I think Broken Ambitions would work. Mirror of Fate should give us enough control over the library to handle the mills and I don't think we ever actually require the graveyard -> library move once we get going. Manipulating Threshold seems tough without it, but I think we have enough instants/sorceries that we can move around freely between graveyard/library/exile to make that part work.
Starting with that setup seems pretty tough. We lose Drake Familiar, which was really strong so far, and we also lose the ability to ever get Black Lotus out of the graveyard. Unless I'm missing something the only source for blue mana before casting Reality Spasm would be the Calciform Pools, and we'd need to use Worldfire to get the second blue out of it. So while it looks technically possible, it also looks like it will be really hard.
EDIT: I noticed a problem with the Broken Ambitions plan after all. Mox Emerald is not strong enough to produce the green mana we require. It can produce ressources at the same rate as Fountain of Youth, so it will provide exactly enough green mana to use Acorn Harvest while going through the hyperstage. But we do not have a Marshaling the Troops equivalent to generate the green mana when we transition in the hyper^2stage. So we would not be able to set up a new hyperstage and our combo fails.
Thinking about the start, here's what I came up with:
We start with the same seven cards, and again draw Vedalken Orrery, Dual Nature and Evacuation. We play Evacuation to bounce Consecrated Sphinx and Selvala's Enforcer back to our hand, and replay them to get two of each. This time we will need both Selvala's Enforcer ETB abilities, which will draw five cards each. The ten cards we draw will include:
I'm not sure what other three cards to pick; we don't need them yet.
Play Opalescence and Copy Enchantment, copying Dual Nature. We will get two more Dual Nature tokens. Play Psychic Battle and Cowardice, getting five copies of each. Play Kiora's Dismissal, getting five Psychic Battle triggers, allowing us six bounces. Bounce Copy Enchantment six times. The first five times we replay Copy Enchantment we will create 2,4,8,16, and then 34 Dual Natures (Copy Dual Nature with the original on the fifth replay.). Bouncing Copy Enchantment will put Dual Nature destruction triggers on the stack, which we will leave at the bottom. Play Spellweaver Volute on Evacuation. Play Copy Enchantment again; copy nothing, and get 33 copies of Copy Enchantment. Have 32 of them copy Psychic Battle, and one copy Spellweaver Volute, putting it on Kiora's Dismissal. We should now have 33 Dual Natures and 34 Psychic Battles. Cast Flash of Defiance, triggering both Spellweaver Volutes. Resolve Kiora's Dismissal first. We get 35 bouncings; the first 34 will bounce Copy Enchantment, increasing the number of Dual Natures to 33*2^34. The last will switch the target to Opalescence and bounce it. Resolve Evacuation, bringing Consecrated Sphinx and Selvala's Enforcer back to our hand...
Oh shoot. We can't replay Selvala's Enforcer now, there are too many Dual Natures and we don't have a way to get rid of them. How best to handle this?
EDIT: Hmm, I see the problem. What about Elvish Spirit Guide? We can reuse Elvish Spirit Guide once per Evacuation, so we can generate a green mana for a few blue mana using the Spellweaver Volute trick. This should be plenty, I think.
EDIT: No, with the Bloodbond March stack problems I guess we can only get one green mana per stage. Oh well.
EDIT: Maybe we can find a cheaper way to return all creatures to our hand? I haven't found one though. Kederekt Leviathan can return the Fountain of Youths. Awoken Horror and Waterspout Elementals will return all creatures but themselves, and returning them will be a problem.
I also notice that, in the Broken Ambitions version, we don't go infinite with cheap green mana, so we could put in some artifact that gets green mana cheaply. But, I don't know how to add the second green mana at the start other than the three cards we've already mentioned.
The problem seems to be Mimic Vat. Can we somehow get by with one Mimic Vat? I seem to recall this is what we were doing earlier, but I don't know about the current setup.
I guess even without the other switch going for Obelisk of Bant would still save a card if it works out. Intuitively I'd say a single Mimic Vat is good enough. I don't think we ever needed to dealy activating the Vat after it gets a creature and the lowest creature that needs to go under the Vat is conveniently destroyed by a trigger that can also bounce the Vat to refresh it.
A problem that I don't see how to fix without adding another card is that we can't get Vedalken Orrery into play after Retract or Worldfire. Previously we set up a Dual Nature to put a token copy on the battlefield at the right time.
That Vedalken Orrery is indeed a problem. Do you see a way to fix it with just one card? There's Mirrorworks - we cast Vedalken Orrery, put the Mirrorworks trigger on the stack, then eventually Retract will bring it back to our hand. I think that works.
EDIT: Hmm, Mirrorworks can copy Fountain of Youth. This would be good if the number of Fountain of Youths was even, but it's odd. We could previously make it even by having an instant that gains 1 life, but we can't do that anymore. Is there any way to gain exactly one life in the hyperstage transition other than Fountain of Youth? If so, we could cut the number of Fountain of Youths down to one, which would be great.
EDIT: Heh, we can just have two Mirrorworks to replace two Fountain of Youths. So the Mirrorworks don't actually cost us any card slots, and I think we still have a two card savings.
EDIT: No, the first Mirrorworks can copy the second... so it doesn't quite work. Phooey.
