I just picked up my first reinforcement pack. Following the rules you're supposed to remove a lore card from your army's deck for every one of the cards you add from the reinforcement pack. We thought this just slowed down the game set-up and made a house rule to just add them to the deck. I was curious if anyone else does this or if someone has an opinion of why this might be a bad idea.

It's not a particularly bad idea. Rules for swapping cards were made to keep the decks balanced and to counter the dilution of cards in case you enter several neutral units in the mix. If you play a 23-card deck instead of a 20-, it's not a biggie.

The only really important thing for balance is that you never have more than 2 copies of the same lore card in the deck.

We tried playing by the rules but didn't like it. Scenario creation and army building is enough customization for us.

We found that if you combine the decks but then take out all of the duplicates (leaving just one of each card) you have I believe a 24 card deck. That's worked fine for us. No deck customizing, just take your combined, but thinned-out deck and go with it. We haven't have any problems, but we do note that:

1. Mustering neutral units can add 3/6/9 cards to the deck, which is notably larger than 20.

2. Having only 1 card of certain cards they give you two of (and not being able to include 2 copies) might feel a little constraining. Especially if you like the cards that grant +1 VP or a boost to Lore.

Another house rule we've started playing with (in part to tone down the slightly bloated deck, and to make up for the lack of customization) is to let players discard and draw a replacement if you get a Lore card you can't use.

Daverman,

customizing was created to offer an option to remove Lore cards you cannot use in a given game. With the increasing number of units available, it's frequent that you don't have a specific unit fielded, so that having Lore cards boosting that specific unit appeared to be a flaw in the game (especially if you play super-specialized armies done with two or three units types). In this way players have an option to remove the lore cards they know that will never be used in the game. Clearly, with your house rule of draw / discard / redraw you have a good proxy for this one

This said, the important thing is that everyone has fun with the game, so, bending this or that rule in favour of a better game experience is certainly the right thing to do

Daverman, I like that house rule to redraw if you get a lore card you can't use. I always felt compelled to include a diverse squad in case I drew unit-specific cards. Do you allow the mulligan if a player chooses the lore option to draw two, discard one (e.g., redrawing both cards if one is unusable)?

Yeah, anytime we draw a Lore card and it's one we can't use (whether it's for a unit we didn't recruit, or even a unit we had recruited but is no longer alive in the game) we just reveal it, say "oops" and draw a replacement. For us it's worked just fine. We get to skip the deck customization and don't feel punished if we draw a certain card. In our opinion, Lore cards are supposed to be neat, fun cards to play. You still need the Lore, the right units/triggers to happen, etc. not to mention the possibility of cards like Runic Barrier that might cancel your card out. Being stuck with cards you can't possibly use just seems anti-fun to us for no good reason.