Had some other thoughts (and a bump >.> )

I was looking into this game (unrelated to this thread, just poking around) called The Spoils, and while reading a description of game play, came upon another mechanic that can prevent some randomness. A point made earlier is getting set resources each turn. If anyone has played magic they can understand why this would be something brought up, as getting mana screwed sucks (not drawing from a random deck the proper resources needed to play cards). In The Spoils, there are specific resource types, but if you don't have one, you can play one face down as a generic resource. This reminded me of the WoW CCG, which is a similar mechanic except there are ONLY generic resources. Also, if you placed a Quest card face down, you can pay a cost and flip it up for some basic effect (usually something simple like drawing a card). I think this lowers certain variance factors in a game while retaining the fun and strategy of randomization.

Also, I think the Star Wars Classic CCG (decipher) in its mid to later years had some minimizing of variance with starting objectives and effects. By starting with an effect or objective that allowed you to pay Force (resources) per turn to pull locations out of your deck (the primary source of Force, the resource of the game), and other types of cards like Effects (mostly permanents) you could set yourself up for a specific type of play or respond to your opponent with certain cards. In this type, you retain some elements of randomness but by choosing cards that let you pull other cards out of your deck, it minimizes getting resource-screwed or screwed in other ways. The same goes for choosing starting Dudes in Doomtown or Characters in Middle Earth CCG (I've played a lot of CCGs haha), or Faction cards in various other games (Cyberpunk, UFS, Spoils, etc).