Well. it was hilarious, but it was also bad plotting.

The Light would have needed a False Dragon to make it work. A perfect job for Logain with Little Fat Man, which would have explained the Dream of him stepping over a paper Rand that shattered.

Mat should have thought of it. A false Rand would have done wonders to keep Demandred distracted and make him dismiss reports from spies that Rand was actually at SG. The General wanted a Dragon, well... give him one, and make him move a lot!

The way Brandon wrote it, it's like Demandred wouldn't know about slow time at SG, and the rationalization in the book that he thought Rand wouldn't strike at SG before defeating him first was very poor, and resting on Demandred not having spies anywhere (as if the Demandred we know wouldn't have had spies keeping eyes at Thankan'dar...).. after telling us Demandred has many spies and knew Rand had previously shown up at many battlefields.. but not anymore.. what happened? Demandred should have puzzled out what Rand did immediately when he stopped moving around. Striking by surprise at SG was exactly what LTT had done.

It was so obvious that my theory after TOM was that Rand intended to throw all the Light's forces at Tarwyn's Gap to attract all the Forsaken, leaving a fake-Rand behind for Demandred's sake, while he moved secretely for SG using the Dagger.

I thought Demandred would see through it, though, and a lot of other stuff that turned out completely wrong, but the part about giving the Shadow one big battle while Rand went to SG was really obvious. Too obvious for a general of Demandred's caliber, which is why I thought the theory was Rand's plan but that it wouldn't work, that Demandred would reply by opening several battlefronts (actually more like raids on various locations.. following on Caemlyn) to try to scatter the Light's forces.

The plans in AMOL were simplistic on both sides. A much better plan for the Shadow when Elayne committed herself with a big army at Caemlyn was to move the army that's used the Portal Stones at KD or Shangtai (the one that appeared once she crossed the Alguenya) and raze and burn Cairhien and retreat to the PS. Then she now had her two capitals in flame, and either she let one kingdom burn or she had to split her forces and try to deal with both attacks.

Then you attacked Tear, also with a PS just nearby. Etc.

I mean... the striking at Kandor, Caemlyn and TG had succeeded in splitting the Light in three. Why stop there when the plan works so well?

Another plot hole was setting up an hospital in a permanent location. It looked like it didn't bother the Shadow one bit that the Light sent the wounded every night for healing and their armies were back on the field the next morning. Riiiiight. The Shadow should at least have harassed Mayene, forcing the Light to lose a lot of the Healer's energy to move the hospital around the world each day. It's not like the Light's hospital was hard to locate. About any DF among the Light knew about it, and by Merrilor, Moghedien knew.

Another annoying hole was not explain why the Shadow didn't send Dreadlords to destroy the Baerlon Ironworks when it was obvious the dragons were very effective. It's not like there's a lot of choices of where the resources were... it was either Baerlon and Katar. The Light would normally have had to commit enough channelers to defend that location. Maybe it's where our missing thousands of WO were