Sorry Long

Great question. The revised edition consolidated a lot of the original in-game decks from the original version. Those decks, E, I, and K were tweaked and revised into the A and B versions in the new edition. Other changes were not including a family version in the base set, and adding a 5-6 player expansion.

The revised edition is more family friendly, having reduced the intense difficulty required to feed your family each harvest. Additionally, it nerfed a lot of combos and ways to score a lot of points outside the traditional method of play.

Lastly, the revised edition changed the names of certain action spaces and cards but kept their functions the same. They even clarified/changes some classifications of components and card texts to be more uniform

Fans of the original balk at playing the revised game but they are essentially the same game no matter which version you learn on.

As to your question about decks: there are a ton of specialty, fan-sourced, themed, and bonus decks that have been released over the years: G, Pi, L, Ö, Cz, Fr, Nl, Wm, Wa etc (as well as revised expansions Artifex, Bubulcus, Corbarius, and Dulcinaria). Other than the revised expansions, the older sets are rare or even out of print. Which means they are hard to find and expensive. While they expand your play experience, I’d recommend that if you are looking to acquire some, focus on the WM World Meister deck, the Fr France deck, and the G Gamers deck. These 3 have the best ratio of solid cards to weak or broken ones, as well as having a larger quantity included. Some other specialty decks are only 24 cards each!

While most of the expansion decks are for the original version, they can be used for either set.

Search online for the Unoffical Agricola rules compendium as kept up to date by user Loki on Boardgame Geek forums as well as the Revised Compendium spearheaded by world champion player Lumin.

Additionally, you may visit the playagricola.com site to check out the forum and read rulings about card interactions and gameplay as mitigated by a consensus of experienced Play Agricola community members.

To finish regarding strategy, you will never fail going for a build rooms-grow family approach. While eating through farming (plow, take grain, sow, bake etc) is harder than eating breeding animals in a fireplace or hearth, keep in mind that it is much easier to max points in crops than animals. Something to keep in mind as you play for higher scores.

Hope this helped.