Combo · ENGINE

811.5.a - [Hidden] is a characteristic INDEPENDENT of being facedown, which is the only reason four cards can read it in a hand, a deck and a trash

4 cards · mind + chaos · verified

Pieces

Guerilla Warfare ×3 OGN-264 · enabler · mind/chaos
Return up to two cards with [Hidden] from your trash to your hand. You can hide cards ignoring costs this turn.
Ava Achiever ×1 OGN-107 · engine · mind
When I attack, you may pay 1 Mind Power to play a card with [Hidden] from your hand, ignoring its cost. If it's a unit, play it here.

Payoff

Repeatable card advantage

Deck

OGN-264 Guerilla Warfare is a SIGNATURE card tagged Teemo, so 103.2.d.2 forces the legend to carry the Teemo champion tag and the field collapses to ONE name: OGN-263 Swift Scout, the pool's only Teemo legend, Mind/Chaos. Ava Achiever is mono-Mind and sits inside that identity (103.1.b). This is a one-legend line, not a domain line.
103.2.d.1 caps the deck at three Signature cards in total, and three Guerilla Warfare spend the whole budget.
Neither card appears in data/legality.json in either format.

Prerequisites

811.5 AND 811.5.a WERE UNCITED AND THEY ARE WHAT MAKE THE WHOLE ARCHETYPE LEGAL. 811.5: 'Hidden, and whether or not a card has Hidden, is a characteristic of the card and may be checked or referenced by other Game Effects.' 811.5.a: 'This is independent of the state of being facedown.' Without .a there would be a live reading that 'a card with [Hidden]' means a card currently face down - and every one of the pool's four Hidden-readers works on cards that are NOT face down.
THE FOUR READERS, NAMED, WITH THE ZONE EACH READS. Swept 2026-09-09 over data/corpus_flat.txt for 'card(s)/unit(s) with [Hidden]': OGN-107 Ava Achiever reads HAND, OGN-121 Teemo Strategist reads the top five of the MAIN DECK, OGN-263 Swift Scout reads HAND (a discount on hiding), OGN-264 Guerilla Warfare reads the TRASH. Four cards, four zones, none of them face down - which is the whole content of 811.5.a.
THE TWO HALVES OF GUERILLA WARFARE ARE NOT THE SAME HALF. 'Return up to two cards with [Hidden] from your trash to your hand' is the 811.5.a read; 'You can hide cards ignoring costs this turn' is a cost waiver on 811.1.b's rainbow, and 811.1.c.1 ('Hide is not a subset of Play') is why waiving the hide cost is not waiving anything else. Two Hidden cards back plus free hides is the turn this deck is built around.
AVA IS THE HALF THAT DOES NOT CARE ABOUT HIDING AT ALL. She plays a Hidden card FROM HAND, so 811.1.d never engages: 811.1.d.1 confines a hidden PERMANENT to the battlefield it was hidden at, 811.1.d.2 confines the TARGETS of a hidden card's play effects, and neither has anything to bind here. Her payload's targets are unrestricted, and 811.3 says the same thing from the card's side: 'Instead of being hidden, a card with Hidden may be played for its cost as normal, at its normal timing with no restrictions on targeting.' The cost she waives is the base cost, not the timing.
THE PRICE OF THAT FREEDOM IS THE WATCHERS. 811.1.c.1's 'Hide is not a subset of Play' cuts the other way too: a card Ava throws from hand was never face down, so the three 'when you play a card from face down' triggers in the pool - UNL-023 Katarina, OGN-167 Ember Monk, SFD-121 Black Market Broker - never see it. Ava and that package are alternatives, not partners.
AND THE CEILING IS THE BOARD, NOT THE DECK. 811.1.b hides one card per battlefield you control and 485.4 puts two on a Duel table, so however many Hidden cards Guerilla Warfare returns, at most two can be face down at once. What the spell actually buys is a SECOND USE of cards already spent - 811.5.a is what lets it find them - and Ava is the outlet that needs no facedown slot at all. 811.4: 'Multiple instances of Hidden are redundant.'

Steps

Play Hidden cards normally or from face down over the early turns; they end in the trash.
Play Guerilla Warfare (2 Energy + 1 Power). 811.5 makes [Hidden] a characteristic of a card and 811.5.a makes that reading valid on cards sitting face up in the trash, so it can pick up to two of them.
Its second clause waives the hide cost for the rest of the turn (811.1.b's rainbow), so one of them can go straight back face down at a battlefield you control - at most one per battlefield.
The other stays in hand for Ava Achiever: when she attacks, pay one Mind Power to play it from hand ignoring its cost, and 811.1.d never confines it because it was not hidden.
If the payload is a unit, her own text places it at her battlefield, and 359.3.f.2 reads 'here' at execution - where she is standing, inside the attack.

Per iteration

two cards out of the trash per spell, and one free Hidden play per attack for one Mind Power

How it ends

engine - two spent Hidden cards recovered per Guerilla Warfare, one replayed free from hand on every Ava attack; nothing here scores

Sources

Published elsewhere

Riftbound Core Rules, Last Updated 2026-07-16 (data/Riftbound-Core-Rules-2026-07-16.txt) 2026-07-16

Walked here, in this project

Hand walk 2026-09-09, issue #191 - uncited Core Rules sub-rules 500-899 2026-09-09 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.

811.5, 811.5.a, 811.3 and 811.4 were cited by nothing before this entry. Card set OGN-264 + OGN-107 is new; swift-scout-guerilla-hide-cycle uses the spell with the legend instead. Card text verbatim from data/corpus_flat.txt. No unruled reading.

Walked against Core Rules 2026-07-16

Match a deck list against the whole catalogue