Given your starting hand of cards, how much confidence and/or value do you place on its effectiveness for the remainder of your game?

I don't think that the starting hand is something that has an absolute value in the development of your game. Given that you get at least 2 cards each round, and with some decks and planets you can get a lot more each turn. That being said, a good start is always better than a bad start. Having also the chance of a mulligan, I think you have to be really unlucky to get such a bad hand that you can blame the loss of the game on it.

Good reply. Pretty understandable too.

Hopefully someone with gaming experience will chime in and list what a "good starting hand" is and how well they have done with starting hands in general.

I've played about 7 games so far, so my experience is pretty limited, but for an opening hand I want lots of cheap units (0-3 cost) so that I can spread them out and start winning command struggles ASAP. You draw so many cards and can play pretty much any of them most of the time, mos thands are fine though.

I started playing with a friend who is really good at this kind of games and we had only one core, so we started testing the 30 cards plus the neutral ones.

Less than two weeks after I got the first core I got my second (and last one) and we then went into playing with 67 cards (55 faction cards plus 12 neutrals (two copies of each) and we already started too see how some decks can be optimized by removing some cards, both neutrals and from each faction.

I haven't used the mulligan yet, but I agree with Alphasquid. Cheap units is usually a good start so you can start gathering a nice army. On the other hand, it also depends on the first planet. If it's one of the three coloured ones, you may want some strong unit to work with your commander so you can have a good start.

It also depends on the army. High value units in some armies ain't that good or that "combable" as the low value ones, but there are some armies that have units that are worth every resource. Chaos' Vicious Bloodletter (5r, 4/4, AoE 3) is a really tough unit that can be the core of your game and help you win a lot of battles.

Summing up, and this is going to sound like a really obvious thing, I think the most important thing is to have a well balanced deck so you know that even if your starting hand is not perfect, at least you will have good cards in the next round.