So for those of you who were fortunate enough to pick up a copy at Gen Con, and for everyone else once Hall of Beorn/CGDB is updated; here are some of my best encounter decks for competitive mode. I'm happy this format is so fun cooperatively, too. I'll post my "decks" one at a time so as to avoid walls of text.
Location Lock deck: Quest stages are A Fork in the Road and the Sorcerer's Tower
1 Ravenous Spider
1 Spider of Dol Guldur These two spiders are here to provide some sort of boss enemy as the players focus on locations. They were the ones that mesh with the general strategy the best.
2 Dark Bats
3 Eastern Crows
2 Forest Flies These help to generate more locations and provide a little combat as well
1 Goblin Sniper Another card to lock up the staging area. Tough to deal with as well
2 Forest Stream
3 Pine Slopes
1 Twilight Hall
2 Oak-Wood Grove
1 Sorcerer's Tower All of these are staple locations in a deck like this
1 Patch of Midnight Adds to complexity of locations and confuses the players
1 Hunter's Lookout
2 Pitch-Dark Thickets
2 Necromancer's Pass these last three round out the suite of locations
2 Under the Shadow
2 Nightfall
1 Power Sevenfold Just lots of general nastiness
1 Treacherous Fog
1 Fastness of Mirkwood These can wreck the players in a location lock deck
3 Eyes in the Dark
1 Weighed Down To round out the deck
What do you think? And what do you think about the format in general? Will RingsDB integrate this format? Will FFG provide organized play?