The Ultimate Guide to Creating Your Own Gundam Card Game Playmat

If you're playing the Gundam Card Game, there's a pretty good chance you already have opinions about which Mobile Suit deserves to be on your playmat.

Maybe you've always been an RX-78-2 person. Maybe it's Freedom or Strike Freedom. Maybe you're firmly in the Wing Zero camp. Or perhaps your answer is Barbatos, Unicorn, Nu Gundam, Sazabi or something considerably more obscure.

At Tako Mats, we make custom Gundam Card Game playmats in Australia, allowing you to choose the artwork you actually want rather than settling for whatever designs happen to be available.

Choose your artwork, pick between our Slim 2mm and Plush 5mm mats, then decide whether you want our Gundam Card Game zone overlay added to the design.

Start With the Gundam You Actually Love

This is probably the easiest way to approach a custom Gundam playmat.

What's your Gundam?

For some people that's the RX-78-2 Gundam. For others it'll be Freedom Gundam, Strike Freedom, Wing Gundam Zero, Gundam Barbatos, Unicorn Gundam, Nu Gundam, Sazabi, Gundam Calibarn, Gundam Exia or one of the countless Mobile Suits spread across the different Gundam series.

You don't have to choose what's currently fashionable or what happens to have an official mat available. If you've loved Deathscythe Hell since watching Endless Waltz, make a Deathscythe mat. If you're a Zeon tragic and would rather have Char's Zaku II staring across the table than a Gundam, do that. If Unicorn Destroy Mode is your thing, build the entire mat around it.

There's no reason your custom mat has to look like anybody else's.

Or Build Your Mat Around the Deck You're Playing

Your favourite Mobile Suit and the deck you're currently playing don't necessarily have to be the same thing.

The current Gundam Card Game meta gives you plenty of inspiration.

Strike Freedom and Kira Yamato, Nu Gundam and Amuro Ray, Barbatos and Mikazuki Augus, along with the G Gundam/Mobile Fighter package, are all prominent themes in the current competitive game.

So if you've spent hours building a deck around a particular pilot or Mobile Suit, why not build the mat around it too?

A Strike Freedom/Kira mat can match your deck. A Nu Gundam and Amuro design gives you a completely different look. An Iron-Blooded Orphans deck naturally opens up Barbatos and Mikazuki artwork.

Or ignore the current meta completely and make the Gundam mat you've wanted for the last 20 years.

The meta changes. Your mat doesn't have to.

Gundam Gives You Decades of Artwork to Work With

One of the best things about creating a custom Gundam playmat is just how much artwork is out there. Different anime series, movies, promotional illustrations, games and decades of Gundam history mean that even two mats featuring exactly the same Mobile Suit can look completely different. Pilots can be part of the design too.

Amuro and RX-78-2. Char and his Zaku II. Kira and Freedom. Heero and Wing Zero. Mikazuki and Barbatos.

Sometimes combining the pilot and Mobile Suit creates a much more interesting mat than simply putting a giant robot in the middle. The main thing we'd suggest is finding the version of the artwork you actually love, rather than grabbing the first picture of your Gundam that appears.

Think About the Shape of the Mat

A great Gundam picture isn't automatically a great playmat. Our TCG mats are 600 × 350 mm, so we're working with a wide landscape shape. Mobile Suits, unfortunately, tend to be very tall.

Artwork with the Gundam positioned slightly off-centre can actually work better because there's room for the rest of the scene and, if you're adding them, your Gundam Card Game zones.Battle scenes can be particularly good. Two opposing Mobile Suits naturally fill a wide composition without us needing to crop everything around them. You don't need to work all of this out yourself. That's part of what we're looking at when we prepare your artwork.

Find the Biggest Version You Can

Resolution matters.

An image can look fantastic on your phone and still be far too small when we try to stretch it across an entire playmat. If you've found the artwork you want, try to find the largest and highest-resolution version available rather than downloading a small preview or thumbnail. The more information there is in the original image, the more freedom we have to crop, reposition and prepare it for your mat.

Don't Stress if Your Image Isn't Perfect

You don't need to know Photoshop.

Our Image Cleanup Promise means we'll check your artwork and, where possible, help prepare and improve it for production. We're looking at how the image is going to work across the entire mat rather than blindly sending whatever you upload to print. If your Gundam's head is about to disappear off the edge of the mat, we'd much rather catch that before we make it.

Slim 2mm or Plush 5mm?

Once you've chosen your artwork, the next decision is how you want your Gundam Card Game playmat to feel.

Slim 2mm

Our Slim 2mm gives you the classic lower-profile TCG playmat feel. It's lightweight, easy to roll up and a great option if you prefer a thinner mat on the table.

Plush 5mm

Our Plush 5mm is thicker, softer and noticeably more substantial. The extra cushioning gives it a more premium feel and also makes cards easier to pick up from the playing surface. The Plush 5mm has been becoming increasingly popular with our customers and, if you're already building yourself a completely custom Gundam mat, the Plush would be our pick.

Add Gundam Card Game Zones – Or Don't

You can leave your custom playmat completely clean and let the Gundam artwork take over the entire surface. Or you can add our Gundam Card Game zone overlay.

Gundam has quite a bit happening across the playing area, so zones can be useful if you like keeping everything organised. They also make the mat immediately look like it was built specifically for the Gundam Card Game rather than being a generic TCG mat with Gundam artwork on it.

But every zone also covers some of the artwork underneath. So if you've found an incredible piece of artwork and don't want anything sitting over it...Skip the zones.

Gundam Card Zones With Headings or Without?

If you want card zones, there's one more choice.

Card Zones With Headings

Choose zones with headings if you want the full structured Gundam Card Game layout. Everything is clearly labelled, giving you a playing surface that's unmistakably built for Gundam.

Card Zones Without Headings

If you prefer something cleaner, choose zones without headings. You still get the structure of the layout, but there's less text competing with the artwork underneath.

There's no right answer here.

Some Gundam artwork works brilliantly with the full labelled layout. Other designs deserve as little sitting over them as possible.

Gundam Card Game playmat with zones and headings

Gundam Playmats Made by Our Customers

This is where Gundam gets fun.

There are so many series, Mobile Suits, pilots and eras to choose from that everybody seems to have a different answer to what belongs on their mat. One person wants Freedom. Another wants Barbatos. Someone else has been a Wing Zero fan for decades and couldn't care less what's currently being played competitively.

Then you've got Unicorn, Banshee, Calibarn, Exia, Nu Gundam, Sazabi, Zaku, Aerial, Deathscythe, Epyon and an enormous list of Mobile Suits we haven't even mentioned. That's exactly why custom works so well for Gundam. You're not picking the Gundam mat everybody else thinks you should have. You're building yours.

Made in Australia

Every Tako Mats custom playmat is made to order right here in Australia. Your custom design isn't sent overseas to be manufactured and then shipped back. We prepare the artwork, produce your mat and pack the finished order here in Australia. And if something looks wrong with the artwork you've uploaded, there's an actual person here looking at it before it becomes your finished mat.