Hello Splinterlands Summoners and welcome to another edition of Community Engagement Challenge! In today's post, I'll breakdown some of my battles involving the Melee Mayhem ruleset. I'll share my reasons for choosing the units, what worked and what did not work.

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Melee Mayhem

In Melee Mayhem ruleset, units can use melee attacks from any position, even without Sneak or Opportunity abilities. They will target the first position unit of the enemy.

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How to Play Melee Mayhem

There are several ways to play the Melee Mayhem ruleset. You can either go with your strongest melee unit and try to overpower your enemy or you can try to predict and counter your enemy's team.

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Strategy 1 - Play With Your Strongest Melee Units

In this battle, I wanted to anchor my team on my strong melee units. My Water team has two of the strongest free melee units in the game: Commander Slade and Giant Alpine Skink.

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Commander Slade

I've been singing praises for Commander Slade ever since he came out. A rare card but has the kit to stand toe to toe against other tanks out there. He combines offense with beefy defense. He deals a lot of melee damage and he's super fast. He also has a lot of armor and health stats for his tank duties. Even his abilities of Enfeeble (debuff the enemy melee tank's attack) and Dodge (avoid the enemy melee tank's hits) are great for his role as a tank. His only weakness is lack of defense against magic attacks.

Great Alpine Skink

The Great Alpine Skink is ony a common card but also has a high damage output and great speed. It also has decent defense and has the Shield ability against physical attacks.

These two cards form the back bone of my team. The rest of the units are damage dealers and supporters.

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The Enemy Strategy and Why it Did Not Work

The enemy team's strategy is to counter melee attackers by using a unit with Thorns ability. Thorns ability returns two physical damage to attackers when hit by a melee attack. Normally this is a viable strategy and one I use myself but in this case, his unit with Thorns has very low health and armor. I have several units that can attack it and will die before it gets healed by healer.

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The Battle

My team eliminated the enemy's first position unit in two attacks and soon his other units were eliminated as well. It took his fifth unit to eliminate my two tanks but by then I already built a large lead with four units remaining against two of the enemy's. It was an easy victory for my team.

Link to Battle

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Strategy 2 - Counter the Enemy Melee

In this battle, I employed my opponent's strategy in the first battle. I had a unit (Quilliun Legionary) with Thorns ability in the first position but my unit has a lot of defense to be able to take hits and capitalize on his Thorns ability. It's followed by three strong melee units and a couple of elf mages that take was given the Execute ability by my archon. Aside from dealing damage, the mages also provide buff (Swiftness) to my team and debuff (Weaken) the enemy team.

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The Enemy Strategy and Why it Did Not Work

The enemy team's strategy is to divide my attacks by using a unit with Taunt (New Beluroc Aegis). I also employed this strategy in different rulesets and it works if the unit in position one is a strong attacker like Uriel the Purifier with Iziar the Taunt unit drawing attacks. In this case, the opponent's position one unit has no attack and is a pure tank. It just sits there while his Taunt unit is getting attacked.

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The Battle

My team quickly decimated the enemy. By round three, the enemy team only had two units left against five of my units. He didn't do any further damage to my team and the battle ended with my team only losing one unit.

Link to Battle

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Final Thoughts

In Melee Mayhem, think of out damaging your opponent or survive longer than them. You can field high damage units or counter their damage with defensive units and tank healers. You can also punish their melee attackers by using units with Thorns. There are several ways to plan your strategies in every ruleset in Splinterlands battles, this is what makes our game so much fun and exciting! That's all for today and see you in the battle field.