This Splinterlands Social Media challenge post features a battle with the Melee Mayhem ruleset! Before we get into the battle, a few words about Melee Mayhem. Melee Mayhem gives all melee monsters the ability to attack each round, even if they are not in the first position. I do love a good fist fight, and in these battles, those melee attackers are much more likely to see play! As you will see, this battle will showcase a summoner who is perfect to take advantage of this situation.
Before we jump in to our battle, I'd like to take a quick look at our spotlighted ruleset for this battle. As I mentioned above, Melee Mayhem allows melee monsters to attack regardless of their position in the lineup. As you can probably tell, this is a huge boost for melee monsters - their biggest drawback is that under normal conditions they can only attack from the front position. In battles with Melee Mayhem, you can even place them all the way at the back of your team and still benefit from their attacks. Couple that with the fact that melee monsters tend to have more stats for their cost relative to ranged or magic attackers, and Melee Mayhem battles tend to be very heavy on melee attackers - fitting, given the ruleset name.
If you wanted to jump right to the action, the Battle Link is right here. Want to hear some more about the lineup? Read on further!
Here are the rules for our battle - of course, we have the Melee Mayhem ruleset, which allows all melee monsters to attack from any position in the lineup. We also have Even Stevens - even mana costed monsters only! Finally, Tis But Scratches grants all monsters the Cripple ability. To go along with the rules we have a relatively high mana cap of 40, and can choose from the Fire, Earth, and Death splinters.
In any Modern battle where melee monsters are expected to play a large role, Eternal Tofu is one of the first summoners who merits consideration for that fight. Funnily enough, as I write this article I just noticed that it is missing from the (Splinterlands provided!) images, but Eternal Tofu grants all of your monsters the Thorns ability. This gives them a counterattack from any melee attacks, and is something that I love to see in a Melee Mayhem battle. Oh, and that additional health and Tactics monster abilities are even more of a bonus!
I led off my team with Mycelic Infantry and Grund. Mycelic Infantry is a great tank when you are expecting a lot of melee damage on the other side of the battlefield - the combination of high health, some armor, and the Shield ability mean that Mycelic Infantry can stand up to a whole lot of damage. Grund was there to provide some damage - 3 melee attack plus Double Strike results in a whooping 6 damage per turn, and thanks to Melee Mayhem he can attack even from the second position.
My midline contained a pair of support monsters. Queen Mycelia's Protect ability gives my whole team some extra armor, and she also pitches in a bit of magic damage. Goblin Psychic adds to that magic attack, while also helping out with Tank Heal. My plan was for that extra armor and healing to allow my monsters at the front to hold off any enemy attacks, while my team's attack damage and Thorns counter-hitting wears down the opposing team.
I was running low on mana at this point, but I finished off my team with Halaran Huntress and Fungus Fiend. Both of these monsters pitch in a bit of melee damage and add to my team's firepower. In hindsight, I might have been able to make a better selection than Halaran Huntress here though - her Charge and Snare abilities are both a bit redundant on account of my summoner abilities and the battle ruleset. Oh well, that is a spot where I can improve next time!
With the lineup set, it's off into battle! When I see the selected teams I am a little concerned - my team is heavily anti-melee, but my opponent has selected a large proportion of monsters with magic attacks. My team should have plenty of damage and bulk and will certainly be competitive in this fight, but it is not quite the slam-dunk victory that I was hoping to get with Tofu.
Unfortunately, with all of the magic damage on the other side of the battlefield my Mycelic Infantry does not last nearly as long as I had hoped. In the first round of battle both frontline tanks are taken out in short order. On the bright side, my team's slight advantage in bulk means that my frontline tank situation is still looking a bit better than the enemy lineup's.
By the beginning of round 3, my team has made its way through all of my opponent's melee attackers and things are looking pretty good for me - all that remain are the magic attackers, which are significantly more fragile.
One more round and the battle was just about over. While my team has taken a bit of damage, the bulk of my lineup is still intact and in a great position to finish off the remaining enemy monsters with a final round of attacks. And again, if you wanted to see the whole battle for yourself, you can see it right here.
While I didn't quite hard counter my opponent in this battle, the mere threat of Tofu had another advantage in this fight - my opponent instead went for magic attackers, which did not benefit as much from the battle rulesets and ended up being more fragile. In the end those magic attackers were not quite able to keep up with my team's damage output.
Thank you so much for reading all the way to the end. Interested in seeing some more of my writing in the future? Be sure to give me a follow! In the meantime, if you'd like to see some of my recent posts:
Order Up - Battling with Super Sneak! - A Splinterlands battle analysis, featuring Super Sneak!
Splinterlands Economics: Causation - A look at causation, and how we can apply it to Splinterlands!
Splinterlands Economics: Ceteris Paribus - An introduction to the concept of Ceteris Paribus, and how we can apply it to Splinterlands!
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All images used in this article are open source and obtained from Pixabay or Unsplash. Thumbnails borrowed with permission from the Splinterlands team or made in Canva.