A New Wave of Iconic Heroes Promo Cards!

Tuesday, January 19, 2016

Here at PACG Headquarters, we love making promo cards! Sometimes, we get a little... out there. For example, Sweet Dragon Costume is a goblin in a kobold suit who is so completely convinced that he's a dragon that he can scare monsters to death.

Rawr.

But okay, there's one place we take promo cards very seriously. That's in the Pathfinder Battles: Iconic Heroes miniatures boxes, because man, have you seen how cool those minis are? We want to hold up our end of the bargain. Now, you've already seen what we did with sets 1 through 3. So check out some of these swank promo cards in Set #4 and Set #5.

Iconic Heroes Set #4

Here are some cards for three of our most complex characters. Note that all these cards have the Owner trait; that means that the character whose name is on the card can treat it as a Basic card. That's huge.

You'd look grumpy too if Shardra boiled stuff behind your face.

The goal with these promos is to interact well with what the character does naturally. So Jirelle's Bloodcrow Rapier not only scales up with her by adventure deck number, it has a power which enables her to add the Swashbuckling trait to any check to defeat a bane—even if it's not a combat check. For example, the Skull & Shackles villain Caulky Tarroon can be defeated by a Dexterity check, but if you don't add the Swashbuckling trait, she's gonna banish the top card of someone's deck. Bloodcrow Rapier makes that problem go away.

Shoanti Earthbreaker deals with one of the most frustrating types of cards in the game: Constructs. Golems and other Constructs routinely turn off spellcasters' powers, including those of Crowe. The Earthbreaker means he doesn't really worry about that much. He just pummels them into oblivion.

Ritual Censer is one of my favorite cards in this group. Not only does it help Shardra acquire spells, but it feeds off her natural tendency to have characters bunch up around her. While she's helping people with their checks to defeat banes and succeed at Knowledge checks, Ritual Censer helps other characters succeed at checks to close Shardra's location. That's some fine synergy at work.

Iconic Heroes Set #5

By the way, these cards aren't limited to the characters who own them. Take a look at Kess's card. Who wouldn't want to punch their way into better Diplomacy checks? And everyone can, because you don't need to be Kess to play it. And this is good, since we kinda haven't released Kess yet.

Watch out for the spikes.

On the other hand, you want to be Oloch when you play the Orc War Drum. Oloch might be the best character at moving cards around. Displaying weapons and blessings to add to checks, discarding armors and blessings to heal, banishing allies to explore—if it's a card, he can do something cool with it. Orc War Drum lets him get some of those cards back, and enable others to burn allies to boost anybody's check at your location.

Double your pleasure, double your fun! Have two Leryns instead of one!

Hey, it's Leryn! As an ally! When Adowyn uses one of her powers that says "a card that has the Animal trait," Leryn is suddenly available for her—twice. Now it's not such a big deal to shuffle the cohort Leryn into Adowyn's deck, because the ally Leryn is waiting to be played. That's versatility right there.

Pretty cool stuff, says me. Promo-worthy, you might say.

Mike Selinker
Adventure Card Game Lead Designer