Gundam Card Game : Freedom Ascension Deck Build Box (SC01)

The situation has been kind of dry on the GCG-side of things, lately. Not that Bandai isn't busy pumping out card expansions but they sure have a hard time finding their way into my neck of the woods. ST09? Never saw it. GD05? Nothing available. ST10 and EB01? Forget about it. I did however manage to get my hands on the Deck Build Box that released in conjunction with the fifth main expansion "Freedom Ascension". As the game goes on into its second year the product desert continues to be a thing and so I have focused my attention elsewhere.


Anyway, the Deck Build Box is a fixed set of re-printed cards designed to give players a core to build their decks around. There are 25 cards for each of the five colours and the foil treatments have been removed on the higher rarity cards that are included. We also get two player reference and rule sheets which is good I guess if you want to introduce a friend to the game but there is only one set of functional resource cards in there so it is not intended to be a 2-player starter set or so.


The packaging is similar to what you see for other games like the Pokemon TCG boxsets for example. The cards come in a sturdy cardboard box which is designed to store your cards, and it is protected by a cardboard sleeve that slides off to either side. The sleeve has a line-art depiction of the Strike Freedom Gundam and we find the full-colour image printed on the storage box itself. Bandai for some reason actually made three different designs for the storage box itself, in an attempt to con coll... I mean con-vince collectors into picking up multiple boxes. The crux is that you do not know which design you will be getting as the whole thing is sealed with shrink wrap.


Inside we see the main body of cards neatly packed in the middle of the box with disposable cardboard padding on three sides. On the fourth side we find four actual booster packs from the main GD05 Freedom Ascension set as well as a separately wrapped promo-card.


If you have been keeping up with previous releases you won't find much new content in here. I think there were one or two LR cards here that I was missing myself, but the highlight otherwise for me is the set of booster packs, seeing as I'm not sure if I will be able to find a decently priced GD05 box at all. In fact, considering the scalper prices on the secondary market right now, you don't actually pay that much more for this deck building box which is kind of insane. But let's look at the re-printed cards first.


As mentioned earlier, each colour gets a deck of 25 cards divided between nine different individual cards in varying quantities. This infuriating practice of not providing full playsets of four of each is of course a staple in TCG design, intended to lure you into picking up multiple boxes. As you can see here, unit counts vary between 2, 3 or 4. The blue deck mainly features the White Base troika and the Unicorn from GD01. I don't pay attention to the metagame but I do believe that Amuro has been a staple in the blue decks for quite some time now. Apparently, the metagame is now at the point where players complain that the experience is growing so stale that Bandai is actually looking at redesigning parts of the gameplay itself. Wow.


Here we see the re-printed Deathscythe on the right next to the original foil version card from GD01 on the left. The foil effect really doesn't show up all that well but beyond that the artwork and text appears similar (there might be the odd errata or syntax adjustment on some of the cards I haven't inspected them all in detail). All the re-printed cards have the number 2 printed inside the little white hexagon in the top right corner which easily distinguishes them from their original appearances. The third card in this comparison is one of the cards from the GD05 booster packs - it appears that all cards from now on will be marked with the number two (presumably indicating season 2, cycle 2, year 2 or what have you - this might possibly be used to rotate cards out of tournament play further down the line).


The green deck is amping up the Wing Gundam G Team with three of the Operation Meteor mobile suits backed up by a couple of Zakus and Rick Doms. Odd, but as I have moaned about before - theme is not this game's strong suit. To the point that I think the designers have long since stopped caring about it, actually.


The red deck is almost exclusively consisting of Neo Zeon from the Unicorn-era, the Gundam Virsago from After War Gundam X has been thrown in as a joker. I recall seeing multiple players complaining that the red deck did not get the legendary rare version of the Kshatriya in its place; that would have made it an exclusive Neo Zeon navy line-up.


Purple doesn't get any mass-production type units at all and is 100% themed around various unique machines from the Iron Blooded Orphans series. Not a single entry from After War here and I did notice that Celestial Being has been suspiciously absent from this box set as well.


The white deck is the waifu-segment of this package it seems, and is mostly featuring Cosmic Era characters and machines although the Lfrith from Witch of Mercury has also been thrown in there. Overall, there are re-printed cards from the first five and the eight starter decks, as well as cards from the first three booster series GD01-GD03.


You also get a single set of resource cards and tokens enough to equip a single player, the set-up is similar to the concept of all the early starter sets. The only difference is of course the new "2" era/year marking up in the corner. I am still curious why Bandai included two reference cards but only one set of token, perhaps they could have doubled up on the resource cards to entice budget-minded players to go in and share a box?


Alright, I was mostly excited by the chance to open up these GD05 Freedom Ascension booster packs, as this might even be my only chance of getting my hands on some of them. Looking at the card list on the back we see that Bandai has introduced some changes with this generation. The card count has been slimmed down from 13 to 12 in each pack and we can see an introduction of a new classification of cards known as "Special EX Resource" cards. I guess this means that the beautiful portrait cards that used to be thrown in at the end of each pack are now replaced by some type of ultra-rare full-art cards designed to whip up the consumers into a spending frenzy. The joke is on Bandai though, I couldn't even buy more packs even if I wanted to. Let's look inside and see what we can find!


