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

Enter the Ninja

Thursday, June 21, 2018

As I write this, I'm deeply wrapped up in design and development on the next major version of the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game—the new PACG Core Set and the Curse of the Crimson Throne Adventure Path. And while I'll be talking a lot about those in the weeks to come, this seemed like an appropriate time to look at the Ultimate decks, since in some ways they're both the oldest and the youngest PACG expansion material.

Once upon a time, we were putting together the very first Adventure Path. Then, as now, we were deep in development and testing, and it became clear to us that if you all liked the game, we'd be making more someday: more Adventure Paths, more characters, more everything. During a conversation about possible next steps, I pitched to Paizo's Publisher Erik Mona the idea of PACG products built around the expansions to the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Core Rulebook—specifically, Ultimate Combat, Ultimate Magic, and Ultimate Equipment; the Advanced Player's Guide; and the Bestiaries. It seemed like a natural fit. We bandied about some ideas, and then got back to work on Rise of the Runelords, then Skull & Shackles, Class Decks, and so on.

Fast forward a few years, a few Adventure Paths, and a few (okay, 27) Class Decks. We were already looking ahead to a potential revision of the game—not a new game, but a chance to clean, clarify, and streamline various bumps and corners. This was to be a big project, and in the meantime, there were issues that we wanted to address. Iconics both old and new had yet to officially appear in PACG, and several seasons of organized play had turned some seams and imperfections in the existing class decks into cracks. (To be clear, I intend no disrespect to the class decks! As a developer, there are always "seams and imperfections", and the earliest class decks were built as well as we knew how, but with very little real data to go on.) So it was that, looking at new-ish concerns and expecting potentially large new changes on the horizon, we turned to the old idea of decks based on Pathfinder RPG expansion material, and added a new twist: these decks could also be added to existing class decks. This set would also give us a chance to try out some ideas we had for the upcoming Core Set. As it had when talking to Erik and Vic way back when, it seemed like a natural fit.

Anyone familiar with the Ultimate books knows that they're not all created equal. Each focuses on a different area, with plenty of room for overlap. In this month's Ultimate Equipment Add-On Deck, we wanted very broad coverage—a deck that could be useful and interesting when combined with a very wide range of characters—ideally, for anyone who cares about having just the right tool for the job, regardless of the job. To that end, the cards in Ultimate Equipment focus not on the how or the why, but the what. In other words, it's all about the stuff.

For your blog-viewing and card-playing pleasure, we have…

...stuff for breaking things and/or beings:

These are delightful all day long.

...stuff to help you find more stuff:

Oh, so very stylish!.

...even stuff to help you with your other stuff!

Who needs a utility belt when you have spells, friends, or divine intervention?

Of course, in PACG, stuff mostly means items, and Ultimate Equipment has scads of 'em. As our general "utility, miscellaneous, other" category, items include a grand number of juicy, desirable cards (something that people are very fond of pointing out to me whenever I bring up the awesomeness that is Seelah). There are items aplenty no matter what character you're playing, including new items at every adventure number. Here's a peek at new Alchemy, Clothing, and Accessory items!

As Scoutmaster Scar might say: Be Prepared!

Finally (both at the end of the post and after many years of waiting), we get to bring you Reiko, the iconic Ninja.

Sadly, I was thwarted in my efforts to introduce this character in Skull & Shackles.

You might recognize her as an alternate take on the rogue class, or you might just see a deadly shadow, but either way she should be a fun new option for sneaking, stabbing, and solo-guarding whatever nasty locations show up in your next PACG session.

If a ninja vanishes in a combat, is someone already dead?

That does it for our peek into Ultimate Equipment. Next month, we'll take the clichéd "walk on the wild side" with Ultimate Wilderness. Until Then!

