Will be starting a LoR campaign soon, and just wondering what most people do with shop cards when bringing in a new expansion. Because you only draw a certain number, the chances that you'll get new or good cards decreases a lot the more cards you have. I can see a few options:

1.) Throw everything together and take your chances. You'll probably only see that one cool new card after several campaigns, but this seems to be what the rules describe.

2.) Take out old expansions (like LotW in my case) and introduce only the new expansion to the core deck.

3.) Make a campaign shop deck of a certain size with random cards (so the deck is like 20 cards, but the contents are random)

4.) Make a campaign shop deck with chosen cards (same as above, but engineering the deck to include new or desirable cards for certain)

They all have pros and cons, 4 being the most attractive but certainly the most potential for breaking balance. Any thoughts?

The rules are pretty clear, and I think most players follow them. You add them all together and hope for the best. While you're welcome to do #2 remember it's an all or nothing thing. If you remove the items from a certain expansion, you also remove the heroes, classes, monsters, ect. from the possible pool of choices.

Right- the reason content from a given expansion is supposed to be all-or-none is that often the content will play off itself. Nerekhall tiles have a lot of hazard terrain- the iron boots are quite useful in that campaign. Chains and Mists monsters can terrify- items that prevent being terrified (or terrify monsters) are super useful.

EDIT: For act 1, remember that the size of the deck doesn't REALLY matter (at least as much) because the heroes will see every card after the interlude.

I agree with the previous posters but would like to add that the 4th option will affect balance because the heroes will then of course only put the best items in the shop deck. Also, at that point you are not dealing with the game mechanic of 'random drawing' anymore, but just waiting for a specific item to pop up.

But if you want to modify the shop per se, I would suggest the following:

1) Don't reshuffle the cards back in the deck, instead put them back in the game box. This has two effect. First, the crap items can't be drawn again. Second, good items the players can't afford or choose not to buy can't be redrawn.

and/or 2) Allow the heroes to discard all the shop cards and draw new shop cards once per campaign phase. This burns the shop deck a lot faster and increases the chance of good items appearing.