I'm wondering if buying the early cards are a good idea or not? On the plus side, they give you some skills that you can use, but on the con side they don't have any success icons on them, so you are decreasing your odds of getting a success when testing.

It helps that you can trade them in for better cards later if you do buy them, but still.

What do y'all think?

Depends upon your party. They have some of the best synergistic abilities, so you really want them prepared so you can use those abilities AND pull them from your deck to increase success odds. If you have bonuses to scout, it helps you prep your deck more on both accounts. And as I’ve found, the 7s and 12a aren’t necessarily better since card abilities force a harder decision on prepping versus keeping for guaranteed success. You always know you can prep the cheap cards. Now, what I wouldn’t do is take three different rolls and buy three separate tier one cards, because that does affect the quality of your deck badly.

Think about it this way: worst case scenario is you would fail your first 2 adventures, giving you a total of 6xp. You add 2 blank cards. This takes the odds from 26.7% to 23.5% to draw a success. Not a big difference when it comes to drawing successes! But you do add some new abilities if you pull them and prepare them.

21 hours ago, MeeKey said:

Think about it this way: worst case scenario is you would fail your first 2 adventures, giving you a total of 6xp. You add 2 blank cards. This takes the odds from 26.7% to 23.5% to draw a success.

Cool that you've actually worked out some stats. I never sat down and counted how many successes there were.

Still, none of the cards you can buy have successes on them until you hit the ones that cost 12 points. So you could fail the first five adventures before you get up to 12 points.

Yeah I agree that it depends. For instance if I have a title that gives me a modifier of my choice I might forego coordinated strike. It's tempting to take the "word of" skills but I've found they're not always the best call. Coordinated strike can be really handy to take down "bosses", trail sign can really help out a team member, and sneaking can be quite nice for the versatility on a burglar. Those three are my favourite so far I think.

also, the ready defence card is a success with only 7 experience. That can allow you more experience to spend elsewhere and avoid the blank cards.