We can immediately see that there have been some changes to the card-distribution. All the previous main-sets have contained six common cards, four uncommon cards and two rare or higher in a pack, with a resource card of some sort thrown in at the very end. In this pack however there are only five common cards, five uncommons, a single rare card and one of this set's two token cards. It looks like the token card is occupying the space where the second rare or legendary rare card would normally reside, talk about annoying! It seems strange that the balance between common and uncommon cards has been evenly balanced. The fact that there are 50 common cards in this set but only 36 uncommon cards would make the common cards harder to find than the uncommon ones... This was already pretty suspicious back when the allotment was 6 vs. 4 but now they are just messing with us. From here on I don't know what to expect from GD05.

The next big change seems to be in the theming of the decks. I don't know what the designers are smoking but it looks like Neo Zeon has jumped ship from the red deck and are now purple - even though the other Neo Zeon cards in the same Deck Build Box are all red. What a joke. I notice that the civilian use Hobby Hizack is missing its RMS-116H designation on the card as well, like I said - the designers have stopped caring and so should I apparently. We get three green uncommon mobile suits in a nice row there, the randomization seems a bit suspect. The AGE-2 Gundam in Woolf Enneacle tribute colours is a nice looking and unusual card, I can't remember having seen it in any game before. The Gundnode token-card at the end is referenced by the Aerial Rebuild in the green deck, I wonder if these are intentionally packaged together?


Ok, so the second pack here has the traditional distribution of six commons, four uncommons and two rares. I wonder if the previous package changed out a common card for an uncommon to attempt to compensate for only offering one rare card thanks to the included token-card? A pretty poor show I think, unless that Gundnode card is amazing I think most players would have appreciated if you tossed out an uncommon card instead (you know the uncommon cards right? Those are the ones that are more common than the common cards...).

So far GD05 features cards from all sorts of major and minor television series. So far we've seen AGE, Char's Counterattack, SEED Destiny, Victory Gundam, Endless Waltz, IBO, Witch from Mercury and the newly introduced Mobile Fighter G Gundam. Everything feels really disjointed and it doesn't help that Bandai is changing the colours around. It looks like the G Fighters are usurping the red deck away from Neo Zeon - if there is ever a faction that has always been associated with red it is them. That Strike Rouge belonging to Kira Yamato there sits in the blue deck while he and the rest of the O.M.N.I. forces are in the white deck. Go figure. Why even bother with colours at all?


This pack here is all about G Gundam it seems, we've got three of their pilots in this pack including Domon himself in the rare slot. The rest of the pack features a lot of unusual or lesser known designs and here is also our first Legendary Rare card; the Gundam Calibarn with that broomstick (Witch of Mercury, get it?) Rod Rifle deployed. We are seeing a couple of duplicates already, I presume the packs in these boxes have not been seeded in any particularly favourable way, my guess is they have been broken out from the main print run for the booster boxes and just tossed in here.


Yep, no additional legendary rare cards in our final pack, but a couple of duplicates. Overall though it is a fairly good spread, I am counting only four duplicate cards in total but I feel a bit short-changed on the rares. Another two G Team mobile suits join up here, I think we are only missing the Wing Gundam itself now. I don't have any deck building skills for this game but let's take a quick look at the distribution per each individual colour:


Well, your deck-building options will certainly be highly randomized. Blue here ended up with about half as many cards as green, although I do like that all the units belong to the nation of Orb. Green ended up with a battery of uncommon cards led by the legendary rare Calibarn so if you were to build something out of this box green might be a good choice.


The card counts for Red and Purple end up in between the span from blue to green with mostly unit cards, in fact the purple lot is entirely made up of mobile suits. Looking at the cards all lined up like this I get some bad vibes from the artwork. My main reason for following the game is to enjoy the brand new artwork that is introduced specifically for GCG. Somehow the quality appears to be slipping a bit? Most of these designs are quite busy, show only part of the unit from an odd angle - or it is blurred out in the middle of an action. This strikes me as mass-produced and rather soulless computer graphics. Perhaps Bandai's ambitious release schedule leads to some shortcuts - if you like elaborate illustrations good luck going after the alternate artwork cards I guess...


Well, it appears that white is the "winner" with a pool of 14 additional cards to pick from. We have four of the five G Team suits there backed up by Noin too and... hold on a second. Why is Domon in the white deck when the Shining Gundam is in red? Whatever, I'm too tired to deal with it...

Now, before we take a look at the promo-card included in the box I have a bit of a surprise - yes I purchased two Deck Build Boxes. Let's repeat the process once more.




Mmm... that's a nice presentation of the RX-93 on the storage box there. I'm not sure which mobile suit graces the cover of the third box type but I would be willing to take a bet on Wing Zero. More on that in a bit. Let's go straight to the four GD05 booster packs from the second box.


