I've played a couple games of Crisis Mode from the Crisis Expansion (Pack 1) of the DC Comics Deck-Building Game with one, two, and three players. While we like the cooperative mode of it (it always seemed weird in the base game that the heroes were competing against each other), the biggest issue we have is that the game takes so long. While the base game takes about 45 minutes, the Crisis Mode has never taken less than 2 hours (and once almost made it to 3 hours).

The main reason it takes so long of course is that we have to go through so many villains and their crisis events. If we reduce the number of those, then the game would be faster but would be easier because it means you're less likely to run out of the deck cards. So I'm not sure that this is feasible.

What houserules can we employ to make Crisis Mode take an hour or less without reducing difficulty?