Blast: Speed and Reflection Shield a Must Have!

For our battle mage secrets this week, we have my favorite ruleset in blast. It is always fun to see attacks spread all over the place blasting through your opponent. Naturally, because of all that damage that can come you need a good strategy to limit it or hit your opponent first. As always, we will examine a few strategies to use for this ruleset and then breakdown a full battle round by round. To play the battle live, please use the following link: https://splinterlands.com?p=battle&id=sl_6820348eec0ffb8471f90eff564fdcbf&ref=bluedevil0722

Strategies

1. Speed: If you hit your opponent first and hit them hard, you can eliminate the blast damage by taking out their opponents before they fire. Jacek and heavy range damage can do this pretty well, Jacek and speed buffs are also great by using speed to avoid your opponent's damage all together as no blast happens without hitting your target. This can be quite risky as a resilient tank or one with resurrects from life can be impossible to get through in round 1 and if you get unlucky with RNG on dodges you can go down quick.

2. Reflection Shield: A taunt with reflection shield can really annoy your opponent. A tide biter or corsair in a reach position with taunt up front can completely de rail a high blast damage team by allowing no damage to hit the backline. These cards are a must in most cases in blast matches for this reason and have been game changing to the meta

3. Amplify and Magic Reflect/Thorns: The last strategy is a little trickier but if you know what damage your opponent will use can be pretty great to use. If your opponent likes to magic spam, playing an amplify with rathe or other monsters with magic reflect monsters up front can take all the blast damage and put it back on them. A good defense can be a great offense in this case.

The following battle will include a combo of all of these strategies as the magic reflect onto my opponent as well as reflection from tide biter and speed from supply runner were all key to my success.

Round 1

My strategy here was use lily to provide a taunt at less mana and then bring the tide biter to limit blast damage. My expectation was no magic would be seen given the ruleset however my opponent completely avoided that which I was scared for. My damage was key on not having a taunt from my opponent given the mid mana match so I wanted to spread out and cause blast all overall for that reason. In round 1, it is not really looking good for me as my chwala goes down in round 1 and his monsters are all still alive with shields abound. I did bring the oshannus with the void as a secondary reach monster which proved to be a great play I did not plan on.

Round 2

Things really take a turn for the better in round 2 as his wavesmith goes down from relfection shield damage leaving his backline open to my heavy melee approach. His backline gets beat down and his nerissa gets nipped by the magic reflect as it is buffed to apply just enough damage to knock itself off.

Round 3

All but RNG stands in my way at this point as his oshannus is the only monster left. Thankfully, I only have one miss and my deeplurker hits him hard at the end to eliminate his last monster.

My opponent went all offense where my slightly defensive strategy proved too superior to get me the win. Please upvote or comment if you enjoyed this breakdown and have any other strategies for the blast ruleset.