I just recently read a long, long multiplayer lobby chat. One of the complaints that came up was the luck of the opening hand. It seems that I've gained about 200 Coins in treasure from the people who decided that Obvious Maneuvering into Traveling Curse leaves them no way to win. That's obviously not true, but it'd be nice to add a nicer opening hand. One of the ideas I thought of is that one could shuffle whatever cards one didn't want into one's deck in the opening hand and re-draw until you had the starting cards. For example, suppose I draw into Combustible, Hot Spot, Clumsy Chop (as well as the Run card) for my human mage. Under the proposed opening hand modifications, I could ditch the Clumsy Chop and Combustible into my deck and draw two new cards.
I've had more bad starting hands than good. Inevitably I get no moves, but lots of forced play cards first round...so I lose a round on those as I can't engage. Then, right at the heart of battle I end up drawing all move actions. It's annoying yes, but thats luck for you. I could see allowing one full mulligan, but only 1. What I mean by that is you'd have to ditch all the cards drawn by all your characters and have them reshuffled and redealt. No redo after that. 1 shot. If you had 2 good draws but the third character had a negative trait and no moves, you'd have to make a choice. Ditch the good with the bad, or deal with it. Allowing someone to pick which specific cards they wanted to ditch would be way way overpowered.
The thing is, unless you're both playing elves, or both draw Sprint or something, you're probably not going to be fighting on the first round anyway. So you're going to be discarding and drawing new cards regardless.
It is very common for teams to engage right at the first round. You don't have to rely on only Sprint. Team Push, Winds of War, Team Run in addition with the default move can get the team into action right away. It is very common for a mobile team to pack multiples of these cards. Of course if the team is mobile, there will be less attack card to throw around. Whoever getting focused most likely going to survive round 1 to go into the next.
I agree with progammer that first-round engagements are not uncommon, and they often arise from cards other than sprint. But as programmer pointed out, it costs some cards to close the distance, and that means fewer cards for the actual fight. If both teams just use all their cards to head straight to the victory area on the first round, I don't doubt that they'll usually meet and fight and the player with the best starting cards will probably win the game. But that's not how cautious player plays the game... When I draw a heap of weak cards on the first round I usually think of that as a good thing, because it's pretty easy to stay out of trouble in the first round and then with all those dud cards already drawn I'll have a better chance of drawing my strong cards when the real action starts. ... unless someone plays Whirlwind on the first round.
MtG has a perfectly good rule for sending back your opening hand : It penalizes you one card. Would like a nicer way to get a starting hand that can be worked with.
MtG is a bit different though because in MtG you don't have to spend a much of cards to close a distance gap to engage the enemy. In Card Hunter it's possible to play evasively to just stay out of trouble when you have weak cards. In MtG you can't really do that, and so starting hands are more important, and so they need a special rule for it.
