Gundam Card Game Commands - All 145, and When to Play Them

Units attack on your turn. Bases sit there. Pilots pair on your turn. Comprehensive Rules 9-2 says a player may do exactly two things during an action step: activate an 【Action】 Command card, and activate an 【Activate･Action】 effect. Only the first of those is a card leaving your hand - which makes Command the one card type in the Gundam Card Game you can put down while your opponent is doing something, and it says so on one line of printed text.

That line is 【Action】, and Bandai's own FAQ defines it without hedging. Q91: "It means that card can be played from your hand during your action steps or your opponent's action steps."

84 of the 145 Command cards in the game carry it. That is the number this article is about, because it is the only lever you have on a turn that is not yours - and because 15 of the 41 decklists Bandai has published contain none of it.

The only cards you can play on someone else's turn

Here is the shape of the card type, before any of the detail.

Fifty-eight percent of Commands can be played at action timing. Forty-two percent cannot, and those 61 are functionally sorcery-speed cards you have to plan a whole turn around.

How I counted

On 30 August 2026 I filtered the official card database at gundam-gcg.com/en/cards/ to card type COMMAND and pulled the detail page for every result. That returns 275 entries; collapsing parallel art down to distinct card numbers leaves 145.

That reconciles with the rest of the pool exactly. The same filter returns 560 Units, 119 Pilots and 68 Bases as distinct card numbers, and 560 + 119 + 145 + 68 is the 892 deck-legal cards the colour count, the Base count and the series count all worked from.

Off each card I read Bandai's printed fields - Lv., cost, colour, rarity, trait, AP, HP, Source Title - and the full rules text, keeping the 【 】 timing keywords intact. Rules citations are Comprehensive Rules Ver. 1.8.0, dated 10 July 2026. Ruling numbers are from the official FAQ. Deck numbers come from the 41 lists Bandai publishes on its own DECKS page.

What a Command actually is

Rule 3-4-1: "When played, Command cards activate their command effects. They are 'Commands' while their command effects are active and 'Command cards' otherwise."

Three consequences worth having straight before you argue about one across a table.

A resolving Command is nowhere. Rule 3-4-3 says Commands with active command effects "are not considered to be located within any specific game location until those effects end," and 4-1-2 repeats it. It is not in your hand, not on the field, not in the trash. Nothing that counts cards in a location sees it mid-resolution.

It hits the trash afterwards, not before. Rule 3-4-4. If the effect cares how many cards are in your trash, the Command itself is not one of them yet.

No legal target, no play. Rule 10-1-8-1-1: "If a command effect requires choosing a target, playing that Command card is not possible if that target cannot be chosen." You cannot fire a removal Command into an empty board to dig it out of your hand. 10-1-8-1-2 extends that to the first half of any effect chained with "Then" or "If you do."

Every one of the 145 has a dash in its Zone field and a dash in its Link field. None of them has an AP or HP value of its own - the 64 that print AP and HP print them as Pilot modifiers, which is the next section but one.

Two keywords, two windows

【Main】 and 【Action】 are not difficulty settings. They are two different clocks.

Rule 13-2-3-1 defines 【Main】 as a command effect "that can be activated by playing the card during your main phase while no Units are attacking." Note the second half. A Main Command is locked out the moment you declare an attack and does not come back until the battle ends.

Rule 13-2-4-1 defines 【Action】 as playable "during an action step" - and rule 9-1 says exactly where those are: "An action step occurs after the block step and during the end phase."

So the number of action-timing windows in a turn is one per attack, plus one in the end phase.

Two details inside an action step decide most of the close ones.

The defender moves first. Rule 9-3: the standby player chooses to act or pass before the active player does (9-4). Then it alternates until both pass consecutively (9-4-2, 9-5). If you are attacking into an open board, the person you are attacking gets the first word.

It is after blocks, not before. Rule 8-1 fixes the order: attack step, block step, action step, damage step, battle end step. <Blocker> resolves in the block step (8-3-1), so by the time anyone can play an 【Action】 Command the blocker is already declared and rested. You are pumping or removing a known matchup, not guessing at one.

The timing split: 61, 55, 29

The 55 dual-timing cards are the ones that matter for deck slots, because they cost you nothing to hold. Rule 13-2-4-3 and FAQ Q92 both confirm the obvious reading: a card printing 【Main】/【Action】 can be played at either time, your choice, every time.

GD02-101 Beneath the Mask is the clean example - Lv. 1, cost 1, blue, "Choose 1 to 2 enemy Units that are Lv.2 or lower. Rest them," playable in your own main phase or in the middle of someone else's attack.

