Steel requiem is the third main set of the Gundam Card Game and released into the various global markets on January 30, 2026. It is supported by two new starter decks; ST07 "Celestial Drive" which features Mobile Suit 00 Gundam and ST08 "Flash of Radiance" which is focused on the "Hathaway's Flash" storyline. The GCG has been plagued by availability issues and scalping through its release although it seems availability is picking up a little bit over the recent months. Prices vary wildly online and do not allow yourself to be fooled into paying for overpriced stock.
The Steel Requiem box design follows the standard set by the two previous booster sets "Newtype Rising" and "Dual Impact". Artwork from three of the higher rarity cards are showcased on the top and sides of the box and it is as gorgeous as ever. We have the Exia in Trans-Am Mode on the top and the classic Freedom Gundam with a dual beam saber on one side and the mighty Kämpfer with a shotgun on the other. Apparently we can expect more suits from Mobile Suit Gundam SEED as well as a new spotlight on U.C.0080 War in the Pocket, sign me up! I will be really disappointed if I can't get my hands on that Kämpfer.
We have the usual information dump on the back of the box: barcode, distributor information (for Europe in this case), recycling instructions and my favourite - Bandai's various disclaimers about how you must pay for your own Internet traffic and that the future value of the cards are out of the manufacturer's hands. Some people really need everything to be spelled out in front of them, I guess. I like seeing the welcoming of consumer questions since all the usual Bandai import products will typically sport a passive-aggressive "Customer Service inquiries are not accepted from outside Japan" blurb somewhere on the box - at times the only words written in English.
Each booster box contains 24 individual booster packs arranged in two neat stacks. These packages are more compact than your typical Japanese cardgame booster pack, less height and more cards inside. I still feel spoiled holding such a thick packet in my hand, being used to 3-5 card packages for the most part.
The artwork on the individual booster pack is similar to the booster box and there is only one type of package artwork. The information on the individual package is pretty much the same as what can be seen on the booster box itself. You will find twelve regular cards for deck-building purposes inside as well as a thirteenth special use resource card.
This is the second time I recycle the image from the GD01 review to illustrate how the cards are organized in the pack. All cards are facing the same direction and are sorted by type and rarity. the top 6 cards are of the common (C) variety, followed by four uncommons (U) and at the end two foil cards of Rare (R) or Legendary (LR) type. The very last card will have a yellow or red cardback which denotes it as a token or resource card. I always shift it to the front when opening a pack since it is the most uninteresting of the bunch.
Before we start; I did notice that Bandai have sneakily tweaked the card-distribution in the booster box. With the GD01 and GD02 boxes I opened I would typically get multiples of all commons and uncommons as well as at least one of most rares and a couple of the legendary rares in a single box. As you can see on this comparison image GD03 ups the card count but not on the commons or uncommon rarity level. The set now crams in two additional rare cards, a new category called "special" (at the time of opening I speculated that these might be the total number of hidden alternate artwork cards) and the resource/token section has exploded into 20 different cards. With only one resource or token card in a single pack it seems unlikely that you will manage to find all of them in a single box. Not a fan, how come there are so many cards in these categories this time around?
With that said, let's start cracking open the packs one by one starting with the top package in the left stack all the way down before hitting up the right-hand stack.
Just like with the previous Gundam Card Game boxes I am going in more or less completely blind, this is the best way to open a box in my opinion. The first couple of packs especially are a real journey of discovery. This first package leans heavily into red colour with six of the twelve cards going straight into that deck. We see expansions into several eras and themes; there is Mobile Suit Gundam SEED, After War Gundam X, MSG 00, Hathaway's Flash, Iron-Blooded Orphans, AGE, GQuuuuuuX, War in the Pocket and also Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam in a complete chaotic mess. The cards are laid out in the same order they appear in the package. The first six cards are commons, the remaining four on the second row are the uncommons and the two cards down in the left corner are the two slots where foil cards end up with rares or legendary rares or the much coveted alternate artwork cards. Down in the right corner we see a "token card" of the GFreD, presumably to be brought in as a temporary unit based on another card's ability (I haven't studied the card rules in detail).
