Byakuya has been one of my favorite characters to build decks around in UNION ARENA since the game came out. With BLEACH: Thousand Year Blood War Volume 2 out, I had a chance to revisit one of my favorite decks of all: the Byakuya Kuchiki BLEACH Purple deck. This deck has some crazy combos that when you manage to pull them off can help you get way ahead in the game. Below, we’ll be looking at the deck I used to get first place at a UNION ARENA store tournament that blends Byakuya with Ichigo and Rukia for maximum effect.

1st Place Byakuya Deck with Ichigo (Vol 2)

While there are many, many ways to build and play Purple BLEACH, Byakuya/Ichigo is definitely a viable way to go about it. While the deck is largely the same as I played it back in the first set, the two-cost Rukia is the strongest new card to come to the strategy in Vol. 2 and really changes the way you play this deck.

Below, we’ll be going through each and every card in the deck, why it’s included, and how to pay it towards your strategy.

Byakuya deck – quick start guide

Looking to just get your hands dirty and try this deck out right away? Then follow these basic steps and you can play the deck. For more in-depth analysis, continue reading further.

Prioritize building your energy line up to four: at four is when you can raid Rukia, and once you start hitting that Raid you should be able to boost energy to the five you’ll need to play your big guys.
Use The Royal Palace to fuel your sideline each turn.
Combine Byakuya’s When Played, When Attacking, and Senbonzakura to remove multiple characters in a single turn.
Raid five-cost Ichigo to take big removals against 5000 BP characters and to soften your opponent’s front line.
Defend against Impact attacks and pressure Damage 2 with raidless Ichigo, especially in the late game.

Byakuya deck – key attackers

Sometimes the best way to understand a strategy in UNION ARENA is to take a deeper look at your key attackers. Usually UNION ARENA decks are built around one-to-three primary attackers. In this deck, your primary attackers are Ichigo and Byakuya, with Rukia playing more of a supporting role. Byakuya, however, is arguably your strongest card.

Byakuya is your strongest character

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I often feel like Byakuya is vastly underrated as a card. Indeed, at face value, he’s arguably the single strongest character in all of BLEACH Purple. The problem with him? He’s difficult to use.

Indeed, just that wall of text in his Raid Box is intimidating, and even for me it takes some practice to ensure I’m using all of his BP reducing effects optimally. However, he’s scary if you manage to master the way to use him.

Let’s break down each of his effects so you can understand why they are so strong.

Byakuya’s When Played/When Attacking go hand-in-hand

The way to think of Byakuya is that he is capable of removing 2000 BP from a single character the turn he is played. That’s one of his strongest effects, and the ability to drop a single character by 2000 BP is usually more effective than the fact he can subtract 1000 BP from all opposing characters.

That being said, they’re both useful. For example, you can drop a Senbon, subtract 1000 BP from a 2000 BP character, 3000 BP from a 4000 BP character, then Raid Byakuya to sideline them both. If you use the when attacking on the same character you used the Senbon on, you can even reach 3000 BP.

While they’re not identical effects, they certainly go hand-in-hand to help you stack up BP reduction and remove characters.

Impact

Another reason why Byakuya is so strong is because he is an Impact character. To me, this replaces him in most builds with the four-cost starter deck Ichigo. While that Ichigo fits well into a pure Ichigo/Rukia build, there’s not a lot of reasons to not just play Byakuya. You are already building an energy line to five anyways, and Byakuya has a lot to offer beyond just being an Impact character. Additionally, his Impact effect costs less, needing to send only three cards to removal from your sideline as opposed to Ichigo’s four.

You may not draw a card but in this deck where you run such a strong focus on Rukia, even that isn’t a huge tradeoff.

With all of these effects combined, Byakuya is essentially a swiss army knife of a card, capable of removal in the early game against multiple lower BP characters, and closing out the game in the end thanks to Impact.

The Rukia Raid Package

Now that we have Vol. 2, it’s clear that Rukia is a character who was meant to be raided. If you don’t know the history of BLEACH Purple as a deck, you might find that to be something of an odd statement. Rukia’s Raid effect is so strong, of course you would raid her!

However, because of the fact that we didn’t get anything to target her raid with other than the relatively weak three-cost Rukia, many, many BLEACH Purple players built their decks without raiding Rukia at the top of their priorities.

Now, however, Raiding Rukia is a core strategy of this deck, warranting all the pieces included in this build above.

Let’s dive deeper into each piece of the Rukia Raid puzzle and how they add up to the powerful draw engine she is.

Four-cost Rukia

Four-cost Raid Rukia isn’t just one of the strongest characters in this deck, she’s one of the strongest characters in UNION ARENA. Period. By just playing her, you get to draw three cards, then place two cards from your hand into your sideline. This pairs extraordinarily well with both Byakuya and Ichigo, letting them get much more reliable access to their many effects that need cards in sideline to activate.

Additionally, she has another handy effect that grants 500 BP by discarding a card. That’s more fuel in your sideline, and more BP for your characters. She’s so good that Bandai had to nerf her a bit by removing her zero-cost raid target from the game entirely.

And while that does somewhat lessen her reliability, it’s not enough to stop her. Indeed, her two-cost version is an excellent raid target, and the reason I include four of her in my deck.

Two-cost Rukia is her best raid target

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Playable for only two energy, Rukia has a stellar base BP of 3000, while boosting if you’ve sidelined any cards from your hand this turn. This makes her pair incredibly well with her raid. Not only will she gain 500 BP from activating another Raid Rukia’s effect, you can then give her an additional 500 BP using raid Rukia’s “Activate: Main” ability, transforming two-cost Rukia into a 4000 BP heavyweight!

Of course, I’m also running two copies of three-cost Rukia in this deck to have more options to target with, but clearly the stronger of the two is the two-cost Rukia and it’s not close.

Ichigo brings the firepower

Byakuya is really good at dealing with most threats you’ll face, and especially with clearing the board of lower BP characters. However, few characters hit as hard as five-cost Purple Ichigo. Indeed, with the hyper-boost he gets from Raid Rukia’s “When Played,” he’s reliably sidelining just about anything out there.

I love fielding five-cost Ichigo to straight up remove threats when I’m low on resources and getting the combos Byakuya requires to be really deadly off aren’t really anywhere to be found. Additionally, Ichigo can be great at dealing with those 5000 BP characters running around.

Meanwhile, I’m running two of the Nullify Impact Ichigos in this list. While I won’t be able to take advantage of his Impact, it’s relatively easy to hit the ten cards in removal via this deck strategy, making it likely he’ll have the damage 2 attack power to help you apply the pressure.

Byakuya techs and matchups

As it stands, this deck is pretty teched-out, using a hybrid approach to the ver popular BLEACH Purple deck. Additionally, I’m running one copy of Royal Palace in this list simply for the added filtering/sidelining. When it comes up, it’s great and as I’m not running the one-cost Ichigo it somewhat fills that void. For matchups, here are a few to mind.

Strong against integrity knights: in the tournament I handled Integrity Knights pretty easily. This deck just has way more removal capabilities than that deck and much more solid draw.
Against Yellow Saitama: I’m not a huge fan of playing against Saitama with Byakuya as your removal and BP reducing effects are much less effective.
Versus Purple Code Geass: This is a decent matchup, and you may even have the edge with the new Rukia package.

Byakuya is a very strong deck, and an excellent choice for a store tournament or your BLEACH Vol. 2 Rare Battle. Give it a spin and see how it does for you!

UNION ARENA: BLEACH Byakuya Deck (Vol. 2)