Chad Brown
Adventure Card Game Lead Developer

Ultimate Intrigue Deck Preview

Thursday, May 10, 2018

I was up to my eyeballs working on the Adventure Card Guild offerings for PaizoCon when Tyler volunteered to help with the Ultimate Intrigue blog, so I happily took him up on the offer. I am terribly amused that he's switched his favorite character yet again... and this time he technically picked two characters! —Keith Richmond

Hello again, everyone! Now, I know what you're thinking: "Tyler already told us who his favorite character was! Then he told us he lied, and really had a different favorite character!" Well, that's all true... but we can move past all that now, can't we? Today I'm here to talk to you about my new favorite character, Aric. Or as he's known to members of the seedy underbelly of the cities of Galt, the Red Raven.

Aric's constant smile and The Red Raven's constant frown are all you need to see they're VERY different people. (Who needs glasses, right, Clark?)

While the other Ultimate Decks each feature one new character, the Ultimate Intrigue Add-On Deck features two! They're most assuredly distinct characters—in the RPG, they even have different alignments!—but they are inexorably linked, as you can see from the first power on each of their respective character cards.

Aric is real good at chatting people up, making friends, and getting those friends to do favors for him. He's charismatic, charming, and likable. The Red Raven, on the other hand, is a creature of the shadows, striking quickly and decisively and without mercy. Aric and the Red Raven share a single role card that you flip when you switch between their two character cards. It's not hard to figure out the basic strategy to deal with different situations: Aric prefers finding and acquiring boons and likes to evade encounters with monsters, while the Red Raven is all about taking out those monsters, leaving their gear for Aric to clean up.

As you can see, Aric can easily avoid monsters, leaving them for his masked alter-ego to dispatch.

Now, I'm not going to say that I love complex ACG characters, but... well, no, I do. I love complex ACG characters, and the complexity of the interactions that these characters have with boons and banes as you're playing the game is just fantastic. There's no better feeling for me than examining the villain as Aric, switching to the Red Raven, grabbing a powerful weapon from my kit, then exploring and utterly destroying that villain.

If you run into a monster as Aric, it's really your own fault, but even then you can use your Mancatcher to hold him off while you go put on your mask. (Don't ask about the "real world" logistics of that, please...)

Oh, that's right: we haven't discussed the kit yet! Did you notice that Aric's deck starts with 18 cards instead of the normal 15? This is because Aric and the Red Raven have the unique ability to set aside a few extra cards when they draw their starting hand to create the kit, and when you switch between the characters, you get to trade a card in your hand for a card in your kit! It's a fantastic way to allow two disparate characters to work well with the same deck, and it's just one more reason that Aric and The Red Raven are my favorite character(s) ever! (And this is definitive—I mean, there's no chance that a character in some future release could take that place in my heart, right?)

If you didn't expect to see masks in the deck that introduces the iconic vigilante, then I don't know what you did expect...

But oh, we're not done yet! Apart from the amazing new characters, there are tons of exciting new boons in Ultimate Intrigue. From swords that you can use to acquire allies in addition to fighting enemies, to spells that automatically defeat monsters and make them your friends, to armors that keep you from being randomly selected by banes, there really is equipment for every character somewhere in this deck.

FYI, if you are using the Ultimate Intrigue deck, you have no excuse for failing a Diplomacy check. Like, ever.

Ultimate Intrigue also holds a plethora of amazing allies. You thought the allies in the Pathfinder Tales Character Deck were cool —and trust me, they were—but wait until you see the ones in this deck!

With friends like these, who needs... anyone else?

I hope I've made you as excited for the Ultimate Intrigue Add-On Deck as I have been since playtesting it. This deck can bring new life to so many of the older class deck characters, it's making my head spin. (Siwar, I'm looking at you, gorgeous!)

That's it for this edition of "Tyler lies to you but at least shows you some really cool stuff." Tune in for the inevitable next time!

Tyler "Cartmanbeck" Beck
Venture-Captain, Pathfinder Adventure Card Guild Online Play

Ultimate Magic Deck Preview

Thursday, April 19, 2018

Ultimate Magic is another solid example of our highly complex process to stuff every super-awesome thing we could think of into the Ultimate Add-On Deck series.