Well, that's that then! Two packs in and look who shows up in the rare corner; the Legendary Rare Kämpfer itself. Notice that the artwork is not the same as on the box cover, this is the "legendary rare plus" alternate artwork variant. In the previous openings of GD01 and GD02 the legendary rare plus card was present together with the regular legendary rare card variant so presumably (hopefully...) the standard artwork version of the card will also show up inside the box - at the expense of both the Gundam Exia and the Freedom Gundam.
To talk a little bit about the common and uncommon cards discovered so far this set will have to work hard to flesh out five different decks and a multitude of factions so the impression will probably be rather chaotic. This is typical for collectible cardgames that usually start out very focused with a huge amount of well-known units and characters and start getting more and more "diverse" - to use a modern word - and this is really starting to set in here already. I love seeing Bask Om on that Titans command card and it is a shame that characters that are not mobile suit pilots have no representation in the game, it would have been neat if you could attach them to the bases or a headquarter section or something. In the resource card section we find the banal EX Resource card, there is one in every card starter - enough already.
Ah, I see we have some Unicorn representation in the box as well. The unit mix is leaning heavily towards hero units and the only mass-production type is a Hizack with a white flag. What the... if anything that artwork could have suited a command card with a deceptive strategy, but not as a generic type unit. I'm sure I'll end up with a whole squad of white flag carrying Hizacks... We also find three different base cards in this package with two of them from 0080 War in the Pocket. Libot Colony has that funky Japanese spelling but the green deck base card "Cyclops Team" is a missed opportunity - the base card should obviously have been their Yukon-class submarine. As usual, the Gundam Card Game is not intended for us rivet-counters. :)
Here we have the first of the Cyclops Team pilot, but Garcia is downgraded to a combo command/pilot card so we don't get to see his little face at the bottom of the card. With so many decks and combinations in the game already there are only a limited number of slots available in each category. The focus is decidedly on unit cards, expect to see 15+ different unit cards per deck in a booster set. The pilot- and command cards are limited to 3-4 for each category and base cards are typically represented by two different cards per deck. The Hambrabi is looking cool in the rare category and I'm impressed they are still finding and adding unique Managanc Corps pilots. Some of the lesser factions are surprisingly well represented in the game.
The Maganac Corps is now represented by a mass-production type from the ST02 "Wings of Advance" starter as well as one custom unit from each booster set. Leader Rasid Kurama sits in GD01, Abdul was in GD02 and now we also have Auda in GD03. There are a couple of additional named characters but I would be very surprised (but suitably impressed) if they were to show up in the future. It wouldn't hurt to see a differently equipped mass-production type either, keep the string alive! :)
We are seeing several card repeats already, not necessarily a good sign. In the previous booster boxes the duplicates were initially rare and then became common as you dug through more packs. Here it seems that the packs may have been scrambled in a different order with more duplicate cards in close proximity to another in the box. This box features three pilots from Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam and I must say that the artwork is not winning me over on any of them, their faces just not look like the same persons. It is like all their seriousness and sharp edge has been smoothed over and now they look a bit bland. And in the white deck Sergei Smirnow is degraded into a combi pilot-command card, at least Soma got a proper pilot card.
Oh my, six packs in and nearly every common and uncommon card is a duplicate. In the rare section we found another variant of the Gundam Barbatos, every time they change a bolt on the Barbatos it gets a new name and a new card it seems. Talking about the common cards I'm not sad to see another Daughtress Flyer plus a carrier base card, the New United Nations Earth faction now has four different Daughtress cards in the game (plus a token card variant of the basic type) and it warms my heart. Imagine seeing all of them in Gundam Converge one day...
I never expected to see the U.N. Daughtress in the game until maybe in a far distant future where the pickings start to get slim but Bandai have really impressed me with this excellent selection. I believe all the canonical variants have now been covered except for the High Mobility version with its fat Dom-like legs.
