House rule idea for using lots of ultimate and / or class decks

[Ysalmari21]

I am about to finish my first play-through of Skull and Shackles, and wanted to invest in some more decks to add for my next play-through, and wanted to add in the Ultimate decks. Based on everything I've seen online, it seems that shuffling in a whole bunch of extra decks could have some adverse effects on significantly watering down the liklihood you'll see certain boons you might need. Each new adventure deck number would have double the amount of new boons being added (~50 new boons in each adventure deck, and each Ultimate Deck contains 10-15 boons per each adventure deck, with all 5 that makes more boons from Ultimate decks than the adventure deck). I haven't found much online as far as ideas to mitigate this, so I wanted to test out my idea and see what others think.

When I play, I put all banished cards into a pile as I'm playing though, and at the end of the game I sort out the cards and shuffle them back into their respective category. My thought is, after every game, choose 1 boon from each of the six types that were banished that game to remove from the box. If we assume one or two losses per adventure deck number (which is what I had), that's 42 boons removed each adventure deck, roughly the same amount added because of ultimate decks.

You'll still have a tougher time of finding that perfect boon, but at least you have a better chance, and certainly won't see the same crappy spell show up over and over and over again. The two biggest places this might not work is in the blessing deck (keeping those ratios the same seems fairly important), and possibly when you get to decks 5 and 6. I'm on deck 6 in my current game, have most of the elites and basicsremoved, and my boon stacks are pretty thin. I'm pretty sure I have fewer weapons and armor than when I started.

Thanks for any input!

[Axoq]

I'm currently in the middle of a homebrew game -- Bloodlust Corsairs, a Ron Lundeen re-imagining of Skull and Shackles which I can very much recommend. We had two people who decided to play Class Deck characters rather than ones that came with S&S, and so we dumped their character deck contents into the box. This was also while the Ultimate decks were just coming out, so we threw in the Ultimate Combat and UMagic decks as well. We haven't been making any kind of moves towards thinning out those decks in the larger game, so all those cards are sticking around, modulo banishing Basics and Elites. (Never before had we banished so many Blessings of the Gods. Now we can't get rid of them fast enough.)

Does the game feel watered down and less on the theme of pirates? Well, aside from the argument that something "watered down" would actually be more appropriate for pirates, not really. The boons are more varied, but the banes are all still pirate-themed, and the banes at least outnumber the boons. The game certainly does not feel more generic.

Does it make it harder to acquire to acquire that killer item or ally that such-and-such a character ought to have? Somewhat, although the introduction of the Ultimate decks into the mix helps with that because that's their role. They're supposed to be supplements to the Class Decks, especially in the earlier going when nearly all the cards from those decks were taken from the AP decks. They're supposed to make your eyes get all sparkly when you get the chance to acquire one. I also have a hard time seeing any must-have specific boons that your party is considerably worse off without (outside of that one from a different AP:

Spoiler:

Aldern Foxglove

Does it affect the interaction of the blessings deck/hourglass/clock? Yes, this is more of an effect. A number of the Ultimate blessings don't have matches or simply don't do anything interesting even when there is a match. It also made me want to carry a Blessing of the Gods in my deck just so I can copy powers every once in a while for those rare blessings we may never acquire. It's also weird to see the occasional EgypOsirian or Worldwound god spring up where you weren't expecting one. But this is a minor flaw.

All in all, the game doesn't feel all that different except that there is a lot more variety in the boons to acquire. This might be because it's a homebrew, where there's less room for calibration. The Lundeen games never add cards for theme, so the feeling of this card is clearly meant to do that isn't there. Packing extra cards in when replaying an AP doesn't seem all that bad.

(On the other hand, we all have craptacular non-Basic, non-Elite cards we all wish we could find an excuse to remove from the game. I sure won't try to stop you. :-) )