Combo · ENGINE
Scrutinizing Sergeant — the pool's only XP faucet that scales with the board
Pieces
- Scrutinizing Sergeant ×3
UNL-157 · engine · order
When you play me, gain 1 XP for each friendly unit.
- Blood Rose ×1
UNL-109 · payoff · body
When you play a unit, you may pay 1 Energy to gain 1 XP. Spend 3 XP, Exhaust: Ready a unit.
Payoff
Deck
- Body + Order: UNL-203 Keeper of the Hammer (Poppy) and VEN-153 Matriarch of War (Ambessa) both hold it (103.1.b.2).
- A wide board when the Sergeant lands — he counts friendly units, so a token line is what makes him worth E6.
Prerequisites
- He counts UNITS, and a token unit is one: 185.1 makes 'token' an intrinsic category of Game Objects 'in the same way “card” is', and 185.2.b says outright 'Token units have a Might.' So a Recruit or Sprite swarm is the payload. Six bodies on the board is 6 XP on one play, and he is himself the seventh — the count is taken as his trigger resolves, so he is already on the board (817.1.c's 'the permanent entering the Board' logic; his own trigger is a play trigger and 419.4.a fires it when the play completes).
- SPENDING XP TURNS YOUR LEVEL ABILITIES OFF, and this is the trap that decides how the faucet may be used. 730.2: 'To Spend XP, reduce the value of XP marked on the Player spending it.' 824.1.d: 'The Dependent Ability will be Inactive as soon as the controlling player has less than [N] XP.' So a deck built on a [Level N] threshold must NOT spend, and a deck built on Blood Rose must not care about a threshold. The two uses are exclusive; that was registered on wuju-master-blood-rose-level in 2026-09-04 and it applies here in full.
- Nothing in the pool converts XP into points, so no XP line is ever more than an ENGINE — CLAUDE.md's standing finding, unchanged by the size of this faucet.
- Blood Rose's other half — 'When you play a unit, you may pay E1 to gain 1 XP' — makes the Sergeant's own play worth an extra XP, and a token is played without being a card — 350.2, 'Tokens are not cards, but can still be Played', with 185.2.a giving the steps — so 'When you play a unit' fires on tokens while any 'played a card' clause does not.
- Three Sergeants (103.2.b), and no recursion of them in this identity, so this is three spikes a game.
Steps
- Build a wide board of units — tokens count (185.1, 185.2.b).
- Play Blood Rose for E1. From then on each unit you play may be turned into 1 XP for E1.
- Play Scrutinizing Sergeant for E6. His trigger gains 1 XP for each friendly unit; with six bodies out that is 6 XP, plus 1 more if you pay Blood Rose's E1 on his own play.
- Spend 3 XP and exhaust Blood Rose to ready a unit — a second Standard Move (144.2) or a second activation of any exhaust ability on the board.
- 315.1.b readies Blood Rose at the next Awaken, so the bank funds one ready a turn until it runs out.
How it ends
engine only — about 7 XP on one play, which is two readies through Blood Rose, three times a game (103.2.b). Nothing in the pool converts XP into points, so this can never be more than an engine.
Sources
Published elsewhere
- Riftbound Core Rules, Last Updated 2026-07-16 (data/Riftbound-Core-Rules-2026-07-16.txt) 2026-07-16
- Issue #153 (GitHub) 2026-09-06
Walked here, in this project
- Hand walk 2026-09-06, issue #153 — the 55 synergy rules no catalogued entry stands on 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-orphan-synergy-rules.md §19), issue #153, from the orphan rule scrutinizing-sergeant-xp-producer. Card text verbatim from data/corpus_flat.txt. Citations opened: 103.1.b.2, 103.2.b, 144.2, 185.1, 185.2.a, 185.2.b, 315.1.b, 350.2, 419.4.a, 730.2, 731, 824.1.d. The uniqueness claim was swept over all 935 BASE codes, per walk document §11a. Trap check: no attack; no [Repeat]; no [Temporary]; tokens are used only as things that are counted and played, never as cards, so 185 / 186.1 / 416.1 never arise; no recall; 167 is not touched. Deliberately NOT paired with UNL-203 Keeper of the Hammer as the sink, because keeper-hammer-hunt-draw already occupies that pairing; Blood Rose is the Body sink and forces the same Body/Order identity anyway. Depends on no unruled reading.
Walked against Core Rules 2026-07-16