The Yellow Elric Brothers deck from UNION ARENA: Fullmetal Alchemist should be a phenomenally popular choice for players and fans of the anime. Even better, you can fairly easily build this deck by upgrading the Fullmetal Alchemist starter deck (available from my friends at TCGPlayer). Below, I’ll be getting into the core mechanics that make this deck hum, as well as some of the specific card choices that will make your build stand out from the crowd.

Fullmetal Alchemist Yellow Elric Brothers deck list

The Yellow Elric Bros deck is easily one of the strongest Fullmetal Alchemist decks, complete with fantastic combos and a swarm strategy aimed at overwhelming your opponent. Let’s take a look at each card in this deck and how it adds value to your overarching strategy.

Zero cost characters

Fullmetal Alchemist Yellow runs a decent lineup of zero-cost characters. All of them have triggers, and Edward acts as a raid target for your Edward Raids. Alphonse, meanwhile, is your staple draw-one-sideline-one. Winry is your weakest link. However, granting additional BP is hardly a bad thing, and she has a trigger keeping your value out of life consistent.

One-cost Alphonse plays a critical role in this deck strategy

When building decks, I always like to include four copies of a one-cost character as doing so helps build consistency in your energy curve. Lucky for us, Yellow Elric Bros has a fantastic one-cost character in the form of Alphonse.

While being a one-cost, 2500 BP with an Active trigger is handy enough, what really makes this guy complete is his Activate:Main ability. Essentially, activate this effect and you can turn your Edward Elric raid back into a raided character. This is going to be a very handy play in this deck as Edward has effects that unraid himself. By combining the Edward Raid with this Alphonse, you get to have your cake and eat it to.

Two-energy gen cards

Having a solid energy line is important to this deck just like any other UNION ARENA deck, and while you don’t need to build up to high-cost character – your highest are only four-cost in this deck – you still have plenty of options to ensure you have the energy you need to make big plays down the line.

Two-cost Winry

Two-cost Winry feels like a very solid supporting character for this deck. At only two-cost, she’s granting two energy just by having Edward Elric on the front line. She also has the Active trigger which is always nice, and can grant 500 BP to a character on the field.

Gateway of Truth

Gateway of Truth is one very solid site. First of all, it’s generating two energy for you which is handy to say the least. Second, letting you draw-two-sideline-two is very helpful in this deck – enabling you to see more cards while also putting key ones into your sideline. As if that weren’t enough, Gateway of Truth can’t be chosen by opposing abilities, making it impervious to the likes of Mechamaru’s site-killing effect.

I’m not a big fan of the “Activate:Main” effect as it will be taking a life to use it. You can use this effect in a pinch if you really need to find a character, but paying a life feels pricey unless you’re sure you can afford it.

Finally, Gateway of Truth interacts with your four-cost Alphonse in an important way, giving you yet another reason to add this card to your deck.

Three-cost Edward

Three-cost Edward with attitude is an excellent card for this deck, enabling you to filter through two cards, and place whatever you don’t want into your sideline.

Elric Bros core combos

Now that we’ve covered our bases with the lower-cost characters necessary to building up an energy line, let’s look at the core combos this deck has access to in order to make it work.

Edward and Alphonse

Assuming you have all of the cards you need in play, the strongest possible combo you can pull of with this deck is arguably to bring your four-cost Alphonse to the field using Edward Elric’s When Played. If you have Gateway of Truth in play, you can bring this four-cost Alphonse back from your sideline, play him to your field, and pay an AP to switch him to active while also resting a character on your opponent’s field.

This is a very handy effect, giving you more characters to attack your opponent with while simultaneously weakening their defenses.

Another effective play is to bring back the three-cost Alphonse. While not nearly as strong of a card, this Alphonse can be switched to active the turn he is played and even boosts to 4000 BP. What’s more, assuming you played this guy with one of your effects, you get to draw a card – something which will help make discarding two cards a little more feasible.

Starter deck Edward is a powerful card search engine

Starter Deck Edward fills a void in this deck as your Impact attacker. While his “When Played” will cause him to become unraided, you can get away without using it, or simply use one-cost Alphonse to make him Raided once again.

Flex card slots

Along with the core combos and cards above, this deck runs two tech cards. The first is the very handy “Let’s Go Home” event card, which you could consider a core card except you could technically do without. This card is very, very effective, letting you bring back a card from your sideline and then play a card, essentially giving you a free action as you won’t have to pay any more AP for the card you use with this effect. Additionally, this is an effective way to play your Alphonse characters and take advantage of their effects that unlock when played via a card effect.

Roy Mustang provides helpful removal

Finally, there’s Roy Mustang. This two-AP character may only remove 3000 BP characters, but you get the added benefit of those cards removed being sent to the Removal Area instead of the sideline, bypassing effects that trigger when sidelined, and potentially barring your opponent from accessing cards they need to have in their sideline for other effects.

This will not be a card that every Yellow FMA player will run, but could be very handy in certain matchups, and especially handy in the FMA Rare Battle format.

While I originally placed Fullmetal Alchemist Yellow Elric brothers at the top of my list of the decks to watch from the set, the more I look at FMA Yellow the more this deck feels like a solid second tier deck. Fully capable of competing in the meta, at the end of the day it’s not doing anything crazy different than the decks we already have in the S tier.

The real draw of playing this deck is going to be for fans of the anime who have been waiting forever to duke it out in the arena with the legendary Elric bros. For fans of the show, this deck delivers a fantastic play experience that’s relatively competitive, even if lacking some components to make it satisfactory for the most competitive players.

UNION ARENA: Fullmetal Alchemist Yellow Elric Bros Deck