As one of the last people to crack open my first booster box of Dual Impact (not counting hoarding scalpers or their ilk of course) I finally had the pleasure to sit down and work my way through the box. I deliberately and successfully managed to stay away from spoiling its contents and so had a really pleasant time going through the new cards. Dual Impact released on October 24th last year and quickly sold out everywhere and since I was travelling at the time it meant I had to sit around and waiting for restocks. Bandai Namco decided to reprint both GD02 as well as the ST05 and ST06 starters and so around the time of the new year copies again began to surface on the market and it was time for me to strike.
The artwork on the side panels of the box is just as gorgeous as on the first volume, even better I'd say. The Barbatos, GQuuuuuuX and Zeta Gundam on display here will also be featured on cards of the set, presumably on the Legendary Rare level. I would love to see an official book series that shows off the Mobile Suit artwork used on the cards in bigger size and without text clutter. Not being a GCG player myself I simply appreciate all the new artwork that was commissioned for the game.
The backside of the box has the usual disclaimers (I especially like the one about "pay for your own damned Internet"), barcode, in this case European distributor information as well as a breakdown of the cards per rarity level although there are of course also a couple of secret or hidden rare versions of some of the fancy cards with alternative artwork.
One thing I really like about the Gundam Card Game booster pack is how thick it feels in hand. Many card games will have paper-thin packs containing only a handful of cards, but getting 13 cards in a pack is really good. There are 24 packs in the box just as in the last booster box.
Before we begin here is a quick look at the individual pack itself. I will be opening the packs in sequence starting with the topmost one in the left column working my way down before continuing with the righthand side. I haven't been able to notice any pattern in the seeding but I am sure it is there. Technically it would probably be more correct starting with the rightmost pile as this is a Japanese product (and actually manufactured in Japan too) but here we are.
Recycling an image from the GD01 review here 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.
I do question the classification of common and uncommon cards - There are 144 common cards in a pack with 50 different types. This means you are statistically going to end up with 2.88 copies per box. The same figures for the uncommons are 96 cards divided into 36 types with a statistical shot of getting 2.67 copies per box, hardly a significant distinction. The good thing about it is that you are pretty much guaranteed to get every common and uncommon card in a single booster box which is something I as a collector really do appreciate. The bad thing is that you will typically get two or three copies for each common or uncommon card which will not be enough to form the max playset of four - Cheeky bastards.
Off we go then, to the first pack. All the cards you see here are laid out in the order they are presented in each pack, starting with the six commons and so on with the two rare foil cards in the lower left corner. A couple of good pulls in the rares section already; the Byarlant and the Qubeley are both signature suits and the artwork is looking on point (I have no idea how they play and I really don't care). I am especially pleased to find the Gaza-C in here, hopefully there will be enough in the box for a little squad. I found the rest of the cards a little meh. Sure, the pilot card for Cha... Quattro is great but look what they did to my man Woolf making him a command + pilot combo-card, I really don't care for these. The thing that disturbs me the most about these is the lack of a little pilot portrait in the bottom right corner so that it will show when you place it underneath the mobile suit...
I didn't know we would find After War Gundam X in GD02 and they seem to go really strong with four cards of thirteen already. Mobile armours also seem to be a thing with this set. Good to see a proper white faction base card in the Half Beak-class battleship Sleipnir for Gjallarhorn who didn't even get a base of their own in the ST05 starter deck. I was surprised to see the Buster Gundam make a return seeing as it was present also in GD01 but this time it has defected from the red Z.A.F.T. deck into the white deck and Lacus's alliance. Good old Dearka.
Wow... Dual Impact is really all over the place. We have suits and pilots pop up from Zeta, AGE, After War, Witch from Mercury, UC0079 and Iron-Blooded Orphans all in a single pack. You will also see appearances from Unicorn, SEED, Double Zeta, Wing and GQuuuuuuX all jumbled up together before we are done. Now, I am of course not privy to Bandai's greater plan here but I think they seem to be burning through the source material quite fast. I would have preferred a slower pace with a wider selection, I get the feeling they are pulling all the raisins out of the cake too fast and then we will be stuck with lesser known suits and re-runs of the more popular ones with slightly different abilities.
