Hi everybody! So I love to play SWD with a friend of mine. We play it about 5 times a week together (meaning we get together to play it, not five games total). Anyway, I was playing against him with a total boss Beckett/Hondo deck (if this is illegal please tell me, as we are not up to date with the current meta). Honestly, I'm a little surprised I haven't seen this pairing elsewhere because it's so effective, able to churn out about 3-6 Resources per round with some extra damage besides, and that's even without all the Upgrades and Supports you can play with those new Resources. Anyway, the story is I drew Coercion, and played it as my first card of the round. My friend told me I couldn't play Coercion, since the only event he had in his hand is Ataru Strike and he had no Melee Damage in his pool. Now I strongly disagree, as this would make the card absolutely worthless, and if it wasn't worth at least some money, its only purpose would be to watch it BURN. When I pointed this out to him, he pulled out Investigate from his discard pile and said, "No, if your opponent has this card in their hand they could totally use it!" I tried to explain to him why this didn't really make since from my point of view, and he continued to try to explain to me why it worked. Point being, we need help settling this dispute, so any input would be appreciated, so we can play without any conflict.

You can play Coersion to your opponent and force him to passes to the end of round, it's happened to me once, I was forced to passes so many times to wait for him to rolled odd value dice for me to play At Odd event. It doesn't matter if he doesn't have melee in his pool, so either he had to play it or he had no choice but passes to the end of round. That's why Coercion is so dirty card to play. If you want more information, see Rules Reference page 26 about Coercion.

Do as much as possible is a crucial rule. So what hurricat said about not caring about the melee is correct