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Hey battle mages, today, I’m going to be sharing with you a battle strategy to counter melee attacks. This strategy will be most useful in rulesets that rely heavily on the use of melee monsters. Since I’m someone that loves using melee monsters myself, I guess I’m digging my own grave giving this out. But welp, it’s whatever.
Do you remember one of the cards I mentioned I just recently rented? Yeah, I’ve played around with it enough now to come up with a strategy that I believe it’ll best be suited for. Unfortunately, I haven’t had the chance to actually test out the strategy in a real battle because an opportunity that warrants it has not presented itself yet. But as you’ll see soon, it makes sense to use it in the way I’m going to teach you.
Pillars of the strategy
Cryptic
Like with a normal battle, this strategy wouldn’t be very strong if it doesn’t have the right summoner. Honestly, I think the summoner is probably the central point of the strategy and you’ll see why soon. So the summoner we’re basing the strategy on is Cryptic.
What makes cryptic special for this strategy?
Melee monsters rely a lot on speed, since there is a chance their attacks can miss if they’re slow. One of the things Cryptic does is slow down enemy units by 1 speed unit.
Cryptic will also blind enemy melee monsters. This just means it increases their chance of missing their attacks on you by 15%. Not a very high miss probability, I know. But add that to the decreased speed, and that might just do it.
But this is where you really see cryptic’s particular hate for melee monsters.
In addition to the 2 abilities I already explained, cryptic has 2 sets of abilities you can choose from to take to battle, depending on your most pressing concerns. I’ll start with the ones I normally choose it for. I should mention though that it doesn’t give this ability to all friendly monsters, just 2 that you select to get it.
Enfeeble and Retaliate
What Enfeeble does is it gives the monsters wielding it the power to reduce the melee attack of any enemy monster it hits, for each successful hit it lands. The next time I’m dealing with another player who, like me, likes using Grum Flameblade, this is what I’m meeting them in battle with. So as you’re buffing up in melee attack power, I’ll be debuffing you. Lol
For Retaliate, it’s just like the name suggests, the monster that retaliate is quick to temper and is not very forgiving. The monster you give retaliate has a 50% chance of immediately attacking a melee monster that attacks.
Expose and Poison
These abilities, I honestly don’t use much. I’m not a big fan of poison, and I don’t really understand how expose works exactly. So I just normally stick to the first set of abilities. I think I’ve only used Expose and Poison twice, and in those two battles, I could only see Poison working but couldn’t point exactly what Expose was doing. These two are not important for a melee countering strategy anyways (which is the theme for this post), so we won’t be talking about it.
Some monsters you can use with Cryptic
Unfortunately, Cryptic is only a death and water summoner, and given that I am more of fire lover, I don’t get to summon a lot of my favorite monsters when I choose cryptic. That being said, he still has some pretty cool monsters that can do good damage to melee monsters.
Cursed Windeku
Who better to put as tank than this Thorny mf, right?😂 Cursed Windeku is a melee lover’s worst nightmare, especially with this strategy. For every attack you land on it, you lose 2 health, and for every attacks it lands on you, it demoralizes you (reduces your melee attack by 1) and you take 2 damage too.
Disintegrator
I’m sure that when I mentioned Demoralize, Disintegrator came to mind, and yes, he’s perfect to use with cryptic. If you use disintegrator, your opponent monsters are demoralized before your monsters that have enfeeble further reduce their melee attacks. I’m going to call a line up like this “Grum Killer”.
Kulu Mastermind
This guy is an Opportunist and I’m suggesting you use him purely based on that. In case your opponent decides to bring healers, he’ll be ready for them since they’re usually the weakest in health. Of course, he has inspire and you can decide to get creative with how you want to utilize this too in the battle.
Merdaali Guardian
If possible, bring a Tank Heal of your own if you don’t notice your opponent to be someone that has a flair for using opportunists. They’ll do you good in patching up Cursed Windeku.
This is pretty much the strategy. Of course, I left out empty slots or units in the lineup so that you can still be creative yourself on what monsters you might want to add to the line up. I also specify positions except for Cursed Windeku, who if you want, you could move to the back of the line up in case your opponent likes sneaking.
So if you’re ever in need of a summoner to counter a melee-loving foe, be sure to experiment with this strategy and let me know how it goes. I’m hoping that by next week, I’ll have the opportunity to try out this strategy live and maybe I’ll show you the battle outcome in my socialmediachallenge.
All images except cover image are from splinterlands.com