Strategy Corner #26 - Keep Your Distance Ruleset - Sometimes limitation is good

in Splinterlandslast year

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Hiya Splinterlanders :)

We have been waiting and waiting and finally, we receive really something juicy. Somebody could say it's just a ruleset with another collection limitation, but I would disagree with that statement. Of course, we lose access to melee monsters, but overall we have to usually rethink our whole strategy for the battle, and a lot of new possibilities open up that way. Ok, let's see the ruleset definition with a lot of great tips inside the game to help documentation.

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Description:

Units with melee attacks may not be used.

Use Phase, Void, Void Armor, and Magic Reflect to counter magic attacks.

Use Headwinds and Return Fire to counter ranged attacks.
Units with 2 types of attack (which include melee) cannot be used.

Firstly, the description of the ruleset in the game is not perfect, sometimes you got just general information which not giving you all information you need. Best way to read the full description as above from the game documentation at least once. You can check all here.

I seriously encourage you guys to check all the links above, there is a lot of useful knowledge, and even more advanced players could find something interesting there.

I think it is enough to look at how many different abilities you should pay more attention to according to the ruleset definition to see that is not just a simple collection's limitation ruleset. Of course, you don't care about melee damage, but there are still 2 more types, and you need to figure out to have some good defense strategy. I think for those kinds of line-ups support units are more important, and some no-damage units are crucial here. We could talk and talk about it, but in my opinion, the best way to learn something is to check the theory in practice.

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And today's battle is icing on the cake. you know how big of a fan I am of the open tournaments, we have recently been talking a lot about tournaments in general. Here we got a very interesting battle from a Champion Open Tournament hosted by @aftersound during his Youtube stream. We still have too few such initiatives :(. Let's check the battle:

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As always for this article cycle, we have quite an interesting mix of rulesets: snipe and keep your distance open some nice options. I have for you a similar battle for blog prediction, check the bottom of this page.
I decided to go Fernheart, because usually magic damage is quite easily counterable, my opponent stays with a rather standard Obsidian build with very powerful Dr. Blight at the end.

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Round 1.5, let's stop in the middle of the first round, because as you can see a lot of things happened already. We got a great snipe target - Failed Summoner, opponent used it as well but in the first position, which seems a mistake in my opinion. We try to analyze it later of course. We manage to kill with reflection damage and sneak ability one of the great support card from the opponent team.

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Round 2, our setup seems unbeatable here, Khmer Princess heals herself and backline targets, Unfortunately, we got an affliction from Dr Blight, but Failed Summoner did a lot of damage so far. We manage to eliminate another snipe target and haven't lost any units so far.

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Round 3 - now our team seems not as powerful as before, with scattershot abilities we lost another unit, additionally our Failed Summoner got poison damage and is dead just in the benign of round 3. Fortunately, even when we lost our magic damage unit, because of Close Combat ability from summoner we can still have firepower from range in first position.

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Round 4 - another monster died on the opponent's side, but you cannot underestimate Dr. Blight who could win the fight on his own.

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Round 7 - let's jump to the future, as I mentioned Dr. Blight is so OP. He is still standing, we got unlucky to get a lot of poison damage almost every round. The battle is closer than it looks a few rounds before.

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Round 8 - final blow: Finally we made it, it was a crazy fight, we barely win it, but mostly because of some opponent's mistake. Let's try to analyze it.

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Usually, we analyze some lower-league battles - silver/bronze. Today we got a completely different story :). The fight was very intense, but I think both players made some mistakes here. For sure the position of Failed Summoner is crucial, and with the snipe ruleset putting him on first is a mistake. He didn't do anything during the whole fight and from my side it was just the opposite, even after some affliction and poison damage it was so useful. The second thing I wanted to mention is the position of the support unit Khmer Princess, sometimes this position is the safest because with some healing abilities, and with usually only 1 monster attack is easy to get sustainability. Let's check our core team unit;


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"
FERNHEART, recently I like him more and more, and I used him more and more. As I mentioned I think in all leagues magic damage could be easily countered, so having different strategies usually just completely surprised the opponent. Stats and ability don't seem so strong here, but some of Earth's units fit here perfectly. Additionally, we got now 2 Martyr Cards which we could use on any position with even the possibility to attack.

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FAILED SUMMONER I think I do not need to introduce that unit. For every league, it's a must for the Earth team, usually for every lower mana match. Even with silver with just reflect magic ability he can stop almost all obsidian teams. Because of him, in higher leagues, people usually don't play magic team at all. He is strong, and not easy to kill, but as yo could see above sometimes if you use the pattern to put him in the first place without thinking, it could be that cause of losing the battle.

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IZA THE FANGED, maybe for this fight it wasn't the most powerful unit, but we still got the ability to target something different that snipe target which could be quite resilient. Overall I like Iza in all leagues, recently I play her more. Scavenger is a nice ability, with some combination of martyr cards after she got first place she could have 10 HP and 2-4 range attack. Not easy to eliminate fast.

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I have to say today I have much fun writing the article. Recently the presented ruleset wasn't really exciting, and usually haven't changed a lot with your tactical and strategical approach. For Keep Your Distance I think it is a different story, as I mentioned in the title, sometimes limitation is good and opens different possibilities. There are many diverse strategies that could be used and for me, it's quite interesting to check all the tips from the official Splinterlands site. When I have been starting to play this game, usually you have to figure out everything on your own.
And what is your opinion about Keep Your Distance? Do you like it? Or do you think it is just another "limit some kind of your collection" ruleset?

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I hope you like this kind of battle and strategy presentation. More strategy analysis, discussion, and prediction games you can find on my Wednesday Splinterlands.tv stream. You can check the schedule here

If you have any comments, please do not hesitate. Do you think I could improve anything just tell me :)


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If you wish to try out Splinterlands you can use my reference link.

Thumbnails and other pictures borrowed with permission from the Splinterlands team or made in Cooltext

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We continue our game from the previous week, today new battle, a new card to win :).

I have come to some idea, I hope you will like them and participate. Every week I will publish one battle, and your goal is to point out the first victim of the battle and who will be the winner. This game is exactly the same as my prediction game which I run on my Wednesday Splinterlands.tv stream. I know that not everyone can attend the stream, so I hope you will still have fun that way. More about the rules can be read here.

Among all participants who get the correct answer, I will randomly (probably on my Wednesday stream) choose one winner.

The prize of the blog prediction game for the lucky winner will be the epic card:


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Here we got the battle with a quite similar strategy as above but for silver level (not all buff applied):

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Game instruction:
Try to point out which monster will die first on the battlefield and who wins the battle

  • t - top player
  • b - bottom player
  • number - order counting from the first position

Examples:
t2b = monster on the second position of top player die first, the bottom player wins
b6t = monster on the sixth position of bottom player die first, the top player wins
t3t = monster on the third position of top player die first, the top player wins

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Thanks for sharing! - @yonilkar

thanks for curation :)

t2t
ign: frozenturon

b3t
yw!

t2t -- xykorlz

t2t
ign: pero82 ❤️

t2t

ign: arniboi