Combo · INFINITE
Stealthy Pursuer / Eye of the Herald — infinite ready Recruits
Pieces
- Stealthy Pursuer ×1
OGN-177 · engine · chaos
When a friendly unit moves from my location, I may be moved with it.
- Eye of the Herald ×1
SFD-153 · engine · order
[Equip] 1 Order Power (1 Order Power: Attach this to a unit you control.)
When I move, play a 1 Might Recruit unit token here.
- Renata Glasc, Industrialist ×1
SFD-171 · ready · order
Your tokens enter ready.
Payoff
Deck
- Legend domains cover Chaos and Order (Heart of the Tempest).
- A battlefield you control, so moves never open a combat.
Prerequisites
- Eye of the Herald attached to Stealthy Pursuer (1 Order Power).
- One ready unit at Stealthy Pursuer's location to start.
- THE EQUIPMENT THIS LINE STANDS ON (Eye of the Herald x1) IS A LEGAL TARGET THE WHOLE TIME IT SITS THERE. 718.5.b: "Attached cards still can be chosen or targeted by game effects while Attached." Its printed Rules Text is Inactive while attached (718.2) and its [Equip] is unusable (721.2), but neither of those protects the CARD. The single copy here does not need the mass answer: SFD-005 Detonate (Fury, E1 + 1 Fury Power, "Kill a gear. Its controller draws 2.") is the cheapest KILL in the pool for it - but NOT the cheapest ANSWER, corrected 2026-09-14: SFD-135 Factory Recall is chaos, E1 and NO POWER, [Action], 'Return a gear to its owner's hand.', which is strictly cheaper and answers the Equipment for the window that matters, since 719.5 detaches it on the zone change and 434.1.c stops appending its Effect Text to the carrier. A KILL predicate cannot see a BOUNCE, which is the same narrowness that once made 36 shipped notables claim less than their own question, and the two cards it hands back do not replace what was attached. The unconditional enemy-facing gear kills are OGN-022 Thermo Beam (fury), OGN-224 Salvage (order), SFD-005 Detonate (fury), SFD-032 Disarming Rake (calm), SFD-077 Rocket Barrage (mind), VEN-003 Brittle Steel (fury) - four domains, so there is no identity this line can hide in. (The full swept set is 16 base codes across all six domains; the predicate is /\bkills?\b[^.]{0,80}\bgear\b/i over text+effect of every deckable base in data/cards.json, and the rest either reach only a friendly gear or are gated below this line's costs. Run npm run adversarial to re-derive it.)
- NO GEAR KILL IN THE POOL CARRIES [Reaction] - BUT A KILL IS NOT THE ONLY ANSWER, AND THE PREDICATE THAT MEASURED THAT SET COULD NOT SEE THE OTHER FAMILY. Swept over all 16 kills: Thermo Beam and Salvage are [Action], which 806.1.c.1 makes short for "This can be played during showdowns on any player's turn", and Detonate and Brittle Steel are plain spells, which 155 confines to "an Open State outside of Showdowns on its controller's turn". WHICH OF THOSE PROTECTS THIS LINE DEPENDS ON WHERE IT PAYS, so check before relying on it. If it pays on a HOLD, the Score happens at 315.2.b.2 inside your own Beginning Phase, where 312.2.a gives the opponent no priority in a Neutral Open State and 813.1.c.1 admits only a [Reaction] in the Closed State the trigger opens - no kill in the pool reaches that window at all, so each must be cast on THEIR own turn, a full turn early and fully telegraphed, and that spell on the Chain is itself a Closed State where 312.2.c hands out priority and 813.1.c.1 admits a [Reaction] in response. If it instead pays in your MAIN PHASE, that protection does not exist: 806.1.c.1 puts Thermo Beam and Salvage inside any showdown on any player's turn, so they reach the scoring window itself. THE SECOND FAMILY IS DETACHMENT, AND IT DOES CARRY [Reaction]. 719.1 appends an attached card's Effect Text to its carrier "for as long as they remain Attached" and 137.3.a stops the Might Bonus "as soon as the card with the Might Bonus is no longer Attached", so taking the Equipment OFF switches the payoff off without killing anything. Swept with /\bdetach/i over text+effect of every deckable base: 5 base codes (4 names - Grandmaster at Arms is printed twice), of which only 1 is ENEMY-FACING, because Strike Down says "an equipped friendly unit", Veiled Temple "a friendly gear" and Grandmaster at Arms "you control". That one is SFD-011 Angle Shot - Fury, 2 Energy, NO Power, and it cantrips: "[Reaction] (Play any time, even before spells and abilities resolve.) Choose a unit and an Equipment with the same controller. Attach that Equipment to that unit or detach that Equipment from that unit. Draw 1." The words that make it an answer are "the same controller", which need not be you. WHAT IT PROVABLY DOES is strip the text and the Might Bonus BEFORE the trigger condition is ever met. WHAT IS NOT WALKED, and a reader should not reach for it here until somebody does, is whether a detach inside the scoring window itself accomplishes anything. The reason to DOUBT it - not a paragraph that settles it - is that a Trigger Condition is measured when the trigger is PLACED (383.2.a.1 makes a clause immediately after the trigger "part of the Trigger Condition and not the Effect"), so stripping the Equipment once its trigger is already on the Chain may well change nothing. Nobody has walked what becomes of a chain item whose source text has gone. Until somebody does, treat Angle Shot as a cheap answer cast EARLY, and do not claim it answers the trigger.
