Combo · ENGINE

Baited Hook climbs one Might a turn on PRINTED Might — and Vanguard Helm adds nothing to the ladder

2 cards · order · verified

Pieces

• Baited Hook ×1 OGN-242 · engine · order

  1 Energy + 1 Order Power, Exhaust: Kill a friendly unit. Look at the top 5 cards of your Main Deck. You may banish a unit from among them that has Might up to 1 more than the killed unit and play it, ignoring its cost. Then recycle the rest.

• Vanguard Helm ×1 OGN-228 · engine · order

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

Payoff

Deck

• Any Order legend — both cards are mono-Order (103.1.b.1), and neither is a Signature card, so no legend is forced.

Prerequisites

• THE LADDER CLIMBS BY ONE A TURN, NOT TWO, AND THIS ENTRY SAID TWO UNTIL 2026-09-12 (#191 batch 23, corrected on merge). The original claim was that a buffed corpse dies at printed Might plus one, so the Hook`s *"Might up to one more than the killed unit"* would read two higher each turn. Two paragraphs refute it, and both were cited by nothing in this catalogue: **705** - *"If a Unit leaves play, remove all Buffs from it"* - so the corpse has no buff to read, and **711** - *"Units in Non-Board Zones are evaluated according to their printed Might"* - whose own example ends *"It doesn`t matter if there were effects raising or lowering its might while it was on the board."* The same false sentence was in CLAUDE.md and is corrected there in the same commit. **What survives**: the ladder is real and climbs by ONE, because each fetched body`s PRINTED Might sets the next ceiling; and OGN-228 Vanguard Helm`s contribution is +1 Might on the living body, which is worth having and is much smaller than this entry claimed.
• AND THE UNIT ARRIVES FOR NOTHING. 'play it, ignoring its cost' is Energy AND Power, so the whole engine costs 1 Energy + 1 Order Power a turn — the Hook's activation — however big the body it fetches. 143.4 makes it enter exhausted, so it defends and holds from the next Awakening rather than the same turn.
• 702.3 IS WHY THE HELM IS NOT REDUNDANT AND ALSO WHY IT CANNOT BE DOUBLED. 'There can only be one Buff on a Unit at a time', and 702.3.a adds that a second buff 'is not placed instead'. So the Helm cannot stack buffs on one body — it relocates the single buff off a corpse and onto a fresh unbuffed one, which is exactly the shape the #106 walk measured for a repeatable buffer: the product is min(triggers, new unbuffed bodies), and the Hook makes exactly one new body a turn, so the two rates match with nothing wasted.
• THE HELM NEEDS THE DYING UNIT TO BE BUFFED, AND THAT IS ITS ONLY ROLE HERE. The first kill needs an Order buff from elsewhere; from the second turn on the Helm supplies it. Note what this does and does not buy after the 705/711 correction above: it keeps a buff circulating onto each newly fetched body, which is +1 Might on something alive. It does NOT raise the tutor ceiling, because the ceiling is read off a corpse in a Non-Board Zone.
• IT IS NOT A LOOP AND IT IS BOUNDED BY THE DECK, NOT BY COPIES. The Hook looks at five cards and recycles the four it does not take to the bottom (416.1.a), so the deck cycles rather than depletes and the ceiling is the largest printed Might still in the Main Deck. Looking never Burns Out — 431.1.c: 'that player looks at or Reveals as many as possible, but does not Burn Out'.
• THE KILL IS EFFECT TEXT AFTER THE COLON, NOT A COST, SO A TOKEN CAN FEED IT. The Hook reads '[cost]: Kill a friendly unit …', which puts the kill after the colon — so 416.3, 203.3 and 185 never bite and a token unit is a legal victim (428.1 with 185.2.b). It is a poor one here, because a 1 Might Recruit sets the ceiling at 2, but on a turn where nothing better is expendable it keeps the Hook firing.
• NOTHING HERE SCORES. It is a free body and a free tutor every turn; the points still come from whatever those bodies then do at a battlefield. That is the same honest ending karma-lux-recycle-buff-army and gemcraft-karma-herald-buff-faucet carry.
• THE RULES PRINT THIS CARD`S OWN COUNTERPLAY AND NO BAITED HOOK ENTRY MENTIONED IT (upgrade 2026-09-12, #187 batch 6). 359.3.e.12 - *"If the spell checks information about a target that is no longer legal or a card or permanent whose location, zone, or status has changed such that that information is no longer available, that check returns `null` and all calculations based on it are ignored"* - and its worked example quotes `OGN-242 Baited Hook` in full, ending that its controller *"looks at the top 5 cards of their Main Deck, but can`t choose any unit from among them."* So an opponent who returns the friendly victim to hand IN RESPONSE makes the whole payload evaporate: the unit cannot be killed, its Might is null, and the Energy, the rainbow and the exhaust are already spent. 359.3.e.4 is the general form (*"it is no longer a legal target, because it`s not treated as the same object"*) and 359.3.e.13 is the limit that keeps the card working normally - a spell that moves something as its OWN cost or effect may look back, so only an OUTSIDE zone change nulls the check. **The bodies a Hook ladder starts on are small, which is exactly the range the pool`s two cheapest bounces cover** (`SFD-138 Windsinger` at zero Energy from face down, `OGN-169 Gust` at one) - see `windsinger-gust-bounce-as-a-counterspell`.

Bodies no card supplies

First activation: pay 1 Energy + 1 Order Power and exhaust the Hook to kill any friendly unit

Steps

1. Play Baited Hook (3 Energy) and Vanguard Helm (2 Energy). Both are gear, so 143.4 leaves them ready.
2. First activation: pay 1 Energy + 1 Order Power and exhaust the Hook to kill any friendly unit. Look at the top five, banish a unit of Might up to one more than the killed one, and play it for free. Recycle the other four to the bottom (416.1.a).
3. Buff that new body — the Helm does it for you from the second turn on, and any Order buff source does it on the first.
4. Next Awakening readies the Hook (315.1.b). Kill the body it fetched. **705 removes every Buff as it leaves play** (*"If a Unit leaves play, remove all Buffs from it"*) and **711 reads the corpse at PRINTED Might** (*"Units in Non-Board Zones are evaluated according to their printed Might"*, whose example says outright that it does not matter if there were effects raising or lowering its might while it was on the board), so the tutor ceiling is printed Might plus one and NOT two.
5. The Helm still sees a buffed friendly unit die and buffs the unit the Hook just fetched, which is +1 Might on a LIVING body and real. It is simply not part of the ladder. Repeat: the ceiling rises by exactly ONE a turn for 1 Energy + 1 Order Power.

Per iteration

+1 free body (Might ceiling +2 per turn), -1 body, -1 Energy, -1 Order Power, and the buff is preserved rather than spent

How it ends

engine — one free unit a turn for 1 Energy + 1 Order Power, with the tutor ceiling climbing 2 Might per turn instead of 1; nothing here scores

Sources

Walked here, in this project

• Hand walk 2026-09-06 (docs/phase0/walks/2026-09-06-engine-payoff-walk.md, section 27) 2026-09-06 record
• Cause/trigger matrix over the pool, rows 25-30 (friendly-dies) 2026-09-06

Walked against Core Rules 2026-07-16

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