ordinarily i would agree with you thran. the smaller, the better. but with this deck, aside from the fact that it has been proven to work, on the fellowship side, practically ALL your freeps cards will hit the table every fellowship phase. combine that with most of your shadow hand being played in the shadow phase. you just have to be a little careful, and make sure you discard when you can in the regroup phase.
that said, i would probably drop one copy of nelya, and maybe a
seclusion or
pallando to drop the whole deck down by 2 cards. that would give you 35/35
on the other hand, you could drop the whole entire gandalf package (gandalf,
citadel to gate,
pallando,
foe hammer) that gets rid of 4 cards right there, and you can probably do just fine without it. and on the shadow side, maybe drop 1x nelya 1x ferny, 1x mauhur 1x
archer of harad.
that brings you down to 32/32. right where you said it should be. problem is, its hard to slim down the shadow side at all. you really need all those
archer of harad, and that extra mauhur comes in handy. not to mention, by cutting the gandalf package, you lose your wound sponge, healer, and touch of burden and condition removal.
all those ideas are possibilities, but if i was going to build this deck the only thing i would probably do is cut a nelya and
pallando.
-mm