- TOURNAMENT RULES 505 IS WHY THIS LOOP MAY BE SHORTCUT AT AN EVENT, AND IT WAS CITED BY NOTHING (upgrade 2026-09-12, #191 batch 27; Tournament Rules, labelled). **505.2** - *"Players performing a loop must have each iteration of the loop be identical with no conditional actions"* - and **505.9** - *"If a sequence of actions is non-deterministic, it may not be shortcut and iterations must be performed manually."* Read against Core Rules 416.5, two or more cards recycled to the Main Deck simultaneously go to the bottom in RANDOM order, so a loop that recycles 2+ per pass is non-deterministic unless it draws all of them back. **The condition is checkable and this entry meets it**: the Main Deck is empty by construction, so every card recycled in a pass is drawn back inside that same pass and the random order never selects a subset. That means the *"zero spare draws"* invariant this catalogue maintains for a different reason - a fifth draw is Burn Out (431.1.a) on one side and a stranded random card on the other - is load-bearing a SECOND time, against a procedural rule it was not written for: it is exactly what makes the loop shortcuttable rather than hand-iterated at a table.
- THE 505 PARAGRAPH ABOVE IS RIGHT ABOUT THE SHORTCUT AND WRONG ABOUT THIS ENTRY'S REASON, corrected 2026-09-13 (#200). It was applied UNIFORMLY to all fourteen INFINITEs by #191 batch 27, and its stated condition - *"the Main Deck is empty by construction, so every card recycled in a pass is drawn back inside that same pass"* - describes the RECYCLE-AND-DRAW loops. **This entry is a COMBAT-RECALL loop: it walks in, takes the Attacker designation, is recalled by 466.1.a.2, and repeats. It puts NO card into the Main Deck and draws none back**, which this entry says in its own words - its `netPerIteration` reads zero cards spent. **So it needs no empty deck at all, and its licence under 505.9 is shorter and stronger than the pasted one: nothing is recycled, so Core Rules 416.5 never fires and there is no random order to be non-deterministic about.** Re-measured over each entry's own `steps` rather than over the pasted needle, the class splits **8 that need an empty Main Deck and 6 that do not**; this is one of the six. **The standing form is about uniform notables rather than about this paragraph: a sentence pasted across a whole class is worth auditing precisely because that is how a CORRECT sentence lands on an entry it was never measured against** - and here the entry's own `netPerIteration` contradicted it in the same record.
Steps
- A ready friendly unit Standard-Moves from Stealthy Pursuer's location to your battlefield (or back to base), exhausting itself (rule 144.2).
- Stealthy Pursuer's trigger moves him along. This is not a Standard Move, so he does not exhaust.
- Eye of the Herald's granted effect fires on Pursuer: play a 1 Might Recruit here. Renata Glasc, Industrialist makes it enter ready.
- That Recruit Standard-Moves back the other way; Pursuer follows; another ready Recruit appears. Repeat.
Per iteration
+1 ready Recruit per move; no resources spent.
How it ends
infinite ready Recruits (engine); wins through Conquer, Hold, or The Grand Plaza
Sources
Published elsewhere
- Riot Games — July Ban List Updates: "the potential to create infinite Recruits as early as turn three" 2026-07-24
- Piltover Archive — Vendetta rules update coverage 2026-07-17
- Reddit r/riftboundtcg — "Pre-Rift Event Infinite" (the earliest written statement of this loop) 2026-02-06
- YouTube - MoreThatMillGuy, "Riftbound Has An *ILLEGAL* Infinite Combo - Can It Be Stopped!?", 5.394 views - it is not a one-turn kill, said by the source itself 2026-02-10
- YouTube - Turn 'em Sideways!, "Riftbound's Infinite Combos EXPLAINED" - a second, independent walkthrough with the same caveat 2026-07-02
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.
Kept although banned: legality is a dated, format-scoped fact the matcher reports, not a reason to delete the combo. ORIGIN TRACED 2026-09-04 (docs/phase0/walks/2026-09-04-reddit-mining-and-gutter-palace.md): issue #16 carried a candidate #11, a "first infinite" for Spiritforged known only from videos dated 2026-02-07/09. It is this loop. The Reddit thread above, one day earlier, states it in writing, and the thread's own answer is negative for the format it asked about - Stealthy Pursuer is an Origins card, so it was never playable at a Spiritforged Pre-Rift event, and the OP edited the post to say so. A commenter there also predicted the legend that would enable it ("There will be an order+chaos legend in set 4"), which is Heart of the Tempest.
Walked against Core Rules 2026-07-16