Most of the cards in here expand on the contents of the first pack which is nice, I'm really liking the mass-production types and the Methuss (although they did Fa dirty by putting her on a combo-card) and I was not expecting to see Haman's Gaza in here which is a great pull. I do notice however we already have a second Gundam Leopard which seems a bit excessive; this card is linked to Roybea Loy so he will obviously make an appearance in here while the previous version just had the Vulture faction trait. I think Bandai are making this overly complicated, either he is the pilot of the Leopard or he is not.
There are lots of obscure units and characters in this pack. This is why I think it would have been better to have a tighter focus on a few select eras and dug deeper into each. It is convenient that we get both the Kikeroga and Challia Bull in the same pack, just like Fa and the Methuss were together in the previous set, I'm sure this is just random though. The two rares aren't doing a whole lot for me but I think that it is good to place character specific mobile suits in the rare slot rather than commons, there is a tendency that you end up with more cards for a single Gundam than for a mass-production type. This is not how I would design a game, I'd like the army-building aspect to be front and centre with elite units being just that; rare.
This pack brings another two combo command+pilot cards, not liking that format at all. We have a couple of spacecraft here which I really enjoy and I never expected to see the GINN Recon Type in the game which just happens to be one of the best looking mobile suit designs of all time in my opinion. It is a shame the only figure ever made is a rare Seika pencil sharpener from 20 years ago. Notice that I managed two get two variants of the same card in the rare slot; Kamille shows up both as the standard rare card and the slightly more unusual rare plus (R+) alt-art variant.
I'm sure that the Gundam Card Game deserves all the praise it is getting as a game but I have some issues with the loosey-goosey way it handles the subject matter. If you approach the game from the fluffy aspect of the established factions and themes there is a lot that doesn't make sense. Take a look at the above example. The Earth Alliance Moebius-class mobile armor sits in the white deck but the nuclear-armed strike version is now blue? Yet they both have the same faction alignment. In fact, GD02 has shifted all Earth Alliance forces from the white deck they belonged to in GD01 and the starter into blue. I get that you can combine two colours in a single deck but what exactly is the point of having factions then? I guess it solves the issue of having both the Earth Federation and the Three Ship Alliance in the same deck but everything seems really poorly thought out. The theme is clearly just pasted onto a game without much care and I suspect we will see more of this as the game plods along.
The next pack has four new pilots and the modernized artwork of old classics looks great but that is a lot of ability text on Flit Asuno's card for you to squint at. I love to see the Marasai in here but would have loved to see Kacricon's unique machine in here as well, perhaps something for the future. Oz is also getting a new mass-production type and again I hope we can see the white Sanc Kingdom version in the game too now that we have established that the designers care little about faction alignment anyway... :/
Well, well... doesn't this pack seem strangely familiar? Maybe because four of its commons are repeated in the exact same sequence as in the previous pack. Patterns like these often appear in cardgames and it takes you out of the experience a bit when everything starts feeling staged rather than a genuine treasure hunt. The Titans are getting the Alexandria-class cruiser as a base card, man this set is not holding back! We also have a third variant of the Daughtress family (counting the token card as one of them) and we will discover a fourth unit later in this set too, this is how I wish all the armies were treated in the game. I'm still looking for a game that lets me field squadrons of similar mobile suits into combat. The A.E.U.G. is getting the modernized Rick Dias as an uncommon unit with the designation "red" to differentiate it from the black early type which is a strange name much preferred to the "Quattro Bajeena custom" which is seen in many places.
