Combo · BURST · 8 points

Trinity Force attached for nothing, and carried off the Sentinels

8 cards · mind + body · verified

Pieces

• 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.)

• Trinity Force ×3 SFD-115 · payoff · body

  [Equip] 1 Body Power (1 Body Power: Attach this to a unit you control.)

  When I hold, score 1 point.

• Veteran Poro ×3 SFD-099 · engine · body

  [Weaponmaster] (When you play me, you may [Equip] one of your Equipment to me for 1 Power of any domain less, even if it's already attached.)

Payoff

Deck

• Mind + Body. VEN-149 Defender of Tomorrow (Jayce) is the ONLY Mind/Body legend in the pool (103.1.b.2), which this line shares with blue-sentinel-trinity-force-hold.
• Everything must stand at ONE battlefield you hold: the Sentinels' doubling is scoped to 'holding here'.

Prerequisites

• THE FREE ATTACH IS EXACT ARITHMETIC. Trinity Force's [Equip] cost is one Body rune; [Weaponmaster] attaches 'for 1 rainbow less'; one minus one is nothing. Each Veteran Poro arrives with a Trinity Force already on it at no Power cost, and blue-sentinel-trinity-force-hold's three [Equip] payments disappear. The rule that decides which Equipment this is worth doing to: [Weaponmaster] equips 'to ME', so it only pays for CARRIER-INDEPENDENT Equipment. Trinity Force scores on whoever holds it, so the free attach is pure profit; SFD-059 Svellsongur copies the carrier's text and SFD-030 Skyfall bridges the carrier's own effects, so neither can ever be freed this way.
• Priced against the sibling, both directions. This line: 2 Sentinels (E8 + 2 Mind Power) + 3 Trinity Forces (E12) + 3 Veteran Poro (E6) = 26 Energy and 2 Power. blue-sentinel-trinity-force-hold: the same Sentinels and Trinity Forces plus 3 Body Power of [Equip] = 20 Energy and 5 Power. Six more Energy for three fewer Power, and against the catalogue's ~9 Energy per Power (#21) that is the cheaper board; against a real game's free floor of 2 Power a turn (#44) the sibling is easier to assemble. CORRECTED 2026-10-25 (#461): the second comparison holds only once the Rune Deck is empty. Before that a Power is a recycled rune, which goes to the bottom of the Rune Deck (416.1.b) while 430.1 channels from the top, and is short on every turn until it comes back: T7 at the earliest going first and T6 at the earliest going second with only the Channel Phase's two a turn (161.2.a, 315.3.b, 485.7); each two more recycled push it a turn later, and a card that channels more (430.2) brings it back sooner. Measured with the queue model printed in PR #467, three Power recycled in one turn going first leave the board 10 rune-turns short if paid on T3, 7 on T4 and 4 on T5 (going second 8, 5 and 2). So the sibling's three extra Power cost more than the six Energy they save when paid by T4 going first or by T3 going second, and less after: which board is easier to assemble depends on the turn its Power is paid. The mechanism and the declared quantities are unaffected; status unchanged.
• WHAT THE SPREAD ACTUALLY BUYS IS GRACEFUL FAILURE, NOT SURVIVAL, and the honest arithmetic is this. The burst needs T x (1 + K) >= 7. At T=3, K=2 it is 9, so the total is 10 — but ANY single body lost drops it below 8: killing a Sentinel gives 3 x 2 = 6 (total 7), killing a carrier gives 2 x 3 = 6 (total 7). What the spread prevents is the TWO-FOR-ONE. In the sibling all three Trinity Forces ride the two Sentinels, so one removal spell on the Sentinel carrying two of them takes T from 3 to 1 AND K from 2 to 1 at once: 1 x 2 = 2, total 3. Here no single card can take a Trinity Force and a Sentinel together.
• The version that actually survives a removal is K=3: T=3, K=3 is 1 + 12 = 13, and after any one loss it is still 1 + 3 x 3 = 10 or 1 + 2 x 4 = 9. That is one more Blue Sentinel, E4 + 1 Mind Power, and it is the upgrade to buy before a fourth Trinity Force (103.2.b caps T at 3 anyway).
• Five bodies, not eight: 2 Sentinels and 3 Veteran Poro. Trinity Force is gear and is never a body. Each Poro is M2 + 2 from the Trinity Force's Might Bonus (718.4) = M4; each Sentinel is M4 + 2 while defending. So the cheapest break in combat is 4 damage onto a carrier, and 465.2.c.3 forces that lethal damage to be assigned in full before anything else is touched.
• SFD-113 Lucian, Merciless is the +1-Might-per-body alternative at E3 instead of E2: M3 + 2 = M5 carriers, so the cheapest break rises from 4 damage to 5, for 3 more Energy across the three. His second sentence, 'The first time I conquer each turn, ready me', is dead weight in a Hold line (a Hold is not a Conquer — 469.2 against 466.5.d), so the Might is the whole difference.
• Points per Hold: 1 + T x (1 + K). T=3, K=2 gives 1 + 9 = 10. The single Score is capped by 470 at one per battlefield per turn; the nine are ability Gains, which R2 = A puts under 194.1.c and outside that cap. Checked against this entry's own declared quantities before authoring.