Oh my... that is a lot of duplicates of cards we have already seen. In fact, all six common cards are the exact same cards as found in one of the booster packs from the previous box - arranged in the exact same sequence. I have seen this crop up in various collectible card games over the years but I kind of expected better from GCG. I hope this won't be a pattern for the rest of this box. The uncommon and rare cards are all. We've seen most of the uncommons too, only Sting Oakley is a new face. Things are better in the rare slot however; while I never like seeing a command card in there we do in fact find the Nu Gundam from the box cover itself - and the artwork is really inspired. Great!


What the... is going on here? This pack also has the exact same six common cards - sequence and all - as in another of the packs from the previous deck build box. Are we dealing with some type of pre-set here or am I just unlucky? The uncommon cards are all new this time though and there are some great cards here too. I particularly like seeing Buran; that means the Asshimar is in this set too, hope I can find it. In the rare slot we have Andrew Waltfeldts yellow Murasame (a mobile suit I would very much like to see in Converge by the way) and the mighty Axis Zeon asteroid fortress - now in purple instead of red of course. Let's keep going.


Nope, it is the same shit all over again - all the common cards are an exact clone of the contents of another pack from the other box. We now have three booster packs out of four with the exact same combinations of common cards. While I have seen shenanigans like this before I've never seen it to this extent. Could it be that the common cards have been particularly seeded like this for purposes of balanced deck building? I'd love to hear from other people cracking open their Deck Build Box booster packs.

Fortunately, we are getting fresh cards in the uncommon and rare slots. I love seeing Andrew Waltfeld again and here comes Gyunei's Jagd Doga to team up with Quess' machine from the previous box. Among the rare cards we have old and bitter Amuro from Char's Counterattack and instead of another rare card an alternate artwork version of an uncommon card. This is supposed to be a bit of a rarity but I am not impressed, let's take a closer look at it.


The cards we see here are the O.G. Chuatury pilot/command card from GD01 on the left and the basic uncommon Demi Barding from GD05 on the right. In the middle we have the "U+" alternate artwork version of the card on the right. Alternate artwork cards have up until this point been very interesting with completely different illustrations but this is a simple hack-job of copying two existing assets onto the same card. Unfortunately, I have also seen similar images of cards where Allelujah is pasted onto a card of the Kyrios and the floating Quess we saw earlier superimposed onto the red Jagd Doga card. Bandai appears to have lost interest in both artwork and theming of this game, and apparently the rules don't seem to work to people's satisfaction either? Ouch.


In our last pack the curse of the common cards is finally broken. There are a couple of dupes in there but hey, that Jegan is new and looks great, and the oddly spelled Exus entices me as well. I notice that it is only linked to Phantom Pain and not Neo Roanoke so maybe he is not present in this set? We get a fresh batch of uncommon cards as well and there is my beloved Asshimar in a bit of an unfortunate angle, you don't really get a decent look at it. We have both the Gun EZ and the Gunblaster premiering in this pack, cards I really would have liked a couple of duplicates of. Notice that green command card by the way; "Interwoven Blessings" costed at 10/10 - crazy!

And look at that, we actually got a second Legendary Rare card in this box but it is unfortunately one we have seen already. I think my luck could have been a bit better with these booster packs. Just to hammer the point of commons and uncommons home: We encountered 26 of the 50 types of common cards and 28 of the 36 uncommon cards. The conclusion is that nothing really seems to matter in this game (or Bandai is really bad at maths); just shut up and buy more boxes already.


Blue had a poor showing in the previous box but here they are doing fairly well with a good pool of units and pilots to pick and choose from.


Green is however the undisputed frontrunner here, 17 out of the 48 cards including both of the legendary rare cards is an impressive feat. If you are not building on green when drafting from this box the game must have some serious balancing issues (why do I hear an outcry of thousands of voices shouting "Blurple!" in the background?).


The red and purple decks have a pitiful showing of only 5 and 7 cards each, good luck working with that. You clearly aren't getting a curated experience from these boosters which is why I find it so odd that the seeding between the two boxes was nearly identical for the common cards.


White had a strong card pool in the previous box and doing fairly alright here as well. Again we see a number of the G Team mobile suits at the front, they really want you to go for Wing, huh? I didn't even see a single Gjallarhorn unit in these boxes either.

Before we go, let's take a look at the two promo cards stuffed inside their own separate packaging. There are three types to collect and they are supposedly unique to the Deck Build Box and so whatever we find I just hope it won't be doubles.


Alright, two different cards... I can breathe again. Have to admit, it was a bit nerve-wracking to open the second pack. These promotion cards are simply vanity items that add some flair to your EX Base appearance. I never really understood how these illustrations are intended to work thematically but who cares - they look great! We see EXBP-027 Wing Gundam Zero and EXBP-025 Nu Gundam here.

I did look up EXBP-026 online and found that it is the Shining Gundam with the King of Hearts logo in the background. I had actually expected it to be the Strike Freedom Gundam and I had formulated a theory that the three promo cards would match the three different storage boxes but that was apparently not correct. So... I have no idea which mobile suit is depicted on the third type of storage box and the deck Build Boxes are long sold out over here so I doubt I will ever see it.