Good luck prying the spellbook out of her hands.

I've previously mentioned that Enora is one of my favorite characters, though I'll admit that I like all kinds of characters with lots of card variance, deck cycling, and a versatile toolkit. Ultimate Enora hits a lot of great notes, just like Wrath Enora, and she's even got an impressive array of awesome books to accompany her.

Whichever role you pick, you're still awesome.

I once described Enora as supercalifragilistic-Librariana-docious, and I'm pretty sure any version of Enora I make is going to get some kind of book-related role. This Enora also explores her worship of Nethys and turns into a fairly excellent healer with her White Mage role.

Got a problem? Ice and Fire will solve it.

Ultimate Magic is filled to the brim with spells. There are a ton of spells of all kinds to spice up any cleric or wizard's deck. This is especially true for Attack spells, which are represented in every single adventure deck number. There's also a new cycle of spells that includes Icicle Swarm, which caters well to casters who might need to defeat a multi-check villain, and also to sometime-casters like the Magus or Bloodrager who might see benefit from a solid replacement dice expression.

Not every problem is solvable with destruction, but every problem has its spell.

Of course, many of the spells are useful outside of combat as well. Fly is a fantastic way to do a little bit of scouting from above, then go to the best location. Rejuvenation is the most powerful solution in the game for all that ails you.

Sometimes you need an outfit with a bit of flair.

While spells are a huge chunk of this deck, we couldn't possibly stop there. We have an assortment of caster-appropriate armors and items. What bard wouldn't like to wander into a tavern with a gorgeous hat and an incredibly useful instrument?

The right magical tool for the right magical job.

Ultimate Magic also has a ton of useful items, including more awesome staves and wands than you can shake a magical stick at. There's also a hefty cycle of powerful books for knowledgeable casters like Enora and the Pathfinder Tales Character Deck's Varian.

You can almost see the journey from child to adult here.

As for allies, Magical Child is a highly useful and adorable card for anyone. You might be a little confused by that "Vigilante" tag but, with the help of her magic costume, powers, and pet friend, she is totally fighting crime and making the world a better place! On the other end of the spectrum, Autumn Witch is ready to offer fabulous power to any caster who might need her assistance.

The gods of magic have got your back. Or at least your existential ability to alter reality.

Assuming you like to reliably recharge your blessings, you'll find Blessing of the Spellbound fantastic for all of your Arcane and Divine needs. Qi Zhong is the Tian Xia deity of magic and healing, and he's going to be very helpful for all your exploration needs. You'll also find upgraded blessings of the Master of Masters, the Seventh Veil, and the All-Seeing Eye.

I hope you'll find this deck truly magical! Next month we're going to show off one of the craziest characters we've ever made, along with an impressive array of boons, in Ultimate Intrigue.

Keith Richmond
Adventure Card Game Designer

Adventure Card Game Combat Goes to 11!

Thursday, March 22, 2018

Ultimate Combat, the first of the Ultimate Add-On Decks, is making its way into the hands of subscribers and favorite local game stores everywhere, so it's finally time to spill the beans on our design process for the Ultimate decks:

1. Phase 1: Include every super-awesome thing we can think of
2. Phase 2: ?
3. Phase 3: Profit

Okay, wait, it was slightly more complicated than that.

Hayato should spend some time with Jinfu's stylist.

First, we identified a single character to include in each deck, preferably ones we'd had trouble sneaking into a class deck otherwise. Hayato was the obvious pick for Ulitmate Combat. He is a master of Iaijutsu and mounted combat, fighting under a banner that bolsters his comrades and strikes fear into his enemies. His bonded mount Jinfu is a versatile warhorse that never lets him down.

"Yojimbo" does sound way cooler than "bodyguard."

Hayato's roles are designed primarily around your fighting style in your party. Ronin is best for when Hayato who walks his own path, with a great deal of healing and bonuses to checks while alone. Yojimbo is better for when Hayato wants to protect others and make the best use of Jinfu in a group.

