I played one round of carta and was just like NOT...FOR ME... I'll probably cheat my way through it in my current NG+ HAHAHAHA

I didn't even know about the specific system re: shards. I just spent time grinding and exploring and then when I came back around to the sidequests I was like "Hey, somehow I have a shard with that quality! Neat!" More of a pain to me was dualizing the actual weapon if it was one of those special ones like Flamberg or a Katana or whatever...