Suggestion on the "Station" mechanic.

Keyler

Currently, this mechanic only works by combining loyalty gems through a swap match. Loyalty swap matches aren't the most effective way to play this game, so you have to spend lot of turns with barely any mana to activate this ability, and be lucky enough that your opponent doesn't destroy your support first. The only way to increase more than one "Station" charge would be to take extra turns and do another loyalty swap match, which would still happen very rarely and be ineffective in games.
Therefore, I propose a small rule change so that this ability can be activated at least in some more games than it is now: My proposal is that a "Station" charge can only be increased once per turn, but that it can be done with any combination of loyalty gems, whether by cascading, converting loyalty gems, or through a swap match. With this, the ability is still quite weak, but at least we would have the possibility of activating it more easily after several turns.

Tolkne

I'm ready to support the idea of ​​the Station

Really it's long and tedious. To reach the 6th level of the Station, it is necessary to make a swap match with loyalty 6 times.
It's not effective.

Because I have never seen anyone use a card with a Station label, they just throw it away and do not try to increase the levels of the Station, just let it go and that's it. There is no effect and no point.
You can say it's a "garbage" card, that is, an extra one.

To do this, there should be a sense in the mechanics - remove the condition "swap match with loyalty" and put something else in order to effectively raise the level of the Station as quickly as possible, like the vanguard.
Otherwise, believe me, all players will not use the Station card, and even for several years, if you do not correct the mechanics.

I would suggest a mechanic like level up, rather than a gem swap match. For example, a 5-color Station card, which needs to reach level 2 each turn in order to reach level 6 and activate its ability in 3 turns. This would make sense. However, it doesn't make sense now, so I just add them to my collection and don't use them again, even if they remain unused for 3 years.

But the thing is, in MTG Arena, there's a different Station mechanic, so it's possible to accumulate charge. However, in our match-3 game, we need to change something. Otherwise, players may forget to use the Station card and continue playing with Ghalta and Rakdos.

JTK421

The only deck Stations would be good in tends to get nerfed by including them: Ugin1 Loyalty, where you run seven of some loyalty conversion supports and 3 powerful cards so you can repeatedly spam his A3. The problem is that replacing the conversion supports with Stations so that loyalty matches are likely brings down the number of loyalty gems to match.

While I get the idea of focusing on the board, one solution might be to look at the hand. If, at the end of your turn, you have a creature card with full mana that’s disabled in your hand, you get one station level. It’s still slow, but it does match paper better and adds an interesting dynamic between casting the creature and leveling up.

Janosik

I'd much rather see (much) lower Station values on cards than allow non-swap loyalty matches to count. My gut instinct says that allowing non-swap matches would only really increase the playability of Station cards within mass gem conversion decks, and I'd prefer to see them playable by more decks than that.

I'm thinking about how Spree currently works... Spree 2 is a nice low number that's plausible to achieve for a player playing without gem conversion, but Spree 5 isn't