Do I understand correctly that you can use the Action: part of this card to cheat this into play without paying its resource cost (and discarding two cards, ideally Elven-lights) in such quests as Escape from Dol Guldur where there's a limit of "one ally played per round for the whole group" similarly as you can cheat allies into play with Sneak Attack or with Elf-stone in the same way?

Terrible to Behold? More like, terrible card to put in a deck. (Got em.)

Ok, in all serious, my main problem with this card is that you still have to exhaust a defender. To me, there's no point in canceling or preventing an attack if you still have to exhaust a defender anyway. It would have been worth it to me if you could play it after you saw the shadow card so that you could cancel an attack that you know could destroy your hero, but as written you have to play it before revealing the shadow card, so for all you know you could just be wasting a card and a resource. It seems to me like a slightly better version of A Light in the Dark that is at the same time slightly worse. Did they intend for it to be used with hero Denethor, who came out earlier in the same cycle? He's the only Noble hero in the Dream-chaser cycle. But his 3 means he probably needs this card the least out of all the heroes.

I love this card! It costs 0, it can draw you multiple cards and it can even draw other copies of itself! It even has indirect synergy with hero Radagast, not only because Radagast and his staff let you play the Eagle allies that this card draws you more easily, but also because he lets you use Wizard Pipe, so you can put an extra Eagle from your hand on top of your deck (hopefully swapping it with a non-Eagle) and then add it back to your hand right away. Goes without saying that it's useless unless you have a deck full of Eagles, but otherwise it's a 5/5 from me.

My problem with this card is the same problem you run into with "full heal" items in video games: you collect them throughout the game and never use them because you want to save them until you reeeeally need them, and then you beat the final boss without ever having used any of them. Which is the same way I feel about healing events like this and Beorn's Hospitality in LOTR LCG. Except for a very few specific quests, I would want repeatable healing like Self Preservation or Warden of Healing over event-based healing in almost every case, because even though they heal less damage, you don't have to pay for them every time you want a heal. And I think the designers understood that too, because after the core set we got a lot of healing options on allies and attachments and very few more healing events.

I don't see a lot of good uses for this card, even in a dedicated Eagle deck. Maybe it's useful if you can't pay the resource cost to keep a Vassal of the Windlord or Winged Guardian in play, because you can play it in the action window that comes between combat damage and the attack ending? I guess it also powers up your Eagles of the Misty Mountains by returning an Eagle to your hand whenever you want, but that seems like a waste because you've just spent 2 cards (Meneldor's Flight and the returned Eagle which won't end up back in your hand). Admittedly it does seem cool to pick up and play Descendant of Thorondor or Meneldor over and over, but that's expensive unless you have cost reduction like Radagast's Staff (which came out near the end of the game's life cycle and this card came out near the beginning). So I guess if there were more cards that cared about when Eagles entered or left play (kind of like a Tactics version of what the Silvan play style ended up being), then maybe this card would have been more useful. But as it is, the card isn't that great.