This is a very unit heavy package with lots of good stuff in it including the last variant of the Daughtress. Notice again how two of the uncommon cards follow in direct sequence to another just like they did in the pack before it. The rare section holds to lovely menacing machines and the violet deck is getting some love with both a new variant of the Barbatos and the Hammerhead warship as their base. I love seeing all these battleships joining the factions. The old Gundam War card-game also featured spaceships as regular units functioning as supports with no direct attacks of their own but so far we haven't seen this in GCG.
New units and pilots keep getting introduced, the latter as these unappealing combo-cards that don't make a whole lot of sense to me. Where is the thematic sense in playing a card called "It's Name is Ryusei-Go" when the effect is not in any way linked with the mobile suit itself... I don't get it? Again I think the old Gundam War game handled it better with generic command or operation cards like "Disarmament", "Pre-emptive Attack" or "Malfunction" although that game had its share of cheese as well. The rare slots feature Woolf's custom G-Exes which goes nicely together with the basic Genoace and we also have the Sodon as a base for the green faction. The Sodon is coming to the Converge SB-line later this year and I look forward to it bringing some additional colour to that very white line-up.
Pack nine brings more mass-production type goodies into the game, the beautiful Nemo was kind of expected but I never expected to see the Ga-Zowmn in here, can I hope for the Gaza-D as well? (spoiler alert: no) However, there is one card here that really disappointed me, can you guess which one it is? Yes, of course it is the "Just the boys chillin'" combo card that shoves Forbidden Gundam pilot Shani Andras, crazed Raider pilot Clotho Buer and their sorry leader Orga Sabnak onto a single card. These guys are fantastic over-the-top villains and deserve their own unique cards with proper artwork and links to the respective unique machine. Fine, I don't want to see any individual pilot cards for the "G-boys" of Gundam Wing, the Tekkadan children or those obnoxious kids from ZZ Gundam either then. Pffft...
Lots of stuff going on here. Several mass-production type units fill up their respective faction ranks and Vulture gets its land-based battleship Freeden as a base option. I wonder if the game will feature Andrew Waltfeld and his Lesseps-class battleship will also come further down the line. They already released the LaGOWE as a generic ZAFT unit but dear designers now you can start figuring out how to do a legendary rare variant that you can link to two pilot cards. The Raider Gundam shows up in MS form in the uncommon section while the MA-form was a common card, not sure what is going on there. The Forbidden Gundam does not have a transformed variant in this set.
I have already lost count of how many times the Leopard and Airmaster have showed up so far, they seem to be able to form a deck of their own. The rare card slot features a new version of the Tallgeese (it was originally featured in starter deck ST02) and the mighty Gundam X with a nice foil effect applied to its solar panels. The card btw is linked to Garrod Ran but the only version of him released this far is a card featuring both him and Tiffa Adill - it is small inconsistences like these that could do with some polish and minimize unnecessary confusion and debates at a gaming table.
We are seeing a lot more duplicates by now, this pack is nothing but repeats save for the rare slot. At first I thought I had pulled a duplicate of the Gundam X until I realized that it was a command card. Again, the solar panels on the card are very suitable for the otherwise very muted foil effect used in GCG. I love to see the Ryusei-Go show up and I am still waiting patiently for Gundam Converge or Mobile Suit Ensemble to pick it up because I know it would look fantastic. Z.A.F.T. is getting their third Long Range GINN already which is just how I like it, unfortunately this is the only ZAFT-card in the entire set.
Again most of the card are repeats but we have a new Schwalbe Graze among the uncommons, I really love that there are so many Graze-types in the game already but I suspect we may not see much more of Tekkadan in the game going forward. I am actually rather curious to see how Bandai plans to expand the game and if they will mostly add new factions or keep expanding the existing ones as well. Otherwise we will soon end up in that last-stage phase of the game where we get nothing but Windmill Gundams and other strange Jupiter Empire weirdness. the rare section features the might Ashtaron and everybody's purple hair favourite Haman Karn. A beautiful card but I am guessing there is probably also an even better looking alt-art-variant in the set as well.
