Kcall07 said:
Besides these cards can actually be quite fun - the tension of taking a shadow effect you know you can't block, or having an easy victory snatched from you at the last minute only to claw it back with your one, heavily wounded, remaining hero.
Well, at least in the Ithilien scenario you start out with enemies (one for each player) dealing 5 base damage. Shadow cards will add up to 3 additional damage to that (up to 4 in a four player game). There's also a shadow effect dealing 1 damage to the defender that cannot be soaked. In addition there's both an enemy that gets an extra attack from the staging area and a shadow effect granting an additional attack.
Effectively this means you cannot ever dare to defend with a hero (except Frodo or - once - Beorn) or an ally with only 1 hit point. So you either must have two allies that can soak 2 damage in reserve or a cards that allow you to prevent an enemy from attacking.
The majority of cards in the deck are enemies and almost all of the Treachery cards have surge which usually means you need to have a second defender ready.
And because the Path to Ithilien is the active location, all of these enemies will attack right away, unless you quest successfully and can accumulate at least four tokens. And this is frankly a gamble and will require luck.
If one of your heroes is killed in this initial assault you might as well start over. It may not be an instant game over, but you'll lose nonetheless. You can draw out the game but you will never win it.
In my nine games this only worked in two of the three easy-mode games and in none of the 'normal difficulty' ones.
Clawing your way back to win with a single hero can only work late in the game after you've already assembled a sizeable band of allies.
Alright, and now I'm ready for the flood of replies telling me how I'm totally wrong, not skilled enough and have been using crap decks. Shoot away! 
