If I disregard the 'play with one set or the other set' and just shuffle them all, what's the impact?

Is it just that you'll have a more random deck and potentially therefore not pull some of the powerful character cards?

I thought about that aswell, difference I had was remove all the double up cards ie hidden fleet, subversion etc.

Or maybe get a larger draw so you can go through the cards.

I guess if you both have the cards then at least it'll be out of balance for both sides ;0

4 hours ago, stuuk said:

If I disregard the 'play with one set or the other set' and just shuffle them all, what's the impact?

Is it just that you'll have a more random deck and potentially therefore not pull some of the powerful character cards?

The risk of having a completely crappy hand could happen. What if you had 4 rescue cards in your hand, for example?

I had this conversation with my friend I play with. Retaining balance is important but we think we can go through the deck and use one of each card, discarding the duplicates and maintain that balance. Next time we play we are going to try that. We both agree that using EVERY card would be way to much.

Maybe what you can do is keep the structure of cards not associated to a leader. I don't have the game in front of me but I think when you use one set over the other, you remove a certain number of cards wit the intel, diplomacy, spec ops and logistic. For example, the number of intel cards you remove from one set matches the number of intel cards you introduce with the other set. The same happens with the other 3 icons. Like I said, I don't have the game in front of me so I'll just make up a number. Let's say there are 4 intel cards in the base game that you replace with 4 new intel cards from the expansion set, maybe what you could do is line up all 8 intel cards (from both base game and expansion) and pick 4 to be in your mission deck. This would allow a mix of cards from both set. Or you could randomly pick 4 but like someone pointed out above, you could get suboptimal mission decks.

From the empire point of view, it would be attractive to do that just to ensure you retain the Carbonite Freeze mission (which otherwise is not used with the expansion set).