Equal Opportunity: To Taunt or Not to Taunt?

For our battle mage secrets this week, we have the equal opportunity ruleset. A common ruleset to run into and allows you to break out some real heavy hitters on your team that are really powerful in this ruleset. As usual, we will discuss three different strategies to use when thinking about this ruleset and then breakdown round by round a battle using one of the strategies. For the full battle, please use the following link: https://splinterlands.com?p=battle&id=sl_2466ec0a2dceb9d26a2353c4fb21a68c&ref=bluedevil0722

Strategies:

1. Taunt: A taunt card is a tank that draws all attack damage to it outside of scatter shot damage. This is a great way to protect your low health monsters and can be paired with resurrect or repair or heal cards to make it more resilient. I would say this is probably the greatest used strategy currently in the game especially in lower leagues.

2. Lily Shieldpaw: Using the lovely panda card, allows you to taunt without using a high mana cost monster. Your opponent is forced to target the front line unless they have scatter shot due to the camo ability Lily gives to all her monsters.

3. One health monster with shields: There are several cards with one health and heavy shields to protect them such as the clockword aide and the enchanted defender. Naturally these cards are very suspect to magic damage but as you will see below can be signifanctly upgraded by using rathe. Legionnaire alvar is another great play as he already has the void armor and relatively low health for a high mana card. This strategy forces your opponent to target this creature for most of their monsters and causes them to have to go through a lot of damage before getting to your damage creatures. One flaw in this strategy is if you opponent goes heavy sneak or snipe as the opportunity will be ignored.

As mentioned above, we will look at strategy number three in the below battle and breakdown how this strategy was successful for my team. Let us get into it!

Round 1

We have a mid to high mana match with 42 here so I was tempted to go taunt but decided on the void armor monster strategy here to hit more damage. Life has a stellar card in the silvershield knight giving inspire and has piercing in silver league. In round 1, everything goes to plan as I eliminate two of his monsters with my clock aide still alive up front. Not sure his strategy here as one of his main damage dealers was left unprotected after the one mana meat shield was gone.

Round 2

Round 2 continues in the right direction as I eliminate his void dragon and my clockwork aide was resurrected and still standing strong up front. My backline remains untouched ready to continue to strike at my opponent.

Round 3

Round 3 gets a little more interesting as my aide goes down and leaves the time mage as well as other backline monsters vulnerable. My time mage goes down however his chwala does as well and it is two to four as far as monsters go.

Round 4

Round 4 goes from bad to worse as my mech misses his grund making it even more resilient with only three monsters to go with low health pools.

Round 5

My defender stays alive just long enough for my mech to eliminate his grund leaving his pelacor the only attacker. Fortunately, I have the brightwing with a repair as a tank now and with that it is all over. He is unable to deal any damage to her and my mech as well as adelaide finish the mercenary off.

As you can see, this strategy can be very powerful especially paired with resurrects and repairs on the backline. The added shield from the defender proved to be quite helpful as well making it that much more difficult for my opponent to eliminate the aide. Please upvote or comment if you enjoyed this rendition of battle mage secrets and have any other strategies you use with this ruleset.