Marksman Mastery

Marksman Mastery

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Tier I	The first cell you open each stage does not break your chain.
Tier II	If the sum of your chain is greater than the max stage power, kill monsters before they can deal damage to you.
Tier III	[ 2 Charges] Double the length and value of your chain.
Unlock I	Unlock by creating a 15-turn chain on Normal or above.
Unlock II	Unlock by creating a 30-turn chain on Normal or above.
Unlock III	Unlock by creating a 50-turn chain on Normal or above.

The Marksman Mastery is focused on building chains.

General Uses

The marksman plays extraordinarily different from the base game and can essentially kill almost every single monster on the stage if you play off chains with a value of 1. The marksman is great at killing enemies but generally plays fairly slow if you want to maximize effectiveness. Most of the marksman's gameplay revolves around the 2nd passive ability with the mastery and 1 passive ability acting as padding. Anything that activates a penalty on mistake, a penalty on monster reveal, or a limitation on flagging will almost stop this mastery dead in its tracks. This is because its main gimmick is technically you constantly making mistakes, revealing monsters to kill them, and relying on the ability to over flag/flag empty cells.

Techniques: Building up chains

If you over flag a cell you can get multiple chains out of it.

You simply unflag each over flagged that you know is safe one by one and chord the number you're trying to chain. In this case the 1 in the center (chording the same cell will not result in getting extra chain so it's a good idea to chain nearby cells followed by the previous cell so that it can stack up}.

You simply unflag each over flagged that you know is safe one by one and chord the number you're trying to chain. In this case the 1 in the center.

We can continue doing this until no safe cell are left which will maximize how many chains we'll get. You just have to make sure that you only open or chord cells that you know are the same value that your chain is. In this case, we'd end up with a value one chain with a sum of 5. This is mainly useful to know before you're chain's sum is greater than the max stage power.

Techniques: Keeping Your Chain When Killing

The core of this technique is that the value it uses to add to your chain is the one after the monster is killed. This mixed with chording allows for the ability to clear almost all of a board of monsters.

We have a chain value of 1 and our chain sum is above the max stage power. All we know is that there's 1 mine in the 3 hidden cells.

If we instead flag everything but the one cell we know has a monster we can satisfy the 2 and give ourselves the ability to chord that 2.

When we do this the 2 cell becomes a 1 and does not break out value 1 chain because after the monster was killed it was the same value as our chain. We then unflag the 3 cells we used to over flag the 2 so we're not confused and continue playing.

Here's another scenario...

Much like the previous scenario we only know that there are 2 monsters in the flagged cells and have a value 1 chain with a sum above the max stage power.

We again flag everything apart from the monsters we're trying to kill then chord the 3 since it is satisfied.

That kills 2 monsters leaving the cell we chorded with 1 left which keeps our value 1 chain going. We again unflag the over flagged cells to continue playing.

Every time you do this it counts as a mistake and reveals a monster so be careful of doing this in the wrong stage. The goal is to eliminate exactly the amount of monsters that are needed to bring the cell we're chording down to the value of our chain so we can keep it and do this technique again immediately after.

Techniques: Value Reduction and Clearing Boards

Value 1 chains are the most effective at clearing the board if you can get over the threshold of the max stage power. Using the chording killing technique above you can essentially continue this for nearly the whole stage by constantly trying to reduce the 2s, 3s, and 4s down to 1s by specifically targeting the monsters that make them too big for you to kill them without losing your chain. You can always reduce something down to a 1 with the above technique but can never bring 1s up to 2s with it so you'll generally have more options building up value 1 chains. Lets use an example with a 4 we're trying to reduce down.

We have a value 1 chain and the sum of our chain is greater than the max power. We only know that there are monsters in the flagged cells.

We can flag accordingly to chord some the 2s marked with arrows so that we eliminate 1 monster from each side of the 4. Those 2 monsters are now unflagged.

Then we chord the 2s (you'd do this for each side separately but I'm showing both sides at once)

We're then left with this result.

We then clean up the cells we flagged for chording that don't have any monsters and can continue solving the board from there. In this case, we can even use the marksman ability to now solve the 2 that was once a 4.

With the reduction technique, you can strategically widdle down numbers to be easily dealt with and kill monsters. You are generally going to be using the chording trick on 2 and 3 value cells since they're the easiest to kill enough monsters to have it be a 1 after the chord. You can't entirely clear a board with this technique but you are generally left with 3-6 cells at the end of the stage. This is VERY time-consuming.

Uses for your Mastery Ability

You don't get any bonus for having a ridiculously high chain so this ability is mostly useless apart from a few scenarios. The main one being if you don't have enough cells to start building up your chain again to above the max stage power. You get a chain going to about half power or slightly greater then use this to allow yourself to use the second passive ability again.