Phantom Aria is the fourth main booster series of the Gundam Card Game and it was released globally on April 24th. Bandai Namco are really pushing hard on the release pedal with a new set hitting the shelves roughly every two months. This wouldn't be a problem if the availability of the game was stable. Actually, GD04 is the first set not to instantly sell out in my corner of the world, something that can not be said for the ST09 starter set which preceded it a month earlier (of which I haven't seen any single sign as of yet). While this review focused strictly on the card collection perspective rather than gameplay, I couldn't help picking up on the grumblings regarding static meta and continued pressure from cards in the very first set from disgruntled players and I wonder if the game is starting to lose a bit of its momentum.
The GD04 packaging follows the established style for the game and this time the trio of mobile suits that adorn its top and sides are pulled from SEED Destiny, Victory Gundam and Unicorn. As usual the assumption is that we can find all of these as Legendary Rare denominations inside the set and that hopefully at least a couple of them will be held inside this particular box. The thing that I enjoy so much about the Gundam Card Game is all the new artwork that has been produced for the product; there are no stale reissues of old artwork here.
The back-cover of the box has all the usual product information including card rarity amounts and the contact information for some of its European distributors. I'll get back to the rarity distribution in just a second.
A booster box includes 24 individual booster packs, each thick from the amount of cards held within. I keep mentioning this but when you compare a pack of 13 cards to a typical Japanese Pokemon pack of five cards or - even worse - the old Mobile Suit Gundam Duel Company packs that held only three cards these are so satisfying to hold in your hand.
There are no alternate artwork styles on the individual packs, they simply reuse the image from the top cover which makes for easy identification. Much of the information from the booster box is repeated again on each individual pack as well.
I keep recycling this image from the GD01 review don't I? This illustrates 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 (face side up) 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 utility card. I always shift that card to the front when opening a pack since it is typically the most uninteresting of the bunch.
Here is a comparison of the card rarity distribution for each of the four booster sets that have been released up until this point with GD01 on the left and GD04 on the right. We can see that the amount of common and uncommon cards have remained unchanged while Bandai has been tinkering a bit with the other denominations. GD03 was annoying in that it radically increased the number of resource- and token cards to a level that made it impossible to collect all of them in a single box and also for introducing the "special rarity" category which makes a return also in GD04. In my opening of GD03 the special category was represented by an alternate artwork card of a pilot card found in one of the starter sets which I felt was a bit random. Anyway, let's start opening packs!
Alright, what exactly do we have here? While I have seen the occasional preview image of a card here and there I generally try to avoid spoiling the surprise and so I am going in pretty much blind. This makes the opening of the first couple of packs really exciting (before the duplicates start to take over) but I have to say this first pack has a distinct feeling of "meh". We have a couple of oddball mobile suits from smaller franchises here, the only major hits are the Virtue (which we have seen several times in the game already) and the Victory Gundam which is sitting there next to its Core Fighter - I wonder if these are distributed in pairs?
We do have a couple of pilots in the pack, the most notable one being Garma Zabi which probably means that his Zaku II will be included in the set (spoiler alert: no, it unfortunately isn't). I see Gates Capa in his GQuuuuuuX form, having no idea what machine he pilots in that show. You can see the two rare cards from each pack down in the bottom left corner. Nena Trinity hints at the Throne Gundams being included while Captain Gladys of the Minerva is reduced to a simple command card because only mobile suit pilots are characters in this game.
With the second pack opened I think I know what is going on here. This set appears to be heavily focused on oddball support craft from smaller fighters to massive mobile armours. We also see more generic titles on the command cards. I find it rather poor form not to include character names such as Talia Gladys and now Wang Liu Mei on the cards - I guess Bandai expects everyone playing this game to recognize every ancillary character from the past 40 years. The functional faction associations on the cards continue to rile me up as well, the Earth Federation is apparently cross-compatible between the Universal Century and the Advanced Generation-era, while the United Nations factions from Anno Domini and After War are not - go figure.
