Wandering Judge Imrijka is the bestest (or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying About the Blessings Deck and Love the Inquisitor)


Rules Questions and Gameplay Discussion


Ok, with AD4 under her belt, Imrijka is here to give an update on how the Wandering Judge is the most powerful tool in the game for trivializing the blessing clock.

Now, you might be thinking, "Imrijka? You mean the second-best ranged-divine hybrid in WotR? The half-orc who can fight a dozen monsters in a row in theory, but whose base combat stats are low enough that part of you thinks it'd be safer just letting Alain lance them one by one? I guess she has the second most exciting hat in WotR, after that summoner guy."
Bear with me.

Even pre-role, Imrijka is highly skilled at burning through dangerous locations before the clock can become a factor. While her base values are just OK, once you tack on her extra d4 (which works against all those nasty pre-combat checks, don't forget!), charges from a mythic path, Flames of the Faithful on some turns(more scaling!), and ideally a Steal Soul (DON'T LISTEN TO THE WIZARD YOU NEED IT MORE TO HUNT EEVVIILLL), and/or some assistance from a succubus, she can cut a mean swath through a long list of monsters, often without needing to roll. Don't forget that you can use melee weapons almost as well as ranged, so don't be afraid to grab your share of the swords and polearms. Every monster you kill is a chance at a free explore, so make your big turns count, and be sure to cycle away your vast armory of weapons so they don't slow you down. Remember, you are the Ranzak of killing. In a good way.

Then comes Wandering Judge, and things get interesting.
(Disclaimer: Cold Iron Warden is a more-than-solid role with a lot of good options---putting barriers on the bottom of locations, recharging blessings, even more effective evil-hunting---but it basically plays fair, and I didn't take it, so I'll be ignoring it after this.)

Specifically, then comes this power:
"[] When you play a blessing that matches the top card of the blessings discard pile, you may shuffle the top card of the blessings discard pile into the blessings deck."

Now, if you're remembering the built-in power of most non-basic blessings to recharge when they match the current blessing, you're probably thinking "oh, that's nice, that should maybe come up a few times a game, I'll grab that after I drop three feats into being a Harsk copycat."

Now realize that this works with Blessings of Ascension. Which are half the blessings in the deck as of AD4 [they would be slightly less, but you should make sure your fellow party members stock up on other kinds, which brings it back up again. In a larger game, the ratio only gets better the more blessings are pulled out of the pool]. If you max Imrijka's blessing slots, carry 3+ Blessings of Ascension, and carry singletons of blessings that others in your party don't carry (preferably the corrupt ones like Shax & Abraxas that you can play whenever [no Deskari for this plan], since they have more copies[6] in the base set than the random non-corrupt ones).

Remember how great the Holy Candle was in RotR? Imrijka is made of Holy Candles.
Running through AD4 my Wandering Judge matched her way to this many extra turns for the party ... (all 3p. More players gives you a better ratio of favorable matches, but fewer chances to refill your hand.)
4-1: 6 extra turns, scenario ended with 11 blessings in the discard.
4-2: 7 extra turns (again, around half the blessings left)
4-3: 12 extra turns (intentionally using nearly the full clock to shop at the marketplace/have time to hit the villain multiple times)
4-4: only 3 extra turns, as scenario finished in no time with 4 in the discard (good henchmen luck)
4-5: 8 extra turns (about half blessings remaining)

In short, if you want a blessing deck that's reliably over 40 deep, Imrijka is the answer.

*How this works:
1) Build a deck that becomes streamlined in play: the more non-blessing cards you draw, the fewer extra turns you'll get. Cards that display, bury, or otherwise don't end up back in your deck are what you want (Steal Soul, Banner of Valor, Mysterious Disk, Javelin of Lightning, etc.). Bring a Mastiff along, and use it to draw cards like you have a problem.

2) If you draw/acquire cards that don't cycle, pitch 'em! Use your base power to cycle away excess ranged weapons if they don't have built in recharge options. If you keep resetting with more non-blessings than a weapon and an armor sitting in your hand, discard more.

3) Proper feats: Max your blessing slots. Max your hand-size. (Take enough spells to support your monster-killing side, but you have enough weapons already.) If other party members can assist (bonus card-draw from Arue's heal; an extra blessing or two handed off on occasion), that's nice, but isn't essential.

4) Hold your Blessings of Ascension until a match comes up whenever possible.

5) Have heavy healing in the party. When your discard pile builds up 3-4 blessings, you need those to be shuffled back in ASAP. Imrijka can carry at least 1 heal herself, but someone like Arueshalae (Redeemed), Oloch, various versions of Kyra/Seelah, or just anyone with a pile of Cures can keep you going. Don't stress about giving up explorations to heal (like with Pillar of Life), as you should have more time to spare than you're used to.

