wc-transfer-planner — between-round transfer optimisation

The engine behind wc-squad-architect's transfer work. Given the current 15 and the round's signals, it answers four questions in priority order: who is dead weight and must go (eliminated nations), where the fixtures are swinging (chase the drop), where value is left on the table (upgrade), and is the rebuild big enough that the Wildcard beats spending free transfers. It does not pick the squad and it does not present a board — it ranks in/out pairs, budgets the free transfer(s), prices any hit, and recommends (or rejects) the Wildcard, then emits a transfer-plan signal for wc-squad-architect and the Director to act on.

The discipline that defines this skill: a transfer is only worth making if its EV gain over the horizon the player will actually survive exceeds its cost. Two failure modes sit on either side of that line — under-trading (leaving an eliminated player in the squad to rot) and over-trading (transfer thrash: churning the squad chasing every one-band fixture wobble, burning free transfers and paying hits for swings the field hasn't even priced). This skill exists to find the moves that clear the bar and stop at the ones that don't.

This is between-round, transfer-adjacent search. A structural rebuild — most of the squad re-pointed at the surviving nations at the group→knockout transition — is not a transfer plan; it is a Wildcard, and the whole candidate space reopens to the full market (chip-catalog.md §1). The rule for when the rebuild crosses that threshold is below.

When to invoke

• wc-squad-architect is this skill's primary caller: it runs the transfer plan whenever the between-round window is open, then folds the result into its transfer-plan signal and the squad it carries to the board.
• A wc-strategist genotype calls it when its candidate is an evolution from the current squad (a few moves) rather than a from-scratch build — A4 (Fixture Exploiter) especially, whose whole thesis is rotating toward the steepest fixture drops via transfers. The skill returns a neutral EV-ranked pair list; the archetype tilt (how aggressively to chase variance, whether to pay a hit) happens in the caller.
• It does not run on a Wildcard round — when the Wildcard fires, the population is re-seeded from the full market via wc-squad-architect (build-squad), not evolved one transfer at a time. This skill's job on such a round is the recommendation to fire the Wildcard, after which it hands off.

Workflow