The ultra rare in a Tournament Pack set is always something special. Cards like Morphing Jar, Needle Worm, and D. D. Warrior all have unique in-game effects that make them desirable for serious duelists. Several of these cards, like Mechanicalchaser and Royal Decree, made a huge impact on the competitive dueling scene after their debut. New Tournament Pack sets only arrive a couple times a year, but when they do, they’ve always got something in store for both the average duelist and the collector. These sets reprint old favorites, introduce new ones, and usher in some of the hottest and rarest cards in the game. At just one copy in every 108 packs, ultra rares in Tournament Pack sets are scarce.

Of course, we’re opening up our Tournament Pack 8 preview week by giving you a glimpse at the most sought-after card in the set, Magical Arm Shield! It’s a normal trap, and its effect reads as follows.

You can only activate this card when your opponent declares an attack while there is a monster on your side of the field. Take control of 1 of your opponent's face-up monsters, except the attacking monster, and this monster is attacked instead. At the end of the Battle Phase, return control of this monster to your opponent.

Pretty cool, huh?

Think of Magical Arm Shield as an alternative to Sakuretsu Armor. If you manage to get your hands on one and want to put it in your deck, that’s probably what you’ll want to swap out. The difference between the two lies in the increased complexity of Magical Arm Shield, making it a bit trickier to play but a lot more rewarding.

Sakuretsu Armor fulfills two chief purposes in almost every deck. The first is to protect your monsters and life points by keeping attackers from hitting you. Second, it provides simple monster destruction, clearing your path of threats that you would have to waste attacks on, blow out of the way with Smashing Ground or Exiled Force, or otherwise simply have to absorb. Magical Arm Shield is similar to Sakuretsu Armor in some ways. It’s not quite as easy to use, because your opponent needs to control two face-up monsters (one attacker and one bystander) and you need one yourself in order to activate it. Let’s compare how the two cards perform.

In the defense department, Magical Arm Shield is far superior. Sakuretsu Armor can only ever defend you from one monster, but Magical Arm Shield protects you from two—the monster that is forced to waste its attack, and the one that your grabby little Arm scoops over to your side of the field. The monster that you take from the opponent remains under your control until the end of the battle phase, so if it was a potential aggressor, you’ll save yourself from two attacks for the cost of a single card. Granted, you need a monster on your side of the field to activate it, but that shouldn’t be difficult for the average deck.

On the monster destruction level, Arm Shield gets interesting. If the face-up monster you took is in defense position, and its DEF is higher than the attacker’s ATK, your opponent won’t lose either monster. If, however, both monsters are in attack position, or your new borrowed defender’s DEF isn’t high enough to shake off the attacker, the opponent will lose one monster to your single trap, resulting in an even exchange.

If the opponent controls two monsters with the same ATK values, he or she could easily lose both. While this isn’t too likely to happen, we can expect to see pairs of identical monsters hitting the field more frequently with the release of Enemy of Justice. In addition, if the current Advanced format continues to become more aggressive, this situation becomes more likely.

So, Magical Arm Shield has the potential to provide double the protection of Sakuretsu Armor. It can also generate the single piece of monster destruction that most duelists consider to be a must. It matches the two functions of Sakuretsu pretty darn well, easily exceeding its power for pure defense. What’s really cool is that it can do a lot more than just that.

Sakuretsu Armor can’t affect your opponent’s life points. It’s virtually impossible to deal immediate damage through the use of its effect. Not so with Magical Arm Shield, which can create large life point swings.

Consider the following scenario. You open the game with a set monster and a set spell or trap card. Pretty common, right? Your opponent then special summons Cyber Dragon, and normal summons Mystic Swordsman LV2. It’s a bad place that we’ve all been a few times. Now, if the opponent gets his or her way, he or she will attack with the Swordsman to destroy your monster, and then swing directly with Cyber Dragon, hitting for 2100 damage. Let’s look at how the set spell or trap changes this scenario.

