1. Player with initiative shuffles all their mission cards together and then reveals 3 random missions face-up.

2. The opposing player selects one mission to be discarded.

3. The player with initiative then gets to choose from the remaining two missions.

The idea is players would get more choices of what mission they have to play, so theyre not stuck playing "get to the ship" for the millionth time while all the missions they bought get to see little play. The players also get more autonomy in addition to more variety, as the player without priority gets to veto one of the 3 missions and the other player gets to decide which mission is played,giving both players some control over with mission gets played. Thoughts?

I think that is a good house rule. Your explanation says it all. I may give this a try in the future. Thanks for sharing!

Yea also liking this, great idea

I do like the idea of tinkering with how missions are selected. However, I do think your solution is creating some pitfalls.

A) The skirmish setup hinges on the player with the lowest total squad value getting to decide who gets the initiative. This can play a significant role in how you design your list, potentially bidding to get to decide. Something that is already an important part of your decisions making the list, that might now become too important.

B) Which map you play on plays as large a role as which specific mission, with some lists significantly better on some maps than others, so at the very least the other player should be able to discard an entire map rather than a singular mission.

C) And even if the second player gets to discard a mission - or a map - there are already so many maps/missions in circulation that it would be somewhat trivial for the player with initiative to pick a battle ground or objective that would disadvantage the second player enough to make the actual game unbalanced enough to border on being trivial.

Now, Star Wars Armada has an asymmetric setup and has managed to do so with a smart design, but the weight of being first/second player is very different in that game (as having the initiative is 'permanent' of sorts unlike in IA) and I think it is more trickier to do with IA as it is. I do like to already have meaningful decisions during the setup, but they risk taking away meaningful decision during the game itself, if the setup becomes too influential for the outcome of the game.

Cremate, you pointed out that getting to choose who gets initiative is an important part of setup, but how often does a player choose to give themself initiative at the start, currently it is considered a disadvantage. With this system the player with initiative gets final say on the map, so it wouldn't be an automatic choice to give the other player initiative, making that choice more interesting.

You're right that the map can matter just as much as the mission, but that will only matter in the unlikely scenario where the same map is drawn twice in the 3 cards. It's also not much different than having just drawn that map randomly with no player getting a choice.

Also note this is for casual skirmish to increase player autonomy and game variety while still keeping things fair and interesting with variance, competitive skirmish has its own method of selecting maps for each round of a tournament that is completely different than the Skirmish guide.