Combo · ENGINE
Shadow Temple × two Blue Sentinels — nine cards into your trash a turn, on a four-turn fuse
Pieces
- Shadow Temple ×1
VEN-165 · battlefield
When you hold here, [Burn 3]. (Put the top 3 cards of your Main Deck into your trash.)
- Blue Sentinel ×2
UNL-087 · engine · mind
[Shield 2] (+2 Might while I'm a defender.) Your hold effects for holding here trigger an additional time. When I hold, [Add] 1 Power of any domain at the start of your next Main Phase. (Abilities that add resources can't be reacted to.)
Payoff
Deck
- Any legend with Mind in its pair (103.1.b.3) — Blue Sentinel is the only domained card here and Shadow Temple is colourless.
Prerequisites
- NINE CARDS A TURN, WHICH IS THE LARGEST TRASH FAUCET AVAILABLE AND ALSO ITS OWN CLOCK. R8 = A is what makes it work: a battlefield's own Hold trigger is one of 'your hold effects', because 190.6.a gives its Controller the ability, 190.6.d makes 'you' mean that Controller, and 383.4.d.2.b puts an ability referencing the Holding player on the Chain for the player who Held. R1 = A with stacking then makes two Sentinels three executions: 3 × [Burn 3] = 9.
- THE FUSE IS FOUR TURNS AND THE ENTRY WILL NOT PRETEND OTHERWISE. 103.2 caps the Main Deck at 40 and 103.2.a.1 removes the Chosen Champion before play, so you draw from 39; nine a turn plus the ordinary Draw Phase card empties it in about four Holds. Then 431.1.b applies — putting cards from your Main Deck into another zone in excess of what is there IS a Burn Out — and 431.2.b makes the Burn Out 'recycle their trash into their Main Deck', which ERASES every card the engine spent four turns putting there, on top of 194.1.d handing the opponent a point. Filling the trash and emptying the deck are the same action; this engine has to be spent, not accumulated.
- The consumers it is for are the ones shadow-temple-trash-fuel names: Vi's recycle-from-trash costs, SFD-019 Assembly Rig, SFD-150 Last Rites, [Flow] spells cast from the trash (829.1.b), and every 'return a unit from your trash' body. Nine cards a turn is roughly three times what any of them can eat, which is why the fuse matters more than the throughput.
- The Sentinels pay for themselves alongside: each one's own 'When I hold, [Add] rainbow at the start of your next Main Phase' is also a hold effect at that battlefield, so 2 × 3 = 6 rainbow Power arrives at 316.4 — after 316.3 has emptied the pool, which is why 167 does not take it.
- Shadow Temple has to be the battlefield in play: 485.4.a puts only 1 of your 3 into the game, randomly in Duel (485.5) and Skirmish (487.5), chosen in Match (486.5), and 103.4.c plus Tournament Rules 402.1 forbid three copies. It competes for that slot with The Grand Plaza and Power Nexus.
- It is symmetric in the worst way: 'When you hold here' reads for whoever holds it, so an opponent who takes the Temple mills THEIR deck, not yours — the Sentinels stay with you, so they lose the multiplier, but you lose the engine entirely.
Steps
- Control Shadow Temple with two Blue Sentinels standing on it (4 Energy + 1 Mind Power each).
- Survive to your Beginning Phase. Scoring Step (315.2.b.2): you Hold, scoring the ordinary 1 point (471.1, capped by 470).
- The Temple's own hold trigger is one of your hold effects (R8 = A) and fires 1 + 2 = 3 times: [Burn 3] three times, nine cards from the top of your Main Deck into your trash.
- Each Sentinel's own hold effect also fires three times: 6 rainbow Power at 316.4 of your Main Phase.
- Spend the trash the same turn or the next. Repeat, and count the deck: at roughly the fourth Hold 431.1.b turns the ninth card into a Burn Out, 431.2.b recycles the whole trash back into the deck and 194.1.d gives the opponent a point.
Per iteration
+9 cards into your trash and +6 rainbow Power per Hold, at the cost of 9 cards of Main Deck
How it ends
engine — the pool's largest trash faucet, with a four-Hold fuse before 431.1.b burns you out and 431.2.b undoes it
Sources
Walked here, in this project
- Walk of the unwalked partners of the 66 proven synergy rules, rules blue-sentinel-hold and shadow-temple-trash-fuel 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.
AUTHORED 2026-09-06 from issue #160. VEN-165 is the anchor of shadow-temple-trash-fuel and appears in NO entry's uses — its five basis combos are the consumers, not the faucet — and it was an uncatalogued partner of blue-sentinel-hold. Card text verbatim from data/corpus_flat.txt; 103.2, 103.2.a.1, 103.4.c, 167, 190.6.a, 190.6.d, 194.1.d, 315.2.b.2, 316.3, 316.4, 383.4.d.2.b, 431.1.b, 431.2, 431.2.b, 470, 471.1 and 485.4.a opened in the Core Rules file. Stands on R1 = A with stacking and R8 = A, both ruled 2026-09-04 or earlier; no new reading. The entry is deliberately written around its own drawback: #95 established that a Burn Out recycles the trash and so erases the currency of every trash line, and this is the engine most likely to cause one.
Walked against Core Rules 2026-07-16