UNION ARENA: SAO Yellow Goddesses Deck
The most exciting deck in UNION ARENA: Sword Art Online is the Yellow Goddess deck, focused on the three powerful goddess characters in SAO’s third season: Leafa, Sinon, and Asuna. Of the three, Asuna is the strongest and also the main character of this deck.
Below, we’ll be taking a look at my custom deck build and going over how you can pilot this deck to victory at your next store tournament.
SAO Yellow Goddess Deck – Quick Start Guide
Yellow Goddesses has the potential to dominate the meta, with several key advantages that are unlike anything else we’ve seen to date. We’ll get into all of this in more depth below. However, if you’re just looking for a few quick pointers on how to get started, see below.
Look for the early game rush play, fielding your zero-cost characters and pushing them to front line.
Take advantage of one-cost Asuna to block incoming attacks and get through your opponent’s early defenses.
Use a combination of three-cost Asuna and Lisbeth to fuel your energy line while finding the cards you need.
Remove your own life with three-cost Asuna and four-cost Leafa to get closer to your ideal number of life: four.
Use Asuna raid to disrupt your opponent’s field and create openings in their defenses.
Defend your life once you get to four left with your two Leafa with Nullify Impact.
Use Raid Sinon to close the game out with her devastating combo of Snipe/Impact at two life.
Yellow Goddess Deck key cards
Asuna (Stacia, the Goddess of Creation)
As mentioned above, Asuna is the backbone of this deck, and her strongest version is her raid. Asuna has a very unique When Played effect that makes her highly effective in the current meta. Essentially, you use her to swap one of your opponent’s strongest characters on the front line with a weaker character on the energy line. They both get switched to resting which opens up a huge hole in their defenses. The best part is, however, if you have four life or less you are able to force them to not move the following turn.
This is an excellent way to lock down a really strong character on your opponent’s front line – such as a 10000 BP Saitama or a 5000 BP Lancelot – and preventing them from being used in combat the following turn.
However, it’s worth noting that this doesn’t only prevent them from attacking you the following turn: it also prevents them from defending, essentially taking them out of the game for two whole turns.
Sinon (Sun Goddess, Solus)
While Asuna acts as a powerful tool to create openings in your opponent’s defenses, Sinon is your late game powerhouse capable of removal via Snipe and Impact. The only problem with this Sinon raid is that you really aren’t going to want to use her until you have at least four life or less, limiting her usefulness early game.
For this reason, I think you are relatively safe running just the four zero-cost Sinon characters as raid targets.
Get to two life or less and she becomes incredibly effective, gaining 500 BP, Snipe and Impact.
Use three-cost Asuna to drain you own life and gain resources
While this Yellow Goddess deck is not at all afraid of taking hits to life, you can accelerate the rate at which you reach four or less by playing a few key cards. One of them is this three-cost Asuna card. She lets you add a card from your life to your hand and draw a card. Because the card added to your hand from your life in this way becomes part of your hand, you can essentially think of this “When Played” as an effect that lets you draw two cards – a very rare ability in UA in general and quite effective.
While normally adding a card from your life to your hand might be seen as a disadvantage, your strongest characters (listed above) gain tremendous power from having less life in your pool, making this card jus straight-up deadly.
As if that weren’t enough, Asuna also has:
3000 BP
Two energy generation
Yellow Color Trigger
She is an absolute must as a four-of in deck.
Leafa (Earth Goddess, Terraria)
While the other two goddesses that make up this deck are primarily offensive characters, Leafa is your defensive line. Indeed, she may just be one of the single most effective Raidless characters in the game up to this point.
Four energy cost makes her easy to play.
4000 base BP makes her an excellent attacker.
Nullify Impact helps defend your life late game.
Activer Trigger is always solid, helping grant additional BP your characters need to survive until the next turn.
While all of these base stats are insane enough, it gets better. Leafa’s When Played enables her to gain 2000 BP and prevents her from being chosen by your opponent’s abilities. This gives her insane staying power, and ties in with her regenerative abilities in the show that prevent her from being defeated by any enemy.
Play her and you are virtually guaranteed to have her around the following turn to dismantle your opponent with. Watch out, however: Leafa’s When Played does not stop Snipe effects so characters with that keyword and strong enough BP can still remove her, limiting her effectiveness against those decks.
Lisbeth
Lisbeth turns out to be a pretty phenomenal card in this deck. You really need your key goddess cards to win with this deck, and Lisbeth makes finding them much, much easier. Not to mention she’s got the handy draw trigger, as well as two-energy gen. I’ll often play more than one of her to the field simply to take advantage of her top deck search ability.
Situationally effective cards
In addition to the above key cards, this deck offers unique strategies that can be very effective in certain situations. First, let’s talk about a card that stands out as one-of-a-kind and that is this one: Unlimited Landscape Manipulation Ability.