We have our first Legendary Rare card encounter in the headless RX-78 doing its Last Shooting pose. How many RX-78 cards do we have in the game at this point, half a dozen? Yawn. The pack also contains the first yellow-border token card in the resource-card slot (bottom right) and it is a psycommu-controlled arm of the Zeong, which is hopefully also somewhere inside the box (otherwise things would be rather awkward).
Trinity Team confirmed - We get both Michael and his Throne Zwei in the pack together with several other suits and armours from Mobile Suit Gundam 00. Gundam Dynames is also a returning face but now sits in the red deck as opposed to green for some reason. The way this game treats faction alignments, pilot links and deck colours is an afterthought at best as far as the theme is concerned, it is like plonking Squirtle into your fire deck. Still, nothing unique for this particular game I'm afraid but I think that older Gundam card games were a bit more respectful to the lore; GCG really has the feeling of "product" plastered all over it. Still, the artwork is great for the most part. :) Talking about the rare cards I really dig the GN Flag - can't say the same about the Moon Moon-nonsense from Double Zeta I'm afraid but I heard that this card is a powerful blocker in the current meta so I guess there is that. (Editor's Note: That's the Moonrace Queen Diana Soriel and her body-double from Turn-A and nothing else...)
The resource card slot holds a portrait of the Victory Gundam and as you can see if you squint really hard this is the alternate foil-card variant with a C+ denomination. So far, every booster box I have opened has always included exactly one resource card with foil effect and I assume that this box will not be breaking that rule.
Four packs in and already I am starting to spot several duplicates. Unfortunately, several of the common cards in this set are unique machines - I would have preferred most of the common slots to be taken up by mass-production types but the game thinks differently. I commented about it at the time - GD01 is fantastic when it comes to including a lot of iconic mobile suits types - too many in fact. Bandai would have done well to mix it up a bit to avoid situations like GD04 where I just sit and open packs of exotic or one-off mobile armours like the Alvatore and Esperansa from peripheral timelines. This is not the first front-loaded Gundam-themed game either so you'd think there might be a lesson in there somewhere. Talking about the cards we have a single mass-production suit from the Shrike Team which I hope to get more of, as well as some interesting faces making an appearance. I guess technically you could call the Gundvölva a mass-production type although it is more akin to a GX-Bit or for that matter, a Shahed-136. Who needs psycommu and newtypes when there are drone weapons?
Checking the rare slot that GN Flag sure looks familiar, back-to-back familiar actually. The second card is an alternate artwork rare (R+) depiction of the most famous Victory Gundam pilot, another kid who should be in school studying prepositions and history. Alternate rare-cards like these are the hardest to collect and I wonder if it belongs to the "5 Special" rarity category on the box. The resource-slot has another token card in it; the Alvaatore. This is a mobile suit that goes together with the Alvatore mobile armour we discovered in the previous pack (a set of very expensive Mobile Suit Ensemble figures I will apparently never manage to catch I might add).
My goodness, there are a lot of duplicates in the common section already. I assume the distribution could be similar to GD03 where it seemed like some commons were found primarily in the first half of the packs with the other showing up in the second half and so on. If you buy singles, give those packs a good shake-up. Talking about randomness, this pack contains six white cards (including both rares), five for the red deck and a single one for blue, which is a bit crazy. I spot another duplicate rare already, hopefully this will not become a thing - the goal here is to see as many different cards as possible and we can't waste these precious slots on duplicates.
Talking about the cards in the pack I can see a beautiful GN-X in the uncommon slot, worrying for a mass-production type but in my experience you seem to end up with 2-3 of every common or uncommon card in a set anyway so these categories seem rather interchangeable. This pack also contains three different base cards all of which are military installations or warships, just the way I want it to be. White gets another iconic suit, Al-Saachez's blue Enact which has the Superpower Bloc trait while Al-Saachez himself has both Superpower Bloc and UN because the game is wonky like that.
