BATTLE MAGE SECRETS Weekly Challenge! Keep Your Distance!
Hi everyone! It's time for the weekly Battle Mage Secrets challenge and the challenge this week is the Keep Your Distance Ruleset.
About the Ruleset
Keep Your Distance
The Keep Your Distance ruleset states that "Monsters with Melee attack may not be used in battles". This means that only magic, ranged and non-attacking monsters can be used. The battle strategy should be to try to counter the magic and ranged attacks of the opponent while at the same time try to boost your own magic and ranged attacks.
Battle Ruleset(s)
Details of my battle with this ruleset is as follows.
Target Practice: All Ranged and Magic Attack Monsters have the Snipe ability
Keep Your Distance: Monsters with Melee attack may not be used in battles
Silenced Summoners: Summoners do not give any stat buffs or debuffs or grant/use any abilities
Only the Fire, Water and Life Splinters can be used
Mana Cap: 26
Format: Modern Tournament, Bronze League, No Legendary Summoners
Cards & Line Up
Summoner
vs
Summoner: Kelya Frendul - This increases the Speed and Shield of my deck by 1.
 |  |  |  |
 | | | |  |
| Position | Name | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Djinn Oshannus | It is the main tank, as I figured that it won't be attacked first given the Target Practice ruleset. |
| 2 | Venari Marksrat | It's here to provide the stats boost from its Martyr ability. It will be the first monster to be attacked given the Target Practice ruleset and that on ly ranged and magic monsters can be used to attack. |
| 3 | River Hellondale | It's here for the Resurrect ability, so I can get a double stats boost from Venari Marksrat, and benefit from the boost as well. |
| 4 | Spirit Hoarder | It's here to provide the heals for River Hellondale, given that it'll be attacked next after Venari Marksrat. |
Strategy
The ruleset here meant that (1) No Melee monsters may be used, (2) Monsters will have the Snipe ability, which means the first non-melee monster starting from position 2 will be targeted first, and (3) Summoners provide no boost to the deck.
My strategy was to rely on Djinn Oshannus to tank and boost its stats using the Venari Marksrat. River Hellondale was used to resurrect Venari Marksrat for the double boost in stats. Since River Hellondale will get 2 more health, Spirit Hoarder to heal River Hellondale so that it can last a little longer. I make a mistake here though as I was a little too trigger happy and closed out the card selection too fast. I still had 2 mana to use and should have placed Igor Darkspear between River Hellondale and Spirit Hoarder.
The opponent had a similar strategy, with the difference being having Igor Darkspear in the first position. This did give me a slight advantage as the stats boost to Igor Darkspear was basically useless except for the health boost. Whereas for my deck, River Hellondale benefited with the added Magic attack and speed as well.
This goes to show that card placement is important even if the cards on both decks are largely similar.
Thoughts on the Keep Your Distance Ruleset
As the Keep Your Distance ruleset prevents melee monsters from being used, one headache I also have is the tank selection. I have a limited selection of ranged and magic cards that can be used as the main tank. For this ruleset, I sometimes use monsters with the Taunt ability to deflect the attack from the main but weaker tank. At other times, I place Venari Marksrat in the first position to boost the stats of the tank. Abilities that counter magic or ranged attacks should be used as much as possible to gain an advantage over the opponent.
Thanks for sharing! - @mango-juice
