For our weekly battle mage challenge, we have the weak magic ruleset. Very astutely named as magic is clearly the best attack in the game but is negated by this ruleset. Bringing as many shields and protect as possible is always a good strategy, however always thwarted by the powerful shatter ability. As usual, we will breakdown a few strategies for this ruleset and then take a look at one of the top battles in the silver league to see how the two mages went into the match. The link to the full battle is as follows: https://splinterlands.com/?p=battle&id=sl_6f8f595fac4f6f1046acbd0737beb1f9
Strategies:
1. Immortalis: Pretty straightforward here as shatter is very powerful here along with the void to further negate the magic attacks that could be coming your way. Shatter as a whole as we will see is the way to go here.
2. Rust: Naturally if you do not have shatter available, rust is the next best option. Summoners such as the wizard of eastwood as well as astral entity give minus two shield which can be a nice boost to this strategy as well.
3. Protect, Repair, Resurrect: If you are not playing defense with the strategies above, then you might as well play offense. Boosting your shields, repairing them, and also using resurrect to make your opponent go through them again can be very annoying for your opponent to deal with and win you the match easily if they do not have either of the abilities above.
Game breakdown: Round 1
A battle of two silver champ matchups here with a weak magic and magic reflect ruleset. Furious chicken up top went with the minus shield strategy mentioned before and would have one easily in my opinion however Juno had the shatter monster. This completely wipes out chickens skull. In round 1, the shatter works and his skull goes down for the first time and then is ressurected. The skull would have had twenty two health to go through if not for the shatter monster. The sneak attack was a good choice by chicken as well however the triage will delay the ability for this to impact the magic monster as we will find out.
Round 2:
In Round 2, the skull did its best to stay alive but even with some dodges goes down very early. The sneak attack from chicken finally takes out the kulu but the magic monster is scavenging up nicely making the magic reflect null and void.
Round 3:
Round 3 continues with the shatter and kill on the side of Juno which brings on of chickens sneak monsters to the tank position. This spells disaster as the uraeus will not be able to overcome the triage from the angelic mandarin.
Round 4
There is a slight glimmer of hope in round 4 as Juno's baakjira goes down and the shavii gets a clutch dodge to stay alive another round.
Round 5
Round 5 goes from bad to worse for chicken as his shavii dies along with the protect monster. Too much damage on the other side and to make matters worst his uraeus misses the tide biter and it is all over at this point. The match finishes up in round 7 with Juno taking it.
The shatter prevails over the rust strategy here and that makes sense in my opinion. Shatter guarantees a disruption in the opponents strategy while rust just diminishes it slightly. Hope you enjoyed this breakdown and please upvote or comment if you have any other strategies to use in this ruleset.