One quarter portion in and look at that, the four uncommon cards are an exact repetition of the line-up from the first pack we opened. This certainly lends credibility to my theory that the Core Fighter and the Victory Gundam might be paired but I'm still not convinced this is actually the case, it might actually be a coincidence. Meanwhile, the game continues to introduce weird mobile armours and.... militia biplanes. Tokwan, our Zeon pilot there on the right is I believe piloting a Bigro so it seems almost certain that it will pop up in this set. We have anonymous Mirai Yashima there pretending to pilot the White Base using a ship's wheel while trying to catch the eye of... is it Bright Noa or Sleggar Law? The rare section treats us to a rare base card for the League in the Reinforce Junior (Bandai spell checkers are asleep at the wheel too it seems) followed up by a legendary rare Banshee Norn - now that's what I call a good pull!
Oh boy... it's kindergarten time! This set is really full of underage characters but we at least have the Bigro there and look, it is linked to Tokwan indeed. I noticed that some unique mobile suits in this set like Jamil Neate's Gundam X and the Gundam Exia (the common one in the purple deck) do not have links to named pilots while others like the Gundam Dynames and Gundam Virtue do - I have no idea what is going on with that. I do know that one common criticism of the game is that the card drawing mechanism gives the player very little input to actually successfully pair up pilot and suit, thus spoiling certain combinations and rewarding generic suit and pilot pairing. Knowing my own luck under such circumstances I'd probably get very frustrated waiting for the right card to appear.
In the rare section we find yet another version of the Exia. This time it sits in the red deck and has a named link to Setsuna - which the common version in the purple deck we saw a couple of packs ago does not have. I guess it makes sense to someone, somewhere.
We are still finding interesting appearances among the commons. I'm really liking the artwork on Sochie's card and the set already has multiple Milita vehicles and suits for her to operate. I haven't yet seen the little Armadillo (WaD) walker which would be my personal choice and spoiler alert again: it is unfortunately not included in this set. I lauded the game for including so many variants of the Daughtress-family and here we have yet another variant. I had no clue what a Wise Wallaby would be and set my hopes on some kind of Wild Weasel electronic warfare unit but it turned out to be pilot Ennil El's personal ride. Wow, first we got the Esperansa mobile armour and now this, she simply must be in here somewhere.
The pack closes on a real surprise; not only is it two green rares next to each other but they are both Lfrith variants! We also have a second Gundvölva in the pack (the box contained three in total) to back them up, what a lovely coincidence. Dawn of Fold is getting some proper representation in GD04, we already pulled both Norea and Sophie and here come their machines as well - Bring the pain ladies!
We've seen a lot of the cards in this pack already but another mobile armour does indeed pop up among the commons; the truly unique-looking Zakrello. The card is not linked to any particular pilot and I doubt that we will see its pilot Dimitri in the set - I think it would make perfect sense to introduce pilot and suit in the same set together but Bandai tells me to hush and sit down so fine, whatever (he already appeared on a card in Gundam War NEX-A anyway). The Heinree is a mass-production type from Grassley House so you can use it to back up Shaddiq Zenelli in his Michaelis, if you are running a green and white combo that is because Zenelli is in the white deck...
Talking about odd deck-fellows we have another version of the Gundam Dynames here. We just saw that unit in the previous pack but with red deck allegiance. Both are linked to Lockon Stratos who so far has only one appearance in the green deck. Notice Hallelujah there n the uncommon section - he is in the red deck but his Kyrios is also in the previous pack but in the green deck. Make it make sense... In the rare section both slots go to the white deck (so far this is the third time out of nine that both slots are claimed by white) with the Silver Bullet from Unicorn as rare and the moustachio Turn-A itself as the third Legendary Rare. Look at the card text for the Turn-A, I think my eyes will start to bleed. Thankfully I just enjoy collecting the cards, not playing the game.
Lastly, we've pulled another token card in the resource slot - the legs of the Victory Gundam, unceremoniously referred to as "Parts". I assumed that the top section would also appear as a resource card but no, this is the only card related to the Victory. Still, the League Militaire has a solid presence in this box so far with multiple Victories and Core Fighters already, but where are the Zanscare forces? So far, the only thing we've seen is a Zoloat in League Militaire colours.
