Combo · ENGINE
Overt Operation is the only card that spends N buffs and refills them in the same resolution
Pieces
- Overt Operation ×3
OGN-153 · engine · body
[Action] (Play on your turn or in showdowns.) For each friendly unit, you may spend its buff to ready it. Then buff all friendly units. (Each one that doesn't have a buff gets a +1 Might buff.)
- Fae Dragon ×1
SFD-101 · engine · body
When you play me, buff up to four friendly units. (Give each a +1 Might buff if it doesn't have one.) When you spend a buff, play a Gold gear token exhausted.
- Renata Glasc, Industrialist ×1
SFD-171 · enabler · order
Your tokens enter ready.
Payoff
Deck
- Legend domains must cover Body and Order (103.1.b.1): OGN-153 and SFD-101 are Body, SFD-171 is Order. Five legends qualify: OGN-269 The Boss, OGS-023 Might of Demacia - Starter, SFD-205 Grand Duelist, UNL-203 Keeper of the Hammer, VEN-153 Matriarch of War.
- Bodies on the board to hold the buffs. 702.3 caps it at one buff per body, so the ceiling is the number of units, never the number of buffers.
Run play
Prerequisites
- THE N=5 ARITHMETIC OF ISSUE #97 BELONGS TO THE SECOND CASTING, NOT THE FIRST, AND THIS IS THE CORRECTION. It declares '1 Overt Operation, 1 Fae Dragon, N=5 cuerpos buffeados' and gets +3 Power. Fae Dragon reads 'buff up to four friendly units'. So with one Dragon and nothing else the first Overt Operation spends 4: 4 readies (702.2.b) + 4 Golds, which under SFD-171 enter ready (R25 = A) and are 4 Power, against E5 + 2 Power — NET +2 POWER, and everything is re-buffed. The SECOND Overt Operation is the one that spends one buff per friendly unit on the board: at N=5 it is +3, at N=7 it is +5. Both numbers are real; they are just two different castings.
- THE FIFTH BUFF HAS TO COME FROM SOMEWHERE, and inside Body/Order the pool supplies it: OGN-141 Kinkou Monk (Body, E4 P1, 'buff up to two other friendly units'), OGN-223 Peak Guardian (Order, E6 P1, 'buff me. Then, if I am at a battlefield, buff all other friendly units there'), OGN-139 Cithria of Cloudfield (Body, E2, 'When you play another unit, buff me').
- IT IS NOT THE ONLY MASS SPENDER EITHER, AND THAT IS THE SECOND CORRECTION. A grep of every 'spend ... buff' in the corpus returns TEN spenders, and two of them take more than one: OGN-153 and OGN-230 Albus Ferros (Order, E4 M3, 'When you play me, spend any number of buffs. For each buff spent, channel 1 rune exhausted'), which is also inside Body/Order and also fires the Dragon N times. WHAT SURVIVES IS THE CLAIM WORTH HAVING: Overt Operation is the only card in the pool that spends N buffs AND REFILLS THEM IN THE SAME RESOLUTION ('Then buff all friendly units'), which is what makes the next copy as good as the first. Albus Ferros pays in channelled runes instead of readies and does not refill; the other eight spend exactly one.
- WHY THE SPEND FIRES THE DRAGON N TIMES. 702.2.b is flat — 'Spending a Buff removes a single Buff counter from a Unit' — with no exemption for a spend made as a cost, which is the reading fae-dragon-wallop-industrialist already stands on. 355.10.c.1 confirms the shape: 'This includes costs within instructions, identified by phrases like "[do X] to [do Y]"', and its own example is 'you may spend a buff to move a friendly unit'. Overt Operation says 'For each friendly unit, you may spend its buff', so each unit is its own spend.
- THE ORDERING CAVEAT, INHERITED AND RE-CHECKED. The Golds arrive AFTER the spell has been paid, so the 2 Power must be up front and the surplus is only spendable later in the same Main Phase. 429.2 is what makes it spendable at all — 'Triggered and activated abilities that Add resources resolve as soon as they are finalized' — and 429.2.a adds that they 'will resolve before any other outstanding items on the chain are finalized'. 187.5 is the Gold itself: 'a domainless gear token with "[Reaction][>] Kill this, [E]: [Add] [A]"' — the exhaust in that cost is exactly why R25 matters.
- WHAT REFUTES IT, KEPT IN FULL. (a) 705: 'If a Unit leaves play, remove all Buffs from it' — every body that dies is a coin gone. (b) 702.3: one buff per body at a time, and 702.3.a ('it is not placed instead') means a second buffer aimed at a buffed body does nothing; OGN-078 Lee Sin, Ascetic ('I can have any number of buffs') is the pool's one override and it is Calm, outside this shell. (c) The refill prints no 'may' — 'Then buff all friendly units' — so you cannot hold a body buff-less to keep a 'becomes Mighty' window open (709).
- AND EVERY BUFF IS A CHOOSE (702.2.a, 'a player chooses a Unit and then places a buff on it'), so a mass buffer is N chooses off one card. That is the trigger SFD-195 Blade Dancer and SFD-057 Irelia, Fervent read — but Blade Dancer is Calm/Chaos and her ready costs her own exhaust, so the chooses are not the bottleneck there. See blade-dancer-caitlyn-choose-ready.
