Who is as excited as I am for the 2013 GenCon Melee Tournament?
I have been putting a lot of time into Agot this year. And I have decided that raw talent alone cannot win joust in this environment with too many baddies winning with TLV; therefore, I have been focusing on melee--a game that is won based on raw skill.
Let me explain, because I am sure you are thinking: "Whaaa??? Melee is not really a skill game".
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No. Melee is truly where it is at right now. The restriction of the scourge and the engineer has brought balance back to melee. That deck was really strong control deck, and a lot of people were trying to play rush last year so of course it would dominate. But now, rush has entered back into the melee meta prior to GenCon 2013. Can a pure control deck win again, like at worlds? I think it can, but only piloted by a skilled player like DCDennis.
Furthermore, TLV won't be very good in Melee because it usually takes a while to get those decks rolling and the Bara player at the table will have won by then. In fact, since TLV is so broken in joust, they should just errata the agenda to, "If you have more than one opponent" since I think the agenda is quite balanced in melee.
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Most people in DC are coming to Indy just for the melee tournament this year (I know a few of us actually have to catch the red eye home after the melee tournament is over) as it has been pretty much the only thing we are playing this summer. It has been a lot of fun! We have had lot of fights though. The table alliances have been broken more times than Taylor Swift's heart. I am never making an alliance for second place with Corey again. F**k that guy seriously.
I have had all the usual DC suspects (Corey, Erick, Dennis, Brian, Dan etc etc. because lets be honest they love melee more than joust too--since they can never win a joust championship and close doesn't count) over to my place for cocktails, beers, bbq, and melee about 15 times this summer. We try to have 4 to 6 melee games per week.
The best part about these melee parties is that we have found melee to be super competitive in all the houses. We have had some crazy games come down to the wire. One time we were playing and it was like 14 power for Erick and I had 10 power and then my girlfriend came over to serve us some more margaritas and she spilled them all over Dan Ach's cards! We just stopped playing and declared it a draw--actually I don't know where I was going with that story. I had to buy Dan a new playset of NCF's.
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The point is, melee is where it is at, and I can't wait to play it at GenCon 2013. Not sure which house I wanna try and win it all with this year, but I am thinking Bara, Targ, or Greyjoy. Any house can win from our playtesting though.--Not that our melee playtesting is definitive by any means (we have a general bias toward NPE melee decks).
You guys should all get out there and start doing some melee testing prior to the joust FAQ. Because the melee restricted probably won't change to much, and melee is a game, in the words of my good friend and true mensch and woodman, Erick Butzlaff: "Melee is a game that can be beaten."
