Steins;Gate Union Arena Guide: Pull Rates, Chase Cards & Decks (UA57BT, 2026)

The quick verdict: Steins;Gate (UA57BT) is a two-colour, four-archetype Union Arena set with a lean box. A 16-pack display reliably gives you about 4 SRs and exactly one parallel — and that is usually the whole story. The double-star SR★★ landed once every 16 boxes across the 32 documented here, the triple-star SR★★★ landed zero times, and the hand-signed serial AP landed zero times. Meanwhile the plain SR foils you actually need to build a deck were listing at $6.50–$14.75. That combination gives this set an unusually clear answer: open one box for the Steins;Gate nostalgia, then buy the SRs as singles.

What Is Steins;Gate Union Arena?

Steins;Gate (UA57BT, card codes UA57BT/STG-1-xxx) is a booster set for Bandai's Union Arena TCG, built on the 2011 time-travel anime. It released in Japan on Friday 23 October 2026. The lineup is the Future Gadget Lab roster — Okabe Rintaro, Makise Kurisu, Shiina Mayuri, Hashida Itaru (Daru), Urushibara Luka, Amane Suzuha, Kiryu Moeka, Faris Nyan-Nyan, Mr. Braun and Tennouji Nae — plus event cards drawn straight from the show's best-known beats: "This Is the Choice of Steins Gate", Stardust Handshake, Mayushii's Slap and Operation Skuld.

This is a nostalgia set first, and the openings make that obvious — one opener noted he rewatches the anime once a year and still plays the game on Switch 2; another worked out mid-box that he watched it live in university, fifteen years ago. Bandai leaned into it with a pile of newly-drawn illustrations commissioned for the product, which the community debated on camera: the officially-styled anime-screenshot cards got a warmer reception than some of the new art.

Union Arena is a smaller TCG in the West, so there is no 500-box aggregate to work from. This guide is built the way a thin-data set has to be: structure from what every documented box agrees on, hit rates from the actual run totals, and prices from a live Japanese export shop's launch-weekend list. The sample is 32 boxes / 512 packs across four separate openings, including one full 16-box carton — which for a Union Arena set published two days after release is an unusually deep look.

One structural note that matters before you buy: this is a Japanese release and the Japanese display has no box topper. If your reference point is the English Union Arena sets — Inuyasha, for instance, ships a separate 1-of-8 topper pack with three gold-foil designs — do not expect one here. Across all 32 documented boxes, every single hit came out of the 16 game packs.

Box Composition & Pack Structure

What every documented opening agrees on:

• 16 packs per display box — confirmed independently, including one three-person opening that split a box into 6 + 5 + 5 packs on camera
• 16 boxes per carton
• ~¥6,200 per box (about $40), i.e. roughly ¥385 per pack at Japanese retail
• 2 colours — blue and green — across 4 deck archetypes
• No box-topper pack in the Japanese display
• Rarity grades in the set: C · C★ · U · U★ · R · R★ · SR · SR★ · SR★★ · SR★★★ · AP
• The chase is a hand-signed, serial-numbered AP card of the two lead heroines — Makise Kurisu and Shiina Mayuri

The ★ suffix is the thing to understand. In Union Arena a star is a parallel treatment of an existing card number, not a separate card — so Makise Kurisu STG-1-029 exists as a plain SR foil, as an SR★, and as an SR★★★, all the same card with escalating finish. That is why a 124-entry singles list for a set this size is mostly the same two dozen characters repeating up the ladder.

And here is the part that defines the set: a box gives you one parallel. One. Both the Japanese openers and the English-language opener state it outright — "you're guaranteed one parallel card per box, and then you can possibly get a parallel action point card" — and a three-person group opening three boxes side by side confirmed it the hard way, stopping to clarify on camera that their three parallels came from three separate boxes, one each, not three from one box. That single parallel can be any rarity's star version, from a C★ up to the SR★★★. Usually it is near the bottom of that range.

Because the real sample is 32 boxes rather than hundreds, we are not publishing a fake per-pack percentage table. Here is what is structural versus what the boxes actually produced:

Read the bottom three rows together: across 512 packs, the set's entire top end produced two double-stars and nothing else. A Steins;Gate box is a 4-SR box with a parallel in it — anything above that is a genuine outlier.