- 745.2 IS WHY AN UNQUALIFIED "SPEND A BUFF" CAN ONLY TAKE ONE OFF YOUR OWN BOARD, AND THE 741-749 BLOCK WAS CITED BY NOTHING (upgrade 2026-09-12, #191 batch 26 - diagnosed five days earlier by #187 batch 2 and never applied). The cards that print this cost say *"spend a buff"* with NO owner stated, and none of them has ever had to, because the rules say it: **745.2** - *"In order to spend a Counter, the spending player must control the Game Object the Counter is placed on."* It is the general form of the 702.2.b.2 this project cites fourteen times, and its neighbours finish the picture: **749** (*"Counters do not have a controller"*) and **748** (*"Game Objects that change zones to a non-board zone lose all of their Counters"*), which is the real rule behind buff recovery rather than the 702.x usually cited. Measured consequence from the same walk: a change of CONTROL is not a zone change, so **a buff survives a theft and becomes the thief`s to spend** - the exact complement of 718.5.f, under which an Equipment`s Control does NOT follow its carrier while a buff`s spendability DOES.
- THE `BUFFING IS CHOOSING` SENTENCE IN THIS ENTRY IS FALSE FOR THE CARD THIS ENTRY IS BUILT ON (corrected 2026-09-12, #187 batch 29). The card selects PROGRAMMATICALLY — *"all other friendly units there"* / *"all friendly units"* — and 355.10.d makes a programmatically selected object NOT a target, its own worked example being the identical grammar (*"Kill all units at a battlefield targets a battlefield, but does not target any units"*). **383.4.b.3, cited by nothing, closes it: *"Although these abilities say `choose` in their Condition, they trigger specifically when an appropriate Game Object is Targeted."*** So this card fires NEITHER `SFD-195 Blade Dancer` nor `SFD-057 Irelia, Fervent`. 702.2.a`s *"a player chooses a Unit and then places a buff on it"* is the buff action`s internal description, not a claim that the card targeted anybody. **Swept: 39 cards buff, 37 of them CHOOSE and exactly TWO are programmatic — `OGN-153` and `OGN-223` — so the old sentence was true of thirty-seven cards and false of the only two anyone would call a MASS buffer.** This entry`s verdict does not move (it declares neither trigger and does not need them); the sentence was simply wrong inside a correct entry. Rider: a mass buffer pays no [Deflect] either, since 809.1.c charges *"for each time they choose"*.
Steps
- Renata Glasc, Industrialist on the board first, so every Gold that follows enters ready (R25 = A).
- Play Fae Dragon for 7 Energy + 1 Power: buff up to four friendly units.
- Play Overt Operation for 5 Energy + 2 Power, the 2 Power up front. For each buffed unit, spend its buff to ready it: 4 readies.
- Each spend fires the Dragon: 4 Gold gear tokens, entering ready. Each is 'Kill this, exhaust: Add 1 rainbow' (187.5), so that is 4 Power, and 429.2 resolves the Adds immediately. Net +2 Power on the first casting.
- The same resolution then re-buffs ALL friendly units, with no 'may'.
- A second Overt Operation now spends one buff per friendly unit on the board: at N=5 that is 5 readies, 5 Golds and a net of +3 Power; at N=7, +5.
Per iteration
one ready and one ready Gold per buff spent, against E5 + 2 Power a casting — net +2 Power after one Fae Dragon and +(N-2) once the refill has covered N bodies
How it ends
engine only — three copies (103.2.b), one buff per body (702.3), and every dead body is a coin gone (705); 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
- Lente de buff y Might — issue #97 (GitHub) 2026-09-06
Walked here, in this project
- Hand walk 2026-09-06 2026-09-06 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 2026-09-06 (docs/phase0/walks/2026-09-06-might-buff-lens.md), issue #97 candidate 5. REWRITTEN ON TWO POINTS. (1) The issue's headline arithmetic (1 Overt Operation + 1 Fae Dragon, N=5, +3 Power) cannot happen on the first casting: SFD-101 buffs 'up to FOUR'. The first casting is +2 and the N=5 figure belongs to the second, after the refill has covered every body; both are stated separately, with the Body/Order buffers that would supply a fifth buff on the first pass named. (2) The issue calls OGN-153 'la unica carta del pool que gasta N buffs de un golpe'; a grep of every buff-spender finds ten, two of which take more than one (OGN-153 and OGN-230 Albus Ferros). The surviving claim is that it is the only one that spends N AND refills in the same resolution. The +2/+(N-2) ledger and the R25 reading are consistent with the verified fae-dragon-wallop-industrialist, whose own note already ran the K-body arithmetic; this entry gives OGN-153 a row of its own with its cap stated. Card text verbatim from data/corpus_flat.txt. Citations opened and read: 103.1.b.1, 103.2.b, 187.5, 355.10.c.1, 429.2, 429.2.a, 702.2.a, 702.2.b, 702.3, 702.3.a, 703, 705, 709. Ban check: OGN-153, SFD-101, SFD-171, the three extra buffers and all five Body/Order legends carry no [BANNED marker. Trap check: no attack (807.1.d, 383.4.e, 461 never arise); all spending is Main Phase (167); no [Repeat]; no [Temporary]; the Gold token is killed by its own cost and never recycled, so 185/186.1 do not bite; no recall; no battlefield of its own. Stands on R25 = A, ruled on issue #11; depends on no unruled reading.
Walked against Core Rules 2026-07-16