Much of the content of this tenth pack is known to us already but a couple of new cards are filtering in. We have another type of GN Armor in the common section, this time it sits in purple together with the Exia card we saw earlier. Unlike the Exia however it has a direct pilot affiliation to Setsuna - I know I shouldn't keep on moaning about it but it just does my head in. The uncommon section treats us to the mighty Gaplant which has no direct pilot link so not sure if we also get to see one of its pilots in the set. In the rare section we find the regular version of the Uso Ewin alternate card we saw earlier and we have a new version of the Xi Gundam for red which is consistent with the other three versions released for this mobile suit so far.
The set still has oddball mobile armours to throw at us, here comes the Gadeel from After War which is actually a pretty cool looking aircraft but the card art doesn't really work for me. Lunamaria's ZAKU Gunner pops up again and is linked up with the Minerva Squad - presumably the gang from ST09 that I haven't managed to purchase yet. Below it we can see the Sword Impulse Gundam which is linked directly to Shinn and Lunamaria which is canon I guess, but it makes less sense then to have Lunamaria's custom red machine linked up with the entire MS team of the Minerva?
The pack comes with two iconic mobile suits in the rare section: First we have the Psycho Gundam Mk-II which is linked to Rosamia Badam so I guess the mystery Gaplant pilot in this set is now also revealed. In the LR-slot we have the Destiny Gundam and it is the first of the three mobile suits from the box cover. Both card are a bit messy to look at, I tend to prefer cleaner and more zoomed-out artwork without effect parts thrown in all over the place.
Halfway through the pack by now and I believe we have seen most of the cards already, hopefully the second half will introduce the "b-sides" if you will. In the rare section we have a double pull for green, this is the second time it occurs. We have a utility command card and the freakish Kikeroga mobile armour which is a weird amalgamation of the Braw Bro from U.C.0079 and something that looks like a slimmed-down Geze. I recently saw the Robot Spirits incarnation of this and I'm amazed that someone thought it worthy of being a figure. Does that mean we will see a really premium pay-through-the-nose version in Mobile Suit Ensemble or Gundam Converge as well? I'd say it is highly questionable but sometimes insane things like that happen.
Lots of repeats in the common and uncommon sections now so we'll have to focus more on the rare slot. This time we get a new pilot card for Suletta who is jumping ship and shifting decks (just like everyone else seems to be doing in this game) going from white to green. The other slot holds our next legendary rare and in line with the mobile armour focus of GD04 the Neo Zeon forces are rolling out the insane Neo Zeong with a level of nine and a cost of eight - who will be the first to break the barrier and hit level 10?
There are a couple of new cards in the uncommon section this time; the rather obscure character Pala Sys who pilots the G-Falcon and the mighty space fortress A Baoa Qu which I prefer better under its Gate of Zedan name when the Titans operated it. Maybe it can make an appearance in the Titans-focused started deck coming out this autumn? The rare slot holds a boring command card and another oddity; a battleship from Turn-A that looks very much inspired by the Argama-class (when you view it in full light from above). Next.
Fifteen packs in and we are seeing some new faces. Riddhe Marcenas finally pops up, we've been encountering a couple of his Banshee Norn variants already and what do you know we have yet another warship, this time in purple. While the ships are really scattered from every conceivable timeline I really appreciate them being included here. The rare section introduces Rey Za Burrel from the Minerva but we haven't seen his personal ride in this set so far, is the Legend Gundam hanging around in the unopened packs? (Spoiler alert: No, it is not unfortunately). The second slot treats us to another alternate artwork card, this time of the Victory Gundam. The League Militaire are absolutely killing it with this box, now we have seen three alternate artwork cards and they are all lifting this single faction. Now all we need is the regular version of this card, you know the one from the box cover. Based on experience from other box openings I'd say there is a pretty good chance that it is in here and that means that unfortunately the Unicorn Gundam won't.
