Question: How do people beat an early assault by really tough enemies - like getting two Hill Trolls on Turn 1 or 2 in the second of the core scenarios or getting a Mumak on turn 1 or 2 during Into Ithilien?

I've always really struggled (mostly it's been game over, to be honest). You can sneak around the trolls for a few turns if you keep your threat low, sure, but the Mumak is going to engage and smash for 7 damage each turn. Maybe I get lucky and can Feint for one turn, but that's about as good as it gets.

Thoughts?

Re-shuffle.

Will the trolls, you generally try to have lower threat against that deck so you can buy time until you build up an army, then engage 1 at a time and take them out. Obviously, if your threat is already over 29, then you'll generally just lose. The Mumak is different, mostly because it has so much threat that it makes it difficult to keep up there. Once again, I don't generally win if it shows up early unless I can find a way to quest around it and keep my threat low enough to not engage it. Mumaks are best just left in the staging area if you have the ability to quest around it.

You can survive for a round with feints, Gandalfs (usually via sneak attack), or chump blocking. The best sustainable defense is Beregond + Gondorian Shield.

You can survive for a round with feints, Gandalfs (usually via sneak attack), or chump blocking. The best sustainable defense is Beregond + Gondorian Shield.

Yea, those are certainly helpful. Hopefully you draw them and if you draw Gandalf on round one, then I hope you also have a sneak attack because unless you play Legacy of Numenor, you're not gonna have the necessary resources..

You can survive for a round with feints, Gandalfs (usually via sneak attack), or chump blocking. The best sustainable defense is Beregond + Gondorian Shield.

Feint and Feigned Voices, Wizards Voice if you can afford the threat gain. Direct damage with Gandalf, Galadhon Archer etc. Beregond with shield and Unexpected Courage or Elrohir with Steward and shield. Good allies with high attack and ranged. Heroes with high attack and awesome attachments (Eomer with firefoot, Haldir with Galadhon Bow, Legolas with Rivendell Blade etc).

I have fairly combat oriented decks (or at least one of them is very combat oriented) and early game bosses aren't much of an obstacle at all for me. I have more difficulty with quests that require very high questing power right off the bat

All the suggestions rely on either starting with the right 2 card combination in hand or keeping threat low enough to not engage. The former is just luck, so simple - fail to draw the right starting hand and you might as well restart. The latter is worth talking about more....

I have always been interested in Secrecy decks. Keep the threat low and quest under the radar, but doesn't that mean the staging area quickly jams full of enemies that up the threat to the point where you can't succeed at questing and you just lose by having your threat hit 50? I've never been able to figure how that should work.

It doesn't.

It's a card game so luck will be involved no matter what you do.

You can do secrecy and still combat enemies - at your own pace. Secrecy doesn't mean avoid enemies forever. If you do leave a bunch of them up there, the staging area could start to get populated by enemies, but there are tools to deal with it (Radagast's Cunning, staging area attack, or the new spirit event that lets you put progress from the quest as damage on an enemy, etc). Still relying on drawing cards, but as I said before... it's a card game. There will always be a reliance. Decrease the luck factor with card draw for your deck, or encounter deck scry/manipulation effects.

It's a card game so luck will be involved no matter what you do.

Agreed completely. Occasionally getting screwed by a bad draw is natural, as is getting hosed by a bad set of encounter cards at just the wrong time. By the same account, the wrong or right card as a shadow card will change the nature of a game, and that's how it should be.

However, I've probably played about 250 games of LotR LCG and I'd say that about three quarters have been decided by the end of turn two. Judging by the cards you have and the cards appearing, you have already lost (mostly) or are cruising to a victory (much more rarely). In fact, I'll probably start tracking stats on that.

Any game where X is very likely to happen or guaranteed to happen at the start and only Y will counter it or delay it long enough to build a decent response, but you know you only have 3 copies of Y in a 50 card deck and only one mulligan available to you, that's likely to be the case.

And yet.

And yet people regularly report 60% or higher win rates, so I'm trying to figure what my wife and I are doing wrong. It's clearly not a game design issue since we're the only ones with that problem.

I have an overall victory percentage of 48.83%! And that has the advantage of being a measure rather than an estimate; I have kept a spreadsheet since about 3 months after I started playing, and it's got data from >90% of all the game I've played. It's heavily influenced by behavioral characteristics, though... I'll get stubborn and play a quest 9 times in a row if I keep losing, so some of the individual quests have win rates at about 10%! It would be really more meaningful if I tracked win% for a particular deck, but that is not something I've done.

Something I find useful is to watch videos of others playing through quests. Glaurung's youtube channel has quite a few, there is the Progression Series , Cardboard of the Rings ... It's very cool to see the strategies that others bring to the table, to see them play cards that I rarely think about, etc.. Definitely inspired some of my decks.

I'll start to check out other people's experiences. Sounds like that's the way to go :-)