The 29 Action-only cards are the interesting ones, because they are dead in your main phase. You cannot cash them in for tempo when the game is quiet. They are held or they are wasted, and 17 of those 29 have a second life the other 12 do not - see the Pilot-Command section.

Level and cost are close together on this card type but not identical: 18 of the 145 have Lv. equal to cost. The rest ask you to be further into the game than the Resources they rest. Two cards share the widest gap in the set, GD01-112 Extreme Hatred and GD03-110 Eliminate Target, both Lv. 6 for a cost of 1.

Which colours get to interrupt

The colour breakdown established what the five colours do. This is where they are allowed to do it.

Green has the joint-largest Command count in the game and the smallest number of them it can play on your turn. Twenty of its 32 are Main-only. Red has four fewer Commands than green and eight more that work at action timing.

That is consistent with what those two colours do elsewhere in the pool - green is the colour of EX Resource and acceleration, which is a main-phase activity, and red is the colour of damage, which is a combat activity - but the timing line is where it becomes a constraint rather than a flavour note. A green deck that expects to hold up interaction is holding up twelve possible cards.

The Pilot-Command trap

64 of the 145 Commands print a 【Pilot】 effect on the bottom half. Rule 3-4-6-2: when played, such a card "can be paired with a Unit as a Pilot instead of activating its command effect." The Link Unit map covers which Units those 64 pair with; this is about when you are allowed to make the choice.

You are not always allowed to make it. Rule 13-2-4-2:

"You cannot pair a Command card with a 【Pilot】 effect as a Pilot during an action step."

Read that against the timing split and a specific group of cards falls out. 17 of the 64 Pilot-Commands are Action-only - their command effect cannot be played in your main phase at all. Which means the card is exactly one thing in each window: a Pilot in your main phase, a Command in an action step, and never both.

ST02-013 Peaceful Timbre is the card Bandai's own FAQ picks to explain this family (Q163: it "is only treated as a Pilot while in the battle area paired with a Unit"). It is Quatre Raberba Winner at +1/+1 in your main phase, and in an action step it is "During this battle, your shield area cards can't receive damage from enemy Units that are Lv.4 or lower."

All 17 of the Action-only Pilot-Commands cost 1:

Seven of the seventeen are green, tied with white, and green is the colour that otherwise gets the least action timing. That is worth knowing if you are building green: a good share of your interaction is stapled to cards you may already be counting as Pilots.

Commands are cheap, and Pilots are why

107 of the 145 Commands cost 1. That number looks like a design statement until you split it by whether the card is also a Pilot.

Every Pilot card in the game costs 1 - that is the finding in the deckbuilding guide - and the Pilot-Commands almost all follow the Pilot price. Only two break it: GD01-106 Fortress Defense and GD02-113 Sisterly Care, both cost 2.

Strip those 64 out and the pure Commands look far less uniform: 45 at cost 1, 21 at cost 2, and 15 spread from 3 up to 10.

The 10 is GD05-107 Interwoven Blessings, Lv. 10 for a cost of 10, which is more Level than any other Command in the set asks for. Its 【Main】 destroys the first two cards in an enemy shield area. It also prints a 【Burst】 that places an EX Resource - which is to say the card is designed to be more useful sitting in your shield area than in your hand, because reaching ten Resources means the game has gone very long indeed.

No Command has ever been a Legend Rare

Every one of the 145 is Common, Uncommon or Rare: 73 C, 39 U, 33 R. Filtering the database for COMMAND at each higher grade returns nothing at all.

That is not a quirk of Commands. It is where Bandai puts its top rarities, across the whole pool:

Legend Rare is a Unit slot with one exception. The Link Rare family - LKC, LKU and LKR, which the rarity guide explains as parallels that encode a base rarity - is Units only. And the P bucket is almost entirely Resource cards, plus the EX Base and EX Resource promo tokens.

The practical version: no Command card is a chase card. Commands do appear with alternate art (275 database entries against 145 card numbers), but the rarity stamp in the corner never goes past R. If you are buying singles to finish a deck, the interaction is the cheap part.

There is one more list a Command has never appeared on. Bandai's Banned/Restricted page, dated 24 July 2026, names GD01-020 Anksha as banned and ST02-016 Corsica Base as restricted to two, plus a set of banned pairs. None of the card numbers on that page is a Command. The tournament rules guide has the full list.

