Melting Remnant is such a BURDEN.

[Arylice]

Melting Remnant is such a BURDEN.

How on Earth do you even win with the Melting Remnant as an ally?
His candles are weak in health and self-destruct after 2 turns.
Even his spells aren't efficient!

The best way I've found to play with the Melting Remnant as an ally, is by not playing any of his cards whatsoever. This is nonsensical.

HOW?!

Edit: Finally got the win I wanted, but it was not a pretty one.

[Weekend Player]

Great money generation, harvest units can get crazy big and stealth is a very strong mechanic exclusive to melting.

There are cards to extend burnout and resummon dead units even stronger if you haven't noticed. Watch some videos.

[Gentlest Giant]

Initially I found the remnants to be wonky as hell and they were certainly the clan hardest for me to get anywhere with. Right now I have a slightly better winrate with them than my average, so apparently I've caught up.
Not sure what you need to hear in particular to improve though.

As for the starting card, I think it's one of the most consistently useful ones at all stages of the game. There is a lot of stuff that can be done with 1-slot creatures, be it basics like blocking a single attack or evening out an attack sequence to make the row better at actually killing stuff. They tend to perform well at dealing damage to the early chunky enemies and bosses. Compare to Frozen Lance.
If you really have nothing going for them, just dumping them with no expected value is still better than what the other starter cards might do since they just disappear.
I don't often bother to remove them at all, but if my deck has some random unit selections like Plans of Salvation or the reforming Rector, they might be on the chopping block.

(Edit: One uniquely bad thing about Remnants starting unit is the Guardians of Light fight that can happen in the first circle: the ones with 3/40 dudes that get damage shield on kill. They really mess with the dregs and the Spikes trial in particular is super dangerous. (backline dregs attack, die and give a damage shield to the chonker.)
On top of that the boss spawns with a Footsoldier behind it, which the dregs can't reach.)

I think one of the more useful skills I developed was in regards to reforming. If the creatures are on a constant merry-go-round around the revolving doors of death, your attack numbers will change a whole lot round by round. Take the time to calculate how much damage you need on any given row and where it's best to put the units in regards to attack sequence: unless you have trample, overkill is not useful. I find the Remnants to be quite complicated in this regard since there can be so many options.

And it's fine to skip reforms altogether, the harvest creatures in particular are quite solid if you have consistent area effect damage (hard to get from Remnants) or just very big attacks. They get very good payoff from floor stacking effects like Dripfall.
The spells are overall wonky, conditional and situationally specialized as a theme. It's fine to just accept that many of them won't make your current deck better and skip ahead. However, they can scale fairly well and stuff like Holdover+ (-ember or Doublestack) Engulfed in Smoke can facilitate win conditions with strong attack units.

[DuckSonata]

Originally posted by Araylie:

Melting Remnant is such a BURDEN.
(Pun intended.)

Ok, I give up. What's the pun?

[Manxome]

https://xkcd.com/559/

[DuckSonata]

Exquisite.

[abyssalfury]

I think Burnout is the issue for MR as an ally - because it's a diminishing resource, you need to devote a lot of cards to keep it going, or have ways to get dudes back, which is obviously way easier in main clan due to Flicker. So if you get offered a lot of Burnout cards, they're probably going to be pretty bad.

But other than that, they get a lot of good stuff. Stealth, Endless, Dripfall, lots of disposable 1 size blockers with good effects, money generation, and cards that give pretty nice payoff for getting killed/having dead dudes.

[Feikki]

It is a very weak allied deck as you are not guaranteed to get any reform cards. They have very strong cards but you need to draw them.

[Gentlest Giant]

Originally posted by Feikki:

It is a very weak allied deck as you are not guaranteed to get any reform cards.

What makes them significantly worse without their Champion? Is reform really that essential to the clan?
As for my own winrates, Remnants as an allied clan is actually 12% higher than as primary. I don't consider that a significant difference and can't rationalize one myself.
Looking at my data, Remnant ally is actually my second best allied clan.

[Feikki]

They are super dependant on their starting draws. The dregs are not that great if you can't reform them. And getting something like hallowed drippings when it is your allied clan just seems very weak. You don't really want to recruit any burnout units unless you can reform them.

The champion is a really strong one, melting and umbra have the great champions. But it isn't just that in my experience. The non-burnout units are great, if you draw them. But you have good shot of just getting bad draws when it is an allied clan. Reform is not necessary, if you get the good draws. But unless you have reform recruiting burnout units is very meh. So without reform you are at the mercy of RNG.

[Manxome]

It IS kind of annoying that there's a major signature mechanic (Reform) that you might not be able to access, BUT...there's actually very few Melting Remnant cards that have Burnout (I think only 3 out of 16, not counting Dreg?). Most of their cards are playable with zero Reform in your deck.

The main problem units are Draff (Burnout 1 and Multistrike 1) and Lady of the House (Burnout 3 with high stats). Those two are going to be hard to use effectively without support effects of some kind.

Also Bounty Stalker (Extinguish: +8 damage permanently) doesn't have Burnout, but needs some way of coming back to life, just so you can trigger the ability more often (though Endless arguably works better than Reform).

But...that's more or less it. Avoid those 3 units and you probably won't have issues.

Lady of the Reformed has Burnout, but comes with a Revenge ability to increase Burnout, so you can use her as a tank even without support cards. (And she'll enable other Burnout units if you have them.)

And there's your starting Dreg cards, but you have to remember that they're a starter card and should be compared to starter spells rather than to "real" units. They're arguably one of the best starting cards even if you just let them die. (If they attack just once, they're doing more damage than the Stygian starter card, at a lower ember cost, and won't come back when you reshuffle.) Yes, they're dragging down the average quality of your deck, but so is every other faction's starting cards, what did you expect?