I'd recommend a Wakizashi to pair with the Katana, and a Do-Maru for that fine helmet.

Because Hayato is a Tian character, this was a perfect opportunity to include some appropriately themed cards. That includes the Katana, a more elegant Bastard Sword for a more civilized samurai, and the Kabuto Helmet, highly protective and good for impressing those you come across.

Dwarven innovation to break down a wall, elven innovation to shoot the army on the other side.

The deck is not limited to just that theme, however. It features a startling array of weapons, with some of the best one-handed and two-handed melee and ranged options in the game at every adventure deck number.

Bringing armor back, baby!

We've been experimenting with the design space for armor for quite some time. Our design goal (going forward, but specifically for Ultimate Combat) is that armor should be good enough that players are always tempted to spend a card feat on armor and a power feat on armor proficiency. Armor is designed to save you from emergencies, but in doing so it cannot increase your chance of failure to keep it around.

The new armors in Ultimate Combat tend to have great bonuses to make them worth keeping in your hand or displaying. Kikko Armor displays, allowing you to use it when needed with no downside. Choosing to use a one-handed weapon over a two-handed weapon allows you to use a shield, but generally reduces your Combat check. That's not an ideal formula for success, so the new shields like the Dwarven War Shield help melee combatants make up that gap.

I'm extremely interested in hearing what folks think of the new armor. I'm probably not supposed to say that you're playtesting ideas for the next base set [You are most assuredly not.—Mike] but you totally are.

We play both Ranged and Melee at this fine establishment.

While armor and weapons are the slim majority of the deck, we did not remotely skimp on other cards. Any character who really cares about combat, especially of the Melee and Ranged varieties, will other cards to keep them occupied. That includes an entire cycle of Bow Ammunition (similar to the bullets in Gunslinger), cards like the Grappler's Mask to help combat-focused characters occasionally get past those pesky non-combat challenges, and a small array of spells for Arcane and Divine mixed martial artists.

There are indeed vikings in Golarion.

There's also a solid selection of great allies. Most trend towards assisting in combat, moving to combat, and post-combat healing, but there should be something here for everyone. I'd certainly consider taking a Swiftshooter on a non-Ranged character just for the draw before I explore.

You'll count your blessings that you've got these blessings.

One of the earliest design decisions for the Ultimate decks was how much each deck should support the included characters. There may well be a parallel universe in which Ultimate Combat contains only armor and weapons, where to remotely play Hayato you need to supply other cards. That universe isn't this one, so we needed a bunch of blessings for every Ultimates deck. Mike meticulously analyzed every single blessing we've made and every deity who could still use one to make sure we solved this problem right.

Each Ultimates deck contains a new basic blessing, like Blessing of the Samurai above, that should be well-suited and even exciting for its intended audience. Each also contains a number of new deities, including deities from Tian and nonhuman races when appropriate. Finally, spread over the Ultimate decks are normal and upgraded blessings for every single one of Golarion's core deities.

Those of you playing in the Adventure Card Guild may wonder how Ultimates work for you. If you're playing a character from a non-Ultimate Deck, you can add the cards from any 1 Ultimate Deck to your deck; if you're playing a character from an Ultimate Deck, you can add the cards from any 1 Class Deck. This means that Hayato can use cards from, say, the Paladin Class Deck if he wants. It also means that you can start taking Ultimate Combat boons with any of your Organized Play characters like Crowe, Oloch, and Reta. If you've ever regretted not having an upgrade choice for a boon type, fret no more—we've got you covered. If you're prone to analysis paralysis and aren't sure what boon to take... expect to spend a lot more time paralyzed with indecision!

See you next month to talk about the dozens of spells and other magic doodads in Ultimate Magic!

