Combo · ENGINE
Downstage Dramatics on the Power pass — an extra cycled card for four Energy and no Power
Pieces
- Downstage Dramatics ×1
UNL-061 · engine · mind
[Reaction] (Play any time, even before spells and abilities resolve.) [Repeat] 2 Energy (You may pay the additional cost to repeat this spell's effect.) Draw 1.
Payoff
Deck
- Legend domains cover Mind and Order, which the Lux shell already is (103.1.b.1).
Prerequisites
- The Repeat is not optional for this entry to exist. Without it the spell is 2 Energy for Draw 1, and that single draw is spent pulling the spell itself back out of the deck: net zero. With it, 4 Energy buys Draw 2, of which one redraws the spell - net +1 draw. 820.1.c.1 makes the Repeat an Additional Cost paid while playing, and 820.1.c.3 ("Each Repeat Cost can be paid only a single time") makes Draw 3 impossible, so 4 Energy per extra draw is a floor as well as a price.
- It only fits on the Power pass, and this is the piece the hunt did not measure. An extra cycled card needs BOTH a recycle slot and a draw, and Forge of the Future prints a hard cap: "Kill this: Recycle up to 4 cards from trashes." On the Energy pass the #21 ledger counts 3 of those 4 slots used (Forge, Shadow's Call, Sacrifice) plus Ekko recycling himself, leaving 1 spare slot and 0 spare draws - so putting Downstage Dramatics in the rotation spends that one spare slot and converts it into one spare draw, leaving the target card with no slot. Net zero. On the Power pass the ledger counts 2 of 4 used (Forge, Retreat), so Forge can recycle Forge, Retreat, the target card and Downstage Dramatics in one activation, and the pass's 2 draws plus the spell's 2 cover all four.
- Against the ledger's own price for the same thing - "an extra cycled card costs 1 Energy + 1 Mind Power, about 10 Energy", bought with Renata Glasc, Mastermind's draw ability, which carries no exhaust and is therefore unlimited - this is 4 Energy against 10. The number that matters more than the ratio is the Power: Downstage Dramatics spends NONE, and Power is what the engine has to manufacture at 9 Energy each.
- Renata's draw stays the right answer on the Energy pass, because it consumes no recycle slot at all. The two are complements, not rivals.
- Sequencing has to keep the deck non-empty. lux-infinite-energy declares "Main Deck EMPTY" as a prerequisite and the loop deck is 4 or 5 cards, so 416.1's bottom-of-deck is reached again inside the same pass; but a Power pass ends with one card left in the deck, and that card is what absorbs the sixth draw of the following Energy pass instead of a Burn Out.
Steps
- Run a Power pass of the Lux engine. Kill Forge of the Future and use all four recycle slots: Forge, Retreat, the card you actually want back, and Downstage Dramatics.
- Play Downstage Dramatics for 2 Energy and pay its [Repeat] for 2 more: Draw 2, no Power spent (820.1.c.1, 820.1.c.3).
- Between the pass's own two draws from Lecturing Yordle and these two, all four recycled cards come back to hand - the target card among them.
- Bank the 4 Energy out of the engine's own output rather than out of Power. The same card retrieved through Renata's ability would have cost 1 Energy + 1 Mind Power, which the #21 ledger prices at about 10 Energy.
Per iteration
+1 net drawn card for 4 Energy and 0 Power, using one of the Power pass's two spare Forge slots.
How it ends
cards out of the trash and back into hand at 4 Energy each instead of 10, for as long as the engine runs
Sources
Walked here, in this project
- Reaction/Deflect lens hunt, issue #44 candidate 5 (rc-huntF) 2026-09-05
- Hand walk 2026-09-06 2026-09-06 record
How this entry was audited
REFUTE = a refutation pass, with its date and verdict · WOUNDED = the pass found a flaw and the entry was rewritten · BUDGETED = the pass checked the recycle-and-draw ledger · lens = the hunt that proposed it.
HAND-WALKED 2026-09-06 (docs/phase0/walks/2026-09-06-reaction-deflect-candidates.md), issue #44 candidate 5, REWRITTEN. The hunt's headline (4 Energy against the #21 ledger's 10) survives, but its derivation did not separate the two things an extra cycled card needs. Walked out here on the accounting identity that over any closed cycle cards drawn equals cards recycled: the card needs a slot AND a draw, Forge of the Future caps recycling at 4 per activation, and the Energy pass has only one spare slot - which Downstage Dramatics itself consumes. The line therefore lives on the Power pass, where the ledger counts two spare slots. Also measured and not in the hunt: without paying the Repeat the spell is exactly break-even, so the Repeat is mandatory. CLAUDE.md's ~10 Energy figure is not wrong - it is the price of the slot-free route.
Walked against Core Rules 2026-07-16