1. Can Treebeard pay for, say, Derndingle Warrior purely out of his collected resource pool if for example my only Tactics hero was captured during Escape from Dol Guldur and thus Derndingle Warrior being out-of-sphere at that time?
2. Does Treebeard enter play exhausted even if cheated in play with say, Sneak Attack or Elf-stone?

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.