Lately, I haven't been paying the Gundam Card Game a whole lot of mind. The continued fiasco of stock shortages combined with an ever swelling number of rare cards drained a lot of the fun out of it. What little stock there is, is either in scalper hands or turning into in-store sales only. I did however find the latest wave of starter decks at retail price from a mail-order outfit in a nearby country and decided to take a look. The four new starters were set free upon the world on September 25th and bar the "Aquatic Assault" deck appear to have no specific themes to them, outside of gameplay perhaps. Each deck is fronted by one particular mobile suit but that is pretty much as deep as the fluff will go.
I don't know what I expected from this game, but fourteen different starter decks in a little bit over a year definitely was not it. I liked the thematic, mostly faction-based, set-up of the original four starters and would have preferred to see them remain as entry points but such is not premise of a collectible card game. Games like these are constantly re-balanced and new rules get introduced over time - older cards are phased out (or banned because they were poorly balanced...) in favour of newer cycles to drive consumer spending. However, a lot of the iconic and interesting units were released early and now the game is a roster of slapdash obscurities that no longer pay any heed to the franchise it supposedly celebrates. The skin suit is thinner than ever before.
Lamentations aside, how about we actually examine the first of the four starter decks - Aquatic Assault - a bit closer then? Well, the format is certainly familiar. The deck follows the exact same template as all the decks that preceded it. You have the same old fixed 50-deck fronted by two cards printed in foil and a slew of supporting cards and tokens. There is also the small punch card of tokens, the double-sided rules sheet/playmat and a single-card promo-pack exclusive to this particular starter deck to entice you to buy multiple copies.
I was too lazy to photograph each rules sheet and playmat as they are mostly old hat, but the rules now also include a Battle Royale-section with additional instructions for setting up a multi-player game with three or more players.
Each starter deck has so far been made up of cards from two suits, in this case blue and purple (affectionately known by players that either play it or hate playing against it as blurple). All the units in this deck actually do represent aquatic mobile suits and armours only, but they are gathered from a wildly different range. The blue units hail from Zeon and Z.A.F.T. while the purple cards have origins spread out among various series like Unicorn, After War Gundam X, Turn-A and SEED Destiny. Yes, it is a bit of a mess. Oh, and I guess Zeon is blue now? At this point, why even bother with factions - anything goes.
All of the units in this deck have the special "Marine" keyword. I don't recall seeing this before, I'm pretty sure it is new. Looking at some older cards with their immediate counterparts or just different naval types we can see that - besides the deck migration from red to blue - the old units lack the Marine typing. Oopsie.
The signature units of course come paired with their respective pilots. Not only are the units defecting from their old decks but their heroes are too. Why even have colours? Loni Garvey has been upgraded from a command/pilot combo-card but decided to join purple instead of red, and the new artwork is really dull compared to the previous Extreme Hatred-card from GD01. I was positively surprised to see a minor character like Morassim get a card of his own but it was silly to link his name to the ZnO which is a mass-production type - the ZAFT trait should have been more than enough. At the bottom row you see the same bog-standard set of functional resource and token-cards with the same old ugly Microsoft Windows-logo printed on them.
Before we are out of here, let's check out the promo-pack. As usual, you will get one of the cards from the starter set in a slightly upgraded foil-version. I got the Marco Morassim-card which I don't mind but the foil-effect is rather forgettable in the first place (and doesn't show up well on camera). As usual, I will not comment on the viability of the cards in this deck as I am only in it for the card collection aspect. There are a couple of really nice looking cards in here and not too many of that messy zoomed-in variety which isn't really to my taste.
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