There are still some common cards we haven't seen; the giant Zaku III joins the game and we have some new faces in the uncommon area as well. I really don't like the modernized artwork for Jerid Messa, it looks like a completely different person having a really bad hair-day. The rare section features a white Mk-II to counter the blue version we saw earlier but neither the G-Defenser or the Super Gundam appear in GD02 but I'm sure we will see them further down the road. The AGE-1 Normal appears as a legendary rare in a pose that looks very awkward for some reason. The resource-card slot holds another boring EX-resource token that looks just like every other non-promo version, do we really have to scatter these around in the booster packs? If you need more than token Bandai should have provided enough of them in the starter set.
There are still new common cards to be found out there, the GQuuuuuuX is next and considering it is plastered all over the cover it has been keeping a really low profile so far. The Titans get yet another mass-production type in this set, I think they should have held back a bit and focused on one or two of them and created multiple variants instead. It feels like they are rushing through all the good stuff to fast and then we'll be stuck with very little in the future. The uncommon section features the Archangel's sister ship the Dominion as a base-card but the rare section is a little bleak with a very obscure Vagan machine (again conveniently paired with its pilot in the same package) and a boring command card.
We are well beyond the halfway marker but there are still new common and uncommon cards to enjoy. I had not expected to see the Gabthley in here which is another of my alltime-favourites but what is the Heavyarms doing in there? Neo Zeon gets a warship of its own as a base card; this set is really rectifying some of the thematic complaints I had about the bland base-cards found in the starter sets.
I am curious why Bandai felt they needed to release another version of the Heavyarms, it was already featured in both the Wings of Advance starter ST02 (left) and in the main Newtype Rising set GD01 (centre). If we disregard the various card levels and costs as well as the special abilities the main difference appears to be that the new version of the card is no longer linked to Trowa Barton specifically, but to any pilot with the Operation Meteor keyword. As I mentioned before, this game seems to be wearing the Gundam-theme as a thin layer on top of a gaming meta that probably needed some fine-tuning?
And while we are on the topic of faction alignment; is the Earth Federation really going to get this multi-colour handicap? Many different Gundam-eras will have an Earth-centric faction present in its storyline and so here we see various representatives from the E.F.S.F. in the main Universal Century-era the Federal Forces of AGE and the GQuuuuuuX alternate universe variant. The O.M.N.I. forces from SEED lucked out since they are known by their keyword "Earth Alliance" but they are pretty much the same thing. We can probably expect the units from the F91-era to swell their ranks even further. It seems to me the Earthnoids are being given a huge advantage in their deck formation opportunities here.
Notice also the Galbaldy Beta on the left there. It is primarily an E.F.S.F. model and we see them assisting the Titans searching for the missing Mk.IIs in Zeta Gundam. Yet here for some reason the Beta is exclusively a Titans faction unit even though the Titans are a sub-faction of the E.F.S.F. at that. Those Core Boosters next to it have dual faction traits and why the Galbaldy Beta doesn't is just mystifying to me. Shut up and consume appears to be the most logical explanation.
Two thirds through the box and we are still finding new common and uncommon cards. We have another named character from the Maganac Corps in his own dedicated mobile suit, perfect, this is just the way to keep organically growing even the smallest of factions. Talking about small factions by the way, the Police Zaku there has the keyword Side 6, that is going to be a very lonely category I imagine. I didn't comment on it earlier but the red faction base card called "Shuji's Hideout" is officially the lamest base concept to ever make it into the game. What's next, the Clyne Residence?
More military police for Side 6, at least now I can build a single patrol. The most interesting card here is the alternate artwork version of the legendary rare AGE-1 Normal, this being the LR+ variant. This was the only LR+ card in the box which I thought was a bit stingy. I went back and checked GD01 and while I did get two LR+ cards in that box I guess that alt-art R+ version of Kamille Bidan we saw earlier in here is taking the second alt-art spot. I asked the Google AI and it suggests that two alt-art cards is indeed the most commonly seen distribution while also not guaranteed.
