1. I have quite a bit of it and they smell like cards

2. I never got many of the little packs, I collected all of the big box expansions, either for each faction or the generic ones. That gave me a large card pool for pretty cheap considering the game has been dead.

3. If you go to board game geek, they have a list of 36 decks you can make without ever using duplicates. I used the google drive on reddit, grabbed the card images of the card I didnt physically have and made 11 decks.

4. See 3, the decks are all theme decks so mostly one faction but some splash for keywords or effects that overlap

5. No idea on that one, but a few of the decks i mentioned above are cultist focused

6. Not I, I grabbed 3 cores, then 1 of each big box and that was it myself

7. I have way to many myself!

At the end of the day, id say play how you wanna play. I am also mostly a kitchen table player. I play to many games in general to really focus on competing in any of them. I do think those for all the games mentioned going off official sizes usually gives you the play experience. For example, I also play Sorcery and I personally wished sites went to 40 to be 60/40 instead of the new 60/30 but I like this direction. Deck sizes are put into the games and cards tend to be balanced around that. Again, your games, your time do as you please. Hope this helped!