With the Ultimate Wilderness Deck, Your Power Will Be Mushrooming

Thursday, August 9, 2018

Hello! We just came back from a highly successful Gen Con, where we showed off the newest stuff for the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, including the debut of the Ultimate Wilderness Add-On Deck. It falls to me to guide you through the wonders therein, and I'm thrilled to do so, because it allows me to talk about mushrooms.

Yes, mushrooms! The fleshiest, most spore-bearing fruiting body of a fungus you'll find in the moistest, least welcoming shadows of the forest. I get to tell you all about them, because I'm a fun guy. (See, if anyone else on my team had volunteered to do this blog, they could have stopped me from making that joke.) [Vic: So very, very tempted to delete that, but Erik Mona says not to stand between a man and his puns... much.]

The reason the subject of mushrooms is so fond to me is that there is an epochal divide on the PACG design team. There is one group (headed by me, Liz, and Paul) that believes mushrooms are the best! And there is another (headed by Chad, Gaby, and Tanis) that believes mushrooms are the actual devil. (Keith pretends to split the difference, but we all know he's just placating us mushroom enthusiasts.) So those of us who love mushrooms relish any opportunity to wax poetical about squishy, fleshy mushrooms in front of the others.

So I shall! The Ultimate Wilderness Deck is filled with them. Here are three.

The delight of mycophagists everywhere.

Let's address the elephant ear mushroom in the room first: The trait PLANT is not quite accurate, since everyone knows mushrooms aren't plants. But we needed things that worked on Plants to affect these cards, so we ignored the biological distinction. I figure everyone in Golarion thinks mushrooms are plants, even the ones that shriek all the time.

Once you get past that, you'll love that the deck is filled with tons of Plants, all of which have that great kicker on the bottom of the card. Basically, these plants don't count as in your hand when you set your hand size. So you can have a whole lot of them. They grow, you see.

There are also some Plant allies as well.

Feed me, Seymour!

Of course, we also loaded the deck up with Animal allies and things that affect them.

You are not going to argue with a person who befriends Vampire Squids.

As well as all sorts of other cards that affect Animals.

There are blessings for Halflings and Gnomes too.

And if you like having animals around, why not turn into them? We have nine new spells of the aspect type we introduced in the Hunter Class Deck. The aspects are the first spells to have the Animal trait. They're kinda creepy looking, but in a good way.

Mostly in a good way.

You know who likes all this stuff? Zova, the iconic shifter. The shifter is straight out of Pathfinder RPG Ultimate Wilderness, and Zova has been a favorite of ours since the R&D team started cooking her up. We started designing this deck before the RPG rules were finished, then reconciled things as the shifter... well, took shape, as it were.

Nice claws.

I'd like to call your attention to Zova's hand size. It's the first hand size line with text in it, because Zova has the spell Shapechange hardwired into her character. Every turn, you can pick your hand size from three (or even five!) options. No more dying because you drew too many cards, maybe ever.

Then when you get good at playing with a variable hand size, you can either blow everything up with Fire and Acid, or just be a lycanthrope.

That flavor text for Elemental Shifter is how we talk about the weather in Seattle.

The Ultimate Wilderness Add-On Deck is the shiftiest deck we've ever made, and we're thrilled to end the Ultimate series with it. Now we're taking a break from class decks to focus everything on the new Core Set and Curse of the Crimson Throne. Thanks for letting us put out 27 decks in the Class Deck and Add-On lines. We hope to make more someday! For now, enjoy Ultimate Wilderness!

Mike Selinker
Lead Designer, Adventure Card Game