[Official] Shard of Patience | Shard of Patience

[Laxadarap]

The only advantage it has is that, like you said, beats stalls, but I doubt ANY creature deck would have this. The only decks that would really have this are either stalls themselves or breaks meant to break through stalls. I highly doubt you'll see a shrieker rush packing these just because it wants to defeat stalls.

In the BL metagame, yes, I use it. I think cheesy uses it. It's strong enough to beat stalls.

Ok lets compare a lava destroyer to a shreiker with "growth", assuming you have an earth mark for the golem (basically makes it free) Golem obviously outdoes it.  Shreiker + SOP is 9 quanta, 9 quanta with a golem would be 4 growths.  Shriekers max damage in 4 turns is actually less if you include SoP, and destroyer ties it at that point.  SoP actually works better with smaller creatures, its better for massive amounts of cards, like comboing with fractal or mitosis, which also takes a lot of quanta.  Ok so take photons, they are free attackers.  Fractal nets about 6 or 7 cards on average, so lets say you have 8 rol on the field.  That is 9 quanta (same as the shrieker).  Take 4 turns again, The lava golem is at 40 damage, while RoL's max damage is 48.  Not counting the fact that mass CC will destroy it, the golem will have a nice healthy 11 HP its not really that overpowered.  Take an upped eclipse and hyppothetically say that RoL's were darkness type.  For only an extra 3 quanta, These 8 Rol's will do 8X3X4=96 damage.  Twice as much.  3 quanta is definietly worth 48 damage.  SoP is only really worth it compared to growh in special occasions, like chrysoras.  It isn't fully effective unless its being used on really low attack creatures.

Of course you don't use it when you don't need to. But if the opponent does any stalling, whether it's dims or sundials or freeze or SoSac or BBlood, it gains its power. This does not mean it's useless if you're not facing those, too. Low attack creatures? Vampires, dolls, devourers, parasites and even nymphs. Darkness is one of the elements that has the most low-attack creatures.

So SoP is essentially only good against stalls.  Lots of stalls have CC, what about Rain of Fire and Pandemonium.  Also, SoP only beats it if is a decker.  Take traditional monoaether, it can stall long enough with dims to win the game.  OTK's don't let damage through until the end.  Firestalls have CC, and a win condition.  As long as you can block damage for long enough to win, SoP has no effect.  Maybe chimera + SoP, but thats a combo itself.

[Xamuel]

Sorry for being ignorant but how does this card supposedly beat stalls?

Stalls (in my book) come in several flavors:  dim shields w/immortal creatures; fire decks with over 9000 CC/PC cards; poison spammers with sundials/shards of sacrifice; and pandemonium pansies.  None of these are particularly beat by SoP unless I'm missing something terribly significant.  I guess there are deckout decks (though I hardly ever see them), but a deckout deck had better have some way of surviving anyway, it's not like decks without SoP just sit around doing nothing and wishing for patience

[furballdn]

I think he's referring to deckout stalls that rely on lots of healing and cards. Normal stalls should be no problem as long as they have some offense. It's not like that these shards suddenly make your shrieker rush hard counter a mono aether shield chain.

[rosutosefi]

I think he's referring to deckout stalls that rely on lots of healing and cards. Normal stalls should be no problem as long as they have some offense. It's not like that these shards suddenly make your shrieker rush hard counter a mono aether shield chain.

It did.
EDIT: at least for antabow.

[furballdn]

I think he's referring to deckout stalls that rely on lots of healing and cards. Normal stalls should be no problem as long as they have some offense. It's not like that these shards suddenly make your shrieker rush hard counter a mono aether shield chain.

It did.
EDIT: at least for antabow.

I"m still very skeptical. Antagonbow already has some counters to mono aether, such as momentum and deflag. I doubt the SoP are what win you games and make any stall you go up against instalose.

[Cheesy111]

I think he's referring to deckout stalls that rely on lots of healing and cards. Normal stalls should be no problem as long as they have some offense. It's not like that these shards suddenly make your shrieker rush hard counter a mono aether shield chain.

It did.
EDIT: at least for antabow.

I"m still very skeptical. Antagonbow already has some counters to mono aether, such as momentum and deflag. I doubt the SoP are what win you games and make any stall you go up against instalose.

Point of clarification: Mono-Aether is not a stall.  SoP does, however, aid in the battle against mono-aether by buffing up your creatures until you draw some PC.

[Annele]

I believe two things:

• There needs to be more in-element PC.
• The only thing needed to be done to SoP is to increase the cost by one or two.

There wasn't an option for this, so I picked the "other" option.

[Cheesy111]

I believe two things:

• There needs to be more in-element PC.
• The only thing needed to be done to SoP is to increase the cost by one or two.

There wasn't an option for this, so I picked the "other" option.

Cost increases in Other cards hardly matter until they get to insane levels (something like 10+) because of the ease of generating Other quanta compared to the ease of generating elemental quanta.

[rosutosefi]

Regarding cost increase stuff,

What's the problem with SoFo? The neutral cost. Personally, I think that the shards' costs don't matter that much, it's just that smaller costs are usable in mono decks and cards with larger costs fit well into a rainbow. As a consequence, you cannot balance a shard by increasing it's neutral cost, because this will only make people use it with novas and rainbows, which is silly. Shards should be paid with a low cost, enough to give it a "cost"  and still become good in monos. The main problem here is that SoFo does too much as a shard: it's effects mean that it should have a very high cost, but this cannot be done because increasing the cost will only make it favor rainbows and become unusable in mono-gravity decks. This should be the same with the other shards.

TL;DR: We cannot make a powerful shard with a high cost. SoFo completely disobeys this.

I would like to post this in every shard thread in existence.

[Higurashi]

So far I've yet to see a presented problem; only explanations why SoP is even usable in the first place.

"The problem is that this single card acts as a stallbreaker in and of itself." This is, of course, false. Just like Fractal, which breaks stalls a lot better due to not being vulnerable to either CC or PC (but is vulnerable to QC), it requires good enough creatures. Too low HP and you -should- pay for it, unless your opponent is a dunce.

So the only argument left that bothers me is how it interacts with Burrow. I agree that's a powerful mechanic, solely because of how good SoFo Grabbows and other speedbows are. I wouldn't mind if it changed, even though Nova remains the fundamental problem at hand.

In the end, this card isn't close to OP, but I know you mostly started this topic on principle because you want to balance all cards, one at a time. My response to that was that it'd take way too long. Zanz adds new cards to change the meta instead for a reason. In this case we need more PC, but that was already true before SoP anyway. That explains my vote, of course (add more PC).

[esran]

i have yet to see a sop+burrow deck thats any good, so i am nto worried about that.

[Laxadarap]

i have yet to see a sop+burrow deck thats any good, so i am nto worried about that.

http://elementscommunity.org/forum/index.php/topic,36261.msg479693.html#msg479693

Not the best, but definitely not bad.  Still, SoP isn't OP.