Here’s my take on the Myr vs Anaphon debate.

 VS. 

Star Cutting Time Dragonbound, Myr: ATK x7.7, reduce damage taken by 50% after matching Heal orbs in a cross formation. Increases time limit of orb movement by 2 seconds.

Chaotic Black Dragonbound Armor, Ana (Typhonana or Anaphon): Balanced & Dragon type cards HP x1.35, ATK x1.35. ATK x6, reduce damage taken by 35% after matching Heal orbs in a cross formation.

Leader Skill Restrictions

The first thing you’ll notice is the type restrictions. Most dark cards are going to be devil and/or god. Balanced and dragon is not terribly popular for dark. It still however lets you use Gremory, Yomi Dragon, Plum, Akechi, and some others

But! It cuts out a lot of monsters like Pandora, Sephiroth (probably not a big concern), Cecil, and more.

So that’s a restrictive type requirement. Particularly the Pandora restriction which is one of the best in terms of RCV (darks tend to not have much of this), awakenings and a great skill to top it off.

Leader Skill Values

Next when you’re comparing multiplier values, 7.7x for Myr against 8.1x for Anaphon, or, 59.29x and 65.61x respectively.

The damage difference is very low here from the multiplier values solely.

This leaves us with 4/59.29/4 (in the form HPx/ATKx/RCVx) for Myr. The 4 comes from the 75% shield which means 4x effective hp (and with having damage reduced by 75% it means you only need to heal 1/4th of the damage so, 4x RCV).

35% shield for Anaphon leaves us with about 57% reduction for 2 leads with heart cross or an effective 2.37/65.61/2.37 (not the final value).

One last thing before calling it a day would be to add the hp multiplier to Anaphon, for about 4.31x HP overall. [(100% x 1.35)^2 /(1-(shield value))^2 ]. 4.31/65.61/2.37.

Notice that the HP buff provided by Anaphon’s leader skill does not translate into RCV benefits. While Anaphon’s effective HP is higher due to a combination of real HP added and shielded damage, there is no real RCV added to match the HP added.

So in the end you have higher base hp and effective hp, about 5x higher additive multiplier for ATK, but lower RCV by far (where dark monsters don’t particularly excel in the first place). It also makes recovering from gravities worse. You’d get hit for 42.25% of a gravity every time, whereas on Myr it’s only 25%.

This can be pretty important when you consider the 500% gravity on Gaia Dragon in Ultimate Arena 3 which requires an additional shield of greater than 50% while Myr can make do with as little as 20% (assuming 1 resist latent).

You gain a typing restriction and lose the 4s of free movement. Even among end game players I’ve seen very few that can activate Gremory clearing a row + heart cross + clearing the remaining board for 7 or more combos on 4 time extends. I’ll assume that for most players, those 4s from Myr leads make a huge difference. See a break down of combo damage at the end of this article.

Sub Pool

Another assumption is that equivalent or better subs can be found on Myr compared to Anaphon. Yomidra is quite the unique sub in stats, utility and active for activating Anaphon and you don’t really have that equivalent on Myr. Furthermore, no cards that pack the same spiking power as Akechi EXCEPT for Light Akechi which was time limited and passed already. Akechi packs in an enhance + dark/heart generation in one active (of course you still have cards like Sun Wukong that enhance the hearts but it’s not the same). I put some of the possible subs below. Note the differences in potential subs with board changers (before including inherits for things like delays).

Awakenings

About awakenings, both are unbindable so that’s a moot point. One thing that’s nice is that Anaphon has bind clear awakening but you lose a lot of orb enhance. Myr brings 3 OE each from the leads alone which guarantees any light skyfalls to be enhanced already. Matching 3 enhanced orbs on Myr with 6 OE total (which is what the leads provide) gives you 1.534x damage. Your standard Anaphon team completely loses this multiplier in favor of the unbind awakening and devil killer (which will be discussed further in depth in a bit).

Active Skills

If you’ve ever played with quad color boards, you’d know that while tricolor are finicky enough, quad color will troll you quite a bit more often. Anaphon’s 13 turn cooldown means that inheriting over her just takes that much longer over Myr at 7 turns. If you choose to inherit, say, a tricolor like Cecil or Apocalypse over for a tricolor board on Anaphon, the result would be over 21 turns (22 for Cecil, 23 for Apocalypse) to get a more consistent board which is less likely to troll you. Otherwise you would have to bring with you board fixers like Akechi for the sole purpose of using in conjunction with Anaphon active. While this generally produces good boards that can output a lot of damage, this is 2 actives used and using Akechi at a different point in time could mean activating Anaphon skill without a fix, leaving you out of luck.

Inherits for Anaphon:

Lastly, one fun thing is that additional shields are multiplicative of the resulting damage after cross shield is calculated.

So if you were to use Indra (75% shield for 3 turns) on Myr you’d take 6.25% (.25 from Myr reduction x .25 from Indra reduction) damage while on Anaphon you would take 10.5625%, only a 4% additive difference which is a plus in favor of having a combination shield and HP multiplier.

Arena

Lastly, specific to running arena, Parvati would be a royal pain for Anaphon because you get that 65x AND an additional 3x for Anaphon devil killer. This means you’re pretty much always going to over damage Parvati’s 300K damage cap with Anaphon dark damage. Standard Myr teams run no killers so they don’t have issues with absorbs. The closest thing to an issue would be Hera Dragon having an effective 1m damage cap (since you get 2x for her being dark and she has a 2m absorb) so you could get skyfall trolled to death however Hera Dragon and Sopdet are generally subject to RNG with most teams.

The conclusion here is that Myr is superior to Anaphon assuming similarly strong teams. Very rarely will Anaphon be better than Myr unless you sold all your light cards for Yomi Dragons and Plums. Myr offers better RCV, the time extend and better awakenings with no type restriction on LS. Anaphon leaves you with a difficult Parvati fight, higher susceptibility to gravities and a hard restriction on sub pool for a small HP and ATK boost.

 > 

Some math on the value of additional combos and why time extends can be superior for damage.

Let’s take an average 4 combo total for row + cross + combos on Anaphon or 6 for row + cross +combos on Myr.

That’s 1.75x on top for Anaphon and 2.25x for Myr just for the combo count.

65.61 x 1.75 for Anaphon is about 114.82x damage.

59.29 x 2.25 for Myr is about 133.4x damage.

This is purely looking at the leader skill damage multipliers along with damage multipliers for combos and is not considering the effect of orb enhances.

Assuming you can hit 2 more combos on Myr over Anaphon, you’re doing more damage on Myr even from a lower leader skill multiplier.