The best man/elf from that era didn't need archery beyond
Greenleaf. The deck focused on 5 vitality
Greenleaf and
Aragorn ROTN with Anduril and Last Alliance. All the other companions were expendable and replaced with a new companion. The deck could kill a minion with
Greenleaf in the archery phase and another with Aragorn in the skirmish phase, use tricks like
Stone Tower & Citadel to kill something, use
Dervorin to discard something in the regroup, use
Sting to get rid of a fierce minion, etc, then heal with Elrond and
Shadow Between and move again. Once it was set up it was very difficult to kill and it would just let the other companions die and then replace them. If you got in a pinch you could always have Aragorn go defender +3 or +4 to keep yourself alive, and if he was still alive at 9 there wasn't much the shadow could do. It had a good chance against anything, so it was popular among good players because they could rely somewhat on their ability to outplay people in any matchup. It could also be run at 30 cards for maximum efficiency or bumped up a few with tech cards.
I have noticed that many (not all) of the decks people post on here focus on playing 5 companions and keeping them all alive, but that wasn't a very popular strategy back then except in
Dauntless Hunter decks. Most decks played 9 companions and had one or two key companions while the rest were all expendable. When you aren't worried about keeping everyone alive you can double move a lot more.
Heavy archery just wasn't as effective then because Corsairs killed your bows, Grond killed your bows,
Cantea FTW killed your bows, Easterling Polearms stopped the archery, etc. It was much more reliable to play the way you see the list because you didn't get totally hosed by strategies built to stop direct wounding. You'll also notice that the man/elf decks played 0 possessions because of all the possession hate running around at the time.