Where to buy Steins;Gate Union Arena

Japanese retail is ~¥6,200 (about $40) per box, and basically nobody outside Japan is paying that. Allocation is the story of this release: one channel pre-ordered a full carton and was allocated 10 boxes instead of 16 — they spent the intro of the video asking Bandai to print more. A Japanese export shop had the sealed box listed at $104.99 and already out of stock on launch weekend. The English-language opener described simply grabbing the one box his store had left on the Saturday. Check your local game store before paying a secondary markup, and note that UA57BT is a Japanese-language product.

Observed Run Log: 32 Boxes

Combined data from 32 display boxes (512 packs) across four separate release-weekend openings. With a sample this shape, the honest move is to show each run rather than blend everything into one invented percentage — because the runs disagree, and the disagreement is the useful part.

Small sample, and the carton run was a highlight edit rather than a card-by-card count, so the SR column rests mainly on the two runs that tracked it. We'll update the log as more openings appear.

What the openings agree on

• ~4 SRs per box, not ~6. This is the headline difference from a set like Inuyasha. The group run called out a 3-SR box, several 4-SR boxes and a 5-SR box in the same session, and the independently-opened English-language box finished on exactly 4 — its opener said "I think we usually get, what, four SRs in these per box" before he started, and he was right.
• Exactly one parallel per box. Stated by openers on both sides of the language barrier and verified on camera across three simultaneous boxes. It can be any rarity's star version — the single box documented in English produced an R★, not an SR★.
• The top end is genuinely empty. Two SR★★ in 32 boxes; zero SR★★★; zero signed serial APs. The group run opened ten boxes and finished with no double-star at all, which is well within normal at a 1-in-16 rate — that is the variance buyers need to price in.
• Triple-stars are a career event, not a box event. The group run's own cumulative figure: roughly 500 Union Arena boxes opened across all sets, and two SR★★★ in that entire history — call it 1 in 250 boxes. That is the number to hold in your head, not a per-box percentage.
• AP cards clump. Four across 32 boxes, but they did not arrive evenly: the carton's two both came out of its final box, the group run's two were the same card twice (Kiryu Moeka), and the five-box solo run pulled none at all — its opener signed off with "I couldn't pull a single AP."
• SRs come in badly distributed. The clearest finding in the whole sample: ten boxes was not enough to finish one deck. The group laid their SRs out and found duplicate Okabe Rintaro SRs stacked up while the green Makise Kurisu deck they wanted to build sat at three copies of one key SR and two of another — "full of holes," in their words.

The Rarity Ladder

Steins;Gate's eleven rarity grades, from bulk to top lottery:

C / U / R                    ← deck bulk
→ C★ / U★ / R★               ← parallel commons; often the box's one parallel
→ SR (foil)                  ← ~4 per box, the reliable hit
→ SR★ (single-star)          ← parallel of an SR
→ SR★★ (double-star)         ← ~1 in 16 boxes
→ SR★★★ (triple-star)        ← 0 in 32 boxes; ~1 in 250 boxes career-wide
→ AP (character AP card)     ← ~1 in 8 boxes
→ Signed serial AP           ← chase lottery (Kurisu & Mayuri)

Prices are launch-weekend (25 October 2026) asks on a Japanese export shop's list, in USD and including export markup — not sold prices. Note the shape: the SR tier tops out at $14.75 while a single SR★★ runs $162–$375. Union Arena concentrates value in the parallel finish, not in the card.

The Chase Cards

A hard guardrail for a set this thin: these are launch-weekend asks from an export shop, not a settled market. Of the 47 highest-priced Steins;Gate singles listed two days after release, 14 were already sold out — including every triple-star and the AP01. Cross-check eBay sold listings and price to the recent-sold cluster before you buy or sell anything here.

Two things worth calling out. First, the event-card parallels punch above their rarity — a Stardust Handshake R★ at ~$52 out-prices every plain SR in the set, because the famous scenes carry the demand. Second, the SR tier is remarkably cheap, and the openers noticed in real time: one said mid-box that "the SRs look cheap this time, so if I come up short I'll just buy them." That is the correct read, and it is the backbone of the verdict below.

The AP Cards & The Signed Serial

AP (Action Point) cards are Steins;Gate's equivalent of a box-topper chase, except they sit in the 16 game packs. There are six documented character APs — AP01 Okabe & Makise Kurisu, AP02 Mayuri, AP03 Moeka, AP04 Luka, AP05 Faris, AP06 Suzuha — and they carried asks of $33.50 to $77.25 on launch weekend, with AP01 sold out entirely.

