Welcome back to our Weekly Battle Mage Secrets!
This week, we are featuring the Broken Arrows ruleset.

Broken Arrows:

• Monsters with ranged attacks cannot be used.
• Monsters with 2 types of attack (which include ranged) cannot be used.

Broken Arrows essentially removes ranged type attacks from the board. It's quite hefty in terms of narrowing down your monster pool so it's best to think of synergies and counters while you're at it.

Synergies
Thorns	Thorns, which we featured last week, can help with tanks as majority of the time, your enemies will have at least 1 or 2 melee monsters depending on the ruleset. Find our review here.
Void Armor	Since we can expect a good mix of melee and magic monsters, having void armor gives you a catch all type of armor so you can sustain your monsters for longer.

Counters
Demoralize	Similar with the reasoning for thorns, since we can expect a few melee monsters more often than not, having reduced damage taken from them will go a long way to enhance sustain.
Magic Reflect	We will almost always expect magic type damage for rulesets like these so having reflect will help clean up your enemies' lineup faster
Silence	If you don't have magic reflect, silence is a good option too as it pairs well with demoralize to decrease overall damage from magic type enemies

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

• Earthquake
• Broken Arrows
• Super Sneak

This combination of rulesets makes it a more bearable one because melee monsters without reach or sneak or opportunity are able to deal damage. This is also a good time to put in some flying monsters to help overcome the earthquake ruleset.

Round 1

While this is in the diamond league, both teams don't have max summoners so therefore can't also have max monsters. I do have quite a significant lead in terms of summoner and monster levels so that becomes very helpful.

I opted to go with Obsidian since green has a good mix of flying and magic damage dealers. Leading off with a Pelacor Mercenary with flying and heal can do wonders for sustain and having +1 magic damage while also having a silence as a counter creates a good synergistic approach when going up against the opponent.

Round 2

Since we both have taunt monsters, they are able to soak up a lot of damage upfront so we go into round 2 with all monsters still alive. It's already clear though that I have the advantage because my Mycelic Slipspawn has the forcefield ability which means it can soak up significant damage above 4.

Round 3

At the start of round 3, we can see that I have already removed both the tank and front line Pelacor Conjurer from their lineup while only losing my tank. With a 5v3 lineup, it's going to be clearer to see where this one will be going.

Round 4

One thing that was important to note here is that, retaliate can be a game changer in matches like these. Sure their now tank, the Drybone Barbarian, might be soaking up all of the incoming magic damage, but with the enrage ability, it now deals a whopping 8 damage while also being able to have a chance to do counterattacks for every instance it gets hit! That should be enough to make you sweat as you'll have to see if lady luck is on your side.

Ultimately though, they just didn't have enough in the tank while my backline monsters were still fairly strong and even a secondary tank ready in case the Pelacor Mercenary goes down.

Results

GG! If the enemy had a similar level summoner, this would have been a lot closer and would have a lot more RNG involved especially with the retaliates.

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.

For those interested in playing the game, you can use my referral here.

"Together we Thrive Kapamilya"