Burst, and the line Bandai does not cross

45 of the 145 Commands print a 【Burst】 effect - the thing that fires for free when the card is sitting in your shield area and a Shield gets destroyed (rule 13-2-5-1). Blue has the most at 12, then white 11, purple 9, green 7, red 6.

Now the part that is a rule in everything but name. Not one of the 64 Pilot-Commands has a 【Burst】. All 45 are in the 81-card pure-Command group. A card in this game is allowed to be a Command and a Pilot, or a Command and a Burst, and so far never all three.

The neatest use of the keyword is the self-reference. EB01-082 Warship Cruise reads "【Burst】Activate this card's 【Action】," and ST01-014 Unforeseen Incident - the hero image at the top - does the same trick with its 【Main】. A Shield that breaks turns straight into the card you would have paid for.

One published limit on that, from the FAQ rather than from inference. Q83: a card taken off your shield area into your hand by an effect does not get to Burst. The card has to be destroyed as a Shield. All 68 Base cards in the game open the same two lines - "【Burst】Deploy this card," then "【Deploy】Add 1 of your Shields to your hand" - so a Base can pull a Burst Command into your hand and pay you nothing for it.

What Bandai's own decklists run

Bandai publishes 41 decklists across 40 pages on its DECKS site - one page carries two lists - and all 41 are exactly 50 cards. Counting every card in them whose card type is COMMAND:

Median 6, mean 6.9, range 2 to 20. Against a 50-card deck that is a median of 12% of the list, and it lines up with the 6.3 average the deckbuilding guide found in the seven most recent lists.

The action-timing number is the one worth staring at. Across all 41 lists there are 284 Command copies, and only 120 of them carry 【Action】. Fifteen of the 41 lists contain no action-timing Command at all - not one card that can be played on the opponent's turn. Twenty-six run at least one; the deepest is Bandai's "Ξ Gundam x Qubeley (Team Battle Version)" at 13.

The 41 lists between them use 52 distinct Commands out of the 145 available. Ten of those do most of the work:

The most-played Command in Bandai's own lists is a cost 1 "Draw 2. Then, discard 1." with no timing flexibility and no interaction whatsoever, at 35 copies across 10 lists. Six of the ten are white or blue, and five of the ten are Main-only.

One honest caveat on this table: Bandai's decklists are pictures of cards with copy counts, so a Pilot-Command in a list is counted here by its printed card type, not by which half the deck's designer intended to use. The 64 dual cards are ambiguous by construction.

The rulebook sends you to the wrong page

If you go to the Comprehensive Rules to check any of this, the Commands section will send you somewhere useless. Rule 3-4-5 - the rule that introduces 【Main】 and 【Action】 - ends "(See 12-2. Keywords)". Section 12-2 is battle royale rules for multiplayer games. Keywords are section 13-2. Rule 3-4-7, on Burst, ends "(See 12-2-5. 【Burst】)". 12-2-5 is the paragraph on winner-takes-all versus last-player-standing. Burst is 13-2-5.

It is not confined to the Commands section. Ver. 1.8.0 contains 30 parenthetical cross-references; I checked each against the section it names, and 11 point at a number lower than the target:

The other 19 are correct, and the document gets the same reference right elsewhere more than once - 8-4-1 points to "8. Action Steps" while 7-6-3-1 points to "9. Action Steps," for the identical section. The rules text itself is fine; only the signposting is off. Look up the section by its title in the table of contents rather than by the number a rule hands you.

What this count does not tell you

A count is not a metagame. I have no tournament results for this game. Fifty-eight percent of Commands being playable at action timing says nothing about whether holding them up beats deploying a Unit, and nothing in a database says which of the 145 is good.

Fifteen zero-interaction decklists are Bandai's teaching material, not a verdict. Most of those 41 lists are published to sell a product - they show off a starter deck or a new booster's archetype. They are evidence of what Bandai builds, not of what wins.

Six dated products are coming and none has a card list. Four starter decks land first - Aquatic Assault [ST11], Raging Onslaught [ST12], Silent Barrage [ST13] and Heavy Dominion [ST14], all on 25 September 2026, each a ready-to-play 50-card deck. Stardust Trails [GD06] follows on 30 October 2026 and Blazing Fist [GD07] on 29 January 2027. Bandai has published card data for none of the six, and the ten ST decks already in the pool contribute 25 of the 145 Commands between them - so every number above is a snapshot, and the first table to move moves on 25 September, not in October.

All counts are 145 distinct deck-legal Command card numbers as of 30 August 2026, covering GD01 through GD05, EB01 and ST01 through ST10, parallel art collapsed.