Escape from Dol Guldur - Nightmare - Progression

So we don't have all the time in the world, therefore we cheated on this scenario. Anyone who tells you they beat this without cheating in some way is either lying or spent an excessive amount of time scooping. Like in the hundreds probably.

To me, this is the BAD kind of difficult. No amount of clever deck builing or good choices while playing will help you. It is pure luck of what you draw from your deck and encounter deck. And more than that, such a high persentage of draws are basically instant losses. I like difficulty that you can surmount with thinking and planning with luck/randomness to a minimum more so to add variability and replayability.

We played about 10 quick scoops with no cheating before deciding that almost any combination of encounter cards is going to be insurmountable. Then we tried another 10 or so quick scoops where we put Light of Valinor and Vilya in our starting hand and randomized the other 4.

Then we didn't want to waste a billion years so we decided to arrange the first 5 encounter cards, the three used in setup and the first 2 to be revealed during questing. To do this we choose I think 14 of the least bad cards (in our judgement) from the deck (including enemies, locations and treacheries). Then we shuffled just those and selected 5 off the top. The rest got shuffled back with the rest of the deck and the 5 selected were put on top.

This ensured that we got a more docile start but kept it random and also allowed the power to spike at the 2nd quest phase.

With this setup we got a small foothold on turn 1 and from there it was a more appropriate level of difficult. I am still proud of the win as we still had to make good choices all throughout to win, by no means was rigging the top 5 of the encounter deck insurance of a win.

Anyway, this may be the 1 scenario I truly did not have fun playing ? Also, I will not leave tips/tactics for these decks as it really depends more on the luck of the encounter deck. My decks for the non-nightmare version probably have at least some tips about the scenario in general.