Combo · ENGINE
Platewyrm Eggs readied by Defender of Tomorrow and Acceleration Gate
Pieces
- Platewyrm Egg ×3
VEN-075 · engine · body
This enters exhausted. [Empower] — 1 Energy, Exhaust (Pay the cost: Empower this. Use only if not Empowered.) [Reaction][>] Exhaust: [Add] 1 Energy. If this is [Empowered], [Add] 2 Energy instead.
- Defender of Tomorrow ×1
VEN-149 · legend · 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.
- Acceleration Gate ×1
VEN-150 · enabler · mind/body
Ready up to 4 units, gear, and/or runes.
- Temporal Portal ×1
SFD-078 · enabler · mind
1 Power of any domain, Exhaust: Give the next spell you play this turn [Repeat] equal to its cost. (You may pay the additional cost to repeat the spell's effect.)
Payoff
Deck
- Legend is Defender of Tomorrow (VEN-149, Mind/Body) — the legend is one of the engine pieces.
Prerequisites
- Three Eggs played and Empowered on earlier turns — 3E to play plus 1E to Empower each, and an Egg cannot be Empowered on the turn it enters because it enters exhausted and Empower costs an exhaust.
- Exhausted runes on the board for the Gate's spare readies. Runes give Energy by exhausting (164.2.a) but Power only by recycling (164.2.b), and a recycled rune leaves the board, so it cannot be readied back.
- Hall of Legends (SFD-210) readies the legend for 1E on a conquer there, for a second Defender activation. It is one of your three battlefields and Duel picks one of the three at random (485.5).
Steps
- Awaken readies the three Empowered Eggs, the legend and the Portal. Do not spend anything yet: the Rune Pool empties at the start of the Main Phase (167), so Energy added before then is lost.
- Main Phase: exhaust the three Eggs, +6E.
- Defender of Tomorrow (Empowered): 1E and exhaust the legend to ready two Eggs; exhaust them again for +4E. Net +3E, once per turn unless Hall of Legends readies the legend on a conquer there.
- Acceleration Gate (3E+1P): ready the three Eggs and one exhausted rune, then exhaust all four. +7E for 3E+1P, net +4E −1P.
- Temporal Portal's Repeat is a trap here: it costs 1 rainbow plus a second 3E+1P, and the second execution finds the Eggs already ready, so it only readies four more runes: +4E for 3E+1P and a rune off the board. Take the bare Gate instead. Why no window exists to re-exhaust the Eggs between the two executions: 820.1.d puts both executions inside ONE resolution ('execute the instructions of this chain item one additional time during resolution') and 820.1.c.3 caps the Repeat Cost at a single payment, so there is no second Pay Costs step; and 429.3 - the only permission to fire an [Add] Reaction outside a priority window, which the Egg's '[Reaction] exhaust: [Add] 1' would need - is bounded to 'any time that spells or abilities require resources be paid', which the middle of a resolution is not. R21 is the conservative reading of that and it is the one this entry takes, so R21 cannot make this line overclaim.
- Hextech Anomaly (SFD-083) and Ancient Henge (SFD-117) convert between Energy and Power once per copy per turn, at 1:1.
How it ends
engine only — +6E per turn from the three Eggs, +3E from the legend, and +4E −1P per Acceleration Gate; nothing here scores
Sources
Walked here, in this project
- Hunt v2 lens L3, entry L3-04 2026-09-03 record
- REFUTE pass 2, 2026-09-03 2026-09-03 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.
Bounded by Gates (3), Portals (3) and the once-per-turn legend exhaust; never closes. Mind/Body also holds Renata Glasc, Mastermind (SFD-088): a Gate that readies Renata and three Eggs is one point plus +6E — that is the point-loop lens (renata-bubble-bot-ready, jayce-mesmerize-renata). The Garbage Grabber re-draw variant is refuted (L3-05): recycled cards go to the bottom in random order (416.5) and the deck grows by 2 per pass. Card text verified against the corpus. Two numbers in the first write-up were wrong: the Awaken exhausts lose their Energy to 167, and the Repeated Gate cannot ready the same Eggs twice. The bare Gate (+4E −1P) beats the Portal-plus-Repeat version (+5E −3P) once you price Power as a rune leaving the board. REFUTE 2 (2026-09-03): WOUNDED — Awaken Energy evaporates at the Main Phase start (167) and Repeat cannot double the Eggs (R21); corrected to +6E +3E per turn and +4E −1P per bare Gate. HAND-WALKED 2026-09-04 (docs/phase0/walks/2026-09-04-aurora-reksai-platewyrm.md). 820.1.d is explicit that Repeat executes "one additional time during resolution" and 820.1.c.3 caps it at one payment, so R21's conservative reading is the right one - and the entry's claimed output never uses the Portal, so R21 cannot make it overclaim; the other reading would only make it stronger. 164.2.a/b is why the Gate's rune readies are worth little (Energy by exhausting, Power only by recycling, and a recycled rune leaves the board). 416.5 confirms the refuted Garbage Grabber variant, with Garbage Grabber as the rule's own example.
Walked against Core Rules 2026-07-16