Gundam Card Game - Heavy Dominion (ST 14)

We've reached the fourth and last starter deck of the September wave and here Bandai puts the spotlight on some imposing damage dealers and bulked-up tanks. Whether that will really translate into the game itself proper I do not really know but the design language seems clear enough to me. Most of my comments regarding the product in general have been communicated already in the reviews for the three previous boxes and so rather than repeating myself unnecessarily here feel free to hit the previous entry button to check out the other sets.


"Heavy Dominion" leads with the Full Armor Unicorn on the front cover but if you look at the multiplayer illustration at the back ST14 is actually represented by the PMX-003 The-O instead. This is the same pattern that we saw for the Qubeley/Aerial pairing and so either the front cover had a late switcharoo or someone simply decided that the four-player duel looked better with the alternate illustrations. In my mind, a boring committee decided that the Aerial and FA Unicorn had more mainstream appeal than the Qubeley and the mighty The-O...


There are no surprises in this box, you get the pre-arranged 50-card deck together with 12 functional resource card, a punchboard of tokens, the double-sided rules sheet/playmat and the bespoke promo-card pack which is unique to ST 14.


The image of the updated rules here is recycled from ST 13 but only the card graphics are different between the different sets. Of interest here is the righthand column which now also explains how to run a multi-player free-for-all game with three or more players.


Our unit selection mainly resembles a pandemonium of heavy-hitters brought in from an absolute plethora of sources. We have mobile suits from Zeta, Unicorn, War in the Pocket, Char's Counterattack, After War Gundam X, Endless Waltz and SEED. The two signature suits are a really tanky The-O and a slightly more defensive Full Armor Unicorn; both cards have the discreet foil-treatment which is so typical for this game. I think the fact that the yellow hulk comes first in the sequence strengthens my belief that it was ditched from the front cover. One aggravating thing about this release is that every bloody mobile suit has been seen in the game before, there is not a single fresh face in here. The original starter sets had a bit of flair to them, this is just a lump of stuff with numbers on them.


There is nothing too exciting in the pilot and command cards section either, you know the drill by now - most of the units and crew have jumped from one deck colour to another. The illustration on the base card has to be the dumbest one so far; the Gryps 2 Colony Laser is a converted space colony, all the illustrators had to do was draw a cylinder but instead we get this abomination. Not impressed at all.


The promo-pack contains one of the cards from the starter deck with a foil treatment (in case of you scoring a version of the already foiled cards the foil effect will be slightly different). I must say I am pleased with the cards I have been finding in my packs, three out of four turned out to be unit cards which is usually what I prefer to receive. The foil effect doesn't show up that well in my photos but you can at least see how the text box has been removed to let the artwork display a bit better. I don't really have a whole lot to say about these starter sets in general. I think ST 11 was the most interesting of this lot due to its tighter focus around amphibious units and also introducing a new keyword "Marine". the other three packs mostly feel like filler or rather making mobile suits from the early sets available again but in completely different forms.