Hello Splinterlands players, here we meet again on my new splinterlands post.

as usual I say this sentence: Another Week, Another New Splinterlands Challenge... welcome to my weekly Splinterlands Battle Mage Secret challenge. As of this week, we are having ARMORED Ruleset as our theme.

ARMORED UP is a ruleset that gives +2 armor buff to all the units in the battle at the beginning of the battle. It has similar effect as Protect Ability, but there is no card to be killed to annul that buff. So these armors will be a challenge for both party and usually people will with Shatter and Piercing to break or bypass these armors.

Some prefer to go with magic only, because Magic can by pass armor protection. This is the most simple idea and of course the cheapest too. To prevent this approach, mostly we will use a tank with void armor, however this will be useless if the opponent has a shatter ability in the line up.

Because I tend to use defensive line up, having a void armor ability seems more suitable to my preference. However my case is not about picking the tank only, I prefer to have Grandmaster Rathe as my summoner during this Armored Up ruleset.

Grandmaster Rathe gives void armor ability to all units on his team, which I see this fits well for the ruleset and for my preferred style. I do not have to bother which tank I should use and how to counter if the armor of the void armor user gets shattered. OK Let's check our battle then...

THE BATTLE

This was a Gold League battle of Wild Format. I was using @Blackkrrsantan, a Scholarship account for Juice Guild from bulldog1205 one of our famous streamer. You can check his account and his twitter too, recently he share many contents outside his youtube channel.

We had a Armored Up ruleset here however we needed to think a bit about the other ruleset. Tis But Scratches would keep reducing your units' health even the armors would guard them well. Close range should be considered too, we could use some range units with high armor, and did not have to worry where they would be set. So here were my points of building my line up

1. 55 mana cap, this was all out war. No excuse for a lousy line up
2. I used Grandsmaster Rathe, so I had no obligation to bring any range units because I had Rathe here, not General Sloan. I preferred to build up a magic focused line up.
3. I would bring Adelade Brigthwing because I needed a repair ability. I believed due to cripples everywhere, armors had to be up all the time.

So this was how the battle went:

• The battle started with both of us buffing up our team and debuffing our opponents. With Lux Vega on their side, they had more buffs than my team.
• My opponent had 8 melee damage, 5 range damage and 5 magic damage. It's a 18 damage per round.
• My team had 4 melee damage, 4 range damage, and 9 magic damage. Combined all, they became 17 damage per round.
• Overall both of us had similar lineup, however the meta we used were very different. They put more defense against blast damage and I had more emphasize in armor repairing. They had War Pegasus to shatter my armor, and I had blast damage from Prismologist which would get countered by Corsair Bosun.

• Round 2 started with their side at a better condition. Its something that already anticipated, regarding Lux Vega Buffs. Round 1 was definitely bagged by them.
• Same as Round 1, Round 2 was dominated by them. My team could keep up but overall we were losing

• As you could see, losing the race in the first 2 round made the condition on the start of round 3 seemed more favoring on their side.
• Both of us lost our Iziar in this round.

• Round 4 started with more equal condition, 5 vs 5, an equal one. However looked at my Prismologist. She would change the tide of this battle... as I said this, she missed her attack in this round.

• Round 5 my team turned the condition, we were leading right now 5 vs 4.

• Wow this was an amazing one, they refused to give up and fight back to put the condition on equal again. However I had Prismologist with 6 + 3 range damage, and she was too much for them.

• If this battle did not have close range ruleset, this condition was already the end of for them.

• Round 8 was the last one. Good Game

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CLOSURE AND DISCUSSION

That was an amazing battle, both of us had pros and cons. My team had better level lineup and their team had better units, they had high level War Pegasus and Corsair Bosun. The battle was more like a bout between Lux Vega and Grandmaster Rathe, which Rathe came out as the victor. Ok lets see what points we can take from this battle.

1 Martyr + Resurrect = Semi Cheat

How could you survive if your opponent had this OP Prismologist? FAST 4 speed, Big Hitter with 6 range damage, A Blast ability... It's quite a semi cheat, produced by having a Martyr and the martyr got resurrected and died again.

In the beginning, I bet only a few people could realize that my core was not the mage squat on my line up, it was here, the Prismologist. The reason was simple, I must anticipate a small probability that they would use Magic Reflect unit.

Grandmaster Rathe does not buff any type of attack, so you are free to mix or combine all type of attack, do not have to focus on one type

2. Cripple Kills All Healing

One that worries most people from TIS BUT SCRACTHES is that everyone has this cripple ability. It means as time goes, every units will lose their max health point, and it's a matter of time when Healing finally gets useless.

Their team had a more defensive approach, they had Triage, They Had Reflection Shield, They had heal, and a tank heal... 3 of those were HEAL based, which as the battle progress, the effectiveness of those heal would deterred. This explained why they were so good at the first 2 rounds, then they started flopping down.

Meanwhile my defense was focused on armor build up and repair. As long there were armors, my units would not die, and only their War Pegasus was the thread. Maybe this battle would be more equal and attractive if my opponent was using Immortalis. But definitely Grandmaster Rathe won this battle.

ok that's for today, Have fun with ARMORED UP ruleset. And please and don't forget to leave your comment or feedback below. thank you.

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Thank you for visiting my BATTLE MAGE SECRETS Weekly Challenge, don't forget to leave your comments and feedback below. There are credits in this post for these people:

• @splinterlands : for holding BATTLE MAGE SECRETS challenge events
• carrieallen : for ultimate markdown tutorial
• bulldog1205 : for Lending me the Blackkrrsantan account
• thepeakstudio : for wonderful divider art