I was thinking how its rather boring to take out all the fun challenging cards to make easy mode. So why do you make your side more powerful instead? I was thinking if you had Black Riders, you could use frodo, the ring, and the ring bearer cards and then just play against any normal scenario. Always having an extra 2 will power from Frodo (or like Tales from the cards says it, a potential extra 2 progress tokens) can be very good and you could always have the option of using the Ring to get rid of a nasty card you dont like. Maybe a Ring limit though like only 4 per quest. And of course now and then those Ring bearer cards can be quite helpful. I don't know, just an Idea that I thought of and I think it would cool to have Frodo and the Ring on all your journeys AND have the quest more easy if you so desire.

Khamul

haha must be a bad Idea. I never actually tried it anyhow.

Sounds interesting, I will get BR for Christmas so I will tell you then

In the early days of the game, when the card pool was SO shallow I experimented with a 4 hero variant. In essence this is what getting Frodo or Bilbo does for the solo player. A fourth hero at zero threat cost and an extra resource per turn. (Of course the saga adventures are also fun because we feel like we are re-tracing the footsteps of the books, but that's another matter entirely.). In my variant I added a fourth hero, but only counted the threat of the highest three. I also drew eight cards in my opening hand, which I would certainly change back to six now. A the time I felt like it might be too powerful. It was fun though and let me set up some combos that would have been difficult otherwise. I may experiment with this again, and I may even try your Frodo variant.

I do feel like playing double fisted is the best way to open up all the flavor in the game, but then you are essentially playing three decks at one time and it is so easy to make a mistake. To say nothing of the added table space required.

When Easy Mode first came out I tried it and it struck me that gaining the extra single resource at the beginning of the game was a huge part of making the game easier. Suddenly you could drop Arwen on the first turn and maybe even still have a resource left for A Test of Will if needed. So I put all of the cards back in and just took the extra resource at the beginning. This wasn't needed in the middle four of the Gondor quests though.

I do prefer theme decks, but I also like to have a reasonable chance of winning. (>10%). So I'm not averse to trying little things to boost the odds. Playing four heroes or drawing an extra resource are fine for the kitchen table.

I sometimes play "Medium Mode" where I don't take out any cards but follow the startup rules for easy mode where you start the setup with 1 resource each hero. This makes quests like Peril in Pelargir a lot less luck dependent in those first two rounds. Sometimes if the quest is really hard I'll also start with a seven card hand. I find that 7th card makes a big difference.

I believe a lot of the difficulty in this game comes from having a rough start. Once the first two rounds are made easier, the tougher quests become a lot more fun.