HELLO to all Splinterlands readers of my humble blog.👋🏻👋🏻👋🏻 Welcome to yet another week of the "new" iteration of the Splinterlands Weekly Challenges 😜.

For any old Hivers/Splinterland players who've just come back and are confused, fret not! Even with the name and format tweaks, right at it's core, battles are still the foundation of these posts.

In this week's edition of Battle Mage Secrets, it is hard to see in this fog. I remember when I was first introduced to the RTS genre via Warcraft and Command & Conquer, scouts were essential to get a heads up on what was coming my way instead of just focusing on base building. Well, that's the fog of war for you!

No matter! I present to you the ruleset — FOG OF WAR 💨💨💨

The game's description of FOG OF WAR is as follows: "All units lose the Sneak, Snipe and Opportunity abilities."

This is a ruleset which effectively removes all the advantages of units which I like to term "assassin units". They are no longer able to surprise and kill your undefended units and have no choice but to target whichever unit is in the front line.

I feel that this ruleset puts the advantage firmly on the team which is prepared defensively. Since no units are able to take out your weak supports, you are able to focus all out on buffing your main tank making it nigh indestructible.

I will take advantage of this ruleset in my battle showcase today to show how 1 of my units in particular becomes a lot stronger than one would expect with FOG OF WAR. Introducing the Summoner, ASTRAL ENTITY.

From the shadows and the ether comes an eldritch entity known only as the Astral Entity. It is a celestial being that drifts through rifts in reality, searching for new planes and realms. There are almost no recordings of the Astral Entity in the athenaeums of the Splinterlands, but if one was to search through forgotten scrolls in the cobwebbed corners of ancient libraries, one would find the briefest mentions of this being. Snippets from across the centuries mention a humanoid shape made of cosmic energy. No one knows where it came from or what it wants, but it has only been recorded doing one thing: observing.

From Splinterlands Lore on ASTRAL ENTITY

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The Astral Entity is a Legendary card released during the Chaos Legion expansion. It has definitely found it's place in many Death decks given its availability and usefulness. It's effects on the battlefield are -2 🛡️ARMOR🛡️ and it grants the DODGE ability to all your units. It is also able to use the RESURRECT ability once on your team. It's summoning cost is, like all other Chaos Legion Legendary Summoners, 6 🧪MANA🧪.

The stat buffs it gives are nothing out of the ordinary, so at first glance, he might look pretty bland. It would seem that in terms of firepower, this summoner does almost nothing to boost your team. However, in a defensive game, all his abilities combined makes this Summoner one of the strongest in the game!

Firstly, he debuffs the opponents with -2 to their ARMOR, which gives melee attacks a small advantage against them. However, I would say that I am more focused on the DODGE and RESURRECT abilities.

I would venture to say that with the FOG OF WAR ruleset in play, we are heavily incentivized to go for a very strong Main Tank. Add one and one together and I hope it's glaringly obvious by now that the Astral Entity is a match made in heaven for this situation. Dodge gives all units an additional 25% chance to literally evade any physical based attacks and Resurrect gives an extra "save" for the first unit which dies.

This could make all the difference if the battle comes down to the wire where the slightest advantage is the fine line between victory or defeat! 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻 This is definitely what I'd consider game changing! 😱😱😱

⚔️🛡️My Battle Showcase🛡️⚔️

Let me present a battle I fought recently in which the ruleset FOG OF WAR was in effect. My opponent used the Chaos Legion edition Summoner Kelya Frendul from the WATER splinter as his main pick, while I used the Chaos Legion edition Summoner Astral Entity from the DEATH splinter. 💧 VS 💀

At first glance, it would seem like I was at a distinct disadvantage.

• My opponent was using a level 4 Rare Summoner VS my level 1 Legendary.

• Effectively, that puts him at roughly 2 levels ahead of me.

• His units were likewise significantly higher levelled than mine.

• This gave his entire team a huge increase in raw damage output.

• To exacerbate matters, there was an extra "EXPLOSIVE WEAPONRY" ruleset in play too. This meant every single hit from my opponent would hurt even more!

I was honestly expecting this to be a really bad matchup for me 😜🤣. This was a team who had an innate advantage in this ruleset. His team had one purpose only and that was to output the maximum amount of damage possible. Would I be able to turn the tide of battle against such an opponent then? Victory or defeat would lie in the small details.

I would say that the ruleset FOG OF WAR was DEFINITELY the MVP of this match, having played it's role in turning the tide of battle. The advantage it gave my team resulted in me outlasting my opponent in this battle. It definitely provided the edge that I needed to overcome my opponent.

