How About One More Ultimate Deck?

Monday, November 6, 2017

In last week's blog on designing the Ultimate Add-On Decks for the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, we purposely failed to mention one big thing: We're not doing just four of them. June's Ultimate Equipment will be followed in July with the fifth Ultimate deck: Ultimate Wilderness.

Why'd we keep that a secret? Well, we needed a little more time after the first announcement to make sure we wanted to do this deck. After all, when we made the decision to do those decks, the Ultimate Wilderness for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game was still being written. We didn't know what the book would contain, what would be illustrated in it, or even who the iconic character would be. But then this happened:

The Ultimate series—it ain't over till it's Zova.

Hi, Zova! As you saw last week, Zova is the iconic shifter from Ultimate Wilderness. Note the claws. She's got the ability to alter various parts of her body to animal forms. That's a cool idea, but one which we didn't really have a mechanic for. That is, until we designed the Hunter Class Deck.

For the Hunter, we sprinkled the deck with a new cycle of spells called "aspects." We designed this cycle for characters who want to take on aspects of certain animals, characters like the Feral Hunter and Shifter. Take a look at Aspect of the Stag, a spell that has the Animal trait.

Just one aspect of the aspects.

In Ultimate Wilderness, we're not exactly going to sprinkle the deck with aspects. The appropriate verb might be "inundate," really. Because requesting the art for the dinosaur and monkey aspects just made us smile.

There are also so many cool non-humanoids in Pathfinder RPG Ultimate Wilderness. We're gonna have trouble choosing between these.

A koala, an archaeopteryx, and a snapping flytrap walk into a bar...

We're also doing some fun new things with blessings in these decks. In each of the five Ulitmate decks, we'll introduce a brand-new Basic blessing. If you're playing a home game, we encourage you to mix and match these with the blessings of the Gods, the Ancients, the Elements, Ascension, the Archdevils, and even the Gobs. Because Basic doesn't mean boring.

So... Ultimate Combat, Ultimate Magic, Ultimate Intrigue, Ultimate Equipment, and now Ultimate Wilderness. That sounds like a great quintet. Bring on the Ultimates.

Mike Selinker
Adventure Card Game Lead Designer