It's no secret that Phantom is difficult to play. This shouldn't come as a surprise, especially if you plan on using the katana extensively. You are playing a First Person Shooter after all. Everyone has guns. "But wait!" a passing nubcake will say. "Phantom can be invisible. I can just walk up to people and stab them without ever being seen!". Short answer, no. Long answer, go try that and let me know how it works out for you. Phantom's Refractive Armor isnt 100% invisible all the time. His "invisibility" is quite visible, and you don't have to be redeye to do it.
So to run that down, you're bringing a sword to a gun fight and you're not invisible. Well this sounds like a lost cause. That again is where you would be wrong noobarino. Phantom is a good slayer, a great one even, and I'm going to lay out exactly how to unlock his power right here.

The first step to playing any game is knowing what tools you have at your disposal. In the case of Phantom, there are 3 things you need to familiarize yourself with in order to have any sort of success. With the most recent update, Phantom's loadouts recieved a rebalance. The katana is available on 6 out of his 9 cards, with the cricket bat on the other 3. Despite the rebalance which makes most of the katana cards viable, I still highly recommend the C94 as the ideal card for Phantom. You get both chopper for extra melee damage and undercover to increase the utility of cloak.





KEK-10
Damage: 11
Rate of Fire: 700 rpm
Magazine Size: 45
Reload time: 2.0 seconds
Speed modifier: .9

Crotzni
Damage: 12
Rate of Fire: 650 rpm
Magazine Size: 40
Reload time: 1.7 seconds
Speed Modifier: .9

Blishlok
Damage: 18
Rate of Fire: 400 rom
Magazine Size: 30
Reload Time: 1.8 seconds
Speed Modifier: .9

Which weapon you use is not ultimately up to your preference, but the card the gun is on. The guns all perform very similarly, and realistically you will be able to adapt to whatever you need to to get the required perks.
This will be your ranged option against opponents who are too far away for you to get into melee range. Your gun should not be your go to for all situations like it would be for other mercs. As we will see your melee also acts as a primary.

Katana
Damage Slash [+Chopper]: 60 [69]
Damage Stab [+Chopper]: 90 [103.5]
Rate of Fire: 79 rpm
Speed Modifier: .975

The katana is probably the reason a lot of people picked up Phantom in the first place. It has both the highest damage per strike and the highest range of any melee weapon in the game. It's hit box is also extremely long, with both slash animations spanning most of the screen. Nothing in Phantom's arsenal kills faster than the katana. Getting into range to use should be your priority, and is where most difficulties with Phantom arise.
Knowing which attacks to use is also vital. Since different mercs have different amounts of health, some mercs require different techniques to get the job done quickly. This is the breakdown of which attacks will minimize your time to kill (TTK) for each merc.

One stab (health<90)
Aura
Sparks
Aimee
Kira
Proxy
One stab (health<100 w/ chopper)
Phoenix

Two slashes (health<120)
Bushwhacker
Fletcher
Nader
Phantom
Sawbonez
Vassili
Arty
Redeye
Skyhammer
Stoker

One stab, one slash (health<170)
Fragger
One stab, one slash (health< 170 w/ Chopper)
Thunder

One stab, two slashes (health>170)
Two stabs (health>170 w/ chopper)
Rhino

Refractive Armor
Ability Duration, Still [w/ undercover]: 16.5 seconds [18.1]
Ability Duration, Sprinting [w/ undercover]: 8.5 seconds [9.3]
EMP effect radius: 10 meters
EMP aftereffect: 5 seconds
Cooldown: 12 seconds (max), 7 seconds (min)

Phantom's Refractive armor isnt just a cloak. If it was it wouldnt be called "armor". RA has many uses, the most obvious being invisibily*. This does not mean you are 100% all the time. It does have limits. Firstly, you are quite visibile when sprinting, or walking. You will appear to your enemies as a gray blob, but with a distinct outline. It's more of an opaque distortion than invisibility. The armor also emits a distinct, high pitched hum when moving that is very audible. More often than not this is what will give you away.
So what good is it then? Well the cloak aspect does work very well if you are not moving. In this state you are almost undetectable. In this state, the hum normally emitted is silent.
The second aspect is why Refractive Armor is armor. When activates, the armor takes any incoming damage instead of your health. The damage taken will deplete from the energy of the armor, and thus make it run out sooner. The amount of protection RA gives you is limited, and after it runs out you will take damage to your health as normal.
The third, and most recent addition to the myriad of traits RA already has, is the EMP. When RA is activated, any deployables within a 10 meter radius of you will be disables. This doesnt just include health stations and turrets, but also equipment such as stickie bombs, mines, and most interestingly heartbeat sensors. The devices remain deactivated as long as they are inside the radius. Even after the devices leave the EMP area, they remain deactivated for an additional 5 seconds.

Your first instinct with phantom will be to use cloak to walk straight through yhour oppenents ans stab them right in the blind spot. Unfortunately, that would make Phantom hideously overpowered, so that's not how he is designed. For starters, your cloak is very loud. When moving it emmits a very audible hum that is a dead give away to your position. Secondly, cloak isnt perfect invisibility, at least while moving. Your sillouete is visibile as a translucent gray mass.
Cloak is extremely useful while still, but that sounds way too situational to be useful, right? True, it means cloak is only useful in a select few situations. Ergo, you should seek to lure your opponent into that situation where you have the advantage.

