Monday, March 14, 2016

The Endless Deserts: Ability Cards


As Adepticon approaches I took the opportunity to address one of my biggest weaknesses while playing games and make something I thought was pretty cool at the same time, Ability Cards!

In all of the games of Age of Sigmar that I've played I have always had an issue with remembering to use all of my command abilities each round. In friendly games this has never really been an issue because we usually just let each other go back and complete whatever we forgot. With Adepticon though I knew that if I forget to do something that would be it, no do over, since it's a tournament.

One of the accessories I always really liked from 8th edition were the magic cards. There is just a certain satisfaction with laying down a beautifully designed card to show my opponent what I'm about to do. This of course is also very practical because it reminds me to use the abilities since I have a physical reminder of it right there in front of me. In AoS we don't have anything like that, so I took the opportunity to make something myself.

With AoS there are a ton of different abilities that can buff individual units and characters. These range from Command Abilities, to other abilities, to spells. I went through the Tomb King warscrolls and wrote down each one that had a command ability or another stay in play ability like the Necrotect's and the Carrion's. After that I also got the different spells as well as the generic spells every army has access to. To design the cards I was able to reuse a lot of the different assets I had already made for older Endless Deserts supplements. I was also lucky enough to have the help of Kenneth Erickson, who has been working with me to create illustrations for the supplements. He had made a bunch of different little "filler" illustrations which worked great to fill in the blank spot beneath the shorter abilities.


I had my set professionally printed as cards, but I have also made some great looking PDF versions for everyone else to print on card stock and cut out. I was able to use mine the other day in a local tournament and I really liked how great they looked on the table. I remembered to use all of my abilities each turn and was then was also able to easily look at the buffs each unit had in shooting and combat. I'm almost 100% certain that I would have forgotten to do something otherwise (although I did forget to use the Tomb King's curse when he died once). It's also great to see you unit with three buffing ability cards laid down next to them as they prepare to charge the enemy.


I do plan on making these for my Stormcast Eternals as well, but I will probably wait until I have more of them painted. For all of the other Tomb King players out there you can find the PDF for the Ability Cards below. If you open these in a separate window you can download them for your own use. I may also make them for more armies going forward if I get enough requests for them, but it also depends on what artwork I can get a hole of.

I want to thank Kenneth again for providing so many great illustrations for this project so far, and let me tell you, based off of some works in progress I have seen there is even more great work coming soon.



Expect even more for the Endless Deserts in the future. I have definitely been putting a lot of work into it with the Tomb King's current situation and Adepticon approaching and have been enjoying the whole process.

Let me know if you find these useful and what else you may want to see from me in the future.

You can follow Kenneth on Instagram at @kenquistador where you may see sneak peaks of some of his works in progress for the Endless Deserts from time to time.

Until next time,

Tyler M.

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