It's a problem apparently lots of people have, and having recently reached level seven myself, I'm starting to feel. Gradually your mage goes from having 2 firestorms in a 15 card deck to 2 firestorms in a 30 card deck. You don't have many power beads though, so those extra cards you keep adding to your deck are stupid things that don't help you at all, like the level one racial skill items (Walk! Shuffle team! and a block skill.). So here's my suggestion: For empty item slots beyond the basic ones (such as, weapon 1, armor, shield for warrior; weapon, trinket 1, trinket 2 for wizard; weapon 1, armor, trinket 1 for priest), instead of having them grant a bunch of weak cards that you really don't want in your deck, they instead grant a bunch of minor negative traits that are generally bad, but three of them might be better than three walks. Some examples might be: "Stepped on a rock" - trait, duration 1, encumber 1, when you draw the last card of your deck, take 1 damage. "Tore a lumbar" - trait, duration 1, weakness 1, when you draw the last card of your deck, take 1 damage. "Dropped your glasses" - trait, duration 1, reduces all attack range by 1 to a minimum of 1, when you draw the last card of your deck yada yada yada. Basically, the whole idea being, if you don't mind getting hit by a bunch of minor, inconveniencing debuffs, you could keep the same consistency at level seven that you had at level three. It could even be a strategy to leave certain item slots empty in multiplayer if you want your character to have a laser-focused strategy (like say, a dedicated discard character). That final clause I added to basically make it a large trade-off to leave the majority of your slots empty, as you could conceivably be taking 5 damage every turn or every other turn if you really went all-in.
I am still jealous you even have 2 firestorm and I am still sitting at 0. Otherwise try to get similar or the same equipment to offset having more equipment with more abilities and my wizard at times uses 2 of the same arcane items often to offset this such as: Burning Bangle The problem I feel is if you can limit yourself to a very few cards like you suggested it could prove to be overpowered against the campaign and in multiplayer if you face someone who doesn't do it.
Might be a bit too easy to abuse. Since you can only have 3 buffs/debuffs on a character at once this would make fire/cold mages next to useless. There is also an armor card that blocks all buffs/debuffs that would synergise with this way to well. Maybe if they were something like Ouch! it would be better but I guess that would force people to use dwarves so they could take that extra damage... Maybe we should just stick with using items like Electroporter Novice.
Well I don't know much about balance so obviously the specific examples I listed could be too strong. My main point was that it would be nice if we could take a bunch of negative trait cards in exchange for having a smaller card pool and more consistency, especially in the earlier levels when you don't have access to as many good items and have to make due with a big pile of useless crap while enemies get stronger and stronger.
You kind of can do this already. Not with whole item slots, but in each slot there are items available with 1 or 2 negative cards, and many of those are indeed trait negatives. You just have to choose very specific items.
