2025 Weiss Schwarz at a Glance

It’s been a bit of a rough year hasn’t it? I can’t believe we are nearing our fifth year anniversary on this website. I’ve been writing articles for almost half a decade. I hope my writing has improved for you all and that you continue to enjoy the content that’s produced here. Anyways, here’s our round-up of all the sets released from the last year.

This post details sets running from January 2025 – December 2025.

Set sail for the high seas with the Azur Lane girls. The infamous boat girls received their second set of support which introduced a variety of new strategies for each of the corresponding factions. There’s a lot to explore here, and I highly encourage you to take a look and see for yourself what each faction has now added to their arsenal.

Creating a storm at the beginning of the year, the miraculous standby deck seems to have finally stepped down. The newest iteration of Love Live! joins the game with Love Live! Hasunosora School Idol Club feat. Link! Like! Love Live! And yes, that is the literal official name of this series. From memory, there was severe hot debate about one of the decks for the series with the standby pile being far too efficient and powerful, but a banlist during the year ended that. You never know with Bushiroad. There’s a chance they’ll spring up again soon.

It’s been almost a hundred years since I last saw Fairy Tail (joking). I’ll be blunt, I’ve got no idea what’s going on with the hundred year quest. Personally, I stopped reading long ago way before the series ended in the manga itself. I’ll be honest; this is essentially a soft reboot of the entire series for the card game. You don’t require any of the old cards to make the modern version of Fairy Tail function. It is a good strong independent product, but you can always dust out those decade old singles and try to play with some older synergies.

I was always confused why the set code ID for Oshi no Ko was “OSK”. I always thought it would be ONK (Oshi No Ko), but my current headcanon is that it must be something along the lines of OShi no Ko. Oshi no Ko brought along its new support with some nice additions that could be used alone or with old cards in mind. I still standby the fact that I support the younger sister, Ruby, in the conquest of her big brother, Aqua.

I don’t even know what Bang Dream set this is at this point. I think Bang Dream is coming close or has already exceeded the amount of support that Da Capo previously held. What doesn’t help is the fact that the naming of new support sets is just as confusing with words like Vol. 2. in the title despite the series having another volume of cards released as a booster for either the anime or the phone game. There was a slight nerf this year to this set’s release as Sakiko here was too powerful in conjunction with tools like stock swap.

The trial deck for Girls Band Cry came out this year as an addendum to the previously released booster. This was an odd choice in terms of release schedule.

Returning after years of absence, GGO rushes straight to the stage once more with an extra booster, something equally as rare. Within the released set were new archetype cards but also a lot of callbacks to the original series. Tomfoolery regarding checking for cards that are level two or higher have remained, a fresh reminder of the old times.

Sneaker Bunko released, granting some more support to the preexisting sets. Most infamously, Alya and her friends entered the game. Among the many series represented, I myself was able to get some more cards for my existing Mikuru (Haruhi) deck, Aqua (Konosuba) deck, and my eventual max rarity Noucome deck (one day: three more Chocolas left and four more Furanos).

Look out! The snazziest high school crew has arrived in tow. Whether it be chasing after Okarun’s golden balls or battle aliens from outer space, the crew always has a mess up their sleeves to deal with. Dandadan was quite a cool set with a bunch of pretty fun designs. There was switcheroo attacker Okarun as a modular finisher that also reflected the changing and evolving nature of the characters of the show.

The loveable shrine maiden trio makes their debut this year. While having generally distinct decks, the trio manages to unite together under the shades of the same 1/1 event. If you want to learn more about the mechanic of the overall set, do feel free to check out this post.

Bow-wow! The Gakuen Puppies have arrived! Arguably, potentially even nominated as the most powerful set of the year, the Hatsuboshi Gakuen girls have joined the game to compete. The trio shown above, Re;Iris, has made definite headlines with their memory package and shenanigans being a large talking point in the Japanese metagame.

Overlord received two boosters of support this year. The first is based on the movie release for Overlord and moves the focus slightly away to some new characters with Neia and her group. Compared to the previous Overlord release, it feels a lot less powerful. Players seemed to be looking for replacements for the old 1/1 Ainz backrow and full combo, but I don’t think this set provides the same experience. Still, there are undoubtedly some treasures to build with inside this set.

I don’t really know anything about Aogiri myself. Supposedly, they’re a group of Virtual Youtubers that are even older than Hololive. Anyways, only time will tell if they’re able to rival Covercorp’s infamous virtual war criminals. There was an interesting deck surfing around at one point focused on messing around with traits.

As a 20th anniversary gift for fans of the series, Nanoha makes a surprising release. From my memory, the series remained more or less the same with memory elements still bouncing around in play. Hope you still have your old dusty cards in the closet because they’re getting new life with these additions. Don’t sweat, Vivid Strike! players, Bushiroad has you covered as you also get a single card of support (maybe a new set next year).

Makeine is well-known for being one of the sets I made the most translation errors on a rare set to feature a rule warping design. With Anna, you had a finisher that could allow you to survive until level five if you were able to meet her rather rigid requirements. Each of the three starter Pokémon main female leads had a colour mix built for them with yellow being its own unique thing featuring the male lead.

To be honest, I know very little about Summer Pockets. Some locals keep telling me that all I need to know is Shiroha is the cutest. There’s also some debate about Ai being best girl. I don’t know what that means. All I know is that, supposedly, you get challenged to ping pong as one of the early game boss levels, and that a young child wakes you up and cooks you breakfast since you are apparently a slob. Anyways, there’s a Re:Edit booster that released this year containing tons of reprints. There will be an anime set coming later in the future though, so keep an eye out for that.

