Phantom Blaster Dragon

So since Johnny reminded me that we get Set 4 soon, I thought Id post this up.

I still say it's a fun card to use.

Honestly, when I first came into the game, I was impressed with this skill. The anime also sets up this skill so perfectly out of goddamn nowhere that it's just funny to think "Lol, perfect set-ups to use this thing" when it happens (I'm looking at your Babd Cath -> Babd Cath -> some pointless unit).

And then I improved a smidge.

I'll still use the dumb thing's skill if only because I feel like going HAM on some b**** asses.

Skill is good if you don't f*** around and do it when opp has null.
... And nulls are being ran at 4.
Well.
Dammit.

It's more useful from a meta perspective. Blaster Dragon's greatest strength isn't in an individual fight, but in an entire tournament. Any skilled fighter running one or two copies of him will be able to almost certainly guarantee victory versus any fighter who isn't using perfect defense cards, or one that is running too few of them (i.e. just one or two.) If you can still fill the field afterward, doing the counterblast once per turn from T3 onward will absolutely wreck their game--particularly if you're already ahead in the damage race--because it simply consumes too many resources to guard for a 26000+ vanguard while accounting for triggers (31000+ with Apocalypse.) The crit 2 means that the opponent has to stop it as well, because no one thinking clearly is going to choose betting on double heals over taking the chance and stopping the attack, even if that means that one trigger will bring it through. Basically, Shadow Erosion forms a cutoff point; Blaster Dragon wins against everything except perfect defense, so you autowin against anyone not running [enough] perfect defense.

This isn't practical on CFC or in the upcoming Ride to Victory, but in a real-world Bushi-run tournament there's enough people going around who couldn't finish their deck by game day that you can get as far as round 6 with this. After that though, yes it's Darkmetal, Il Dona, Dictator or Overlord all the time. Being searchable 11k is good enough to sit around on while waiting for your endgame strategy to come together, though.

It's kind of unfortunate that compared to every other +10k skill swarming the game now, the crit is the biggest impact left. PBD's release was something of a turnaround for the game--I'd like to think that he taught us what our new standard for power would be, since +10k/+11k boosters like Tron and Charjgal, and +10k skills like Majestyand Exculpate are now all over the place.