• The gear's line becomes the unit's line by 136.2.b (Effect Text is active while attached), 718.3 (it is appended to the Top-Most Card's Rules Text) and 136.2.d (whose worked examples are Guardian Angel and Brutalizer), which makes it a Hold Ability of a Unit under 383.4.d.2.a.
• 818.1 makes [Equip] an Activated Ability, so the attach is NOT a play and no 'When you play this' fires — irrelevant here, since Trinity Force prints none, but it is why a Weaponmaster body cannot substitute for SFD-024 Rell, Magnetic in the entries that need a play trigger.
• NOTHING IN THIS LINE IS PROTECTED FROM A GEAR KILL, AND THE POOL PRINTS SIXTEEN OF THEM. 718.5.b: 'Attached cards still can be chosen or targeted by game effects while Attached' - the Equipment's own printed Rules Text is Inactive while attached (718.2) and its [Equip] is unusable (721.2), but the CARD is a legal target for every turn it sits there. Swept with /\bkills?\b[^.]{0,80}\bgear\b/i over text+effect of every deckable base in data/cards.json, the pool has 16 base codes (15 names; Jayce, Man of Progress is printed twice) and EVERY ONE OF THE SIX DOMAINS prints at least one, so there is no identity this line can hide in. The unconditional enemy-facing ones are OGN-022 Thermo Beam, SFD-005 Detonate and VEN-003 Brittle Steel (Fury), OGN-224 Salvage (Order), SFD-032 Disarming Rake (Calm) and SFD-077 Rocket Barrage (Mind). OGN-022 Thermo Beam - Fury, E5 + 2 Fury Power, '[Action] (Play on your turn or in showdowns.) Kill all gear.' - is the only card in the pool that kills EVERY gear at once, so it answers the whole payoff with one card; it is symmetric, which makes it cheap for a gearless deck and expensive for anyone else (the shape acceptable-losses-ravenbloom-prefect-gearless-gear-hate already records for OGN-179).
• THE TIMING CUTS BOTH WAYS, AND NO [Reaction] GEAR KILL EXISTS. Swept over all sixteen gear kills: none carries [Reaction]. Thermo Beam and Salvage are [Action], which 806.1.c.1 makes short for 'This can be played during showdowns on any player's turn'; Detonate and Brittle Steel are plain spells, and 155 confines a spell to 'an Open State outside of Showdowns on its controller's turn'. The Score this line pays on happens at 315.2.b.2 inside your own Beginning Phase, where the opponent holds no priority in a Neutral Open State (312.2.a) and the Closed State the trigger opens admits only a [Reaction] (813.1.c.1). So the opponent can NEVER strip the gear in the window that pays - every answer has to be cast on their own turn, one full turn before. That is what keeps the line alive, and it is also the window in which to defend it: the removal spell on the Chain is a Closed State, 312.2.c hands out priority there and 813.1.c.1 admits a [Reaction] in response.
• 6 ENERGY ANSWERS THE GARRISON THIS LINE NEEDS. OGS-002 Firestorm is fury, 6 Energy + 1 Power: "Deal 3 to all enemy units at a battlefield.". 143.2.a kills on marked damage at or above Might, so it kills every body at or below Might 3 SIMULTANEOUSLY however many there are: the binding constraint is MIGHT PER BODY, not the number of bodies, so going wider answers nothing. A CHEAPER ANSWER EXISTS AND IT IS NOT AVAILABLE TO EVERY OPPONENT: OGN-268 Bullet Time costs 1 Energy + 2 Power here (it pays per point of damage, so it scales to any garrison) and is [Action], so 806.1.c.1 puts it inside any showdown on any player's turn - but it is a SIGNATURE card tagged Miss Fortune, and 103.2.d.2 requires every Signature card to carry the Chosen Champion Legend's tag, so only a Miss Fortune legend can run it. Count it as a matchup, not as the field. THE IDENTITY DOES HOLD AN ANSWER: OGN-294 Trifarian War Camp +1 (that battlefield only), SFD-089 Rumble, Scrapper +1 (Mech bodies only), UNL-077 Soul Shepherd +1 (token bodies only) - a permanent, garrison-wide +Might is the only thing that lifts every body at once, since a single-target pump is useless against a sweep that hits all of them. (A battlefield protection is a 1-in-3: 485.5 has each player "randomly select one (1) of their three (3) Battlefields", so it is not a card you can count on drawing.) WHEN THE ANSWER LANDS, AND IT IS NOT INSIDE THE HOLD. A Hold resolves at 315.2.b.2, which Holds "all Battlefields they Control", inside YOUR Beginning Phase - and 312.2.a gives a player priority only "When the turn is in a Neutral Open State during their Main Phase", i.e. their own. So the opponent cannot answer in the Hold window itself; they answer on THEIR turn, which is the turn immediately before it. The cost of that is yours, not theirs: your own Main Phase comes AFTER your Beginning Phase (315 then 316), so there is no window in which to rebuild the garrison. Holding up a [Reaction] on their turn is the only response this line has.

