Goodmorning everyone, depending where in the world you are of course! 😁
The Battle Mage Secrets challenge was a little delayed, and I try to do my blog posts on a Thursday most of the times but it wasn't released last Thursday, Friday is a busy workday for me so Saturday it is!
I made a Social Media Challenge post for this week last Thursday, sharing a nice strategy too, you can read my post here.
Welcome back to my Splinterlands blog you all, and thanks for being back, I'll try to make nice good looking posts here every week, and hopefully newer players can learn a thing or two from reading it, and get some strategy insights or new ideas.
It also helps being in a guild, my guild mate @estebam is sharing some nice strategies in our guilds Discord server every once in a while also, the strategy in this game is so deep, you can't think of everything on your own so that helps, together we rise! Or... the Splinterlands word for that...

VONAK!

to find out how you can participate in this challenge yourself, you can find the official Splinterlands post here.

This weeks Battle Mage Secrets is about the Close Range ruleset, in which every ranged monster gets the Close Range ability, being able to fire from the first position.

"Monsters with ranged attacks are allowed to attack in the first position."

The battle is want to share for this week is a ranged monsters only battle, so the Close Range was extra important, it's a Wild League Close Range / Going the Distance battle with 41 mana to be used, the Water and Death splinters are locked out. Obviously, good tanky monsters are important here, and since we don't need to pay attention on who can fire from the first position, it's just about putting some chunky HP monsters up front, and speed helps a lot too, one certain summoner is perfect for this job, nerfing both speed AND ranged damage: Quix the Devious!

Of course there are always more options, Jacek would be a nice option here too, and you can control the enemy damage output with Ash Mirage, but I really don't like the Scattershot he brings except for blast battles.
General Sloan is always a possible option, giving a +1 damage boost to your team, my whole strategy was made around speed, and I needed a healer to repair the damage that DID land on my team.

First look at the battlefield:

General Sloan it is! and I can already say I'll probably be okay for winning this battle, not a lot of fast monsters in the enemy team, resulting in a lot of misses while my own team kills them one by one, and so nice he brought a blast monster, I was hoping my opponent would bring a sniper or blast to kill my martyr 😁 thanks for that!

My Line-Up:

• Summoner: Quix the Devious - reason: Speed control and damage nerf, as well as access to fast and evasive dragons, I need those for my strategy!
• First position: Runic Skyclaw - reason: Mostly for his speed with Flying to dodge attacks.
• Second position: Venari Marksrat - reason: Martyr.
• Third position: Drybone Raider - reason: Double Strike with Shatter is really nice, in this ruleset IF he gets to the first position he's a beast doing 12 damage every round, good luck with that!
• Fourth position: Venari Crystalsmith - reason: Just a backline healer doing nice damage itself.
• Fifth position: Naga Assassin - reason: My fail safe, to dodge and let the Arbalest kill the rest.
• Sixth position: Pelacor Arbalest - reason: Double Strike.

The Battle:

Round 1: 4 misses on Runic so that's great, the enemy tank died, no way I'm going to lose this.

Round 2: They can't even kill my martyr for more speed and damage, come on, put a little more effort in it! 😆

Round 3: In round 3, the Battle was finished, leaving my entire team standing.

You can watch the battle unfold for yourself here.

I guess you have to be older to know this guy... 😅

A nice 0.47 SPS reward, that's pretty nice for Wild League! In Modern we can earn a lot more, but it's way more competitive so I play most of my battles in Wild, switching to Modern in the last days of the season to farm extra SPS so I don't have to fight the top dogs in Modern League.

Well, that's it for this week, I also did my battles for today so time to get another coffee!

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.