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