Combo · INFINITE

Garen, Commander and a buffed Malzahar trade Fiora readies — infinite Recruits without Stealthy Pursuer

7 cards · order + mind · verified

Pieces

• Garen, Commander ×1 OGS-013 · engine · order

  Other friendly units have +1 Might here.

• Eye of the Herald ×2 SFD-153 · engine · order

  [Equip] 1 Order Power (1 Order Power: Attach this to a unit you control.)

  When I move, play a 1 Might Recruit unit token here.

• Fiora, Worthy ×1 SFD-180 · ready · order

  When a unit you control becomes [Mighty], you may pay 1 Order Power to ready it. (A unit is Mighty while it has 5+ Might.)

• Malzahar, Fanatic ×1 OGN-113 · engine · mind

  Kill a friendly unit or gear, Exhaust: [Action] — [Add] 2 Power of any domain. (Use on your turn or in showdowns. Abilities that add resources can't be reacted to.)

• Stupefy ×1 OGN-095 · enabler · mind

  [Reaction] (Play any time, even before spells and abilities resolve.) Give a unit -1 Might this turn, to a minimum of 1 Might. Draw 1.

• Facebreaker ×1 OGN-220 · enabler · order

  [Hidden] (Hide now for 1 Power of any domain to react with later for 0 Energy.) [Action] (Play on your turn or in showdowns.) Stun a friendly unit and an enemy unit at the same battlefield. (They don't deal combat damage this turn.)

Payoff

Deck

• Legend domains cover Mind and Order.

Prerequisites

• The opponent defends Trifarian War Camp (OGN-294, +1 Might to units there) with a unit of 2+ Might on a battlefield they already control, and no second un-stunned unit there — after the recall the defender Establishes Control, a Conquer worth a point if the battlefield was not already theirs (466.5.d), and any un-stunned defender damage kills Garen or the Recruit before the cleanup heals. Malzahar enters the loop buffed by Bonds of Strength; the loop must be primed with 1 Power, because Fiora's ready on the way in is paid before Malzahar's Add that pass. Darius, Executioner (OGN-243, Order, +1 Might to other friendly units here) can replace the War Camp — but then drop the Malzahar buff, or he sits at 5 with Garen away and never re-crosses. In the Darius build both Garen and Malzahar cross on the way home, Malzahar's +2 lands first, and no priming is needed.
• RULES: recall does not change the unit's state (458); combat cleanup heals and recalls attackers when defenders remain (466.1.a); Malzahar's ability is an Action usable in showdowns. R13: a unit crossing 5 Might through an aura or a battlefield bonus 'becomes Mighty' each time.
• THE EQUIPMENT THIS LINE STANDS ON (Eye of the Herald x2) 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. OGN-022 Thermo Beam (Fury, E5 + 2 Fury Power, "[Action] (Play on your turn or in showdowns.) Kill all gear.") is the only card in the pool that kills EVERY gear at once, so against the 2 copies this line stands on it answers the whole payoff with ONE card. It is symmetric, which makes it cheap for a gearless deck and expensive for anyone else. 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.
• TOURNAMENT RULES 505 IS WHY THIS LOOP MAY BE SHORTCUT AT AN EVENT, AND IT WAS CITED BY NOTHING (upgrade 2026-09-12, #191 batch 27; Tournament Rules, labelled). **505.2** - *"Players performing a loop must have each iteration of the loop be identical with no conditional actions"* - and **505.9** - *"If a sequence of actions is non-deterministic, it may not be shortcut and iterations must be performed manually."* Read against Core Rules 416.5, two or more cards recycled to the Main Deck simultaneously go to the bottom in RANDOM order, so a loop that recycles 2+ per pass is non-deterministic unless it draws all of them back. **The condition is checkable and this entry meets it**: the Main Deck is empty by construction, so every card recycled in a pass is drawn back inside that same pass and the random order never selects a subset. That means the *"zero spare draws"* invariant this catalogue maintains for a different reason - a fifth draw is Burn Out (431.1.a) on one side and a stranded random card on the other - is load-bearing a SECOND time, against a procedural rule it was not written for: it is exactly what makes the loop shortcuttable rather than hand-iterated at a table.
• THE 505 PARAGRAPH ABOVE IS RIGHT ABOUT THE SHORTCUT AND WRONG ABOUT THIS ENTRY'S REASON, corrected 2026-09-13 (#200). It was applied UNIFORMLY to all fourteen INFINITEs by #191 batch 27, and its stated condition - *"the Main Deck is empty by construction, so every card recycled in a pass is drawn back inside that same pass"* - describes the RECYCLE-AND-DRAW loops. **This entry is a COMBAT-RECALL loop: it walks in, takes the Attacker designation, is recalled by 466.1.a.2, and repeats. It puts NO card into the Main Deck and draws none back**, which this entry says in its own words - its `netPerIteration` reads zero cards spent. **So it needs no empty deck at all, and its licence under 505.9 is shorter and stronger than the pasted one: nothing is recycled, so Core Rules 416.5 never fires and there is no random order to be non-deterministic about.** Re-measured over each entry's own `steps` rather than over the pasted needle, the class splits **8 that need an empty Main Deck and 6 that do not**; this is one of the six. **The standing form is about uniform notables rather than about this paragraph: a sentence pasted across a whole class is worth auditing precisely because that is how a CORRECT sentence lands on an entry it was never measured against** - and here the entry's own `netPerIteration` contradicted it in the same record.

Steps

1. Stupefy Garen: 4 Might this turn.
2. Garen attacks Trifarian War Camp: 5 Might there, Mighty — Fiora, 1 Order Power, ready him. Two Recruits enter with him.
3. First pass only: Facebreaker on Garen and the defender.
4. In the showdown, Malzahar kills one Recruit: +2 rainbow.
5. Cleanup: Garen and the surviving Recruit are recalled to base. Garen's aura lifts the buffed Malzahar to 5 — Fiora, 1 Power, ready him.
6. Repeat from the attack: 2 Power in, 2 Power out, and one Recruit stays behind in base every pass. The War Camp build needs 1 Power of priming, because the first Fiora payment happens before Malzahar's Add.

How it ends

unbounded Recruits in base for zero net resources; the finish is a wide board, Azir's token moves or a Grand Plaza hold

Sources

Published elsewhere

• Reddit r/riftboundtcg — "Bring this incredible 7 card combo to your next nexus nights" (Spin 2 Win flowchart), Pandorassong — 333 points, 93 comments, rules objections answered in-thread 2026-02-18
• Rift Mana — "Infinite Combo", Viktor Herald of the Arcane by SpicyMcChicken (published 2026-02-19, 1186 views) 2026-02-19

Walked here, in this project

• REFUTE pass 2, 2026-09-03 2026-09-03 record
• Hand walk 2026-09-04 2026-09-04 record

Walked against Core Rules 2026-07-16

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