Are Meld cards just there to collect dust?

Foznertep

Recently got my first card with Meld and it was even a Rare. Cool. Bad news is that it was Hanweir Battlements and I'll probably never get the sister card.
Would it be too much to ask to have the cards be actually interesting on their own?

Plastic

Meld is this expansion's devoid/delirium/awaken.

So yes, it's mainly there to be useless.

LeafHyren

They could fix it if instead of two specific cards fusing there was a range of possible combinations, and more options.

For example: Fire Beast, Water Beast, Earth Beast, Wind Beast. Any pair of those being able to fuse successful, and resulting in a different kind of beast afterward... It does seem niche in the long run, and maybe too complicated, but the successful implementation of features tend to be those that are regularly emphasized and refreshed. Part of why werewolf seem to be doing well. They made events requiring them, added new good werewolves and even a PW just for them. So I agree Meld will collect dust... until it gets the attention it needs to be successful.

yunnnn

They could have easily made chase-cards out of Meld by putting ridiculous abilities on them, but they chose not to because they don't understand balancing and basic marketing:

Do they not understand that high-powered Meld cards would be a wise marketing tactic? It encourages people to seek the full set , either through playing more or spending more. They are just shooting themselves in the foot here! Instead, they chose to make Deploy the Gatewatch completely overpowered, a card which is comparatively trivial to obtain, and just as lame in its effect (yay, you win the game, good job).

Let's think about a key design principle in regular MtG: Produce new mechanics and encourage players to use them in new and interesting ways. On the flip side, almost all the keyword mechanics that were copied over to this game are not used in the slightest (unless the base effect is good).

Meld is this expansion's devoid/delirium/awaken.

New keywords make the game interesting. By putting in a pittance of time into the design, it shows how little effort they're really putting in to make the game more interesting. Take a look at the spoiler yourself, and how many interesting keywords there are out of the 80+ cards shown (inc front/back):
https://d3go.com/mtgpq-card-list-eldritch-moon/

Landfall: 1 card. Uhh... Landfall isn't even in the printed set. Are we on Zendikar?
Madness: 1 single Madness card. Thanks?
Menace: 1 card. This effect is bugged currently.
Delirium: 2 cards.

Don't forget the other thread which mentioned the disparagingly heavy % of creatures vs spells/supports in this set. It all screams lazy design to me.

Are the designers of this game creating more vanilla cards because it's just cheaper to produce and less time consuming? Are they scared of players finding even more bugs? And let's not pretend that there aren't any bugs: This game has almost a 1:1 of bug threads to general chat threads. In contrast, it's more than 3:1 on the MPQ forums.

nexus13

Awaken had some utility to it and some of the cards were pretty good. Delerium is occasionally a nice little bonus surprise as many of those cards are very playable if delerium never fires.

Meld just seems never worthwhile. Gisela looks great, don't even put Bruna in the same deck.

Fiddler

I have not seen meld work well...yet. But I have not had strong enough meld cards to use with Deploy the Gatewatch. There may be a few other pull cards that makes it very workable. I guess that's what's called trying out new things.

I do wish the delirium mechanic would change. It would be in more decks if the trigger was higher than 5 cards.

shteev

nexus13 wrote:

Gisela looks great

She does, doesn't she? Get your wallets ready if you want to play with her.

HomeRn

shteev wrote:

nexus13 wrote:

Gisela looks great

She does, doesn't she? Get your wallets ready if you want to play with her.

I got a feeling that when she's available for $$, the other half of the meld combo will be the event reward. If not... then somebody's not doing both halves justice!

GrizzoMtGPQ

The Hanweir Meld cards are pretty awesome. Tough to get them both unless you take a queue from @yunnnn and start throwing events to get EMN rares. But after giving them a try against the BFZ baddies I'd say they are cool.

Better if you have deploy, which I don't.

Grizzo, Extinction

ARK_Angel

Agreed, I will add that the most useful new ability has been Transform. Look at Ulrich for example. I've actively been transforming him back into his normal state so that he can transform into his wofl form for creature destruction in green decks. There also seem to be more cards with different ways to transform in MTGPQ than cards with other abilities in the game.

Morphis

I think meld can have its place in this current form but needs a little bit of change.

I would balance it totally different.
it should be based on a couple aspects:

- it should be good cause you can get a creature that's better than the sum of the two melding. It means its power should be higher than what you would expect for the mana sum of the two cards melding

- it should be good cause it's easier to "reinforce".

Now why reinforce in quotes...
Well if each half of the meld can reinforce it and the first point it's true, we would get an OP creature for sure.

Let's for example assume a simple case as example:
- first half is a 3/3 for 7mana
- second half is a 2/5 defender for 7 mana
- meld is a 7/8 defender(a little better than the sum.

Now it's not op in itself. If you can reinforce it with 7 mana becomes definitely OP.

So for this meld to actually work the reinforce need to have different rules.
I think each half should list which benefit gives to the melded creature if casted afterwards.

For example above it could be:
- first half gives 3/3 stats
- second half gives 2/5 stats and regenerate 1

This way you get that:
- the act of melding is efficient
- increasing the value afterwards("semi reinforce") is valuable and can also add different benefits
- both halves used in this semi reinforce means bypassing a little the slot limitations and more chances to buff the melded creature(same benefit as current meld.

Up vote if you like this

octal9

ARK_Angel wrote:

There also seem to be more cards with ... transform

Fun facts: there are 37 creatures with transform. The only abilities that are higher are Flying (87), Activate (55), Defender (50), and Devoid (42).

booglyclaw

You know what's really interesting about all of this? I play other Gacha type mobile games and there's some sort of law against having sets of characters drawn being more powerful when you complete a set. Meaning that if you randomly draw characters A, B and C and play them together they give you a specific bonus for having all 3. That's essentially what meld is SUPPOSED to be so I wonder how that works legally. Maybe that's why all the cards blow? Or maybe that law is only applicable in Japan (all the other gacha games i play are Japanese in origin). Just kinda thinking out loud here.

Foznertep

I just pulled a second Battlements card. Just my luck.

kinomoto

booglyclaw wrote:

Or maybe that law is only applicable in Japan (all the other gacha games i play are Japanese in origin). Just kinda thinking out loud here.

Correct. This is illegal only in Japan. More at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complete_gacha.