Gundam Card Game ST11-ST14 Decklists Are Not the Box

Two weeks ago, publishing an ST11 through ST14 decklist meant guessing. The ST11-ST14 card list piece checked Bandai's own DECKS page on 12 September 2026 and found nothing - the four September starters had card lists but no decklist, and the piece said so directly: "Anyone publishing an exact ST11 through ST14 decklist today is guessing at that part."

On 25 September 2026 - the day Aquatic Assault, Raging Onslaught, Silent Barrage and Heavy Dominion actually reach shelves - that stopped being true. Four new pages went up on gundam-gcg.com's DECKS index: deck-045 through deck-048, one full 50-card list per starter. I read all four against the card database the same day. Not one of them is the box run out to four copies.

Nine of Raging Onslaught's own sixteen cards make Bandai's cut. Eight of Silent Barrage's do. Even the two decks that keep most of their own box still reach outside it for a Base, a Command, or both.

Release day, and a page that was empty two weeks ago

The four decks carry a battle-style name apiece on the DECKS page rather than the retail title: ST11 Marine, ST12 Close Combat, ST13 Bit / Funnel and ST14 Heavy Armed. Each is tagged as exactly 50 cards. That distinction matters, because it tells you what these are before you read a single row: not the shrink-wrapped contents of the box, but the same kind of aftermarket, tournament-shaped decklist Bandai has been publishing for the other 41-plus lists on that page since launch - the ones the deckbuilding guide and Bases guide have been counting from all along.

That is a real answer to a real open question, even though it is not the specific open question the card-list piece flagged. Bandai still has not told anyone how many copies of each of the sixteen box cards ship inside the physical 50-card starter deck - that gap is exactly as open today as it was on 12 September, and the last section of this piece says so plainly. What changed is that Bandai's own recommended build for each starter now exists, in public, dated to the day the product hits stores.

How I checked

I pulled all four lists - ST11 Marine, ST12 Close Combat, ST13 Bit / Funnel and ST14 Heavy Armed - from gundam-gcg.com on 25 September 2026, cross-checked every card number against the 16-card tables in the ST11-ST14 card list piece, and fetched the individual card database page for every number that piece had not already covered. Every list sums to exactly 50 cards on its own arithmetic; none needed rounding or guessing to reconcile.

Two things the DECKS page does not carry, worth saying up front. There is no publish date printed on the deck pages themselves, so I am dating them by the same method the site's own news index uses - the four appeared alongside the products they support, on the products' own street date. And the page does not explain why a card was chosen over its box-mate; everything below is what the list runs, not why Bandai built it that way.

One more honest note: four more decklists appeared on the same page the same day - Strike Freedom x Destiny, Nu Gundam x Sazabi, Banshee Norn x Xi Gundam, and Big Zam x Psycho Haro. All four are built around Freedom Ascension [GD05] Legend Rares rather than the September starters, and they are outside what this piece checked in full - a separate story for a separate day.

None of the four decks is the box

Line the four up by how much of their own sixteen-card box survives into Bandai's decklist, and none of them is close to a wash:

Every one of those distinct-card-number totals - 13, 14, 14, 15 - lands inside the 13-to-16 range the deckbuilding guide found across the seven official lists it sampled back in August. The new wave is built to the same consistency-first template as the rest of the format; it just is not built from the same sixteen cards you get in the box.

Colour discipline holds too. Every single imported card matches one of its deck's own two printed colours - nothing outside Blue/Purple shows up in ST11 Marine, nothing outside Green/White shows up in ST14 Heavy Armed. Fifteen distinct outside cards get pulled in across the four lists, and not one of them breaks the starter's own colour pair.

ST11 Marine keeps eleven, and swaps its own Base

Aquatic Assault is the deck that changes least in raw card count, and it is still not the box. Eleven of ST11's own sixteen numbers make the list - 001, 002, 003, 006, 007, 008, 009, 010, 011, 012 and 015 - at three or four copies each. The five that do not: ST11-004 ZnO, ST11-005 Ash, ST11-013 Poorly Planned Offensive, ST11-014 The Orca of Red Sea, and its own printed Base, ST11-016 Mad Angler.

