No, the Merchant does not. Just the writs and the ordinary deeds, although the price points for both are a good value as compared to other ways to get them – e.g., Daily Deals.
And as @Sister_Tatz suggests, use your Writs to craft Imperial Deeds. Not for the reasons that she states, IMO, but because I find Imperial Deeds to be a more difficult-to-come-by currency. At all, let alone in the quantities that are necessary once you start leveling a decent number of kingdoms to 20.
Thanks for your input. I always thought I had to use writs to craft deeds of magic… for the magic stats kingdoms.
I’ve managed to get 11 kingdoms to max (PL30) so far. Focused on magic, then kingdoms connected to difficult delves (for the lvl 17 and 19 hoard bonuses) and tried to get them up to max as well. As such, I’ve got every underground kingdom maxed except one, which I deliberately kept at lvl 20, so I could farm 3 x lvl 20 runs there every day. 9 easy battles with a chance for merchants/angels and it gets me easy chaos shards. Then, it was just looking at what I had enough pets and stuff, and doing whatever I could.
I personally disagree regarding crafting. It’s all individual, but I’ve hardly ever been short on imperial deeds (especially now we get them from underspire) so I spend gems in the dungeons every day. I always buy the 50 gem “gem bounty” offer, as it’s the best value, and usually buy the 150 gem “daily deal”, as I need the diamonds. I never buy the 15 diamonds for 100 gems, as that’s a terrible price. So, (since I have most of the weapons) I have enough jewels to use them to craft deeds, and then books. To me, that’s what I need most, so that’s where I spend the resources. If you need deeds, it makes sense to grab them instead of imperial deeds.
Add to that, I try to grab gold marks. It’s been said, but they’re the best way to get books. I do the daily battles in the citadel and the following day grab the bonus gold marks, but I also do a lot of my PvP battles early in the week and see how the leaderboard is shaping up. If there’s 3 or more who do a lot of PvP, I skip PvP for the week, doing the bare minimum. If there’s less than 3 who have high scores, I focus on PvP that week, trying to hit the top 3 on the leaderboard, for the extra gold marks. It’s basically a free book if you place in the top 3.
I also grab deeds and writs from offers and angels, but I try not to overspend on gems, so I have enough to play events and stuff, too.
That’s what I did. I have 27 kingdoms at PL30. I always use writs to craft coloured deeds. Purple first, then once all magic kingdoms were done, I alternate between red and brown as those 2 colours each have one more kingdom than the others.
I haven’t found the supply of coloured jewels to be a problem. Dungeon, paloozas and pet rescues are good sources of them.
My imperial deeds are starting to get low (70ish), but I haven’t spent gold marks on any yet.
I’m working on the last kingdoms for blue, green and purple. Once one of those is finished, the random colour in the PvP books will start to be a problem. I may finally get the gold mark pets at that point.
My experience is that it requires too much time and effort to finish Top 3 in the Diamond League, because I’m then obliged to compete against a couple of whales and/or players who seemingly play this game 24/7. So not only do I choose to not make the effort on those weeks where I’m in that top bracket, but I make an effort to play the bare minimum possible – i.e., just the Citadel and follow-up battles for Gold Marks – with an eye towards finishing in the relegation zone. It works most weeks, but some weeks get a lot more worrisome than others.
Then when I drop to the Ruby League on those in-between weeks? It’s pretty easy to finish in the Top 3 of one of those brackets. I’ll put in some “excess effort” on those weeks to grind a double share of the VP necessary to unlock all the “free rewards” by the end of the season. But if those didn’t matter to you and you’re only worried about Gold Marks? That shouldn’t be too much of an issue.