The situation has been kind of dry on the GCG-side of things, lately. Not that Bandai isn't busy pumping out card expansions but they sure have a hard time finding their way into my neck of the woods. ST09? Never saw it. GD05? Nothing available. ST10 and EB01? Forget about it. I did however manage to get my hands on the Deck Build Box that released in conjunction with the fifth main expansion "Freedom Ascension". As the game goes on into its second year the product desert continues to be a thing and so I have focused my attention elsewhere.
Anyway, the Deck Build Box is a fixed set of re-printed cards designed to give players a core to build their decks around. There are 25 cards for each of the five colours and the foil treatments have been removed on the higher rarity cards that are included. We also get two player reference and rule sheets which is good I guess if you want to introduce a friend to the game but there is only one set of functional resource cards in there so it is not intended to be a 2-player starter set or so.
The packaging is similar to what you see for other games like the Pokemon TCG boxsets for example. The cards come in a sturdy cardboard box which is designed to store your cards, and it is protected by a cardboard sleeve that slides off to either side. The sleeve has a line-art depiction of the Strike Freedom Gundam and we find the full-colour image printed on the storage box itself. Bandai for some reason actually made three different designs for the storage box itself, in an attempt to con coll... I mean con-vince collectors into picking up multiple boxes. The crux is that you do not know which design you will be getting as the whole thing is sealed with shrink wrap.
Inside we see the main body of cards neatly packed in the middle of the box with disposable cardboard padding on three sides. On the fourth side we find four actual booster packs from the main GD05 Freedom Ascension set as well as a separately wrapped promo-card.
If you have been keeping up with previous releases you won't find much new content in here. I think there were one or two LR cards here that I was missing myself, but the highlight otherwise for me is the set of booster packs, seeing as I'm not sure if I will be able to find a decently priced GD05 box at all. In fact, considering the scalper prices on the secondary market right now, you don't actually pay that much more for this deck building box which is kind of insane. But let's look at the re-printed cards first.
As mentioned earlier, each colour gets a deck of 25 cards divided between nine different individual cards in varying quantities. This infuriating practice of not providing full playsets of four of each is of course a staple in TCG design, intended to lure you into picking up multiple boxes. As you can see here, unit counts vary between 2, 3 or 4. The blue deck mainly features the White Base troika and the Unicorn from GD01. I don't pay attention to the metagame but I do believe that Amuro has been a staple in the blue decks for quite some time now. Apparently, the metagame is now at the point where players complain that the experience is growing so stale that Bandai is actually looking at redesigning parts of the gameplay itself. Wow.
Here we see the re-printed Deathscythe on the right next to the original foil version card from GD01 on the left. The foil effect really doesn't show up all that well but beyond that the artwork and text appears similar (there might be the odd errata or syntax adjustment on some of the cards I haven't inspected them all in detail). All the re-printed cards have the number 2 printed inside the little white hexagon in the top right corner which easily distinguishes them from their original appearances. The third card in this comparison is one of the cards from the GD05 booster packs - it appears that all cards from now on will be marked with the number two (presumably indicating season 2, cycle 2, year 2 or what have you - this might possibly be used to rotate cards out of tournament play further down the line).
The green deck is amping up the Wing Gundam G Team with three of the Operation Meteor mobile suits backed up by a couple of Zakus and Rick Doms. Odd, but as I have moaned about before - theme is not this game's strong suit. To the point that I think the designers have long since stopped caring about it, actually.
The red deck is almost exclusively consisting of Neo Zeon from the Unicorn-era, the Gundam Virsago from After War Gundam X has been thrown in as a joker. I recall seeing multiple players complaining that the red deck did not get the legendary rare version of the Kshatriya in its place; that would have made it an exclusive Neo Zeon navy line-up.
Purple doesn't get any mass-production type units at all and is 100% themed around various unique machines from the Iron Blooded Orphans series. Not a single entry from After War here and I did notice that Celestial Being has been suspiciously absent from this box set as well.
