B · Engine & Sequencing · §7

Conquer, Never Hold

Temporary kills Sprites at the start of your Beginning Phase, before scoring, which makes holding structurally impossible for them.

Temporary is printed as: at the start of this permanent’s controller’s Beginning Phase, before scoring, kill this.^◆src

Where that lands in the turn

The Beginning Phase runs a Beginning Step and then a Scoring Step. Temporary resolves at the start of the phase, explicitly before scoring, so by the time holds are counted every Sprite you controlled is already dead.

Rules noteA Sprite can conquer, because conquest happens on your turn while it is standing. A Sprite can never hold, because holding is scored in the Beginning Phase and Temporary has already removed it. There is no sequencing, no trick and no card in this deck that changes that.

What follows from it

A board of Sprites left standing overnight scores exactly zero.
Every point the token engine earns is a conquest point.
The seven shuffled units are not filler. They are the deck’s only access to the other half of the scoreboard.
draws when you hold there, which means the Grove is a battlefield for a Witness or a Student, never for a Sprite.

Strategy thesisPlan the turn around what can be taken now. A turn that develops without conquering has paid rent and bought nothing.

The other way Sprites die

Temporary is the scheduled loss. The unscheduled one is that a token put into any non-board zone other than the Chain stops existing immediately, so a Sprite returned to its owner’s hand does not go to your hand at all.^◆src

Rules noteGust returns a unit at a battlefield with 3 Might or less to its owner’s hand, and every Sprite you make is exactly 3 Might. It is a one-Energy reaction that deletes any Sprite outright, and it is in 20.7% of sampled maindecks. , at 48.8%, returns one of yours and one of theirs, which against a token board is a trade they win.

This is why a Sprite standing alone at a battlefield is more fragile than a 3-Might body normally is. It is not a unit that survives being answered cheaply; it is a unit that stops existing.

Every body you make is exactly 3 Might

Lethal damage in these rules is any nonzero amount at or above a unit’s Might, and there is no separate toughness. Every Sprite is a 3, so a card that deals 3 kills one and a card that deals 3 twice kills the whole turn. Falling Star is exactly that card, and Singularity at 6 to each of two units kills any pair you have.^◆src

⚠ WarningBoth sit at 22% of sampled maindecks, but Falling Star’s share rests on two lists and Singularity’s on four. Treat them as a shape the format can take rather than as cards you will reliably face.

The cost of the constraint

It makes the deck committal in a way that punishes careful players more than reckless ones. You cannot hold a Sprite back to block, cannot keep a board while waiting for a , and cannot decline a mediocre conquest in favour of a better one next turn. The mediocre conquest is the one that exists.