I always enjoyed various shadow sides based around Saruman and
Throne of Isengard, and I played many variants over the years, namely:
culture mixed with
Agent of the Dark Lord and Gollum. This could be built to play with resistance tricks like
Frenzied Attack as well. This one I played as a real life deck once I acquired 3 copies of
Throne of Isengard, so I basically just slapped them to a Shadows block uruk deck with some Gollum support. It won me a bunch of kitchen table games, but honestly, it was not optimized whatsoever.
Suppressing Uruk is active in most games (
SFTF and/or cannon fodder companions are used in most decks).
with
Coldly Still and
The Mouth of Sauron, Messenger of Mordor,
GATS,
Sunland Weaponmaster and various stacking possession tricks. This was fairly consistent but vulnerable to
Ithilien Blade, probably could be played better, but I stopped experimenting with it. The Mouth can also be use to fetch cards like
Pursuing Horde to enable
Wormtongue, which is an extremely potent play in some situations (
Betrayer of Rohan is also superb here though).
Oath Sworn (+
Rapid Reload and
Messenger's Mount) was also strong here, it enables
Coldly Still nicely. Saruman with
Wizard's Device +
Corsair Halberd +
Throne of Isengard is a massive damage +3 beast. This one could be built way more focused than my initial version was I feel.
with a mix of different Sarumans, including
Servant of the Eye and involved assignment tricks (
Lieutenant of Barad-dur is such a great underplayed card). This is a fun version, and possibly the best way to play the expanded meta as it is heavily mixed version with
and
.
I don't like to rely much on the Deceived Wizards conditions, they are just way too easy to get rid of. I did play few copies in each version though.
One thing that took me 10+ years to realize is that you can play 4
Saruman's Staff, Wizard's Device and 4
Staff of Saruman, Fallen Istar's Stave in the same deck, as they are worded differently. Well played Decipher
. This makes
Servant of the Eye a bit better, if you are playing a mix of differnet Sarumans.
An other thing that I like to do is playing
Too Great and Terrible with various recursion tools for it (
Black Shadow,
Morgul King,
Ring of Terror). Gandalf is an issue once you play
Throne of Isengard.
Controling the assignment phase is a great way to go, as it allows a Saruman with some massive damage bonuses to grind down fellowships.
A Gollum splash is nearly mandatory for more control and recursion, or to get the right Saruman out if you play different copies (
Sudden Strike,
Evil-smelling Fens). It can also provide protection with
Final Strike and twilight generation with
Led Astray. Also you want to cripple the opposing fellowship in skirmishes so
Her Ladyship can help with that (and in general just a beast of card).
Incited is very good also with such deck, and I like to play a copy of
Gollum, Skulker too for his lurker keyword.
Then there is
Throne of the Golden Hall. Well... I don't know how to deal with that to be honest. Is there anything but
Grond, HotU that gets rid of it?
It is a really interesting archetype that I doubt has been fully optimized yet (at least I never bumped into it on GEMP or GCCG). It is very challanging to build it well rounded without having a deck size of 100/100.