I was disappointed to see that the dimensions of the deck box are not optimized to store... you know, cards? No matter which way I put the cards inside it was suboptimal. I guess that is why Bandai call it a "Half Storage Box", it just functions in a half-arsed way. Fantastic.

In conclusion, the Deck Build Box is a very functional and utilitarian release for players that have problems sourcing the early starter sets and booster boxes (i.e. everyone). The fact that you need to buy at least two boxes to get full playsets of 4 cards of the more powerful unit cards is of course an underhanded tactic but a single Deck Build Box could close that gap for players who only bought a single starter deck of each type for example. For everyone else, there is of course the joy of opening up a couple of booster packs and take a stab at finding the promo cards. Honestly, there are already so many promos and specials out there that it isn't really worth the trouble in my opinion.

Gundam Card Game - Phantom Aria (GD04)

Phantom Aria is the fourth main booster series of the Gundam Card Game and it was released globally on April 24th. Bandai Namco are really pushing hard on the release pedal with a new set hitting the shelves roughly every two months. This wouldn't be a problem if the availability of the game was stable. Actually, GD04 is the first set not to instantly sell out in my corner of the world, something that can not be said for the ST09 starter set which preceded it a month earlier (of which I haven't seen any single sign as of yet). While this review focused strictly on the card collection perspective rather than gameplay, I couldn't help picking up on the grumblings regarding static meta and continued pressure from cards in the very first set from disgruntled players and I wonder if the game is starting to lose a bit of its momentum.


The GD04 packaging follows the established style for the game and this time the trio of mobile suits that adorn its top and sides are pulled from SEED Destiny, Victory Gundam and Unicorn. As usual the assumption is that we can find all of these as Legendary Rare denominations inside the set and that hopefully at least a couple of them will be held inside this particular box. The thing that I enjoy so much about the Gundam Card Game is all the new artwork that has been produced for the product; there are no stale reissues of old artwork here.


The back-cover of the box has all the usual product information including card rarity amounts and the contact information for some of its European distributors. I'll get back to the rarity distribution in just a second.


A booster box includes 24 individual booster packs, each thick from the amount of cards held within. I keep mentioning this but when you compare a pack of 13 cards to a typical Japanese Pokemon pack of five cards or - even worse - the old Mobile Suit Gundam Duel Company packs that held only three cards these are so satisfying to hold in your hand.


There are no alternate artwork styles on the individual packs, they simply reuse the image from the top cover which makes for easy identification. Much of the information from the booster box is repeated again on each individual pack as well.


I keep recycling this image from the GD01 review don't I? This illustrates how the cards are organized in the pack. All cards are facing the same direction and are sorted by type and rarity. The top 6 cards (face side up) are of the common (C) variety, followed by four uncommons (U) and at the end two foil cards of Rare (R) or Legendary (LR) type. The very last card will have a yellow or red cardback which denotes it as a token or resource utility card. I always shift that card to the front when opening a pack since it is typically the most uninteresting of the bunch.


Here is a comparison of the card rarity distribution for each of the four booster sets that have been released up until this point with GD01 on the left and GD04 on the right. We can see that the amount of common and uncommon cards have remained unchanged while Bandai has been tinkering a bit with the other denominations. GD03 was annoying in that it radically increased the number of resource- and token cards to a level that made it impossible to collect all of them in a single box and also for introducing the "special rarity" category which makes a return also in GD04. In my opening of GD03 the special category was represented by an alternate artwork card of a pilot card found in one of the starter sets which I felt was a bit random. Anyway, let's start opening packs!


Alright, what exactly do we have here? While I have seen the occasional preview image of a card here and there I generally try to avoid spoiling the surprise and so I am going in pretty much blind. This makes the opening of the first couple of packs really exciting (before the duplicates start to take over) but I have to say this first pack has a distinct feeling of "meh". We have a couple of oddball mobile suits from smaller franchises here, the only major hits are the Virtue (which we have seen several times in the game already) and the Victory Gundam which is sitting there next to its Core Fighter - I wonder if these are distributed in pairs?

We do have a couple of pilots in the pack, the most notable one being Garma Zabi which probably means that his Zaku II will be included in the set (spoiler alert: no, it unfortunately isn't). I see Gates Capa in his GQuuuuuuX form, having no idea what machine he pilots in that show. You can see the two rare cards from each pack down in the bottom left corner. Nena Trinity hints at the Throne Gundams being included while Captain Gladys of the Minerva is reduced to a simple command card because only mobile suit pilots are characters in this game.


With the second pack opened I think I know what is going on here. This set appears to be heavily focused on oddball support craft from smaller fighters to massive mobile armours. We also see more generic titles on the command cards. I find it rather poor form not to include character names such as Talia Gladys and now Wang Liu Mei on the cards - I guess Bandai expects everyone playing this game to recognize every ancillary character from the past 40 years. The functional faction associations on the cards continue to rile me up as well, the Earth Federation is apparently cross-compatible between the Universal Century and the Advanced Generation-era, while the United Nations factions from Anno Domini and After War are not - go figure.

