AA just got much harder a few months ago. Please read the very comprehensive wiki in this thread:

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/credi...ost-first.html

and then the last few pages and then start asking questions there about Citi AA cards.

There's unfortunately very few other lucrative ways to earn AA miles from credit card signups besides Citi AA. There's SPG which only gets you about 30k or so (after the 20% bonus on 25K which otherwise transfers 1:1) with $5000 spend, and you can't repeat that very often. You can theoretically transfer a bunch of other hotel program points to AA miles, but the transfer ratios mean you get very poor return on those.

UA works a little better cause of Chase Ultimate Rewards (often abbreviated to UR). Although you can only generally apply for each Chase card once, there's about half a dozen different ones you can get (a UA card or two and then several UR cards). There's a whole forum dedicated to Chase UR:

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/chase...e-rewards-722/

Again, please ask, there, not here, if you want to learn more about applying for multiple UR cards and transferring to UA.