Shield Counter

Shield Counters are a specific type of Counters that allow monsters, as well as players, to protect themselves against destruction from battle or card effects (in the case of monsters) and from battle and effect damage (in the case of players). The reason behind introducing this type of Counter was that many Duels are becoming shorter and shorter with more frequence, in a good part due to the starting number of Life Points of a player being relatively low in comparison to the total amount of damage a player can inflict in one turn (nowadays is more and more easy to Summon several monsters with high ATK in one turn), leading to frequent OTKs and FTKs. Also, cards that recover or increase Life Points are usually not good enough, especially the generic ones, so players are not encouraged to use them, thus most of them tend to lead towards OTK strategies and reject defensive strategies. Shield Counters will help in making a lot of Duels longer and encourage defensive strategies, because when a player would take damage from an attack or a card effect, a Shield Counter will be removed instead, no matter the quantity of damage they would have taken. In the case of monsters, a Shield Counter will be removed each time the monster would be destroyed by battle or card effect.

Shield Points
Another feature that it's being introduced are Shield Points. These are similar to Shield Counters, but they actually take in account the quantity of damage. For example, if a player has 2000 Shield Points due to a card effect, and gets a direct attack from an opponent's monster with 1500 ATK, they won't lose any Life Points, and will have 500 Shield Points remaining. If they have 2000 Shield Points and they get a direct attack from a monster with 3000 ATK, first they will lose the 2000 Shield Points, and then they will take 1000 battle damage. Shield Points will also be used when calculating damage in a battle between two monsters, or when taking effect damage. In the case of monsters, Shield Points will mostly protect them from being destroyed by battle as long as they are equal to or higher than the ATK of the monster they are battling. For example, if your Attack Position monster with 2000 ATK has 3000 Shield Points and gets attacked by a 3000 ATK monster, your monster will lose 3000 Shield Points, but it won't get destroyed by the attack. However, damage calculation will still be applied normally, and you will take 1000 battle damage. Some monsters also have effects that allow them to lose Shield Points instead of being destroyed by a card effect. In the case of monsters, Shield Points are sometimes called Armor Points, because they actually act like an armor for them.