Combo · ALT WIN
Zed × Shadow Clone × Eye of the Herald — two ready Recruits per swap
Pieces
- Zed, Without a Sound ×1
VEN-112 · engine · chaos
When I conquer, play a 0 Might Shadow Clone unit token to your base. (It has "When I attack, you may banish a unit from your trash. If you do, give me [Assault 4] this turn.") [Action][>] 1 Energy + 1 Chaos Power: Move me and a Shadow Clone you control to each other's locations.
- Eye of the Herald ×2
SFD-153 · payoff · order
[Equip] 1 Order Power (1 Order Power: Attach this to a unit you control.)
When I move, play a 1 Might Recruit unit token here.
- Renata Glasc, Industrialist ×1
SFD-171 · enabler · order
Your tokens enter ready.
- The Grand Plaza ×1
OGN-293 · payoff
When you hold here, if you have 7+ units here, you win the game.
Payoff
Deck
- Legend is Heart of the Tempest (VEN-155) — the only Order/Chaos legend in the pool.
Prerequisites
- The Grand Plaza must be the battlefield in play, and a deck may not carry two of it (Core Rules 103.4.c, Tournament Rules 402.1): random 1 of 3 in Duel (485.5) and Skirmish (487.5), chosen in Match (486.5).
- Zed at The Grand Plaza after conquering it (so his Clone exists at base); an Eye on each; Renata on board; 12 runes with at least 6 Chaos in the Rune Deck.
- Per activation: −1 Energy and −1 Chaos Power. The Power rune can be the very rune just exhausted for the Energy (recycling needs no exhaust), so N Chaos runes give N swaps and 2N ready Recruits — twelve Chaos runes is 24 bodies, and seven is enough for the Plaza.
- THE EQUIPMENT THIS LINE STANDS ON (Eye of the Herald x2) IS A LEGAL TARGET THE WHOLE TIME IT SITS THERE. 718.5.b: "Attached cards still can be chosen or targeted by game effects while Attached." Its printed Rules Text is Inactive while attached (718.2) and its [Equip] is unusable (721.2), but neither of those protects the CARD. 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 against the 2 copies this line stands on 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 unconditional enemy-facing gear kills are OGN-022 Thermo Beam (fury), OGN-224 Salvage (order), SFD-005 Detonate (fury), SFD-032 Disarming Rake (calm), SFD-077 Rocket Barrage (mind), VEN-003 Brittle Steel (fury) - four domains, so there is no identity this line can hide in. (The full swept set is 16 base codes across all six domains; the predicate is /\bkills?\b[^.]{0,80}\bgear\b/i over text+effect of every deckable base in data/cards.json, and the rest either reach only a friendly gear or are gated below this line's costs. Run npm run adversarial to re-derive it.)
- NO GEAR KILL IN THE POOL CARRIES [Reaction] - BUT A KILL IS NOT THE ONLY ANSWER, AND THE PREDICATE THAT MEASURED THAT SET COULD NOT SEE THE OTHER FAMILY. Swept over all 16 kills: 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", and Detonate and Brittle Steel are plain spells, which 155 confines to "an Open State outside of Showdowns on its controller's turn". WHICH OF THOSE PROTECTS THIS LINE DEPENDS ON WHERE IT PAYS, so check before relying on it. If it pays on a HOLD, the Score happens at 315.2.b.2 inside your own Beginning Phase, where 312.2.a gives the opponent no priority in a Neutral Open State and 813.1.c.1 admits only a [Reaction] in the Closed State the trigger opens - no kill in the pool reaches that window at all, so each must be cast on THEIR own turn, a full turn early and fully telegraphed, and that spell on the Chain is itself a Closed State where 312.2.c hands out priority and 813.1.c.1 admits a [Reaction] in response. If it instead pays in your MAIN PHASE, that protection does not exist: 806.1.c.1 puts Thermo Beam and Salvage inside any showdown on any player's turn, so they reach the scoring window itself. THE SECOND FAMILY IS DETACHMENT, AND IT DOES CARRY [Reaction]. 