UNION ARENA: Every NIKKE Deck, Ranked
Ready to shoot your way to victory with the best Goddess of Victory: NIKKE UNION ARENA decks?
With the full English NIKKE card list available and release events underway, many NIKKE fans and UNION ARENA players are finding out for themselves just how much fun this set is. With plenty of affinity-based combos and never before seen mechanics — as well as a hefty dosage of fan service — NIKKE is a UNION ARENA set with something for everyone to enjoy.
With that being said, I’ll be taking you through each and every NIKKE deck to build and ranking them from good to great!
Which deck will end up on top? Find out below!
#6 Tetra Line
Tetra Line is a hyper aggro deck that looks to do one thing and one thing only – move fast and hit hard. It can’t function well in a prolonged battle given it doesn’t have the tools required to deal with bigger BP characters or to survive constant removal. Still, some players might find its mix of fun combos and winter-themed waifus reason enough to run this low-to-the-ground deck strategy.
Speaking of combos: this deck’s strongest one occurs between Rupee and Alice.
Assuming you’ve done a solid job of stacking up cards under your characters on the field, you can use these two characters together to play a three-cost character, and then switch her to active with Rupee. This makes the aggro play into this deck much stronger, with the likes of the three cost Alice being able to be played raidless then swtiched to active in the same turn, complete with Impact and even 4000 BP if you also combo her with your Noir.
Although a bit more combo/setup heavy than the payoff to this strategy is arguably worth, there’s still plenty of synergies here to explore for those eager to try.
Dive into the Tetra Line deck in my guide.
#5 Yellow Exotic/Wardress
The Exotic/Wardress deck is another heavily aggro style deck. It looks to to soften your opponent’s defenses through a mix of BP reduction and resting effects and then strike hard with low BP bodies which can be played with relative ease thanks to Viper. While it’s not the strongest aggro deck we’ve seen to date, it does have some very solid combos that are fun to pull off.
Take, for example, the three-cost Viper character. While being a 2 AP character may seem like a steep cost at first, you have to keep in mind she lets you play an additional card from your hand, helping establish your board to go to for the aggro play very similarly to how the powerful Kikoru Kaiju No. 8 deck works.
Yuni and Jackal work together to create yet another powerful combo for the deck. Raid the Yuni, rest Jackal on the front line, draw a card, neg your opponent’s entire front line by 1000 BP, and then switch your Jackal to active. Additionally, Yuni can switch any of your other characters on the front line with those on the bench, just in case you’ve used one of this deck’s many other resting effects.
Combining effects that rest your own characters with others that let you do things like switching strong characters to active feels very satisfying to pull off, even if there are certainly stronger strategies out there that require less work.
Go hyper aggro with my guide to the Exotic/Wadress Yuni deck.
#4 Green Missilis
The green Missilis deck is where things start getting a bit stronger for Nikke. While it lacks the bells and whistles of a top tier deck, its strategy is pretty straightforward and admittedly sound: build up your board with 4000 BP characters and swing for life. While you have plenty of strong ways to do this with characters who are either 4000 BP natively or boosted to that threshold via character effects, the strongest character by far is the five-cost Laplace.
Laplace comes in hot with Damage 2 and a “When Played” effect that is both a powerful defensive Raid option while also acting as means to disrupt your opponent’s defenses.
Ultimately, the Green Missilis deck doesn’t care about nuanced strategies like removal, BP reduction or building up much of an energy line. It’s more of a blunt instrument looking to build up the board with 4000 BP characters so that it can swing for one or two turns of overwhelming damage.
Read my NIKKE Green Laplace/Missilis deck guide to learn more about this aggressive archetype.
#3 Purple Pilgrim/Pioneer
If you’re still wanting the purple Nikke UNION ARENA flavor but running a bunch of triggerless cards makes you nervous, you might like the Pilgrim/Pioneer deck instead. This deck is surprisingly solid, with a collection of decent BP reducing/removal effects that help you when dealing with 4000 BP characters. Meanwhile, this deck’s color trigger character, Snow White, is very handy, letting you shut off abilities on opposing characters – a solid counter into cards like Roy Mustang that dominate the meta.
And while Snow White is a solid secondary attacker to this deck strategy, your strongest character for outright removal is four-cost Modernia. Raid her to reduce the BP of an opposing character by 3000 BP, and couple that with your other characters like the very effective three-cost Scarlet to finish off a 4000 BP character or more.
