UNION ARENA: Purple Gaius Deck List and Guide
Purple Gaius is the strongest Evangelion deck. Coming to the UNION ARENA English Version with zero cuts, players are free to pilot Purple Gaius at full power – and they will to great effect. Purple Gaius shoots directly to the top of the UNION ARENA following its release thanks to its powerful combos and ability to rapidly flood the board with 4000 BP+ attackers.
Below, we’ll be looking at the ins-and-outs of this next generation deck and why it’s the one to watch from Evangelion.
Purple Gaius’s key card
Surprise surprise! The Purple Gaius deck’s key card is – Gaius! This Evangelion is arguably the strongest in the game, offering insane draw support, and the ability to rapidly fill your front line with strong attackers.
It may just look like an ordinary Evangelion, but essentially built into this one card is three different high BP attackers. Achieve this by:
Raiding this 5000 BP Impact character out.
Draw a card and play another (preferably) high powered character to the front line.
Sideline a (preferably) low BP character and play yet another high powered character from your hand.
You have three different characters that are ideal for this effect: Asuka, Mari, and Shinji.
The five-cost Shinji is one of your more useful character cards in the deck, doubling as both an energy generating character when needed as well as a 4000 BP attacker that can be played set to active via your Gaius’s effect.
Six-cost Asuka, meanwhile, is pretty straightforward as a 5000 BP attacker that lets you extend your draw power when played. Mari is the ideal character to use when you’ve sidelined a character with Gaius’s Activate: Main. Use her to bring a Shinji to the field so you have something to block with the following turn.
The Misato Raid package
The Gaius free-play in active mechanic is the strongest aspect of this deck. But like any good deck, it’s not the only powerful play at your disposal. The Misato Raid package is also quite strong and gives you a devastating way to control your opponent’s board.
Zero-cost Misato is an excellent Raid target but also offers a strong BP boosting effect.
One-cost Misato is arguably the strongest in the Raid line, letting you grant Impact or Damage 2 to any character on your board – an excellent play into your Gaius or into your other 4000+ BP attackers.
Three-cost Misato is a decent draw effect while also acting as one of your energy generation characters.
Control your opponent’s board with the AAA Wunder
All of these Raid targets are strong, but they are especially strong for their ability to feed into the AAA Wunder.
The AAA Wunder works very well in this strategy. Pair it with the one-cost Misato and you are forcing your opponent to block with a character while also doing Impact. This is very similar to the Guren play from Purple Code Geass, but with the added benefit of letting you search out two five-cost characters from the top five cards of your deck when sidelined.
Devastating offensively, a pain for your opponent to sideline – AAA Wunder is the ideal supporting Raid for your Gaius deck.
I like color-trigger Mari for this build
While you can also pair this deck with the other Purple Color trigger on the Kaworu, Mari is just excellent at enabling this deck to draw even more cards.
Speaking of draw, it’s something that this deck massively excels at – letting you draw from multiple cards in a single turn. Even the special has a draw effect built into it.
There’s a reason Gaius is already considered a top tier deck in the UNION ARENA meta. Consistent, powerful, with an unparalleled ability to flood the frontline with strong attackers, Purple Gaius is a shoo-in for top UNION ARENA deck, and should dominate the meta for a good while.
Purple Gaius matchups
Purple Gaius has solid matchups going into the meta, doing well against the likes of Saito, the Red Evangelion deck, GGO and even the powerful Purple Yuna deck.
However, there is one area that careful testing has depicted as a potential problem for this deck: aggro decks.
Despite how fast and powerful this deck is for a high energy deck, it still takes some time to ramp up to seven energy, giving aggro decks the opportunity to take too much life before Gaius builds up to its bigger combos.
Red Kenshin will also likely be a difficult matchup for Purple Gaius. Not only can Red Kenshin move quickly, its energy line disruption could be a big problem for a seven-energy cost deck like this one.
Regardless, Purple Gaius has solid achievements in the Japanese meta, and will likely be a dominate deck in the English version, taking the covetted title as best deck in format.
