Can you play the Crisis Expansion's Crisis Mode with the core game and Heroes Unite combined?

Question

The description for the DC Comics Deck Building Game: Crisis Expansion 1 says the following:

This is not a standalone product. DC Comics Deck-building Game or Heroes Unite is required to play.

Is it possible to play with both at once in Crisis mode, maybe with house rules? Since the deck size in Crisis is the time limit, my first thought is that it could maybe be done if you mixed them all up, then reduced the size, but I'd be interested to know if this works well in practice (bonus points if there is something official that says whether or not they work out together).

To be clear, I know that I can just add the decks together and play without further modifications, but that makes the difficulty far, far easier because you have about 75% more cards (meaning you'll probably never end the game by reaching the end of the deck). I'd like to know if there is a way to play it that keeps the difficulty about the same.

Answer 1

As per BGG

James Cheng:

One of the option rules for combining and playing with both set mix up is to alternate your game with two separate decks. So you can play two game with each half of the combined deck. The second game will have a little more knowledge about what you might expect.

Richard Brady of Cryptozoic chimes in

At Cryptozoic, if we want to play with mixed sets... we generally mix all the cards up from the first two (and future!) sets and then count out about 115 or so cards to be our main deck. Sometimes you get some scary games with a lot of Villain cards but for the most part it's worked out pretty cool.

Otherwise, I'd suggest making a deck list of your favorite cards but make sure it's somewhere between 110-140. If you go above 140 it actually gets fairly easy, though we've made our own weird variants that use over that amount. We have never gone over 150 as far as I can remember.

John Galietta III:

If I recall my rulebook perusal correctly, it recommends that if you wish to customize the decks, use 25 cards per player. With 1-3 player games this is a little small, so I'd say no smaller than 100 cards. But just a random 100+ cards seems a little random for my tastes. You don't get as much of the synergy you normally would.

I usually keep my main decks separate. If I want to play using both sets, we use both decks separately, using 2 line ups. With the rules that A) you can only buy/gain/affect one line-up per turn, and B) when you buy/gain a card from the line-up, destroy the card in the second line-up in the same spot. There was a file about this variant in one of the forums.

I'd say for that, if you wanted to use the new main deck cards as well just mix 16 into each of the main decks. this variant wouldn't work very well in Crisis mode, though.

There's also this article on a supposed balance of combining the two decks. That might work as well.

In short while there are workarounds some of which are semi-official. There's no official method of combining. There are however many player suggested varients that should resolve the complexities.

Answer 2

The backs of the cards are all the same just for that reason.

Play Heroes United on its own, or combine it with the original for an epic battle!