The parade of duplicates continue but there are still some new discoveries in here. The Type F02 Messer nicely complements the three types found in the ST08 starter - another win for a rarely seen and obscure faction. We have another GM Sniper II in here but so far I haven't seen any other E.F.S.F. units from the show, hoping to find a couple of GM Commands and the Mass-production type Guncannon at least. The rare card slot is somewhat wasted on a pilot card and a base card; with so few cards in these categories I don't think they should be classified above commons. I had expected to see the Dogosse-Giar in this role but it makes sense to go for the Jupitris together with Paptimus Scirocco, hopefully the DG will show up in a later wave.
the eight pack has nothing but duplicates in the commons and uncommons section and at this point I am starting to get a bit worried. Hopefully things will pick up as we go along. The rare section sports a command card (I have the same problem with this as with sticking pilot- and base cards in there...) and a variant of the Kyrios - the second in this box already. Combined with the two options in the ST07 starter this is all a bit much in my opinion.
Duplicates, duplicates, duplicates... At least we have a new base card for the green deck, the Peace Million arrives to stick your Wing units in I guess. In the rare section we have a third variant of the Gundam Virtue adding to the two from the starter and look at that - it is the Legendary rare Kämpfer from the box cover! I've made the observation that whenever a Legendary Rare Plus card is found in a box, the basic Legendary Rare version is also in there, let's see if this holds true also for GD03.
We are ten packs in and suddenly we see several new common and uncommon cards, the card distribution has definitely been shaken up inside the GD03 box. If you are buying singles packs in a shop you may want to consider this if the packs in the box have not been scrambled. But look at that, the rare slot contains the exact same card combo that we saw in pack number five, hardly a coincidence. I can't help to notice that the common card section sports a fourth variant of the Gundam Heavyarms but hey, at least this is the upgraded variant. With so many mobile suit options to choose from it is starting to grate to see multiple versions of the same couple of unique mobile suits already.
Still a number of duplicates in pack eleven but also some new ones. I smiled at the humorous Awkward Approach card (poor captain Bekkener) and it is great to see that the Tieren High Mobility Type made it in. Hopefully the different Tieren variants will also follow (spoiler alert: not in GD03). The Sandrock Kai joins the Heavyarms Custom and Deathscythe Custom, I take it that the Altron and the Wing Custom are in here somewhere as well (second spoiler alert: yes, the Altron is a legendary rare but was not included in this particular box and no, the Wing Custom is not).
Oh my, this pack certainly delivers. As a Titans lover we have two of their signature machines - both the Palace Athene as an uncommon card and the mighty Messala in the rare slot. The second rare card is actually an alternate rare artwork card - the Rare plus version of the "standard" rare pilot card for Rau Le Creuset. So far we have encountered two alternate artwork cards in this box and I have a feeling that this will be all. When I opened up a GD02 Dual Impact box there was one R+ card inside it together with its base rare variant so I am expecting to find the regular version of this card in one of the remaining packs in this box. By the way, notice the Hy-Gogg that has quietly snuck inside the resource card slot. This is only the second token card to pop up in the 13th slot while we are seeing repeats of the basic resource cards already. I hope these are not crucial to other card abilities because they seem to be in short supply and we definitely won't get many of them inside a single box.
Several new common cards are pouring in, I have a working theory that the first half of the set is centred around one subset of cards and the other half focused on the other. With only one box opened I of course cannot verify it - curious to hear other experiences on this topic. In this pack we finally find the two base cards for the white deck; the AEUG's Radish in the common card section and Lacus' Eternal as a rare card. The base card segment in this box is really limited and very skewed, this box contained a total of four blue base cards, seven green, five red, five purple but only three white. After opening one each of every starter and booster box the total number of base cards now stand at 23 for blue, 24 for green, 22 for red, 15 for purple (which is the youngest faction) but only 20 for white. This seems a bit unbalanced in my opinion.