Steps

1. Establish Control of a battlefield and keep it: 469.2 makes a Hold the maintenance of Control you have not yet Scored this turn.
2. Play the two Blue Sentinels there (E4 + 1 Mind Power each).
3. Play each Veteran Poro (E2) to that battlefield with a Trinity Force already on the board. Its [Weaponmaster] trigger attaches one for a rainbow less than the one-rune [Equip] cost — nothing.
4. Three Veteran Poro carry the three Trinity Forces, and none of them is a Sentinel. 718.3 appends 'When I hold, score 1 point' to each carrier as a Hold Ability of a Unit (383.4.d.2.a).
5. Beginning Phase, Scoring Step (315.2.b.2): you Hold. That is the Score, 1 point, capped by 470.
6. Each Trinity Force's hold effect goes on the Chain and the two Sentinels make every hold effect fire 1 + 2 = 3 times: nine ability Gains (194.1.c, R2 = A, uncapped by 470).
7. Ten points in one Hold, off five bodies and no [Equip] Power at all.

How it ends

burst of ten points in one Hold — one Score and nine ability Gains — for 26 Energy and 2 Power, with the three Trinity Forces carried off the Sentinels so no single removal takes T and K together

Sources

Published elsewhere

• Riftbound Core Rules, Last Updated 2026-07-16 (data/Riftbound-Core-Rules-2026-07-16.txt) 2026-07-16
• Issue #161 (GitHub) 2026-09-06

Walked here, in this project

• Hand walk 2026-09-06, issue #161 — uncatalogued feeders of the finishers 2026-09-06 record

Walked against Core Rules 2026-07-16

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