Combo · ENGINE
Defender of Tomorrow readies two gear a turn — two Mech tokens out of the Hextech Discs
Pieces
- Hextech Disc ×2
VEN-087 · engine · body
[Empower] — Exhaust (Pay the cost: Empower this. Use only if not Empowered.) Disempower this, 1 Energy, Exhaust: Play a 3 Might Mech unit token to your base.
- Defender of Tomorrow ×1
VEN-149 · engine · mind/body
[Empower] 2 Energy + 2 Power of any domain (2 Energy + 2 Power of any domain: Empower me. Use only if not Empowered.) 1 Energy, Exhaust: Ready a gear. [Empowered][>] 1 Energy, Exhaust: Ready 2 gear.
Payoff
Deck
- Defender of Tomorrow (VEN-149) IS the legend; Hextech Disc is Body, inside its Mind/Body identity (103.1.b).
Prerequisites
- Each Mech costs TWO readies of a Disc, and that is the whole arithmetic: one ready is spent paying the [Empower] (exhaust), and the ability that makes the token demands the Disc ready again, because 414.1.b and 414.4 forbid paying an exhaust cost with something already exhausted.
- CORRECTED 2026-09-06: count exhausts, do not apply a floor per turn. The floor assumed the Empowered state does not cross the Awaken, and it does — 441.2 makes Empowered a state of the object on the board and only the Disc's own ability takes it off, so a Disc that ends a turn Empowered and exhausted starts the next one Empowered and READY and makes a Mech for a single exhaust. Disc exhausts per turn = #Discs (Awaken 315.1.b) + A x min(2, #Discs), where A is the Defender's activations; each Mech costs two of them, so with #Discs >= 2 the amortized rate is #Discs/2 + A. One Disc gives 1 (the second half of 'Ready 2 gear' is wasted), two give 2 — the published rate, and correct — and THREE GIVE 2.5, not 2, on a 2/3/2/3 alternation. A third Disc does buy something, half of what the second buys, for 4 Energy + 1 Power; two Discs remains the efficient number and is what this entry declares.
- Empower the Defender once (2 Energy + 2 rainbow Power, 827.1.c.1) to reach the two-ready version; 441.2 keeps it Empowered for the rest of the game.
- VEN-062 Hextech Formula ('This enters exhausted. exhaust: Empower another gear') moves one of the two exhausts onto a different card but does not remove it, so it does not raise the ceiling. Noted, deliberately not in uses. What DOES raise it is a second gear-ready: OGN-162 Miss Fortune, Captain (Body) readies the legend for free every turn and takes A from 1 to 2, which is the separate entry miss-fortune-defender-hextech-double.
- The tokens land in your base EXHAUSTED (143.4). Renata Glasc, Industrialist cannot fix that here — she is Order, outside Mind/Body. SFD-089 Rumble, Scrapper is Mind and does fit: 'Your Mechs have +1 Might (including me)' makes them 4 Might. Rider, not in uses.
- Against Rumble, Scrapper alone, who makes one Mech per Hold: this needs no scoring and no battlefield, so 485.5 does not get a vote.
- Setup is 2 Hextech Disc (8 Energy + 2 Power) plus the Defender's Empower (2 Energy + 2 Power).
Steps
- Empower Defender of Tomorrow once, for 2 Energy and 2 rainbow Power. It stays Empowered (441.2).
- Awaken readies both Hextech Discs, disempowered from the previous turn (315.1.b).
- Main Phase: pay each Disc's [Empower], which costs only its own exhaust. Both are now Empowered and exhausted.
- Activate the Defender: 1 Energy, exhaust, ready 2 gear — both Discs are ready again.
- Pay each Disc's 'Disempower this, 1 Energy, exhaust': two 3 Might Mech unit tokens to your base, and both Discs end disempowered and exhausted, set up for the next Awaken.
Per iteration
two 3 Might Mech unit tokens per turn for 3 Energy, every turn
How it ends
engine — two Mech tokens a turn with the two Discs it declares; the ceiling is readies, not cards, and the amortized rate is #Discs/2 + Defender activations, so a third Disc buys half of what the second did
Sources
Published elsewhere
- Hunt lens [Empower]/[Flow]/[Level N] — issue #34 (GitHub) 2026-09-05
- Riftbound Core Rules, Last Updated 2026-07-16 (data/Riftbound-Core-Rules-2026-07-16.txt) 2026-07-16
Walked here, in this project
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 2026-09-05 (docs/phase0/walks/2026-09-05-escalation-empower-flow-candidates.md), issue #34, which filed it as 'confianza baja'. REWRITTEN UPWARD after counting the cycle: the issue measured one token per turn for 2 Energy, but with two Discs the steady state is two tokens for 3 Energy, and the readies-per-turn budget (one per Disc from the Awaken plus two from an Empowered Defender) was written up as floor((#Discs + 2) / 2), 'so a third Disc buys nothing' — SUPERSEDED, see the correction at the end of this note. That same 2026-09-05 pass reported by grep that VEN-149 was the pool's ONLY gear-readier — FALSE, also corrected below; what is true is that it is the only Mind/Body legend, which is why the entry cannot be built with another legend. Trap check: no attack; no [Repeat]; no [Temporary]; no recall; no rune recycled for Power; all costs are Main Phase activations so 167 does not bite. Shares Hextech Disc with matriarch-of-war-empower-ready, which is a different legend (Body/Order) and pays in readies instead of bodies; the two cannot share a deck, because a legend has exactly two domains (103.1.b). CORRECTED 2026-09-06 by the ready-lens walk (docs/phase0/walks/2026-09-06-ready-lens-candidates.md), issue #56. Two things in this entry were false. (1) The uniqueness claim on VEN-149: its own grep, 'ready [0-9a-z]* ?gear', requires exactly one word between 'ready' and 'gear' and so swallows every adjective; five cards ready gear, not one. (2) The rate for three Discs: the floor was applied per turn, but 441.2 carries the Empowered state across the Awaken, so three Discs run 2/3/2/3 and amortize to 2.5. Class, uses, quantities and steps are UNCHANGED — two Discs is still the efficient number this entry declares.
Walked against Core Rules 2026-07-16