When Bandai introduced their new Gundam-themed collectible card game with much fanfare last year I wasn't sure what to think about it. I was surprised to see the company deciding to introduce not only a card game with a global launch but also a new miniatures game (Gundam Assemble).It remains to see how dedicated they will be to this new game but at least now we can take a better look at it. While some players got their hands on last year's beta release the first wave starter decks have now finally been released.
There are currently four different starter decks to choose from, loosely grouped together based on theme, with another two decks following in September and October respectively. The starter decks are all bite-sized introductions to the game with a fairly low cost of entry. The real meat of the game of course comes in the random booster packs which are designed to suck the players' wallets dry. The first wave "Newtype Rising" launches next week and will probably sell out quickly, so I figured now is a good time to give prospective players a little glimpse into what to expect from these starter decks.
We will begin with the first deck called "Heroic Beginnings" which appears to be the most popular deck seeing how it is selling out the fastest in my area. The deck is themed around the core White Base crew and is paired with suits and pilots from The Witch of Mercury. There are currently four different card colours in the game and you may compose a deck of 1 or 2 of them. Heroic Beginnings combines blue for the Earth Federation and white for The Witch of Mercury-cards (regardless of faction).
The Heroic Beginnings starter deck is also available as a version that includes miniatures for the yet-to-be-released miniatures game Gundam Assemble. It carries the code ST01A and comes with three miniatures of the Gundam, Guncannon and Guntank. This is a nice tie-in with the cards in the pack however the two games have nothing to do with each other, it is simply Bandai trying to cross-promote two very different products. Note that Gundam Assemble figures have to be built and painted into little statues so only modellers need apply. I personally won't give it any time of day (however had the figures been pre-painted and assembled it may have been a different story).
Each starter set contains a fixed composition of 50 main deck cards and an additional 18 resource cards. Bandai also tosses in a promo pack containing a single random foil-card version of one of the cards in the set, clearly intended to lure people into buying multiple starters of the same type. The package also contains a single set of cardboard tokens and a dual-sided playmat/rules sheet.
The flimsy playmat contained within this package will of course be supplanted with bigger and more fancy looking playmats down the line, for now it will do a passable job of teaching the game. With the rules being printed on the flip-side you will probably not be able to use it that much during your first games as you may want to reference the rules sheet from time to time.
I won't go into the rules of the game in this review, other sources will do a much better job at that. Here I just want to go through the various cards you can expect to find within. The main chunk of cards are different unit cards as in mobile suits or mobile armours. The blue section of the deck features the iconic White Base trio and a couple of GMs. The Gundam also appears in its G-Sky form. The white section is centred around Gundam Aerial in two versions and a couple of support suits. The main card for each faction is printed with a pretty muted foil effect, honestly I don't think these stand out that much compared to the regular cards, perhaps the idea is to focus on readability rather than the fancy graphic effects you tend to see in other collectible card games.
The second half of the deck features a couple of signature pilots and a base card for each colour, the target of your opponent's team. One of the main gimmicks of the Gundam Card Game is that some cards can function both as event cards or pilots. The cards for Hayato and Kai Shiden can be played either as "Commands" (basically events) or be attached to their linked mobile suits as pilots to boost the main card's stats.
The package also contains 18 cards that are not part of the main deck but instead function as resources or tokens. There are ten resource cards used to pay for cards or card actions and a set of "token" mobile suits that are spawned into the game based on other events and function as low level units, at least that is how I understood it. We also have a cardboard sheet with double sided tokens that can be used to represent damage or special effects triggered by some of the abilities on the unit cards.
The different card types have differently coloured flip-sides as seen above. Your main deck consisting of units, pilots and command cards have a blue back, the resource cards have red backs and the special EX-resources and tokens come with yellow backs. I have moaned about it before but the logo of this game really is terrible and seems to belong on a smartphone accessory case rather than printed on the cards of an exciting fantasy wargame...
So what about the bonus-card? Well, I opened it and colour me underwhelmed. I got perhaps the least interesting card in the starter set in a very dull foil-variant. It is not easy to depict a foil-effect with a static photograph but you honestly won't be more excited than what you see here. Chasing these promo-cards seems like a fool's errand to me. The promo-set contains 16 different cards which seems to correspond with the 16 different types of blue-back cards found in this set. I don't know if there are any alternate artwork-version cards in the mix but I haven't seen any information about it.
Above you can see how the GCG cards compare to some of the other games releases by Bandai in the past. On the left we have cards representing Gundam Arsenal Base and Gundam Try Age (cards designed to support arcade machine-games) and on the far right the spiritual ancestor of GCG, the early 2000's Gundam War collectible card game.
From the perspective of a card collector rather than player I have so far found the Gundam Card Game to be a bit underwhelming. While the artwork commissioned for the game is really good looking the overall feeling I get from it is still a bit bland. It remains to be seen how the decks develop and how deep into the exotic mobile suit territory and obscure characters the game will venture. Personally, I would love to see more coherent factions rather than focusing on a few characters and suits from every show ever invented and throwing everything together into a hot mess. If this is just another game with the same old faces and machines that we have seen in every other game for the past 20 years the novelty risks wearing off pretty quickly.
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