Solid removal, a handy ability negation via Snow White, and topped off with a heavy-hitter like the five-cost Scarlet makes Purple Pioneer a solid choice for players looking for a well-rounded deck with a lot of options.
Learn how to play the underdog Pilgrim/Pioneer deck.
#2 Purple Pilgrim/Inherit
The Nikke Pilgrim/Inherit deck brings one of the most unique mechanics into UNION ARENA so far – a deck focused on triggerless cards. Not only do you gain benefits from running an incredibly low count of triggers, this deck also seeks to punish your opponent for using triggers in their deck.
While there are a lot of interesting little mechanics to support this strategy baked into the deck, the strategy ultimately culminates into your five-cost Dorothy Raid who acts as a powerful removal tool with a pretty impressive range. Just how strong of a character can Dorothy remove? Almost anything as her BP scales to 8000 BP. That’s enough to take out a Colossal Titan!
And while you do have a few cards that help you get value off of your cards that get hit from life without trigger – like the three-cost Dorothy that lets you draw a card for each triggerless off of life or the Eden site card that lets you add them to hand –the tradeoff sometimes doesn’t feel worth it. Instead, these cards can feel more like a consolation prize for not having had more triggers in your deck in the first place, rather than a true incentive to lean into this strategy.
That being said, the combination of Dorothy’s powerful removal with the two-AP cost Scarlet for late-game finishing make this deck feel viable – even if it may not be likely to fall into the hands of the most competitive UNION ARENA player out there.
Check out my full guide to the NIKKE Purple Dorothy deck for more info.
#1 Yellow NIKKE – Counters with Modernia
If you’re looking for a deck with the draw and removal power to keep up with the current UNION ARENA meta, NIKKE Yellow Counters/Modernia is the deck for you. NIKKE Yellow has a lot going for it. For starters, Moderna is a very solid removal character with a similar kind of appeal as the legendary Roy Mustang deck – capable of taking high-powered removals turn-after-turn.
Raid Modernia is a high-powered removal tool
When you play her, you get to bring a bunch of “Memory” event cards to your hand. Then, you get to send as many event cards from your hand into your sideline as you want to sideline something on your opponent’s field with BP equal to 1000 plus 1000 per card sent to the sideline. This is basically Roy Mustang’s removal effect only with massive recyclability thanks to the “When Played” effect that lets you instantly fill your hand with up to four event cards (assuming you’ve managed to hit all of your Memory events).
You also have plenty of ways to draw cards, and search out events in this deck. For example, the four-cost Rapi lets you search out an event card and add it to the hand while also easily gaining Impact.
And while she’s your strongest card searching character overall because she doubles as a solid offensive character, you also have two additional search tools via your Marian characters.
While zero-cost Marian is a draw card not a searcher, she still fits the theme of helping you get what you need. Indeed, Modernia has a very solid raid line of characters built-in to her strategy thanks to these three different potential raid targets, with the three-cost letting you search the top seven for a “Memory” event and the two-cost letting you search at the top three for either a “Memory” card or “Counters” character.
In total, this combination of low-cost draw and search capabilities significantly bolster the NIKKE Yellow Counters strategy.
Raid Anis is Yellow Counter’s Swiss Army Knife
Another powerful supporting character is four-cost Raid Anis. Anis has a pretty powerful draw effect, letting you draw potentially three new cards when you play her and only requiring that you sideline one card. She also has a “Nullify Impact” and Double Block which is pretty impressive given the rest of her abilities.
Ideally I’d like to run Raid Anis at a higher count, but in this deck build it feels hard to fit her in optimally as the Raid Rapi and Modernia are both so critical to this deck’s functionality. Anis is still a solid character, however, and even just having two of her adds some solid utility to this deck build.
Neon is a powerful Damage 2 attacker
As if all of that weren’t good enough, you have yet another strong attacker who also functions as your card with the color trigger, and that is the four-cost Neon.
Although played raidless, having Damage 2 on a raidless character like this (with only needing to have played an event to get access to it) is extremely strong. And don’t forget her “When Attacking” effect that lets you draw-one-sideline-one! Attackers like this are worth their weight in gold and NEON is a an instant must-have in your NIKKE Yellow deck list.
All-in-all, there’s enough here with the solid draw, search capabilities, and powerful removal that you can theoretically use turn after turn to make Yellow Nikke a decent-sized threat to the meta – if not necessary a contender for the S-tier.
Get more insights into the Yellow Modernia NIKKE deck via my guide.
