Suppose three players agree to a variant in which each player's starting deck has five cards: KC, KC, and three cards of that player's choosing. If the players choose nine distinct kingdom cards then the board is those nine plus a tenth chosen at random; if they choose fewer than nine distinct, then enough are chosen at random to make a full board. Starting hands are chosen simultaneously, and then it is decided at random who goes first.
Which cards would you have to exclude to make this game interesting? (For example, Bridge would have to be excluded, otherwise the first player just wins immediately.) Having implemented those exclusions, what starting hand do you choose?
I have a few ideas, but for every possible "you would obviously begin with X" solution, one can tweak the exclusions to make configuration X impossible (at least if the reason why X is so good involves overwhelming first-mover advantage).
