PickmanMCs Core "Skids" O'Toole

Do you only want to fight? No investigation?

This is a really expensive deck, but I don't really have a lot of meaningful suggestions to offer because I cannot get Skids to work with just the Core Set.

There are some cuts and adds you can do on the margins. You should add more skill cards like Guts or Perception. The latter helps you with investigation with little cost, and can draw a card if you're successful. Guts is for some extra protection from the willpower treacheries that'll come from the encounter deck. I'd also switch out the knives for flashlight, because you want your weapons to do two damage a swing - which the knife can only do once. The going rate for clues per action is one per, and the flashlight makes your investigate actions more successful for three separate tests.

My first cuts for this deck are burglary, Hard Knocks, Backstab, and Sneak Attack. Burglary generates resources too slowly. Hard Knocks only works for decks that are inexpensive in the aggregate (and yours is expensive). Backstab can be very impactful, but it's too expensive and unreliable. Sneak Attack is also a slow way to do 2 damage, because you are taking 2 turns to do 2 damage. I'd replace them with cheaper cards like Opportunist and Dodge.

If you are leaning towards combat, I'd also suggest switching out Leo de Luca for Beat Cop. Beat Cop is less expensive, gives you a passive combat buff, and its upgraded version helps you do free, testless damage. I just don't think Leo jibes well with assets that cost 3 or higher, like Derringer and Machete.

With all the suggestions I'm making though, I still don't think Skids is very good with just core set cards. His strength in evasion is irrelevant for scenarios like Night of the Zealot. He is middling in both combat and investigation. He can have these amazing, game-swinging turns, but can be so useless in other turns that he has to play catch-up against the agenda deck.

A comparison with Roland Banks is in order here, because he is also a possible 'generalist' who's a better fit in Night of the Zealot. While Cover Up is a nasty personal weakness, Roland's low agility is not a big deal, because agility treacheries are rare and only target his large health pool. His ability to resist willpower treacheries is not that far off from Skids, as he has one additional base willpower in exchange for one less sanity. Most importantly, he is better in combat; and he can use that strength to contribute to gathering clues through his special ability. His access to seeker cards like Working a Hunch also allows him to pull his weight in investigation better than Skids can, despite a similar intellect value of 3.

This is a long way of saying that from my personal experience, Skids is a hard investigator to play with just the core set(s). You can find jankier decks and setups that essentially ignore a lot of the objectives win conditions of the Night of the Zealot scenarios until the very end. But besides those innovations, he just didn't have a good card pool to start off with unlike the other investigators he came with. You have been warned!

Thank you for your feedback. Theres a lot of useful information for me in there. And I will definitely consider trying Roland Banks instead. Hopefully our next try in this campaign will be more successful...