Can a "Qualifying desktop OS" be paper only?

Some VL licensed Windows editions require a pre-existing "Qualifying desktop OS", which must be one of the consumer-grade editions.   Question to VL experts is if that "Qualifying desktop OS" can take the form of a paper only license kept on file and reserved for filling that role .

The scenarios considered are new virtual machines and clean OS install on physical hardware (which may or may not have an irrelevant OEM key in BIOS).

Because installing and immediately wiping an OS image of lower quality/value on each machine would be an obvious waste of time .

Also, when the VL licensed OS is an LTSC edition dated at least 1 month before install, automatic consumer grade updates to latest consumer channel version could make installing the chosen LTSC edition technically a "version downgrade in place" which tends to not work (at least for past Windows versions).