Sauron Culture
Sauron is the enemy of the Free Peoples of Middle-Earth. In this game, his culture is a Shadow culture made up of his army of militant orcs and trolls, with the occasional oddball of a different race. Sauron culture is one of the largest cultures, and generally dabbles in at least a little bit of every Shadow mechanic in the game, at least until it's mostly retired after the Mount Doom set. The culture is very versatile, ranging from small cheap swarming minions like Orc Ambusher (1C261)
to fearsome beatdown tools like Troll of Cirith Gorgor (10R101)
, and that's not counting Sauron, The Lord of the Rings (9R+48)
himself!
There's no one typical Sauron strategy the way that there is for 
Moria or Uruk-hai. "Redeye" strategies include corruption, discard and mill, slow grind through direct and undirected wounding, site control, buffing shenanigans involving roaming minions or initiative, and so on and so on. If there's a unified theme to Sauron culture, it's that most of its strategies are slow grinds, slowly setting up an obvious plan or slowly grinding down the Fellowship. But sometimes they can also play 4-5 trolls and smash faces, too.
For all its versatility, though, Sauron culture does one thing badly: its pump events are all telegraphed. They all have to spot something, be it burdens (Enduring Evil (1R246)
), threats (Anguish (7C263)
), or controlled sites (Beaten Back (10C80)
). Often as not, they're telegraphed conditions instead, like Flames Within (10C85)
. A minion might unexpectedly murder your companion with a card like Mordor's Strength (1C255)
, but you can almost always look at the table and know whether or not it's possible to win any skirmish that doesn't finish prematurely.
Sauron culture was mostly retired after Mount Doom. Starting with the Shadows set, the orcs and trolls were combined with the orcs of Moria, 
Isengard, and 
Ringwraith cultures into one single 
Orc culture, while Shagrat and his uruk-hai underlings moved to 
Uruk-hai culture. There were only a handful of Sauron cards in the subsequent sets, all focused around Sauron himself: Sauron, Dark Lord of Mordor (13R140)
, The Mouth of Sauron, Lieutenant of Barad-dur (12R118)
, Sceptre of the Dark Lord (13R141)
, Throne of the Dark Lord (17R105)
, and Sauron’s Might (19P27)
.
| 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
| |||