This ensured that the other units could eventually wear down the opponent until victory was achieved! 🏆🏆🏆

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LINK TO MY FIGHT

👯‍♀️👯👯‍♂️LINEUP CHOICES👯‍♀️👯👯‍♂️

1st CARD SLOT

Harlaw is chosen for this slot. He plays the role of the Main tank perfectly with his great stats. His high health stats and the SHIELD ability will also allow him to have much longer staying power on the battlefield. This allows all other units to be kept safe until he is taken down.

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2nd CARD SLOT

The Venari Marksrat occupies this slot. It's main role here to be the sacrificial target in order to activate it's MARTYR ability.

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3rd CARD SLOT

Djinn Muirat fills this slot and it's main role is to be the DPS and also a backup tank. With his VOID ARMOR, he is more than able to take over the tanking duties if needed.

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4th CARD SLOT

The Scavo Hireling fills this slot. It's role is to be Support unit thanks to the REPAIR ability. The Tank's armour should be constantly refilled.

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5th CARD SLOT

Skok Duskblight occupies this slot. He is yet another DPS unit for the team but his WEAPONS TRAINING ability also confers his damage capabilities to adjacent non attack units. This turns my support units into potent attackers too!

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6th CARD SLOT

The Will-o-Wisp occupies the last slot. It's main role is to debuff all units and reduce their health with it's WEAKEN ability.

I hope you're starting to see the pattern here in my team setup. 😉

⚔️🛡️Battle Action Report🛡️⚔️

As you can see, both of us fielded very similar units in our matchup. Even though we both used the different splinters, our unit selection was a similar mix of magic, ranged and melee units. 😱

💧WATER💧 VS 💀DEATH💀

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My opponent used the Diemonshark as his tank in the 1st slot which was a VERY good choice. With his great defensive stats, this is a unit which will protect it's entire team until it falls.

The Flying Squid occupied his 2nd slot. This is another tough unit and with it's REACH ability and good damage, it packs a punch. It would likely also be the backup tank after his main tank falls.

His 3rd slot was occupied by the Disintegrator, which is able to debuff all melee units with -1 attack. This is then followed by the Deeplurker. Ordinarily, the Deeplurker would be a very deadly unit thanks to it's OPPORTUNITY ability.

His last 2 slots were filled with ranged DPS units.

All in all, I would say that the opponent picked a really strong team.

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The battle started out with all our units just duking it out pound for pound. It was a high mana game with 54 mana as the limit. The rulesets were EXPLOSIVE WEAPONRY & FOG OF WAR.

• The first round saw both our sides launch a flurry of attacks. Both teams took a lot of damage trading blows, especially with the ruleset conferring BLAST on everyone. 🤣

• The opponent started off strong as his faster units attacked first against my team. The BLAST damage also ended up killing my Venari Marksrat TWICE! Thanks to my Astral Entity Summoner ability, it was ressurected (before dying again almost immediately).

• Normally a unit dying is a bad thing, not to mention it dying twice. However, thanks to MARTYR, my Harklaw and Djinn Muirat got a massive double buff with +2 to all stats! This turned them into monstrosities both defensively and offensively.

• When it was finally my turn to attack, the sheer firepower from my team killed his Diemonshark and left his backup tank precariously low on health too!

• Round 2 was even worse for the opponent as my units destroyed his Flying Squid, Disintegrator, and Deeplurker.

• With only 2 ranged units left, it was game over with no chance of recovery now.

• It was all over for the opponent now as I eventually mopped up his entire army. 💀💀💀

Talk about doing WAY MORE than it was supposed to!!! 😱🤯🥳 All I expected was for the FOG OF WAR ruleset to give me a slight advantage. Individually, on their own, my units would face a huge disadvantage against an enemy which has higher levelled than me. However, thanks to being able to focus on just one main tank, I was able to turn the tides of battle! The opponent simply could not handle all that at all.

Well as you can see here in this GIF of my battle, the results were pretty good! 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻

This was truly an eye opener! 😁🏆

Slowly, but surely, I wore down the opponent's team and the match ended up with me inflicting a crushing defeat. My team selection proved to be the edge I needed to eventually overpower my opponent. 💪🏻

🔮🔮🔮Hindsight is 20/20🔮🔮🔮

Would I have done anything differently? 🤔 This might have seemed like a disadvantage at the start but I ended up winning handily. IF I had to use the same cards again, there would be no better lineup than what I had already used for the match. Any other combination MIGHT have resulted in a loss for me. I'm really satisfied with the results against such a worthy opponent. 🏆🥇

💭🧐💭Ending Thoughts💭🧐💭

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I definitely can appreciate the ruleset FOG OF WAR and how it changes the dynamics of usual gameplay. This is one of those rulesets which can be turned into a huge advantage if surrounded with the proper team. The role it brings to the battlefield will give a player the edge in squeezing out every tiny advantage to get the win. 👍🏻

I hope this article has given you some insight into its potential. 😉

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