The white deck is the waifu-segment of this package it seems, and is mostly featuring Cosmic Era characters and machines although the Lfrith from Witch of Mercury has also been thrown in there. Overall, there are re-printed cards from the first five and the eight starter decks, as well as cards from the first three booster series GD01-GD03.
You also get a single set of resource cards and tokens enough to equip a single player, the set-up is similar to the concept of all the early starter sets. The only difference is of course the new "2" era/year marking up in the corner. I am still curious why Bandai included two reference cards but only one set of token, perhaps they could have doubled up on the resource cards to entice budget-minded players to go in and share a box?
Alright, I was mostly excited by the chance to open up these GD05 Freedom Ascension booster packs, as this might even be my only chance of getting my hands on some of them. Looking at the card list on the back we see that Bandai has introduced some changes with this generation. The card count has been slimmed down from 13 to 12 in each pack and we can see an introduction of a new classification of cards known as "Special EX Resource" cards. I guess this means that the beautiful portrait cards that used to be thrown in at the end of each pack are now replaced by some type of ultra-rare full-art cards designed to whip up the consumers into a spending frenzy. The joke is on Bandai though, I couldn't even buy more packs even if I wanted to. Let's look inside and see what we can find!
We can immediately see that there have been some changes to the card-distribution. All the previous main-sets have contained six common cards, four uncommon cards and two rare or higher in a pack, with a resource card of some sort thrown in at the very end. In this pack however there are only five common cards, five uncommons, a single rare card and one of this set's two token cards. It looks like the token card is occupying the space where the second rare or legendary rare card would normally reside, talk about annoying! It seems strange that the balance between common and uncommon cards has been evenly balanced. The fact that there are 50 common cards in this set but only 36 uncommon cards would make the common cards harder to find than the uncommon ones... This was already pretty suspicious back when the allotment was 6 vs. 4 but now they are just messing with us. From here on I don't know what to expect from GD05.
The next big change seems to be in the theming of the decks. I don't know what the designers are smoking but it looks like Neo Zeon has jumped ship from the red deck and are now purple - even though the other Neo Zeon cards in the same Deck Build Box are all red. What a joke. I notice that the civilian use Hobby Hizack is missing its RMS-116H designation on the card as well, like I said - the designers have stopped caring and so should I apparently. We get three green uncommon mobile suits in a nice row there, the randomization seems a bit suspect. The AGE-2 Gundam in Woolf Enneacle tribute colours is a nice looking and unusual card, I can't remember having seen it in any game before. The Gundnode token-card at the end is referenced by the Aerial Rebuild in the green deck, I wonder if these are intentionally packaged together?
Ok, so the second pack here has the traditional distribution of six commons, four uncommons and two rares. I wonder if the previous package changed out a common card for an uncommon to attempt to compensate for only offering one rare card thanks to the included token-card? A pretty poor show I think, unless that Gundnode card is amazing I think most players would have appreciated if you tossed out an uncommon card instead (you know the uncommon cards right? Those are the ones that are more common than the common cards...).
So far GD05 features cards from all sorts of major and minor television series. So far we've seen AGE, Char's Counterattack, SEED Destiny, Victory Gundam, Endless Waltz, IBO, Witch from Mercury and the newly introduced Mobile Fighter G Gundam. Everything feels really disjointed and it doesn't help that Bandai is changing the colours around. It looks like the G Fighters are usurping the red deck away from Neo Zeon - if there is ever a faction that has always been associated with red it is them. That Strike Rouge belonging to Kira Yamato there sits in the blue deck while he and the rest of the O.M.N.I. forces are in the white deck. Go figure. Why even bother with colours at all?
This pack here is all about G Gundam it seems, we've got three of their pilots in this pack including Domon himself in the rare slot. The rest of the pack features a lot of unusual or lesser known designs and here is also our first Legendary Rare card; the Gundam Calibarn with that broomstick (Witch of Mercury, get it?) Rod Rifle deployed. We are seeing a couple of duplicates already, I presume the packs in these boxes have not been seeded in any particularly favourable way, my guess is they have been broken out from the main print run for the booster boxes and just tossed in here.
