guidelines for playing with expansions?

[killigula]

I recently purchased two expansion decks (2 and 3) and added expansion 3 (clerical errors) to my existing starter deck and played a few games. Overall I was disappointed due to the perceived overall decrease of monsters in the door deck. What am I doing wrong?

More generally what are the guidelines for playing with expansion decks? Are all cards supposed to be used from the expansion? Has anyone else ever experienced this problem? Is this really just a function of my sucky shuffling?

[Clipper]

You should generally add the entire expansion and do so in order if you want to keep Class and Race balance maintained.

The proportion of monsters doesn't really change when adding expansions, and it actually increases when you add Munchkin 3, but the length of periods you will get without monsters may increase due to the higher card count, so the monsters may seem less frequent, even though they aren't. For proof, here's the numbers for the sets you combined:

Munchkin: 37 monsters / 95 doors = 38.9%
Munchkin: 27 monsters / 66 doors = 40.9%
Munchkin + Munchkin 3: 64 monsters / 161 doors = 39.8%

Munchkin 2 would make the monsters more frequent too as it has 27 monsters in 64 Doors.

If you think the game is moving too slowly, employ the Listen at the Door rule in the Faster Play Rules section on the last page of the rules. You will got through the Door deck a little faster that way.

[MunchkinMan]

If the above info is too much to swallow: Munchkin 2 and Munchkin 3 try to maintain the balance of cards, and each actually has a greater proportion of Monsters in their Door decks. Almost 12 years of experience with the game says to me that mostly what you'll see is that you just don't have to shuffle the deck s as often because there are more cards. I don't recall any significantly increased Monster lag unless the deck is not shuffled well...

The best way to go about it is to add expansions in order, but that is, by no means, a requirement.

[Andrew Hackard]

Also: the sets tend to get printed with cards of a type together in a deck, so you may want to deal them into piles, recollect, and THEN shuffle the first time you use a set.

Or just spread 'em out on the table and mess 'em around awhile. Y'know, the finger paint approach to card shuffling.

If you go straight into riffle-shuffles out of the box, you probably aren't doing a good enough job mixing up the card types unless you do a bunch of shuffles.