Melee.gg: built from nothing, run for six years

What Melee was

Card game tournaments require seamless coordination of registration, decklists, pairings, results, standings, payments, and refunds. Stores, organizers, and publishers needed a reliable, unified platform that minimized additional work for judges. Melee.gg started with no platform and one developer: me.

The decisions I made

• A single multi-tenant platform allowed stores, organizers, and publishers to share one system. This ensured that every update or fix benefited all users.
• All rules were centralized. Pairing and standings logic was implemented in well-tested utilities, as accuracy in standings is critical at a top cut.
• Exports were treated as core features. Since coverage and broadcast teams operate under tight deadlines, their export needs were prioritized and maintained.
• Payment risk was minimized by processing transactions through Stripe with tokenization, and by designing the architecture to keep PCI scope as limited as possible.
• Real-time with restraint. Pairings and announcements were pushed live; everything else was cached.

What resulted

• A global platform of millions of lines of code, adopted by retail stores, organizers and circuits worldwide.
• Used by teams at Wizards of the Coast, Ravensburger and Star City Games, and supported events and promotions with Wizards of the Coast and Fantasy Flight Games.
• Ran Magic: The Gathering and Star Wars: Unlimited events, at peak concurrency across thousands of matches.
• Strong organizer retention, driven by reliability and lower judge overhead.
• I ran it for six years as EVP of Product, having started as its only developer.

Under the hood

• Core: .NET/C#, ASP.NET MVC, NHibernate over MariaDB, Redis caching.
• Real-time: SignalR hubs for pairings, results, announcements and search.
• Services: standings, jobs and format microservices; background workers for heavy calculations and reports.
• Operations: Stripe payments, SendGrid email, Dockerized services, role-based authorization and audit logging.

If you have a platform like this

If you are managing a platform that has outgrown its original team, begin with a one-week diagnostic assessment.