We have our first Legendary Rare card encounter in the headless RX-78 doing its Last Shooting pose. How many RX-78 cards do we have in the game at this point, half a dozen? Yawn. The pack also contains the first yellow-border token card in the resource-card slot (bottom right) and it is a psycommu-controlled arm of the Zeong, which is hopefully also somewhere inside the box (otherwise things would be rather awkward).


Trinity Team confirmed - We get both Michael and his Throne Zwei in the pack together with several other suits and armours from Mobile Suit Gundam 00. Gundam Dynames is also a returning face but now sits in the red deck as opposed to green for some reason. The way this game treats faction alignments, pilot links and deck colours is an afterthought at best as far as the theme is concerned, it is like plonking Squirtle into your fire deck. Still, nothing unique for this particular game I'm afraid but I think that older Gundam card games were a bit more respectful to the lore; GCG really has the feeling of "product" plastered all over it. Still, the artwork is great for the most part. :) Talking about the rare cards I really dig the GN Flag - can't say the same about the Moon Moon-nonsense from Double Zeta I'm afraid but I heard that this card is a powerful blocker in the current meta so I guess there is that. (Editor's Note: That's the Moonrace Queen Diana Soriel and her body-double from Turn-A and nothing else...)

The resource card slot holds a portrait of the Victory Gundam and as you can see if you squint really hard this is the alternate foil-card variant with a C+ denomination. So far, every booster box I have opened has always included exactly one resource card with foil effect and I assume that this box will not be breaking that rule.


Four packs in and already I am starting to spot several duplicates. Unfortunately, several of the common cards in this set are unique machines - I would have preferred most of the common slots to be taken up by mass-production types but the game thinks differently. I commented about it at the time - GD01 is fantastic when it comes to including a lot of iconic mobile suits types - too many in fact. Bandai would have done well to mix it up a bit to avoid situations like GD04 where I just sit and open packs of exotic or one-off mobile armours like the Alvatore and Esperansa from peripheral timelines. This is not the first front-loaded Gundam-themed game either so you'd think there might be a lesson in there somewhere. Talking about the cards we have a single mass-production suit from the Shrike Team which I hope to get more of, as well as some interesting faces making an appearance. I guess technically you could call the Gundvölva a mass-production type although it is more akin to a GX-Bit or for that matter, a Shahed-136. Who needs psycommu and newtypes when there are drone weapons?

Checking the rare slot that GN Flag sure looks familiar, back-to-back familiar actually. The second card is an alternate artwork rare (R+) depiction of the most famous Victory Gundam pilot, another kid who should be in school studying prepositions and history. Alternate rare-cards like these are the hardest to collect and I wonder if it belongs to the "5 Special" rarity category on the box. The resource-slot has another token card in it; the Alvaatore. This is a mobile suit that goes together with the Alvatore mobile armour we discovered in the previous pack (a set of very expensive Mobile Suit Ensemble figures I will apparently never manage to catch I might add).


My goodness, there are a lot of duplicates in the common section already. I assume the distribution could be similar to GD03 where it seemed like some commons were found primarily in the first half of the packs with the other showing up in the second half and so on. If you buy singles, give those packs a good shake-up. Talking about randomness, this pack contains six white cards (including both rares), five for the red deck and a single one for blue, which is a bit crazy. I spot another duplicate rare already, hopefully this will not become a thing - the goal here is to see as many different cards as possible and we can't waste these precious slots on duplicates.

Talking about the cards in the pack I can see a beautiful GN-X in the uncommon slot, worrying for a mass-production type but in my experience you seem to end up with 2-3 of every common or uncommon card in a set anyway so these categories seem rather interchangeable. This pack also contains three different base cards all of which are military installations or warships, just the way I want it to be. White gets another iconic suit, Al-Saachez's blue Enact which has the Superpower Bloc trait while Al-Saachez himself has both Superpower Bloc and UN because the game is wonky like that.


One quarter portion in and look at that, the four uncommon cards are an exact repetition of the line-up from the first pack we opened. This certainly lends credibility to my theory that the Core Fighter and the Victory Gundam might be paired but I'm still not convinced this is actually the case, it might actually be a coincidence. Meanwhile, the game continues to introduce weird mobile armours and.... militia biplanes. Tokwan, our Zeon pilot there on the right is I believe piloting a Bigro so it seems almost certain that it will pop up in this set. We have anonymous Mirai Yashima there pretending to pilot the White Base using a ship's wheel while trying to catch the eye of... is it Bright Noa or Sleggar Law? The rare section treats us to a rare base card for the League in the Reinforce Junior (Bandai spell checkers are asleep at the wheel too it seems) followed up by a legendary rare Banshee Norn - now that's what I call a good pull!


