At the risk of recycling old-hat content we will return to the Iron Bloom starter set for the Gundam Card Game. There is already a review up for the Japanese edition (link) but I figured this might be a more useful reference for international players. The box was released internationally on September 25 2025 and quickly sold out pretty much everywhere. After being available only through unscrupulous secondary sources for a bit Bandai Namco eventually decided to do a second print run in December and the pack has since returned to the pegs, in my region it happened in early January. Iron Bloom is of course yesterday's news since it was followed by ST06 in October and recently sets ST07 and ST08 in mid-January - two starter sets that quickly sold out here again even though Bandai promised to raise the production numbers so I guess I will be sitting around hoping for a second print run. Man, I am beginning to loathe this game.
Iron Bloom or ST05 as it is commonly referred to is the first starter deck of the game to introduce the fifth violet colour. In keeping with the starter format the deck is made up of a combination of white and violet cards with a definitive slant towards the latter which makes sense; it is a new faction choice and thus needs to get on the ground quickly.
Here is a quick comparison of the Japanese and English packaging variants. I find it a little bit amusing that a starter deck is referred to as a start deck in Japan but that is pretty much the only aesthetic difference I found.
The contents mimics the four first generation starter decks; a fixed set of 50 cards for the playing deck plus another 10 resource cards, a playmat/rulebook and the randomized single-card promo pack that Bandai puts in there to entice you to buy multiple starter sets.
You get a full-colour playmat with the starter that also features a quick breakdown of the rules on the flip-side. As I have stated before this is not the ideal way to do it and a mini-booklet would have been a more logical choice but I suppose there won't be much need to reference it much once you get up to speed.
The first 30 cards consist of units and are easily the most interesting components. Here we have brand new artwork for nine mobile suits (eight plus one mobile worker vehicle if we are to be picky) all pulled from the Iron-Blooded Orphans TV-series. Rather than repeat the previous review word for word (linky...) I'll just state here that two thirds of the cards are centred on Tekkadan for violet while Gjallarhorn has to make do with nine white cards only (but there are a total of seven Graze in there, nice!)
The pilot- and command cards share the same lopsided distribution; McGillis has to fend off those pesky Tekkadan kids himself. Tsk, tsk. I am still sitting on an unopened box of the second booster pack set for the Gundam Card Game and am hoping to find more fire support for Gjallarhorn in there. That review has been put on hold due to terrible gloomy weather and the fact that my camera broke down and I had to get a replacement.
Iron Bloom is the first starter box to get rid of the "Token Cards" and instead comes with the same old miserably ugly resource cards as we saw in the other starters. The Gundam Card Game should have taken a page out of the old Gundam War NEX-A game which featured different card art for the different colours; it could just be something so simple as the cover image from the starter box. Anything is better than this. I'd consider using tokens or chits with two different colours and flip them over instead.
So, which promo card did I get this time? There are 16 possibilities, each card type featured in this package upgraded into foil (and the two "legendary rare" foil cards get a slightly altered foil version). You of course want to get a mobile suit and with 9 chances out of 16 the probability should be pretty high but I am instead really good at pulling command cards which is what I ended up with again. I'm starting to think that the distribution might be skewed because out of the eight promos I have opened four are command cards. I shouldn't complain too much though - I got a Graze in the Japanese version after all.
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