White/Red may not be the color combo that’s getting a ton of attention on the competitive Gundam Card Game scene, but there’s one deck strategy that’s actually quite solid, and that’s the ZAFT Red/White deck. Combo heavy and capable of some incredible plays, ZAFT is a very fast and powerful deck. Get the cards you need and you can absolutely compete with the meta. Below, let’s look at the custom build I’ve been testing and dig into what makes this deck tick!

ZAFT Deck List and Guide

Dominate the board early on

One thing I like about this ZAFT deck is its ability to be effective early on. Specifically, it has two cards that make it a headache for opponent’s to deal with in the first few turns, giving you an edge against other popular midrange decks like White/Blue Blockers by being able to play more aggressively than them while also granting you tools to handle aggro threats. Being able to adapt playstyle to what deck you are facing is one of the things I love about ZAFT.

The two cards that are especially nasty early on are the especially are the ZnO unit and the Stealth Stratagem Command.

ZnO is pretty straightforward in its usefullenss – essentially ou gain First Strike when attacking enemy units Lv 2 or lower, making it the ideal early game attacker. Of course, that’s not all – you can also Link it with any of your ZAFT Pilots, helping you unlock added effects.

Stealth Stratagem, meanwhile, has two uses. First, it lets you deal two damage to any Unit with 2AP or less. While this deck build doesn’t focus on lowering AP meaning you won’t be using this on bigger bad guys, it's again a solid way to deal with early game threats and clear the way for a rapid offense.

Meanwhile, having the option to Link into your Blitz Gundam later in the game is a nice-to-have.

Boost AP to unlock additional effects

The core theme of the ZAFT strategy is to boost AP for Units in order to unlock additional effects. The key benchmark to reach is 5 AP. Once Units reach 5 AP, they get some huge advantages. To do this, you have three main methods to boost AP. The easiest is arguably to simply pair already strong units with a pilot. The second is to use the handy Vesalius Base, granting 1 AP to any friendly unit.

However, for situations when you need just a little more firepower, you also have the powerful Buster Gundam – a character who not only grants 3 AP via Support to a ZAFT Unit, but one that switches to Active after doing so. This is great to either keep it alive to use in the future or to sneak out some attacks

The Aegis/Buster Gundam deadly combo

For example, the powerful Aegis Unit dishes out three damage to Lv 5 or higher units when attacking. Have two of these out using this effect and you can topple even the mightiest of foes with damage alone.

While you have many options for enhancing BP, the powerful Athrun Zala is the best Pilot to pair with the Aegis. Not only do the two Link, enabling you to attack the turn it’s played, Athrun Zala boosts the Aegis to 5 AP innately, while also enabling you to attack active units.

Athrun is one of the strongest pilots offensively in the game right now thanks to this insanely powerful effect. However, this deck has ways to further enhance his efficacy when paired with either the Aegis of the Justice (more on the Justice later) thanks to the powerful Blitz Gundam.

Blitz Gundam is truly an insane card, letting you grant ZAFT Units “Frist Strike” as long as they have 5 AP or more. This means that not only can your Aegis attack active units, deal three damage to a Lv 5+ enemy unit – it can do so without taking any damage, assuming you’re strong enough to destroy the opposing unit. This is absolutely the single strongest play in this deck, and it’s so deadly that it makes the whole ZAFT combo really worth it.

Duel Gundam and LaGow also have solid effects

While the Aegis/Athrun/Buster Gundam combo is this deck’s ace move, there are other moves to pull off via the same 5 AP effect threshold. Both your LaGow and Duel Gundam gain powerful effects as well when at 5 AP and can also be combined with the Blitz Gundam to gain First Strike.

Duel Gundam stands out as this deck’s Breach attacker, meaning it can attack both your opponent’s Unit and Base. Of course, it needs to be at 5 AP for this to happen, but that’s fairly easy to do in this deck. Even apart from your deadly Buster Gundam (which we’ll get to in a moment), hitting 5 AP is as easy as Linking the Duel Gundam with one of your pilots and then using your Vesalius to grant an additional AP.

LaGowe, meanwhile, will need more effort to get to 5 AP, meaning the Buster Gundam is necessary here. But pull this combo off and you can easily pair this with the Aegis to quickly eliminate threats before they are an issue.

