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B · Engine & Sequencing · §7The Credit Engine

B · Engine & Sequencing · §7

The Credit Engine

One unit per turn, and the decision is which body rather than whether.

Signature line

Discount, play, eat, resource

01Have the two-cost Krennic unit on the board from an earlier roundIt is a separate card from your leader and does not compete with the Epic Action.
02Play Expendable Mercenary as the round’s first When Defeated unitThe discount makes it cost 3 rather than 4, and it only applies to the first one each round.
03Exhaust the leader and defeat the MercenaryThis is a cost, not a target: nothing the opponent holds interrupts a cost.
04Take the Credit tokenA resource you did not have to draw.
05Resolve the Mercenary’s own trigger and resource it from the discard pileA second resource, from the same card.
Rules noteOne four-cost card, played for three, becomes two resources and stays available to Trask Walker later. This is the deck’s land drop.
Strategic purposeReach seven resources a full round before the curve says you should.
Failure conditionsIt costs you your board. Every resource this line makes is a body that is no longer holding the ground arena, and against a deck that is attacking rather than building, the Credit is worth less than the blocker.
Tested againstCards the field actually maindecks, played against this line rather than assumed.

From the guide . §7 The Credit Engine

The leader ability is an Action: exhaust the leader and defeat a friendly unit, then create a Credit token. Both halves are the cost, which matters: a cost is paid on announcement and there is no window in which the opponent can respond by saving the unit or shrinking the payoff.

Which body

In rough order: a unit that has already attacked and is exhausted; a unit whose When Defeated ability you want right now; a unit that is damaged and will die anyway. Last and rarely: a healthy blocker. The order is about what the body is still worth, not about what it cost.

The line the deck is built around

Play as the round’s first When Defeated unit, so it costs three. Eat it for a Credit. Resolve its own trigger and resource it from the discard pile. One four-cost card, played for three, becomes two resources, and it is still in the discard pile for to rebuy later.