Combo · BURST · 8 points

Ivern under Red Brambleback — ten points on one Conquer, and no excess damage to find

6 cards · order + fury · verified

Pieces

• Ivern, Friend to All ×3 UNL-177 · payoff · order

  As you play me, choose Bird, Cat, Dog, or Poro. I gain that tag. When I conquer or hold, score 1 point if your units have all of the following tags among them — Bird, Cat, Dog, and Poro.

• Red Brambleback ×2 UNL-029 · engine · fury

  [Accelerate] (You may pay 1 Energy + 1 Fury Power as an additional cost to have me enter ready.) Your conquer effects for conquering here trigger an additional time. When I conquer, [Buff] a friendly unit. (Give it a +1 Might buff if it doesn't have one.)

• Soaring Scout ×1 OGN-216 · enabler · order

  [Deathknell] — Channel 1 rune exhausted. (When I die, get the effect.)

Payoff

Deck

• Legend domains cover Fury and Order. Measured over data/cards.json on 2026-09-12, the pool prints THREE Fury/Order legend names: Hand of Noxus (OGN-253 / OGN-302), Void Burrower (SFD-187 / SFD-243), Piltover Enforcer (UNL-187 / UNL-229).
• None of UNL-177, UNL-029 or OGN-216 is a Signature card (checked on the signature field in data/cards.json, all three false), so 103.2.d.2 forces no legend. 103.2.b allows the three Ivern and the two Brambleback.

