The only way to get one thus far is to sacrifice some of your existing Exotic gear, and when you don't have spare Exotics to throw away to obtain one, farming for Exotics the old fashioned way is just a pain in the ass.
Yes, three of coins exist, but they're far from reliable, and if you don't have any then you've got to wait for Xur to get some.
Buying some Exotics straight from Xur burns through your strange coins, and if you try to stockpile Exotic shards, you burn through them super quick with infusions.
I just think we should be able to cut out the middle man in all these cases and just be able to buy Exotic Shards from Xur.
"But then everybody will just spam the blueprints for infinite exotics". Um...no? Exotic Blueprints are for re obtaining Exotics you already got the "correct" way. To put it simply, they will have already earned the exotic, and thus being able to distribute copies of those Exotics freely between characters would have no negative effects whatsoever. If they REALLY wanted to, they could just move the original from their main to an alt, they wouldn't need to use Exotic Shards at all.
The purpose of this is for infusion only. Right now, we have only one source for Exotic Shards and two uses for them. Since infusion eats up a lot of them, I simply believe that we need another source of them in order to balance things out.
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Dude if you don't need the coins, spend em. I have 224 strange coins, i have 16 shards still from yr 1. Before ROI comes i planned to buy a bunch of engrams to dosmantle. You should do the same to prepare. Engrams, motes, and synths. You need it all more than you think.