Combo · ALT WIN

Ferrous Forerunner × two Karthus — six 3-Might Mechs onto The Grand Plaza

6 cards · fury + order · verified

Pieces

• Ferrous Forerunner ×1 SFD-021 · payoff · fury

  [Deathknell] — Play two 3 Might Mech unit tokens to your base. (When I die, get the effect.)

• Karthus, Eternal ×2 OGN-236 · engine · order

  Your [Deathknell] effects trigger an additional time.

• Renata Glasc, Industrialist ×1 SFD-171 · enabler · order

  Your tokens enter ready.

• Blade of the Ruined King ×1 SFD-178 · enabler · order

  [Equip] — 1 Order Power, Kill a friendly unit (Pay the cost: Attach this to a unit you control.)

• The Grand Plaza ×1 OGN-293 · battlefield

  When you hold here, if you have 7+ units here, you win the game.

Payoff

Deck

• Legend domains must cover Fury (Ferrous Forerunner) and Order (Karthus, Renata, the Blade) — OGN-253 Hand of Noxus, SFD-187 Void Burrower, UNL-187 Piltover Enforcer. The Plaza is colourless.

Prerequisites

• SIX IS ONE SHORT OF SEVEN, AND THAT IS THE ENTRY'S REAL CONTENT. 1 Deathknell + 2 Karthus = 3 executions × 2 Mechs = 6 bodies. The catalogued karthus-machine-evangel-renata-plaza gets 9 from OGN-239 Machine Evangel and wins on the Mechs' arrival alone; this line has to walk a support body in with them. 144.3 makes that free — 'Players may perform multiple Units' standard move simultaneously. This is treated as one game action performed on multiple Units' — and 144.3.a only requires a shared destination, so the six Mechs plus Renata plus both Karthus arrive together as ONE action: nine units at the Plaza.
• WHAT THE ENTRY BUYS FOR THAT EXTRA STEP IS 3-MIGHT BODIES. 187.4 defines the token as '3 Might and the Mech tag'. 465.2.c makes the attacker assign damage equal to summed Might and 465.2.c.3 forces lethal onto one unit at a time, so clearing six Mechs plus a 4-Might Renata and two 3-Might Karthus costs 28 damage; the nine 1-Might Recruits of the Machine Evangel line cost 9. Surviving the opponent's turn is the only thing a Plaza line has to do, so that is not a footnote. CORRECTED 2026-10-27 (#503): 28 and 9 are full-clear figures. The attacker has to leave only six of the nine, so the kill price is three bodies: 9 damage here (three 3-Might Mechs or Karthus), 3 damage for three 1-Might Recruits.
• The kill is on demand and costs no card: SFD-178's [Equip] cost is '1 Order Power, Kill a friendly unit', so attaching it to any body you keep pays the Forerunner's Deathknell whenever you choose. 428.1 is the definition — 'Killing is the action of a Permanent going to the trash from the board' — and 428.1.a.1 admits it 'as a cost for a card or ability'. This is the same trigger blade-of-ruined-king-deathknell-ondemand records, applied to a partner it had not been applied to.
• The Mechs are born at your BASE and enter ready under Renata, which is the whole reason she is in uses: 143.4 makes units enter exhausted, 143.4.a admits the alteration, and 144.2 charges the Standard Move an exhaust they could not otherwise pay on the turn they appear. R25 = A, ruled 2026-09-04.
• The count is measured AT THE HOLD (383.2.a.1 puts 'if you have 7+ units here' in the Trigger Condition), so the nine have to survive the opponent's whole turn and nothing can be topped up at that instant. Nothing here is [Temporary], so 816.1.b never fires. CORRECTED 2026-10-27 (#503): seven of the nine have to survive, not all nine; the attacker must kill three to stop the Hold.
• The Grand Plaza must be the battlefield in play — 485.4.a puts only 1 of your 3 into the game, randomly in Duel (485.5) and Skirmish (487.5), chosen in Match (486.5); 103.4.c and Tournament Rules 402.1 forbid three copies. It is symmetric, so an opponent parking seven units on it wins the same way.
• Cost, counted whole: Forerunner 6 Energy + 1 Fury Power, two Karthus 6 Energy + 2 Order Power, Renata 4 Energy + 1 Order Power, the Blade 3 Energy + 1 Power to play and 1 Order Power to [Equip]. 19 Energy and 6 Power, spread over several turns. A second Forerunner doubles the Mechs to twelve and removes the need to walk any support body in.
• CROSS-REFERENCE: this is the Fury/Order, 3-Might-body instance of ready-recruits-grand-plaza, the generic token-consumer row; that row is a strict subset of this one by design (#166 shape, 2026-09-07).
• THE EQUIPMENT THIS LINE STANDS ON (Blade of the Ruined King x1) IS A LEGAL TARGET THE WHOLE TIME IT SITS THERE. 718.5.b: "Attached cards still can be chosen or targeted by game effects while Attached." Its printed Rules Text is Inactive while attached (718.2) and its [Equip] is unusable (721.2), but neither of those protects the CARD. The single copy here does not need the mass answer: SFD-005 Detonate (Fury, E1 + 1 Fury Power, "Kill a gear. Its controller draws 2.") is the cheapest KILL in the pool for it - but NOT the cheapest ANSWER, corrected 2026-09-14: SFD-135 Factory Recall is chaos, E1 and NO POWER, [Action], 'Return a gear to its owner's hand.', which is strictly cheaper and answers the Equipment for the window that matters, since 719.5 detaches it on the zone change and 434.1.c stops appending its Effect Text to the carrier. A KILL predicate cannot see a BOUNCE, which is the same narrowness that once made 36 shipped notables claim less than their own question, and the two cards it hands back do not replace what was attached. The unconditional enemy-facing gear kills are OGN-022 Thermo Beam (fury), OGN-224 Salvage (order), SFD-005 Detonate (fury), SFD-032 Disarming Rake (calm), SFD-077 Rocket Barrage (mind), VEN-003 Brittle Steel (fury) - four domains, so there is no identity this line can hide in. (The full swept set is 16 base codes across all six domains; the predicate is /\bkills?\b[^.]{0,80}\bgear\b/i over text+effect of every deckable base in data/cards.json, and the rest either reach only a friendly gear or are gated below this line's costs. Run npm run adversarial to re-derive it.)
