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Ahoy fellow Splinterlands players and welcome to another one of my weekly Battle Mage Secrets posts.

This week the featured ruleset is the Equal Opportunity ruleset. With this ruleset all Monsters gain the Opportunity ability so it often changes which Monsters will be attacked because all Monsters, except the one in 1st position, will attempt to attack the opposing Monster with the lowest health.

You can recognise this ruleset with the following icon.

When this ruleset is active your Monsters in the backline will target the Monster on the enemy with the lowest Health. Like any Monster that has the Opportunity ability by itself. Bringing one or more units with Taunt could be a quite effective way to protect your lower Health Monsters because then your opponents would attack your Taunt unit first. You have to be a bit careful with how you place your Monsters too because your opponent could bring a Monster with Trample.

The battle that I want to share this week was from a recent tournament a few days ago. This was the Gauntlet Wild Bronze Invitational tournament. In the wild Format I'm usually in Silver league so it allows me to join those Wild tournaments. In this battle I want to share with you I played against viru5.

Here's a picture of our initial lineup.

Battle Rules

This was a battle with a 32 Mana Cap where the Fire, Earth, Life, Death and Dragon elements were available. Almost every element available except for Water. The battle had 3 rulesets:

• Reverse Speed: Monsters with the lowest Speed attack first and have the highest chance of evading attacks.
• Earthquake: Non-flying Monsters take 2 Melee damage at the end of each round.
• Equal Opportunity: All Monsters have the Opportunity ability.

Here is a link to the battle if you want to check it out: https://splinterlands.com?p=battle&id=sm_4to4Hhfh0ZyxwJPMReq3&ref=athunderstruck

Battle Lineup

Alright we have a Reverse Speed ruleset so it's best not to sure Monsters with too high speed. Then there is Opportunity on every Monster to take notice of. Finally there is Earthquake so all Monsters take 2 damage at the end of each round unless they have the Flying ability.

Because of the Earthquake ruleset I want to use Brighton Bloom in this battle. I don't play him that often because I only have him at level 2 so especially when I play in the Gold League in Modern it's not that great to use him. This is a Bronze league tournament though so level 2 Brighton Bloom is perfect! Giving all Monsters on my team the Flying ability so that the Earthquake ruleset is no problem for them.

As my frontline I'm using Flesh Golem, quite high health Monster and he has the Heal ability so he can sustain himself a bit. Especially because he won't be targeted early on except for by the opponents frontline and this is because of the Equal Opportunity ruleset.

Skipping the 2nd for now I go to Kron the Undying in position 3. He also has a Heal on himself to sustain, has low speed and still a solid 3 Magic Damage. I think he's great addition to the team.

Back to the 2nd Monster, in position 2 I placed Fungus Flinger with the Martyr ability so that when it dies it will give +1 to all stats of my Flesh Golem and my Kron the Undying. In position 4 I placed Venari Marksrat to provide a 2nd Martyr buff to my Kron. It'll then also provide its Martyr buff to my Sporcerer. Those Martyrs will increase their Speed so that's not great in the Reverse Speed ruleset, but their increased Damage and Health hopefully makes up for that. The Equal Opportunity ruleset will cause them to get attacked soon to provide the Martyr buffs.

Next up I have Sporcerer. When you don't play Brighton Bloom in the Earthquake ruleset it's always great to have Armor on your Monsters to take the first or even multiple rounds of Earthquake damage. Since I'm playing Brighton Bloom I figured maybe instead of giving myself Armor with Queen Mycelia I'll take away my opponents Armor with Sporcerer.

Lastly I placed Fungus Fiend just for the 0 Mana Cost and it'll be the first target of my opponents Opportunity attacks.

Battle Analysis

As you can see my opponent also had the idea of using 2 Martyr cards that'll be targeted by Opportunity and then provide buffs to the adjacent Monsters when they die. My opponent decided to bring Lobb Lowland as his Summoner though so that he could use Quora Towershead. She definitely becomes a beast when she gains those Martyr buffs and especially if she can then kill Monsters and trigger the Bloodlust.

