When it comes to the Back to Basics ruleset Modern Meta can be really varied, I have seen great teams with Elowen Sylphie summoner, Brave Tofu and other summoners. Today I am going to share my favorite summoner for the Modern League and Back to Basics ruleset and share a battle to illustrate it.
My Favorite Back to Basics Summoner
My favorite summoner to play in the Back to Basics ruleset is Nidhoggr:
The reason I like playing Nidhoggr in the back to basics ruleset is because it allows me to bring in powerful dragon monsters as well as to pick water splinter when it is available to bring in one of my favorite cards to play in the back to basics: Shock Trooper:
Shock Trooper is an extremely powerful card to play in the Back to Basics ruleset, because this card is known as a negative ability card. It has the Electrified negative ability and in the Back to Basics ruleset it looses its negative ability and becomes an even stronger card with five magic damage, six health and four speed for just four mana.
In addition to giving me an ability to select monsters from two of the most powerful splinters Nidhoggr removes one armor and one health from the monsters on the opposing team. Additionally it equips my whole team with a Blast and Deathblow abilities that are both very useful in the back to basics ruleset as I tend to put my biggest damage dealers like Shock Trooper in the very back of my line up.
Strategy and Other Favorite Monsters for Back to Basics
For the battle I am sharing today, my strategy was to use Nidhoggr to nerf the opponents monsters health and remove shield as well as provide my monsters the blast ability. This ability is particularly important for this battle as all of the monsters on both teams get the divine shield as Holy Protection ruleset is in effect. Additionally we have Target Practice ruleset in effect so it is less important to have a huge tank upfront.
Therefore I spent most of the available mana of forty two points on the backline damage dealers, so I played another monster that has a negative ability and becomes very strong as my tank: Halfling Refugee.
This monster for one mana has great basic specs of five melee damage, eight health and three speed. Yes it does loose the self heal in Back to Basics but it also looses the Weary negative ability which makes it stronger in back to basics.
In the second position I played Endless Gibbon, this one mana monster is basically a meat shield here. In the third position I went with Abyssal Elemental which has three magic damage, three shield and six health points for six mana at level five (I don't have this monster maxed out).
Next I played a beefy Calamity monster which is another negative ability monster that is great for the Back to Basics ruleset as I get ten health points four speed and three magic damage for only four mana. You might be seeing a pattern here as I am playing negative abilities monsters in back to basics. And this is not an accident, negative abilities monsters tend to have outstanding basic specs that are tempered by negative abilities.
And finally the last two monsters I have played here were my high damage dealers. Rage and Shock Trooper. I placed Rage in front of the Shock Trooper because Rage has eleven health compared to Shock Trooper at only six.
The Battle
My opponent chose to play Elowen Sylphie summoner for the Back to Basics ruleset, lets see how this will turn out...
In the first round we both lost a monster, but so far due to the corrupted healing my opponent's team looks a bit stronger:
At the start of round two we lost our Calamity monster which was quite unfortunate.
At the start of the round three it is still not clear who is in the lead in this battle. My opponent still has two of his major damage dealers on the field and they will strike my Rage first, but he should be able to take both hits due to his armor and his next hit would do a lot of damage to the opponent and take out the holly shield from their main damage dealer.
Round three turned out to be the decisive round for my team, it looks like this battle is pretty much over.
And just like that in round four my team lead by Nidhoggr wins the battle where splash damage offensive strategy won over the corrupted healing defensive strategy.
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