Expand your encounters with this massive collection of 450 reference cards, featuring every monster from Pathfinder Bestiary 2! Each 4 x 6 card is printed on sturdy cardstock and features a beautiful, full‑color image of a Bestiary 2 monster on one side, while the other side provides that monster's statistics for quick and easy reference. With each encounter, show the players what their characters are facing while keeping the monster's abilities at the ready, and watch your games come alive!
What follows is a repeat of my Bestiary 1 Battle Cards review. I have all three bestiaries:
Useful in isolation and the highest production values. These are much better than the equivalents in the other roleplaying game. However, there are some serious flaws for use as a Referee (who grabs and stores these cards often):
1) The box. The cards lay flat in two columns. There's no possibility to add dividers for the 300-400 cards. The box is hella sturdy, so they could've been stacked on their edge: sideways or vertically -- like magic. This would allow you to add dividers for storage and referencing the numbering, which leads me to...
2) The numbering. This should be great. However, these numbers aren't in the Bestiary. They're arbitrary to this card deck and, thankfully, matched in the cardboard minis. Which makes it great to store if it weren't for #1. I wish the monsters had canonical numbering in the bestiary so everything was clearly organized and laid out but...
3) The layout. Some monsters are split across three cards. Due to layout. They couldn't easily used a landscape orientation, two-column layout for the statblocks, a trick the books use to eliminate empty space. They have two magic cards worth of space but use one at best. Most GMs will flash this to the players then use them as reference, letting the matching cardboard or plastic miniatures take over representation. There's no indication of which bestiary it's from, so if you spill multiple sets, it'll be hard to organize them again. There's a 1-400 in each set.
Production values are great. Totally support the amazing workers. Just needed a little more practical experience and use by Referee to understand what would be useful as a reference.
I hope a template is made either by Paizo or fan based so we can also make our own for homebrewed monsters and for creatures from APs and Standalone Adventures.
I can see stat blocks in PFS scenarios made in this format so you could cut them and make them into cards.
Feedback and Request:
Can we change it up from the Bestiary 1 Battle Cards and make the box vertical, so that all the cards can sit in it standing up? It would be much more useful that way!
Can we change it up from the Bestiary 1 Battle Cards and make the box vertical, so that all the cards can sit in it standing up? It would be much more useful that way!
Agreed; when I received my Bestiary Battle Cards box I was surprised how small and impractical it is. It's actually really hard to riffle through the cards when they've been packed so tightly in horisontal decks.
I agree with a better solution for box shape. Allowing the cards to sit vertically would make them easier to search though.
But what I'd really like to see is a solution for holding the cards at the top of the Paizo GM screens. Some sort of simple clip that would allow them to be seated at the top, with the art facing the players and the stat block readable for the GM. I've kind of made my own with a couple of plastic rulers taped together and clipped to the screen, but I'd definitely buy a more professional looking solution.
Strange - when I tap on the small image [looks like a demon, a draugr and a wood golem] I get a different picture of the lantern archon, jellyfish and d’ziriak on the box...
What do you actually get with the digital version of this product?
It's a folder of either JPGs or PDFs of the card fronts and backs. I'm using the backs as artwork to show the players in the VTT I'm using.
Also, there was a super useful Excel doc someone had posted in the Bestiary Battle Cards thread that linked the card numbering to the actual monster names and their location in the book. I didn't see anything similar for this set or for the NPC cards, so I put it together myself.
Here it is, for anyone who might be interested: Link
Pathfinder Pathfinder Accessories Subscriber; Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber
drexl93 wrote:
Zioalca wrote:
What do you actually get with the digital version of this product?
It's a folder of either JPGs or PDFs of the card fronts and backs. I'm using the backs as artwork to show the players in the VTT I'm using.
Also, there was a super useful Excel doc someone had posted in the Bestiary Battle Cards thread that linked the card numbering to the actual monster names and their location in the book. I didn't see anything similar for this set or for the NPC cards, so I put it together myself.
Here it is, for anyone who might be interested: Link
Oooh! I had totally forgotten that I had done that in the past! Now that you mention it, I should have updated mine to have all of them!
Nice work on that!
(Also, it was actually a Google Sheet, but yeah, same difference.) :P
[Edit]
Here's mine, with the first box + updated to have the second one too and the NPCs. I have also a page mixing them up together, but that one is more for indexing my personal collection (I might do an extra one for NPCs if they release more).
It's slightly different because I made the names more "human-readable", and more similar to the AoN way it is written. I also duplicated the entries that had more than one card, to have all the "card numbers" indexed.