Adela Ghenis

As promised, here is the first preview for the next set of 4e, henceforth called 4eXtended. I do not yet have a name for the set but will soon enough.

I also promised to talk about the design ideas behind the upcoming set. Unfortunately I do not have any cards ready to preview to show case the design concept. Every time we start designing a set we have some sort of theme in mind whether it be mechanical, like most of pre 4e  or story/region based as many of the 4e sets were. Not all cards follow those themes but a good portion will. A theme is important to give the overall set a sense of cohesion and not just a mass of random cards and it also helps focus the designers, giving them somewhere to start, even if later on some of their ideas deviate from the theme greatly.

With that being said, the theme of the upcoming set is summoned characters. I guess the rules never got updated like they should have  (Just checked) so my hint wasn't too useful. I will update the rules when or before this set is legal (we actually have a number of rules updates that we never got in print). In addition to previous definitions, any card that is put into play from your collection, is "Summoned".  On cards in this set you will see the actions such as "Order: Summon Malrog."  Which means put Malrog into play from your collection, following all normal entering play restrictions.  All Summon abilities specify a specific card by name to summon, or sometimes multiple cards, but there are no cards that say, for example "Order: Summon a Weapon."


For our first preview, allow me to introduce Adela Ghenis, the Deverenian Warlord. First off you should notice that she is a multi-class fighter-rogue. The majority of the Warlords in this set are multi-class, teaming up their factions weak and strong classes. The exceptions are Chosen and Mercenaries.  In addition, the theme for most of the warlords is a subrace ability.

One of the things I'm not sure of is how much I should go into talking about the design of warlords. On the one hand I'm sure some of you are interested but I know a lot of people would prefer to discover how the warlord plays and find combo's without any preconceptions and bias from me coloring their perceptions as the evaluate the cards.

One last thing. The full art for older cards has been much harder to find that I had anticipated, so in order to be uniform, warlords will be presented in the old non-full bleed format.