The other day, one of my frequent readers and X friends asked me if UNION ARENA was a dying game. My initial thought was “what an odd question.” From my vantage point as someone who has been highly active in the UNION ARENA scene both online and in store, the idea that UNION ARENA could be a “dying game” hadn’t occurred to me. Of course, that’s largely because of the high demand I’ve seen online for my work on UNION ARENA. Despite covering several large TCGs on this site, UNION ARENA has easily been one of the most popular topics I’ve covered since the game came out.

So what then, has sparked this conversation about the overall health of UNION ARENA just as I’ve seen it spike to new heights in interest from an online perspective?

Is UNION ARENA a dead game, or is it flourishing one year after its English version debut?

In this article, I’m going to be covering as much ground as humanly possible – everything from the history of the game, its highs and its lows, its gameplay mechanics, collectibility, community, and future.

So buckle up! It’s going to be a an exciting ride.

UNION ARENA – a history of the English version of the game

Now that we’re one year out from UNION ARENA’s inaugural sets (BLEACH and Hunter x Hunter), we have a great deal of perspective on the game. For those of us (like me) who have been there from the start, we’ve seen the game grow from a largely two-deck format to one with an incredible array of top decks to choose from.

Not only has it been exciting to see the game grow in terms of IPs and mechanics, it’s been equally exhilarating to see the player base expand – again usually with each new IP that gets added.

For a TCG, UNION ARENA has a diverse player base, with folks from every walk of life imaginable dialing into the game, all driven by their love of card games and the IPs. Indeed, the IP-driven nature of the game brings an added level of connectivity to events. Unlike other TCGs that are built around behemoth franchises like Pokemon, Disney, or Gundam, being a collection of smaller IPs gives you something inherently easy to discuss and connect over.

For example, you’re not likely to run into someone who harbors a passion for Code Geass at your local supermarket. But you certainly can at a UNION ARENA event. This draw around specific anime brings an air of intellectual connectivity to the game that is hard to find even in the relative camaraderie found in the world of TCGs.

But apart from the generally wonderful community that’s sprung up around UNION ARENA, the game itself has grown and changed incredibly.

UNION ARENA’s introductory meta was surprisingly good

*Me and Jeremy Eggers at our first ever* *BLEACH Rare Battle*

The current UNION ARENA metagame is a far cry from what it looked like in the halcyon days of its first few sets. I remember fondly grinding out games at locals and then late into the night at Starbucks between the two behemoths at the time – Kurapika and Purple BLEACH.

The game in those early days was rudimentary at best, but still fun for its simplicity yet high-skill ceiling. Yet even in those earliest days, the notion that UNION ARENA was a “two deck” format is largely overblown. Indeed, look no further than one of the first big UNION ARENA tournaments for evidence of this fact – a tournament that saw Toshiro finish in first and a range of different decks topping the event despite the overwhelming popularity of Kurapika and Purple BLEACH.

UNION ARENA Deck — *1st Place Toshiro Rush by Tyler Green*

Indeed, UNION ARENA had a surprisingly mixed and balanced meta even in its earliest days despite only having two sets available – something which instantly drew me into its fold and away from other TCGs I was covering at the time that were bigger but suffered from an overwhelming tier-zero deck.

As diverse as the introductory UNION ARENA meta was, it soon got much greater variety with the additions of Jujutsu Kaisen and Code Geass.

However, the game would hit its first real plateau in a good way when Demon Slayer released.

Demon Slayer marked a big moment for UNION ARENA

Demon Slayer Pull — *My epic* *Serialized SR*** Tanjiro* *from Demon Slayer*

Along the way in UNION ARENA’s story, there have been a few moments that mark a significant uptick in interest for the game. As is the nature of any TCG, there are certainly peaks and valleys in regards to interest in the game, and Demon Slayer was certainly one of those peaks. However, it also was something of a turning point for the game – something I’ll explain more in a moment.

