Gundam Card Game Link Units - Every Pilot Pairing, Counted

The link box on GD05-026 Gundam Aerial Rebuild reads [Prospera Mercury] / [Ericht Samaya]. Filter the official card database by that second name and you get exactly one result - the Aerial Rebuild itself. There is no Pilot card named Ericht Samaya. There is no Command card with an Ericht Samaya Pilot effect. Out of the 173 distinct link requirements printed across the entire game, it is the only one that no card in existence can satisfy.

That is the kind of thing you only find by reading all of them. So I did. On 17 August 2026 I pulled every card in the official English database - all 892 of them - and mapped the complete link web: every requirement a Unit prints, every Pilot that can answer it, and every Command card quietly carrying a Pilot in its bottom half.

The deckbuilding guide answers how many Pilots a deck should run. This piece answers the question that comes right before it: which pairings actually exist.

The link name that matches nothing

The Aerial Rebuild is not stranded - its other option, [Prospera Mercury], is a real Pilot card, GD05-088. But the pairing is strange in the opposite direction too: Prospera links with exactly one Unit in the whole game, this one. She is the least connected Pilot in the game, attached to a Unit whose second link option does not exist.

Ericht Samaya is a character from The Witch from Mercury, the same series the Unit comes from, and Bandai printed her name in a link box anyway. Link requirements are written for the franchise first and the card pool second. A name in a link box with no card behind it is a slot the game has left open.

How I counted

Method first, same as the colour count this piece is a sibling to.

I collected every card number from the official database at gundam-gcg.com/en/cards/ with parallel-art variants collapsed - 892 distinct cards: 560 Units, 145 Commands, 119 Pilots, 68 Bases - and fetched the detail page for every Unit, Pilot and Command. The detail pages print the link requirement as its own field, so this is Bandai's own data, not my reading of card scans.

Where a link box offers alternatives, the database indexes the Unit under each one separately - filter by [Allelujah Haptism] or by [Hallelujah Haptism] and you get the same eight Gundam Kyrios Units either way. I count those as one Unit with two doors, not two Units.

How linking actually works

The rules underneath, compressed, because every number later sits on them. All of this is Comprehensive Rules Ver. 1.8.0, dated 10 July 2026.

• Only Unit cards have link conditions (rule 2-12-2), and a condition is a Pilot name, a trait, or a choice between them (2-12-1).
• A Unit whose paired Pilot satisfies the condition is a Link Unit, and a Link Unit can attack the turn it is deployed (3-2-6-2, 3-2-6-3). That is a full turn of tempo.
• A bracketed name matches on contains, not equals (3-2-6-4). The rulebook's own example: the Pilot Garrod Ran & Tiffa Adill satisfies the requirement [Garrod Ran], because the card name contains it.
• Pairing is permanent. You cannot swap a new Pilot onto a paired Unit, and you cannot move a paired Pilot to another Unit - rulings Q86 and Q87 in the official FAQ.
• A mismatched Pilot is not a wasted card. Ruling Q89: the AP and HP still get added and 【Attack】 effects still fire - you only lose the immediate attack. The rulings deep-dive works through that one properly.

Three of every four Units want a Pilot

The topology of the whole pool, counted across all 560 Units:

So 423 Units - 75.5% of the game - can become Link Units, demanding some mix of 127 distinct names and 46 distinct traits: 173 requirements in all.

The 137 with no link box are worth pausing on, because that is a quarter of the game that can never attack the turn it arrives, no matter who you pair. They are not evenly distributed: GD01 Newtype Rising launched with only 57 of its 86 Units linkable (66%), while GD05 Freedom Ascension runs 68 of 80 (85%) and ST07 Celestial Drive is 8 for 8. Across the five numbered boosters the linkable share climbs from GD01's 66% to GD02's 74%, GD03's 84%, GD04's 82% and GD05's 85%.

The characters with the deepest benches

Counting how many Units demand each name, and how many Pilot cards exist to answer:

Amuro Ray tops the list at 12 Units, and he is also the cleanest illustration of how colour and links interact: his two Pilot cards are the blue ST01-010 and the green GD05-085, so an Amuro deck picks its colour pair partly to decide which Amuro it gets - or, as Bandai's own Blue-Green Londo Bell decklist does, runs both.

The long tail is longer than the top ten suggests. Of the 127 named requirements, 63 are demanded by exactly one Unit and another 31 by exactly two. Most characters in this game are a single specific pairing, not an archetype.

Trait links are the open door

Named links are narrow by design. Trait links are the opposite - one requirement, a whole cast of answers:

And trait links are what create the game's most connected card. ST10-011 Kamille Bidan links with 26 different Units - the most of any pilot-capable card in the game. The arithmetic: five Units demand [Kamille Bidan] by name, thirteen demand the (G Generation) trait, and eight demand (Attack), and this card carries all three identities at once.

