Battle Mage Secrets: Up Close & Personal by @nozem01

Good day everyone 🙂 I hope you're doing well and welcome back to my Splinterlands blog, today I will be making another Battle Mage Secrets post, it's the first post this week for me, by doing this twice a week I'm earning something extra to buy Splinterlands assets with, last week I bought a little over 2000 SPS tokens at $0.018 with my blog earnings, as a future investment. For now I can rent it out and get around 15% APR on it 😊.

To find out how you can participate in the challenge yourself, you can read the Splinterlands post here.

This week, the Battle Mage Secrets challenge requires us to make a post about the Up Close & Personal ruleset, in which only melee monsters can be used, not to be mistaken with the Melee Mayhem ruleset, where melee monsters can attack from anywhere, I sometimes meet people that make a line-up with monsters unable to attack from the position they're in 😆.

Only units with melee attacks can be used.
Use Thorns and Demoralize to counter melee attacks.
Units with 2 types of attacks (including melee) can be used.

And that last sentence is something to keep in mind!! Units with two types of attacks can be used, I have a cheat sheet next to my screen with reminders for certain rulesets on it, and next to Up Close & Personal it says: WATCH OUT FOR QUORA! 😏

Important abilities for this ruleset:

• Demoralize
• Inspire
• Thorns
• Protect
• Shatter
• Reach
• Opportunity
• Sneak

The battle I want to share for this post is a 31 mana Heavy Hitters / Up Close & Personal Modern League battle with only Death and Dragon available to be chosen from, and since I don't have a Death summoner that can influence melee damage like Zintar Mortalis, it was the best option to pick Quix, to influence speed. With only these two splinters open to be chosen from, you can expect thorns 100% with both Djinn Chwala and Cursed Windeku as nice tanks, but a Harklaw / Disintegrator combination could work nice also, keeping this all in mind, I wanted to have a strong thorned tank with at the same time I wanted to hunt down his backline while protecting my own.

First look at the battlefield:

If I'm counting right... my opponent has 1 mana left, he must have had a one mana card in the death team right? From the first look, I'll think I'll be okay, he has level advantage over my cards but that doesn't say everything, the reach will get it's damage twice as hard back to itself, doing only 1 damage itself because of my demoralize and receiving two thorns damage, I have a way better sneak team and a extra opportunity hunter that will target the reach monster first, as with most matches, you can generally say having more smaller monsters is better than a few big ones, only certain OP cards like Quora or Agor Longtail can overpower them.

My Line-Up:

• Summoner: Quix the Devious - reason: Access to the Dragon team, the best option in this case for me, -1 speed is more important than -1 HP in my opinion.
• First position: Djinn Chwala - reason: The better tank of the two thorny tanks because of it's armor.
• Second position: Dhampir Infiltrator - reason: Ok damage, low mana, Double Strike.
• Third position: Whelp Herder - reason: Ok damage, low cost Opportunity hunter.
• Fourth position: Silent Sha-Vi - reason: One of my best sneakers, good damage and fast.
• Fifth position: Disintegrator - reason: -1 melee damage as well as backline protection against sneak.
• Sixth position: Corpse Fiend - reason: Just 1 extra hit for 0 mana, a meat shield.

The Battle:

Round 1: With everyone being demoralized this is going to take a bit longer, my Corpse Fiend died but that was the plan, not much else happened yet.

Round 2: There we go! the reach monster died, and soon will the tank and backline protection die, this won't take long and my team is still doing fine.

Round 3: Faster as expected, as soon as the enemy demoralize was gone things went fast, no one is left alive and my own team is still standing, except for the Corpse Fiend but that's okay!

You can watch the battle unfold for yourself here.

Right now I'm still fighting in Wild League with my main account, Modern is so damn hard, and the strange thing is, I do way better in brawls as in ranked battles... I'll hope to switch to Modern in the next few days because that's where the nice SPS rewards are.

This is it for today, I'll be grinding some more battles now to drain my battle energy enough so it doesn't reach 50 before I can play again tomorrow. I hope to see you on my second post too, I'll probably make it this Saturday.

Thank you for reading!!!

If you haven't made an account already, please consider using my referral link to sign up, I'll happily send the amount I get for your signup back to you in DEC or SPS to help you start.

Have a great day!

Sources: For my thumbnail I used a background from @golemoverlord, when you're not playing this game as a splinterlands player, you're missing out!
I made a post with more info about Golem Overlord here.