Prerequisites

• TEN POINTS IN ONE SCORING EVENT, ON THE FORMULA ITS OWN FAMILY PUBLISHES. 1 + N x (1 + K), N = Ivern present at the conquered battlefield, K = Red Brambleback present. At N=3, K=2 that is 1 + 9 = TEN, for E28 and 2 Fury Power, five bodies at the battlefield and one at the base. The ceiling is N=3, K=3 = THIRTEEN for E32 + 3 Fury Power, and it is not what the entry declares because ten already clears the Victory Score by two. Its sibling tryndamere-brambleback-conquer runs the same multiplier at T=2, K=3 for NINE at E26 + 7 Fury Power - so this is 2 Energy dearer, 5 Power cheaper, one point better, and it is Order paying where that one is Fury. CORRECTED 2026-10-26 (#472, the follow-up PR #471 listed for #464): the formula counts every Ivern and every Brambleback as present at the Conquer, and after a combat a dead one is not. 383.4.c.2.a: 'The Conquer Abilities of Units are put on the Chain as Pending Items after the Unit(s) these effects correspond to are present at a Battlefield when a player gains control of it and gains 1 Victory Point from Conquering.' 365.1: 'Passive Abilities of Permanents are typically only active while on the Board.' The defender picks the deaths: 465.2.c: 'Starting with the Attacker, each player assigns an amount of damage equal to their summed Might among the other's Units.' With 465.2.c.3: 'Units must have lethal damage assigned to them in full before damage is assigned to a different Unit. Example: If a player has 5 damage to distribute among four 3 Might units, they may not choose to assign 2 damage to one of the units and 1 damage to each of the remaining 3. They must assign at least 3 damage to one, and the remaining 2 to another.' And a dead Ivern takes its tag with it. Ivern reads 'When I conquer or hold, score 1 point if your units have all of the following tags among them — Bird, Cat, Dog, and Poro.' Each of the three Ivern carries one of the four tags, the Scout at the base the fourth, and the tag check is made as each instance resolves (the Bird notable), so with one Ivern dead the survivors' instances find three tags and score nothing. The count is therefore 1 + 3 x (1 + surviving K) with all three Ivern alive, and 1 with any Ivern dead. The declared board attacks with three Ivern at 6 and two Bramblebacks at 4, 26 in all; the Scout stays home and takes no combat damage. Against a garrison of summed Might G with no damage marked and nothing else changing Might in the combat, the defender choosing the deaths that cost most, N=3 and K=2 score: an empty battlefield, since nobody fights (316.8.b.1: 'Showdowns that occur as a result of a player moving to an empty Battlefield are a stand-alone Phase and do not create a Combat.'), 10; G 1 to 3, 10; 4 to 5, 7 (a Brambleback dies); 6 to 25, 1 (an Ivern dies and every Gain blanks; the Conquer's own Score stands); 26 or more, 0 (both sides die, or the garrison survives, and 466.5: 'If no Showdown or Combat is staged at this location, the player with Units remaining here Establishes Control if they didn’t already control this Battlefield.'). Re-derived on 2026-10-26 from the rules above. THE DECLARED QUANTITIES STILL REACH 8, so the class stays BURST: ten in one Conquer, on the open battlefield the no-gate notable names, or against a garrison of 1 to 3 summed Might.
• WHAT IT ADDS OVER ITS SIBLING IS THAT IT HAS NO GATE. OGN-034 Tryndamere reads 'When I conquer after an attack, if you assigned 5 or more excess damage to enemy units' - 383.2.a.1 puts that clause immediately after the trigger, so it is part of the Trigger Condition, and 807.1.d with 323.9 means the attack itself needs an enemy garrison. Ivern asks for four tags and a Conquer and nothing else. So where Tryndamere is dead on an OPEN battlefield - no attack, no excess damage, no point - this line takes one through 344.2 ('If Control of a Battlefield is Contested, there aren't units controlled by different players there, and the turn is in a Neutral Open State, a Showdown is opened during the next Cleanup') with 348.2.a and 348.2.a.1, bloodlessly. Measured at 764 entries, fury/order had EIGHT finishers of which two survive a stalled board and BOTH are attack-gated; this is the identity's first conquer-gated one.
• AND THE HONEST CAVEAT, WHICH THE READER IS OWED. Denominated in turns rather than points, this is slower than doing nothing: an unopposed deck Holds both battlefields from its own Beginning Phase (315.2.b.2) and reaches eight on turn 5 or 6 for free, while E28 and 2 Power of deployment lands later than that. Ten points is therefore REDUNDANT against an opponent who lets you hold two battlefields, and the line earns its slot on the board where the Hold curve has been broken - which is exactly the board its conquer face still pays on and a Hold-gated finisher does not. That is a property of the whole BURST class and not a defect of this entry; it is stated here because almost no finisher in the catalogue states it.
• THE SINGLE POINT OF FAILURE IS THE BIRD, AND IT IS AN EFFECT CHECK RATHER THAN A CONDITION. Ivern reads 'When I conquer or hold, score 1 point if your units have all of the following tags among them' - the conditional follows the effect verb, which is 383.2.a.1's Loose Cannon shape ('The "if you have one or fewer cards in your hand" conditional statement is not immediately after the trigger condition, so it is part of the effect and not the condition'), NOT its Sona shape. So the tags are checked as each instance RESOLVES, and killing Soaring Scout in response to the triggers blanks ALL NINE Gains at once, leaving the bare Conquer Score. The mitigation is two Energy: a second tag body, which 103.2.b permits to three. What makes the line survivable at all is that the pool cannot do it at instant speed - swept over every non-banned card carrying [Reaction] in its own text (with parenthesised reminder text and quoted token text stripped, because UNL-073 Deadly Flourish's [Reaction] belongs to the Gold token it makes), the population is seven, and the only one reaching a BASE is OGN-033 Shakedown, whose own text lets the defender decline by having the caster draw 2. So the Bird has to be killed on the opponent's own turn, a full turn early and fully telegraphed, by OGN-229 Vengeance, VEN-154 Public Execution or SFD-158 Sandshifter.