If the card you set was Sakuretsu Armor, you can use it to destroy either the Dragon or Swordsman. Hit the Swordsman, and you lose any monster short of Spirit Reaper to Cyber Dragon. No one takes any damage, and if your monster was a flip effect, you’ll at least get to claim its ability. Hit the Dragon, and you lose your monster to Mystic Swordsman LV2. You won’t get a flip effect, but you will clear out the Dragon. Either way, you lose a monster and no one takes any damage. Pretty decent, right?

Now let’s examine the same scenario with a set Magical Arm Shield instead of Sakuretsu Armor. In this scenario there is only one possibility: Mystic Swordsman LV2 attacks and you activate the Shield. You take control of Cyber Dragon, the Swordsman runs into it, and the opponent loses 1200 life points and a monster. You lose nothing. Good deal, eh?

This situation occurs any time you’re faced with multiple attackers and your opponent doesn’t attack with the largest one first. In that case, you can take the monster with the highest ATK value, force the opponent to run his or her first attacker into it, and then wall off attacks for the rest of the turn.

Let’s set aside life points issues and look at other popular openings. Say that Mystic Swordsman LV2 was Spirit Reaper instead, threatening to discard a card from your hand. In that case, the Dragon attacks, you flip Magical Arm Shield, target the Reaper, and it explodes because it’s been targeted. A replay is triggered, and Cyber Dragon still gets to attack your monster, but your hand and life points are safe. The same goes for Don Zaloog in place of Reaper. Activate Arm Shield in response to Cyber Dragon’s attack, steal Zaloog, and let the Dragon whack it. You lose 700 life points, but you get to keep your monster and your opponent loses Zaloog.

Also, you don’t necessarily have to return the stolen monster at the end of the battle phase. You can still tribute it for cards like Enemy Controller or Deck Devastation Virus. That’s a difficult trick to pull off, but it’s good to keep in mind.

There are several matchups in which Magical Arm Shield becomes even more useful. Dark World has a tendency to swarm the field in an attempt to win. Since Goldd, Wu-Lord of Dark World and Sillva, Warlord of Dark World share identical ATK values, and any Dark World build usually runs a combined total of five copies, Magical Arm Shield can easily become a trade of one trap for two of the opponent’s enormous monsters. That’s not just card advantage, it’s also a complete momentum-killer, destroying the aggressive potential which the Dark World player has so carefully cultivated.

The same can be said for Return from the Different Dimension. Often a duelist will activate Return against an opponent with one remaining back-row card, carefully calculating that even a single monster loss will still permit victory. It happens quite frequently. In such a case, the semi-negation of a second attacker usually dooms the Return player, and that’s exactly what Magical Arm Shield affords.

Macro Cosmos will face similar problems, since pairs of D.D. Survivor and D. D. Scout Plane will be common. If you can keep Macro Cosmos off the field long enough to smash a pair into each other and send them to the graveyard, you’ve dealt a solid blow to the deck’s infrastructure. In short, if a deck swarms, it will hate Magical Arm Shield.

While it’s easy to look at this card and see a conditional version of Sakuretsu Armor at first glance, it’s really much more than that. With far greater defensive power, arguably equal (and sometimes better) destructive potential, and the ability to slow momentum and dish out huge damage, Magical Arm Shield is highly versatile. Like so many of its predecessors, it’s completely unique and offers a peerless experience to those duelists who are lucky enough to own one. You can expect it to become a high-demand card for collectors and duelists over the coming months.

Keep heading back this week as we show you more cards from Tournament Pack 8! Eager to get your hands on Magical Arm Shield and more? Tournament Pack 8 will not be sold in retail stores, so head out to your local hobby store and compete in sanctioned Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG competition. Finding tournament locations in your area is as easy as checking the official tournament locator, or email entertainment@upperdeck.com!

—Jason Grabher-Meyer