[Official] Dimensional Shield | Phase Shield

[Basman-1453]

Now that  has Shard of Patience, whenever my opponent casts Dimensional Shield I would just cast my Shard. I wouldn't be able to attack anyway, so the drawback of the Shard doesn't feel too frustating. Within 3 turns, all my creatures get +6/+6 (+15/+15 with Flooding). If they managed to chain 6 Dimensional Shields, I would have my creatures getting +36/+36 (+90/+90 with Flooding). Such a Xanatos Gambit, eh?

Unless they would kill you with a Mono SoW

Well, has access to all 3 types of damage. If physical damage can't get through, the poison damage from early Puffer Fish attacks and spell damage from Ice Lances will do.

You're forgetting Chrysaorae/Physaliae's skill (the skill costs , but they're also a popular SoPa feed alongside Arctic Squids/Octopi for a nice reason). Also, assuming mono-Water, not every deck can afford the Puffer Fishes' acquirement cost.

[Luminous]

Plus SoW is way faster than the damage your fishes will provide before dims

Also, lobos

[Monox D. I-Fly]

Now that  has Shard of Patience, whenever my opponent casts Dimensional Shield I would just cast my Shard. I wouldn't be able to attack anyway, so the drawback of the Shard doesn't feel too frustating. Within 3 turns, all my creatures get +6/+6 (+15/+15 with Flooding). If they managed to chain 6 Dimensional Shields, I would have my creatures getting +36/+36 (+90/+90 with Flooding). Such a Xanatos Gambit, eh?

Unless they would kill you with a Mono SoW

Well, has access to all 3 types of damage. If physical damage can't get through, the poison damage from early Puffer Fish attacks and spell damage from Ice Lances will do.

You're forgetting Chrysaorae/Physaliae's skill (the skill costs , but they're also a popular SoPa feed alongside Arctic Squids/Octopi for a nice reason). Also, assuming mono-Water, not every deck can afford the Puffer Fishes' acquirement cost.

I don't use any quanta besides . This is my deck:

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5i4 5i4 5i4 5i4 5i4 5jm 5jm 5jm 5jm 5jm 7gk 7gk 7gk 7gk 7gk 7go 7go 7go 7go 7go 7go 7gp 7gp 7gq 7gq 7gq 7gq 7gq 7gq 7gr 7gr 7gr 7gr 7gr 7gr 7gt 7gt 7gu 7gu 7gu 7gu 7gu 7gu 7h1 7h1 7h3 7h3 7h3 7h3 7h3 7h3 7hi 7hi 7hi 7hi 7i6 7i6 7i6 7i6 7i6 8pp

[ratcharmer]

Alright so here's the thing:

Dim. Shield lasts 3 turns. You can have 6 of them. 6*3= 18 turns of damage immunity.
Most decks have 30 cards, draw 7 or 8 on turn 1 and 1 card per turn after that. Thus, a "standard" deck will deckout in 24 turns.
The difference is only 6 turns. If your opponent packed Dim. Shield and you don't have PC/momentum you have 6 turns to kill them in, and that's assuming they have no other stall.

But where this gets really broken it the arena.
Let's discuss the deck doubling dexterity dodad. Suddenly they go from having 18 turns of damage immunity to 36.
Furthermore, if they have a 2x or 3x mark they will have enough quanta to summon the next shield by the time their old one expires from their mark alone.

Mono is currently hyper-dominant in the arena right now, to the point that I'm seeing a  lot of "dead card" mono where the deck builder simply ignored the oracle card and built a monoaether with 5 unplayable cards. Many of these decks are even performing fairly well

[omegareaper7]

Alright so here's the thing:

Dim. Shield lasts 3 turns. You can have 6 of them. 6*3= 18 turns of damage immunity.
Most decks have 30 cards, draw 7 or 8 on turn 1 and 1 card per turn after that. Thus, a "standard" deck will deckout in 24 turns.
The difference is only 6 turns. If your opponent packed Dim. Shield and you don't have PC/momentum you have 6 turns to kill them in, and that's assuming they have no other stall.

But where this gets really broken it the arena.
Let's discuss the deck doubling dexterity dodad. Suddenly they go from having 18 turns of damage immunity to 36.
Furthermore, if they have a 2x or 3x mark they will have enough quanta to summon the next shield by the time their old one expires from their mark alone.

Mono is currently hyper-dominant in the arena right now, to the point that I'm seeing a  lot of "dead card" mono where the deck builder simply ignored the oracle card and built a monoaether with 5 unplayable cards. Many of these decks are even performing fairly well

Hyper dominant in arena? Hardly. The reason they do well in bronze and silver is people A: Don't know what they are doing still: B: testing stuff out: C: bad draws,(lost a lot do to them) Gold and plat don't see very much mono aether at all. Especially plat, where its actually pretty bad.

[Timdood3]

Alright so here's the thing:

Dim. Shield lasts 3 turns. You can have 6 of them. 6*3= 18 turns of damage immunity.
Most decks have 30 cards, draw 7 or 8 on turn 1 and 1 card per turn after that. Thus, a "standard" deck will deckout in 24 turns.
The difference is only 6 turns. If your opponent packed Dim. Shield and you don't have PC/momentum you have 6 turns to kill them in, and that's assuming they have no other stall.

But where this gets really broken it the arena.
Let's discuss the deck doubling dexterity dodad. Suddenly they go from having 18 turns of damage immunity to 36.
Furthermore, if they have a 2x or 3x mark they will have enough quanta to summon the next shield by the time their old one expires from their mark alone.