Yep, no additional legendary rare cards in our final pack, but a couple of duplicates. Overall though it is a fairly good spread, I am counting only four duplicate cards in total but I feel a bit short-changed on the rares. Another two G Team mobile suits join up here, I think we are only missing the Wing Gundam itself now. I don't have any deck building skills for this game but let's take a quick look at the distribution per each individual colour:
Well, your deck-building options will certainly be highly randomized. Blue here ended up with about half as many cards as green, although I do like that all the units belong to the nation of Orb. Green ended up with a battery of uncommon cards led by the legendary rare Calibarn so if you were to build something out of this box green might be a good choice.
The card counts for Red and Purple end up in between the span from blue to green with mostly unit cards, in fact the purple lot is entirely made up of mobile suits. Looking at the cards all lined up like this I get some bad vibes from the artwork. My main reason for following the game is to enjoy the brand new artwork that is introduced specifically for GCG. Somehow the quality appears to be slipping a bit? Most of these designs are quite busy, show only part of the unit from an odd angle - or it is blurred out in the middle of an action. This strikes me as mass-produced and rather soulless computer graphics. Perhaps Bandai's ambitious release schedule leads to some shortcuts - if you like elaborate illustrations good luck going after the alternate artwork cards I guess...
Well, it appears that white is the "winner" with a pool of 14 additional cards to pick from. We have four of the five G Team suits there backed up by Noin too and... hold on a second. Why is Domon in the white deck when the Shining Gundam is in red? Whatever, I'm too tired to deal with it...
Now, before we take a look at the promo-card included in the box I have a bit of a surprise - yes I purchased two Deck Build Boxes. Let's repeat the process once more.
Mmm... that's a nice presentation of the RX-93 on the storage box there. I'm not sure which mobile suit graces the cover of the third box type but I would be willing to take a bet on Wing Zero. More on that in a bit. Let's go straight to the four GD05 booster packs from the second box.
Oh my... that is a lot of duplicates of cards we have already seen. In fact, all six common cards are the exact same cards as found in one of the booster packs from the previous box - arranged in the exact same sequence. I have seen this crop up in various collectible card games over the years but I kind of expected better from GCG. I hope this won't be a pattern for the rest of this box. The uncommon and rare cards are all. We've seen most of the uncommons too, only Sting Oakley is a new face. Things are better in the rare slot however; while I never like seeing a command card in there we do in fact find the Nu Gundam from the box cover itself - and the artwork is really inspired. Great!
What the... is going on here? This pack also has the exact same six common cards - sequence and all - as in another of the packs from the previous deck build box. Are we dealing with some type of pre-set here or am I just unlucky? The uncommon cards are all new this time though and there are some great cards here too. I particularly like seeing Buran; that means the Asshimar is in this set too, hope I can find it. In the rare slot we have Andrew Waltfeldts yellow Murasame (a mobile suit I would very much like to see in Converge by the way) and the mighty Axis Zeon asteroid fortress - now in purple instead of red of course. Let's keep going.
Nope, it is the same shit all over again - all the common cards are an exact clone of the contents of another pack from the other box. We now have three booster packs out of four with the exact same combinations of common cards. While I have seen shenanigans like this before I've never seen it to this extent. Could it be that the common cards have been particularly seeded like this for purposes of balanced deck building? I'd love to hear from other people cracking open their Deck Build Box booster packs.
Fortunately, we are getting fresh cards in the uncommon and rare slots. I love seeing Andrew Waltfeld again and here comes Gyunei's Jagd Doga to team up with Quess' machine from the previous box. Among the rare cards we have old and bitter Amuro from Char's Counterattack and instead of another rare card an alternate artwork version of an uncommon card. This is supposed to be a bit of a rarity but I am not impressed, let's take a closer look at it.
