Hello everyone! Pozdrav svima!

This week I'm going to show you how to play when faced Back to Basics ruleset. What to look for, what are benefits of this ruleset (if there are any), how to take advantage of it, what cards go well with it and finally a showcase battle featuring this ruleset.

First of all lets see what this ruleset is all about. How to take advantage of it and what you need to pay attention to.

This is a ruleset where you don't have to worry about Monsters' abilities, but you have to optimize the Damage, Speed and Health. Also, Ranged and Magic monsters are main damage dealers, since Melee can do damage only from the 1st position (no Sneak or Opportunity here). I always try to put a tank with high health upfront and behind it fast Magic and Ranged monsters with as much damage as possible.

I order them so Magic are in front of Ranged and higher health monsters go in front of lower ones.

This is where Summoners make a real difference, because their abilities are the only ones that matter. So try to use the ones that mitigate the damage (Void or Void Armor), increase the chance of evading certain attack type (Dodge, Flying or Phase), or increase the Magic or Ranged damage.

Also, Monsters with two attack types are of high value in this ruleset, like Quora, Oaken Behemoth, Runemancer Florre, Kralus, Agor Longtail, Vigilator and similar.

There are some special cases where you need specific abilities because you're expecting certain damage type from your opponent, like Return Fire against Ranged or Counterspell against Magic.

Now let's get into the battle featuring Back to Basics ruleset. I wanted to show you a battle with a summoner that's usually used in completely different situations, but it fit here perfectly. Maybe you guessed it from the cover image, but I'm talking about - Immortalis.

The battle had Lost Magic and Armored Up rulesets in addition to Back to Basics, so why Immortalis if no Magic monsters can be used? Immortalis is usually the go-to guy when you expect Magic attacks because of his Void ability he gives to your whole team. But here I took advantage of his other two abilities, mainly Shatter ability and -1 health to opponent's team is always welcome.

If you want you can see the whole battle, play by play, click 👉 HERE 👈

I will try to explain each part of the ruleset, so you get the better understanding what was I thinking when I picked my line-up.

Since there was no Magic attack available, I expected my opponent will go with heavy Armor monsters, at least that's what I would do if I didn't come up with this line-up. I picked Immortalis summoner, because it gives the whole team Shatter ability that will take care of that Armor with just one hit. I put a monster with most health in the first place and the rest of the team was about optimizing speed/damage/health.

My opponent went with Death splinter with high health monster as a tank, followed with high Armor monster. He thought my team will break down when it gets the turn to tank, but they went through it like a knife through the butter.

You can see the line-up from both teams in battle screenshot right after this section. I will go through my line-up and explain why was each card picked and put in that spot.

SUMMONER

IMMORTALIS Earth splinter Legendary summoner that costs 6 mana. He buffs the team with Void and Shatter ability and reduces enemy Health. -1 Health to enemy Monsters. Void - Reduced damage from Magic attacks. Attack damage gets halved (rounded up), except attack 1 which deals 0 damage. Shatter - Target's armor is destroyed when hit by an attack from Monsters with this ability. I chose this summoner because of the reason I already mentioned - mainly Shatter ability.

1st POSITION ("TANK")

VENARI KNIFER Earth splinter Common card. Costs 6 mana and has very high Speed and pretty decent Heath with 3 Melee attack. Thorns - When hit with a Melee attack, does 2 damage back to the attacker. Backfire - If an enemy misses this Monster with an attack, the attacker takes 2 damage. I picked this monster as a tank because I needed someone with high health to tank while the rest do the damage. His abilities didn't matter because of the ruleset.

2nd POSITION

VAMPIRE BAT Earth splinter Common card. Costs 3 mana and has 2 Melee attack. Flying - Has an increased chance (25%) of evading Melee or Ranged attacks from Monsters who do not have the Flying ability. Dodge - Has an increased chance (25%) of evading Melee or Ranged attacks. I picked this monster to be the second tank, because of its Speed and decent Health.

