A · Fundamentals · §1

Archetype Identity

An engine deck whose trash is a second hand, and whose Legend pays it for every card played out of one.

This is an engine-tempo deck built on a single sentence of Legend text: when you play a card from anywhere other than your hand, empower . Everything else in the list either manufactures those plays or gets paid for making them.

Stock the trashPlay from outside the handConvert one empowerCash in the trashScore

Strategy thesisThe trash is a second hand. Fill it, play out of it, and take points while it fills.

The primary plan

Burn cards into your own trash, then play them back out of it. burns two on entry and, when it conquers, hands a spell in your trash Flow equal to its cost for the turn. digs and trashes two more. burns two every time you conquer there. plays a trash spell outright, plays a trash unit, and plays himself straight off the top of your deck.

Every one of those is a card played from outside your hand, so every one of them empowers the Legend.

The secondary plan

The trash is not only fuel for replay. costs one less for each card in it, so a deck that has burned eight cards is holding three six-Might units at two Energy each. That is the plan that wins games where the engine never fully assembles, and it is the reason burning is a cost reduction rather than card advantage.

What the deck generates easily

Empowers, trash depth, and card selection. None of those are scarce. By the middle of a normal game you will have more empowers banked than you have turns left to spend them.

What actually limits it

Legend readiness. Spending an empower exhausts the Legend, so one converts per turn no matter how many you have.
Scoring windows. The engine does not win the game; points do, and the engine turns are the ones you are not scoring on.
Restricted Power. Nine Chaos and three Order runes, with Order cards that matter and a sideboard that wants more of it.
Board presence. Fourteen shuffled units, most of them one or two Might.

What it is commonly mistaken for

A value deck. It generates a great deal of value and it does not out-attrition a real attrition deck, because most of that value is one and two-Might bodies and a Legend ability that only works while attacking. Treating maximum card generation as the goal is how this list loses to decks with worse cards.

What it is not trying to do

Assemble a specific combo. There is no loop here, only a rate.
Win a long attrition game against a dedicated engine deck.
Cast for ten Energy.
Convert every empower it generates.
Defend. Assault 2 applies only while attacking.

Pilot noteThe nearest familiar shape is a self-mill value deck where the graveyard is a resource rather than a byproduct. The difference is that the payoff is a cost reduction and a rate, not a critical mass, so there is no threshold you are waiting to cross.