Talent Cards and why they deserve our love

One of the biggest unknowns at this stage of AH:TCG’s lifecycle is – how well will designers handle the character development? Will we be excited, adding new, stronger card to our decks? Will we have interesting choices and dilemmas? Will we feel like the investigators we play are growing in strength as the campaign progresses and they gather experience?

I really like what I have seen in the preview of Blood on the Altar, featuring 2 out of 5 new Talent cards¹. Why? There are few reasons why!

I wouldn't draw a person in glasses for the Keen Eye card...

 The most important aspect of 2 new cards is their “Permanent” keyword. First of all, they do not count against the deck size. Thanks to that, you don’t need to remove a card from your deck in order to add one of them. In fact, they actually INCREASE size of your deck! How is it possible? It’s simple – if you decide to include them, you most probably can remove a level 0 talent card from your deck. I am aware, they do not provide a bonus to the same pair of skills, but still the chances are, you decide to remove the weaker talent from your deck.

This touches fundamental challenge of deck upgrading – many of the level 0 cards are of a great significance to a deck. Exchanging them for a new, high level card might not be a deck improvement at all. There are few ways of dealing with this issue. The easiest solution are higher level versions of a card with the same name (let’s say 0 and 2 level versions of Lucky!). While it works fairly well for some cards and is a way to deal with some of the upgrades, it’s not always the best key (bit more of a detailed explanation has been provided by me here). Another alternative is to replace a card with another one, playing a similar role (let’s say Shotgun instead of Machete).

Finally, the third option is a card with a “Permanent” keyword. The even more ingenious design of the “Talent” cards helps even further to deal with the deck size problem (creating the aforementioned slot). It’s therefore the only upgrade path, which enables you to add new cards with new roles to the deck (in place of the remove 0 level talents).

Bloodletting - a controversial treatment

There are also two minor reasons for me to like the previewed cards. They mitigate chance for a bad luck of a draw, providing you with means of dealing with the scenario from the very first action even if you happen not to get a strong hand. It is even more important in further scenarios (where you can use them) – if you get very unlucky in the first scenario, you can just start the campaign from scratch with minimum wasted time. If it happens in the middle, however, it is very often a strongly negative playing experience.²  

Lastly, they are more than just stronger versions of level 0 talents, they use a new design. Not only it’s fresh, which is good by itself. The new design is also encouraging more of an interesting planning than the 0 level talents do (and, as I've already mentioned, boost a different pair of skills!). Keen Eye encourages you to take advantage of the increased skill value for the entire phase, hence forcing a choice to either fight/investigate 3 times in one turn or waste part of its benefits. Blood Pact has even more of an interesting approach, as adding doom tokens is a very delicate matter (also note how incredibly thematic this card is!).

At the end of the article I’d like to make a prediction. I predict we’ll see higher level versions of signature cards in the far future (around 3^rd campaign cycle or so). Let’s see if I guessed correctly!

¹ The preview uses a bolded word “Talent” to describe them, which suggests it’s a trait, shared by all five of them. However, the Blood Pact card does not have the Talent trait printed on it. It might be just an unfinished version of a card, or maybe the article’s author made a minor mistake.

²I have briefly touched the subject of the luck in the board games in the introduction. The question, whether a sudden loss due to a string of unfortunate random events is a good playing experience in Lovecraftian universe has also been briefly mentioned there (towards the end of the article). It is worth noting, that in a recently published preview of “Investigators of Arkham” FFG designers openly admitted a major difference between purely Lovecraftian view on the world and the Arkham Files setting. In Lovecraft’s work Mythos beings are invincible. The doom is imminent and cannot be stopped by human hands. People, even humanity in general are powerless and meaningless in the cold, uncaring universe. Since it does not make a good background for a cooperative game, that is supposed to be won every now and then, Arkham Files characters are portrayed as willing and able to resist the otherworldly powers to a degree and to repel them at least for time being.

All images are courtesy of cardgamedb.com and fantasyflightgames.com