*Why you might want to do this:
1) Security: Avoid losing to the clock running out, and equally avoid losing/dying because you had to run into a dangerous spot not fully prepared. Use extra turns to heal/set up hands more than usual, and reap the rewards.

2) Time for scouting: Any party with an Adowyn, a Lancer Alain (using his move-around-power), an Alahazra, or any form of Mythic Archmage can turn time into knowledge. That 5-charge 'scout a location' becomes much more appealing for frequent use if the party can afford to take off several rounds for recovering charges with Blessings of Ascension and party healing resources.

3) Endless farming: If you hit a henchman while a location is still full of loot, don't worry about closing it now, as you've got plenty of time! Even better are locations with closing requirements involving acquiring a boon (Armory/Marketplace), as you can choose to fail them repeatedly (just one turn each time!) to keep drawing at it until you find something you want.

4) Revenge! Do you remember running out of time during Best Served Cold, Bizarre Love Triangle, or the Toll of the Bell? Never again will the game designers challenge you in that particular way! Not While Imrijka still draws breath(or at least, draws blessings)!

TL;DR: Match Blessings of Ascension with Wandering Judge Imrijka. Laugh. Then laugh some more.


Hehe awesome man. I thought about using wandering judge, very intriguing on that candle ability and unique. But since I decided to focus near 100% on combat the cold iron seemed more useful for that direction. Only the fortune arrow almost changed my mind as judge had the ability to draw before exploring again.


philosorapt0r wrote:

4-1: 6 extra turns, scenario ended with 11 blessings in the discard.

4-2: 7 extra turns (again, around half the blessings left)
4-3: 12 extra turns (intentionally using nearly the full clock to shop at the marketplace/have time to hit the villain multiple times)
4-4: only 3 extra turns, as scenario finished in no time with 4 in the discard (good henchmen luck)
4-5: 8 extra turns (about half blessings remaining)

Since I'll assume you yourself used all the tips from the end of your post, these seem like good examples why a player SHOULDN'T waste a feat on this power.

If I'm reading this correctly, all throughout AD4 you would be perfectly fine even without this power, safe maybe for your shopping spree in 4-3, but then that's you trying to farm the location, which you would do even with 30 blessings, but on lesser scale (and there's no need to get into the math of the average chance of getting something you want only from the Imrijka-granted additional clock turns). And, IMO, the need to build your blessings around that power and then to hope for a match (let alone the cases where you'll be tempted to play blessing for it's match, and not because it's really needed for the check)just far outweigh its usefulness.

Speaking of which, I may have been playing it wrong, but I don't believe you're allowed to auto-fail when trying to close with "summon and acquire". The rulebook says (along the lines of) "you may not choose to fail a check, you must always attempt it". You probably refer to the rules of encountering boon in a location, which allow the decision if you'll attempt to acquire or not; however, by the very fact that you're attempting to close, you've already chosen to acquire, and therefore must attempt the check (yes, you can use you Dex for that Bow, instead of your maxed Ranged: Strength, but that's all you get).

At any rate, you used the magic phrase "trivializes the blessings deck", so expect the power to be FAQed into "every time the blessing you play matches the blessing on top of the discard pile AND there's a full moon outside of your window..."


Longshot11 wrote:
philosorapt0r wrote:

4-1: 6 extra turns, scenario ended with 11 blessings in the discard.

4-2: 7 extra turns (again, around half the blessings left)
4-3: 12 extra turns (intentionally using nearly the full clock to shop at the marketplace/have time to hit the villain multiple times)
4-4: only 3 extra turns, as scenario finished in no time with 4 in the discard (good henchmen luck)
4-5: 8 extra turns (about half blessings remaining)

Since I'll assume you yourself used all the tips from the end of your post, these seem like good examples why a player SHOULDN'T waste a feat on this power.

If I'm reading this correctly, all throughout AD4 you would be perfectly fine even without this power, safe maybe for your shopping spree in 4-3, but then that's you trying to farm the location, which you would do even with 30 blessings, but on lesser scale (and there's no need to get into the math of the average chance of getting something you want only from the Imrijka-granted additional clock turns). And, IMO, the need to build your blessings around that power and then to hope for a match (let alone the cases where you'll be tempted to play blessing for it's match, and not because it's really needed for the check)just far outweigh its usefulness.

At any rate, you used the magic phrase "trivializes the blessings deck", so expect the power to be FAQed into "every time the blessing you play...

