This situation actually came up for us the other day. We tallied the total rewards for each scenario and adventure deck and allowed random fate to reward the player with weapons, armor, items, etc. as they were rewards for completing certain scenarios. Because we were beginning adventure deck 2, they were not allowed to acquire any deck 2 equipments because we did not have them either. In the and they were pretty balanced with a few elite items and all the accumulated power feats and card feats. By the end of the first scenario they had even better equipments as we picked up a few deck one items.