Our march through the September starter decks continues and we're up to the third entry. Again, discourse will be kept to a minimum here, I simply don't have a whole lot to say beyond what I mentioned in the previous two entries. My barrage of words has grown silent it seems.
The third of the four starters is a green and red combo-deck centred around... uh, hold on a second, which mobile suit is that exactly? For some reason my brain kept drawing a blank for several seconds until the floating Gund-bits gave me a bit of a clue. I was trying to figure out which Celestial Being MSV-design this might be until it clicked that oh, this is probably the Aerial. Not the most successful illustration in my opinion. And look there on the back of the cover, ST 13 is not represented by the Aerial there but the Qubeley. Could it be that the Qubeley was originally planned for the cover and this was later replaced by the Aerial?
The box contains the standard loadout of a fixed 50-card deck with 12 additional resource cards. There is also a punch card with tokens, the double-sided playmat and rules sheet and a random promo-card which is exclusive to this particular starter deck.
The rules-sheet is updated to now also include instructions for setting up a multi-player Battle Royale of three or more players. Again, the graphics feature the Qubeley and Haman Karn rather than the Aerial and Suletta as examples of card types.
The unit composition of Silent Barrage is another eclectic bunch of mobile suits and armour from all over the place - Zeta, Witch, U.C.0079, X, 00 and GQuuuuuuX. The two totem-units are the Qubeley and the Aerial which are the only two foil cards in the deck. I know I keep droning on about it but the deck is fronted by the Qubeley, it simply must have been the originally intended face of the box. Neither illustration fails to grab me however, I think they completely miss the mark. Considering that this game might be some people's first real exposure to Mobile Suit Gundam I find it a bit unfortunate that most of the illustrations here are so bland. Just look at that Jagd Doga for example, it is a blur of yellows and turquoise, how do you even screw something up that badly?
I'm not seeing any particular pattern among the units selected for this starter, I imagine they are intended to offer some core options for your red or green deck building options. One thing that has always bothered me about the card design is the use of acronyms for the faction alignment traits. This set includes a fair bit of them. "CB", "UNE", "SRA" - how is this going to capture the interest of newcomers to the franchise?
All pilots in the box are returning faces. Suletta has been released in white and green before and here she is in red. Can she be the first pilot to make it to all five suites? Haman has done a mirror-action and switched from red to green. I was surprised to see Carris Nautilus get a second card, are we running out of pilots and mobile suits already? He of course switched from red to green as well, perhaps they are just all colour-blind.
The promo-card pack contains one of the sixteen different starter deck cards in a slightly revised foil-treatment. We pulled the Elmeth here which is a good candidate for this alteration. Removing the text box exposes more of the background art and gives it a nice floating in space effect. In summary, from an aesthetic perspective I find ST 13 to be the weakest entry of the gang so far. We still have one starter set to go, let's see if it can end the experience on a high.
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