The fact that PACG is often a game where one succeeds the vast majority of the time doesn't mean that making your party more powerful is a 'waste' of a power. No other power feats would have led to a higher success rate in those scenarios than what we had, so arguing that 'we won anyway without clock pressure, so anything that helped with clock pressure was worthless' is overly results-oriented. If the baseline is that you have enough time to win 90% of the time, then something that pushes that up to 100% may look the same on a given 5-game-sample, but "didn't run out of time" is different from "couldn't possibly have run out of time".

Also, if we would have won anyway without clock pressure with *any* post-role power feats, it doesn't follow that every Wandering Judge option is therefore worthless.

Besides, it's actually not true that the power didn't make a difference to how easily the scenarios played out. With the knowledge that we had the turn freedom to archmage-scout locations on-demand, our party had to run many fewer risks than they did previous to AD4. In every scenario where we were concerned about blind-hitting a villain, we were able to scout until we found it. Could we have aggressively used the archmage power without Imrijka's promise of 10+ extra turns? Sure, but then we would have had to do so without knowing whether we'd actually have enough time to durdle around to get enough mythic charges back.

That's an interesting point on checks-to-acquire outside of an encounter. Imrijka isn't as hindered by it as most, as you note (can roll her d4 melee/base dex die/int instead of knowledge/etc.), but that would indeed mean that many characters won't be able to do this at the armory/will have to choose (in)appropriate types at the marketplace.

And I'm totally uninvested in whether this power gets FAQ'd or not, although I don't think there's a good way to nerf it slightly ('basic blessing' still gives tons of turns, 'non-basic blessing' is sufficiently worse to no longer be worth the cost of a feat and building your blessings around it, instead of just grabbing a stack of Nethys or whatever.)

What I do want to point out is that the fact that a character can, with effort, trivialize the blessing deck, isn't itself necessarily a problem for the game. The extra turns Imrijka grants are fairly shared throughout the party as normal. And from the blessing-reshuffling book in AD5, it seems like the design team is OK with that (absence of blessing pressure) being a possibility. Lancer-Alain isn't the most powerful clock-destroying tool in the game, he's just a particularly obnoxious and obvious one :).


Holy crap. I gotta point this out to the guy playing Immie in our upcoming game.


I'm philosorapt0r's partner in crime and I can confirm walking-holy-candle factory that he has turned Imrijka into.


You guys are awesome for trying this. I feel it's not easy to configure/pull off and shuffle sequence can ruin your day.

Paizo Employee Chief Technical Officer

There's a good chance this wants to begin "When you play a non-Basic blessing that matches..."


Vic Wertz wrote:
There's a good chance this wants to begin "When you play a non-Basic blessing that matches..."

The next thing you say is probably going to be that Sword of Iomedae needs some sort of 'if it's that player's turn, end the turn'/'1/turn' clause on its 5-charge power to prevent INFINITE POWER for appropriately-slimmed blessing-heavy decks.

Spoilsport :). Just give me a couple weeks to finish off WotR first, kk?


That is to say, I probably agree with fixing overpowered exploits :).

I mean, my Courtier-Siwar (banished allies --> her discard), WotR Kyra (heals put allies directly back in hands), Feiya (discard allies to get spells back), WotR Seelah (discard her deck on people's checks to find the key allies) S&S party had a glorious shining moment when the combination of Feiya looping Recast on Kyra's Holy Feast (giving back the animal ally to get back Recast, along with 1-2 other animals) made everything infinite and trivial (Imp --> anyone can draw their deck; Phantasmal minion on Feiya --> pass cards to anyone; Barracuda Aiger --> full-scout every deck; Pteranadon --> move and explore wherever; Master of Gales & Arronax guy ---> auto-pass non-combat checks on a ship, auto-pass henchmen; spyglass-type card---> stack whichever deck you want). But the game isn't actually fun at that point, so I'd rather you patch things :).

Or is your philosophy in part that it doesn't matter if things are broken at AD6, if people find the right loot?

Paizo Employee Chief Technical Officer

3 people marked this as a favorite.

Our philosophy is if you want to go to great lengths to build a complicated machine that's hard to get going and not without risk, and that makes the game less fun for you, that's your own problem—especially when it takes multiple characters to engage that machine. None of those powers are problematic outside of the machine, so "fixing" them would serve only to make the game less fun for others, and that's not a win.

If that sort of thing easily allowed a single person to make the game unfun for his party without them being complicit, we'd probably want to address it.

Adventure Card Game Designer

After some discussion, we decided to remove the power's ability to do this with Basic blessings.

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