Combo · ENGINE
Sprite Fountain fed to Malzahar, Fanatic — Power and two ready Sprites per Fountain
Pieces
- Sprite Fountain ×1
UNL-078 · engine · mind
[Temporary] (Kill this at the start of its controller's Beginning Phase, before scoring.) When you play this, play a ready 3 Might Sprite unit token with [Temporary] to your base. [Deathknell][>] Repeat this gear's play effect. (When this dies, get the effect.)
- Malzahar, Fanatic ×1
OGN-113 · engine · mind
Kill a friendly unit or gear, Exhaust: [Action] — [Add] 2 Power of any domain. (Use on your turn or in showdowns. Abilities that add resources can't be reacted to.)
- Jayce, Brilliant Inventor ×1
VEN-068 · ready · mind
When you play me or the first time you play a non-token gear each turn, you may ready something besides me that's exhausted.
Payoff
Deck
- Legend domains cover Calm and Mind (Fire Below the Mountain SFD-189 adds 1 rainbow per turn for gear; Seals of Insight OGN-120 add Mind Power).
Prerequisites
- Each Malzahar acts once per Awaken. Jayce's trigger is on the first non-token gear of the turn only, and it readies anything exhausted — a rune is usually the only live target, since the Malzahars have not been spent yet.
- Sprites are Temporary: they die at the start of your next Beginning Phase, before the Scoring Step (816.1.b, 315.2.b). They can conquer on the turn they are made and defend on the opponent's turn, but they can never Hold and they are never alive at the start of a Main Phase.
Steps
- Play Sprite Fountain (2E+1P): a ready 3 Might Sprite token at your base. Jayce's trigger fires here, on the first non-token gear of the turn — every Malzahar is still ready from Awaken at this point, so the useful target is an exhausted rune (+1E), not a Malzahar.
- Malzahar: kill the Fountain as the ability's cost and exhaust him for +2 rainbow. Killing as a cost still fires the Deathknell (428.1.a.1 makes a cost-kill an Active Kill; the gear paragraph is 808.1.a 'present on Permanents' + 808.1.d.2, not 428.1.a.1.b, which says 'a unit'), which repeats the play effect for a second ready Temporary Sprite.
- Net per Fountain: −2E +1P and two ready 3 Might bodies. Three Fountains and three Malzahars is six Sprites for a net −6E +3P.
How it ends
engine only — up to six ready 3 Might Temporary bodies a turn for a net −6E +3P; they can conquer the turn they are made but cannot hold
Sources
Walked here, in this project
- Hunt v2 lens L3, entry L3-06 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.
Target (b) of lens L3: the repeatable core of an Ornn Calm/Mind gear deck. Sinks are the weak point. The Grand Plaza's win condition is a Hold trigger and Temporary kills before scoring, so it needs LeBlanc suppressing the Temporary trigger (see leblanc-temporary-plaza); Bottled Constellation triggers at the start of your Main Phase, always after the Beginning Phase that killed the Sprites, so it can never eat them. What the engine buys is 18 Might of ready bodies for two conquers and a defensive turn. Shurelya's Requiem (SFD-192) readies every unit once per play and Legion Quartermaster (SFD-044) returns it to hand for a replay at 7E+2P — a bounded second ready of all Malzahars, not an engine of its own (L3-07). Card text verified against the corpus. REFUTE 2 (2026-09-03): WOUNDED — the per-Fountain numbers hold but both named sinks were dead: Temporary Sprites never see a Hold or a Main Phase start. HAND-WALKED 2026-09-04 (docs/phase0/walks/2026-09-04-sprites-and-dragons.md). The engine turns on 428.1.a.1, which counts a kill taken AS A COST as an Active Kill, and on 808.1.a ('It is present on Permanents') + 808.1.d.2 ('the card with an ability that triggers on its own death'), which put the death trigger on the chain before the GEAR reaches the trash - so Malzahar's cost-kill really does repeat the Fountain's play effect. CITATION CORRECTED 2026-09-06 by the #107 walk: this entry cited 428.1.a.1.b, whose text opens 'When a unit with a Deathknell...' and so does not reach gear; CLAUDE.md already recorded the right pair from the #85 walk and it had never been applied here. Mechanism, class and quantities unchanged. Both named sinks are correctly refuted: 816.1.b kills the Temporary Sprites before the Scoring Step (315.2.b), so they never Hold and never see a Main Phase start. Depends on no unruled reading. FEATURE CORRECTED 2026-09-06 (issue #64, docs/phase0/walks/2026-09-06-issue63-payoff-lens.md): produces temporary-body-engine, not token-body-engine. UNL-078 Sprite Fountain plays 'a ready 3 Might Sprite unit token with [Temporary]', and 816.1.b kills a [Temporary] permanent at the start of its controller's Beginning Phase BEFORE scoring. This entry's own terminatesIn already said the bodies cannot hold; the split makes the graph say it too, so a Grand Plaza consumer can never be fed by them.
Walked against Core Rules 2026-07-16