Also the split, while having the same mark as your tower/pends, is useful only in EQ/trident, not really steal, deflag.
Too true, too true. I should add that pendulums actually work against you when your opponent uses steals but not aether quanta, since the pendulums are at least useful to the opponent half the time. Aether towers, on the other hand, are only useful to decks that can use aether quanta.
Anyway about the deck, I would prolly replace the dragon with another bolt. In most cases you wont get to play the dragon as the immortals are cheaper.
I have been playing a similar deck with dragons but have not tried without, and additionally, my immortals are not upped, but I think there is a significant damage-dealing bonus to having the dragon there, probably enough to justify keeping it, but maybe I just haven't tried it enough. My problem with immortals, even upped and even with shards, is that they just don't have much punch. Just getting one or two out on the table is expensive, and then they give you five damage a turn, up to nine with a single shard. Ten or fourteen damage a turn from the dragon, on the other hand, I think maybe ends the game a turn or two sooner in a fair number of cases. So, I will often wait an extra turn or possibly two to play an immortal, if it means I get to put the dragon out first. Usually if I'm cranking out enough aether to make the dragon casting cost, it's only 1 additional turn to get out the immortal.
Looking at it another way, the immortal plus shard (both upped) costs 9 aether to get nine damage a turn, while the dragon costs 14 aether to get ten damage a turn, which definitely seems to give the advantage to the immortal. But the real advantage, to me, is that the dragon can get to 14 damage a turn for 16 aether, AND you can still add six more immortals to your board. In a number of cases where I've been facing a deck with lots of life-generation or a shield that subtracts two physical damage a turn from my creatures, I have been very happy to have the dragon, and I don't think an additional lightning bolt would have given me the same return.
So, in sum, I like the dragon, I would keep it.
On a slightly different note, I am a bit up in the air about the bolts being in the deck at all. I have been playing mono-aether-immortality a lot recently and have found the deck to be more profitable with phase shields instead. Maybe people can comment on their preferences of lightning bolts versus phase shields?
For me, I like the phase shields and trying to get them out early, first or second turn ideally, then keep the phase shield up the whole game, and in arena-farming, I can get an elemental mastery bonus maybe 10% of my wins (not sure if it's that high). I was running lightning bolts for a while as well, and what I liked about them was that I could sometimes "trick" the AI into waiting one too many turns to play a miracle or heal or similar, or otherwise manage to couple the lightning bolts with the creature damage to finish the opponent off, often ending a game before I would have lost without the bolts. Yet, I would guess that it suffers from having no damage defense, and perhaps isn't as fast as the many, many, many darkness, fire, creature-spam decks out there. Maybe the bolts would help kill dragons and other high-damage targets and delay the end long enough?
So, to recap, this deck has relatively little chance of getting an elemental mastery bonus, and I think it may have a lower W/L rate than a deck with phase shields instead of the lightning bolts. Thoughts?
