Adventure Card Game: Cards backs different colors

[Zephrin]

Hello,

I am playing through the Rise of the Runelords campaign. Just got into the second adventure deck, but the card backs are a totally different color than the base set. This is extremely noticeable, the card on the left is from deck #2 and the one on the right is from our base set.

Imgur Link

Is this normal? It's frustrating because we had to blindly shuffle everything today to avoid knowing where the cards are...but as soon as we saw one of the new cards we knew it was going to be a henchman or the villain. I don't want to sleeve the cards because I like how they fit into the box, but I am shocked that the backs are different colors. Are there any options here?

Thank you.

[Hawkmoon269]

Hi Zephrin,

I am not a Paizo employee, and I'm sure customer service might be able to give you a better answer, but I am very familiar with the Adventure Card Game, so I wanted to offer you some information.

What you are seeing was fairly common in Rise of the Runelords. Rise of the Runelords had two printings. The first was done in China. There were complaints of color variation. See this and this. The product sold out and Paizo decided to switch printers for the second printing. See this. The second printing was done in the USA. You can tell the difference if you look on the box the cards came in. The first printing says "Printed in China." The second printing says "Second Printing. Printed in the USA."

The issue will be exasperated if you have a mix of the two different printings. (i.e. a Base Set printed in China, but an adventure deck printed in the USA.) Unfortunately, I don't think there is much that can be done about it.

What I've done is just sleeve my cards. The insert is very nice, but I've much preferred to have my cards sleeved. There are many 3rd party companies that have created inserts for the game that will hold sleeved cards. I've used this one from the Broken Token with much success.

I'd also encourage you to check out the Adventure Card Game forum. It is a friendly and helpful community that shares your love of the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game.

Good luck on your adventure.

[Diego Valdez]

Hello Zephrin,

Hawkmoon269 is correct. It looks like you are seeing cards from the different printings of the Rise of the Runelords set.

There are a few ways to tell which printing a deck came from. The easiest is at the end of the small print on the back of the box. A first printing deck will say, "Printed in China" while a second printing deck will say, "Printed in USA". Some other ways are that first printing boxes have much smaller, and rigid shelf hangars, while the second printing boxes have larger shelf hangars that easily fold back on the box. First printing boxes load from the top, while second printing boxes side load.

[Zephrin]

Unfortunately I have been purchasing the decks from Amazon so there's no way to know what version I'm going to receive. I'd really hate to have to buy sleeves and then an insert on top of it just because of faulty printing. Thanks for the responses, guys. They're very helpful, but not the news I was hoping for.