That Base swap is the single cleanest example in this whole wave. In place of Mad Angler, Bandai's decklist runs four copies of ST01-015 White Base - a Blue Base from the very first starter deck, Heroic Beginnings, already the third-most-played Base across the format's other lists per the Bases guide. The other outside card is four copies of GD05-050 Gundam Exia Repair, a purple Level 2 Unit from Freedom Ascension that destroys any Level 4-or-lower enemy Unit with no paired Pilot it deals battle damage to, and mills two cards off the top of your own deck when it dies. Both imports keep the deck's Blue/Purple identity intact; neither is a card you get by buying the box.

ST12 Close Combat imports two Legend Rares the box never had

Raging Onslaught is where the gap widens. Only nine of ST12's own sixteen numbers survive - 001, 003, 005, 006, 009, 010, 011, 012 and 016 - which cuts Shining Gundam, Gundam Exia, Gyan, Efreet Schneid, The Final Victor, Wise Leader's Pride and Two Unicorns entirely. In their place, Bandai's list runs five outside cards for nineteen of the deck's fifty slots: GD01-044 Kshatriya, GD01-050 LaGOWE, GD01-051 Kshatriya, GD01-093 Marida Cruz, and GD05-111 Airframe Seizure.

Two of those are worth stopping on. GD01-044 and GD01-051 are both named simply "Kshatriya," and they are not the same card twice - GD01-044 is a Legend Rare, Level 5, cost 4, 5 AP / 4 HP, linking to Marida Cruz; GD01-051 is an Uncommon, Level 4, cost 2, 3 AP / 4 HP, linking off the (Cyber-Newtype) trait instead. Two distinct card numbers, two different rarities and statlines, one shared name off the same mobile suit. Marida Cruz herself comes along as the Pilot both Kshatriyas can pair with - a Rare with a Burst that adds itself to hand and an Attack effect that pings a same-level-or-lower enemy Unit. None of the three ships in the Raging Onslaught box. ST12-016 Libra is the one Base number that does survive - ST12 and ST14 are the only two of the four decks that keep their own printed Base rather than importing one.

ST13 Bit / Funnel keeps half the box, and a second Qubeley

Silent Barrage keeps the least of its own box: eight of sixteen numbers - 001, 002, 006, 008, 009, 010, 011 and 012 - cutting Bertigo, GX-Bit, GFreD, Gyunei's Jagd Doga, I'm a Newtype, Final Duty, Operation to Intercept Solomon, and its own Base, ST13-016 Sodon.

Sodon's replacement is GD05-126 Quiet Zero, a green Base with 6 HP against Sodon's standard 5, carrying the (Quiet Zero) and (Stronghold) traits and an ability that deploys a [Gundnode] token once per turn if you control a Level 5-or-higher Unit with "Gundam Aerial" in its name. The other five outside cards - GD01-112 Extreme Hatred, GD02-036 Qubeley, GD03-107 Over the River and Through the Woods, GD05-025 Demi Barding and GD05-111 Airframe Seizure - fill out the remaining fifteen slots.

GD02-036 Qubeley is the strangest of the six, for the same reason GD01's two Kshatriyas are strange. ST13-001 Qubeley, the box's own Legend Rare, is Green, Level 7, cost 5, 5 AP / 5 HP. GD02-036 Qubeley is Red, Level 7, cost 5, 5 AP / 5 HP - identical stat line, different colour, different card number, same unadorned name, and Bandai's own decklist runs both of them in the same 50 cards. Where the two Kshatriyas split old-model-versus-new by rarity and cost, the two Qubeleys split entirely by colour: the green one links to Haman Karn's (Neo Zeon) side of the roster, the red one gives itself Suppression when it links and pings a damaged enemy Unit when paired with a (Neo Zeon) Pilot.

