UVS Experience Bundles - Good or Bad?
Written By Grant Emory
Hello! Welcome back to Undefeated at Locals!
This week I have a completely different type of article for your UniVersus themed reading pleasure! This one is a little long winded as there’s a lot I want to cover.
Back in September of 2025 UVS Games announced an entirely new product type, Experience Bundles. These are intended to be a product line that “focus on a particular universe and come in a variety of configurations” and be a premium experience for fans of the franchise or that want cool versions of cards/characters in the game. The following is a little bit about the 3 different configurations we’ve seen and my thoughts on the idea as a whole and where I would like to see this go in the future.
The first of these Experience Bundles was the Solo Leveling S-Rank Hunter Bundles. These are new Solo Leveling skins on existing characters from multiple IP’s, these come with the character card as well as a playmat featuring the Solo Leveling character on the new version of the card. These sets retail for $29.99, which in my opinion is a pretty fair price. Playmats alone are regularly $19.99 - $24.99 and you also get the character card. While it’s a bummer that the playmats were not the stitched edge, higher quality playmats we had become accustomed to with recent sets as well, my main issue with these bundles was 2 of the characters we received had some distinct differences from the original version of the characters, making them technically, mechanically unique cards. For example, Cha Hae-In was chosen to be reprinted with Levi Ackerman’s (Battle for Humanity) stats and abilities but was printed without the Survey Corps keyword making her unable to make use of cards with Survey Corps only abilities. Choi Jong-In is the Solo Leveling character chosen to be reprinted with Caleb Widogast, Fiery Transmuter’s (Heroes of Exandria) stats and abilities, but without his Mighty Nein keyword, making this version unable to use any Mighty Nein locked abilities. This doesn’t matter a ton for this character as MOST of those abilities aren’t particularly good or even played but it does make a difference. In the future I would hope to see these types of re-skins be done the way Baek Yoonho was, where a character like Ryu, World Warrior (Street Fighter 6) was chosen that doesn’t have any specific keywords or traits that could have abilities locked to the original IP version of said character. I didn’t personally purchase one of these but Marvin grabbed the Baek one to have a character from one of his favorite IP’s on top of his current favorite deck instead of Ryu, which is why I think these are such a cool idea.
Along with the S-Rank bundles we also got the Shadow Monarch Spotlight Bundle, with a Sung Jin Woo playmat, an alternate art version of Sung Jin Woo, all-new skill tree for the character, and 5 new double-sided cards from Solo Leveling that you get full playsets of all for $34.99. This is an even better value than the S-Rank Hunter bundles! I personally purchased this one but not to play as Sung Jin Woo, these cool attacks that shift into Backups all slot very well into Caduceus Clay from Heroes of Exandria, which is one of my favorite characters released this year. The HUGE problem with this bundle in my opinion is the fact that out of the 21 cards in my bundle, 8 had shim lines. Now we have unfortunately gotten very used to this in every set for a while but in something that is billed as a premium product like this, this is unacceptable. UVS Games really need to step up their game in the quality control department so that doesn’t continue to happen.
Next up, and last up so far, is the Borderlands 4 Experience Bundle. I was extremely excited about this announcement, Borderlands is one of my favorite video game series of all time, so much so that I have a Vault Symbol tattoo on one of my fingers. This was ORIGINALLY announced to be 1 copy each of four more reskinned characters representing each of the Vault Hunters from the newest game, as well as four copies each of four other reskinned cards all packed in a “Collectors Case” for display for the great price of $39.99. The reskinned non character cards that were chosen were in my opinion, some of the best cards they could have picked, they were all originally in the YuYu Hakusho Dark Tournament set which has become a very hard set to get ahold of, and the cards were a mix of very sought after rare cards in Walk The Dog and Weapon Clash, and played commons in Paying The Cost and Resting Up. Four Walk the Dog for forty bucks sounds way too good to be true…. Well, it turns out it was. Due to what was announced as a mistake somewhere in the packaging process these would end up arriving with only one of each character AND non-character card. This was a huge problem, and it upset a lot of people.
While in the end UVS Games did the best they could to make it right by giving a 75% refund for the missing 75% of the cards, the biggest issue lies where it always seems to with them, communication. They made the decision to update the article about the bundle to show that it only included one copy of the cards, which obviously needed to be done to ensure anyone else who purchases the set knows that it’s not four of each. However, this was done BEFORE alerting the community full of fans whom had already purchased it that they knew there was a mistake and that they were going to find a way to correct it somehow making it look to some people like they were trying to gaslight people into thinking it only ever had the one copy of each. I choose to believe that that was never what they intended to do and that they just reacted as fast as they could to a bad situation to both mitigate losses on future sales and assure us that they would make it right and just got it in the wrong order. Had I known that it was more like a Magic the Gathering Secret Lair style drop, we would have either had our expectations set for only having the single copies or resigned ourselves to the fact that we would need to purchase four of them to have a playset of the cool new alt-arts. The latter is what Marvin and I both eventually ended up doing in the end. For me these are some of my most played cards and I have an addiction to shiny cardboard, and for Marvin he didn’t own a single copy of Walk the Dog and the bundle was about the same price as a single copy of the original printing at the time so why not? To add just a little more salt into the wound even these shipped to many people with the dreaded shim lines, including several of Marvin’s’ Walk the Dogs. PLEASE UVS GAMES, FIX THE SHIM LINE ISSUE!
Even with all of that said, I really do hope we get more of these Experience Bundles just with some quality control and correct information on what to expect when my package arrives. I think they are a very cool way to get IP’s in the game that people love without making a full set. They also open up some cool decks for the new 3v3 format where maybe you really like Paul Phoenix and want to play him as two of your characters, well now with Amon, The Forge Knight, you can!
Thanks for bearing with me through all of that! Let me know what you think of the Experience Bundles below and what IP’s you want to see next!
