So after starting a RtL campaign with just the base game, and enjoying it thus far, I've picked up Well of Darkness and Tomb of Ice. We're only a couple weeks in, so we're going to shuffle in all the new cards added by the expansions, but I'm actually not thrilled with the free extra overlord cards - they're fairly low-powered spawn cards that between the two expansions would add six cards to my deck, increasing the time it takes to run through it and pick up some valuable Overlord XP.

I'm considering effectively treating them as actual zero-cost treachery cards, and just swapping them in while taking a like number of cards out. Since the cards being added aren't particularly powerful, it doesn't seem like it would be unbalancing. Has anyone else tried something along these lines?

The extra cards in WoD and ToI may not be the best cards in the deck, but they're far from the worst, and most are probably above-average. Treating them as zero-cost treachery cards would be rather advantageous to the overlord.

Of course, I say this without actually having seen the RtL monster stats, so it's possible (for all I know) that the expansion monsters are much worse (relative to base game monsters) in RtL than in vanilla...

Nah, you get a Dark Priest Spawn for goodness' sake. The extra Overlord cards are meant to be added, yes, raising your deck size to 45 (from 36 in the base game). The two Kobold spawns are rather useless, true, while the Ferrox and Dark Priest spawn are great. You also get an extra Crushing Block and a free Danger. Does this disadvantage you? Xandria thinks: not.

So: bad lame OverLord! Back to your cave!

Well, seeing as the Dark Priest spawn is from Altar of Despair, which I don't yet own, that's not so helpful. I had somehow missed that the Danger card was free though, I thought that one had a Treachery cost. Regardless, if the experience is that the larger deck size does not penalize the OL I'll just throw the cards in.

WarrenLocke said:

Yeah it takes maybe an extra few turns to cycle through the deck, but the extra cards are worth it IMO.

The extra Crushing Block free Danger card are also from Altar of Despair. So are the extra Paralyzing Gas trap and the Blood Ape spawn. There's a Danger card in Well of Darkness, but it costs 1 event treachery (and still always struck me as a very good card--AoD seems designed to just give the OL arbitrarily good stuff).

The Kobold spawns have always struck me as far from useless--the masters generally pay for the card with Trickery, and unless the heroes have an AoE weapon (or sometimes even if they do), the normal Kobolds often pay for the card again by absorbing ~5 hero attacks and thus delaying the heroes a turn or so. Again, this is based on playing JitD quests, not RtL.

Spawn cards generally seem to be among the most powerful cards available to the overlord, but the reinforcement marker seems like a rather heavy-handed nerf to them, so I'm not sure where they end up.

There is just no opportunity to use kobolds in RtL really. The issue is the high cost of spawning (weighing this card vs that card knowing you usually will only get three spawns a dungeon, less if the heroes play decent at all) and the minimal space to spawn in. In the normal game, they are fantastic, even if you just hide the masters somewhere the heroes have already been and have no plans to go back to (this value is lost in RtL again as the monsters are out of play a few turns later as the heroes exit the level).