In the spirit of the new weekly Battle Mage Secrets challenges, I would like to take a look at a Splinterlands battle with a particular focus on a ruleset. While this week's Battle Mage challenge is dealing with Back to Basics, the ruleset I will be examining in this post is a rather different one - instead of taking away every monster ability, it gives every monster one. And it's a pretty good one - today, we will be taking a look at a battle with the Equal Opportunity ruleset!
As you may be able to guess from the name alone, Equal Opportunity grants every monster in the battle the Opportunity ability. This means that every attacking monster will be focusing on the enemy monster with the lowest health remaining. There are many monsters which benefit from this ruleset and become more useful including, but not limited to, melee monsters, low health high armor monsters, and the Taunt and Blast abilities.
If you wanted to jump right to the action, the Battle Link is right here. Want to hear some more about the lineup? Read on further!
First up: the rules. Obviously we have the Equal Opportunity ruleset, which gives every monster the Opportunity ability. To go along with it, we have Keep Your Distance and What Doesn't Kill You. While Enrage has a limited impact in this battle - any monster taking damage is likely to take more and die quickly - Keep Your Distance is pretty important, since melee attackers tend to be great in Equal Opportunity but they are actually all ineligible here.
Thanks to the rules eliminating melee monsters, our options as far as team composition are a little limited. I decided to go with Yodin Zaku, and a ranged attacker strategy. Yodin is a strong selection in most rulesets, and this one is no exception. With What Doesn't Kill You, bringing Blast into the battle is a bit of a risk because you run the risk of Enrage-ing the enemy monsters. But my hope was that I could bring a team with tons of damage into the fight and be able to kill the enemy monsters quickly enough that it wouldn't make much of a difference - that Blast plus ranged attack buff can add up in a hurry!
My two frontline tanks were two monsters which are both solid in Equal Opportunity battles. You almost never see Vanri Heatsmith getting played, but it is (surprisingly) fairly decent in Equal Opportunity. With just 3 health it tends to attract enemy attacks relatively early in battle, and thanks to Void Armor it can absorb all types of damage and buy the rest of your team valuable time. Iidri Fyre is another standout in Equal Opportunity. Even though it doesn't have low health to attract those Opportunity attacks, it does it the old fashioned way with Taunt, serving as the perfect lightning rod in Equal Opportunity.
With some solid protection options set up at the front, it was time to bring along some damage. Lava Launcher and Supply Runner are both great attackers with good speed and a high amount of ranged damage, which gets boosted even farther by Yodin.
I finished off my team with some monsters to help with my team's survivability. Ash Mirage is the perfect anti-ranged ranged attacker, using Headwinds to blunt any enemy ranged attacks while also contributing a bit of damage of its own. Spirit Hoarder was my last selection, and was there to hopefully heal Iidri Fyre a bit and help it to Taunt as many enemy attacks as possible.
With the lineup set, it's off into battle! When I see the selected teams I feel pretty good about my chances. The enemy lineup is heavy on ranged damage, which means that Ash Mirage will be particularly helpful. There is also a distinct lack of Taunt or other buffer monsters on the opposing team, which means that my attackers will be able to get started on my opponent's weakest monsters immediately.
The first round goes about the way I expect - the battle starts off with a bang and my ranged attackers are able to make quick work out of not one, not two, but THREE enemy monsters. Iidri does an excellent job of protecting my team with its Taunt and has taken a bit of damage, but is still hanging in there.
One more round and the fight was all but over. The power of Yodin's Blast and ranged attacks has helped my team to wipe out all but one of the enemy monsters, and the remaining one doesn't even have an attack. Game over! And again, if you wanted to see the whole battle for yourself, you can see it right here.
My strategy for this battle worked out perfectly - my ranged attackers were able to sweep through the enemy lineup in short order, without even losing a single monster. Equal Opportunity is a great help to monsters with Blast, giving them some extra chances to hit the middle of the enemy lineup and deal extra splash damage. Yodin becomes crazy good in these types of situations, because he gives EVERY monster Blast. In the end this battle wasn't particularly close, even though my opponent's team had a substantial level advantage.
Thank you so much for reading all the way to the end. Interested in seeing some more of my writing in the future? Be sure to give me a follow! In the meantime, if you'd like to see some of my recent posts:
Don't Try This at Home - Battling with Armored Up! - A battle analysis, featuring Armored Up!
Splinterlands Economics: Causation - A look at causation, and how we can apply it to Splinterlands!
Splinterlands Economics: Ceteris Paribus - An introduction to the concept of Ceteris Paribus, and how we can apply it to Splinterlands!
Thinking about giving Splinterlands a try but haven't signed up yet? Feel free to use my referral link: https://splinterlands.com?ref=bteim, and be sure to reach out to me if you have any questions!
All images used in this article are open source and obtained from Pixabay or Unsplash. Thumbnails borrowed with permission from the Splinterlands team or made in Canva.