Unlimited Landscape Manipulation Ability
While the first effect listed above is essentially the same effect as raid Asuna (minus the “can’t move” buff you get at 4 cards or less, the second effect is pretty insane, letting you straight-up remove a site from play. This can be an excellent tech to stop powerful cards like Malevolent Shrine from being used against you.
Eldrie adds a defensive layer
In my original deck list I included four copies of the two-cost Sinon character. While that card has a few interesting pros to including, I ultimately decided on the two-cost Eldrie instead. While this is primarily because he has the draw trigger (opening up room for me to include the zero-cost Leafa which we’ll get into in a moment), he also ends up being a pretty solid defensive character, boosting to 3500 on your opponent’s turn without any strings attached.
Zero-cost Leafa is handy throughout the game
The reason I made space for this zero-cost Leafa at a four count is simple: she has Nullify Impact. While you already have four copies of Nullify Impact characters in your deck thanks to four-cost Leafa, I find having plenty of Nullify Impact on hand to be effective. Since you’ll be removing so much of your own life throughout the game, it’s important to stop your opponent from taking cheap shots against you via things like Impact once you’re down to four life.
I don’t think this zero-cost Leafa is absolutely mandatory. However, she’s a huge boon to your strategy and makes more sense in this deck than any other of the zero cost characters besides Sinon and Asuna.
Radiant Light is the strongest Special in the game
I’ve played Goddesses enough at this point to be convinced of one thing: Radiant Light is the strongest special in the game. The strongest thing about this card is that you can play it for only the cost of three. When played you can switch a character to resting and freeze them the next time it would switch to active. That’s a handy effect to be able to use at anytime for just a three cost.
Meanwhile, if you have four or less life you just get to sideline a character instead. Given how easy it is to get to four or less life in this deck that makes it insanely effective.
Yellow Goddesses matchup guide
Beyond being a powerful deck with no characters over four energy, Yellow Goddesses has a pretty insane matchup spread in the English UNION ARENA meta. Especially, it does well against the uber popular Yellow and Green Saitama decks, with the key matchup being against Yellow as that one is so prevalent in the existing meta.
Vs. Yellow Saitama
Against, Yellow Saitama, you can easily take two AP Saitama out of the game, locking him down for two whole turns. That massively removes their main advantage, making Yellow Goddesses a powerful counter to that deck. If this deck ends up being as popular as I think it could be, it could take Yellow Saitama out of the running for top decks.
Vs. Green Saitama
Green Saitama has proven itself to be a popular pick in the English meta as well as a late game powerhouse if you play your cards right. While some decks struggle against this deck’s removal and blocking power, Yellow Goddesses has several key advantages against it.
For starters, Yellow Goddesses is a very rushable deck, making it easy to take plenty of life early on without worrying much about your energy line.
Second, Asuna’s switching is effective here, letting you strategically move King cards off the front line and becoming far less effective locked down on the back line.
The only issue you will run into with Green Saitama is that it doesn’t attack much, making it harder to reduce your own life. However, it’s not a huge issue as you’ll just have more fuel for your effects that target your own life.
In some ways, the fact you aren’t being attacked by Green Saitama often only enhances your strategy as you can remove your own life and gain powerful effects without fear of getting behind.
Lastly, Leafa is the strongest counter in the game to Green Saitama. She can’t be removed via Green two-AP Saitama’s When Attacking effect, and she has nullify Impact, thereby shutting that play down entirely.
Vs. Code Geass Purple
Your strongest play against Code Geass Purple is to use Asuna to bring zero-cost C.C. to the front line. When played at the right time, this could essentially shut their strategy down. Otherwise, use your life-taking effects sparingly as Geass Purple will have no trouble knocking your life down to size.
Vs. Purple BLEACH
Purple BLEACH is arguably your worst matchup. If Yellow Goddesses gets popular that deck could actually come back hard. BLEACH has no trouble getting rid of your four-cost Leafa assuming it saves up the sideline fuel to do so. Additionally, the switching/resting effect isn’t all that big of a deal against this deck as they usually have plenty of Four cost characters to replace those on the front line.
Your biggest advantage in this matchup is going to be your Sinon with Snipe/Impact. Save her till when she’s fully powered up to edge out a very close matchup.
From where I’m standing right now, Sword Art Online’s Yellow Asuna Goddess deck is looking like the strongest Sword Art Online deck. It has effective matchups against Yellow Saitama and Blue JJK thanks to the character lockdown and site removal. Meanwhile it should fair reasonably well against other powerhouse decks, with the only weakness being its reliance on having less life in your pool.
To defend against this you’ll need to prioritize having a few Nullify Impact characters around.
In the end, Yellow Goddesses is a fun, and powerful deck with incredible closing moves that could catapult its way to the top of the UNION ARENA meta.