Oh boy... it's kindergarten time! This set is really full of underage characters but we at least have the Bigro there and look, it is linked to Tokwan indeed. I noticed that some unique mobile suits in this set like Jamil Neate's Gundam X and the Gundam Exia (the common one in the purple deck) do not have links to named pilots while others like the Gundam Dynames and Gundam Virtue do - I have no idea what is going on with that. I do know that one common criticism of the game is that the card drawing mechanism gives the player very little input to actually successfully pair up pilot and suit, thus spoiling certain combinations and rewarding generic suit and pilot pairing. Knowing my own luck under such circumstances I'd probably get very frustrated waiting for the right card to appear.

In the rare section we find yet another version of the Exia. This time it sits in the red deck and has a named link to Setsuna - which the common version in the purple deck we saw a couple of packs ago does not have. I guess it makes sense to someone, somewhere.


We are still finding interesting appearances among the commons. I'm really liking the artwork on Sochie's card and the set already has multiple Milita vehicles and suits for her to operate. I haven't yet seen the little Armadillo (WaD) walker which would be my personal choice and spoiler alert again: it is unfortunately not included in this set. I lauded the game for including so many variants of the Daughtress-family and here we have yet another variant. I had no clue what a Wise Wallaby would be and set my hopes on some kind of Wild Weasel electronic warfare unit but it turned out to be pilot Ennil El's personal ride. Wow, first we got the Esperansa mobile armour and now this, she simply must be in here somewhere.


The pack closes on a real surprise; not only is it two green rares next to each other but they are both Lfrith variants! We also have a second Gundvölva in the pack (the box contained three in total) to back them up, what a lovely coincidence. Dawn of Fold is getting some proper representation in GD04, we already pulled both Norea and Sophie and here come their machines as well - Bring the pain ladies!


We've seen a lot of the cards in this pack already but another mobile armour does indeed pop up among the commons; the truly unique-looking Zakrello. The card is not linked to any particular pilot and I doubt that we will see its pilot Dimitri in the set - I think it would make perfect sense to introduce pilot and suit in the same set together but Bandai tells me to hush and sit down so fine, whatever (he already appeared on a card in Gundam War NEX-A anyway). The Heinree is a mass-production type from Grassley House so you can use it to back up Shaddiq Zenelli in his Michaelis, if you are running a green and white combo that is because Zenelli is in the white deck...

Talking about odd deck-fellows we have another version of the Gundam Dynames here. We just saw that unit in the previous pack but with red deck allegiance. Both are linked to Lockon Stratos who so far has only one appearance in the green deck. Notice Hallelujah there n the uncommon section - he is in the red deck but his Kyrios is also in the previous pack but in the green deck. Make it make sense... In the rare section both slots go to the white deck (so far this is the third time out of nine that both slots are claimed by white) with the Silver Bullet from Unicorn as rare and the moustachio Turn-A itself as the third Legendary Rare. Look at the card text for the Turn-A, I think my eyes will start to bleed. Thankfully I just enjoy collecting the cards, not playing the game.

Lastly, we've pulled another token card in the resource slot - the legs of the Victory Gundam, unceremoniously referred to as "Parts". I assumed that the top section would also appear as a resource card but no, this is the only card related to the Victory. Still, the League Militaire has a solid presence in this box so far with multiple Victories and Core Fighters already, but where are the Zanscare forces? So far, the only thing we've seen is a Zoloat in League Militaire colours.


Much of the content of this tenth pack is known to us already but a couple of new cards are filtering in. We have another type of GN Armor in the common section, this time it sits in purple together with the Exia card we saw earlier. Unlike the Exia however it has a direct pilot affiliation to Setsuna - I know I shouldn't keep on moaning about it but it just does my head in. The uncommon section treats us to the mighty Gaplant which has no direct pilot link so not sure if we also get to see one of its pilots in the set. In the rare section we find the regular version of the Uso Ewin alternate card we saw earlier and we have a new version of the Xi Gundam for red which is consistent with the other three versions released for this mobile suit so far.


The set still has oddball mobile armours to throw at us, here comes the Gadeel from After War which is actually a pretty cool looking aircraft but the card art doesn't really work for me. Lunamaria's ZAKU Gunner pops up again and is linked up with the Minerva Squad - presumably the gang from ST09 that I haven't managed to purchase yet. Below it we can see the Sword Impulse Gundam which is linked directly to Shinn and Lunamaria which is canon I guess, but it makes less sense then to have Lunamaria's custom red machine linked up with the entire MS team of the Minerva?

The pack comes with two iconic mobile suits in the rare section: First we have the Psycho Gundam Mk-II which is linked to Rosamia Badam so I guess the mystery Gaplant pilot in this set is now also revealed. In the LR-slot we have the Destiny Gundam and it is the first of the three mobile suits from the box cover. Both card are a bit messy to look at, I tend to prefer cleaner and more zoomed-out artwork without effect parts thrown in all over the place.


