The Thing in the Depths - Wins Almost Always

Fun and easy quest that takes a while to play. We played this dozens of times, and only lost like 1-2 times.

Tactics player takes all the enemies. Lore/Spirit player quests and manages the locations. We usually wait 6+ rounds before putting the 2 Enemy Allies into play. It doesn't really matter how long we wait, because after a while, the Tactics player will have so much attacking power, they will remove all the tokens from the male enemy in one round.

In the beginning, the biggest threat is location lock, so the Lore/Spirit player should get questers into play immediately, rather than spend resources on Attachments. Once a couple questers are in play, then he tries to get the other key cards into play. Master of the Forge is one of the most important cards, because you need a lot of Attachments.

If you get Master of the Forge, Imladris Stargazer, Vilya (on Elrond), and Unexpected Courage (on Elrond) all in play, it's almost impossible to lose, because you can use MotF to look at the top 5 cards for an Attachment, shuffle, then you Stargazer to arrange the top 5 cards in any order, then you draw the top card at the start of the round, then you can use Vilya to put the next card into play, then use Unexpected Courage to ready Elrond. Then repeat each round, so out of the top 5 cards of your deck, you get to control which card you draw, and which card you can play with Vilya each round. Then you use MotF to look for an Attachment, but more importantly, to reshuffle your deck, so Stargazer gets a fresh 5 cards to play with.

Threat is almost never a problem in this quest, but worst case, it's easy to play the side quest to lower your threat by 5.