Anyway, before we move on we also have a new token card in the resource slot; the head of the Zeong as it scoots away into that Last Shooting scene. We now have both an arm and the head as tokens for the Zeong but not the mobile suit itself - I'd be really annoyed if it turns out not to be included in this box. :)
We are two thirds in and now finally crew is starting to roll in. It must have been a hard night drinking for miss El there, we've been getting multiple vehicles for her to pilot already so she can get to work. So much for being a common card. The uncommon section also introduces another latecomer; Rosamia Badam shows up ready to pilot either the Gaplant or the Psycho Gundam Mk-II. Get busy, ladies. What else do we have here... Let's see, a couple of mildly inspiring rare cards but oh, we have a new mobile suit in the commons section. That's the Demi Trainer - a suit I'm pretty sure I've seen in the game already, let me check...
Yeah, there it is. We have indeed seen both pilot (with impossible candy floss hair - that's a morning routine I don't envy) and suit before in GD01 but - of course at this point - at the time in another deck. The astute observer may have also noticed that the suit is now seen in its later appearance with the long range rifle replaced by a Gatling Gun (and in game it has also lost its pilot-link).
Pack seventeen introduces several new mobile suits - we have yet another RX-78 in the uncommon section (still in the blue deck for some reason) which seems pointless because I here all blue faction players are spamming Amuro in the GM but I guess it is like Pikachu, it simply has to appear in every other goddamn set. Heine gets his orange GOUF but the card art is pretty disappointing, these face close-ups are doing nothing for me I'm afraid. The Trinity Team is finally completed with the Throne Eins as our first rare and would you look at that, here comes the mighty Zeong as a legendary rare and it is looking great. It is a perfect example of how you can do dynamic art and still give a clear representation of what the unit looks like in its entirety.
As you can see from its abilities, the Zeong is directly supported by two types of token cards. While I would like to assume that this fact informed how the boxes were seeded I ended up with only one arm-token and so it is indeed probably just random.
We have seen all the regular cards before and even in the rare section we have a duplicate of the red-deck Exia, the only new card to throw into the mix is yet another version of the Victory Gundam with its VSBR rif... (oops, wrong show there), I mean its Overhang Cannon pack which sports a couple of beam cannons as well as additional boosters. The League Militaire version of the Guncannon I guess. Let's crack on with the next pack.
Two new cards make their debut in the commons section; we have yet another civilian base from GQuuuuuuX in the red deck and look at that, our first proper Zanscare Empire mobile suit. Or hold on a second, it has both the League Militaire and Zanscare Empire traits on it, what is up with that?
Ok, so the Shokew bothered me a bit and I just had to zoom into and read up on it a bit. In the lore, it is a prototype machine that according to Gundam writing 101 gets into the hands of a civilian kid who just happens to be the next top ace and so Uso Ewin steals it and crews it for a while. And this is enough for it to receive faction keywords for both teams? By that logic the Gelgoog should get the Titans trait because Reccoa Londe bumbled around in one, once. Also, we already have a couple of machines appropriated by the opposition in this set and they have been single faction only. There is of course also "Jamil's Gundam X" in the purple deck so this may as well have been "Uso's Shokew" by the same logic. This game...
Anyway, back on track now, apologies for the sidestep. It is probably more important to mention that we have two important cards in the rare section. Loran or Rolan - the jury is still out - is our linked pilot for the Turn-A Gundam and here comes the anticipated regular version of the Victory Gundam in the legendary rare slot. The League Militaire continues to dominate this box.
Pack 20 is a lot of the same but the rare section introduces two new cards at least. First we have yet another version of the Gundam Airmaster - the last two sets have been crawling with these - and wouldn't you know it; ANOTHER mobile suit for the League Militaire. Seriously, their line-up in this box covers a lot of their early inventory, we are just missing out on the Gunblaster and the Victory 2 variants which are obviously going to follow at some point in the future.
