Hello everybody, how are you today? I hope you all have a good day, Today I will make a post about the Splinterlands contest Battle Mage Secrets Challenge. This Week's Theme is Counterspell ruleset.

I play in the Modern Format Diamond League, using my scholar account from Balthazar I only use cheap cards like Chaos, Reward, and some Neutral.

Battle Link

If you want to watch the Battle Link
Video link:

Ruleset

• Counterspell, all monsters have Magic Reflect ability.
  • Magic Reflect
    When hit with magic damage, does reduce Magic damage back to the attacker. Deals damage equivalent to the attacker's damage divided by 2, rounded up
• Rise of the Commons, only monster with rare and common rarity can be used in this battle.
• Up to Eleven, every monsters have Amplify ability.
  • Amplify ability, Increases Magic Reflect, Return Fire, and Thorns damage to all enemy monsters by 1
• mana cap.
• can use Fire, Earth, Death, and Dragon element.

My Lineup and strategy

• Because of the ruleset Counterspell and Up to Eleven for sure we will not use the magic monster because the reflected damage is high. Therefore, the monsters we use in this battle are melee and ranged types.
• for Rise of the Commons ruleset, I don't memorize all the rare and common monsters, so my first method is to choose an element that is suitable for use in this ruleset, then choose a monster/unit, if I don't find a monster that is important to use in this battle, then I will choose another element.

We decided to use the Fire element because there are lots of ranged-type monsters that have a lot of damage, also it has good summoners for avoiding ranged and melee attacks because we guess that the enemy will also use a mix of ranged and melee monsters.

This is my lineup :

Summoner or monster	Abilities	Description
	Jacek the Conqureror, Summoner. Has ability Scattershot, Piercing ability, and can give +2 speed to all friendly monsters.	This is a summoner from the Fire element. I used this summoner because of its increased speed and Piercing ability (if Melee or Ranged attack damage is more than the target's armor, the remainder will damage the target's health.). Another ability is scattershot will make this monster attack a random enemy monster, this ability depends on our luck/RNG for our monster to target the weak enemy monster and kill it.
	Ferox Defender, 1st position, attakcer and support. Has the ability Protect, Repair, and Shatter.	I use this monster because can give extra armor +2 to all our monsters and (Repair ability) restore the ally armor that got the most damage. Has good armor and HP so I put it in here. If the enemy monster has high armor it can destroy it with 1 attack because have Shatter ability.
	Scavo Chemist, 2nd position, support. Has the ability Cleanse, Slow, and Headwinds.	I use this monster mainly because has Headwinds ability which decreases all range damage by -1. The other 2 abilities are good to have too, Slow will decrease all enemy speed by -1, and Cleanse will delete all negative buff from ally monster in the first position.
	Molten Ash Golem, 3rd position, support. Has the ability Close Range, Weaken, and Demoralize.	Although this is a range monster This monster can attack in the first position because have Close Range ability, this is the reason we use this monster so we can have a triple tanker in front to protect our range monsters behind. Weaken ability to decrease all enemy HP monsters by -1. Demoralize will decrease all melee attacks by -1
	Firecaller, 4th position, attacker and support. Has the ability Martyr, Fury, and Ensnare.	Have Great Damage and most importantly have Martyr ability, if this monster dies then all monsters adjacent to it will increase all base stats by +1. Every time this monster attacks an enemy unit that has the Taunt ability will do double damage. Ensnare ability will disable the Flying ability, and If this unit hits the unit with the Flying ability it can't miss. I put this monster here in case the enemy bring same summoner like us, with the Scattered shot ability hope can hit this monster kill it and it will boost the Molten Ash Golem and Supply Runner base stats.
	Supply Runner, 5th position, attacker and support. Has Swiftness, and Strengthen ability	We need this monster to further boost all our monster speed by +1 because it has Swiftness ability. The Strengthen ability will make all of our monsters may live longer by enhancing the HP by +1.
	Blood Maker, 6th position, attacker . Has Scattershot, and Criplle ability	We use this monster because of high speed, in case the enemy bring monster with Sneak ability we have higher chance to evade the attack. Cripple ability will decrease enemy Maximum HP everytime the attack hit. Scattershot ability is same like our Summoner Jacek ability.

Our Formation is finished and we are ready to battle :

Did your Strategy Work?

Our strategy did not work properly, the enemy used a new summoner from Rebellion Reklah, this summoner can provide the ability Reflection Shield to 2 magic units brought by the enemy so that they are immune to counter attacks due to the Counterspell ruleset. The monsters brought by the enemy and their magic attack types are:

• Cabalist which has large damage, can reduce melee attacks by 1 and can also increase damage due to Counterspell.
• Venari Bonesmith which gives a poison effect to enemy monsters (has a 50% chance that monsters affected by poison at the start of each round will have their HP reduced by 2).

We did not anticipate any magic type attacks so we brought the Ferox Defender tanker which is weak against magic attacks.

The enemy brought 3 range types of monsters. Thanks to the debuff from Scavo Chemist with the Headwinds ability, the damage of the enemy's attacks was reduced. Our high speed makes our monster can evade many attacks from enemy range and melee attacks.

In this battle we were lucky because our random attack hit the enemy with low HP and killed him:

• In round 1 we can kill Drybone Bowdog.

• In the second round we killed Venari Bonesmith before his HP increased too much, this monster is very dangerous because it can give a Poison effect and also every time it attacks the enemy its HP will increase because it has the ability Life Leech
  

The enemy also brought Queen of Crows that can reduce damage from our monster range. Apart from having a lot of HP, this monster can also reflect attacks from range monsters and deal damage. Luckily our attack only hit this monster once before it finally advanced to first place in the 4th round and our remaining units ganged up on it.

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We can win this battle because of our speed and the RNG. Even though many people don't like RNG, especially when they lose, in my opinion, this is the only way that players who have weaker/cheaper cards/units still have a chance to beat players with more expensive cards. In this way, players with limited cards can still enjoy this game and players with more complete/expensive cards have a greater chance of winning because they have invested more.

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 Hive account@kyo-gaming.
• Card description, Image, and graphic were taken from https://Peakmonsters.com and https://Splintercards.com