Mantles are super powerful merits

[Omegaphallic]

Take the Autumn Merit for example.

If you have 5 dots you can get 10 dice to a mundane social roll to intimidate someone with Autumn Mantle or Goodwill, 5 dice to any social roll with some with Autumn Mantle or Goodwill, or 5 dice to intimidate or scare someone, dump 5 Goblin debt once per story, 5 dice to investigate True Fae and Faerie, get a glamour for investigating new scary things, 1 Glamour off when using contracts to subvert something from Faerie, and spend 2 Glamour to duplicate an magical effect that has been used on you, mantle is used for Court contracts, and you can treat mantle as successes on contract rolls when you drop the mask.

That is alot for a 5 dot merit.

And the other Mantles are powerful too. 10 dice to social rolls when seducing members of your court, ect...

How many merits can compete with that?

When you Hedgespin and Dreamweave you use Mandane Rolls, so say trying to intimidate the hedge, bullying it into complying or something like that would get your dots of Autumn Mantle to the mandane roll, or a Spring Courtier getting their mantle to a mandane roll to seduce a Eidilon in a dream.

[HelmsDerp]

Well, yes.

That's by design. Changelings join Courts for protection, for means to fight or evade or outwit their abusers. Courts have always had mechanical incentives to encourage them to do so. First edition Mantles were... well it depended on the Court but they were strong in theory at least, and Court Contracts (most of them, first edition wasn't the most mechanically consistent) ran off attribute+skill+mantle, meaning that even a Changeling recently out of the Hedge had the potential to successfully use them against enemies of moderate supernatural power.

Second edition did away with dice rolls for a lot of Contracts and made the rest three part pools, but Mantles got buffed.