The deck was initially built with Argalad as part of a two-handed fellowship meant to damage enemies in the staging area which worked well in many scenarios. In Race Against Harad, however, I tried dropping him for Thurindir with surprising effect.
The strategy is to use Scout Ahead to give the orcs a misleading head start. In a two-handed fellowship, Scout Ahead gets to see 6 cards off of the encounter deck. That's enough depth to immediately make the Chieftan whiff on first orc quest, sabotage the shadow card on the Uruk Warg-Rider, neuter the two encounter cards revealed next turn, and possibly make the Chieftan whiff on the second orc quest.
These decks are hardly optimized for the quest, so the rope-a-dope was truly the winning tactic here. Having a round to set a solid board state foundation makes the difference. Asfaloth is obviously a critical card to find in the opening hand and the draw cards help get there. Ranger Spikes is another critical card to find early.
In order to optimize the deck the first tweak would add Lembas and take out Ranger Bow in order to give Glorfindel some action advantage. I'd also add Halfling Bounder instead of the Guardians.
This particular build features a lot of 1x due to the The Savage South card in The Mumakil. The jungle widlife was well-tamed by these master trappers.