From my perspective, Demon Slayer was one of the biggest UNION ARENA sets to date, and the first really big set. While it’s impossible to get a fully accurate image of sales data for UA, Demon Slayer showed the highest excitement up to that point for a UNION ARENA set in regards to web trends, something which I feel is an excellent indicator for the overall interest in a set, although certainly not the only metric to judge its health by.

More anecdotal evidence pointed to the enormity of this set, as it was the probably the peak time for attendance at local card shops that I experienced for the game, with local tournaments easily grossing 20 players regularly.

However, despite the success of Demon Slayer, it also felt like something of a turning point for the game. Following Demon Slayer there felt like a definite slump in interest for sets and in attendance at local shops for a few months after.

While the next several sets were relatively popular, it wouldn’t be until Black Clover and BLEACH Vol. 2 released in late May that UNION ARENA would once again reach such high levels of interest. When this happened, however, excitement for the game not only matched what I saw with Demon Slayer, but exceeded it and became more consistent in the following sets.

Ultimately, Demon Slayer felt like it released right around the time many of the initial players began to phase out of the game. While this hit was felt for a while, it only paved room for many, many more new players to discover UNION ARENA, helping it to grow to bigger, and better heights.

Today, after massive sets like Fullmetal Alchemist and Attack on Titan have hit the shelves, one thing is clear to me: UNION ARENA has never been bigger.

Gameplay – how is the health a year later (pros and cons)

While UNION ARENA showed a promising start from a meta perspective and variety, a year later it’s a tapestry of variety. While the core strategies don’t change (each top tier deck is different variation on a core theme like removal, multi-attack, etc), the way to express your strategy dramatically differs from deck to deck, and the game is immensely skill intensive, especially when it comes to matchups and how to handle the randomness the game throws at you.

UNION ARENA players may not be aware of just how good we have it, and non UA players are certainly missing out. Not only do decks remain viable for a long, long time when compared to other games, the sheer number of competitively viable decks in the game – especially the fact that each new set brings at least one really good deck into the game – is just not commonplace in most TCGs.

Clearly the UNION ARENA game designers knew what they were doing in laboriously crafting the English version meta, removing key cards that could offset it, and planning set releases around what will make this game hum.

Is UNION ARENA overly reliant on luck?

Now to the main complaint I hear most often about UNION ARENA’s gameplay: an over reliance on luck. However, is UNION ARENA overly luck focused?

In the phenomenally successful business strategy book, Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets, the authors highlight a story about an immensely successful poker player and how he is able to consistently win major tournaments despite the insane luck factor involved in Poker.

I would say that Poker is even more luck based than UNION ARENA, and yet the Poker champion had this to say and I’m paraphrasing: in the game of poker, everyone has access to the same amount of luck. So where skill comes in is in the decisions you make with the cards that you have.

So while things like Special Triggers may have a disproportionate impact on the course of the game, that’s a luck factor – a luck factor that is equal between each player. How do you plan for that potential special, though? How do you set up your board for any potentiality? Do you take a risk? Do you play conservatively? These decisions, in some ways, are only heightened by the crazy luck factor brought into the game by triggers.

Triggers actually make UNION ARENA way more fun

Despite try-hard players dismissing UNION ARENA for its triggers, I would argue that the presence of Triggers is one of the mechanics that makes me most addicted to UNION ARENA. Unlike other TCGs where you can usually tell who the winner is going to be by turn one or two, UNION ARENA keeps you engaged often until the very end.

There are very, very few times I actually scoop a game as hope from triggers keeps me going. Will I hit that special that will keep me alive? Will I hit the final?

Having to work around potential triggers also impacts the way you play the game – with more skilled players making plans for the potential of a certain trigger and knowing when to take a risk and when not to.

How are Vol. 2s?

Buy on TCGPlayer

Another big change to the UNION ARENA meta is the addition of Volume 2s into the mix. How have Volume 2s impacted the meta? Are they too strong, forcing a zero-tier meta or are they bringing more fun, advanced techniques into core gameplay mechanics?

In his well-thought-out and very long review of UNION ARENA, MonkeyFight TCG highlights how power creep has actually greatly helped the UNION ARENA meta. Specifically, he highlights how Volume 2s have really up-leveled the game, turning previously basic decks into exciting strategies.

