All Knives Out - Melee Mayhem

Hello, Splinter family!

This week's Battle Mage Secrets challenge is featuring Melee Mayhem, a ruleset which has been avoiding me for almost a week. Still, I think I managed to find a good enough battle to showcase. Before jumping into action I want to mention, and thank, @bravetofu for delegating me some SPS. Me and my monsters are very grateful.🙂

Now, let's take a look at what Splinterlands has to offer us this time!

---

Rulesets

This 14-mana battle had two rules:

Melee Mayhem means simply put that melee monsters can attack from anywhere. This fact combined with all the different abilities makes it one of the most fun rulesets.

In addition to that, there was also the Stampede ruleset enabling the Trample ability to trigger multiple times. This one doesn't concern me since I'm not gonna use any Trample monsters. Interesting ruleset duo, though.

---

My Team

For such a low mana battle it's usually wise to choose a low-cost summoner as well and while Tarsa's 4 mana cost ain't that much, Pyre for example, would have been even cheaper leaving more mana to be used for monsters.

However, Tarsa's summoner buffs are just perfect for low-mana battles - plus 1 to both melee attack and health, making small guys grow stronger.

One of these little fellas is my tank unit, ANTOID PLATOON. It actually has some pretty good base stats and with a little help from Tarsa, even better. With the Shield ability, these guys shouldn't be that easy to knock out.

---

URAEUS is my go-to monster with Tarsa. Being a Neutral monster, this snake can be used with any other Splinters but I tend to use it mostly with Fire because of the summoner buffs. Uraeus has the Sneak ability so it will be targeting the last enemy monster which in this case is a good thing since every other melee unit goes for the tank cos of the Melee Mayhem.

BATTERING RAM will on the other hand target the weakest link among the enemy ranks using its Opportunity ability. Both the Ram and the Snake are good additions to a Melee Mayhem battle in case my opponent should have a strong tank. My plan with these two is to take down any possible support units while other melee troops will be focusing on the tank.

---

RADIATED SCORCHER would be quite useless without the Melee Mayhem rule unless he would be put in the first spot. Being a pretty weak one, the Scorcher wouldn't last long in such a demanding role. However, it can be very useful in battles like this when he is placed in a more safe spot. From there he can use the Shatter ability to take out the opponent's armour making our job much easier.

The latest addition to my deck, SCORCH FIEND, is a zero mana unit that is often used to fill an empty place "for free". If my opponent shouldn't have Sneak or Opportunity monsters, who knows, maybe the Fiend would have its moment to shine and perform an attack.

---

Entering The Arena

After all the buffs the setup for the battle looked like this:

It seems like my opponent chose to tackle the Melee Mayhem ruleset with a heavy emphasis on magic and why not. They have a summoner boosting the attack of all the magic units and unlike my melee units, they will ignore the armour.

On top of that, they even have the super annoying Queen Mycelia providing armour to all. Yet, when taking a closer look at their units, we can see that they really lack speed compared to my team. This is gonna be an interesting one!

---

The Battle

Magic or Melee? To find out, you can take a look at the battle here or/and continue to read my battle report:

ROUND 1

Our units being much faster than the opponent's ones seemed to work well to my advantage in the first round. Even though we lost our Antoid Platoon, we managed to take out their Fiend, Mycelic Morphoid, and destroy some armour.

ROUNDS 2 & 3

Again our speed was the essence here and two more enemy monsters were down - even Queen Mycelia. The hidden Djinn Biljka was revealed and while he got to hurt Uraeus a bit, he was quickly put down at the beginning of round 3.

---

Aftermath & Other Good Melee Mayhem Strategies

Well, this battle turned out to be much more one-sided than thought. The good thing about it, and in analysing these battles in general, is the fact that it always gives you new ideas. For example, I have never really thought that Speed could be such a big factor in Melee Mayhem battles but actually makes a lot of sense. Since everyone can attack, better make sure they are the first ones to do so.

Even though I feel like I've played a lot during this week, I didn't come across Melee Mayhem battles that often and if I did, I probably lost miserably and therefore don't want to share them with you.

I do have some strategies and thoughts(I always do!) for that perfect Melee Mayhem fight:

• The first one would be done with Weapons Training ability. Some time ago I pulled Kulu Mastermind from a daily chest, now this beautiful creature indeed has the ability to provide half of its attack strength to non-attacking monsters. This would mean such units as Creeping Ooze or Chaos Agent, bot 1-mana monsters. This would nicely leave some room in the mana cap making it possible to add more expensive units while the Ooze and friend would be dangerous for once in their lives.

• The second strategy would include a monster with a Blast ability such as Exploding Rats which I for some reason didn't even consider for this example battle. The Rats would be great if put somewhere safe while still able to attack and cause damage to the second enemy monster.

Conclusion

Melee Mayhem is a perfect ruleset to check out your dusty, unused cards. You might have some forgotten melee monsters that lack abilities and just aren't that good to be used as tanks. Bring them out in the fresh air and who knows, you might fall in love with them again.

Thank you for reading!