Combo · ALT WIN

A Towering Combatant holds The Grand Plaza from turn two and Up from the Deep fills it on turn three — seven units behind a six-Might Tank for a turn-four Hold

4 cards · body + chaos · candidate

Pieces

• The Grand Plaza ×1 OGN-293 · battlefield

  When you hold here, if you have 7+ units here, you win the game.

• Towering Combatant ×1 UNL-099 · enabler · body

  [Shield 2] (+2 Might while I'm a defender.) [Tank] (I must be assigned combat damage first.)

• Up from the Deep ×1 VEN-100 · engine · chaos

  Play two 1 Might Tentacle unit tokens from Bilgewater. [Flow] 3 Energy (You may play this from your trash for its Flow cost. Then banish it.)

• Pit Rookie ×1 OGN-136 · enabler · body

  When you play me, buff another friendly unit. (If it doesn't have a buff, it gets a +1 Might buff.)

Payoff

Deck

• Legend's Domain Identity includes Body and Chaos (103.1.b.3): the Combatant and the Rookie are Body, Up from the Deep is Chaos, The Grand Plaza is Colorless. Synthesized for Body/Chaos (#512), the least-covered legend pair not yet worked, and walked with UNL-201 Voidreaver and UNL-111 Determined Sentry (Body, E1, the one unit at Energy 1 or less in either domain) as the three bodies.
• Seven units at the Plaza when your T4 Beginning Phase starts: three bodies, the Combatant, the Rookie and two Tentacles.

Run play

• A Towering Combatant makes one Plaza kill cost six, their six kill only it, and the turn-four rebuild wins the turn-five Hold

Prerequisites

• KILL PRICE (#503): 6 Might at the end of your T3, 5 at the end of your T2. The unit an attacker must kill first is the Combatant, [Tank] (815.1.b; 815.1.c.2: 'Units without Tank are invalid assignments until all units with Tank have lethal damage assigned to them.'), and as a defender it is 3 + 2 ([Shield 2], 814.1.c) + 1 (the Rookie's buff, 703). Every other unit of the seven is 1 or 2 Might. Against up-from-the-deep-flow-grand-plaza (1) and frisky-hunter-grand-plaza (3) this is the highest kill price of the three identity-first Plaza lines. Walked in docs/plays/2026-10-27-a-towering-combatant-makes-one-plaza-kill-cost-six-their-six-kill-only-it-and-the-turn-four-rebuild-wins-the-turn-five-hold.md against the Calm/Order Radiant Dawn deck of the two earlier slices: their T3 attack with 6 Might killed the Combatant and nothing else, which left six, so the T4 Hold did not win.
• THE T2 BOARD IS NOT FRAGILE: two Determined Sentries and the Combatant. A 3-Might attacker on their T2 kills nothing (3 is not lethal for a 5-Might Tank, and 815.1.c.2 bars damage to the Sentries until it is), where it kills three of four on frisky-hunter-grand-plaza's T2 board.
• THE ONE BOARD IT WINS ON T4: 5 Might or less ready in their base on their T3 (units at their own battlefield cannot reach the Plaza, 144.4.a, 144.4.b; units played on their T3 enter exhausted, 143.4), and no answer spell. 383.2.a.1 counts the seven when the Hold happens.
• THE CHEAPEST SPELLS, pool-wide, priced against the target: OGN-133 Flurry of Blades (Body, E1) deals 1 to every unit at battlefields and kills the three Sentries and the two Tentacles, leaving the Combatant (4 Might outside combat, 814.1.d.1) and the Rookie; OGN-169 Gust (Chaos, E1) returns a Sentry, a Tentacle or the Rookie, but not the buffed Combatant, which is 4 Might and over Gust's 3. None of the seven has [Deflect], so each spell pays its printed cost.
• SPELL TAX: VEN-045 Helm of Suppression on their T2 makes Up from the Deep E4 on T3 (356.3), so six runes buy it and the Rookie or it and the Sentry, six units: the T4 Hold does not win on the clock's terms either, and the line moves to the T5 Hold, the baseline's own turn. The Helm is their whole T2 going second, so nothing of theirs is ready in base on their T3.
• TURN CLOCK: npm run adversarial -- --turns prints T4 against the Body/Chaos Hold baseline of T5. The Combatant (E4), Up from the Deep (E3), the Rookie (E2) and three bodies priced at E1 each (UNL-111 Determined Sentry, the cheapest Body body) are twelve Energy, exactly the 2 + 4 + 6 of T1 to T3 going first, so the set completes on T3 and the Hold waits for T4. Nothing in it costs Power. It uses no readying effect, no readying rune (#513) and no [Accelerate] (#517).
• HOW OFTEN: seven units at the Plaza by the end of T3 going first, with a Tank among them, in 0.36% of games with three each of Determined Sentry, Towering Combatant, Up from the Deep and Pit Rookie in the 39-card draw pile (Tournament Rules 402.1), computed exactly over ordered draws and every way to spend 2, 4 and 6 Energy, mulligan ignored; seven without the Tank in 5.90%. 485.5 puts the Plaza in play one game in three.
• THE WALK WINS ON T5: after their T3 kills the Combatant, your T4 casts Up from the Deep's [Flow] (E3) and a second Combatant (E4), and Voidreaver buffs it with the XP of the combat won on their T3: nine units behind a 6-Might Tank. Their 6 Might ready in base can kill only the Combatant, which leaves eight, and the T5 Hold wins (195). That is the Body/Chaos baseline's own turn, and it needs the second Combatant drawn by T4.

Bodies no card supplies

Get two of your units onto The Grand Plaza by the end of T2 and a third onto it on T3

Steps

1. Bring The Grand Plaza as one of your three battlefields; 485.5 picks the one in play at random.
2. T1: play two Energy-1 bodies to base. T2: they walk onto the empty Plaza and Conquer (144.4.a, 316.8.b.1, 348.2.a.1), and Towering Combatant is played straight onto it (355.2.a). Three units, one kill costs 5 Might.
3. T3: Up from the Deep (E3) for two Tentacles at the Plaza, a third body (E1) and Pit Rookie (E2) onto it, the Rookie's buff on the Combatant. Seven units, one kill costs 6 Might. (Up from the Deep's [Flow], E3, in place of the body and the Rookie also makes seven, at a kill price of 5.)
4. Their T3: all seven must survive it. An attack has to assign the Combatant lethal damage before any other unit (815.1.b, 815.1.c.2).
5. T4 Beginning Phase: the Hold (315.2.b.2, 469.2) fires the Plaza, 383.2.a.1 counts the seven at that instant, and 195 gives you the game.

How it ends

you win the game at the T4 Hold, if all seven units are still at The Grand Plaza when your Beginning Phase starts

Sources

Published elsewhere

• Riftbound Core Rules, Last Updated 2026-07-16 (data/Riftbound-Core-Rules-2026-07-16.txt) 2026-07-16

Walked here, in this project

• Play 2026-10-27 (docs/plays/2026-10-27-a-towering-combatant-makes-one-plaza-kill-cost-six-their-six-kill-only-it-and-the-turn-four-rebuild-wins-the-turn-five-hold.md), issue #512 2026-10-27 record

Walked against Core Rules 2026-07-16

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