Pack number fourteen introduces the Vagan forces HQ vessel as the set's second purple base card, the Vagan subfaction is also really well represented in the game with multiple units discovered in the GD03 box. Yazan appears to pilot the Hambrabi, with so few pilot slots available I guess his two squadmates are out of the question. We also get Mikhail Kaminsky to pilot a second Hy-Gogg but so far I haven't found any in the box, I would have expected to have racked up a few already but I'm sure it is in here somewhere. The rare card slot holds the mighty X Divider for the purple faction and a level 8 variant of the GQuuuuuuX to overpower the ones found in the ST06 starter.
Well, look at that - here is our missing Hy-Gogg as an uncommon card. That means there should probably be at least one more in the box but that doesn't create a full Cyclops Team now does it? It would have been cool to have two variants, one with and one without a hand missile unit, perhaps it will return in the future as a common variant? I did not expect to see a variant of the Mobile Worker from the ST05 starter but I'll definitely take it. In the rare card section we find the "common" variant of the Rau Le Creuset pilot card, so far the theory that rare plus- and legendary rare plus-cards do indeed accompany their basic variants inside the same booster box. The other rare card is the Zaku II Type Fz from War in the Pocket - I get why it is elevated to the rare card slot but it should really be available as a common card also, perhaps a simpler variant will appear in a future set. The artwork is pretty disappointing too and way too situational - are we really wanting Santa Claus in the foreground?
Pack 16 and we are now two thirds through the box. There are still several interesting new cards popping up in all categories. Hardy Steiner is finally popping up but he looks more like Lee van Cleef than himself, I think most of the character artwork for War in the Pocket has been quite bad unfortunately. In the rare slot we find the second of the three box cover units, the good ol' vanilla Freedom Gundam. I guess this means we won't be picking up the Exia then, since I have been capped to two of the three in the previous sets that I've opened. We get another token card and it is the IBO mobile worker popping up again, together with the unit found in the ST05 Iron Bloom starter we now have a neat little trio of Mobile Worker units and I love random stuff like that.
The red team finally gets its second base, the unfortunate Jachin Due fortress that was blown to oblivion - and look, there is that annoying flag-waiving Hizack again. We get an elite Vagan pilot in the rare slot together with Soma Peries' pretty-in-pink Tieren Taozi which looks much better in this gritty realistic art-style. The Kämpfer's portrait pops up in the resource card section looking crisp as ever. I haven't talk much about the resource cards in this review but all I want to say is that I wish there were less duplicates of them because we are missing out on a ton of the token cards unfortunately.
Alright, it is time for another interlude. Ever since the first reviews I've been consistently crying about the arbitrary groupings of factions in the decks but the game continues to drag me there. While I can understand the limitations of sticking dozens of different factions from unrelated times and eras into a handful of somewhat balanced decks for gaming purposes can we at least try to be consistent within each era? Not only are the Advanced European Union, the Union of Solar Energy and Free Power and the Human Reform League rivals in their own right, they have also had their factions scrubbed and replaced with a nebulous "Superpower Bloc" trait. Yep that's right, the units synergize freely with one another, kind of like putting Ramba Ral in the GM or Kira in the CGUE. Have some self-respect, game!
We've seen pretty much everything now save for the rare cards. With the Kämpfer and the Freedom in this box I'll have to make do with the portrait of the Exia on the resource card for now. The rare cards aren't particularly exciting either, another command card and the rather obscure Hajiroboshi from IBO. Let's move on.
A quarter of the pack to go and everything exciting takes place on the bottom row by now. The Red Gundam joins the GFreD, Hy-Gogg and Mobile Worker as a token card and this is the last one we will get in this box for a total of four out of the eight cards. Now, without knowing which the other four are this seems particularly odd to me, you'd think they are more of a gaming tool than a rare unit to field? Perhaps the remaining four are connected to some of the units we won't find in this box but I never really understood the distribution of these cards anyway. In the rare slot we find Paptimus's mighty The-O as a legendary rare and curiously a mass-production G-Bouncer as a rare card. Admittedly it is typically associated with Woolf Enneacle but the card is only linked to the Earth Federation (no, not that Earth Federation, the other Earth Federation in the green deck... but maybe if you run a blue-green deck... whatever).
