I keep seeing mention of tournaments. How would that work given the format of this game? I'm curious about it, though nobody in my area plays at all...

In France, we do a "Championship" each year.

We have used a home made format based on "Faction".

Each player choose a faction (actually Rohan, Gondor, Elves, Dwarves and Hobbit) which define the heroes he could use.

Some heroes without faction traits (like Beorn) have been arbitrarily dispatch in factions.

We played 3-4 scenario with four player (each player belong to a different factions).

For each scenario, the partners are changed.

We record the score of each game and do a ranking for each factions.

So we have a Champion for each factions.

Without a faction?!

I AM my own faction, thank you very much!

Yet another reason I need to get to France. How did you organize this? How did you get folks from various parts of the country to show up?

I was there and play tournament with them once. Quite cool but when you play Nightmare mode pairing with new player everygame us garanty lose since bad synergy player decks is bad in difficult nightmare.