Stand Back - Battling with Keep Your Distance!

This week's Battle Mage Secrets challenge features the Keep Your Distance ruleset! Not a fam of melee monsters? Well, then this just might be your favorite Splinterlands ruleset. You may already be able to tell from the name, but in these battles there is absolutely no hand to hand combat at all!

As I just mentioned at the start, there is absolutely no hand to hand combat in Keep Your Distance battles. That's right, any monster with a melee attack is banned from those fights. Ranged, magic, or not attack at all? Then you're good to go. The big loser in Keep Your Distance battles is fairly obvious - monsters with a melee attack are completely unusable.

Whenever there is a loser there is often a winner, and in this case there are a few. First, there are bulky monsters without melee attacks that can serve as a tank. Without melee monsters bulk is more difficult to come by, and any monster that can serve as a robust tank for your ranged attackers becomes quite a bit more valuable than it would be in other battles. And second, there are the counter options. Knowing that your opponent is limited to ranged or magic attacks means that you have a greater chance of being able to counter their strategy with an anti-magic or anti-melee team composition.

If you wanted to jump right to the action, the Battle Link is right here. Want to hear some more about the lineup? Read on further!

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Here are the rules for our battle. We have Keep Your Distance, which rules out any melee attackers. We also have What Doesn't Kill You and Silenced Summoners, which will grant every monster Enrage, and remove any summoner bonuses. Oh, and I should also mention here - this was a gold foil brawl battle, which means that we are working with a much more limited deck than usual.

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Thanks to Silenced Summoner, whichever summoner we choose will not be providing our team with any if their usual summoner buffs. So we want to go with the cheapest possible mana cost summoner. Bortus is great in this situation since he costs 3 mana, which is less than the 4 mana that the Chaos Legion rare summoners require. This gives us an extra point of mana to spend on our monsters!

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This is a Keep Your Distance battle, which means that all the monsters will have ranged, magic, or no attack. I wanted to lead off my team with a monster that would be able to attack from the front position, and Nerissa was just the card I was looking for. Nerissa Tridawn is relatively tanky with 10 health, and hits hard with 3 magic damage. In this battle, the 10 health is particularly important - it gives us a greater chance of being able to take advantage of Enrage from the What Doesn't Kill you ruleset.

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Up next was a pair of support cards. Venari Wavesmith helps out the entire team with some extra armor, and Merdaali Guardian with Tank Heal will hopefully help to keep Nerissa healthy.

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I finished off my lineup with a monster that works well with Venari Wavesmith - Swamp Spitter. Swamp Spitter has a decent ranged attack, and also has the Repair ability. Couple that with Venari Wavesmith's Protect and that allows me to give any monster on my team some additional protection against physical attacks.

With the lineup set, it's off into battle! When I see the selected teams I am hopeful - my opponent brought a respectable team to the fight, with a smattering of ranged and magic attackers. However, they have spread out their healing by bringing a monster with Tank Heal and a monster with Triage. My entire team attacks the front monster, which essentially takes Triage off of the table. On the other hand, my team's own Tank Heal and Repair abilities can both help out my front line monster, giving my Nerissa Tridawn much more staying power.

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With recovery skills on both sides of the battlefield, this fight starts off slowly. By the start of round 3, my team is making slow but steady progress on the opposing Wave Brood. My Nerissa is taking some damage too, but it is being healed each turn by my Merdaali Guardian and Swamp Spitter.

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The enemy Wave Brood goes down and the dominoes begin to fall - by the beginning of round 5 my team is already beginning to go to work attacking my opponent's Magi of Chaos.

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Once the bulky Wave Brood was out of the picture, the rest of the enemy team was a relatively easy nut to crack. By round 7 all that remained on the other side of the battlefield was a lone Kulu Swimhunter, and my team was poised to take the victory. And again, if you wanted to see the whole battle for yourself, you can see it right here.

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My strategy for this battle worked out perfectly - bringing double recovery skills in my lineup was enough to completely negate my opponent's damage output. Pair that with a bit of magic and ranged damage, and my monsters were able to slowly wear down the enemy team.

This battle showed the importance of using a focused lineup in a fight. Trying to cover all of your bases gives you some play in every situation. But spreading out your team's attacking or healing power can potentially mean that your monsters will fall to a strategy which is concentrated at one specific point.

Thank you so much for reading all the way to the end. Interested in seeing some more of my writing in the future? Be sure to give me a follow! In the meantime, if you'd like to see some of my recent posts:

• Playing Splinterlands? You Should Join a Guild! (and we just might want you!) - The perks of joining a guild, and a recruiter for Rebels of the Rift!

• Splinterlands Economics: Causation - A look at causation, and how we can apply it to Splinterlands!

• Splinterlands Economics: Ceteris Paribus - An introduction to the concept of Ceteris Paribus, and how we can apply it to Splinterlands!

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All images used in this article are open source and obtained from Pixabay or Unsplash. Thumbnails borrowed with permission from the Splinterlands team or made in Canva.