3rd POSITION

VENARI MARKSRAT Neutral splinter Rare card. Costs 3 mana, has 1 Ranged attack. Martyr - When this Monster dies, adjacent Monsters get +1 to all stats. Snare - When attacking enemies with Flying, removes the Flying ability and cannot miss. I picked this monster to do some ranged damage, nothing special.

4th POSITION

FUNGUS FLINGER Earth splinter Common card. Costs 3 mana, has 1 Ranged attack. Martyr - When this Monster dies, adjacent Monsters get +1 to all stats. Blind - All enemy Melee & Ranged attacks have an increased chance (15%) of missing their target. I picked this monster to do some ranged damage, nothing special.

5th POSITION

IZA THE FANGED Earth splinter Legendary card. Costs 4 mana, and has 2 Ranged attack. Sneak - This Monster targets the last Monster on the enemy team. Scavenger - Gains 1 max health each time any monster dies. Stun - It has a chance (50%) on hit to stun the target making it to skip its next turn. I picked this monster just like the one before it - because of its high speed and high Ranged damage.

6th POSITION

GEM METEOR Neutral splinter Epic card. Costs 5 mana, has 3 Ranged attack. Scattershot - This monster's attacks hit a random enemy target. Piercing - If Melee or Ranged attack damage is in excess of the target's Armor, the remainder will damage the target's Health. I picked this monster because of its high speed and high Ranged damage.

This was quite a short battle, because Monsters didn't have any of their abilities so the 6 rounds just flew by.

In round one, the speed difference of my Monsters helped them to take most of the health from enemy tank, while his team missed half of their attacks on my tank.

After moving his tank out of the way right at the start of Round 2, it was turn on my opponent's high Armor tank whose Armor got annihilated by just one hit. His health followed quickly after.

Left with only Ranged monsters in the team in the third Round, my opponent stood no chance, and all his team could do was wait for their turn to get hit.

Last few Rounds was just a matter of trying to figure out which of my Monster will be the one that will deal the killing blow, and that honor went to Gem Meteor.

You can watch the video of this battle on 3speak.tv.

This was a Ranked battle in Gold 1 league, where I got a nice SPS reward together with big Rank boost because of the win streak.

As I already mentioned at the start of this post, there are a couple of different approaches to Back to Basics ruleset, mainly depending on the other rulesets in the battle. I already showed the strategy with Shatter ability in Lost Magic and Armored Up, and, if you are interested, you can watch my other battles where I used some of the previously mentioned strategies.

This was a battle where we had Aim True and Keep Your Distance rulesets in addition to Back to Basics. This meant we have no Melee monsters available so our damages dealers are Magic and Ranged monsters. But since they cannot miss you would prefer Ranged monsters since they usually have higher damage compared to Magic monsters of same Mana cost.
That's why I used Ilthain summoner that gives Return Fire to my whole team, and since more then half of my opponents Monsters were Ranged attack you can guess the outcome.

This was a battle where I used Owster Rotwell summoner with Magic Reflect ability to reflect damage back to Magic attackers. We had Briar Patch ruleset, so I anticipated that the opponent would use Magic attack monsters.

I jump on every opportunity to use my beloved Quora and this was a perfect example how two type attack Monsters work great in this ruleset. Well, to be honest, they work great everywhere if you can afford the mana for them. 😝

This last example was a battle showing how more speed and armor (and/or health) makes the difference in this ruleset, even though I had less fire power, since my opponent's summoner reduced my Ranged attack damage.

Link to the featured battle itself can be found 👉 HERE 👈

If you still haven't tried Splinterlands try it out 👉 HERE 👈

Thank you for your time. 👍

Special thanks to:

@carrieallen for ultimate markdown tutorial.
@kyo-gaming for text dividers used in this post.
@splinterlands for images used in this post and for making this great game.
splintercards.com for ability and ruleset descriptions, as well as card price history.
cooltext.com for cool looking title images.