The options are limited in size, so here's the detail:
Yes, occasionally, I have decks relying on merged vampires Yes, but not frequently (I have decks with a copy of the base or adv version, just in case) No, no merged vampire is worth being in a deck No, I'd like to but it's too slow / too complicated / not worth the effort / doesn't work well (crypt building, merged mecanism)
Please explain why / why not.
Prince of Paris, France
Ratings Coordinator, Rules Director
For my part, I find there are some nice vampire once merged, but it's a bit complicated to use them casually.
Star vampires are maybe an exception, because I'd probably include 5 copies of the base version anyway and just add 1 copy of the merged version (or 4+1). It makes the crypt somehow unbalanced but not more than for a star vampire.
Eg. Nergal + Nergal adv
The real trouble is for non-star vampires: it doesn't work well.
Let's take for instance some Carna deck with Valerius Major. You'd probably be forced to play 3 Valerius adv + 1 base, because the advanced version has the nice anti-obf special.
But then your crypt is a bit crippled, and you can't play Epiphany (works only with base version).
If you merge it manually, it takes an extra turn which is quite a penalty when you intend to bring out 2 more vampires.
If you use Wider View, you'll even probably need 1 extra turn to fetch the right version (if you're lucky), for a total of 2 turns.
Prince of Paris, France
Ratings Coordinator, Rules Director
i love merging for 2 main reasons:
1) there are vampires who get a real boost merging, even if their "basic form" (ty pokemon) is good (eg Lucita or Nergal)
2) on the RPG side, it means character has somehow evolved and story has continued to grow
Lurking in the underground of Bologna, Italy
I like the idea. The gains are often awful. I had a deck where I ran both Sutphens because it seemed interesting. It killed me when I drew both and had one less uncontrolled vamp.
Still, since I do all kinds of things, I'll have decks that merge or that have multiple merges.
Traveller Card Game
basically, the concept is usually cornercase at best unless it's a star vampire for the deck. and even then, hinging a star vampire deck on merging your star seems a dubious strategy at best.
Merging vampire generally is interesting, but the mechanics for achieving this are too complicated and too shaky to rely a deck's main strategy on. I have/had a few decks with normal/advanced versions of the same vampire like Goratrix, Sarasine or Theo Bell. But the decks never really relied on merging them.
Maybe it would help to change the rules for merging a bit, e.g. similar to the Anarch Convert effect, you could choose to draw another card from your crypt or alternatively to gain a pool. I was also thinking how it would change things if you further incentivize merging vampires in different ways, for example Untap the vampire if you're merging them. Gain half the capacity (round down) in blood for the vampire.
It is an interesting feature, but for most decks it is a too slow and complicated one. In the case the advanced version is the more interesting one, you do not even have "Epiphany" as an option.
A kind of "merge convert vampire" or a master (trifle) card (something like "Recruitment") might be a suggestion to improve things.
National Coordinator Germany nc [dot] germany [at] magenta [dot] de
I'd love to play, but Al'Ashrad have more interesting adv version.
Sabbat.Black Hand Shakar: Lech loathe ranged weapons. Once each action, he may burn 1 blood to become Camarilla Prince of Krakow until the end of the action.
I don't merge vampires, but I love Advanced Vampires. There are a lot of lackluster, large cap vamps in this game that never get played and releasing advanced versions of those vamps with a new special gives them the opportunity to rise above the status of wall paper and join the game.
My most recent vaguely good advanced deck was a Pentaniqua Tunnel Runner deck so you could get ridiculously cheap Tunnel Runners and some other cheap wolves. If you didn't get Pentaniqua with both copies in your draw it was basically a bust. I suppose with moe tuning and so on I could have pushed up the playability but Epiphany isn't great, the Master Merger isn't much better and as usual you will never draw it when you want without loading the deck so heavily you clog on the card later.
Maybe a mech edit where you could bolt on an advanced or base for a higher than current merge price (I.e. Pay 2 pool, only bring out one vampire this influence phase and search for the missing half) might be enough.
Retired Baron of Sydney, Australia, 418
I think the only marged Vamp (or basic AND adv) that I've used in my decks so far has been Sébastian Goulet.
Actually, my NSFTM Celerity deck might have 1 Adv copy of Cesewayo in addition to like 3 copies of the basic version. Or maybe not...
Finnish Politics!
Often the merged vampire is nice to have, but usually only one of the two versions is essential for your deck, so usually I take only one.
However I like some of the new cards such as Sarassine Adv, where you really need to merge if you want to get a powerful special.
Wider View makes it actually quite doable to get merged if you are not in a hurry, and it also has other uses.
Epiphany and Gift of Experience take up card slots and may clog your hand, so you want to include some card cycling tech. For Gift of Experience, tutoring is nice but your vamp gets tapped so you do not have an action.
If you really need a fast merger you can also tutor the missing part with Recruitment, but the 2+1 pool cost makes it worse that Gift of Experience, depending on how much you would value your actions/staying untapped.
I do often. I've build decks around Helena, Dominique, Alan Soverign and Petaniqua. It is a fun and quite unique mechanic and I enjoy using it as it makes crypt building quite simple but I agree on that it only helps star decks
> Borrelstein wrote:
> Epiphany and Gift of Experience take up card slots and may clog your hand, so you want to include some card cycling tech.
>
Remember that every non-Advanced crypt card is considered to be a base version, so any non-Advanced vampire can play Epiphany to cycle it, even if they don't have an Advanced version. I have a bunch of decks that involve merging vampires, and my merging package is 8x Epiphany and 2x Wider View. I've found merging to be fairly easy, with negligible hand jam.
Sebastian Goulet is defientily the vampire I have merged most often, others that I occasionally merge are Ramona (simply because both versions do roughly the same so might as well use one of each as support vampire in protean decks, as merged her specials are quite handy), Petaniqua, long ago Tariq, and also tried very hard to make merged Tegyrius to work, but it never really did. Kemintiri also occasionally, thats the main ones that can think of that have merged.