Digimon Card Game: Starter Deck – Gallantmon (ST-7)

Gallantmon is the 7th starter set of the Digimon Card Game. Released in Europe in October 2021, this deck is a pure red deck featuring Gallantmon, one of the “Royal Knights”. This starter deck includes as usual 50 cards, 4 digi-eggs and 2 memory gauges. In addition, Gallantmon starter deck comes with 6 very useful Promo Memory Boost cards, one per colour.

Being a pure red deck, this starter deck focuses on attack exploiting both the higher-than average CP of the featured Digimons and a wide range of On Play/Inherited effects that deletes your opponents Digimon. The Lv6 Mega Digimon featured in this deck is of course “Gallantmon” itself, a Royal Knight with 11000 DP and security attack +1. To help dominating the fight, Gallantmon has also an interesting ability that allows it to delete one of your opponent’s Digimons with 4000 CP or less or to gain 3000 DP in case no Digimon was deleted. This second part of the ability is quite handy as it allows Gallantmon to easily take on the majority of the other Digimons, including most of the Lv7 ones.

Let’s review how your Digimon deck can fight off any opponent.

Deck Composition & Strategy

As mentioned above, the key strategy of this deck is to keep removing your opponent lower level Digimons from the field to prevent your opponent to gain the advantage while you bring down the security stack with Gallantmon .

The starting point of this deck is a classic red egg, Gigimon, that has the inherited effect of getting 2000 DP every time one of your opponent Digimon is deleted. This ability is a good advantage for a deck that focuses mainly on attacking.

The rookies (Lv3) of this deck include Monodramon, Agumon, Biyomon and Guilmon. Biyomon is a nice low cost blocker that can be helpful to prevent some early damages while Agumon has an inherited effect that increases the Digimon DP when attacking the security stack. The best rookie of the deck is Guilmon as the version enclosed in this deck has the ability to digivolve straight into Gallantmon if the enemy has a Lv6 Digimon in play. This ability can easily turn the tide of a battle allowing a player to bring out the heavy guns quite quickly.

Among the champions (Lv4) of this deck (Growlmon, DarkTyrannomon and GeoGreymon), GeoGreymon is probably the most interesting one. Its security option in particular is quite good as it allows the player to get it to the field without paying its memory cost. When played, GeoGreymon also has the ability to delete a Digimon with 4000 CP that helps keeping swarming decks at bay.

Gallantmon starter deck also includes three Ultimate (Lv5) Digimons. Among them, Groundramon is an average Digimon with no special effects while RizeGreymon can delete a Digimon with 4000 CP when played. WarGrowlmon is definitely the best Ultimate of the deck as it has the ability to delete a Digimon with 3000 CP or less when attacking and an inherited effect that grants “Security

Attack +1″ for one turn when an opponent Digimon is deleted. This last effect is quite interesting as it can be combined with Gallantmon ability to delete low CP Digimons when attacking in order to have a total of +2 security attacks.

The second Mega included in this deck, ShineGreymon, is a very good companion for Gallantmon having Security Attack +1 and Piercing. Both Gallantmon and ShineGreymon will benefit from CP boosts and “when attacking” effects from all their devolutions ensuring they will be able to quickly destroy the security stack of your opponent.

Among the options, the one that can easily come in hand is “Lighting Joust” that increasing a Digimon CP by 2000 and grants Security Attakck +1 if the player has less security shields than the opponent. Atomic Blaster and Gaia Force are very good options to have in the Security stack as they both allow the player to delete some of the opponent’s Digimons.

Is This Set Worth Buying

Overall, ST-7 is a nice and straightforward deck for those players that are looking to get into Digimon without having any previous experience with collectible card games. As a pure red deck, the Gallantmon starter deck offers in fact a very simple mechanic that does not require a lot of preparation and that is also very forgiving. On the other hand, more experienced players may perceive the deck engine as a bit flat as the only real option available is to attack. Finally, it should be considered that this starter deck is average in terms of competitiveness and it will struggle a lot against some of the more recent blue or green starter decks.

On a positive note, Gallantmon has some very good support cards that are also easy to add to the starter deck. In case you are looking to make this deck more competitive, I would strongly recommend to buy two copies of the starter deck first and to remove all the cards not linked to Guilmon-Growlmon. A good addition to this deck are the red-purple Growlmon and WarGrowlmon from EX3 (“Draconic Roar”) as they have lower digivolution costs and interesting effects. The X-antibody version of Guilmon, Growlmon and WarGrowlmon from BT9 (“X Record”) are also quite useful as they digivolve for zero from their counterpart and they increase the maximum DP limit a player can choose when triggering a an effect that allows to delete a Digimon. Gallantmon X-Antibody in particular is a great asset to add to the deck as it allows to delete a Digimon with the lowest DP and to trash one card from the security stack every turn if the player has digivolved it from the standard Gallantmon. Last but not least, this deck can really benefit from a tamer and Takato Matsuki from EX2 (“Digital Hazard”) is the best one to look for.

Finally, the next two expansions planned for 2023, BT-12 “Across time” and BT-13 “Versus Royal Knights”, will focus on providing new support for all the Royal Knights and there is a very good chance there will be new and interesting strategies that can make Gallantmon shine on the table.

That concludes our thoughts on Digimon Starter deck ST-7: Gallantmon. Do you agree? Let us know your thoughts and tag us on social media @zatugames. To buy Gallantmon Starter deck today click here!