• FIVE BODIES HAVE TO ARRIVE, AND [Accelerate] IS WHY THE BRAMBLEBACKS CAN BE LATE. 143.4 has units enter exhausted, so a body played on turn N cannot move until 315.1.b readies it at your next Awakening - the three Ivern therefore deploy a turn early and walk in together, which 144.3 makes ONE game action ('Players may perform multiple Units' standard move simultaneously. This is treated as one game action performed on multiple Units') with 144.3.a requiring the shared destination. The Bramblebacks are the exception: their printed [Accelerate] buys 'enter ready' for 1 Energy and 1 Fury Power each, so they can be played and moved on the finishing turn rather than exposed for a full opponent turn. The Bird never moves at all.
• THE CATALOGUE SIDE, MEASURED. scripts/have.mjs UNL-177 UNL-029 reports no entry on this card set or a subset, across TWELVE Red Brambleback entries and SEVEN Ivern entries - both cards are heavily mined and the pair of them was untouched. The three multipliers that reach a point card are Svellsongur (Calm), Red Brambleback (Fury) and Blue Sentinel (Mind); Ivern is the pool's only Order point card and the only one whose text reads 'conquer OR hold', so he is the one payoff that fits every one of them. The Blue Sentinel pairing is ivern-sentinel-hold and ivern-arena-sentinel-hold, both Mind/Order and both on the HOLD face; this is the CONQUER face, and it is the pairing that makes the payoff work on a board you do not already control.
• THE TAG BODY IS PARKED AT BASE TO DODGE `OGN-133`, AND THREE CARDS REACH IT THERE (added 2026-09-13, #200). `UNL-177 Ivern, Friend to All` reads *"When I conquer or hold, score 1 point if your units have all of the following tags among them — Bird, Cat, Dog, and Poro"*, and that clause carries NO location clause — which is exactly why this entry declares `OGN-216 Soaring Scout` (Might 1) in zone BASE, where `OGN-133 Flurry of Blades` (*"Deal 1 to all units at battlefields"*) cannot reach it. THAT REASONING IS RIGHT AND IT IS INCOMPLETE. Measured over the twenty cards in the pool that remove more than one body in one action (the table is in `docs/phase0/walks/2026-09-13-might-1-survivability.md`), FOUR carry no location clause of their own and take the base too — corrected from THREE on 2026-09-13, and the fourth is the CHEAPEST of them: `UNL-132 Angler Beast` (Chaos, E5 P1, *"return all units with 2 :rb_might: or less to their owners' hands"*), `VEN-133 Glowstone` (Order, **E2**), `UNL-180 The Ruination` (Order, E9 P3, *"Kill all units."*) and `SFD-147 Downwell` (Chaos, E8 P2, *"Return all units and gear to their owners' hands."*). Glowstone's route is printed on the card: its own activated ability reads *"Disempower this, :rb_exhaust:: Choose a player. They gain control of this and recall it."*, and its delayed clause reads *"At the end of your turn, kill this and deal 5 to all units you control."* So an opponent plays it, Empowers it, then disempowers and exhausts to HAND IT TO YOU, and 053.2 makes a gear say "this" and *"your turn"* its CONTROLLER's turn, so the end of YOUR turn deals 5 to all units YOU control, base included. Against a Hold line the timing works: the body dies at the end of turn N and the Hold at the start of N+1 finds three tags. Two qualifications, because they decide what to do about it: it is FIVE damage, so no +Might in the pool reaches it and it belongs in this census rather than in any repair list; and it costs the opponent a cross-turn setup that sits visibly on their board first. The tag body sits inside Angler Beast's band and THERE IS NOWHERE FURTHER BACK TO PARK IT, because the base is already the safe zone. And the loss is total rather than partial — though NOT for the reason the first version of this note gave, which had 383.2.a.1 exactly backwards (corrected 2026-09-13). THAT RULE’S TEST IS POSITIONAL and Riot works both sides of it: `Sona, Harmonious` puts the *"if"* IMMEDIATELY after the Condition, so it is part of the Trigger Condition and *"if she is removed in reaction to the triggered ability, it will still resolve"*; `Loose Cannon` puts it after the effect verb and Riot says outright it *"is not immediately after the trigger condition, so it is part of the effect and not the condition"*. `UNL-177` reads *"When I conquer or hold, score 1 point if your units have all of the following tags among them"* — THE EFFECT VERB FIRST, which is the Loose Cannon shape — so the tag check is part of the EFFECT and is made ON RESOLUTION. The loss is total because the card says *"all of the following tags"*, and the TIMING runs the opposite way from a Trigger Condition: killing the tag body IN RESPONSE to the trigger BLANKS the whole Score, where a Trigger Condition would have survived it. **That makes parking the body at base MORE load-bearing, not less** — and it is why the three no-location threats above are the ones that matter. PARKING AT BASE IS A DEFENCE AGAINST FLURRY AND NOT A DEFENCE AGAINST THE LENS — eighteen entries in the catalogue park a Might-2-or-less body at base and, before this note, none named any of the three. AND THE REPAIR FOR A BASE-PARKED BODY MUST BE BOARD-WIDE, WHICH NO NOTABLE IN THIS FAMILY SAID UNTIL 2026-09-13. The six static +Might grants split on location exactly as the threats do. `OGS-013 Garen, Commander` and `OGN-243 Darius, Executioner` read *"Other friendly units have +1 :rb_might: here"* — the last word is HERE —, so they are complete against the sixteen location-scoped sweeps AND ONLY AT THAT BATTLEFIELD, and they do NOTHING for a body at base. `VEN-018 Rage Amplifier`, `UNL-077 Soul Shepherd`, `UNL-147 Baron Nashor` and `UNL-191 Wuju Master` carry no location clause, so they reach the body wherever it stands, up to their own Might threshold. A SCOPE IS SAFE EXACTLY WHEN IT MATCHES THE THREAT: `OGN-133` reads *"all units at battlefields"* and a Plaza counts its seven *here*, which is why a here-scoped +1 answers it completely — and this body is at the BASE, which is the one place that grant cannot follow it. The reason no earlier notable said so is structural rather than careless: the Ivern notables were written about the base-reaching threats and the Plaza notables about the here-scoped one, and nobody put the two halves in the same sentence.