For the most part, I think Volume 2s have been a big success. Just as MonkeyFight TCG highlights, they bring positive power creep into the game – not power creep that destroys the game but up-levels it. They create subtle differences, filling gaps decks had before to make them function more like they should. Players who upgrade their decks with key cards from a Volume 2 set are left feeling “aha! This is how my deck was meant to function all along.”

The dark side of Volume 2s

And while there is undoubtedly a huge positive side to Volume 2 sets, there’s also a less positive side to them, as well. That being the fact that very rarely do brand new decks introduced in a Volume 2 actually make their way to the top of the meta.

There are a few examples of this happening, like in the case of the powerful Squad Zero/Ichigo hybrid deck topping major tournaments. However, for the most part the new energy colors added in Volume 2s are largely just a little short of the top tier, making them feel less enticing for players to invest in.

And if the net-new decks from net-new energy colors aren’t enticing despite making up the bulk of what you actually get from Vol. 2s, the end result is a suboptimal set where players can more easily pick up singles than actually buy product.

How does prizing for UNION ARENA hold up a year later?

Now that we’ve talked about the actual gameplay and meta, let’s talk about another factor that has a pretty big impact on the overall health of a competitive TCG – the prizing. How does the prizing hold up for UNION ARENA one year out?

In short: very well.

While you won’t find massive cash prizes at official events in this TCG, at the local level all the way through to the regional level, prizing is incredibly strong. Indeed, prizing feels to only get better as time goes by, with stellar new artwork concepts getting introduced that are even exclusive to the English version of the game.

The best prizing arguably comes from Rare Battles – a competition where the top four players get a Rare Battle Promo – something which is a huge incentive to play as you don’t have to fully top the event to bring home the prize.

UNION RARE Cards — *My Kirito Winner Rare Battle cards from back-to-back undefeated runs.*

However, it’s not just Rare Battles that offer great prizing: weekly tournaments do, too. And while for some going after the same card each week when it is not necessarily hotly valuable (although Rare Battle winner cards often are), for me I make it a game to try and collect as many of my favorite winner card as possible.

Case and point when I went undefeated five tournaments in a row and bagged a binder page’s worth of Asuna Winner Cards.

Store Tournament Cards — *Me with my page of Asuna store tournament winner cards*

As if all of this weren’t good enough, we’re getting prizes with a special 1st Anniversary stamp this fall for both store tournaments and rare battles.

Support for local tournaments feels really, really big, especially when compared to other TCGs. For example, playing the Pokemon TCG locally only affords prize packs, not exclusive winner cards, while even the Gundam Card Game fails to incentives players with a whopping four winner cards to choose from if you top.

That’s not to say UNION ARENA is necessarily better for everyone than those games, but it certainly has its perks and provides an arguably more fun tournament experience because of more opportunities to bring home prizes.

Regionals afford the biggest prizes

Of course, the biggest prizes come from attending and doing well at UNION ARENA regionals. Again, this isn’t going to land you a massive cash prize, but I’m sure these Gold cards are quite valuable given their exclusive nature (for more info on the Gold cards you get at Regionals, see the official site.)

What is the product opening/collecting experience?

We’ve covered a lot of ground here but I promise we’re getting close to the end. But before we get there, I would be remiss to not at least touch briefly on the actual collecting/product opening experience. For me, collecting is secondary, with my main focus being on playing the game.

That being said, I do regularly create and update UNION ARENA market guides on the site, and also do collect UNION ARENA cards, and enjoy the ocasional deck bling (like my full max rarity Goddesses build).

On that note, and as a more casual collector of UNION ARENA, I’m perfectly happy with the opening experience. Indeed, in the early days of UA when cards were going for a bit more than they typically do now, I was a little blown away at the kind of value you could get from opening a box.

While that value has decreased, I still find I get relative value out of my boxes, and also tend to get a little lucky with my pulls, frequently hitting an SR** out of just a few boxes, or even the incredible Tanjiro Serialized I showed above (which I got from just purchasing two boxes from the set).

