So, after several successful tries, I decided to go and play Hunt for Gollum once again today. However, a situation arose that left me wondering whether I played it right.

I was on the second quest card, which has this forced effect: At the beginning of the quest phase, the first player looks at the top 2 cards of the encounter deck. Reveal and add 1 of those cards to the staging area, and discard the other.

At the beginning of that phase, there was only one card left in the encounter deck. Because of that the encounter deck would not yet be reset. So, I'm left with one card and I'm not sure how to apply the effect. On first thought, I figured having only one card I would simply choose whether to add or discard it. But, I'm not so sure now. The wording on the effect suggests that you must first choose one card to add and then, the other is discarded. That would mean that if you have only one card, it must be added to the staging area.

So, how should it be played?

Am I missing something? Why not draw the last remaining card, reshuffle the encounter deck, and draw a second card?

I thought about that too, but it just seems incongrous to me to stop in the middle of applying an effect to shuffle and reset the encounter deck. Not unless the effect itself said to do so.

From pg 14 of the Rulebook:

"If the encounter deck is ever empty during the quest phase, the encounter discard pile is shuffled and reset back into the encounter deck."

From pg 18 of the Rulebook:

An empty encounter deck only resets during the quest phase.

So in your situation, you would have drawn a card, reshuffled the encounter deck, drawn another card and played one then discarded one.

Edit: Correction

I'd simply shuffle the draw deck and then draw any remaining cards.