Me and my son love this game and play whenever we can. The stange thing is we never really play with the 'best deck'!!!

We like to play every quest 3 times - but we do them themed until we are successful and then record the results which we compare later. So first we will do the quest as dwarves - my son is quite strict, he will only let us use cards fitting in with a dwarf theme, heroes, allies, etc. Once complete we do the quest again but as Elves, then finally we do it as 'Men'.

This may sound rather bizaar to most of you hardcore players, but we really enjoy this challenge.

I have every quest released and we have done them all in this way except one! That was the Battle of Lake Town - we did it in 6 attempts with the dwarves but had to give up with the others.

As a rule we find the dwarves are usually successful in fewest attempts or the lowest score. We play every quest cold with no preview - so sometimes with the dwarves we re-draft between attempts to best use certain mechanics.

I thought I would share our unusual approach in case you are interested. Because of our approach we tend to get some good play time out of cards that perhaps very rarely get out of other players boxes. I love playing and I also love the drafting side of this awesome game......

Interesting idea. I'm more interested in trying many decks than trying each quest multiple times.

That sounds like an great idea. I might try something similar and try to be as strict as your son!

I have to say that some cards tend to sneak in to my dwarf decks when I build them that are not necessarily thematic - Gondorian Spearman springs to mind.

Have you tried with just hobbit cards? Or are there not enough of them to use? And what about breaking 'Men' down into Rohan and Gondor? Have you tried that?

Lake town with elves is very doable. Probably even more so with silvan now.