Combo · ENGINE
Reckoner's Arena turns Kennen's conquer into a Hold — a discounted spell out of the trash every turn
Pieces
- Kennen, Storm of Shuriken ×1
VEN-113 · engine · chaos
When you play me, [Burn 2]. (Put the top 2 cards of your Main Deck into your trash.) When I conquer, give a spell in your trash [Flow] equal to its cost this turn. (You may play it from your trash for its Flow cost. Then banish it.)
- Stargazer ×1
VEN-098 · enabler · chaos
Spells with [Flow] you play from your trash cost 2 Energy less, to a minimum of 1 Energy.
- Reckoner's Arena ×1
OGN-286 · battlefield
When you hold here, activate the conquer effects of units here.
Payoff
Deck
- Legend domains cover Chaos — Kennen and Stargazer are both mono-Chaos, so any Chaos legend runs it.
Prerequisites
- Reckoner's Arena must be the battlefield in play, and a deck may not carry two of it (Core Rules 103.4.c, Tournament Rules 402.1): random 1 of 3 in Duel (485.5) and Skirmish (487.5), chosen in Match (486.5) — unless the opponent brings it, since it is colorless.
- You must be HOLDING Reckoner's Arena with Kennen standing there. Lose the battlefield and the engine stops. Reckoner's Arena is colorless, so the opponent can bring it too — 127.1 with 485.4.a means the one you control in a Duel is normally the one you brought.
- The fuel is finite and this is why it is not INFINITE. 829.1.b.1 makes the Flow banish a delayed replacement effect: the spell is banished when it leaves the chain, so each copy in the trash can be re-flowed EXACTLY ONCE. With the 3-copy deck limit the engine runs dry.
- Stargazer discounts Energy only, to a minimum of 1 Energy. The Power cost is paid in full every time: Downwell still costs 2 Power.
- 829.1.b.2 — playing for a Flow cost does not change the spell's timing. A spell without [Action] or [Reaction] is still a Main Phase spell even though the Flow was granted during your Beginning Phase; the 'this turn' duration covers it.
Steps
- Kennen stands at Reckoner's Arena, which you control.
- In your Beginning Phase you hold there. 383.4.g.1 tells you how: 'that player checks the condition of all of the specified effects, as if they had fulfilled the named part of the condition' — and its own worked example IS Reckoner's Arena. Kennen's conquer trigger fires on the hold.
- Kennen gives a spell in your trash [Flow] equal to its cost, this turn. Kennen carries no non-conquer condition, so 383.4.g.1 lets it reach the chain — unlike Yone and Swain, which the reckoners-arena-conquer-on-hold pattern excludes for exactly that reason.
- In your Main Phase, play that spell from the trash for its Flow cost minus 2 Energy (Stargazer), minimum 1 Energy, full Power. Examples measured against the corpus: OGN-198 The Harrowing E6 P2 becomes E4 P2; SFD-147 Downwell E8 P2 becomes E6 P2; VEN-103 Shadows of the Past E3 P1 becomes E1 P1.
- The spell is banished as it leaves the chain (829.1.b.1). Next turn, a different spell in the trash.
How it ends
engine — one discounted spell out of the trash per Hold, no cards spent, until the trash runs out of spells that have not been re-flowed
Sources
Walked here, in this project
- Hunt L7 — Chaos (docs/phase0/hunt3/L7-chaos.md), candidate C4 2026-09-04 record
- Hand walk 2026-09-04 2026-09-04 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.
HAND-WALKED 2026-09-04 (docs/phase0/walks/2026-09-04-nine-domain-lens-candidates.md), issue #29. All three texts verified verbatim against data/corpus_flat.txt on 2026-09-04. This line crosses two synergy patterns that had ZERO combos behind them when it was written - stargazer-flow-spells (15 partners) and reckoners-arena-conquer-on-hold (28 partners) - and VEN-113 was already in the second list. CORRECTED 2026-09-12 by audit #202: calling them THE ONLY TWO was already self-falsifying, because this entry is one of the combos behind the second. Re-measured at 215 rules, reckoners-arena-conquer-on-hold now carries SIX basis.combos INCLUDING THIS ENTRY, stargazer-flow-spells carries one, and the three rules with none are windswept-hillock-move-triggers, wizened-elder-buffed-payoff and vicious-snapjaws-friendly-kill. A count of what a rule has been extracted from is perishable in exactly the way a count of entries is; the durable half of this note is the crossing itself. Same battlefield, second body worth noting: VEN-112 Zed, Without a Sound ('When I conquer, play a 0 Might Shadow Clone unit token to your base') is also on that list, so parked at Reckoner's Arena he makes a free Shadow Clone every turn with no conquer — a mono-Chaos route to the clones that zed-clone-eye-recruits reaches through Order. Trap check: the trigger arrives by Hold, not by the Attacker designation, so 383.4.e/461 does not bite; no [Temporary]; no rune recycled; the hold lands in the Beginning Phase but the Energy is spent in the Main Phase, so 167 does not bite. WALK: holds as written, unchanged. It stands on the Core Rules' own worked example — 383.4.g.1 uses Reckoner's Arena by name — and 829.2 ('Flow … is a characteristic of the Spell') is what lets Stargazer's discount reach a Flow that Kennen granted rather than one that was printed. The four discount figures were re-run against the corpus and all four match, including Shadows of the Past landing on the E1 floor rather than by subtraction.
Walked against Core Rules 2026-07-16