You'd also like to have Reform when using tomb units, but even without any access to Reform they're basically like imps. You can use them like one-shot spells or upgrade them with Endless and spam them.

Lots of stuff in the faction works somewhat better if you can recycle units, of course. Every faction has combos.

[Feikki]

I like the dreg cards. But it is much harder to quantify their value than that. They might not deal any damage at all if they get wiped out first. And once you have a decent ascension they don't hit on the first turn on the uppermost floor where the gold carriers spawn. And they might block spawning a better unit if the next turn if you place them. On a plus side, if you don't have any random reforms, they are removing themselves from the deck automatically, which you usually want basic cards to do.

But the stygian starter cards can benefit from magic power upgrades, and they are great for the +20 power consume. I mean, you want the basic cards removed so you would want to add consume with no other effects. And you get a very nice magic boost to that one use. If your main clan is hellhorned, then you can just upgrade those snipes instead that benefit even more from it. But if you are having a major clan without similar spells, you are losing the option to use a very good upgrade by having dregs instead. 25 gold for what roughly equals purge (you have to cast it once, but the effect becomes decent) is a really awesome bargain.

And if you gain cards that give random reforms then the dregs are clogging up your reform pool.

But even if there are not that many burnout units (the guy adding rage to burnout units becomes quite useless too). You are really dependant on the first monster draw, I usually try to gain a nice monster, upgrade it and then duplicate it. So anything that adds the odds of that fizzling is pretty bad. There is a limited amount of monsters that can become good upgrade + duplicate candidates (and draff and lady of the house both fit the bill). For example getting the thug that gives money when he kills isn't the best duplicate monster.

[Simca]

Yeah, you need to get used to them more. Melting Remnant is actually very good, even as a secondary. Just avoid the Burnout cards unless you pick up an early Lady of the Reformed when using them as a secondary clan.

There's a couple reasons why Melting Remnant is incredible:
1. Engulfed in Smoke is extremely powerful. Getting a single one of these can often turn a run into a victory. This single card is a decent reason to pick them as a secondary clan.
2. Dregs self-filter from your deck, allowing you to spend your card purges on all of your other clan's starting cards and train sentinels. I personally always try to keep my deck size exceptionally low when playing Melting Remnant so that by round 7 or 8, all but 7 cards have consume or are units. This means you will be drawing the same 7-8 cards every turn; it basically means you have 'holdover' for your entire hand.

I recommend reading through the Melting Remnant guide posted in the Guides section for Monster Train here on Steam. It helped me a lot with learning how to play them well.

[Lorska]

I'll never understand how people can call an ally faction that you don't have to remove the starter cards for can be considered a burden.
Just by picking this faction you are basically saving about 1000 gold. Unless you roll an insane amount of magic shops to slap consume on spells I guess (ignoring the fact that even +20 power starter spells are trash at cost 1).

I don't think it's needed to talk about morsel reforming and how valuable it is to choose exactly which buffs you want at any time.

They have supporting spells for pretty much any faction combination (stealth, floor stacking, etc.)

I'm pretty sure remnant was my most used faction across all while climbing to cov25. A lot of powerful strategies rely on concise combinations of single faction cards (rage builds, spell builds, frost builds, thorn builds).

Remnant basically just consists of two card types: extremely synergy reliant cards that you can safely skip to go for a safer win condition and situational extremely powerful supporting cards. If you need a small deck with versatile cards to get you through problematic situations, remnant is just really good.
The only reason you would not at least consider this faction is when you intend to run a minion heavy strategy and either don't care about removing a lot of cards or just value Regen/multistrike/trample/etc. highly which is also valid.

[Wyrd]

There are some excellent insights on this thread, so let me offer some lame advice:

I'd say if you're trying to play Remnant without its champion, you're depriving yourself one of the strongest champions in the game, only possibly rivalled by The Sentient of the Awoken. Remnant does have some tricks up their sleeves when it comes to supporting a primary, and they're in no particular order:

Subsuming Blade for ever increasing targeted spell dmg,
Remnant Pact for a very cost-effective way of granting Endless,
Resin Removal for removing debuffs from yourself, or buffs from your opponents (The dazed 1 effect you get for summoning on the topmost level is dispelled by resin removal)
Engulfed in Smoke for Stealth, rendering your stack invulnerable once upgraded with holdover.

You should note that all those listed above are Uncommons or Rares, making them hardly a guaranteed commodity. When going for a secondary clan, you should find their Commons desirable first of all: that's why Hellhorned or Awoken are great secondaries.

if you're picking Remnant as a secondary, you definitely want a Lady of the Reformed to keep a stack alive indefinitely.

However, I don't think any clan gets any particular benefit from allying with the Remnant at the moment compared to other clans that might offer far more, so definitely try a Remnant primary run. I think Remnant is one of the strongest and most fun clans once you figure out what makes them tick.

["Donut☆]

Melting Remnant is in my experience one of the better supporting clans there is. It has many usefull tools that work in any deck.

- Starting cards are very usefull in blocking attacks. They are also easy to dispose during battles, which makes it unnecessary to purge them.
- The stealth spell and the spell tomb (especially with endless/holdover) are OP and can help any clan pumping out boss damage or protecting fragile minions.
- Sacrifical resurrection can help you thing out your deck during battles, leaving your best spells to be drawn every turn. It can even remove deadweight etc. (very underrated card imo)
- Resin removal. Not useful in every battle, but when it is, it does great things. (it can also remove emberdrain)
- Some awesome supporting monsters: Big Sludge, Wickless tycoon, Wickless Baron, Lady of the Reformed and the tombs.

Just ignore cards related to burnout