You are either a psycho or just nuts.

NBarden you are obsessed.

To tell you the truth, i would rule it completely differently. With the same logic that i cannot discard a fellow shadow player’s corsair war galley to add tokens, i have no right to activate a text on a fellow shadow player’s artifact, whoever its bearer might be.

So, assuming casual play, you decide to play , a 1/10 chance. You opponent plays one of the cultures using Saruman, primarily or . But in order for this scenario to be plausible, there would have to be a non-fighting Saruman. So 2/10 chance (1/5, again, giving the benefit of the doubt) that your opponent is running a deck with a culture with Isengard, 1/10 that he’s actually running Saruman in it.

Now, you mutual opponent is running a wizard. (a 1/6 chance, giving the benefit of the doubt.) Then assuming the wizard survives, we’ll give it a 1/7 chance with that factor. Now, assuming that this happens perfectly at one site, a 1/9 chance. Throw into the mix that at that one site, every minion gets kiled except Saruman. Granting that you and the other shadow player are collaborating on are collaborating on this scheme to take his Saruman into your hand, a 1/2 chance Saruman survives with no other minions. If your not collaborating, the deck he’s running probably runs tanks for him to consider running a Saruman, so that’s a possible 3 minions out at a site. Assuming a 50% chance of the FP winning all the skirmishes, that’s a 1/6 chance of Saruman being the only minion to not lose a skirmish. But, then you have to consider damage to actually kill, or archery to soften the minions up, which is only run in dwarves and elves. So, assuming this wizard is splashed in a dwarf or elf deck...we’ll assume a 1/12 chance, although its more likely 1/18 or 1/24. Then, you pull it off. The chance of this happening is, granting the benefit of the doubt and assuming your fellow shadow player isn’t in on the plot.

1/10 * 1/5 * 1/7 * 1/9 * 1/6 * 1/12 = 1/226,800!

That’s right. A one in 226,800 chance of this being successfully pulled off! Assuming that the conditions are favorable to it being pulled off in your meta, etc. I don’t think you’ll have a problem with this.

However, with collaboration, its only a 1 in 6300 chance. So, you would have to plan this with your fellow shadow player in order to pull it off at a given site. Then it works 1 in 6300 times, assuming typical gameplay.

Your very first assumption, that you have a 10% chance of choosing to play Isengard, seems very strange to me -- you wouldn’t care about the uses of Saruman’s Staff in the first place if you weren’t playing Isengard already!