User blog comment:LilyheartsLightning/A Year in Retrospectre/@comment-173.189.226.12-20130317193122/@comment-24174486-20130317214057

And I had a good friend test it out with a save editor and vanilla ME3—no DLC or patches. With the highest EMS value possible and the Reaper Heart, he could get the Destroy variation where Shepard lives, whereas he couldn't with the Reaper Brain (the War Asset you get from preserving the Collector Base).