From Rags to Riches: UNION ARENA Two Years Later
It was early October 2024. I was at a local card shop and one of the guys who worked there told me about a new game I “had” to try. He said it was called UNION ARENA, and it was about a bunch of anime characters getting together and battling. People seemed pretty excited about it, at least in my local area.
I wasn’t convinced. I wasn’t exactly looking for another card game to get into at that time. I was already covering the Pokémon TCG and Lorcana. What did I care about some brand new card game from a publisher I had never tried before?
My mind changed a little when I heard what the first set was: BLEACH. BLEACH has been one of my favorite anime/manga series since I was a kid. Some of my favorite summer memories are watching BLEACH DVDs on my PS2 (already outdated at that time but it made a good DVD player) on my tiny tv with my brother, wielding our favorite character’s swords we bought online, and biking to the book store to pick up the latest manga.
My mind changed even more when I saw the Toshiro alt art Ross at the card shop pulled. A tiny little twinge for something I didn’t even realize I had forgotten pulled at my heart strings, and suddenly I was fifteen years old again, and the best thing in the world had happened to me: a BLEACH card game had fallen into my lap.
Toshiro Hitsugaya (085) (SR*)
UE01BT: BLEACH: Thousand-Year Blood War • Super Rare 1-Star
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Only, UNION ARENA isn’t a card game that could have been born out of the time when I was a kid. Anime was still too niche. Card games even more niche. No one would have taken a chance on a game like this and imbued it with art stunning enough to turn the head of the most hardened TCG collector.
The cards in UNION ARENA BLEACH: Thousand Year Blood War’s first set encapsulated everything I loved about the manga and the anime and printed it out onto cardboard.
But what was it like to play the game?
I’d soon find out, after purchasing the two original starter decks, BLEACH and Hunter x Hunter, for myself and my friend, Edgar, to play.
For the first time in my TCG-playing life, I picked up a new game almost instantly. It made total sense to me, and from the moment I first played the game, I simply couldn’t get enough.
Playing UNION ARENA for the first time
UNION ARENA’s launch: a success among players, panned by everyone else
Yet the magic I experienced seemed to be lost on the general TCG public. Despite BLEACH selling out everywhere in my area, and cards being quite valuable and in demand on the secondary market, online critics mocked the game’s anime screenshots for bulk cards, and many labled it Bandai’s next flop.
That is, among people who paid it any mind at all. Most seemed to ignore the fledgling TCG. Finding information on it online was almost impossible, with the main websites serving info that was completely outdated.
Yet, in my area the local scene was almost instantly packed. We had no trouble finding players to battle with, and the first ever major online tournament sold out quickly.
The number of players eager for information about the game, and the amount of information available to them online, was badly out of sync. So, as I had done with the Pokémon TCG before, I began to write down what I knew about the game.
I wrote deck lists, market guides, tournament recaps – everything I could in the beginning, adding more and more content over time. Despite the general consensus that UNION ARENA was a game made to die from the start, I never saw it that way. To me, UNION ARENA was the next big thing. Only, it would be a while until it reached its potential.
UNION ARENA opens doors for me beyond the website
Anyone who has been following my website since then is already familiar with how big the game would eventually become for me.
But what many might not know are the many doors UNION ARENA ended up opening for me. Not just for my work running one of the top independent TCG content sites in the world, but creatively and personally as well.
2024 was a tough year for the web as a whole. Many websites didn’t make it through the seismic changes that occurred during that year. From a business perspective, it was the toughest year so far for this website.
UNION ARENA came along at the perfect time, not only as a new content creation opportunity, but as something to give my creativity new life, and room to grow in a new sea that felt almost limitless.
However, it wasn’t always as great as all that sounds. In the very beginning, the game showed promise from a content creation standpoint, but it was anything but a slam dunk. It was still in its infancy – many didn’t yet know to even look for information on the game, and many of the very early UNION ARENA players didn’t stay with the game long enough to see what it would become.
Yet having this new opportunity in front of me to be one of the few to create regular, professional content on UNION ARENA gave me energy. It breathed new life into my website and would eventually drive a whole new approach to the way I write my TCG coverage.
In late 2024, however, it was just a game that showed promise. But more than that, it had rekindled something in me that I had almost forgotten over the last decade of my life: my love for anime.
Suddenly I wasn’t just revisiting my favorite series: I was exploring brand new ones. Leading up to the Code Geass release, I watched the entire show, and was blown away. I absolutely loved Code Geass. At that time, it was probably my favorite anime.
The defining deck early on from that set had to be Pizza: the deck I used to win my second ever UNION ARENA Rare Battle tournament.