In Round 1 my Monsters already kill both of my opponents Martyr cards. This then gives both buffs to their Quora Towershead who is already looking like a beast. Their Quora then kills my Fungus Fiend (after his other Monsters missed against it) so she gains a Bloodlust on top of the Martyr buffs. Then she ends up missing against my Venari Marksrat though because she has 6 Speed vs my Rat with 1 Speed and it's the Reverse Speed ruleset. So Quora had 25% chance to hit and 75% chance to miss. 50% from the Speed difference and 25% because I have the Flying ability.

My Sporcerer isn't doing much with the Rust ability it only affects my opponents Pelacor Mercenary, who lost his Armor due to the Rust so also didn't gain any from the Martyr buff. So that was definitely good. Other than that it's doing a bit of damage per round.

Near the end of Round 2 my opponents Quora hits my Venari Marksrat with the Magic attack which kills it. My Kron and Sporcerer gain the Martyr buff. Then she tries to Melee attack my Fungus Flinger but misses because she now has 7 Speed vs 1 Speed so she had 85% chance to miss. 60% from the Speed difference and 25% from the Flying ability on my Monster.

At the start of Round 3 the battle looks like this.

My Fungus Flinger and Sporcerer have 1 Speed. Even after the Martyr buff the Sporcerer has 1 Speed because that's what it started out with and Lobb Lowland does -1 Speed to my team. So they do 4 damage to the Pelacor Mercenary. Then my Flesh Golem gets his turn because he has 2 Speed vs 3 on the Pelacor. And so he kills the Pelacor Mercenary now only Quora is left on my opponents team.

She obviously hit my Flesh Golem with her Magic attack because nothing in this ability gives Magic attacks a chance to miss. But she did miss with her Melee attack.

Now my Monsters bring her down to 3 Health. But she heals for 5 back to 8 when her turn starts. Then her Magic damage is enough to kill my Flesh Golem and get another Bloodlust buff. Now she has 8 Speed though so has only 5% chance to Melee attack my Fungus Flinger. Because 70% chance to miss with the Speed difference and 25% from the Flying ability. So she misses again.

Round 5 starts with Quora taking some Earthquake damage bringing her Health down to 7. My Sporcerer goes first, deals 3 damage to bring it down to 4 Health. Then my Kron attacks and deals the final blow with his 4 Damage!

Victory! 😄

Was My Strategy Successful?

Yeah it was a pretty good strategy. A bit of luck was involved though to get this victory. Due to the RNG of the early Melee misses. If some of them didn't happen then I'm curious how it would've gone because of Quora becoming stronger faster. But near the end due to her high Speed those Melee attacks almost had no chance to hit me anymore.

I do definitely like my opponents lineup as well. Well played viru5! I have also played lineups like this before where I put both of those Martyr cards around Quora and put some other Monsters on either side. It's a really solid lineup when there is Equal Opportunity.

I might have almost played this lineup too, but the main reasons I didn't was because of Earthquake AND ESPECIALLY because of the Reverse Speed ruleset. As you can see from my battle the Reverse Speed ruleset caused Quora to miss all of her Melee attacks due to those Speed buffs and the -1 Speed to my Monsters from Lobb Lowland. As well as the Flying ability on my Monsters providing an extra 25% chance to evade attacks.

Conclusion

It was a great team composition. That Flying ability alongside the Speed difference really caused Quora to miss a lot. Maybe an early Melee hit against my Venari Marksrat could've made a difference. But that Bloodlust would've then caused her to get more Speed quicker and in turn result in more Misses.

I would've wanted to see Quora kill my Fungus Flinger though and see how it went then. Probably still the same because yes she'd gain 1 Health from the Bloodlust but my Kron would also gain +1 Magic damage so still the same damage in that round. If she did managed to attack for 1 Round against my Kron then it really depends on her speed if she had a shot to kill him. It would've been the same 5% chance to hit him.

That's it for my Battle Mage Secrets challenge this week. Thank you for reading!

If you haven't signed up for Splinterlands yet and want to check it out, you can do so with my referral link at: https://splinterlands.com?ref=athunderstruck

I also still have a giveaway for a seasonal delegation of a level 5 Vruz with Martyr ability which you can find in my post where I opened my Season Chests. The old one is now over as the Season has ended, but a new one will be up later when I do my End of Season video.