Steps

1. Over earlier turns, play three Ivern, Friend to All (E6 each, no Power) choosing three different tags of Bird, Cat, Dog and Poro, plus one Soaring Scout (E2) for the fourth. 143.4 has them enter exhausted; 315.1.b readies them at your next Awakening. The Scout stays at your base for the rest of the game.
2. On the finishing turn, play both Red Brambleback (E4 + 1 Fury Power each), paying the [Accelerate] additional cost of 1 Energy and 1 Fury Power apiece so they enter ready and can move the same turn.
3. Standard-Move the three Ivern and both Brambleback to the same battlefield in ONE action (144.3, shared destination per 144.3.a), each paying its own exhaust under 144.2. 450 applies Contested status to the destination.
4. At the Cleanup the battlefield resolves into a Conquer: against a garrison, 323.9 stages a Combat, you win it under 466.3.a, 466.5 establishes Control and 466.5.d makes it a Conquer; against an open battlefield, 344.2 opens a Showdown and 348.2.a / 348.2.a.1 do the same with no damage assigned at all. CORRECTED 2026-10-26 (#472, the follow-up PR #471 listed for #464): the open-battlefield route is unaffected. Against a garrison the Conquer is worth 10 only at 1 to 3 summed Might: 7 at 4 to 5, 1 from 6 to 25, because the defender kills an Ivern and its tag, and 0 from 26 (the formula notable).
5. The Conquer gains its own point (469.1, 471.1). 383.4.c.2.a then places the conquer ability of every Ivern present - and Red Brambleback's 'Your conquer effects for conquering here trigger an additional time', at two copies, gives each of the three THREE executions (R1 = A: N copies yield N+1 instances).
6. Nine instances resolve, each finding all four tags among your units. ONE PLUS NINE IS TEN, in a single scoring event, and 470 is spent on the one Score while the nine Gains are 194.1.c point Gains by ability that it cannot cap (R2 = A). CORRECTED 2026-10-26 (#472, the follow-up PR #471 listed for #464): only with all three Ivern alive at the Conquer. A garrison of 6 or more summed Might kills one, and then no instance finds all four tags (the formula notable).

How it ends

ten points in one scoring event for E28 and 2 Fury Power - one Conquer Score and nine ability Gains that 470 does not cap - and unlike its Fury sibling it needs no attack and no excess damage, so it also pays on an open battlefield through 344.2 CORRECTED 2026-10-26 (#472, the follow-up PR #471 listed for #464): ten on an open battlefield or against a garrison of 1 to 3 summed Might; against a garrison of 6 to 25 the Conquer's Score alone (the formula notable).

Sources

Walked here, in this project

• Hand walk 2026-09-12, issue #200 (docs/phase0/walks/2026-09-12-synthesised-lines.md section 26) 2026-09-12 record

Walked against Core Rules 2026-07-16

Match a deck list against the whole catalogue