Using ordinary 52 card deck...

[Kurgan]

I seem to recall somewhere on the Inn, but I can't find it now, an attempt to use a standard playing card deck (Bicycle poker or whatever) for Hero Quest.
Maybe you have a set that lacks all the fancy original cards and you can't afford to print some just yet, so use a regular pack or something.

I thought it was a little contrived because the NA game uses 64 cards and your usual deck is 52 (well more like 55, since you get two jokers and an "instructions" or advert card in there too). Not quite enough to simulate everything. Or you could just use sheets of paper or something. For a low budget wild card system, it seemed interesting still.

Then I thought, maybe it's useless but as a quick variant you could use it as a treasure deck. Normally the treasure deck is only 25 cards, but it gets added to over time, whether you're adding in the expansion treasures (from EQP, BQP or WOM) or just adding in your own (I have the unique EU treasures in there for example, plus some created by others). Now the more treasures you add in, the more you can play with the "odds" of them drawing something good or bad, which also changes based on how much you shuffle the deck (we've had those debates here... do you shuffle every time they need to draw treasure, or just at the beginning of the Quest and when a bad card is found?).

Anyway, there are many ways you could say each generic card represents something in Hero Quest but here's a proposal:

2 = 20 Gold
3 = 30 Gold
4 = 40 Gold
5 = 50 Gold
6 = 60 Gold
7 = 70 Gold
8 = 80 Gold
9 = 90 Gold
Ace = Here you could go high and say it's 100 (treasure hoard!) or low and say its only 10.
The faces would be bad stuff... Kings, Queens and Jacks would be Wandering Monsters.

What about Hazards? Here I would use the Jokers. Now there's only two of them. So you could make the Aces and Jacks into Hazards and keep the Kings and Queens as WMs.

Or would you do something by suit? Maybe Diamonds are good somehow... being Gold, Hearts could be potions (of healing?), Clubs could be monsters and Spears could be Hazards, but that would really play with the distributions and would the numbers mean anything?

I just think it could be something simple, but fun, as long as its easy to keep track of. Thoughts?

PS: Isn't a standard Pinochle deck smaller? But they're less common. I'm thinking of the type of deck everybody probably has lying around somewhere.

[iKarith]

It winds up being more cards, but what about using a set of cards utilizing (effectively) a double deck as your base? The only difference between Bridge and a standard 54 card deck is that Bridge cards are narrower, so keep that in mind when getting yourself a deck box if you want one. For bridge it's typical to mix two decks with different colored backs so they can be more easily separated again, but you need not do so. The cards cost so little that you may as well devote them to the task, which means you can easily mark your cards as you see fit.

Uno cards available anywhere. Four colors, each with 19 number cards (0 + 2x 1-9) and 2x each of D2, R, S, and 8 black cards: 4 Wild and 4 WD4s. That's 108 cards. Except the boxes I remember had 112 cards, because they had a blank card of each color to replace a missing/damaged card.

The cards are Bridge-sized, not of the same quality as USPCC (Bicycle, Hoyle, etc) cards, and made by Mattel in the US—they don't have that "air pillow" lineny texture. But 108-112 cards for $6 in the US is probably enough for you to do whatever you need. Certainly you've got way more than you need for a search deck! And at $6 you don't need to use all the cards you've bought until you start writing expansions.