Good morning fellow Splinterfans, and welcome back to my Splinterlands blog, yesterday I already made my first post for this week, I made it about a heroic battle against Byzantine Kitty, where I defeated this overpowered summoner with my full team standing, you can read my post here.

Today I'll be making another Battle Mage Secrets post, it's about the Briar Patch ruleset this time, in which all melee attackers receive 2 thorns damage on every attack they do.

All units receive the Thorns ability at the start of the battle. Enemy units that use melee attacks receive damage back.
Damage returned is equal to damage of the attacker divided by 2, rounded up.
Melee attack units with the Reflection Shield ability do not take damage from thorns.
The Amplify ability increases damage.

So, sometimes I learns things from my own posts! I didn't knew the damage the attacker does divided by two rounded up, in most cases, that's just 2 thorns damage, as I thought it would always be, but when your melee attackers hits for 5, it receives 3 damage back to him...

So, best not to go melee, unless it has Shield to halve the incoming thorns damage, or Reflection Shield. With Rebellion, we now have a Death summoner that gives Reflection Shield to two units, but I'm not big in Rebellion just yet because it's a pretty expensive set to level up.

In most occasions, I'm still doing fine with my Chaos Legion summoners, but in certain situations the new summoners with their new abilities are just better, in Splinterlands, you just can't have it all... period.

So as I said in the title of my post: speed wins! it always does, it's so important.

The battle I want to share with you all today is a 50 mana Fire and Regret / Briar Patch battle, with the Earth and Death splinter locked out, with this combined ruleset the most obvious choice would be to go magic, so I made a magic team but at the same time I tried to counter another magic team. Djinn O'Shannus was the carry card in my line-up with everything behind it, to support and do some additional damage. His speed combined with Void and Phase was meant to dodge a lot of attacks, and for the attacks that did manage to land, I put a healer in my back line. What about weak spot, every team you make has it's own weaknesses... I think I did a good job preventing this in my team, sneak and opportunity weren't a real possibility because of the thorns, I put up a high HP card in the second position (as soon as the martyr died) to catch sniper fire, not a lot of magic snipers out there so I decided not to bring a triage unit, educated guesses...

First look at the battlefield:

A Yodin team! I didn't expect that! I see what he tried to do there, heavy melee damage at the front, put a void in the second position as a backup tank and meat shield while trying to do enough damage with the magic blasts, good for me, the Fire team is pretty slow and O'Shannus is fast, especially when it's boosted with the martyr, and the blast will actually help me to kill it. I think I'm fine for this battle!

My Line-Up:

• Summoner: Kelya Frendul - reason: +1 Speed to help be extra evasive, my whole strategy is based on speed here.
• First position: Djinn O'Shannus - reason: Void, Phase, fast!
• Second position: Venari Marksrat - reason: Martyr.
• Third position: Nerissa Tridawn - reason: High HP, good magic damage to catch sniper fire.
• Fourth position: Captains Ghost - reason: Affliction to counter enemy heals.
• Fifth position: Merdaali Guardian - reason: Heal.
• Sixth position: River Hellondale - reason: Resurrect the martyr for a double boost.

The Battle:

Round 1: The enemy main tank is killed, so that's a good start, not much happened on my side, the martyr needs to die to fully gear up my strategy, meanwhile, my healer is supposed to keep O'Shannus alive.

Round 2: There we go, O'Shannus is very hard to hit now for the enemy magic boys with a 5 speed or more difference, I just need to get trough the Void now but that won't be a problem with O'Shannus and Tridawn doing massive damage.

Round 3: It's over... I would say this was a perfect counter to the Yodin team, only I didn't knew Yodin was comming so it was just bad luck for my opponent lol. The blast with magic works great but the attacks HAVE to land first 😁

Round 4: Two attacks actually DID land on O'Shannus this round, Nerissa is hit pretty hard, but as long as my healer keeps O'Shannus alive it's fine.

Round 5: One shot left... Mortal Combat style FINISH HIM!!!

You can watch the battle unfold for yourself here.

Well that's it for this week, for the bigger posts anyway, I'll probably make some smaller ones when I have a little spare time for a few extra pennies, a lot of drops make a shower!

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.