Daily Challenge - Play Shadow and Flame using a deck with Vilya, Narya, and Nenya
It's been a while since I had the time to tackle one of these daily challenges, so I'm glad I was able to get back and do one again this morning. When I played through Shadow and Flame 2-handed, in progression, it was probably the toughest quest in the entire cycle for me. I remember thinking that Galadriel could pretty much trivialize this quest...and it turns out that is correct.
Galadriel should use her ability during planning every round to reduce the threat back to zero and draw a card, effectively making it so that the Balrog is nothing but a 4 threat obstacle in the staging area until the board state is ready to take it out. Thanks to some resource acceleration with Resourceful plenty of card draw, and Vilya it shouldn't take to long to get all three rings and a slew of allies onto the table. Elrond's Counsel is a great card to start with in the opening hand in case you quest unsuccessfully in the first couple of rounds and are forced to raise your threat.
Once most of the allies are out on the board, it will be time to play Gandalf and stop worrying about threat so that the Balrog engages. Gandalf, with help from Arwen Undómiel and Narya can defend for 6, and then swing back for 5 all by himself, meaning that he can survive even if Durin's Bane gets a nasty shadow or you can't A Test of Will away the sword. Warden of Healing and Elrond should be enough to keep him alive for however many rounds are necessary for the rest of the allies to chip away at the Balrog's health.
I found that using Will of the West was a good way to get a few of those extra copies of 5-cost cards back into the deck, so that Imladris Stargazer could go digging for them to toss the Balrog into the pit. In practice, the deck probably doesn't actually need that, since going an extra round to put even more damage on it shouldn't pose much of an issue.