The whole EB01 Eternal Nexus Pilot roster is built this way - all twelve of its Pilots carry (G Generation) plus one of (Attack), (Support) or (Durability), and nine of the twelve link with 20 or more Units. Compare Char Aznable: a marquee name, two Pilot cards, and ST03-011 still only reaches 12 Units. In this game the crossover extras are better connected than the poster boy.

Two names on one line

Sixteen Units print two names in the link box, either of which satisfies it, and the list is a little tour of the franchise's double acts.

All eight Gundam Kyrios Units accept [Allelujah Haptism] / [Hallelujah Haptism] - and Bandai printed the split personality as two separate Pilot cards, ST07-012 Allelujah and GD04-090 Hallelujah, so the machine recognises either half of its pilot. GD03-040 Gundam Virsago & Gundam Ashtaron takes [Shagia Frost] / [Olba Frost], twin machines with a twin-brother link box. GD04-009 pairs the two Guncannons and answers to [Kai Shiden] / [Hayato Kobayashi]. GD03-034 GQuuuuuuX (Omega Psycommu) takes [Amate Yuzuriha (Machu)] / [Nyaan].

Six more Units mix a name with a trait - GD05-019 Re-GZ links off [Amuro Ray] or any (Londo Bell) Pilot, and ST10-002 Zeta Gundam takes [Kamille Bidan] or anything with (Support).

Then there is the substring rule doing the same job from the other side. GD02-094 Garrod Ran & Tiffa Adill is one Pilot card whose name contains two people - it satisfies [Garrod Ran] because rule 3-2-6-4 matches on contains, and it is the exact card the Comprehensive Rules use as their worked example.

The 64 Commands that are secretly Pilots

Rule 3-4-6-2: a Command card with a 【Pilot】 effect can be paired with a Unit as a Pilot instead of being played for its Command half. 64 of the game's 145 Command cards - 44% - carry one.

This is not a footnote mechanic; for a big slice of the cast it is the only door in. Cross-referencing every named link requirement against every card that could answer it, 35 of the 127 named requirements are satisfiable only by a Command card. Ramba Ral, Mu La Flaga, Kai Shiden, Hayato Kobayashi, Dozle Zabi, Nicol Amarfi, Lucrezia Noin, Norea Du Noc, Sophie Pulone, all four of the G Gundam Shuffle Alliance beyond Domon - none of them exists as a Pilot card. They are all Commands.

The worked example: GD05-074 Noin's Taurus demands [Lucrezia Noin] or the (Preventer) trait. The only Lucrezia Noin in the game is GD01-101 Deep Devotion, a Command. If you want that Taurus attacking the turn it lands, a Command slot in your 50 is the only way to do it - which quietly changes what "how many Pilots am I running" even means. Your Pilot count is not your Pilot-type count.

No Pilot is an orphan

The reassuring result from the full cross-reference: every one of the 119 Pilot cards links with at least one Unit. There is no trap Pilot in the game, no card whose link identity points at nothing. The median Pilot card links with 8 Units, 48 of the 119 reach double digits, and only 15 are at three Units or fewer.

The floor is Prospera Mercury at exactly one - her trait, (Quiet Zero), appears in no link box, so she is a pure single-pairing card. The ceiling is Kamille's 26. Between those two poles is the actual deckbuilding question: a narrow Pilot is fine when its one Unit is a four-of, and the official decklists' 8-to-10 Pilot slots are almost always four copies each of two or three names that match four copies of their partner Units.

What the Pilot actually adds

The stat side of pairing, since it decides whether an off-link pairing is ever worth it. Every Pilot card in the game costs exactly 1, and the modifiers cluster hard:

So 107 of 119 Pilots are some arrangement of +1s and +2s, with a slight lean toward attack - and per ruling Q89 you get those points even when the link fails. The colour split is nearly flat too: 26 blue, 26 green, 26 white, 21 red, 20 purple - a tighter spread than the colour count found across the wider pool, where purple trails blue by 62 cards.

What this map does not tell you

The honest limits.

This is a map of what can pair, not what should. I have no tournament results, so nothing here says which Link Units win games - only which exist. A character with twelve Units and two Pilot cards is a deep bench, not automatically a good deck.

The counts are 892 distinct card numbers as of 17 August 2026, covering GD01 through GD05, EB01 and ST01 through ST10. GD06 Stardust Trails lands 30 October 2026 - bringing Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ and Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory into the game, per Bandai's product page - and will move every number here.

If you are new to pairing itself, the rules walkthrough covers how a pairing physically happens, and the rulings deep-dive covers what happens when it goes wrong.