Using Cloak as Cloak
As stated above, cloak's invisibility aspect is most effective while you aren't moving. If you aren't moving, that means you can't get close enough to people to cut them up. If that is the case, then you need to make people come to you. There are two ways to go about this, both of which require you know something about player psychology.
The first is to use your knowledge of map flow and choke points. Most of the time, people take very similar routes through the map to get to the objective. Once you figure out where these routes are on each map, all you have to do is crouch there, invisible, and slice or stab them once theyre in range. This is especially effective on fast classes, since you can kill them in a single stab. The ideal place to set up would be the end of a hallway or in a doorway. From there, you can stab the first person to come through, and you have an escape route in case their friends show up.
The second is a bit more devious, but also much riskier. If you are in a fire fight, before you lose too much health, run away. With any luck your opponent will give chase, hoping to finish you off. When you are in a similar place as described in situation one, activate cloak and wait for them. They'll most likely have their knife out, so they wont be able to shoot you immediately. From there, finish them with the sword before they realize you didnt actually run away. Keep in mind, this only works if you have cloak to use. Dont try to just hide around a corner without being invisible. In all likelyhood you'll have lost health, and a fair gunfight is exactly what you just ran away from.

Using Cloak as EMP
Even before the EMP effect was added, cloak was useful to sneak past Bushwhacker turrets. Now that RA disables all deployables, This list of defenses Phantom is immune to is much longer. You will be able to walk straight through not only Turrets, but also proxy mines, and Fletcher Stickies. All deployables means all deployables. You can also disable heartbeat sensors and SNITCHs, assuming of course they are within your range. Finally, health and ammo stations will be inoperable while youre around.
So what does all this mean for stabbing people? Simply put, you can ignore all the nonesense other players use to give themselves an advantage and surprise them when they thought they were safe. Just a few examples; If you see someone standing on a health station, normally you would need to destroy it before targeting any of the other players. Instead, you can have them think they'll regenerate their health so they wont run away when you start cutting away.
When a vassili throws a heartbeat sensor, they get a little beep when it spots someone. However, they get no indication that's it's disabled. You can walk right over it, without being spotted, and since he'll more likely than not be scoped in you can have your way with him. The same rule goes for land mines.
One especially cheeky thing you can do to Fletchers is with stickies. If they see you, most will immediately try lobbing stickies at you. Most don't realize that they cant detonate them if they passed through the EMP field, giving you time to close the gap and do what you came to do.
Keep in mind the EMP does not prevent Concussions, Nader or Fragger grenades, or airstrike markers from going off. You're still best off running away when you see one.
A word of warning though. When you disable deploys led with EMP, that's is a huge red flag to your enemies that there is a Phantom hiding somewhere. Be aware that people may be hunting for you when they notice they're equipment is down.

Using Cloak as Armor
This should never be your offensive strategy. Refractive Armor does not provide enough extra health to be used as an offensive shield. On top of this, the amount of armor provided dimishes as the cooldown timer ticks up, so the longer you run, the less you get. That said, it can save your life in a pinch if you're somewhere dangerous.
If you're in a firefight you want nothing to do with anymore, pop cloak and run away. If you need to tank explosives or bullets for someone while they plant or defuse C4, pop cloak. Just know that the maximum health you get with RA is only around 40 health or so (testing that is somewhat tricky). You won't be Rhino, but it'll help you take a few more bullets to let you make a clean escape.

Despite what many people will tell you, Phantom is in fact a melee oriented character. His first edition cards don't reflect this, but the fact that all of his second edition cards have either the katana or the cricket bat most certainly does. As such, melee should be your plan A. The strategies I described above for using cloak are all designed with the end goal of you stabbing somebody.
However that does not meant that you should only be using the katana. Phantom can take the KEK and the Crotzni, arguable the two best SMGs in the game. It's also arguable that these are the best guns in the game period (a discussion for another day). It would be a crying shame not to put them to work as well.
Knowing when to use which weapon at any given moment is something you can really only decide on a moment to moment basis, and requires you to know yourself as well as the game. I've taken the liberty of crafting a flow chart to help you visualize the decisions you need to make in order to keep your life expectancy high.


Keep in mind you wont be skulking around in the enemy spawn all the time. Sometimes you're going to be just hanging out with yout team doing as they do. In this situation, play Phantom as you would any other combat oriented merc. You shoot whoever you see, but remember you do have the best melee in the game. Use it when you can, but dont be suicidal. When you can, you should break away and do what Phantom does best.

I wouldn't say this is the best Phantom game I've ever had (the file got messed up for that one) but it's still pretty good, and it shows a lot of the tactics and strategies described above. Pay extra attention to where I choose to fight or run away. Also take note of the times when I cloak and just sit there, watching people go by.
The above Phantom gameplay is now very old, so I will include a more recent gameplay from after the MOFO update.

In the minds of many, Phantom has existed in a sort of limbo within Dirty Bomb. Nobody quite knew what he was for or what to do with him. Was he a "recon" meant for spotting enemies to kill (obviously not)? What he some sort of slayer-lite who shoots people in the back? Or, alternatively, did his unique melee weapon mean that he was the melee specialist and should be used as a sort of invisible samurai.
In a word, yes*. In many mord words, yes he is almost all of those things. He can't really spot people, since he doesn't have an ability to do that. But with the cloak, he has many ways to either get close to people or force people close to him. Once in range, he can use the katana to kill faster than any gun short of a sniper rifle or shotgun. That said he also has a gun. The trick to using him is knowing which to use and when. Hopefully I've given you enough knowledge to apply the above strategies for yourself. You'll see he does have a niche to fill, and he fills it very well.