Today I would like to talk about one of my favorite small mana strategies in Modern League. I used to be afraid of using monsters with negative ability like Incendiary. These days I use the them quite often, but you have to know when it is good to use these kind of monsters.
For this post I will focus on one of my favorite small mana strategies in Modern League: Using Kha'zi Conjurer together with Blazebeard Merc
The Strategy
My strategy here is quite simple: use Kha'zi Conjurer with Blazebeard Merc in the back of the lineup and place a buffer monster between Blazebeard Merc and Drybone Hobgoblin.
Placing Kha'zi Conjure right next to Blazebeard Merc makes sense because that way only the monster next to Blazebeard Merc can catch on fire. Surly drunk is good here because this monster has three health points for only one mana.
In front I am placing Halfling Refugee and it is a great monster for taking hits from the opposing team as it has eight health points and four melee attack points as well as self healing for only one mana point which is critical in this seventeen mana point battle. Of course Halfling Refugee also has a negative ability which is Weary this means that starting at round one this monster has a ten percent chance of becoming disabled where it would not attack or self heal.
In the second position I placed Drybone Hobgoblin. This is a solid card that has two melee damage six health points and five speed as well as Reach ability which works in the Fog of War ruleset that is in effect here.
And naturally no strategy discussion is complete without mentioning the summoner. In this case I am using a gold level Nomos summoner. This is not the best summoner for this kind of small mana ruleset. It comes with five mana as opposed to other summoners that come with only three mana. And his abilities are nothing special here. It is either nerf the magic from our opponent or dispel. Both are kind of underwhelming... I chose dispel in this case.
So why am I using it? The answer is quite simple, this is the most affordable fire summoner.
This strategy is new to me and special thanks to @beelzael for pointing out this combo to me and delegating me the Blazebeard Merc card!
The Battle
Please click here to see the full battle
As we can see here our opponent chose Avina of the Wolf summoner, that summoner is better than Nomos in my opinion. Though in small mana it is not the best as it also requires five mana. But at least her abilities are boost the speed of two monsters or give self heal to one monster are better in my opinion.
You will also notice that my opponent is using a few maxed out cards as well as the Diamond level summoner. Let's see how it will work out...
The first round was fairly successful in my opinion though we almost lost our tank Halfling Refugee, though our tank did manage to heal itself and take out their Halfling Refugee, which was a key win in my opinion.
At the start of the second round we found ourselves with a one monster advantage over our opponent. Let's see if the good luck lasts...
And in the second round our luck suddenly ran out, not only did our Halfling Refugee decided to become exhausted, but our Blazedbeard Merc also missed his shot.
This battle is becoming a little too close for comfort as our backline is quickly burning out, but I think we put enough points in the first round to be able to win it.
In the third round our bad luck continued as we had two more misses and exhaustion from Halfling Refugee, but we did just enough to make sure we are in the good position to win it.
Round four our tank was exhausted again, but our Drybone Hobgoblin is slowly chipping away at their last remaining monster and their monster cannot attack so that is just a matter of time.
And finally in round six we take away the win:
It was quite clever from Mark Boye to use the speed boost from Alvina, that was a clever counter that almost worked!
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