Having multiple rarities to chase in the set makes products very fun to open, although I do agree with the general consensus that having an additional step in rarities for certain key cards would add a ton of value to the game (think an SR* five Cost Lelouch instead of just the SR*** from Code Geass Vol. 2).

All of that being said, I find that if I want to get the majority of what I need to build a good number of decks from a set, I typically have to purchase 4-6 boxes, with 4 being enough to build the primary decks and 6 being to build all of them.

While that’s a sizable investment for sure, it’s made better by the fact that in UNION ARENA you really can pick and choose which set to invest in with virtually no adverse effects on your gameplay experience. The same thing can’t be said about any of the other big TCGs where you will usually fall behind the meta if you skip out on a set.

How well is UNION ARENA selling?

Now we’re getting into really, really murky waters: the actual sales data from UA.

The hardest thing about analyzing how well UNION ARENA is doing from a sales perspective is that there’s really no objective way to know for sure how well it is doing. While we can look for indirect signs of how well it is selling, in reality these are just accidentals expressing a potential reality rather than the full picture itself.

With that being said, one golden source of truth on TCG sales coms from UNION ARENA YouTuber, Kozmic Plays. Kozmic provides insightful market data into the broader TCG world using data derived from TCGPlayer. I highly recommend checking these videos out as they tend to track with more official data down the line.

For example, Kozmic caught the decline in Lorcana sales well before that was essentially confirmed by ICv2. As such, I tend to trust Kozmic’s data and insights that shed a very positive light on UNION ARENA, showing that from a total volume perspective, UNION ARENA could very well be one of the top TCGs in the North American market already.

In the official ICv2 report released in 2025, it’s shown that Weiss Schwarz comfortably makes the top 10, largely thanks to its Nikke set (one that UNION ARENA will be getting later this year).

However, all data shared by Kozmic as well as from other sources seems to imply that UNION ARENA is far outselling Weiss Schwarz – a fact which means UNION ARENA will likely show up somewhere in the top 10 in the ICv2 report next year. Presumably the game was simply too new to be included in the definitive ranking for 2025 (having debuted at the tail end of 2024). That being said, I did read the full ICv2 report booklet that was given out to local game shops and UNION ARENA was mentioned as one of the hot new games to watch (as was Gundam and Riftbound).

So how well is UNION ARENA actually selling?

Realistically, we don’t know how well UNION ARENA is selling at the macro level, and anecdotal information about UA product sitting overly long on a given shelf at a given local game store cannot be taken as proof of a dying game. Indeed, all things considered UNION ARENA seems to be doing well from a sales perspective. However, we’ll have to wait until next year to see if it makes the top 10 in the ICv2 report (and I very much think it will).

Before closing out this part of the article, however, I’d like to highlight a few key things that make me think UNION ARENA is doing quite well overall from a sales perspective.

Very high interest for the game overall on the web.
Continued and even improved support from Bandai.
High volume moved on TCGPlayer.

The idea that Bandai would continue to support UNION ARENA as something of a loss leader is not very likely. Indeed, Bandai cites TCGs as one of their biggest growth opportunities in their own official reporting, meaning that for them TCGs are a way to gain profit, not simply to grab at additional IPs. Corporate America is very, very revenue driven, and as such companies usually prioritize short term gains over longterm plays.

If UNION ARENA weren’t making Bandai money at this point, I doubt we’d be seeing anything near the level of support for it from a marketing and prize standpoint. Indeed, my own opinion on the matter is that UNION ARENA has vastly outperformed Bandai’s expectations from it given a relatively lackluster reception in Japan, and are moving quickly to capitalize on its success on this side of the pacific.

UNION ARENA has never been so alive

Ultimately, UNION ARENA has never been so alive. While it may not stand up to the biggest card games out there, as a more niche TCG, it’s thriving. Prizing is great, the game keeps growing with new players and new IPs, and realistically it shows no sign of slowing down anytime soon.

So…why not jump in yourself? Check out my full UA English release schedule to find an IP that vibes with you!

Is UNION ARENA Dead? A Review One Year Later