[2022] Divination Card Stories - Desecrated Virtue

To continue on with stories of our supporters, we had a chat with frozensteinpp about their card Desecrated Virtue. Check it out below!




Hello! So here is my story:

I have always liked RPGs. I sank a lot of hours into the Elder Scrolls series, Diablo 2-3 and even tried some tabletop RPGs with friends. I've been playing Path of Exile since the spring of 2018. Mainly on Standard because I don't have that much time to play (only managed to accumulate 930 hours in 4 years), but I started some characters in challenge leagues too, because it was cheaper to gear them there.

A friend of mine suggested PoE to me when he heard I like Diablo. The game was on my wishlist for a while, but I always postponed trying it out. Well, I like to read up on games before I start them, so basically I was reading the Wiki for 2-3 weeks before I even installed. Thanks to this I was quite satisfied with how my first character (a Necromancer I started on Standard) turned out: I finished the acts, completed Uber Lab, and all white and yellow maps. (I only managed to get that far, because at that time the Atlas on Standard didn't reset with every new league.)

Fast-forward to 2019 November: I was excitedly watching the ExileCon livestream, and it blew my mind away. Announcing Path of Exile 2, Conquerors of the Atlas and of course awakened support gems. I was already planning to get a divination card design for a few months at that time, and at that moment I knew I wanted the reward to be a double corrupted awakened gem. I set up a payment plan for the design at Christmas, three months later I managed to submit it, and the waiting for the response began. In the meantime The Cheater was released. At first I was scared that someone had thought of the same thing, but in the end I was relieved that it didn't completely overlap with my idea.

The card is themed around gem corruption. Even the name refers to a corrupted virtue gem. I wanted the art to be a gem offered up at an altar (corruption altar) with Awakener motifs and the artist really managed to nail it. The flavor text is pretty straightforward too: 'Awoken virtuous slivers' refers to the awakened gems. I wanted a synonym of fragment, which hasn't yet been used in the game, that's how it became 'slivers'. 'of the void' because we can get them in the Atlas/endgame, 'defiled by the avaricious' as in corrupted by us the players. The 'seized by the tyrannical' part is the only one suggested by the staff. I liked it much more than my original 'for more potency', so I accepted it immediately. I was also told, if I insist on this reward the card drop will be tied to a rare and difficult encounter. It turned out to be so rare that according to poewiki, the drop location is still unknown.

Have fun exiles! May your drops be lucky!