A naming trap worth untangling, because it will confuse you watching openings: openers use "AP" for two different things. The character AP cards above are the once-every-several-boxes hit — the Japanese openers reacted to each one and one of them joked that his Moeka AP was "probably worth about ¥2,000." Plain action-point cards are a different, far more frequent thing; the English-language opener counted three in his single box without blinking, and also pulled a Union Arena code card he couldn't identify. When this guide says 4 APs in 32 boxes, it means the character APs — the tier with a price.

The real chase above all of that is the hand-signed, serial-numbered AP of Makise Kurisu and Shiina Mayuri. Bandai's own marketing led with it, and it is why multiple openers bought in — the five-box solo run opened with "what I'm really after is Makise Kurisu's autograph." None appeared in 32 boxes. Nobody is listing one. If a signed serial is why you're buying, understand that you are buying a lottery ticket at ~$40–105 a draw.

The Four Decks

Steins;Gate is a two-colour set — blue and green — with four archetypes. The group run that opened ten boxes was explicit that there are four axes and they could not find a hidden fifth. Consensus from the openings: green is the stronger colour, blue is the pricier one. The openers predicted on camera that the blue Okabe and Mayuri raid cards would command the highest prices while green stayed cheaper — and the launch-weekend list bore it out, with Mayuri 2★ at $375 and Okabe 2★ at $250 sitting on top.

• Blue Okabe Rintaro (Lab Member 001) — the recursion deck. The SR Okabe (STG-1-011) goes to the outside zone instead of the usual area, and with seven or more blue cards banked out there he returns to the remove area rather than leaving play, redeploying off his raid effect to drop a cheap blue body back onto the field. The archetype the market priced highest.
• Blue Shiina Mayuri — the tempo-lock deck. Mayuri's SR raid (energy 4, 1 AP) draws a card and shuts off an opposing front-line attacker until your next turn, with a BP boost stapled on. Paired with the Okabe raid it is the pair openers expected to carry the set's price ceiling.
• Green Makise Kurisu / D-Mail — the engine deck, and the one the group actually wanted to build. The zero-energy green Kurisu parallel drew the strongest review of any card in the set — draw, filter, pump, and cheat out a 2-or-less green character active — with the verdict "you need four of these, definitely." Urushibara Luka's zero-cost searcher (free when your board is empty, digs four deep for a Field or D-Mail card) was called a mandatory four-of for the same shell, and Faris Nyan-Nyan's energy-5 raid is the payoff, re-triggering her on-play once you've used an event and have a Field down.
• Green Amane Suzuha ("part-time warrior") — the repeat-attack deck. Her SR (energy 4, 2 AP) discards to re-activate herself when there's space in your front line, and from the energy line she can slide into the front after an attack resolves. Openers flagged it as the serial-attack shell and liked it immediately: "it just keeps moving."

The practical point for deck-builders is the one from the run log: ten boxes did not finish one of these decks. Two colours and four axes means the SR pool is spread thin, and the duplicates land where you don't want them. Which brings us to the verdict.

Should You Open or Buy Singles?

Most pull-rate verdicts come down to "don't chase a $400 card through $5 packs." Steins;Gate has a sharper version, because the gap between the cheap tier and the chase tier is unusually wide: the cards you need cost less than a pack, and the cards you want cost more than a carton of expected spend.

Open if:

• You want the Steins;Gate nostalgia rip. This is honestly most of the audience — the openings are 25 minutes of people recognising scenes from fifteen years ago, and that experience is the product.
• You want a spread of C/U/R bulk and a few SRs to start from, and you're relaxed about which ones.
• You're buying a lottery ticket on a signed serial AP or a triple-star and you accept that 32 documented boxes produced neither.
• You can buy at Japanese retail (~¥6,200). At ~$105 exported, the maths gets materially worse.

Buy singles if:

• You want to build a specific deck. This is the big one. SR foils were $6.50–$14.75, so a four-of playset is $26–$60 — cheaper than one box, with no duplicates. Ten boxes failed to complete a single archetype.
• You want any SR★★ — at 1 in 16 boxes across eight-plus cards, chasing a named one is irrational.
• You want a specific AP card. AP01 aside (nobody's selling), the priced APs are $33–$77, far below the expected cost of opening into the ~1-in-8 AP slot and then hitting the right character.
• You want an event parallel like Stardust Handshake. At ~$52 it's one of the best-value cards in the set and it sits inside the single-parallel-per-box slot.