Halfway through the pack by now and I believe we have seen most of the cards already, hopefully the second half will introduce the "b-sides" if you will. In the rare section we have a double pull for green, this is the second time it occurs. We have a utility command card and the freakish Kikeroga mobile armour which is a weird amalgamation of the Braw Bro from U.C.0079 and something that looks like a slimmed-down Geze. I recently saw the Robot Spirits incarnation of this and I'm amazed that someone thought it worthy of being a figure. Does that mean we will see a really premium pay-through-the-nose version in Mobile Suit Ensemble or Gundam Converge as well? I'd say it is highly questionable but sometimes insane things like that happen.


Lots of repeats in the common and uncommon sections now so we'll have to focus more on the rare slot. This time we get a new pilot card for Suletta who is jumping ship and shifting decks (just like everyone else seems to be doing in this game) going from white to green. The other slot holds our next legendary rare and in line with the mobile armour focus of GD04 the Neo Zeon forces are rolling out the insane Neo Zeong with a level of nine and a cost of eight - who will be the first to break the barrier and hit level 10?


There are a couple of new cards in the uncommon section this time; the rather obscure character Pala Sys who pilots the G-Falcon and the mighty space fortress A Baoa Qu which I prefer better under its Gate of Zedan name when the Titans operated it. Maybe it can make an appearance in the Titans-focused started deck coming out this autumn? The rare slot holds a boring command card and another oddity; a battleship from Turn-A that looks very much inspired by the Argama-class (when you view it in full light from above). Next.


Fifteen packs in and we are seeing some new faces. Riddhe Marcenas finally pops up, we've been encountering a couple of his Banshee Norn variants already and what do you know we have yet another warship, this time in purple. While the ships are really scattered from every conceivable timeline I really appreciate them being included here. The rare section introduces Rey Za Burrel from the Minerva but we haven't seen his personal ride in this set so far, is the Legend Gundam hanging around in the unopened packs? (Spoiler alert: No, it is not unfortunately). The second slot treats us to another alternate artwork card, this time of the Victory Gundam. The League Militaire are absolutely killing it with this box, now we have seen three alternate artwork cards and they are all lifting this single faction. Now all we need is the regular version of this card, you know the one from the box cover. Based on experience from other box openings I'd say there is a pretty good chance that it is in here and that means that unfortunately the Unicorn Gundam won't.

Anyway, before we move on we also have a new token card in the resource slot; the head of the Zeong as it scoots away into that Last Shooting scene. We now have both an arm and the head as tokens for the Zeong but not the mobile suit itself - I'd be really annoyed if it turns out not to be included in this box. :)


We are two thirds in and now finally crew is starting to roll in. It must have been a hard night drinking for miss El there, we've been getting multiple vehicles for her to pilot already so she can get to work. So much for being a common card. The uncommon section also introduces another latecomer; Rosamia Badam shows up ready to pilot either the Gaplant or the Psycho Gundam Mk-II. Get busy, ladies. What else do we have here... Let's see, a couple of mildly inspiring rare cards but oh, we have a new mobile suit in the commons section. That's the Demi Trainer - a suit I'm pretty sure I've seen in the game already, let me check...


Yeah, there it is. We have indeed seen both pilot (with impossible candy floss hair - that's a morning routine I don't envy) and suit before in GD01 but - of course at this point - at the time in another deck. The astute observer may have also noticed that the suit is now seen in its later appearance with the long range rifle replaced by a Gatling Gun (and in game it has also lost its pilot-link).


Pack seventeen introduces several new mobile suits - we have yet another RX-78 in the uncommon section (still in the blue deck for some reason) which seems pointless because I here all blue faction players are spamming Amuro in the GM but I guess it is like Pikachu, it simply has to appear in every other goddamn set. Heine gets his orange GOUF but the card art is pretty disappointing, these face close-ups are doing nothing for me I'm afraid. The Trinity Team is finally completed with the Throne Eins as our first rare and would you look at that, here comes the mighty Zeong as a legendary rare and it is looking great. It is a perfect example of how you can do dynamic art and still give a clear representation of what the unit looks like in its entirety.


As you can see from its abilities, the Zeong is directly supported by two types of token cards. While I would like to assume that this fact informed how the boxes were seeded I ended up with only one arm-token and so it is indeed probably just random.


We have seen all the regular cards before and even in the rare section we have a duplicate of the red-deck Exia, the only new card to throw into the mix is yet another version of the Victory Gundam with its VSBR rif... (oops, wrong show there), I mean its Overhang Cannon pack which sports a couple of beam cannons as well as additional boosters. The League Militaire version of the Guncannon I guess. Let's crack on with the next pack.


Two new cards make their debut in the commons section; we have yet another civilian base from GQuuuuuuX in the red deck and look at that, our first proper Zanscare Empire mobile suit. Or hold on a second, it has both the League Militaire and Zanscare Empire traits on it, what is up with that?


Ok, so the Shokew bothered me a bit and I just had to zoom into and read up on it a bit. In the lore, it is a prototype machine that according to Gundam writing 101 gets into the hands of a civilian kid who just happens to be the next top ace and so Uso Ewin steals it and crews it for a while. And this is enough for it to receive faction keywords for both teams? By that logic the Gelgoog should get the Titans trait because Reccoa Londe bumbled around in one, once. Also, we already have a couple of machines appropriated by the opposition in this set and they have been single faction only. There is of course also "Jamil's Gundam X" in the purple deck so this may as well have been "Uso's Shokew" by the same logic. This game...

