Suicide Cult

This fellowship is designed to play with any deck in the fourth slot. Decks should be played in order on turn 1, (Galadriel/Erestor/Galdor should be player 1, Arwen/Beravor/Elrohir player 2, Glorfindel/Aragorn/Treebeard player 3, and the fourth deck should always go last).

The purpose of this fellowship is to get 12+ resources on the fourth deck's heroes, 18+ cards in the fourth player's hand, Gildor Inglorion on the table in front of him, and his threat set to 0. After accomplishing this, all three decks will commit suicide, preventing the encounter deck from revealing any more cards during the quest phase.

All four goals will be accomplished regardless of what the fourth deck is, and before the fourth deck plays a single card. They will be accomplished consistently. Also: we're going to go ahead and play the valour action on Doom Hangs Still to skip the quest phase on turn one. Because why not.

How are we going to do this? Magic! (And by magic, I mean shenanigans.)

When opening hands are drawn, the first player will keep any copies of Daeron's Runes, Deep Knowledge, Legacy of Númenor, To the Sea, to the Sea!, The Seeing-stone and The Fall of Gil-Galad, using Galdor of the Havens to toss back everything else. Erestor is there to increase the odds of getting more card draw effects, since player 1 is the one who kickstarts the entire card-draw engine.

After opening hands are drawn, everyone plays all of their Daeron's Runes and Deep Knowledges. Ideally between the three decks you get at least three Deep Knowledges, giving everyone six more cards to work with. Copies of The Seeing-stone are typically going to be used to fetch more Deep Knowledges. Player 1 wants to get a To the Sea on one of his heroes, (remember that this is a song, so you get extra resources if you have any Love of Tales out). This enables him at any time to discard his entire hand and then activate Galdor to draw six new cards, potentially grabbing another Deep Knowledge.

The single most important goal should be for the decks to get at least one Wandering Took out on the table, to get a Song of Eärendil, (also a song, so remember Love of Tales), on the third player's Glorfindel, and to get as many The Fall of Gil-Galads on Treebeard as possible. The Fall of Gil-Galad is limited to one per deck, but it is not unique; if you get all three on Treebeard, then when he's destroyed, the third player can lower his threat by 39. (Why Treebeard? Aside from his huge starting threat total, The Fall of Gil-Galad specifies that a hero must be destroyed and not discarded, which means they must receive an amount of damage that matches or exceeds their HP. Treebeard is the only hero in the current card pool capable of destroying himself at will.)

Once the Took and the Song of Earandil are out, the Took should be passed to the third player. At this point, the third player can raise his threat by one at any time to lower any other player's threat by one. (Technically what's happening is he gives control of the Took to another player, activates the Song of Earandil so that the other player only raises his threat by two while the third player only lowers his threat by two, then takes the Took back, raising his threat by three while the other player lowers his threat by three. The net result is one point of threat is moved across the board to the third player.)

If there are extra Songs of Earandil, get one on each spirit hero to enable threat to be passed around the table at will. But it's most important to get one on the third player, because the Fall of Gil-Galad / Treebeard combo means he's going to be the person doing most of the work getting the fourth player's threat all the way down to zero.

To the Sea specifies that the "next Noldor ally" has his cost reduced, regardless of who plays him. So in addition to letting the first player get a whole new hand, once activated, any player can play Gildor Inglorion for one resource. Once Gildor is played, any player who is able should play Defender of the West on him. Any player who has a Message from Elrond in hand should then use it to pass a Follow Me! to the fourth player, and one deck should try to get a Song of Kings on one of the fourth player's heroes, (provided he doesn't already have a Leadership hero, of course). The fourth player can then play that Follow Me! at any time to take control of Gildor; after all three other decks threat out, he hangs around with the fourth player for the rest of the game.

At some point, all of this doom should push one of the decks into Valour territory. At this point, hopefully someone has a Doom Hangs Still in hand, or a Hope Rekindled to go get one, (and, ideally, a second Hope Rekindled to lower the cost). Hopefully between Elrohir, Song of Kings, and all of the Legacies of Numenor, that player has the three leadership resources required to play Doom Hangs Still. If not, remember that Arwen Undómiel can give a resource to any Noldor hero at the table. Also, the decklists are largely the same, so if one player gets the Doom Hangs Still while another has the three leadership resources, or if any of the three players is missing a key card or has an attachment they want to play when its not their turn to play, Message from Elrond is a great way to smooth things out.

Beravor hangs around as one last failsafe, if you find yourself just one card short or you're digging for that last Fall of Gil-Galad. Ditto that with Arwen, who should save her ability until you reach a point in the round where one player finds himself just one resource short of a key card. Galadriel acts like a mini-Beravor who can also at times give just enough threat reduction to prevent someone from threating out early.

Once everything is played, get the Wandering Took to player 3 and use shenanigans to get players 1 and 2 to 48 or 49 threat so that one last Seeing Stone, Deep Knowledge, or Doom Hangs Still will take them out. Then have player 3 blow up Treebeard to get his threat as low as possible, (hopefully to zero), and then use Took/Song shenanigans to take away all of player 4's threat, setting it to zero. Even after player four reaches zero threat, player three can continue passing the Wandering Took back and forth and raising his own threat by one until he, too, threats out.

Alternately, if you managed to pull off the Doom Hangs Still, there's no pressure to make sure everyone suicides by the end of the first planning phase, so feel free to stick around. If the players can collectively pull off another Doom Hangs Still in round 2, they can hang around even longer, still; they're free to stick around without consequences until the first round where they cannot play a Doom Hangs Still. At that point, they should pull the pin on the grenade and blow themselves up, leaving Player 4 to coast to victory in the most insane version of "Easy Mode" ever imagined.

Edit: Seastan reminds me that Loreagorn is a refresh action, which means he'll only come into play if the Suicide Cult gets a Doom Hangs Still off during planning. Without a Doom Hangs Still, the Suicide Cult will instead be more reliant on Treebeard / Fall of Gil-Galad to do the heavy lifting of threat erasing.