UNION ARENA: Purple Yuna Deck List and Guide
Purple Yuna is the strongest Sword Art Online deck, and when in the right hands can do some incredible things that haven’t been possible in the UNION ARENA English version until now. However, with all of that power also comes a high learning curve – Purple Yuna might just have the highest learning curve of any other UNION ARENA deck I’ve played to date.
There are so many combos and ways to extend the options available to you in a single turn that it really almost feels like you’re playing a different game when you’re playing Purple Yuna.
Below, we’ll be looking at my Purple Yuna deck and going over how to play this challenging but rewarding deck.
Purple Yuna deck – core “song” combos
Normally when I write about UNION ARENA decks I tend to start with the deck’s strongest attacker. However, the Purple Yuna deck is unique in that it’s a top tier UNION ARENA deck that is more about how strong its combos is than any single main Raid character or attacker.
If there’s any single mechanic I would highlight to impart this deck’s strength, it would have to be the “song” mechanic. Indeed, everything in this deck is built around these “song” affinity cards, and they are very, very challenging to use effectively. Indeed, when combined, the song mechanic gives you far, far many more options than what you typically experience in a UNION ARENA game.
What is the strongest “song” card in the Purple Yuna deck? Arguably, it is the Special Trigger “smile for you” that gets that honor. Really, more than any other it’s the single card that makes this deck make sense.
smile for you
“smile for you” is a deceptively strong card, letting you achieve many things in one card. To start, you can easily bring back a key character from your sideline using its ability. In effect, “smile for you” extends the resources at your disposal to encompass your sideline as well as your deck, hand, and life. Being able to pull just about any card from your sideline to your hand when you take into consideration all of the effects in your deck makes Purple Yuna very strong.
What “smile for you” is achieving, however, isn’t just letting you extend the value of the cards in your sideline – it then lets you play a character set to active from your hand to the field, letting you get added power out of the many strong one AP-cost 4000 BP attackers in your deck.
As if that weren’t enough, they gain a powerful layer of protection that prevents them from being chosen by character abilities.
Yuna Raid characters
Despite starting by saying that there aren’t any single characters to cover here, the most impactful ones still are the two Raid Yuna characters. They are the two characters that make the rest of the mechanics in this deck flow.
Three-cost Raid Yuna
If I had to pick one of the Raid Yuna’s to be this deck’s MVP, it would be a hard choice as both are strong. In the end, I’d probably go with the three-cost Yuna, however. She’s just so good, although she admittedly plays a supporting role in this deck. Her When Played is a powerful effect that lets you bring a song card from your sideline to your hand. This is massively effective at bringing “smile for you” back, and recycling that effect over and over and over again.
Meanwhile, having the 1000 BP buff to a character When Played combined with her Activate: Main that grants an additional 1000 BP is also quite impressive, enabling you to turn regular 2000 BP attackers like Agil quickly into 4000 BP threats.
Yuna isn’t a closer – she’s a support character much like she is in the movie, and she pairs excellently with the other core mechanics in this deck to dominate the playing field.
Four-cost Raid Yuna
Now the four-cost Yuna gets a little more into the realm of attacker, however her role in this deck is still primarily as a supporting character. Both of her effects are powerful, with her When Played letting you play a song card for free (zero AP) and her Activate: Main being particularly powerful when combined with the four-cost Asuna who can easily scale to become an Impact 1 Damage 2 character who can be played set to active via your “smile for you.”
Yuna Raid targets unlock powerful filtering and search
Yuna is also noteworthy from her powerful band of Raid targets, with the strongest being the one-cost. One-cost Yuna’s song searching effect is so strong that she was limited in Japan when she came out. We have yet to hear if a similar restriction will be in place in the English version, but either way it shouldn’t hold this deck back too much. Two-cost Yuna is also quite strong, with a very powerful filtering effect that you can sequence with your “smile for you” to search out powerful characters to then bring back and play set to active.
Kirito brings powerful removal into the Purple Yuna deck
The other character that really bears having his own section devoted to him is the four-cost Kirito.
While many of the characters in this deck are strong, Kirito is basically your secret sauce. Use “smile for you” to bring him back and play him over and over again, while using your powerful AP extending effects to get plenty of plays off in your turn while still sidelining a character with 5000 BP or less.
Four-cost Yuna can easily boost Kirito to a Damage 2 Nullify Impact character as well, giving you added efficacy out of this powerhouse character.
Song cards unlock incredible AP extension
The last point I’d like to touch on is the AP extension you get in this deck. You just get so many free plays for your cards that make playing this deck unlike anything else. Four-cost Raid Yuna lets you play a song card for free, your song cards let you re-stand AP, and your special “smile for you” lets you play a character for free. With all of this free play you’re simply able to just go well beyond what a typical deck can do in a single turn, whether that be playing more cards, searching for more cards, or whatever you need to overcome the challenge right in front of you.
I built Purple Yuna just about right away after opening my Sword Art Online Vol. 2 case, and I was immediately blown away by how strong this deck is. It truly isn’t like any deck we’ve had in the English version of the game to date, and it’s going to be a huge deck for competitive play in the English meta. With that power, however, comes a great deal of skill – it’s also one of the tougher decks to pilot.
In the right hands with the right amount of practice, this deck can be absolutely deadly, however.
