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Friday, September 28, 2012

Upcoming English Booster Set 4: Eclipse of Illusionary Shadows (Part1) - Shadow Paladins

Hello everyone, today I'm going to blog about the upcoming booster set, Eclipse of Illusionary Shadows which is scheduled to be released internationally on December 15th, 2012.

This is the first booster where the Shadow Paladins are introduced for the Japanese game. This is also the booster which introduces a new ride chain format. These two had a pretty decent effect in the Japanese meta when they were released since the Shadow Paladins had pretty decent support at the time and the ride chain was pretty consistent.

In this part, I'll write about the Shadow Paladins. For the upcoming booster, I would recommend mixing them with another clan to have decent trigger support. This will allow you to play double critical, double stand builds or maybe more draw triggers depending on your preference. For the main vanguard, it would mostly be Phantom Blaster Dragon  which can be an 11k vanguard if you have blaster dark in the soul which is pretty easy to get since the ride chain gives you Blaster Dark automatically. Shadow Paladins also have pretty decent hand advantage with Arianrhod and Nemain, Macha can also help thin deck gives field consistency. You can even add Aermo, or clones of his, to get more hand advantage.

The new ride chain is also pretty nice for the Shadow Paladins  if you get the first ride, you get a +1 hand and a secured ride for the next turn. Your opponent will also hesitate to attack you more than once since you are able to retire any opponent rear-guards with Blaster Dark's counter blast. Like any ride chain, your grade 3 vanguard can be an 11k, and like most ride chains, you only need the grade 2 in your soul to achieve this. This means that you can have a draw trigger boost your vanguard and hit 16k. Phantom Blaster Dragon's ability is also not too bad. You sacrifice units that are of not much worth to gain more power and critical. After that, you can call out new, better units onto the field. The ability works great both early and late game.

The alternate, cheaper build would be Dark Metal Dragon. This should be a pure build to increase the consistency for the card's ability. This card is as strong as the Phantom Blaster Overlord. It is able to hit for a higher power with a +4k due to drive checks this card can reach 22k with a vanilla booster. This build also spares you more damage to use. Personally, I would prefer this build due to the environment of the English game right now. It has a more consistent power advantage and also, doesn't use up your cards from any abilities.

There is also another build with Origin Mage, Ildona  the Limit Break for Calvary of Black Steel. Ildona itself has pretty decent attack power, and gives some form of hand advantage. The main usage for this card is to retire grade 3s, preferably Dark Mage, Badhabh Caar and draw into more shield to help defend the upcoming attacks.

The most obvious weakness for this clan is that it's counter blast heavy. You will be forced to choose which ability you would want to use in a game. It also has a severe problem with keeping hand advantage since the Limit Break abilities are able to hit for a very high amount of power. You would need to maintain your damage at most, 4 so that you can avoid wasting your guards.

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