The promised support for the original Idolm@ster series came out this year. As a side note, if you are a fan of Million Live, you can actually use most of the cards released in this set in your older decks. I myself was more than happy to update my own Flower Stand deck. Million Live will receive its own support later next year. The icing on top of the cake here was that this set also reprinted a bunch of old cards and provided support for older Idolm@ster product. You can read more of my personal review of the set here.

Despite growing up watching Disney, I know very little regarding any of the Disney or Disney-adjacent properties like PIXAR or Marvel. I did watch the entire trilogy of Toy Story (I say trilogy since I haven’t watched the fourth movie). I have been warned by folks that the story is good to end just there as is. Maybe in the future, I’ll take a look at the fourth movie. However, I do really think that the third movie ended the series fairly well. So yeah, this is a whole set dedicated to Toy Story with scenes from all four movies. If you’re a fan, check it out.

Kaiju No. 8. arrived with a bang. Quickly identified by players, the Mina deck became something of a prominent menace, threatening and destroying boards. In addition, although less popular, Kikoru had her own unique deck that took advantage of checking soul icons, allowing her to “combo” with vanilla two soul climaxes.

Thank the heavens I’m not a BanG Dream! fan. I only own a deck for every series in Idolm@ster except for the original. Please stop printing product. I’m poor. So, this is BanG Dream’s uhh… I can’t keep track since this series gets so much product every single year in so many forms. Anyways, every band received even more support, but this was also the unofficial debut of the Yumegendai Myu Type group that’s set to come out later in 2026.

Hmm… I don’t really know what to think of MARVEL most of the time. It seems, just like the recent movies, the identity of the series as a whole is all over the place. I do like the comic call-outs, but then there are the real life shots of real actors. As a result, the cohesiveness of the art design is rather muddled. Once again, we have a plethora of new and returning MARVEL characters, likely fan favourites and characters from recently released movies/TV series.

I’ve heard folks calling this set a washout compared to that of Next Twinkle! I’ll be honest, I think this set is very well done in terms of designs and mechanics. Furthermore, this is one of the rare reappearances of trait lock in several years and makes callbacks to original mechanics of each individual band. I think people were disappointed that the set didn’t “change” the meta like Next Twinkle! did. The selective competitive crowd were more interested to see if we could get an adjacent to the Fuyuko/Meguru pile that was running rampant the previous year. I’m still mad at Bushiroad for limiting my Mano and Meguru from being together (it’s the same archetype). Anyways, I wrote a more comprehensive review here if you are interested in learning more about the Shiny Colours booster.

It’s been a bit of a while since we’ve last seen Date A Live receive any official support. We had some indirect support come in from the Fujimi booster the previous year I guess. Anyways, Date A Live Vol. 3 continues from where Vol. 2 ended. Featuring newer girls that Shido entranced including the fluffy cloud Mukuro and the ever-bright ero-novelist Nia, the series looks to catch-up to the recently released last season. I also wrote a review for Date A Live, so feel free to read up on it here.

Adding onto the previous Blue Archive booster, we have a new set released for the overall series but focused upon the anime this time. As such, all the cards featured belong in either one of the three featured groups from the anime: Foreclosure Task Force, Prefect Team, or Problem Solver 68 with the exception of Hifumi (honorary Task Force member for bank robberies). This set also returned with specified trait lock for some of its cards, causing a stir in some of the competitive communities. I see it as a return to form though. Either way, the set is clearly designed in a way to encourage one to build according to any of the three featured groups with some support from the original anime set.

Someone remind me to update the old Sumi deck! I had a rough time picking on which girl to buy when the set was released. Part of the problem was due to the recently released Date A Live and Shiny Colours sets that I had already bought. I was still in recovery. I had a bit of money left over, but, given that Sumi was cheaper, I decided to go with that route. Maybe one day I’ll finish up with Chizuru. Anyways, the day came for Rental Girlfriend’s release, and on that note, I was interested in whether my prediction from before may bear some kind of fruit or result. Seems like nothing of note has taken off. The arts are cute as always, and nothing has changed much. Each girl has a new deck to play with the option to use old supports. We also see the introduction of Mini.

Key 25th’s anniversary has come along. For myself, I was interested to see if I could get an update to my Komari deck. Well, my wish came true, but I don’t have the funds for it signed. We’ll see next year when I can hopefully snag a new job. Lots of series were covered here. Summer Pockets also received some more stuff here, and this isn’t even counting their upcoming anime set.

Reaching the end of our list this year, we have Kiniro Mosaic as a surprise new series. I watched this show growing up, and it was a delight to see the familiar faces of Alice, Shinobu, and their friends appearing in card form. The series seems to split the girls up into specialized pairings based on their friendships.

This has be among the most, if not already, the prettiest set of the year. Compared to your typical game assets or low quality screenshots (shoutouts to Ishtar from Fate/Grand Order by the way for still claiming a top spot on that list), this set is littered with gorgeous light novel artworks. I’m sorry, but the extra booster that was just released this year can’t even come close to the visual quality expressed here.

And now we’ve reached the end with Project Sekai. The long anticipated Vol 3. is out and about featuring more cards for each of the pre-existing units. Interestingly enough, it seems LINK is making a mechanical return on some of the climaxes for Leo/need. We’ll have to see how players will handle and build their decks. Will we see something new or are we awaiting the return of Touya once again?

That’s all for 2025. Personally, I feel this year has released tons of sequel sets rather than debuting new series as a whole. What do you think? Anyways, I’m signing off now. Going to sleep and see you all in the new year!