Why not make a card game that is solo, co-op, and pvp. Just saying.

Taking LotR as a starting point, the encounter deck has enemy, location, and treachery cards (and often objectives, though leave them aside for now), which could be easily thought of as character, location and event cards in a player-deck. The card would need to have a cost for playing it as a player card, but that could easily be ignored for an automated system. For characters, hit points and damage are needed for both, of course. Keywords aren't a problem, either. For traits/special abilities, some will easily work either being played by a person or automatically. For example, "When Darth Vader is in the battlefield zone, damage dealt to him is reduced by 1 (to a minimum of 0)". If a trait/special ability wouldn't work like this, then something like the shadow effects of LotR could work well enough, I think. So if there is a special ability written normally on the card, that is used when playing the PvP game, but if it is in italics, it is to be used when that deck is automated.

Locations could have something like the shadow effect telling you where to place it when it is part of an automated deck. So maybe something like "Imperial Throne Room" must always be played into the support zone, or something. Attachment cards are something that aren't included in the encounter decks in Lord of the Rings, but could be automated without much difficulty - something like "Sith Lightsaber: when revealed, attach to a character with a Dark Side rating of x or higher" or "attach to a character named Darth Vader or Emperor Palpatine", maybe. Even just "when revealed, attach to the highest-cost enemy character in play".

The problem with automating a deck is, of course, that it it doesn't have a "hand" to play from. To get round this, though, they could just put in a dozen or so cards in the core set for use in an automated deck, quite generic "when revealed: shuffle the encounter discard pile back into the deck", "when revealed: search the encounter deck for the first attachment card and play it, if able", "when revealed: search the encounter discard pile for x enemies and add them to the battlefield zone, if able". Rather than producing cards with each expansion that PvP players will never use, they could just make these few and leave them at that.

As for quests/scenarios, herozeromes has already pretty well covered that in "The bone has been thrown…" thread.

Such are my thoughts, anyway - I'm sure someone who does this for a living could come up with something so much better…

I have a genuine question here, one that has caused me perplexity in the past but never, it seems, more so than it is right now.

Why is everybody so obsessed with tournaments?

This could just be because I'm British, with no real chance of getting to any of the events (I know of just two annual events), or maybe it could be because I live nowhere near any game shop where organized play could take place. But does the success of a game really hinge on how tournament-compatible it is? Is there anyone on these boards actually qualified to answer this? Because for a game's ultimate success to depend entirely on how well it can be fitted in to two events in a year just seems farcical to me. I am genuinely stumped by this attitude, which is quite likely down to being the other side of the water as I say, but I just don't see the importance of tournaments. 

To me, a game is successful based on how well it sells, not on whether it can be played in a specific setting, that setting only arising twice annually. 

Thank you in advance