Mother’s Rosario Sword Art Online Vol. 2 Deck Guide
Mother’s Rosario is a very fun and powerful deck from the Sword Art Online UNION ARENA set. While decent in the original set, it becomes a powerhouse with the addition of Vol. 2 – a deck strong enough to challenge the meta. However, it’s not always the easiest deck to pilot well. I could see many players trying and giving up on this strong deck before eve realizing its full potential.
To help you out, I’m putting down a few helpful tips to get you through your first few matches playing Mother’s Rosario using my own custom deck I’ve been playing at tournaments.
Mother’s Rosario Deck List (SAO Vol. 2)
As already mentioned, Mother’s Rosario gets some pretty insane buffs in Vol. 2. And while it’s strongest card is hard to pin down because of how good they all are, if I had to highlight one, it would be the new Yuuki Raid.
Breaking down the Four-cost Yuuki Raid
For starters, just having a Yuuki Raid in this deck feels really good. You’re already running so many Yuuki’s to hit your thresholds for your Asuna characters that having a Raid option fits in really, really well. Whereas in the first set, Mother’s Rosario was all about racing against the clock to get enough Yuuki’s in your sideline to turn your Raid Asuna into a Damage 2 can’t-be-blocked beast, this Raid Yuuki changes the essence of the deck. Suddenly, this deck becomes a fairly heavy removal deck, one capable of doing so while also powering up to an impressive finishing play via the Asuna Raid.
Additionally, Yuuki works as an offensive and defensive double threat. On the offensive side, she is a 4000 BP character that removes another 4000 BP or less character, creating an opening for an attack. Defensively, use her to remove an attacker on your opponent’s front line and then use her to block to fuel your sideline with Yuukis.
Raid Yuuki’s drawback isn’t much of a drawback
If you’re paying attention to the fine print, this Yuuki does have one apparent drawback – she sidelines herself at the end of your attack phase or your opponent’s attack phase. One redeeming quality here, however, is that you can play this Yuuki unraided to avoid the sidelining itself effect when you need a body to stick around.
In the case of playing her Raided (which you’re going to want to do for the most part), this sidelining herself really isn’t that big of a drawback given her other “When Sidelined” effect that lets you free play an Asuna with three or less required energy and one AP cost from your hand set to resting to your field.
So long as you manage to retain an Asuna in your hand when you Raid Yuuki, the drawback of Yuuki leaving the field at the end of your attack phase no longer feels like an issue. Indeed, now you’ll not only get fuel for your Asuna’s stronger effects, you’ll retain a solid body on the field.
Target two-energy gen Asuna for the biggest bang for your buck
While you have multiple Asuna characters to combine with this effect, the one I find most handy is the three-cost Asuna with double energy gen. Asuna lets you draw a card as long as you have two or more Yuuki/Mother’s Rosario cards in your sideline. Early on, an effective way to make use of this draw effect is to use the Raid Yuuki and her Raid source to meet that threshold before free playing the Asuna.
More Yuuki free-plays help accelerate the deck strategy
Indeed, free play effects become a key component of Mother’s Rosario following Sword Art Online Vol. 2. While the Raid-to-Asuna ability is pretty straightforward – you just always make sure to have an Asuna target in hand before raiding the Yuuki – I find the two-cost Yuuki effect to be almost as powerful albeit tougher to use.
Part of the reason for this is there are so many more and different kinds of plays to use this two-cost Yuuki to achieve. The most straightforward option is to use her to free-play the three-cost Asuna that becomes a 4000 BP character with Impact once you have the required names in sideline.
This can be an effective means to play an Impact character to active to close out a game, or it can be a good way to get extra aggression in early. Additionally, you can use Yuuki to extend your turn. Make all the plays you need to make, then activate this free play effect to get a two-energy gen Asuna onto the field and then Raid over her for more damaging attacks via Asuna’s Raid. Again, the main drawback of this effect is that Yuuki sidelines herself – hardly an issue in a deck that relies on having Yuuki’s and Mother’s Rosario cards in the sideline to reach peak power.
Raid Asuna becomes more deadly in this deck
With all the new support provided in SAO Vol. 2, Raid ALO Asuna becomes a much greater offensive threat than ever before. She very easily boosts to a Damage 2 character, and also then extends to a character that can’t be blocked by 3000 BP characters or less. Because of this last effect that comes into play at eight Yuuki/Mother’s Rosario characters in sideline, you can effectively close out a game with her by just removing one or two 4000 BP pieces from your opponent’s board.
Low-cost character card choices – why they matter
Lastly, let’s talk about my card choices on the low end of the energy curve. Two cards feel pretty essential and give you a ton of consistency early on: the zero-cost Sinon and zero-cost Yuuki. Having a draw-one-sideline-one and a filter-two-sideline-one ALO character at this low of an energy cost really lets you set up your hand in a way that will be most beneficial later on in the game.
The zero-cost Kirito, meanwhile, feels admittedly less intuitive of a fit for this deck – but a necessary one regardless. As nice as it would be to run the zero-cost Asuna here, you really don’t need her with the stronger Asuna characters at your disposal, and having a 2000 BP body like Kirito and a strong 2500 one-cost like Asuna with the Active Trigger makes this deck much stronger early in the game before you ramp up to your bigger plays.
Thanks to all of the incredible support Mother’s Rosario gets in SAO Vol. 2, the deck strategy is now very, very strong. With powerful removal, insane early game filtering and searching, and deadly closing plays, Mother’s Rosario is far more lethal than most will realize. In the right hands, it has what it needs to threaten the UNION ARENA English meta.