719.1 appends an attached card's Effect Text to its carrier "for as long as they remain Attached" and 137.3.a stops the Might Bonus "as soon as the card with the Might Bonus is no longer Attached", so taking the Equipment OFF switches the payoff off without killing anything. Swept with /\bdetach/i over text+effect of every deckable base: 5 base codes (4 names - Grandmaster at Arms is printed twice), of which only 1 is ENEMY-FACING, because Strike Down says "an equipped friendly unit", Veiled Temple "a friendly gear" and Grandmaster at Arms "you control". That one is SFD-011 Angle Shot - Fury, 2 Energy, NO Power, and it cantrips: "[Reaction] (Play any time, even before spells and abilities resolve.) Choose a unit and an Equipment with the same controller. Attach that Equipment to that unit or detach that Equipment from that unit. Draw 1." The words that make it an answer are "the same controller", which need not be you. WHAT IT PROVABLY DOES is strip the text and the Might Bonus BEFORE the trigger condition is ever met. WHAT IS NOT WALKED, and a reader should not reach for it here until somebody does, is whether a detach inside the scoring window itself accomplishes anything. The reason to DOUBT it - not a paragraph that settles it - is that a Trigger Condition is measured when the trigger is PLACED (383.2.a.1 makes a clause immediately after the trigger "part of the Trigger Condition and not the Effect"), so stripping the Equipment once its trigger is already on the Chain may well change nothing. Nobody has walked what becomes of a chain item whose source text has gone. Until somebody does, treat Angle Shot as a cheap answer cast EARLY, and do not claim it answers the trigger.
- 1 ENERGY ANSWERS THE GARRISON THIS LINE NEEDS, AND THE BODIES ARE TOKENS SO NO uses[] ROW SHOWS IT. OGN-133 Flurry of Blades is body, 1 Energy: "[Reaction] (Play any time, even before spells and abilities resolve.) Deal 1 to all units at battlefields.". This line's garrison is Recruit tokens, whose Might is fixed by rule 187 (Recruit 1) rather than by any card in uses[] - which is why no ingredient row warns you. 143.2.a kills on marked damage at or above Might, so it kills every body at or below Might 1 SIMULTANEOUSLY however many there are: the binding constraint is MIGHT PER BODY, not the number of bodies, so going wider answers nothing. THE IDENTITY DOES HOLD AN ANSWER: OGS-013 Garen, Commander +1 and UNL-147 Baron Nashor +2 (a Recruit token is never Empowered, so the third name this sentence used to carry is struck below) - 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-based protection is NOT available here, because this line already requires a battlefield: 485.4.a gives each player three and "Only 1 will be used, chosen during setup", and 103.4.c forbids duplicate names, so two of your own battlefields never share a board.) 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. VEN-130 Aurok General IS NOT A THIRD ANSWER (corrected 2026-09-13): he is domain-legal — mono-Order — and reaches nothing. His static is itself gated on `[Empowered]`, costing a further E3 + 1 Order Power on top of an E5 M5 body, and it then grants +2 only to *"your units that are [Empowered]"*, while 441.1 makes Empowering *"the act of rendering one or more Game Objects Empowered"* — something a card must PERFORM on each body, and nothing in this line performs it. THE SAME SENTENCE CAVEATED ITS OTHER MEMBERS AND NOT THIS ONE, which is the tell: a caveat makes a claim honest, it does not make the card an answer.
- OPPONENT BOARD AND KILL PRICE - ADDED 2026-10-27 (#503). THE BOARD IT WINS ON: nothing of theirs that can put seven Might of attackers onto the Plaza on their own turn. The Plaza count is taken at the Hold in your next Beginning Phase (383.2.a.1, 315.2.b.2), so the units must survive their whole turn; a body of theirs ready in their base after their Awaken can Standard Move to the Plaza (144.2, 144.4.a), a body at their own battlefield cannot (144.4.a, 144.4.b) unless it has Ganking (144.4.c.1), and a body they play that turn enters exhausted (143.4) unless it has [Accelerate]. THE KILL PRICE: at the six swaps the prerequisites commit to, the Plaza holds 13 units, Zed (Might 5, evenly many swaps leave him there) and twelve 1-Might Recruits (187.1), none with [Tank] or [Backline] (Zed's text has neither), so the attacker has to kill 13 - 6 = 7 and the cheapest seven are 7 Recruits, 7 damage (465.2.c, 142.4.b), not the 17 to clear Zed and all twelve. Walking the 0-Might Shadow Clone (187.11) as a fourteenth unit makes it 8 (the Clone costs 1, then 7 Recruits); each further pair of swaps adds two Recruits and 2 damage. A sweep that deals 1 to every unit at a battlefield kills the twelve Recruits at once instead.
