I've had a look about but not found anything, is there any articles on the differences between the damage decks and their strategic advantages/ disadvantages?

http://www.belloflostsouls.net/2015/09/star-wars-x-wing-meet-the-new-damage-deck.html

That's great thanks

Is there any reasons to keep the old damage decks?

Reposting what I told someone in the rules forums:

http://s93768914.onl...ing/crits.html#has the details of the old and new crits.

It's hard to make a generic statement about who likes or dislikes the new deck besides "The new deck is more fair to everyone, on average". Here's the breakdown of what changed.

• Damaged Sensor Array in the new deck affects actions you get from Upgrade cards, so it hurts ships that use stuff like Expose and Marksmanship. The old one would still let you use those actions.
• The new Major Explosion causes crits, which is just strictly more deadly than the old Minor Explosion, which only caused hits.
• The new Major Hull Breach makes all future hits against you into crits, which is much more dangerous for high hull ships than the old Minor Hull breach, which just did damage to you if you did a red maneuver.
• Loose Stabilizer (stress from white maneuvers) replaces Munitions Failure. Munitions Failure was deadly to ships that depended on secondary weapons and meaningless to everyone else. Loose Stabilizer is more harmful to ships with bad dials and less harmful to ships with good dials.
• The new Weapons Failure affects all weapons, whereas the old Weapons Malfunction only affected primaries. Ships with secondary turrets loved Weapons Malfunction because it did nothing to them. Weapons Failure is more fair to everyone.
• The new Blinded Pilot is less dangerous because you can flip it down even if there was nothing to shoot at. It also doesn't let you trigger Gunner, which the old one allowed. So the new one is more dangerous to Gunner/Luke ships.
• The old Injured Pilot (lose pilot ability and EPT upgrade) was deadly to aces but meaningless to generics. It was replaced by Shaken Pilot (no straights), which is a weak crit against almost every pilot.

Is there any reasons to keep the old damage decks?

Yes. It can never hurt to have extras. Currently, both decks are tournament legal, so you can choose to use the older one if you have a reason to believe it will be less dangerous to your squad.