• NO GEAR KILL IN THE POOL CARRIES [Reaction] - BUT A KILL IS NOT THE ONLY ANSWER, AND THE PREDICATE THAT MEASURED THAT SET COULD NOT SEE THE OTHER FAMILY. Swept over all 16 kills: Thermo Beam and Salvage are [Action], which 806.1.c.1 makes short for "This can be played during showdowns on any player's turn", and Detonate and Brittle Steel are plain spells, which 155 confines to "an Open State outside of Showdowns on its controller's turn". WHICH OF THOSE PROTECTS THIS LINE DEPENDS ON WHERE IT PAYS, so check before relying on it. If it pays on a HOLD, the Score happens at 315.2.b.2 inside your own Beginning Phase, where 312.2.a gives the opponent no priority in a Neutral Open State and 813.1.c.1 admits only a [Reaction] in the Closed State the trigger opens - no kill in the pool reaches that window at all, so each must be cast on THEIR own turn, a full turn early and fully telegraphed, and that spell on the Chain is itself a Closed State where 312.2.c hands out priority and 813.1.c.1 admits a [Reaction] in response. If it instead pays in your MAIN PHASE, that protection does not exist: 806.1.c.1 puts Thermo Beam and Salvage inside any showdown on any player's turn, so they reach the scoring window itself. THE SECOND FAMILY IS DETACHMENT, AND IT DOES CARRY [Reaction]. 719.1 appends an attached card's Effect Text to its carrier "for as long as they remain Attached" and 137.3.a stops the Might Bonus "as soon as the card with the Might Bonus is no longer Attached", so taking the Equipment OFF switches the payoff off without killing anything. Swept with /\bdetach/i over text+effect of every deckable base: 5 base codes (4 names - Grandmaster at Arms is printed twice), of which only 1 is ENEMY-FACING, because Strike Down says "an equipped friendly unit", Veiled Temple "a friendly gear" and Grandmaster at Arms "you control". That one is SFD-011 Angle Shot - Fury, 2 Energy, NO Power, and it cantrips: "[Reaction] (Play any time, even before spells and abilities resolve.) Choose a unit and an Equipment with the same controller. Attach that Equipment to that unit or detach that Equipment from that unit. Draw 1." The words that make it an answer are "the same controller", which need not be you. WHAT IT PROVABLY DOES is strip the text and the Might Bonus BEFORE the trigger condition is ever met. WHAT IS NOT WALKED, and a reader should not reach for it here until somebody does, is whether a detach inside the scoring window itself accomplishes anything. The reason to DOUBT it - not a paragraph that settles it - is that a Trigger Condition is measured when the trigger is PLACED (383.2.a.1 makes a clause immediately after the trigger "part of the Trigger Condition and not the Effect"), so stripping the Equipment once its trigger is already on the Chain may well change nothing. Nobody has walked what becomes of a chain item whose source text has gone. Until somebody does, treat Angle Shot as a cheap answer cast EARLY, and do not claim it answers the trigger.
• THE GARRISON THIS LINE NEEDS CANNOT BE SIZED FROM THE ENTRY'S OWN BOARD, SO NO ANSWER IS NAMED HERE (corrected 2026-09-14, #222). A sentence naming a one-Energy answer stood here and was WRONG: it was emitted while the garrison floor was read from PROSE rather than from the board, and it claimed the bodies are tokens when no card this entry uses plays one (439.2.c). The repaired instrument declines this entry rather than guessing, because its bodies come from a `needs` engine rather than from its own `uses`, and a floor that is too LOW produces a confident answer that does not work - which is worse than no answer. Size the garrison by hand before trusting any sweep against it.
• OPPONENT BOARD AND KILL PRICE - ADDED 2026-10-27 (#503). THE BOARD IT WINS ON: the opponent has no ready attackers in their base on their turn with 9 or more Might between them, because the nine arrive in your main phase, their whole turn intervenes, and the Hold is your next Beginning Phase (315.2.b.2, 383.2.a.1). Any enemy unit in their base is readied in their Awaken and can Standard Move to the Plaza (144.2, 144.4.a); units at their own battlefield cannot (144.4.a, 144.4.b) unless they have Ganking (144.4.c.1), and units they play that turn enter exhausted (143.4) unless [Accelerate]. N is 9 (six Mechs at M3 by 187.4, Renata at M4, two Karthus at M3); none has [Tank] or [Backline], so nothing orders the assignment (465.2.c.6). Three bodies of Might 3 die to 9 damage (142.4.b, 465.2.c.3), leaving six, so the price is the N - 6 = 3 cheapest units, here three of the eight 3-Might Mechs and Karthus, 9 damage, not 28; the Blade's +4 on a kept body only makes that body dearer and the attacker simply skips it.