Mono is currently hyper-dominant in the arena right now, to the point that I'm seeing a  lot of "dead card" mono where the deck builder simply ignored the oracle card and built a monoaether with 5 unplayable cards. Many of these decks are even performing fairly well

Hyper dominant in arena? Hardly. The reason they do well in bronze and silver is people A: Don't know what they are doing still: B: testing stuff out: C: bad draws,(lost a lot do to them) Gold and plat don't see very much mono aether at all. Especially plat, where its actually pretty bad.

Aye.  The meta in bronze+silver is so much different than in gold+plat, both in decks played and decks submitted.
There are essentially 3 metas in the game, excluding things like tournament metas and whatnot):  Bronze/Silver, Gold/Plat (arguably they should be split), and PvP.
In low tier arena, people use Dims because they don't know what else to use yet.  Many are still learning the game.  A handful of others use it because it works against others who don't know what they're doing either.
In high tier arena, people don't use Dims hardly at all because there are so many more effective things, and most decks people bring into plat either have heavy control or bypass shields with poison.
In PvP, Dims (and by extension ) is used because it works.  It's largely about predicting what will work and what won't against your opponent's deck.  Here's a a flowchart:
Is opponent going to play a rush?
-Yes:  Are you going to have in your deck at all?
--Yes:  Consider Dims.
--No:  Don't use Dims.
-No: Probably don't use Dims.

....This post kind of went from talking about Dims to metas but it's still about Dims so whatever.

[Higurashi]

Thanks to Fractal and immaterial creatures, it's a lot more complicated than that. Rushes tend to pack PC where rush-beaters don't as often. Additionally, your stallbreaking capacity takes almost no hit at all by packing Dims, if you build it right. The several turns of invulnerability puts the majority of games against rushes, domins AND stalls in your favor. Another huge factor is that Dims are among the best for beating Discord decks. Once the chain goes up, a lot of Discord decks have no good PC (both BE and SoFo usually lose to Lobo, Momentum almost always loses to Lobo).

When a card is this universally useful, it helps you against all deck types. Lightning is sometimes better in the unupped meta, but what it does is cover some of the weaknesses of Dims, so that just makes the scenario even more complicated for your opponent. Several high tier PvP decks will max out both or combine Zaps with Bone Wall, Hope or any of the many available healing cards. In the end, this advantage can be overcome. The biggest deal is the offensive versatility of Aether. If it wasn't able to kill quickly in many various ways, its defense would be much, much worse (as it was before Psion, SoW and many Fractal duos became more acknowledged).

[UndeadSpider1990]

Spoiler for Quote by ratcharmer:

Alright so here's the thing:

Dim. Shield lasts 3 turns. You can have 6 of them. 6*3= 18 turns of damage immunity.
Most decks have 30 cards, draw 7 or 8 on turn 1 and 1 card per turn after that. Thus, a "standard" deck will deckout in 24 turns.
The difference is only 6 turns. If your opponent packed Dim. Shield and you don't have PC/momentum you have 6 turns to kill them in, and that's assuming they have no other stall.

But where this gets really broken it the arena.
Let's discuss the deck doubling dexterity dodad. Suddenly they go from having 18 turns of damage immunity to 36.
Furthermore, if they have a 2x or 3x mark they will have enough quanta to summon the next shield by the time their old one expires from their mark alone.

Mono is currently hyper-dominant in the arena right now, to the point that I'm seeing a  lot of "dead card" mono where the deck builder simply ignored the oracle card and built a monoaether with 5 unplayable cards. Many of these decks are even performing fairly well

Hyper dominant in arena? Hardly. The reason they do well in bronze and silver is people A: Don't know what they are doing still: B: testing stuff out: C: bad draws,(lost a lot do to them) Gold and plat don't see very much mono aether at all. Especially plat, where its actually pretty bad.

Yup yup I agree. Mono Aether does well in Bronze and Silver, but then it can also be a surprising nuisance in AI3 if it chains dims — usually when I'm testing weird decks. The card *could* be broken, but the game offers enough viable solutions that it isn't. As long as you build a versatile deck you'll be fine.
(By 'viable', I mean cards that can counter Dim Shield, but are still useful against other strategies (poison, momentum, PC). An unviable counter would be Purify vs poison, before it was buffed to give +2 healing.)

[omegareaper7]

Snip

Either way though, arena is not what things are balanced around. There is pretty much zero reason for it to have been brought up in the first place.

Lets keep this about dime shields.

[dawn to dusk]

Is Dime Shield balanced on it's own? Yes
Is it balanced in an element with Lightning, Fractal and Lobo? No.
How do we fix this? Swap Aether and Light weapons, and give fractal to Life, consequently removing Mitosis from the game, or renaming fractal to mitosis.
Is Dime Shield now balanced? Yes

[omegareaper7]

Is Dime Shield balanced on it's own? Yes
Is it balanced in an element with Lightning, Fractal and Lobo? No.
How do we fix this? Swap Aether and Light weapons, and give fractal to Life, consequently removing Mitosis from the game, or renaming fractal to mitosis.
Is Dime Shield now balanced? Yes

If dime shield is balanced, most other shields are underpowered.

Really though, the math was done in the thread earlier. Even a two turn dime shield still beats out dusk mantle in damage prevented. And it would still provide 12 turns of damage immunity.

So its either A: dime shield is balanced and most others aren't, which I could see. Or B: Its overpowered while the others are balanced. And honestly, I would lean towards A at this point, mostly because the most of rest of them to feel pretty weak, even without dime shield factored in.

[blueberrymania]

Check the HP on the AI