I picked up a copy of Crossfire at a charity game thing, and found out it came with a copy of the Vegas Promo. The 8 special cards are pretty cool, but more importantly they all have about the same difficulty (low-end normal obstacles). The Vegas run is identical to the crossfire starting run, but with 2 of these special cards instead of the first 2 normal obstacles each round (hard obstacles still come out like usual). That reduces the randomness so there is less of a chance of a 11 nuyen obstacle right away, and no chance of more than 2 showing up in any given round. It might be a bit too much dampening of the randomness, but that might be ok for a starter run.
Used sparingly (and certainly not every run), it might be an interesting way to control a run to make sure it is less (or more) difficult at a particular point in the run. Have gangers, bug spirits, or opposing runners show up at the right/wrong time to make for an interesting and thematic part of the run.
Anyone else have thoughts?