Do you merge vampires?

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.

I'd love to play, but Al'Ashrad have more interesting adv version.

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.