Cartomancer 5e
Prerequisite: 4th Level, Spellcasting feature
You have learned to channel your magic through a deck of cards. You can use a deck as your spellcasting focus, and you gain the following benefits:
Card Tricks. You learn the Prestidigitation cantrip and can use it to create illusions that duplicate the effects of stage magic. When you use Prestidigitation this way, you can conceal the verbal and somatic components of the spell as ordinary conversation and card handling.
Hidden Ace. When you finish a long rest, you can choose one spell from your class’s spell list and imbue that spell into a card. The chosen spell must have a casting time of 1 action, and it must be a level for which you have spell slots. The card remains imbued with the spell for 8 hours. While the card is imbued with the spell, you can use a bonus action to flourish the card and cast the spell within. The card then immediately loses its magic.
Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold
The Book of Many Things added a couple of spells and one new feat; my goodness, did they come out swinging. Cartomancer is a needed upgrade feat for spellcasters who prior had to settle for things like Spell Sniper or expand their spell pool with Shadow or Fey Touched. Now, they’ve got a free bonus cantrip with a bit of expansion, and way more crucially, a free spell slot per long rest.
Hidden Ace reads entirely bonkers to me. It's a duplicate bonus action cast of whatever your best spell is, which is insane. I can’t overstate how bananas this is. It's a third 3rd level slot at 5th level, which already is fantastic. Scaled up, it's a bonus 6th, 7th, 8th, or 9th level spell at those tiers. You’re taking an ability built to be a once-per-encounter warping effect and doubling a character’s opportunity to use it, and enabling them to use it alongside a non-1st level or higher spellcasting action as well.
But wait: there’s more. Because it is actually better than a bonus action cast spell slot because it doesn’t specify from your known or prepared spells- you make the hidden ace each long rest using any one spell from your class’s spell list. You don’t need to prepare or know the spell you use this with. It also is a free new bonus prepared spell you can switch around as you please.
This thing is yucky good. The Prestidigitation text is cute, but kind of meaningless given most of what it’s doing was already within the scope of the cantrip or just basic performance checks. Hidden Ace is a second cast of your best spell or some crazy good spell you haven’t gotten a chance to pick up yet. Cartomancer is going to be a feat a ton of people want. It's nuts and scales incredibly well with the game. DMs out there: prepare to see a lot of Cartomancer.
Thank you for visiting!
If you’d like to support this ongoing project, you can do so by buying my books, getting some sweet C&C merch, or joining my Patreon.
The text on this page is Open Game Content, and is licensed for public use under the terms of the Open Game License v1.0a.
‘d20 System’ and the ‘d20 System’ logo are trademarks of Wizards of the Coast, Inc.
and are used according to the terms of the d20 System License version 6.0.
A copy of this License can be found at www.wizards.com/d20.