Then I finally watched Demon Slayer and I was blown away by that. I built the Gyutaro/Daki deck before I realized how bad that deck actually was and won a 20 player tournament with it.
I finally watched the second season of One Punch Man before that set came out in early 2025. I liked it, and back then everyone in the English meta thought that set would break the game because it was a simultaneous release with Japan. One of the weird things about UNION ARENA is that Japan has historically (and remains to this day) way ahead of the English Version in terms of releases. The gap is closing slowly now, and eventually we could see them be essentially on par with one another.
But back then, the big fear was that One Punch Man would destroy the English meta. It left its mark, but it didn’t destroy a thing.
Back in those early days, UNION ARENA wasn’t just something I was playing, or a game I was writing about: it was my own personal anime viewing program to get me back into the medium that had played a huge role in my earlier youth, but had largely forgotten since.
However, none of the shows would properly prepare me for what was about to come next when Sword Art Online released late April/early May.
My Sword Art Online UNION ARENA era
Looking back on my personal journey through UNION ARENA since it came out two years ago, I see it in several phases. There was the early phase where the pattern was pretty much this: watch new anime, pick up new sets, test every deck possible, write guides about them.
Then Sword Art Online came out and it changed all that. Although SAO is essentially a staple in the anime world at this point, to me it was totally brand new. I was a little late to the party, of course. In 2025, SAO was a nostalgic favorite, had already celebrated its 10th anniversary years earlier, and was waiting for a new anime to be in the works.
To me, it was the greatest revelation I had never had. Everything about SAO spoke to me. It’s an anime that focuses on relationships above all else: relationships between friends, siblings, and lovers. It’s a story about hope, heroism, and faith. Today, it’s not only my favorite anime, it’s my favorite story. I’ve read all the books, seen all the movies, and pretty eagerly await the next film coming out in 2028.
After getting this deep into SAO, I absolutely couldn’t wait to get my hands on my first SAO products.
Of course, I won my SAO release event, built every deck, then went on a five tournament winning streak across more than a month using my favorite deck that was absurdly strong at that time: Yellow Goddesses.
Thanks to how well I knew Sword Art Online as a set, I won both of the SAO Rare Battles I went to.
Winning my first SAO Rare Battle
Really, the only downside about SAO coming out when it did is that I sort of missed out on BLEACH Vol. 2. Normally a BLEACH set would have been a huge deal for me. But the intensity that I felt for SAO sort of sidelined the BLEACH set. Luckily that won’t be an issue when Vol. 3 releases in November!
Post SAO and UNION ARENA’s rising tide
Things sort of slowed down for me after that. I kept playing mostly Yellow Goddesses partly because it was my favorite deck and partly because I really wanted to play it at a regional. More sets came out, and by late August when Attack on Titan came out, it was starting to become clear to me that UNION ARENA was becoming more than just my own personal pet game. The game was growing. It was happening under everyone’s nose, it seemed.
The Bandai bros had already moved onto other games like Gundam, and people were asking “is UNION ARENA dead?” Meanwhile, it was clear to me that UNION ARENA was growing with each new set.
Maybe the reason so many missed it was because of how slow the game had been for a while. After Demon Slayer came out in January, there was a definite slow down. Local stores in my area weren’t selling much UNION ARENA product anymore: some even seemed resentful of the products they had purchased that were now sitting around on shelves.
Yet if you looked carefully enough, the signs of UNION ARENA’s potential were there even back in 2025. This is why what would eventually happen during the game’s second year – meaning explosive growth and insane demand – actually wouldn’t surprise me at all the way it seems to have surprised everyone else.
With every set that came out, UNION ARENA’s player base would grow a little more. Then something weird started to happen in late 2025: random chase cards would start fetching an absurd amount of money online.
While NIKKE did well in this department, that didn’t necessarily shock anyone. But then Demon Slayer Vol. 2 came out, and some of its SR** cards were selling for hundreds of dollars online.
There was a small break in-between sets as the year refreshed, but I hardly noticed. After all, SAO Vol. 2 – the set I had been pining for essentially since Sword Art Online originally came out – was starting to make its way back into the game.
Yet even as I was counting down the days until my Sword Art Online Vol. 2 case became available, the broader UNION ARENA player base had their eyes set on a different IP: Evangelion.
Evangelion: UNION ARENA’s breakout set
When Evangelion came out, it was by far the biggest set in UNION ARENA up until that time. It’s a big IP, and it was the set that was dominating Japan, making it the one to watch for competitive players. Despite UNION ARENA making cuts to some of the decks in this set, it still dominated the meta for the North American Championships, and only started waning in power lately.
