When it comes to the pumpable core set talent cards, what are people's general opinions of them. Are they "good"? I suppose I found them good at first, when I can push a base 3 to a 4 or a 4 to a 7. Overtime, I think I realized that it's not economically efficient, especially in turns where you're hanging to only 1 or 2 resources when there are other cards to be played. Would it even be a good idea to take off-colour talents for the new investigators to shore up weaknesses or is that too high of a cost?

It depends on the investigator and the type of deck you're building.

As an example, our current Dunwich decks are Jenny and Pete.

Jenny (who is uber rich) has several talents loaded in, including a few off-class (splash) ones. The reasoning behind this is that she should usually have a chunk of resources to throw at tests, and there aren't a ton of other cards she needs to get out on the board (assets, etc).

Now the opposite of that is my Pete deck. I'm running a low cost deck (because Pete is broke) where he's reliant on only having one or two extra resources at any given time. Those are usually used for pumping into his Fire Ax. This deck, of course, has none of those talents included.

It definitely depends on the character. I'm running Rex right now, and started with them. Spending 2 resources for the +2 covers the spread on his ability trigger, and can often buy an action. Rich characters like Rogues or Zoey can make good use of them too.

They may not be economically efficient, but they are very card-efficient. It's a tradeoff that's worth considering.

I found the opposite with pete. Granted I only played one scenario but most of my assets I gave him were healing ones to help soak damage. I found that duke on his own did most of the heavy lifting without using many resources. I think I sat on 6 resources for 3 turns because I had nothing to play. The final turn I dropped down the fire axe and buffed it to get the killing blow on the Ghoul Priest only to draw a crit fail and perish. good times were had...

Depends on the deck in normal, but they become almost a necessity at higher difficulties, because of the way the various chaos icons punish you with "if you fail" effects.

You can't always stop them from happening, but the skill talents allow you to make "safe" skill tests at important times, rather than rolling the dice on spawning an enemy on your last action (as one example).

While they are inefficient this is relevant to the amount of resources your deck has available. Jenny and especially the new Lone Wolf talent enable these cards better than anyone else, but even if you are playing a character without extra resource generation if your deck tends to use less resources you may find you have the excess resources around.

I used a spread of these in a deck for Jenny to enable her universal approach to cover any situation as a 3rd character separate from the other 2 in the group. I have seen success in using them with Skids and Zoey as well.

My Rex decks uses them a lot. Mind you all I have is 1 Physical Training and 1 Hyper-awareness in there, but once it gets out there, i use them frequently.

With Doc Christopher and Burglary, he tends to have a lot of resources sitting around.

17 hours ago, Guitarquero said:

I found the opposite with pete. Granted I only played one scenario but most of my assets I gave him were healing ones to help soak damage. I found that duke on his own did most of the heavy lifting without using many resources. I think I sat on 6 resources for 3 turns because I had nothing to play. The final turn I dropped down the fire axe and buffed it to get the killing blow on the Ghoul Priest only to draw a crit fail and perish. good times were had...

We probably have different deck theories (kind of the beauty of the game).

With mine, I use Duke to concentrate on investigating (Pete is rubbish at that). I use my resources to drop Fire Ax and Peter S. as early as possible, then I use whatever I can gather to play events and pump the Ax as necessary.