The cards we see here are the O.G. Chuatury pilot/command card from GD01 on the left and the basic uncommon Demi Barding from GD05 on the right. In the middle we have the "U+" alternate artwork version of the card on the right. Alternate artwork cards have up until this point been very interesting with completely different illustrations but this is a simple hack-job of copying two existing assets onto the same card. Unfortunately, I have also seen similar images of cards where Allelujah is pasted onto a card of the Kyrios and the floating Quess we saw earlier superimposed onto the red Jagd Doga card. Bandai appears to have lost interest in both artwork and theming of this game, and apparently the rules don't seem to work to people's satisfaction either? Ouch.
In our last pack the curse of the common cards is finally broken. There are a couple of dupes in there but hey, that Jegan is new and looks great, and the oddly spelled Exus entices me as well. I notice that it is only linked to Phantom Pain and not Neo Roanoke so maybe he is not present in this set? We get a fresh batch of uncommon cards as well and there is my beloved Asshimar in a bit of an unfortunate angle, you don't really get a decent look at it. We have both the Gun EZ and the Gunblaster premiering in this pack, cards I really would have liked a couple of duplicates of. Notice that green command card by the way; "Interwoven Blessings" costed at 10/10 - crazy!
And look at that, we actually got a second Legendary Rare card in this box but it is unfortunately one we have seen already. I think my luck could have been a bit better with these booster packs. Just to hammer the point of commons and uncommons home: We encountered 26 of the 50 types of common cards and 28 of the 36 uncommon cards. The conclusion is that nothing really seems to matter in this game (or Bandai is really bad at maths); just shut up and buy more boxes already.
Blue had a poor showing in the previous box but here they are doing fairly well with a good pool of units and pilots to pick and choose from.
Green is however the undisputed frontrunner here, 17 out of the 48 cards including both of the legendary rare cards is an impressive feat. If you are not building on green when drafting from this box the game must have some serious balancing issues (why do I hear an outcry of thousands of voices shouting "Blurple!" in the background?).
The red and purple decks have a pitiful showing of only 5 and 7 cards each, good luck working with that. You clearly aren't getting a curated experience from these boosters which is why I find it so odd that the seeding between the two boxes was nearly identical for the common cards.
White had a strong card pool in the previous box and doing fairly alright here as well. Again we see a number of the G Team mobile suits at the front, they really want you to go for Wing, huh? I didn't even see a single Gjallarhorn unit in these boxes either.
Before we go, let's take a look at the two promo cards stuffed inside their own separate packaging. There are three types to collect and they are supposedly unique to the Deck Build Box and so whatever we find I just hope it won't be doubles.
Alright, two different cards... I can breathe again. Have to admit, it was a bit nerve-wracking to open the second pack. These promotion cards are simply vanity items that add some flair to your EX Base appearance. I never really understood how these illustrations are intended to work thematically but who cares - they look great! We see EXBP-027 Wing Gundam Zero and EXBP-025 Nu Gundam here.
I did look up EXBP-026 online and found that it is the Shining Gundam with the King of Hearts logo in the background. I had actually expected it to be the Strike Freedom Gundam and I had formulated a theory that the three promo cards would match the three different storage boxes but that was apparently not correct. So... I have no idea which mobile suit is depicted on the third type of storage box and the deck Build Boxes are long sold out over here so I doubt I will ever see it.
In conclusion, the Deck Build Box is a very functional and utilitarian release for players that have problems sourcing the early starter sets and booster boxes (i.e. everyone). The fact that you need to buy at least two boxes to get full playsets of 4 cards of the more powerful unit cards is of course an underhanded tactic but a single Deck Build Box could close that gap for players who only bought a single starter deck of each type for example. For everyone else, there is of course the joy of opening up a couple of booster packs and take a stab at finding the promo cards. Honestly, there are already so many promos and specials out there that it isn't really worth the trouble in my opinion.