Sword Art Online as a set has done incredibly well in terms of value among collectors, making it one of the stronger IPs overall in UNION ARENA from that perspective. But it was overshadowed by the stronger Evangelion set that released the same day as it, despite SAO Vol. 2 still being incredibly strong.
What then happened after Evangelion sent something of a shockwave through the UNION ARENA world: one that to this day many have yet to recover from.
Kagurabachi madness and Solo Leveling as the hottest new thing
Evangelion and SAO Vol. 2 were big sets: perhaps the biggest anyone had seen in English UA at that point. But then Kagurabachi came out, and people went frantic for it. For the first time since BLEACH came out, UNION ARENA products were hard to find. Prices soared, and everyone seemed to blame the same thing: Bandai’s print capacity, and scalpers.
The truth, however, is more complicated than that.
Yet Kagurabachi was a massively successful set, and its top chase cards stood head and shoulders above the kind of value we thought possible from a UNION ARENA set prior.
Chihiro Rokuhira (060) (SR**)
kagurabachi • Super Rare 2-Star
Market Value
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Evangelion was UNION ARENA’s breakout set, but it was largely driven by players. Kagurabachi saw demand squeeze products out of the hands of players for the first time since the game came out. However, this would only set the stage for the storm to come when Solo Leveling dropped.
Kagurabachi may have seen products flying off the shelves, but Solo Leveling’s demand was on another level. Card prices soared to new heights, and Bandai seemed to have finally found the formula it needed – a mixture of currently popular anime IPs, Gold Serialized Action Point cards, and strong mechanics – to sell every single set that followed after Solo Leveling without exception.
Stores that had once basically begged players to buy UNION ARENA products and singles suddenly were holding onto them like they were war rations to be sold at a premium, and prices across the board skyrocketed.
However, I personally wasn’t paying much attention to what was going on with Solo leveling. I was prepping for my Sword Art Online Vol. 2 Rare Battle run, and I would go on to win four out of my six rare battles, and topping the other two. This was just a few months after my successful run at the LCQ in Vegas where I handily got my invite for Nationals and played in UNION ARENA’s first ever National Championship.
After succeeding at Nationals with Purple Progressive from Sword Art Online, and then completing a play set of four Asuna Winner cards, it seemed that my SAO era had finally come to an end.
UNION ARENA on its second anniversary, and where we go from here
For me, seeing the recent fervor for UNION ARENA products and tournaments feels like validation. It’s proof that the potential I saw in it back in that card shop in 2024 wasn’t some wild-eyed fantasy.
UNION ARENA isn’t sold out everywhere simply because of scalpers. True, it’s also not as simple as saying that the game’s just popular. There are many factors as for why UNION ARENA is so hard to come by, especially its latest and most popular sets.
For starters, popularity does play a huge role. Cards are expensive because they’re in demand. Products are hard to find because players and collectors buy them.
Additionally, they probably aren’t printed at a massive volume, and many card shops likely are behind the demand due to the way the whole distribution thing works.
And many opportunistic buyers and scalpers likely do see the incredible numbers alt art UNION ARENA cards can fetch and proceed to buy things out.
All of these things can be true at the same time, and often are about successful TCGs.
For many of us, UNION ARENA started as a game that felt like it had grassroots. It wasn’t mainstream. It was small. For those of us who got in early, it felt like it was ours.
Of course, it was never intended to a be a small game. It had the world’s biggest anime IPs in it because it was intended to be a game that would scale. While I’ve often felt like UNION ARENA was the world’s best kept secret, when you have release events reaching max capacity, Rare Battles selling out in minutes, and products nowhere to be found, it’s hard to argue that UNION ARENA’s a secret anymore.
Yet for these growing pains that plague any TCG in its early days, I almost feel proud of what UNION ARENA has become. It manages to produce killer set after killer set on a pretty grueling pace. Yet still so many decks are viable to play, cards valuable, and from what we’ve seen of upcoming sets like BLEACH Vol. 3, the quality and fun of the game won’t be getting any less. Indeed, it’ll likely only grow.
UNION ARENA isn’t just a small pet game you can get on the cheap and play on the side anymore. At two years, it’s a proper TCG, one with a competitive circuit, popular products, and plenty of demand for more.
As for me, I’m looking forward to having more time soon to attend more regional level events. UNION ARENA isn’t the only thing that has grown in the years since it started. This website has also grown. Today it’s read by millions of people very year and growing. I’ve not even had time to make it to a regional since Vegas to play competitively because of how much the website has grown.
Right now, however, all I really want is a good competitive UNION ARENA event to ring in the second year of the game. And an SAO Vol. 3, if anybody is asking.