Anyway, back on track now, apologies for the sidestep. It is probably more important to mention that we have two important cards in the rare section. Loran or Rolan - the jury is still out - is our linked pilot for the Turn-A Gundam and here comes the anticipated regular version of the Victory Gundam in the legendary rare slot. The League Militaire continues to dominate this box.


Pack 20 is a lot of the same but the rare section introduces two new cards at least. First we have yet another version of the Gundam Airmaster - the last two sets have been crawling with these - and wouldn't you know it; ANOTHER mobile suit for the League Militaire. Seriously, their line-up in this box covers a lot of their early inventory, we are just missing out on the Gunblaster and the Victory 2 variants which are obviously going to follow at some point in the future.


The Banshee Norn completes the resource card line-up for this set, I believe we actually got all the resource- and token cards in the box this time around. I still have a lot of gaps in the series from GD03, hopefully they will pop up on either the singles markets or in lumps of common cards that people are looking to get rid of.


This is booster pack 21 of 24 and it is a complete misfire. We have seen all these cards before, even the two rares are duplicates from earlier in this pack. Let's move on...


Wow, this pack is all about Celestial being it seems, five of their mobile suits and two of their pilots in a single pack must be some kind of record. Hallelujah and the Kyrios are conveniently located in the same pack and the second rare slot holds another version of the Turn-A Gundam, we saw the legendary rare version earlier with all those millions of keywords in its text box, this variant seems more straightforward.


I didn't comment on the GM III earlier; this is another type of very situational artwork that I don't really think works for a mass-production type. Just give me a clean view from a decent angle so that I can envisage the team lining up next to each other, please. We've seen all of the commons and uncommons before but here it comes; pack 23 of 24 contains two very iconic mobile suits just as the box is about to wrap up. First we have Rey's ubiquitous Blaze ZAKU Phantom, you just can't build a Minerva Squad without it. Secondly; there it is - the legendary rare Unicorn Gundam from the box cover!


As this box proves, it actually IS possible to get all three mobile suits from the cover in a single box after all! Now, I of course don't know if this is also the case with the previous boxes in the series but it at least proves that there is no specific rule in place for GD04 to prevent it from happening. I was pretty sure Bandai did this intentionally to lure customers into buying multiple boxes but I guess I owe them an apology (unless of course someone screwed up and that was their strategy all along...). I am really curious to know if people managed to pull all three in a single box from the previous sets as well.


As we unwrap the final pack I feel a sort of zen-like peace within me already, so much so that I can't be bothered to work myself up about the two mildly inspiring rare cards found inside. First up we have a combination card showing of Guncannons unit 108 and 109 from the movie-retcon of the original television series. I really don't appreciate combination cards like these and I already rolled my eyes at the two Core Boosters fighting for space on a single card that we also find within this set. Older Gundam cardgames also do this from time to time, expect to see Freedom and Justice crammed together on a high-level card before long. The worst offender was the arcade game TryAge which in later generations started introducing dual stats for two different mobile suits on the same card, like the Zeta and the Double Zeta or Age-1S Spallow with the AGE-1T Titus for example, it used to drive me up the wall. The very last card is a picture of a baby bottle, I don't think I need to make any snide comments about it, let's just move on.


Card distribution per deck:

Blue: 59 cards, 13 of which were rare or higher.
Green: 56 cards with only 7 rares.
Red: 59 cards with 8 rares.
White: 60 cards and 13 rares.
Purple: 54 cards with 7 rares.

So here is a quick look at the card counts for each faction in the box. While the general amount of cards per each faction is fairly level there was a massive skew in the distribution of the rare cards. Blue and white are standing very tall compared to the other three factions - I don't recall previous boxes being this swingy.


To add further insult to the other teams, the blue deck also got all of the alternate artwork cards in the box. However, the only faction to receive a complete set of cards was actually white with its three Legendary Rare cards while the other four suites missed out on one LR-card each; the RX-104FF Penelope for blue, Elan Ceres's FP/A-77 Gundam Pharact for green, the GN-003 Gundam Kyrios for red and the GX-9901-DX Gundam Double X for purple. It is also worth pointing out that green, red and purple only have two legendary rare cards in GD04, with three each for blue and white. Gundam game-designers are just unable to avoid favouring the E.F.S.F. faction whenever they make a game of this type.

All things considered, I had a good time opening this box even though it didn't really reach the same levels of hype as previous sets. My main complaint as a collector is that unique mobile suits are being reissued over and over again and that suits and people just move around among the different decks without obvious thematic purpose. From a gameplay perspective it also seems that many players are frustrated by some of the core mechanics of the game. It remains to be seen if this project will run out of steam or if the developers manage to set things right.


Review update: Above are the four Legendary Rare cards that were not included in this particular box as well an alternate art version of the Lfrith Thorn and a couple of the resource portraits.