The numbers on chasing the Mayuri 2★

• Observed SR★★ rate: 2 in 32 boxes = 1 per 16 boxes. That's any double-star, not the one you want.
• There are at least eight distinct SR★★ cards (Kurisu 028, Mayuri 018, Suzuha 046 and 004, Okabe 011, Moeka 056, Faris 066, Luka 050). Assume a roughly even spread and a named 2★ is around 1 in 128 boxes.
• At Japanese retail that's roughly ¥790,000 (~$5,100) of expected spend for a card asking ~$375. At export prices (~$105/box) it's closer to $13,000.
• The triple-star is worse by an order of magnitude: zero in our 32 boxes, and about 1 in 250 boxes on a 500-box career figure — across all Union Arena sets, so a specific Steins;Gate triple-star is rarer still.
• And the consolation prize is not consolation: a box that misses gives you four SRs worth maybe $40 of shop ask, most of them duplicates of what you already have.

The honest bottom line: buy one box for the rip if Steins;Gate means something to you — 16 packs, about four SRs, one parallel, and a genuinely good time. Then stop and buy the rest. The SR playsets you need to actually play this set cost less than that box did, the 2★ you want is a 1-in-128-box chase against a $375 ask, and the signed serial that Bandai advertised did not appear once in 512 packs. Open for the nostalgia; buy for the deck.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many SRs are in a Steins;Gate Union Arena box?

About 4 Super Rares per 16-pack display box. The documented boxes landed on 3, 4 and 5 SRs with 4 the most common, and the one box opened card-by-card in English finished on exactly four. That's leaner than the ~6 SRs a Union Arena set like Inuyasha produced — if you're coming from that set, adjust your expectations down.

What are the odds of an SR★★ in Steins;Gate?

Roughly 1 in 16 boxes. Across 32 boxes (512 packs) exactly two double-stars appeared: a Faris Nyan-Nyan in a 16-box carton and an Urushibara Luka in a separate five-box run. A 10-box run produced none — which is entirely normal at that rate, and exactly the variance to budget for. Since the 2★ tier is at least eight cards deep, a specific 2★ is nearer 1 in 128 boxes.

Has anyone pulled an SR★★★ or a signed serial AP?

Not in this sample — zero of each across 32 boxes. The two triple-stars we can confirm, Makise Kurisu STG-1-029 and Shiina Mayuri STG-1-017, were sold out with no listed price on launch weekend because nobody had one to sell. For scale, one channel with roughly 500 Union Arena boxes of history across all sets has pulled a triple-star twice ever — about 1 in 250 boxes.

Is the Mayuri 2★ worth chasing through packs?

No. Shiina Mayuri STG-1-018 SR★★ was the highest-priced single in the set at ~$375, and the expected spend to hit that specific card runs to roughly $5,100 at Japanese retail and well over $13,000 at export box prices. Buy the single. The same logic applies to Okabe 011 at ~$250.

Should I open boxes or buy the SR singles for a deck?

Buy the singles — this set makes it an easy call. SR foils were listing at $6.50–$14.75, so a full four-of playset is about $26–$60, less than one box. And the sample has the counter-example: ten boxes left one group's chosen green Kurisu deck at three copies of one key SR and two of another, while duplicate Okabe SRs piled up unused.

Does a Steins;Gate box have a box topper?

No. No box-topper pack appeared in any documented Japanese display opening. The English Union Arena releases ship a separate 1-of-8 topper pack (five foil, three gold foil); the Japanese UA57BT display is 16 game packs and nothing more, so every hit on this page came out of those 16 packs.

How much is a box and can you actually find one?

About ¥6,200 (~$40) at Japanese retail, roughly ¥385 a pack — but finding one at that price is the hard part. One channel pre-ordered a full 16-box carton and was allocated 10; a Japanese export shop listed the sealed box at $104.99 and was already out of stock two days after release; and an opener outside Japan described taking the last box his store had. Union Arena allocation has been tight across recent sets and Steins;Gate is no exception.

Disclaimer: Pull rates here are community estimates aggregated from 32 documented display boxes (512 packs) opened over Steins;Gate's Japanese release weekend, including one full 16-box carton; the carton run was a highlight edit, so per-box SR counts rest mainly on the runs that itemised them. Expect real variance at this sample size. Prices are launch-weekend (25 October 2026) asks in USD from a Japanese export shop's singles list — not settled sold prices, and they include export markup. Verify eBay sold listings and current prices before buying or selling. This is not financial advice.