Class Decks by the Score

Tuesday, April 19, 2016

Yesterday, we sent our printer Cartamundi four more Pathfinder Adventure Card Game Class Decks, bringing our total of class decks to 20. With such an auspicious number in the books, I thought it'd be nice to look back on our designs—even though you've only seen 13 of them to date. So this is both a review and a preview.

Oh, hey, the important thing: Ace designer Tanis O'Connor led the design of all of these. All of Lone Shark Games' designers helped, of course, but we've been very lucky to be working under Tanis's singular vision for the whole line. Yay, Tanis!

Okay, I mentioned in a recent blog that we design these in "waves." That certainly surprised a few people. I expect folks imagined that on the first of every month, we flip the page on our Dog Shaming Calendar, say "Oh, Bonzo, will you never learn?" and then design a class deck. That's not really how we work. Instead, we tackle a big project with lots of sub-projects all at once, so we can see the whole picture. And then we bang on it over several months until it's done. Then Vic says, "You have to turn it over to me now," and the wave gets edited, illustrated, proofed, printed, and sent to you. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Here's a wave-by-wave look at the decks.

Wave 1: The "Big Seven"

As we were wrapping up Skull & Shackles, we decided to get our feet wet with a set of seven initial decks. Wait, that's not true at all. We decided to do the eleven core iconics' decks all at once, but then our internal gaskets blew into pieces, and we scaled back. Seven was all our diminutive brains could handle in one wave.

Exactly which seven? Our choices mirrored the Rise of the Runelords Base Set's characters—Bard, Cleric, Fighter, Ranger, Rogue, Sorcerer, and Wizard—and established a principle that you could use the deck to grow your character over an entire Adventure Path. At this point, we only had the first two sets' cards to draw from, and we hadn't actually seen folks play with Skull & Shackles in the wild. We decided on a core ethic, though: These decks would be usable with any Adventure Path. So no cards that worked in only one set.

Our primary resource for ideas the Pathfinder RPG NPC Codex. That supplement expanded our minds as to what a character of a class could be. A key exemplar of this idea is Flenta, the fighter who wants everyone to believe she's a wizard. We could never make that our fighter archetype. But in the Fighter Class Deck, we could use the principles of fighterdom to make a new kind of hybrid character that showed off how robust our system was.

We also wove subthemes into the deck. For example, we gave rogues Meliski and Wu Shen some new Poison cards, and the ability to do some fancy trickery with them. We wove our first Gambling items throughout the set, a lucky Rabbit's Foot here and a set of Marked Cards there. We seeded things we hoped to do more ornately later, such as Darago's window on what would become Balazar.

If there was any legit critique of those first seven decks, it's that we were trying to do too much. So for example, the Cleric Class Deck found Tarlin and Zarlova fighting for space to get 2-Handed weapons and Arcane/Divine spells. That seemed untenable. Something had to give.

Wave 2: The Expanded (and Condensed) Roster

After taking some time to see the first wave in play, we made some changes. Wave 2 encompassed Paladin, Monk, and Druid, three of the four classes that originally appeared in the Rise of the Runelords Character Add-On Deck. The most obvious change was dropping from four characters to three, each of whom could now have a full complement of tools to exploit.

Plus we introduced some characters who would look really out of place in the Pathfinder RPG Beginner Box: Rooboo the tengu monk, Raz the dog-riding paladin, and Gronk the elf druid who spent most of his time as a tree. You wanted variety, we gave you variety.

In addition to introducing cards from Wrath of the Righteous, we started relying more heavily on "cycles," sets of cards that introduced variants on a central theme running through the deck. The Monk Class Deck, for example, got a whole bunch of new Asian-themed weapons, all of which work with the Acrobatics skill that Monks are known for.

The key element of this set: surprises. We wanted you to open up the deck and think, "Wow, I didn't see that coming."

Wave 3: Crazytimes Begin

OK, Amiri's waiting this whole time saying, "I was in Runelords too! What's a frost-giant-sword-slinging girl gotta do to get in a class deck?" Best for last, I say. Her time finally came, as wave 3 began with Barbarian, followed by Oracle and Alchemist.