There is really only one card to talk about in the twentieth pack and we will do so shortly. First I just want to point out that I don't mind getting a second Hambrabi in the rare slot but I take serious issue with the EX Base-card in the resource slot, stop wasting these precious slots on bulk junk. But let us know focus on that second card in the rare slot a bit closer:
What on earth do we have here? This looks like an alternate artwork rare except for the fact that Mikazuki Augus is not included among the five purple pilots in GD03. While my camera struggled to pick this up this is actually an alternate artwork card for the card that appears in the ST05 "Iron Bloom" starter pack. What the... so is this what Bandai had in mind when the state that there are seven "special" rarity cards in the set? Are we doing alt-arts for the old starters now? I really have no idea what the other special rare cards might be but I am not a great fan of sticking cards belonging to other sets into products just like they did with that recycled "Siege Ploy" card from ST02 in the ST08 "Flash of Radiance" starter deck. I guess this is an attempt to build hype for hype's sake. I'm not convinced.
The last couple of packs always become a bit of a blurred experience as you blaze through the common cards to see if you can scoop up that elusive rare card that remained out of sight for so long. And since I have been going in blind I don't even know what cards there are to hunt for anyway but I am pretty sure that another command card is "it", good for the young purple deck though I imagine. Next!
This pack gives two rare units to the red faction, one of them being the Xi Gundam in a low-powered form compared to the level nine and eight point cost card that was spearheading the ST08 starter deck. I had expected the Steel Requiem set to have a bit of focus on Hathaway's Flash but so far it has been very slim pickings. Apart from a couple of Messers we now have a mid-tier variant of the Xi Gundam and I assume the Penelope is in here somewhere also but that seems to be pretty much it? Anyway, the ST08 starter is really full of cool mobile suits and well worth picking up to remedy that issue. I only wish there were more mass-production type suits from the E.F.S.F., overall the game feels surprisingly light in that regard as well.
Two packs to go and I realize I spoiled the Graham Aker pilot card in my tirade about the Superpower Bloc earlier... oops. The other rare card is the second generation AGE-2 which is nice I suppose, the Advanced Generation has been really well-stocked with both mobile suits and pilots for both the Earth Federation and Vagan and I hope they will continue to trickle in in the future sets as AGE is usually not well-represented in the collectible game sphere.
Alright, the last pack is open and would you look at that, here comes the Penelope Gundam indeed. The two rivals appeared in the very tail end of the entire box and Hathaway's Flash is only represented by a meagre five cards. The second slot is a command card featuring Alfred Izuruha looking at stuff because we wouldn't want a cool pilot or suit in that slot would we? I notice we have the Gundam Dynames in the resource card slot again, that is the third appearance in this box, a bit much considering we are still missing four different resource cards in here. Let's take a quick look at some stats before we call it a night and bug out of here:
Distribution per deck:
Blue: 57 cards, 10 of which were rare or higher.
Green: 55 cards with 10 rares.
Red: 61 cards with 9 rares.
White: 54 cards and 9 rares.
Purple: 61 cards with 10 rares.
Everyone got a roughly similar amount of cards with a good spread on the rares. The purple deck isn't getting any handicap to get up to speed quickly and those players will have a smaller overall card pool to choose from, I guess with a meta-game it doesn't really matter after all, as long as you have the right cards. Considering that the set is made up of 132 numbered cards in the GD03 series we managed to find all but four of them which is very generous for a collectible cardgame I think. There are of course the super-rare alternate artwork variants to chase as well but I myself will be happy to source the remaining four cards from the secondary market (I do in fact have them on order already).
The four missing ones are the Gundam NT-1 Alex for the blue deck, Altron Gundam for green (nobody likes Wufei...), Rau le Creuset's Providence Gundam for red and of course the Trans-am Gundam Exia for purple. I still don't know what the missing four token cards are but look forward to discovering them in the future. All things considered, as a card-collector I have been very pleased with the booster boxes for the Gundam Card Game in general. The older era games are furiously difficult to complete but with the GCG you at least have a decent shot at it.