Steps
- Activate Zed: he and the Clone swap places. Both Eyes trigger: a Recruit at the Plaza, a Recruit at base — both ready.
- Activate again: they swap back; two more Recruits. Repeat while runes last (an even count leaves Zed at the Plaza).
- Standard-Move the base Recruits to the Plaza.
- Next Beginning Phase, Hold the Plaza with 7+ units: win (195).
How it ends
win the game at the next Hold; ~12 ready bodies a turn even without the Plaza
Sources
Published elsewhere
Walked here, in this project
- Hunt v2 lens L2, entry L2-01 2026-09-03 record
- REFUTE pass 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.
This is the piece the 2026-07-24 ban removed: Stealthy Pursuer was the pool's only 'moved with' effect; Zed's swap is now the only repeatable exhaust-free bidirectional effect move (grep of the corpus). Card text verified by hand. ENGINE rather than INFINITE because the swap costs a rune each time — it is bounded by the 12-rune deck per turn, not by cards. One-turn exposure before the Hold, like every Plaza line. HAND-WALKED 2026-09-04 (docs/phase0/walks/2026-09-04-zed-zilean-and-r27.md). Its two load-bearing readings were R9, RETIRED the same day as settled by rules text: 420.1/420.2.a make an effect move the primary kind of Move (456.1 carves out recalls precisely because ordinary effect moves DO trigger move abilities), and 359.3.f.1/f.2 read 'here' at execution, so each end of the swap gets its Recruit. Verified besides: the swap's printed cost carries no exhaust and no once-per-turn; 187.11 makes the Shadow Clone a UNIT token so it can carry the second Eye; one Chaos rune pays the whole activation (exhaust it for the Energy, then recycle that same exhausted rune for the Power); and the swap never lapses control, because it moves Zed out and the Clone in as one effect (190.4.a) and entering a battlefield you already control applies no Contested (190.3.a.1). REFUTE 2026-09-03: undercounted upward — N Chaos runes → N swaps → 2N Recruits, not six swaps from twelve runes. Either reading of 'here' still yields one Recruit at each end. Zed must have conquered once to own a Clone; the Eye on the Clone costs 1 Order Power. SOURCE CHECK 2026-09-06 (docs/phase0/walks/2026-09-06-issue62-contradictions.md), issue #62 section 5 item 6. The ENGINE class is now corroborated from outside the project: xTacio, piloting this archetype on Frodan's channel, is asked point blank whether the recycle package is there "to go infinite" and answers "not going infinite". Read in context his denial is about OGN-036 Vi in the sideboard rather than about Zed's swap, so it is corroboration and not a refutation - but it lands on the same verdict this entry reached from the rune count. Nothing in the entry changed. RECLASSIFIED 2026-09-06 (issue #152, consistency audit): class was ENGINE while `terminatesIn` already claimed "win the game at the next Hold" and `uses` already lists OGN-293 The Grand Plaza with `role: "payoff"` — the identical shape CLAUDE.md’s class definitions assign to ALT_WIN ("a card that literally says you win"), matching `karthus-machine-evangel-renata-plaza` and `ready-recruits-grand-plaza`, both classed ALT_WIN for the same Plaza-inline shape. Checked against this entry’s own declared quantities before reclassifying, not just the shape: the prerequisites already call for 12 runes with at least 6 Chaos Power, which is at least 6 swaps → at least 12 Recruits split across the Plaza and base sides, plus Zed and the Clone themselves — walking the base-side Recruits over clears the Plaza’s 7+ threshold with room to spare. No `uses` or `terminatesIn` change was needed, only `class`.
Walked against Core Rules 2026-07-16