A friend of mine came up with this idea and to me at least it sounds like a good way to make room for more cards and cut down on multiple copies of cards that are only used once or twice.
Instead of printing multiple copies of the non-unique henchmen cards (like Ancient Skeleton or Harpy Monk, for example) just print 1 copy of each and in the base set you would have a set of Generic/Standard(whatever word you want) Henchmen placeholder cards.
Then for an example scenario you could list
Villain - Black Fang
Henchmen - Bruthazmus
Ancient Skeleton (Generic)
When you built the decks, you would shuffle Black Fang, Bruthazmus, and however many Generic Henchmen cards you need to fill the decks. You'd just keep the Ancient Skeleton card handy to refer to when any of the Generic Henchman cards are encountered during the adventure.
End result, you could cut way down on printing duplicate Henchman cards that would only be used once or twice anyway and make room for more interesting and different banes and boons that could fill those slots in the adventure packs.
There may well be reasons why this wouldn't work but it seemed like a good enough idea that I thought I'd share it on the forums to see what you guys thought.
Your friend isn't the first to suggest such a thing.
I can see it both ways. It's nice not to have to cross-reference things and add that complexity, like Vic said. But on the other hand, I always thought it was odd that the henchmen section of the box is the biggest for the cards you seem to use the least.
Having actual henchmen cards instead of a generic placeholder card and one henchman enables the use of multiple different henchmen in custom scenarios and allows special rules for other custom scenarios that can end up bringing in different henchmen.
I like that aspect of it.
Perhaps you want to create an entire campaign that has a story background to it and actually follows a thematic flow, so you want certain locations of a scenario to have Bandits and certain other locations to have Skeletons as the henchmen. If you used the generic henchman card idea, that wouldn't be possible, as then you'd need two different generic henchmen cards.
Or maybe someone might make a special scenario in which you take all the available henchmen, shuffle them together, and place one random one in each location. That would definitely cause a headache.
I like the idea of generic cards for certain things, but because of how this game is set up and how everything is 'on the card' with no referencing really needed once you know the basic rules, they'd end up being a time distraction, I think. But if Paizo decides to put them in the updated card pack, I'd still happily accept 'em, lol.