RIFTCOMBO

Combo · ENGINE

One board shape, three cards — the exactly-two garrison read as a whole

3 cards · order + calm · verified

Pieces

Payoff

Score arbitrary pointsBoard protection

Deck

Run play

Prerequisites

Steps

  1. Take a battlefield. 190.1 establishes Control through play, and until you have it 190.6.d ignores everything its text says — the same is true of nothing here, but the Hold you are building toward needs the battlefield to be yours.
  2. Hide VEN-117 Disciple of Shen there. 811.1.b hides a card face down 'at a battlefield you control that doesn't already have a facedown card hidden there', and from the next turn it is played ignoring its base cost — so the two-Energy body is usually free.
  3. Play VEN-138 Shen, Leader of the Kinkou Order (E6 + 2 Order Power) to the same battlefield and flip the Disciple. Stop there. The board you want is exactly these two.
  4. Attach VEN-027 Hand Hammer to Shen for one Calm rune. 818.1 makes [Equip] a separate Activated Ability with its own cost, so this is paid on top of the gear's own E2 and 359.2.d had already entered it ready at your base.
  5. Now read the board once and notice that three different cards are reading it. Shen: 'if there is exactly one other unit you control here' — the Disciple, and 383.2.a.1 makes that count part of his Trigger Condition rather than his Effect. The Disciple: 'while I'm at a battlefield with exactly one other unit you control' — Shen. The Hand Hammer, whose 'I' is its carrier (053.2, 136.2.d): the same clause again, now about Shen.
  6. Sizes, with every modifier counted. 137.3 gives Shen the Hammer's Might Bonus of 1 and its Effect Text adds 2, so he is Might 10; 814.1.c with 814.1.b.3 adds 1 more while he is a defender, so 11. The Disciple is Might 1, and 3 more while defending, so 4. Fifteen summed Might on defence under 465.2.b.
  7. Every Beginning Phase from here: 315.2.b.2 Holds all battlefields you control, 469.2 pays the Hold's own point through 471.1, and Shen's condition is met so 194.1.c gains a second one by ability. Two a turn, for as long as exactly the two of them stand there.

Per iteration

+2 points per turn at one battlefield (one Score by Hold, one ability Gain), for zero ongoing cost

How it ends

engine — two points a turn at one battlefield for as long as EXACTLY two friendly bodies stand there; the exactness forbids scaling it with more copies, 470 and 485.4 cap Scoring at two battlefields a turn, and nothing in the line bursts

Sources

Published elsewhere

Walked here, in this project

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.

SYNTHESIZED, not extracted (#200), and the target was a BOARD SHAPE rather than a legend pair or a card. Sweeping data/corpus_flat.txt for a printed exactness returns eight cards and seven of them ask for the same thing — a battlefield where you control exactly two units — which is a designed Vendetta cycle across Calm and Order. The catalogue held it pairwise: two entries use two members each and none used three, and the one that pairs the cycle's defensive cards says in its own terminatesIn that nothing there scores. This is that half put under the cycle's point card. Hand-walked with every cited paragraph opened and pasted; the partner trade-off against shen-duo-mutual-hold and the one-Energy answer to the Disciple are both stated rather than left for a reader to find.

Walked against Core Rules 2026-07-16

Match a deck list against the whole catalogue