Keith Richmond
Adventure Card Game Designer

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

Designing the Ultimate Decks

Thursday, October 26, 2017

We're deep in design on the Ultimate add-on series of character decks for the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game—Ultimate Combat, Ultimate Magic, Ultimate Intrigue, and Ultimate Equipment. (We broke the news on this series in an earlier blog.)

So far from final art, it's not even in the same dictionary as "final" and "art."

The idea is to supplement all the character decks we've made so far with decks of new cards. If you're playing a home game, you can just add Ultimate decks into any Adventure Path box. If you're playing in organized play, you'll be able to use a character deck—say, the Wizard Class Deck—and one Ultimate deck. If you'd like to play the character that's in the Ultimate deck, you can supplement that character with the cards from one other character deck. (There will likely be some limitations on which decks you can use with each of the characters from the Ultimate decks, but we haven't settled this yet.)

So as we're making these decks—moving cards in and out, designing cycles, even rethinking their reasonings for existence—we keep hitting three questions. If you'd like to participate in helping us think these things out, leave your suggestions in the comments.

Question 1: What utility cards must be in the decks?

We need to give all of the existing characters the cards they need to be more awesome. For some of those characters, they need cards they don't have access to, such as Potion of Healing. A melee character who can't get a Greatsword at any tier is going to be sad about it. And even if your character deck has a Cure in it, you're unlikely to be upset about having access to a second Cure. So we're tracking all the cards we just can't get along without.

Sometimes "boring" is another word for "gimme that."

And sometimes we need to help characters play in sets they weren't designed for. All those Curses in Mummy's Mask are pretty nasty, so you might want Remove Curse. A lot.

Where in the Ultimate series such a card goes is also relevant. Ultimate Intrigue doesn't need a Greatsword. Ultimate Combat does.

Just as significantly, we're looking at cards we don't need to put anywhere. We don't need to put any Blessings of the Gods in the Ultimate decks, because the other character decks have as many as they need. Low-powered cards like Dart and Leather Armor seem unlikely to make an appearance in a deck with the word Ultimate in the title.

Question 2: What cards are our favorites?

We want to see reappearances of many of the cool things we've created over the years, especially since Skull & Shackles. (That's the set that was mostly done when we made the first seven class decks.) Every designer on this team has a different set of these, but there are some we're quickly reaching consensus on.

One of these is particularly fun at parties.

For example, Mummy's Mask was the set where we made some bizarre armors. Even people who ragged on armor on a daily basis were stopped cold by a card like Falcon Crown from Secret of the Sphinx.

We also love cards that let someone be something their deck wouldn't otherwise allow them to be. Riffle Scrolls, from the Pathfinder Tales Character Deck, lets a player with the Fighter Class Deck hold on to spells he might play, even if that opportunity is rarer than it is for, say, Ezren.

And of course, it's often just about what makes a certain designer smile. For example, I find the Baby Triceratops adorable. Hey there! Who's a good little trikey-wikey? You are. YES, YOU ARE. So yeah, there's probably going to be a Baby Triceratops in one of these decks. You might want to prepare to bury a lot of cards.

Question 3: What cards are missing?

This is where we're spending a lot of our time. Usually when we make a set or a character deck, we're trying to model something specific. Write a Demon-fighting set, make a lot of things to fight Demons.

But left unchained, what are we going to do? Well, a lot of things. Create more stained-glass blessings for our favorite gods, for example. Japanese weapons for Hayato. New books for Enora. Maybe some new poisons in Ultimate Intrigue. And some just weird things like—hey, did you know there's a luchador mask in the Ultimate Equipment book? We did.

Por el bando rudo.

Chad noted the other day that we had exactly one pair of non-promo shoes in the entire game, the Boots of Teleportation. (I suggested the Reed Moccasin, but he wasn't buying it.) Now, why do we need more shoes? Beats me. But now that he's said it, somebody on the team is likely to demand more shoes.

There are all sorts of things we'd like to do with these decks. But what do you want to see? Leave comments below about what cards you'd like us to include and where. Thanks!

Mike Selinker
Adventure Card Game Lead Designer