Aliens Predator CCG: Deductive vs Inductive Planning

Via The Fresh Prince of Beleren

With the full sets of Alien Predator cards recorded into a spreadsheet, they are prepared for data merging and printing. The problem I ran into was deciding which of the ~350 cards in the Premier set of Aliens Predator.
The way that customizable card games are built means theres a lot more options available than you would ever use.
There is not even a maximum number of copies that makes a 'complete' set because Items and Locations have no limit when included in decks. The lack of hard restrictions on what can be included stumped me for a while - I know I have a print limit, and need to filter the card list down to something workable. But with 367 different cards to assemble into 3 distinct decks with their own requirements felt very daunting.

My first plan was to create a set of cards for each faction for the player to build a deck with. I started evaluating which cards to give to each faction, since lots were written to be faction agnostic - even if the card wouldn't be valuable to your faction. I got a fair bit through the Marine faction when I decided to take a different approach:

I simply scrolled through the card records, picked ones that looked important for the faction, and put them into a print queue. It's not perfect or balanced, but the time it would take to get those up to par would be too long. I need playtesting to see if the game is worth keeping as-is, so I need playable decks. And that's exactly what I made!