I Make Him Better, Ulchor Suffers? 1.0

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"Wait. Wait. I make him better, Humperdinck suffers?" - Miracle Max, The Princess Bride

One half of my 2-player fellowship which defeated Fortress of Nurn. This description will contain spoilers for that scenario.

Glorfindel and Elrond quest, while Beregond defends for both decks. The other deck has Gondorian Shield and Armored Destrier for him. He can also have Unexpected Courage. Often, I found his defense was more important for whoever had the highest threat, so I could lower it, rather than for his 6 defense value.

The scenario really wants you to bring healing with you, but also because of the nature of the scenario, it's possible that your healing cards might get buried and hard to retrieve from under the Castle side quests (or under the quest deck, in which case it's impossible to retrieve them). That's one place where this deck started: let's try using Glorfindel, a hero overshadowed by other options in the card pool, in order to defeat the final scenario, and the first one with a "10" difficulty rating. With him and Elrond, you can heal any character for 2 (once per round) right from the start of the game. You definitely still want more healing though, so we have Warden of Healing here, Dúnedain Remedy in the other deck, and also a little help from Wellinghall Preserver.

This deck's role is to control locations with Mirkwood Explorer, Rhovanion Outrider, and Asfaloth, control threat with Beregond, Woodmen's Clearing, Elrond's Counsel, Double Back, Gandalf, and The Galadhrim's Greeting, and to quest.

I always put Light of Valinor on Elrond because I found his extra defense to be occasionally very useful. However, it could go on Glorfindel as well, and there's a strong argument to be made for that. If defense is well controlled, put it on Glorfindel, because his 3 attack will be more useful when this deck needs to engage enemies. Also, while Glorfindel is questing, he is vulnerable to the treachery which damages you and discards your attachments if you are exhausted. He could lose Asfaloth. This happened to be in my winning game, but I recovered Asfaloth with Reforged. Putting Light of Valinor on Glorfindel would shield him from this problem, at the cost of some defense from Elrond.

One good trick is to use Reforged on Secret Vigil from the other player's discard pile. You can do that in the combat phase right before you destroy the enemy.

Side quests here are chosen just because you need some to delay advancement in this quest. Double Back is the one you very much want to draw; the others are just fine.

There isn't any card draw here, which is intentional. There is a Power of Mordor card which causes you to raise your threat each time you draw a card. As a result, you will be top-decking for the whole game, so you want each card you draw to be useful. To compensate, there are many cards which accomplish the same effect (9 cards for location control, a ton of threat reduction, and lots of allies chosen for willpower).