Steps

1. Control The Grand Plaza. Board over the preceding turns: two Karthus, Eternal, Renata Glasc Industrialist, Ferrous Forerunner at your base, and Blade of the Ruined King in hand.
2. Main Phase: activate the Blade's [Equip] for 1 Order Power, attaching it to any body you intend to keep, and pay the kill half with Ferrous Forerunner.
3. His [Deathknell] runs three times — his own plus one per Karthus (R1 = A with stacking): six 3-Might Mech unit tokens to your base, entering ready (Renata, R25 = A).
4. Standard-Move the six Mechs and every ready support body you want at the Plaza in ONE declaration (144.1.a, 144.3, 144.3.a, 144.4.a). No Energy is paid (144.2 charges only their exhaust), and 190.3.a.1 opens nothing because you already control the battlefield.
5. Survive the opponent's turn with seven of them still there — 28 damage of bodies rather than 9. CORRECTED 2026-10-27 (#503): the attacker only has to kill N - 6 = 3 of the nine, and with no [Tank] or [Backline] it picks the cheapest, three 3-Might Mechs or Karthus: 9 damage (465.2.c, 465.2.c.3), not 28; the nine 1-Might Recruits of the Machine Evangel line cost 3.
6. Your Beginning Phase: 315.2.b.2 Holds the Plaza, the Trigger Condition finds 7+ units here (383.2.a.1) and rule 195 wins the game.

How it ends

win the game on the Hold after the Forerunner dies, for 19 Energy and 6 Power

Sources

Walked here, in this project

• Walk of the unwalked partners of the 66 proven synergy rules, rule karthus-deathknell-double 2026-09-06 record

Walked against Core Rules 2026-07-16

Match a deck list against the whole catalogue