Welcome back to our Weekly Battle Mage Secrets!
This week, we are featuring the Fire & Regret ruleset.

Fire & Regret:

• All units receive the Return Fire ability at the start of the battle. Enemy units that attack with ranged attacks receive damage back.
• Damage returned is equal to damage of the attacker divided by 2, rounded up.
  Ranged attack units with the Reflection Shield ability do not take damage from reflected magic attacks.
• The Amplify ability increases damage.

Return Fire, the Ilthain or Lir Deepswimmer summoner ability. It can be very potent and directly counters a few summoners like General Sloan and can also mess certain games up if paired with the right ruleset. Let's dig in and see what sort of counters and synergies we can find.

Synergies
Void Armor	When going up against this particular ruleset, you want to avoid ranged attacks completely if you can help it. Your opponent will most likely try to do the same. Regardless though, having Void Armor secures you the ability to have extra survivability. Whether if your opponent opts to use magic, or if you are forced to use ranged and get return fire back, the extra armor will be very helpful.
Protect	Piggybacking off of the Void Armor, you'll want to have extra armor where you can, having monsters with the protect ability will ensure you outlast your opponents.
Repair	Rounding out our armor synergy, having repair will help increase survivability even more. If you have a taunt tank in your lineup, it'll have Void Armor, Protect and Repair which will give your other monsters the ability to dish out damage freely for at least a few turns.

Counters
Martyr	For counters, Martyr is one potential avenue you can look at. If you see the soulbound martyr cards like Fungus Flinger and Venari Marksrat, they can potentially buff your lineup as you can expect return fire to take them out after a turn or two.
Reflection Shield	It's stated in the description but Reflection Shield is a good counter for this ruleset. Unfortunately, there are only 3 monsters currently that are ranged that have this ability. Ash Mirage, Ancient Redwood, and Runic Skyclaw are the only ones but keeping this ability in mind will be good as when new cards get released in the future, there could be more monsters that have this ability.
Amplify	Amplify is also mentioned in the description and can't be stated enough. Having this ability in your lineup can essentially make the enemies take themselves out of the game. If the combination ruleset only allows for ranged, for example, if you can throw in a Sea Stalker, you may force the enemy to take themselves out a lot faster than you can kill them.

This week's feature is from a regular match in Diamond League. Rulesets are as follows:

• Odd Ones Out
• Fire & Regret
• Armored Up

We have a small mana ruleset this week so we can't fully take advantage of all that the ruleset has to offer but that's just RNG. We're also limited to strictly the Fire splinter so let's see what our options are.

Round 1

The opponent here opted to go for Jacek which I think is a good play since there's already extra armor added due to the ruleset. The problem with Jacek in this match though is that the mana cap is only at 15 so your options become even more limited.

I opted to use a Tarsa for lesser mana but I am also in a bit of a disadvantage due to having lower leveled cards. I was able to incorporate a few of the synergies and counters I mentioned above by using the Flame Monkey which has repair as well as the Venari Marksrat that has the martyr ability.

Round 2

At the start of round 2, we see that our Chaos Agent has been made quick work of thanks to the pierce ability while we also take out the opposing Radiated Scorcher. At this point, we're able to expose the Uraeus to the front line and our own Radiated Scorcher makes quick work of the armor that it has. This will essentially leave the opposing Tenyi Striker to fend for itself in the next round.

Round 3

As expected, the start of round 3 essentially has us at a 3v1. The Vernari Marksrat actually missed hitting the high speed Tenyi and got a backfire rather than a return fire but still killed it off which works in our favor since that was the plan for it anyway. Our Radiated scorcher will go down and we're still able to tank with our Flame Monkey while the buffed up Djinn Apprentice deals damage from the backline. Cherry on top is the Djinn's deathblow ability which will deal double damage to the last remaining monster on the opposing side.

Results

GG! Not as comprehensive of a use case but still a pretty good win in my opinion. Variety is always important and keeps us on our toes. I did have the summoner disadvantage but the low mana cap worked well in our favor.

That's it for this one and see you next week!

Full battle here.

Images provided by Splinterlands in game and via Weekly Battle Mage Challenge post.

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