So here's what's in the box right now:
all Hinterlands
all Seaside cards that don't require coins/mats/extra cards
all Adventures cards that don't require coins/mats/extra cards
all events that don't require coins/mats/extra tokens
maybe some cornucopia? I can't really remember. I may have cherry picked some fun stuff like HoP, and I definitely grabbed some extra alt VP cards. My thanks go out to iguanaiguana and Roadrunner. And anyone else who sees some of their suggestions in here.
Our first (and only game thus far) with this selection was:
This was the first time my friend had looked at a lot of these cards. This is also the first board we played that wasn't an obvious engine (or really an engine at all). He also dismissed Silk Roads as being worse than Gardens because it only counts your green cards instead of your whole deck. When I pointed out that it requires fewer cards to power up and they self-synergize, he was still skeptical. If I recall correctly, I opened Remake JoaT (using alms) and I think he may have even opened the same. He ended up just doing Treasure Trove BM (I think he had 4 or 5 of them by the end) and I got a ton of remakes and went after silk roads, trashing silvers off JoaT into SR, turning remakes into duchies, and getting the other SR with alms. He missed that I dipped for them so early and I ended up getting all 8 SR's and ending the game on SR, duchy (from trashing remake & SR into duchy) and remake. This was actually my first game with Alms I think, and I think it really made the event shine. Oh, I also picked up a Treasure Trove, but it wasn't actually any good because I kept using alms. I think I only played it once. It was a good way to show my friend the power of alt-vp, and how to start watching for 3-piles. I think I'm going to start making him talk through the set before we start playing to see what he thinks.