The Banshee Norn completes the resource card line-up for this set, I believe we actually got all the resource- and token cards in the box this time around. I still have a lot of gaps in the series from GD03, hopefully they will pop up on either the singles markets or in lumps of common cards that people are looking to get rid of.
This is booster pack 21 of 24 and it is a complete misfire. We have seen all these cards before, even the two rares are duplicates from earlier in this pack. Let's move on...
Wow, this pack is all about Celestial being it seems, five of their mobile suits and two of their pilots in a single pack must be some kind of record. Hallelujah and the Kyrios are conveniently located in the same pack and the second rare slot holds another version of the Turn-A Gundam, we saw the legendary rare version earlier with all those millions of keywords in its text box, this variant seems more straightforward.
I didn't comment on the GM III earlier; this is another type of very situational artwork that I don't really think works for a mass-production type. Just give me a clean view from a decent angle so that I can envisage the team lining up next to each other, please. We've seen all of the commons and uncommons before but here it comes; pack 23 of 24 contains two very iconic mobile suits just as the box is about to wrap up. First we have Rey's ubiquitous Blaze ZAKU Phantom, you just can't build a Minerva Squad without it. Secondly; there it is - the legendary rare Unicorn Gundam from the box cover!
As this box proves, it actually IS possible to get all three mobile suits from the cover in a single box after all! Now, I of course don't know if this is also the case with the previous boxes in the series but it at least proves that there is no specific rule in place for GD04 to prevent it from happening. I was pretty sure Bandai did this intentionally to lure customers into buying multiple boxes but I guess I owe them an apology (unless of course someone screwed up and that was their strategy all along...). I am really curious to know if people managed to pull all three in a single box from the previous sets as well.
As we unwrap the final pack I feel a sort of zen-like peace within me already, so much so that I can't be bothered to work myself up about the two mildly inspiring rare cards found inside. First up we have a combination card showing of Guncannons unit 108 and 109 from the movie-retcon of the original television series. I really don't appreciate combination cards like these and I already rolled my eyes at the two Core Boosters fighting for space on a single card that we also find within this set. Older Gundam cardgames also do this from time to time, expect to see Freedom and Justice crammed together on a high-level card before long. The worst offender was the arcade game TryAge which in later generations started introducing dual stats for two different mobile suits on the same card, like the Zeta and the Double Zeta or Age-1S Spallow with the AGE-1T Titus for example, it used to drive me up the wall. The very last card is a picture of a baby bottle, I don't think I need to make any snide comments about it, let's just move on.
Card distribution per deck:
Blue: 59 cards, 13 of which were rare or higher.
Green: 56 cards with only 7 rares.
Red: 59 cards with 8 rares.
White: 60 cards and 13 rares.
Purple: 54 cards with 7 rares.
So here is a quick look at the card counts for each faction in the box. While the general amount of cards per each faction is fairly level there was a massive skew in the distribution of the rare cards. Blue and white are standing very tall compared to the other three factions - I don't recall previous boxes being this swingy.
To add further insult to the other teams, the blue deck also got all of the alternate artwork cards in the box. However, the only faction to receive a complete set of cards was actually white with its three Legendary Rare cards while the other four suites missed out on one LR-card each; the RX-104FF Penelope for blue, Elan Ceres's FP/A-77 Gundam Pharact for green, the GN-003 Gundam Kyrios for red and the GX-9901-DX Gundam Double X for purple. It is also worth pointing out that green, red and purple only have two legendary rare cards in GD04, with three each for blue and white. Gundam game-designers are just unable to avoid favouring the E.F.S.F. faction whenever they make a game of this type.
All things considered, I had a good time opening this box even though it didn't really reach the same levels of hype as previous sets. My main complaint as a collector is that unique mobile suits are being reissued over and over again and that suits and people just move around among the different decks without obvious thematic purpose. From a gameplay perspective it also seems that many players are frustrated by some of the core mechanics of the game. It remains to be seen if this project will run out of steam or if the developers manage to set things right.