ST14 Heavy Armed is the one deck that barely changed

Heavy Dominion is the outlier in the other direction. Thirteen of its sixteen numbers make Bandai's list - everything except Gundam Heavyarms Custom (EW), Perfect Strike Gundam and Battlefield Emotions - and its own printed Base, ST14-016 Gryphios 2, survives at four copies. Only two outside cards get in: GD01-107 First Contact and GD01-118 Overflowing Affection, both from Newtype Rising, the July 2025 launch booster, rather than from Freedom Ascension like every other import in this wave.

Overflowing Affection is not a stranger to this format. The Commands guide already found it to be the single most-played Command across Bandai's other decklists - a cost-1 White "draw two, discard one" running 35 copies across ten of those lists as of August. ST14 Heavy Armed adds a fourteenth appearance and a fourth copy to that tally. First Contact is a green Command from Gundam Wing with a Burst that places an EX Resource and a Main that places a rested one - a plain ramp piece, not a splashy import, which fits a deck that otherwise did not need much fixing.

The card doing double duty

Exactly one of the fifteen outside cards used across all four lists shows up in more than one of them: GD05-111 Airframe Seizure, a red Command reading "Discard 1. If you do, draw 2," runs four copies in both ST12 Close Combat and ST13 Bit / Funnel. Every other imported card - the two Kshatriyas, LaGOWE, Marida Cruz, White Base, Gundam Exia Repair, Extreme Hatred, the red Qubeley, Over the River and Through the Woods, Demi Barding, Quiet Zero, First Contact and Overflowing Affection - appears in exactly one of the four September decklists and nowhere else in this wave.

Airframe Seizure works in both because Red is the one colour ST12 and ST13 share - Red/Purple and Green/Red respectively - which makes a plain, colour-flexible card-filtering Command the cheapest way to smooth a curve in either deck without touching its identity.

The same day, the banned list grew by two

Bandai's banned and restricted page carries no separate "effective" date printed on the page itself as of this check, but the site's own news index dates this update to 25 September 2026 - the same day the four decklists and the four starter decks themselves went live. The core of the list is unchanged from the version the tournament rules guide already covers: GD01-020 Anksha is still the only fully banned card, ST02-016 Corsica Base is still restricted to two, and the same two named banned pairs still stand.

What is new is the collective group covering every "Level 2, cost 1, 2 AP, 2 HP, without effects" Unit - the group the deckbuilding guide already flagged as auto-expanding whenever a new matching card is printed. It just expanded for the first time from a starter deck rather than a numbered booster:

I checked both cards individually against the card database rather than trusting the banned-list page's description: both print exactly Level 2, cost 1, 2 AP, 2 HP, and neither carries any rules text at all. Bandai's list now names twenty-two cards in this group instead of twenty, and the rule stays the same shape it already was - up to four copies of one matching card, zero of any other. Neither ST13 nor ST14 contributed a card to the group; none of their own sixteen numbers matches the profile.

This does not touch either deck's own official decklist. ST11 Marine already runs its four copies of Daughseat as the only vanilla-profile card in the list, and ST12 Close Combat runs its four copies of Slash ZAKU Phantom the same way - both fully legal, because neither deck pairs its vanilla Unit with a second card from the same banned group.

What Bandai still has not published

The gap the card-list piece flagged two weeks ago is still a gap. Bandai has told the world what sixteen cards exist in each September starter, and now what fifty cards it recommends building around - but it has never said how many copies of each of those sixteen actually ship inside the shrink-wrapped 50-card deck you buy for $15.99. A DECKS-page list and a box list are not guaranteed to be the same thing, and nothing published today closes that specific gap.

Two smaller ones sit next to it. Bandai has not explained why these four lists reach for Freedom Ascension so heavily - fourteen of the fifteen imported cards trace back to GD05 or the GD01 launch set, and none to GD02, GD03 or GD04 - and it has not said whether the four Strike Freedom/Nu Gundam/Banshee Norn/Big Zam lists posted the same day are meant to read as a matched set with these four or as an unrelated release. Both are honest unknowns rather than gaps I am filling with a guess.