And if you haven’t noticed, both of these Units Link with any of your ZAFT pilots, making them very handy in a tight spot.

ZAFT has powerful draw and card search capabilities

While most will look to Blue/White for having the strongest card draw in the game, you shouldn’t underestimate Red/White ZAFT. When built correctly, this deck can absolutely let you draw an incredible number of cards.

For starters, you may notice that this deck runs relatively few white cards. While many will look to partner ZAFT with the Kira/Freedom line of cards, in reality the ZAFT strategy works best when your deck is almost entirely based around ZAFT Units – hence the high count of Red. However, being paired with White does give you access to arguably the strongest draw card in the game:

My favorite turn to play Overflowing Affection is turn one as I’m not running any Lv 1 Units in this deck. However, it’s a solid card to use at any other point in the game.

Your second strongest draw card, arguably, is actually Dearka Elthman.

Dearka’s Discard 1 Draw 1 When Linked is easy to use in this deck as you have three Buster Gundam he links with naturally, and another eight units that link with any of your ZAFT pilots.

The Jin/Jule combo

Before moving onto this deck’s strongest card search power, there is a tricky little combo this deck is capable of pulling off under the right circumstances to draw some cards. Although not as easy to pull off as Blue’s “A Show of Resolve,” at the same time if you do manage to pull it off it typically expends less resources than the latter.

Miguel's Ginn — Miguel’s Ginn

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Ginn’s effect lets you simply draw a card when it’s destroyed – as long as you have another Link Unit in play. Again, ZAFT has plenty of Link opportunities making this easy to pull off. So what I like to do is to pair Miguel’s Ginn with my Jule and attack him into a unit that trades evenly. This way, my Ginn gets destroyed, I draw a card, and Jule’s effect activates, letting me draw another card. For two cards in total and one destroyed enemy unit, this is not bad at all.

While the circumstances around getting this to work are tricky, what’s less tricky is simply Linking Jule with this deck’s strongest card search mechanism: the Duel Gundam Assault Shroud.

When you play this Unit, you’ll be able to search the top four cards of your deck and deploy a ZAFT Unit with Lv 4 or less – which is the majority of Units in this deck. One thing to keep in mind is that one of those units in the top four cards may be your Blitz Gundam. It helps to ensure you’ve already used your AP boosting effects on a potential target if that’s the case. Using Shroud to deploy a Blitz Gundam is a bonkers play, especially if you have something deadly like the Aegis Gundam in play.

The Justice Gundam is your strongest Unit

At long last – we get to talk about the Justice Gundam! If there was one reason to pair White with Red in the Gundam Card Game it would be this: to be able to Link Athruan Zura into the Justice Gundam. The Justice Gundam is just crazy strong, letting you deploy a powerful Triple Ship Token with Blocker and 2/2 AP/HP. This blocker can be absolutely clutch towards the end of the game when you need to edge out a narrow victory.

Being able to Link with Zura is another huge advantage this deck has, although keep in mind the Justice isn’t a ZAFT Unit so the Blitz play won’t work with it. Still, with an impressive 6/7 when Linked with Zura, you have a mighty Gundam to wreck havoc on your opponent, with especially favorable trade capabilies into the popular Blue/White Blocker deck. After all, attack the Justice into the Freedom and the Justice lives to tell the tale even if the Freedom is linked with Kira!

The ZAFT Red/White Gundam deck is an absolute thrill to pilot. I’ve been testing this deck like crazy against meta decks and have been enjoying the results, especially against the White/Blue Blockers strategy against which it can have a slight edge thanks to a more rapid offense early on. If you’re interested in building this deck for yourself, I’d recommend picking up the Seed Strike Starter deck from my partners at TCGPlayer.

While it doesn’t have everything you need to build a fully upgraded deck, it has many of the core components. To build the deck above, I picked up two copies of the Seed Starter Deck and two Gundam Card Game Booster Boxes (also linked to above via TCGPlayer). Everything I needed came from just those four products, so it’s an excellent place to start whether you want to build ZAFT or anything else!

Gundam Red/White ZAFT Deck List and Guide