How to Mulligan in GCG: Building a Better Opening Hand

Your opening hand is a contract with your deck — and a bad mulligan decision can cost you the game before your first unit hits the field. Here’s how to read that contract correctly.

How the Mulligan Rule Works

At the start of a GCG game, each player draws five cards. Once you’ve seen your hand, you have a single opportunity to mulligan, but it’s all-or-nothing: return your entire hand to the bottom of your deck, draw five new cards, and shuffle. You cannot swap individual cards or partially redraw — the choice is binary. Player One decides first; Player Two then decides knowing Player One’s call. Whatever you draw on the redraw is what you play with.

That single-pass, all-or-nothing structure is critical. Unlike formats with multiple mulligan steps or per-card swaps, GCG punishes indecision and over-engineering. You need to know before you pick up your hand what a keepable opening looks like for your specific deck. Going in without criteria means you’re making a gut-feel call under pressure, and gut-feel is how you end up keeping a hand of cheap cards with no real threat, or a hand of expensive cards your Resource curve can’t reach for four turns.

What Every Keepable Hand Needs

Regardless of archetype, a keepable five-card hand generally satisfies three conditions:

– At least one Turn 1 play. A Unit you can deploy on your first turn, or a card that meaningfully advances your position. Sitting empty on Turn 1 hands your opponent free tempo.
– A functional cost curve. Your Resources tick up by 1 each turn (1 / 2 / 3 / 4…), so you need plays at multiple costs. A hand of three four-cost Units is dead until Turn 4, and a hand of five 1-cost Units has nothing meaningful to do once your opponent stabilizes.
– At least one card that gestures at your deck’s win condition. If your deck wins through a specific Pair Up between a key Pilot and Unit, or through a high-AP finisher, your opener should at least not contradict that plan — it doesn’t have to guarantee the kill, just keep the line alive.

If a hand clears all three, it’s almost always a keep. If it fails two of the three, ship it without hesitation. The hard decisions live in the middle.

Conversely, don’t fall into the opposite trap: keeping a hand of five cheap, immediately-playable cards because they feel “safe.” Safe is not the same as functional. You still need a threat.

The Resource Curve Trap

The single most common mulligan mistake in GCG is keeping a hand whose costs don’t match the early-game Resource curve. Your Resource Area builds automatically — each Resource Phase you draw one card from your separate 10-card Resource Deck and place it in your Resource Area — so you’ll have 1 Resource on Turn 1, 2 on Turn 2, 3 on Turn 3, and so on. (Going second, you start with an EX Resource, so you’ll have 2 on your first turn.) Resources come from a dedicated deck — cards in your hand are never committed face-down to generate them.

That changes the mulligan question. It’s not “which of these am I comfortable putting face-down?” — that decision doesn’t exist in GCG. The real question is: when will each card in this hand actually become playable? A hand of two four-cost Units, a five-cost Unit, and two two-cost Units can’t put anything in the Battle Area until Turn 2 at the earliest, and won’t unlock the four-cost Units until Turn 4. If you’re going first with that hand, your opponent gets three turns of free attacks at your Shield Area before you have a meaningful response.

The flip side: don’t keep a hand of five 1-cost cards just because every one of them is immediately playable on Turn 1. A flat curve with no real threat is its own way to lose. You want a hand where each turn from 1 through 3 has at least one credible play, with a card or two in the back half that punches above its cost.

Deck Archetype Changes the Math

Mulligan criteria shift depending on what your deck is trying to do.

Aggro decks want the lowest-cost Unit they run in their opener, full stop. Every turn you spend not applying pressure is a turn your opponent spends stabilizing. If your aggro hand doesn’t have a Turn 1 or Turn 2 deploy, ship it — even if the rest of the hand looks powerful on paper.

Control decks can afford a slower start but need reactive tools early. A hand without any answer to a fast opener — whether that’s a Blocker Unit, a card that destroys an enemy Unit, or a low-cost early-deploy you can land on Turn 1 or 2 — is a liability. Keep hands that give you options, not hands that commit you to a plan the opponent can ignore.

Pair Up and combo-oriented decks are the trickiest. You’re looking for a specific density of pieces — a key Unit plus the Pilot that Pairs with it, or the parts of a multi-card finisher — and the temptation is to fish aggressively. Resist it. A hand with one piece of the combo and a functional curve is usually better than a speculative redraw that might give you two pieces and no way to survive long enough to use them.

Going Second Changes Your Calculus

GCG gives the second player a meaningful compensation: an EX Resource token, placed in their Resource Area at the start of the game. That’s a free Resource on Turn 1 to offset losing initiative. (Both players also start with an EX Base — a 0 AP / 3 HP token in the Shield Area — but that’s a baseline of the game, not Player 2’s edge.)

That EX Resource shifts your mulligan math. When you’re going second, you can afford to keep a hand that’s slightly slower out of the gate, because you have an extra Resource to work with on your first turn. Hands that would be borderline keeps when going first become cleaner keeps going second.

The flip side: going first means your Turn 1 play is the most important card in your opener. You have no Resource buffer and no information about your opponent’s hand. If your hand doesn’t have a credible Turn 1 action, the opponent gets to set the pace of the game for free. Going first with an empty Battle Area is one of the most avoidable mistakes in GCG, and it almost always traces back to a mulligan you talked yourself into keeping.

Building the Habit: Pre-Game Criteria

The best mulligan decisions happen before you sit down. For every deck you run, write down — literally or mentally — the two or three non-negotiables for an opening hand. For a Pair-Up-focused mobile suit deck it might be: one early Unit, one Pilot that Pairs with my key Unit, and a play I can make on Turn 1 or 2. For an aggro swarm build it might be: any Unit that costs two or less, and a believable Turn 1 deploy.

When you pick up your five, run the checklist in order. If the hand passes, keep it. If it fails, ship without second-guessing. The players who mulligan well aren’t the ones with the best instincts — they’re the ones who did the homework before the game started and execute the plan without emotion.

Quick Reference

Mulligan is one-pass, all-or-nothing — five cards, keep them all or send them all to the bottom of the deck and draw five fresh.

Every keepable hand needs a Turn 1 play, a functional cost curve, and a card that gestures at your win condition.

Ask yourself: when does each card in this hand become playable on the Resource curve (1 / 2 / 3 / …)? If your earliest deploy is Turn 3 or later, ship it.

Aggro needs a low-cost Unit in the opener; control needs reactive tools (Blocker, destroy effects); Pair Up and combo decks need a functional curve plus at least one piece.

Going second gives you an EX Resource on Turn 1 — you can keep slightly slower hands going second.
Build a 2–3 item checklist for each deck you run and execute it without emotion.

Know your deck’s non-negotiables before you touch your opening hand — a mulligan decision made with a pre-built checklist beats a gut-feel keep every time.