In pack 18 we are mainly finding repeat cards already seen before. The rare section keeps delivering new stuff although one of them is a command card and the second is a lesser variant of the Gundam X as an (R) card rather than the legendary rare (LR) version we saw earlier.
Duplicates abound so let's skip directly to the rare section. Again another command card, this time for the red deck paired with the last legendary rare card for the red faction, the Ashtaron's mighty battle partner. Together with that command card the entire red set is now completed all from a single box. Not bad, you really do get most of the cards in some version in a booster box, I managed to fill up both the red and green decks while there are still some gaps in the blue, white and violet ones.
There is an awful lot of mobile armour mode cards in package 20, that Delta Plus there has its mobile suit form over in GD01 by the way. Without knowing anything about the game mechanics I really prefer the separate cards for mobile suit and armour forms compared to the old way it was handled in Gundam War. Transforming mobile suits in GW had two different stats with the MA-mode printed upside down at the top of the card and you had to rotate the card 180 degrees when switching between them. While it makes a lot of sense to have two modes of the same suit on a single card I much prefer having alternate artwork fully representing each mode. The rare section features two of the signature mobile suits from GQuuuuuuX with the Red Gundam ironically placed in the green deck. The GQuuuuuuX legendary rare is the first of the three mobile suits shown on the box cover to appear in this box, hopefully I can find at least one more of them even though we are running low on card packs now.
Package number 21 is the first to feature a complete set of thirteen repeat cards with the rare card section being made up of two command cards for the violet deck. Good if you are a violet deck player I suppose but not much to see here, let's move on.
Not much new here but hold on, that legendary rare Zeta Gundam card is new and also the one from the box cover. Surprisingly, this is the only version of the MSZ-006 Z Gundam in the game thus far but I am betting on finding an uncommon or common version of it in the next set.
The penultimate 23rd card pack has only one new card and it is the Argama, the last of the base cards for the set - I was starting to wonder if I was going to miss out on it. Not a whole lot of interesting cards in here and only one mass-production mobile suit.
The last box holds no big surprises either, save for a wild-eye Muruta Azrael screaming and flailing on the bridge of the Dominion. Glad to see a couple more mass-production types in the pack but that will be pretty much it. So, how well did we do with this single box? Let's take a look at some statistics.
The good news is that, discounting alternate artwork variants we are only missing four cards to make a complete set and all four are of course legendary rare-rated. The blue deck is missing the Gundam Epyon and the mobile suit mode of the Psycho Gundam, White is missing a Gundam Kimaris and Violet is of course missing that beautiful First Form Barbatos from the box cover. Most of the common and uncommon cards are present in quantities of two or three. The cards I got a full 4-copy playset of were the Raider Gundam (MA), the Genoace mass-production type, the Gundam AGE-1T Titus, the third form Barbatos, the Ground Type Graze Ritter, Pilot Witz Sou and the base card for the Titans Warship Alexandria.
Card Distribution per deck colour:
Blue: 64
Green: 54
Red: 54
White: 53
Violet: 63
I did expect GD02 to slightly favour the Violet deck seeing as this colour was just introduced to the game but I am surprised to see the blue faction getting the most cards, especially since I didn't even get any of their legendary rare cards in the box. Blue has a total of 19 different units in GD02, green gets 16, red 17, white 16 and violet 16 so the skew seems intentional. Pilot and command cards are mostly evenly distributed except for the violet deck that gets roughly 50% more which seems fair.
All in all I am pleased with the contents of the box and don't feel cheated in the same way you would usually do when opening a Gundam War or Gundam War NEX-A box as they were really stingy with the rare cards. I might be picking up some the missing cards on the secondary market (price depending). However, just as with Arsenal Base you will just have to accept that you most likely not complete a GCG-collection unless you throw absurd amounts of money on it so stay frosty out there and enjoy the game for what it is.
