Pathfinder Adventure Card Game Strategy #3—Knowing Your Cards

Tuesday, November 15, 2016

This is the third installment of our strategy blog written by game historian Shannon Appelcline. You can read the first installment here.

The cards in your character deck require a variety of different actions to play them. To optimize the flow of your cards, you should take advantage of these different actions to make sure you have just the right cards in your deck.

Reveal: The Worst of the Best

Cards that you reveal to play seem like the best thing since sliced goblin. After all, you get their great power, then you put them right back in your hand to use again. The problem is that they tend to be the weakest cards. Yes, a Headband of Alluring Charisma can give Lem a +1 to every Diplomacy, Arcane, and Divine check, including combat... but it's just a +1! Compare that to Lem's ability to continually pick his favorite cards out of the discard pile—including Cure spells, allowing him to quickly cycle through a lot of cards—he can do a lot better!

This isn't to say that reveal cards are worthless. You'll often want to reveal weapons instead of discarding them, particularly if you're fighting weak monsters or you need to make a single weapon stretch over a few explorations. There are even some reveal cards that are widely useful. For example, the Ring of Protection is pretty great for staving off a variety of 1-point damage annoyances. Alternatively, some reveals give a +2 or more to an important skill, which becomes more worthwhile.

However, the best reveals are those that also have another power, such as armor that can be revealed to prevent minor damage, but still recharged at the end of the turn. The Magic Shield, the Elven Breastplate, and many similar items are great examples of this.

So think before you hold onto a low-power reveal-only card.

Recharge: The Great Cycler

Recharge cards tend to be the next most powerful, and they're a good compromise between reveal powers (which tend to be weak) and discard powers (which cost you a card).

The big question with recharge cards is when to use them. My suggestion is: almost always. If a recharge card could help you on a roll, then go ahead and use it. Maybe it was necessary and maybe not, but there's little cost to using it. The one exception is when you have a card that can be recharged for a power or discarded for an explore. (Many allies fit into this category.) In this case, you should probably still use the card, because you'll eventually get the card back, and can explore then—but late in the game you might flip this assessment, since you'll be less likely to see the card again.

You might take it a step further and recharge cards whenever it's legal to do so, even if it's totally unnecessary. The goal here is to get non-useful cards out of your hand. So if you hit the last ally in a location deck, it might be worth playing your Crown of Charisma, even if your roll is a guaranteed success. It's also generally useful to recharge cards that affect singular skills; yes, you might need them on the next turn, but absent foreknowledge you're just as likely to need whatever you draw, and it's better to keep cycling to get to your good cards.

The biggest deficit of a recharge card is that it gets placed at the bottom of your deck. If you're recharging something you don't actually want, that's fine, but if you're recharging something that's pretty great, you may want to figure out how to get back to it sooner...

Shuffle: The Lost Action

The rulebook describes a variety of card actions, from reveal and display to bury and banish, but it doesn't tell you a lot about one of the most important: shuffling. You'll often shuffle your deck when you receive a major healing, such as a Cure. Some characters also have special shuffle powers, such as Weapon Master Valeros or Skull & Shackles Lem.

As long as you're not purposefully trying to keep bad stuff at the bottom of your deck, shuffling rocks because it allows you to more quickly revisit recharged cards—cards that were good enough that you already used them! After you've put a couple of great cards at the bottom of your deck, you might want to be cured primarily for the shuffle ability.

So, to make your recycling strategy that much better, think about how shuffling might enter your deck and your play.

Discard: The Standard Action

Discarding is the way that most things work in PACG. Some characters are pretty good at avoiding it, but most characters will discard over time. Don't be afraid to do it!

You should definitely discard blessings, and you'll frequently discard allies and weapons. You just need to make sure that you're not discarding too much: you should never reduce your deck below your hand size, because doing so can cause instant death if you take a lot of damage.

