). This is very useful to decrease the damage of the monster who attacks us. Protect ability is a support ability that gives all friendly monsters armor of +2. The Forcefield is another good defense ability, it will make all monsters who have damage of 5 or more only give 1 damage to this monster.
	Coastal Sentry, 2nd position, Attacker and 2nd tanker. Has the ability Double Strike, Piercing, and Forcefield.	This is the best attacker we have from all of the elements we can use in this battle. With Double Strike this monster will attack twice each round giving 8 damage and the other ability that makes this monster more dangerous is the Piercing ability this ability will make if the enemy armor hit by this monster is destroyed the remaining damage will hit the HP. usually, this monster only can attack from the first position, but because of the summoner Possibilus it can attack from 2nd position, this monster does not have a strong defense/ability against many attackers and will die quickly, so I put it behind our tanker. Have the highest speed compared to another melee we used in this battle.
	Deeplurker, 3rd position, Attacker. Has the ability Opportunity, and Poison.	The reason we use this monster is because it has high damage and Poison ability, if hit the enemy has a 50% chance to inflict Poison status. The enemy monster who got inflicted by the Poison status each round will decrease the HP by -2. This monster is weaker than Coastal Sentry, no armor and slower, so we put it behind Coastal Sentry.
	Venator Kinjo, 4th position, support. Has the ability Reflection Shield, Camouflage, Immunity, and Slow.	I used it because of the Slow ability. It will decrease all enemy monster speed by -1 and increase the chance for our monster to evade the enemy melee and range attack, and the monster to attack first. This monster can't be attacked unless moves to the 2nd and first position because it has Reach ability from our summoner and Camouflage ability. Immunity ability make this monster immune to all negative status like Stun, Poison, Blind, Cripple, etc. Reflection Shield ability will disable the effect of Blast attack if the allied monster adjacent to this monster is attacked by Blast attack. It will remain a support unless moves to the first position and starts to attack the enemy monster.
	Drybone Rider, 5th position, Attacker. Has the ability Double Strike, and Shatter.	This is the only melee unit that can attack from any position because it has dual type attack melee and range. We use this monster because it has Shatter ability, if the enemy is hit by this monster all armor will be destroyed even if it has 10 or more armor. The monster's weakness is slow speed, hope can hit the enemy.
	Dumacke Orc, 6th position, Tanker in this position. Has the ability Shield, and Retaliate.	This monster is strong against a melee attack because it has Shield ability (decrease the melee damage by 50%. In this position, this monster can't attack we put it here to protect against Opportunity (because it has the low HP) or Sneak ability monster in case the enemy brings it. With the Retaliate ability if this monster attacked it have a 50% chance to hit back.

The Battle

• Round 1 :
  After Buff and Debuff, we can see our front attack has more damage than the enemy, (including the Drybone Raider attack).
  Both teams have several similar monsters in this battle Arkemis the Bear, and Drybone Barbarian. but ours have more speed because we brought Venator Kinjo. Our team has more damage. The enemy Corsair Bosun has 5 power damage with the Forcefield ability our Bear has the damaged switch to only have 1 damage. At the end of the round, the enemy Bear only left with 1 HP compared with our Bear's 9 HP. Celestial Harpy attacked our Dumacke and hit the armor giving 1 damage because reduced by the Shield ability. The enemy Dual-type melee and magic attack Kralus only gives 1 magic damage to our Bear.

• Round 2 :
  The enemy bear was killed by our Coastal Sentry, then this monster activated the Trample ability and immediately attacked the enemy Corsair Bosun, and immediately destroyed the Corsair Bosun armor with Double Strike. We can see that the enemy Corsair Bosun stats who reduce by our Bear come back to normal because the Corsair Bosun has Cleanse (remove any negative effect from the monsters in the first position) ability. Our Deeplurker hit the enemy Celestial Harpy destroyed the armor and gave Poison status. Our Bear reduced the damage of the Corsair Bosun from 5 damage become only 2 damage, but this made the attack to our Bear become 2 because the Forcefield not working anymore.

• Round 3 :
  In this Round, the enemy Corsair Bosun was killed by our Coastal Sentry, which immediately attacked the Drybone behind and reduced the HP to only 5 HP. The Drybone with the lowest HP was immediately attacked by our Deeplurker with the Opportunity ability and killed, and immediately attacking the Kralus behind. Kralus moved to the first position hit by our Bear but nothing happened our Halving not working because Kralus has an Immunity ability that disabled all negative effects. Our Drybone Double Strike is missed because the Kralus has higher speed and Flying ability (increase the chance by 25% to evade the enemy attack).

• Round 4 :
  Kralus have slow speed, so our monster with higher speed Coastal Sentry, Bear attacked first and our Deeplurker killed the Kralus, and immediately attacked the enemy monster Vulguine behind. Vulguine moves to the first position. The victory for sure will be ours.

• Round 5 :
  The enemy Vulguine was Hit by our Coastal Sentry and that ended this battle with victory becoming ours.

Did your Strategy Work?

The Strategy is working. We have more damage and speed, especially because we used the Bear that decreased the enemy Corsair Bosun damage with the Forcefield ability, so our Bear can hold until the last round (+2 HP from our summoner help too). Trample's ability makes the battle become easier. We actually only focused on damage rather than speed because we had not used Kelya Frendul summoner from Water element but the enemy did not bring any speed buff so it became slower.

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If we used Kelya Frendul we can't use our Coastal Sentry because it can't attack from the 2nd position and if put in the first position it does not have any good defense stats/ability making it easy to die.

In this battle, we don't use any monster with Demoralize ability like Disintegrator to decrease the enemy melee damage, because we hope that Forcefield works if the enemy Corsair Bosun attack decreases by 1 and becomes 4 damage, it will make our Bear receive full damage.

Thank you, my friend, for taking the time to review my battle report. I appreciate your efforts and would be grateful if you could provide me with feedback on any mistakes you find by leaving a comment.

If you are new and want to try this fantastic strategy card battle game feel free to use my referral code https://splinterlands.com?ref=poplar-22 to join.

Credit

• Thumbnail using Canva.
• Divider took from @kyo-gaming.
• Card description, Image, and graphic were taken from https://Peakmonsters.com and https://Splintercards.com