Combo · ENGINE

The Shadow Clone is the renewable banish, not Kennen — and the loot's own exhaust is why one a turn is all it is worth

5 cards · fury + chaos · verified

Pieces

• Master of Shadows ×1 VEN-143 · legend · fury/chaos

  When you banish a card you own, empower me. (I become Empowered if I'm not already.) [Action][>] Disempower me, Exhaust: Discard 1, then draw 1.

• 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.

• Zed, From the Shadows ×3 VEN-023 · engine · fury

  You may discard 1 as an additional cost to play me. When you play me, if you paid the additional cost, play a 0 Might Shadow Clone unit token. (It has "When I attack, you may banish a unit from your trash. If you do, give me [Assault 4] this turn.")

Payoff

Deck

• The legend IS the requirement and it is in uses[]: VEN-143 / VEN-191 Master of Shadows (Fury/Chaos) are the only legends in cards.json carrying the Zed champion tag, and both partners are inside those two domains (103.1.b.1, 103.1.b.2).
• An enemy garrison to attack into. The clone's banish is an attack trigger, so an empty enemy battlefield never fires it.

Prerequisites

• THE CORRECTION THIS ENTRY EXISTS FOR. `master-of-shadows-banish-rummage` USED TO SAY in its own name that *Kennen is the only renewable banish in his own domains* - the claim was refuted by this walk and the entry was rewritten on 2026-09-07, so read this note as the record of the correction and not as an open defect. Its own card set was the counterexample: it runs three VEN-144 Death Mark, which prints the Shadow Clone token whose text is *"When I attack, you may banish a unit from your trash"* — a banish that repeats every attack, for free, with no conquer required. Two further cards print the same token in Master of Shadows's own domains: VEN-112 Zed, Without a Sound (Chaos) and VEN-023 Zed, From the Shadows (Fury). Counted over data/corpus_flat.txt on 2026-09-07, three cards in the pool make a Shadow Clone and all three are legal here.
• AND THE RENEWABLE BANISH IS WORTH EXACTLY ONE A TURN, WHICH IS THE MORE USEFUL HALF. The loot is *"Disempower me, exhaust: Discard 1, then draw 1"* — an exhaust in the cost, and 315.1.b readies the legend only in your own Awakening. So the sequence per turn is: banish once, 441.1 empowers him, pay the disempower plus the exhaust, loot. A SECOND banish the same turn re-empowers him (441.1.b: 'An Empowered Game Object can not be Empowered', so it only lands because the loot disempowered him first) and buys nothing, because the exhaust is already spent. The value of a repeatable source is therefore not more loots, it is a loot on EVERY turn instead of only the turns you happen to hold a banisher — Kennen's needs a conquer, Death Mark's costs a card.
• THE CLONE IS A REAL ATTACKER, AND ITS OWN BANISH PAYS FOR IT. Printed at 0 Might, it gives itself [Assault 4] when it banishes: 807.1.d — 'Being an attacker means the Unit has gained the Attacker designation during Combat' — and 464.2.c.3 places the 'when I attack' trigger at that designation, before the damage assignment of 465.2. So a 0-Might token attacks as a 4. 807.2 sums Assault from several sources if you have more.
• WHY IT MUST BE AN ATTACK. 461 and 807.1.d need the Attacker designation, and 383.4.e needs the same for an attack trigger. Walking into an EMPTY enemy battlefield stages no Combat (323.9 requires 'Units present controlled by opposing players'), so it is a Conquer with no Attacker and the clone's banish never fires. This line wants a garrison, which is the opposite of the Stare Down family.
• WHAT IT COSTS AND WHAT IT COSTS YOU. Zed, Without a Sound E5 (no Power). Zed, From the Shadows E4 + 1 Fury Power and a card discarded as an additional cost — that discard is itself a card into the trash the clone can later banish, so the cost partly pays for itself. The real price is the trash: every banish permanently removes a UNIT card from it (108.6.c gives no way back), so this engine is ANTI-synergic with every trash-recursion line in the catalogue — Last Rites, Dr. Mundo, Rhasa the Sunderer, [Flow]. Pick one side.
• THE CLONE IS A TOKEN, WITH EVERYTHING THAT IMPLIES. 185 — 'Tokens are not cards' — and 186.1 makes it cease to exist the instant it leaves the board, so it can never be banished, recycled or reanimated, and it is never itself the 'card you own' that the legend's trigger reads. What the clone banishes is a real unit CARD sitting in your trash.
• SURVIVING THE FIGHT. 143.2.a kills a unit on 'nonzero damage marked on it equalling or exceeding its Might', so a 0-Might clone dies to a single point of assigned damage and 465.2.c.4 forbids the defender spending more than that minimum on it. Each clone therefore soaks exactly 1 of the defender's summed Might — cheap, and gone.

Steps

1. Play Zed, Without a Sound (E5) or Zed, From the Shadows (E4 + 1 Fury Power, discarding a card as the additional cost). Either way a 0 Might Shadow Clone token arrives; 143.4 makes it enter exhausted, so it attacks from the next turn.
2. Main Phase of a later turn: Standard-Move the clone into an enemy-held battlefield (144.4.a; its exhaust is the cost, 144.2 / 420.3.a). 190.3.a.1 and 450 apply Contested.
3. The next Cleanup stages a Combat (323.9) and 323.13 opens it. 464.2.c.1 makes you the Attacker and 464.2.c.3 hands out the designation; the clone's 'When I attack' trigger goes on the Chain.
4. Resolve it: banish a unit card from your trash, and the clone has [Assault 4] for the turn (807.1.d, 807.2).
5. The banish is a card you own, so Master of Shadows is Empowered (441.1, 441.2).
6. At any Open State on your turn, activate the legend: disempower him and exhaust him to discard 1 and draw 1. 315.1.b readies him in your next Awakening, so this is once a turn — and with a clone on the board it is EVERY turn.

Per iteration

one aimed discard-and-draw every turn, plus a 0-Energy 4-damage attacker, paid for by cards already in your trash

How it ends

engine only — the legend's exhaust caps the loot at one per turn however many banishes you make, and nothing here scores

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

• Synergy rule master-of-shadows-banish-empower (data/synergies.json) 2026-09-06
• Hand walk 2026-09-07 (docs/phase0/walks/2026-09-07-rules-second-pass.md), issue #170 2026-09-07 record

Walked against Core Rules 2026-07-16

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