Gandalf & Gwaihir Fly to Mt. Doom

 kyrie: "use Gandalf's passive ability to "cheat" expensive allies into play"

Hope you know that you have to pay its casting cost when playing anything via Gandalf that way.;-) It seems you do not. Its powerful but not as much as you think. If you know i am sorry for this comment.

Fox, thanks for the reminder, however, remember I am using Elrond and Vilya in this deck. Gandalf really is that powerful, that is, when paired with Lord Elrond. Knowing the top card of your deck and being able to switch it with any card in your hand (via Pipe) makes Elrond's ability a sure hit 100% of the time.

I would recommend adding in Silver Lamp for Glorfindel.  With Light of Valinor, he should always be ready when dealing shadow cards, meaning that they will all be dealt face up.  This way you can always be sure to not miss when using Gandalf Staff to discard shadow cards.

Also note - This deck will *break* any quest that requires you to guess the top cards of your deck (Riddles, Doors of Durin, etc).

Played multiple rounds with this deck.  The only change I made was swapping Grim Resolve for a third copy of Flame of Anor.

Multiplayer (2+) It seriously struggled against the encounter deck.  Startup is extremely slow compared to other common archetypes in play right now.  Once it got some momentum, it did well, though.

Resources seemed to be a major struggle.  Most of the allies in the deck are high-cost, and rely on the Elrond/Vilya combo to get them i play.  I often ended up with a large number of cards in hand that I just could not afford to play.  Possibly consider some resource generation (Resourceful or Steward or both) to pump up Elrond/Gandalf's resources so that paying for things outright becomes more feasible.

This would also help with setup speed - Elrond/Vilya can only drop 1 card per turn, and Gandalf cannot help much with playing cards from hand.  Getting enough resource generation to Vilya a card into play, then pay one from hand, and then use Gandalf to pay one from the top of the deck would greatly improve the startup.

The other problem I noticed is opening-hand problems.  Vilya is a must, and Wizard Pipe or Bilbo is almost as essential.  With 32 starting threat, you can't afford to wait long for Light of Valinor either.  The deck essentially has 3 cards that *must* appear in your starting hand or else you mulligan.  This results in most games having a less-than-optimal start.  Without Valinor, you have a good portion of enemies in the game engaging you first-turn (see slow startup above).  Threat management early game becomes an issue, because you can't afford to waste your Vilya on Galadhrim's Greeting, and paying for it outright requires at least Turn 3.  If you didn't pull Light of Valinor yet, you will be sitting on 38 threat on Turn 3, and Galadhrim's will only pull you back down to your starting threat.

This deck did manage to defeat Watcher in the Water, although I am not thematically sure *how*.  I forgot that the scrying effect for Doors of Durin uses the encounter deck, so Gandalf didn't help much.  However, the win condition is having 3 points in your victory display.  I had 3 Flame of Anor in the display by the time I advanced to stage 2.  I am not sure how that worked out in terms of the story, since I won without killing the watcher or opening the doors.

I've been using this deck with a few variations (2 more Unexpected courage instead of Miruvor), +1 Galadhrim's Greeting, +1 Test of will, and I removed a very good tale.

I also added the new Galadriel ally, cause the deck has a lot of attachments, and she's working very well. I want to find a way to fit 1 or 2 Support of the eagles. They will help Gandalf a lot (and with them and flame of anor he can become a beast). I was tempted to remove Grim resolve, but it works very well when you have all vilya and wizard's pipe in play, allowing you to quest with all your stuff and then ready all to be prepared for battle.

Have you tried including Radagast?