Tunadan has nailed it. I'd go so far as to say you should try to cut 10 cards. 30/30 without any intentional cycling will usually have enough cards to last the whole game, 33/33 will give you some room with reconciling. This is a big part of the reason you never have good starting hands and your cards never seem to arrive at the right time.
Another part is how many stars have to align for you to actually play what you have. Assuming you start Arwen and Legolas and can get Aragorn out at the start, you have 4 cards that can't be played without Boromir (
Horn of Boromir and
Blade of Gondor plus the second copy of
Armor and the second copy of
Flaming Brand, or
Ranger's Sword if you put 2
Flaming Brand on Aragorn) and only one copy of Boromir himself. If you figure that 1/5 times you'll draw Boromir first, that means
80% of the time you get one of those cards you have, at best, a useless draw. If you don't discard them immediately -- if you feel you need to keep them for when Boromir is drawn, or draw more than one at once -- then you reduce your hand size which makes
everything work worse without producing any benefit to you. You'll have fewer Shadow cards to work with to stop your opponent, fewer Free Peoples cards to survive the onslaught, and Boromir will be further delayed. It's like a clog in the drain -- it can start out a mild inconvenience, but the more you try to slip stuff past it the worse the clog gets.
The other part is that neither of your sides has a ton of direction, which makes your deck fight against itself. Most strategies do better the more you commit to them (although it's definitely possible to over-commit!). Your 4x
Isengard Forger can put a minion with 6 strength on the field for 1 twilight, but nothing else here makes that intimidating for the Free Peoples player. At best (when you have 3-4 Uruk-hai in hand) you get a cheap wound in on a supporting companion, while at worst he can't do anything but die and deprives you of an Uruk-hai that might have had an impact. Your Free Peoples are a mix of skirmishing and archery, which isn't
bad but with such low quantities of each you're more likely to get part of a skirmishing deck and part of an archery deck -- neither enough to win skirmishes against important minions nor avoid skirmishes by killing minions in archery.
No Stranger to the Shadows is in a similar position. Don't get me wrong, denying twilight tokens is always helpful, but how much impact will it have compared to
Double Shot for an archery build, or a skirmish event for a skirmishing build? Choke is actually a lot like archery, it's about avoiding dangers rather than conquering them. Without enough of it to avoid the danger, you're left without much impact.
So figure out what the point of each card is and determine what the use case is for it. Best case scenario, does the card really bring you much closer to winning the game? Worst case scenario, can you get anything out of it at all? And how often do you think you'll face the opponents of best and worst case, or whatever is in between? Basically, figure out what you want to do when you play the game.
Bow of the Galadhrim and
Long-knives of Legolas are fantastic, but do you really plan on having
Greenleaf fight with any regularity compared to any other companion? If not, what does it matter how well he would do in a fight if he's not going to be fighting? If so, are those two possessions alone enough to actually make it happen?
Mithril coat: are you planning on Frodo tanking Uruk-hai very often?
Horn of Boromir: do you want to make room for allies to use the ability?
For some of your other issues, replays would help. Aragorn can only remove twilight that's in the pool
before you move, not after. Remember that however much twilight you add is how much twilight your opponent can work with. Sometimes, it's better to hold onto an expensive card for later or discard it rather than give that resource up. Also, since companions add
![[1]](https://lotrtcgdb.com/forums/Smileys/classic/1.png "1")
each move, it can occasionally be better to kill a companion than let them limp along exhausted and not contributing to your survive.
Don't lose heart! I remember when I started playing, I thought skirmish events were so overpowered. My opponents could just
play them and win skirmishes all the time while mine never seemed to matter. Once I got a few more games in to get some focus on what I wanted to accomplish in-game, and trimmed my deck down from 45/45 to 36/36, I saw quite a bit of improvement. We've all been there
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