User:Cease/Moria

Moria is the abandoned dwarven underground city of Khazad-dûm, now dominated by stunted goblins and a nameless fear. In this game, it is a Shadow culture that focuses on swarming the opponent with many small orc minions, plus the occasional larger minion that dwells in Moria, such as the Cave Troll of Moria, Scourge of the Black Pit (1R165) and the Balrog. Moria was one of the first cultures introduced to this game, and unlike most of the original cultures, it's always been focused tightly on one strategy: using the faction's hand extension and recursion tools to set up an engine to play many more minions than you'd otherwise be able to play at once.

Part of why Moria is so tightly focused is because the bulk of the culture's cards came out in Fellowship Block. Only a handful of new cards came out for the culture after that, most of them focused on the Balrog. The Shadows set basically retired Moria as part of its culture reorganization, merging most of it into Orc culture. The teeming goblins of Moria and XXXLINK the Cave TrollXXX Lurkers XXXX

Moria is one of the premiere Shadow sides of Fellowship Block, although historically it fell off due to bans, power creep, meta changes, and a lack of new cards. On GEMP in 2021, it remains reasonably popular in later formats where Fellowship Block cards are allowed (save possibly Expanded), because of its strong cycling.

The Moria Engine

Every deck focused on chiefly Moria culture uses a variation of this engine. It even appears in most hybrid decks, like Moria Navy. (The main exception is Stupid Swarm, which is a rainbow strategy with too few Moria minions to make this work.)

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Cultures
Free Peoples	Dwarven	Elven	Gandalf	Gollum	Gondor	Rohan	Shire
Movie-era Shadow	Dunland	Gollum	Isengard	Moria	Raider	Ringwraith	Sauron
Shadows-era Shadow	Men		Orc	Uruk-hai		Wraith