However, you should start being a bit more conservative a little earlier than that. If your character becomes unable to discard without courting death, he's going to be crippled for play: you won't be able to use good card abilities and you'll become afraid of facing danger. So, start going lighter on the discards when your deck is only four or five cards larger than your hand size; then you'll have four or five opportunities to play a discard card when it's really important.

When a character is a heavy discarder, be aware that he'll need regular medical attention. This creates the discard/heal cycle, where a heavy discarder gets healed so that he can discard again. It's every bit as good as the simpler recharge cycle; it just requires an appropriate healing power to get it going. Ideally, a heavy discarder should have his own heal cards, such as Father Zantus, Staff of Minor Healing, or various healing spells. Kyra is a fine example of someone who can always take care of herself: she tosses out blessings like crazy, then can Cure them back. If a character can't support his own discard habit, then make sure you have a healer in the party who keeps regular tabs on him.

When you're playing a character with a discard/heal cycle, you should also think about what's in your discard pile. If you make sure it contains great cards like nice blessings, strong weapons, or exploration allies, then their healing will be that much more powerful. So if you can, avoid discarding the random junk you pick up in the dungeons until just after you heal.

Display: The Weird Action

Display is a relatively infrequent action in PACG, primarily used by spells like Strength and Toxic Cloud. When you can use it, it's pretty great, because it tends to extend an effect over the length of a turn or longer. Play display cards when they're immediately needed or when you think someone will explore a lot during their turn.

To better assess the value of display spells, it's important to understand whom they can affect. Strength and Toxic Cloud offer a good contrast: Strength gives +3 to one person for the turn, while Toxic Cloud gives +1d6 to everyone at a location for the turn. Strength is a fine spell to use if someone is fighting alone, but when you're doing the final fight against the villain, and multiple characters can pitch in, Toxic Cloud is much better.

It's also important to know what happens to a card after it's displayed. Typically, it'll use one of the less weird card actions. Strength and Toxic Cloud are (hopefully) recharged, but other display cards might be discarded or even buried. This ultimate fate of a display card can tell you more about how and when to use its action.

Bury: The Action You Fear Too Much

Though you should try to work through your deck quickly, that doesn't necessarily extend to burying cards, because that takes them out of your play cycle. With that said, don't be afraid to bury your cards. Some characters, like Father Zantus, exist solely to be buried; sometimes Amiri will earn boons that she's happy to bury because they're no good. Even when an armor has a reveal or recharge effect, the bury is usually still its main purpose, so there should never be a qualm about using that either.

The trick comes when you need to determine whether it's worth burying something good. This most frequently comes up for Amiri, when she wants to juice her Strength, Melee, or Constitution. Then you have to decide: to bury or not to bury.

Sometimes you really don't want to bury cards:

• Don't bury cards if you think you'd have a good use for them later.
• Don't bury cards if their absence would make a big dent in a specific category of cards in your deck.
• Don't bury cards if your total card count is too low; that's a good way to end up dead.

But sometimes you do:

• Do bury cards that you've acquired and don't really need; it's a great use for them.
• Do bury cards if you've got plenty of similar cards in your deck.
• Do bury cards more aggressively late in the game; if you're not likely to get healed again, then a card buried and a card discarded are the exact same thing.

Banish: The Action You Maybe Fear the Right Amount

Finally, we come to banishment. Obviously, you want to avoid banishing your good cards if at all possible; in fact, if you will eventually need to banish something to close a location, then you should go out of your way to pick up something worthless.

However, there's one situation when you want to banish: when you have cards that specifically work when they get banished, such as Ameiko Kaijitsu and Mayor Kendra Deverin. Either use them by banishing them or dump them from your deck. But whatever you do, don't just sit on them, letting them take up space in your hand and your deck. Yes, it's tempting to save their one-use power for the perfect moment, but if you don't use them, they're worse than worthless. They're deck cloggers. Get 'em out.

Next time: Choosing location decks.

Shannon Appelcline
Game Historian