Keep up the good work (and looking forward to what you do with the other battle hosts - especially the Gondor one)! Saruman lost very little with the rules "dumb down" - he lost Flameburst (which has its uses, but is usually worse to cast than Sorcerous Blast) and he can't Heroic Channel (which is just fine).

You can probably optimise it by including more siege bows and crossbows, but this is a great starting point and will do well on the table. If you plan on passing over this list and going straight to Ugluk’s Scouts, you can probably forego the Quest of the Ringbearer book, too – although there is a lot of other fun stuff in there. We've taken a bare bones approach on how to get each Legion on the table with minimum purchases and not too many fancy toys, but if a troll or ballista looks like a good time, then that should be your next purchase - don't deny yourself some of the joys of the hobby just because of something you read on a blog or forum.

For these types of items we have to use a courier service and in this case the cost will vary depending on size and weight etc. I get that there's a Warg Rider pack in there, so we NEED to have Orcs, but I think the better option might be to drop the Warg Riders (gasp) and the Witch-King (GASP! But let's dig a little deeper into what Gandalf lost: he retained Immobilize/Command (which are both good at dealing with the enemy hero you'll have on the other side of the board) and he retained Terrifying Aura (which is good since all of the warriors in the other battlehosts are C2-3). This would become the biggest battle host (but still right around 500pts, so on-par with the modified Isengard and either version of Minas Tirith) and would give you "just a bunch of Orc infantry" . You can really pick your poison from this point, too – some more named heroes, and some specialist troops like crossbows or berzerkers will give you a much more varied toolbox and will help to build towards bigger, scarier Isengard lists.

I suppose the first point to address is that while the Isengard Battlehost is a great place to start in the faction, it is also in an odd spot, in that most Isengard lists and especially the Legendary Legions will use either Uruk Scouts or Warriors, but rarely both - especially if you’re looking to optimize your list.This army clocks in at 491 points (if you can find a spare Uruk Hai Scout model great, you could also use Vrasku as a Scout with bow to get to 500). If you can’t beg / borrow / steal a scout from a friend, I’m sure most people would be happy with you using an Uruk-Hai warrior as a proxy. In tournament play very often a pure cavalry force is used, but if you aren’t going to tournaments don’t let that bother you at all.

This would lower their points level a little too, but would also make it so that there's a F4 army to combat the Uruks (if Boromir is equipped with his banner).You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.