After spectacularly failing to complete the quest after eight tries I'm desperately needing any advice at all for beating this thing.

You might want to give this a read at the Tales of the Cards blog.

http://talesfromthecards.wordpress.com/2013/07/11/surviving-the-battle-of-lake-town/

Thanks for the heads-up about the TftC article.

After dumping my old deck designs and building two new decks using the same heroes (Gimli, Ori and Thalin & Balin, Nori and Thorin Oakenshield) using the advice in the article I finally managed to grind out a eight-turn win mostly because of extremely good draws from my decks and some lucky draws from the encounter decks.

Next I'm trying the Hobbit missions.

JUst a question ... with whom you were defending on this ?

In the games i have won I either had an army of low cost chump blockers or Frodo.

Glarung beat this in his video series I believe.

It is the hardest POD quest out there

You might want to give this a read at the Tales of the Cards blog.

http://talesfromthecards.wordpress.com/2013/07/11/surviving-the-battle-of-lake-town/

only problem here is that controls two decks and not solo or multiplayer

Check this out:

Check this out:

Ah yes here is the masterful playthrough