Hoo boy, we jumped quite a ways out of the box here. The Barbarian Class Deck has two great cycles, the war paint cycle (in which you decide what color to paint your face and gain superpowers from it) and the improvised cycle (in which you decide what random thing to smash your foes with). Plus, we debuted the first character for the game based on a Paizo employee's home character: Erik Mona's Ostog the Unslain. (Try to keep him that way.)

In addition to a blind woman in a Rio Carnival outfit, the Oracle deck had a lizardfolk AND a pitborn. Grazzle and Ramexes divined things the fun way: using bones and entrails. This deck also gave the first previews of cards from our upcoming Mummy's Mask set, including some wild Egyptian blessings.

And where the Oracle Class Deck opened the door, the Alchemist Class Deck melted it off its hinges. The deck featured bombs, elementals, and the weirdest armor you've ever seen from us. (Spoiler: The Mummy's Mask team likes weird armor.) But most interesting of all was a cycle of "allies" you probably didn't imagine we'd make: oozes, slimes, and jellies. If these are Mother Myrtle's friends, I don't want to see her enemies.

Wave 4: New Old Tricks

By wave 4, we wanted to use some of the cool tricks we designed for Skull & Shackles and Wrath of the Righteous. This wave—Inquisitor, Witch, and Gunslinger—use rules we'd restricted ourselves from using in previous sets.

For example, check out this card from the Inquisitor Class Deck, Detect Thoughts.

See that little "if you have a role card" dodge in there? That's a spell that grows with you. You might hold on to that Adventure Deck 2 spell well through Adventure Deck 4 if you know it's gonna pick up allies after you get that role card. Thanks, Wrath of the Righteous mythic path cards, for teaching us that little trick.

The Witch Class Deck makes particularly great use of Wrath's cohort rules, maybe the cleverest stuff we've done with that card type. And the Gunslinger Class Deck (created in Wave 4, but due to be released after the next two decks I'm gonna talk about) takes some guns from Skull & Shackles and adds card after card of brand-new explosiveness.

Wave 5: Goblins in the Machinery

By now you know that we're breaking from our traditional class-driven format to roll out some goblin buffoonery. Goblins Fight! and Goblins Burn! are straight-up ridiculous, but as with all the other decks, they're fully playable in the Pathfinder Adventure Card Guild. These decks are... not kind to the goblins in question. You will see lots of goblins blown up, impaled, and/or turned into ooze. But y'know, in a good way. The crude little buggers really wanted to invade Gen Con, so they muscled their way in front of the Gunslinger Class Deck from the previous wave to make that happen.

Wave 5 also includes two of our most intricate decks, Warpriest, and (hey, I'm announcing this right now) Summoner. If you've played Oloch or Balazar, you know that you have to read those characters closely before diving in—there's a lot of "there" in there. And if you like that, you'll like these. The allies in these sets are some of the most interesting ones we've made.

As for the Summoner Class Deck in particular, I have never seen us stress so much over the complex interaction of a character and corresponding Owner card before. Probably took us thirty tries to get it right. But that's a story for another day.

So that's the score on the score of class decks we've sent to the printer to date. By the time the Summoner Class Deck comes out, Class Decks will have added more than 130 different character/role combos to PACG play.

One more thing...

When we were designing the goblin decks, we kept thinking about some of the goblin-themed promo cards we created for previous Adventure Paths, and how they'd go really nicely with these two decks. So Paizo dug into their warehouse and emerged with enough copies of these promos to cover Class Deck subscribers. For the first time, Class Deck subscribers are going to get some of that sweet, sweet promo card love. Subscription copies of Goblins Fight! will ship with the item Goblin Lockpick and a Blessing of Zogmugot (both Skull & Shackles promos), and Goblins Burn! will ship with the spell Fire Sneeze (a Rise of the Runelords promo) and another Blessing of Zogmugot. These are not reprints—these are the very same printings as the copies that have sometimes sold on eBay for more than the price of the decks we'll be shipping them with (so the cut and color of Fire Sneeze in particular is slightly different from the cards we print today).

If you haven't already signed up for a Class Deck Subscription, there has never been a better time. And if you already have a subscription, thank you for that... and get ready for a whole lot of strangeness!

Mike Selinker
Adventure Card Game Lead Designer