While product availability has been somewhat of an issue the number of different products Bandai has been throwing into the Gundam Card Game pool is completely opposite. In the little more than half a year that the game has existed the game has already seen the release of three waves of cards and no less than eight different starter sets. Three additional waves of cards are planned for release in April, July and October respectively. I'm wonder if the idea is to burn out the audience as quickly as possible, will the game really have legs to go on at this pace? Whatever the case, we will now take a quick look at the latest wave of starters beginning with ST 07 which introduces Mobile Suit Gundam 00 into the fray.
There will not be a whole lot to say about this set that doesn't already mimic what has been mentioned about the previous six starter sets. Packaging design seems familiar and follows the well-trodden path of the previous starters. We have a combination of green and purple (I guess I should stop using the term violet because card text refers to cards as purple...) featuring the well-known Celestial Being mobile suits and their pilots.
Contents seem familiar also. You get a pre-set deck of 50 cards with ten supporting resource cards but I see here that the cards have been flipped upside down in the plastic packaging, presumably to better protect the foil cards that would normally sit on top?
The combined playmat and rules sheet looks familiar even though I haven't read the fine print to see if there have been any minor updates, errata or rules additions.
Here you can see the current deck colour combinations available through the starters released so far. Green gets its fourth appearance as does red with ST 08, and the purple side augments the previous Tekkadan forces from ST 05.
The unit mix of ST 07 is very tight and a bit unusual compared to the mix we normally see in the starters. Here the focus is exclusively on the four Celestial Being mobile suits carried aboard the Ptolemaios, split into the purple and green decks. Each suit gets two different card levels with both of the meatier suits going into the purple deck. I think this is a nice way of setting up a starter deck but I am a bit mystified by the way a faction is split into multiple deck colours. The theme of the Gundam Card Game is really just an afterthought.
The Pilot- and Command Card portion of the starter is also unusual in that you get four proper pilot cards for each of the suits, none of that combined "Command/Pilot" concept that I really don't like. Just like with the other purple starter deck there is only a single base card available, the Ptolemaios being the perfectly logical choice.
Nothing is new in the auxiliary card section either. You have the same boring resource cards, an EX Base and an EX Resource plus a sheet of tokens to go with the suits and their abilities. Bandai does take the time to update the rules sheet with images of cards belonging to the respective starter so I think they really could have made the effort of creating starter set unique resource cards. It didn't have to be anything fancy, just a black and white insignia of Celestial Being instead of that horrible Windows 95 logotype for example.
The promo pack contains one of the basic cards from the set in a slightly visually updated foil variant. This time I was actually lucky to find a unit card inside, I tend to be cursed with command card variations in these. As you can see there is nothing particularly fancy about the alternate artwork and these are definitely not worth hunting down for the sake of owning them. That's pretty much all I have to say about the contents of this set as I am mainly in it for the artwork collection aspect. The artwork direction continues to be tight and all cards really feel like they belong in the same setting and I really enjoy seeing new depictions for all the suits and pilots.
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