EDIT: So, I don't see how to fix the Vedalken Orrery problem without something that creates copies of it, and Mirrorworks was the only reasonable card I found. But I can't figure out how to make Mirrorworks compatible with Fountain of Youth.
The problem seems to be, how on Earth can we get started with something as weak as Riku of Two Reflections? We will need to generate a bunch of mana somehow. For the second change, we do have a two card savings, so we could use another card if it helps get things going.
EDIT: Hmm, I thought at first that a single Allay or Kiora's Dismissal could bounce March of the Machines a bunch of times, and therefore we could get multiple uses out of Obelisk of Bant. But now I realize that we can't coordinate the bouncings from Kiora's Dismissal and Metallurgeon to get multiple uses, so we only get one use per Kiora's Dismissal, and so we don't generate mana. I don't see an obvious way to fix it either; any artifact that we need to tap will come at that stiff price of three mana, or two mana for a copy. Sacrificing will come at the cost of two mana to pay for Riku of Two Reflections. About the only thing that can keep up with the cost is Gilded Lotus, and that can produce forbidden red mana. What would be nice if we had some artifact/enchantment that generated mana upon entering the battlefield, but I don't know of any. Mana Reflection is out, since we need to control red mana in the hyperhyperstage.
EDIT: Okay, I have a theory that maybe we don't need more green mana in the original Izzet Guildmage version. Now, the hyperstage does not generate any green mana, since we get one mana back for each mana we spend, whether we use Mox Emerald or Elvish Spirit Guide, I think. But, we do get three green mana for each hyperhyperstage transition, for the three sorceries that we cast. The highest hyperstage then only extends by three stages each repetition, so it does not qualify as a real hyperstage. But for the second hyperstage, we will gain a boatload of green mana each time we repeat it, comparable to the number of Dual Natures on the battlefield. So the second hyperstages on down qualify as real hyperstages, and we have a working hyperhyperstage. Does this make sense?
EDIT: Actually, I think even the first hyperstage is a working hyperstage, it just takes another layer to get going. Normally, we would expect every few Psychic Battle triggers from the top of the second hyperstage would reset the first hyperstage, with a number of stages equal to the output of the previous hyperstage. In this case, we get a hyperstage with three more stages for every few Psychic Battle triggers. But, we have a whole lot of Psychic Battle triggers, and when we resolve the first Bloodbond March trigger from the next layer group, we get a group of Psychic Battle triggers comparable to the output of the previous first hyperstages. After that group of Psychic Battle triggers gets resolved, we will indeed have reached a number of stages in the first hyperstage greater than the output at the end of the previous group of Psychic Battle triggers. So even the first hyperstage works, it just takes another layer from the second hyperstage to each the same result.
Hmm, I too bad about the plans to generate mana via artifact bouncing. I don't know how to fix them.
I think I get the gist of what you are saying about Mox Emerald. Cast Flash of Defiance multiple times and build up green mana from that since we don't have to spent it. But I can't see how it would actually play out. From the triggered sorceries and instants it is hard to generate mana, because, well, they are triggered so we can't put things on the stack in the middle. In particualar if we try to generate mana with Retract we lose the ability to respond at instant speed with Vedalken Orrery. If we go for Evacuation and Elvish Spirit Guide we can't get Bloodbond Marches in the correct position. Our normal transition as I remember it also uses Evacuation in response to Wormfang Behemoth's Dual Nature trigger, to get our hand exiled under the token and did in general use instants without care for the ressources. Essentially we can waste some of the life in the higher hyperstage to regain the small amount of life we need in the lower hyperstage to be at the correct place there. If we try to generate the green mana via those transitions we obviously can't just disregard the cost of casting instants for the transition, so stuff gets more complicated.
Can you break down your plan into a play by play sequence? I think timing is important enough here to look at it in detail.
Hmm, good point about Retract taking out the ability to use Vedalken Orrery. That means we can't trigger an early Retract from one of our triggered sorceries, or else we are screwed for that hyperstage.
So, let's say we are ready to transition to a higher hyperstage.
Let's say we have Vedalken Orrery and Omniscience in hand, and token copies on the battlefield. If Dual Nature is not on the battlefield, play it, so that there are at least two copies on the battlefield. Play Vedalken Orrery, getting Dual Nature triggers. Bounce the Dual Nature, destroying all copies. Resolve a Dual Nature trigger and get a copy of Vedalken Orrery. Bounce the Vedalken Orrery by tapping a Metallurgeon. Leave the rest of the Vedalken Orrery token triggers on the stack.
Do the same for Omniscience to get a token on the battlefield and token triggers on the stack.
Flashback Flash of Defiance, spending 1 red mana and 3 life. This should take us down to 1 life. The casting triggers both Spellweaver Helixes and a bunch of Spellweaver Volutes. Resolve the triggers in the order Marshaling the Troops, all the Battle Crys, and then Worldfire. Resolve Marshaling the Troops, getting a lot of life. We haven't progressed at all, so no new Battle Cries. Resolve the Battle Cries, iterating the Metallurgeon stage each time. Resolve the Spellweaver trigger for Worldfire, but leave the spell on the stack. Next, we implement the hyperstage using the available green mana. Run the hyperstage as far as you can, but do not run it to the point where you lose green mana permanently. (I'm not sure if you can do that, but if you can, stop right before that point.) We need to use the very last Acorn Harvest to bring all our permanents back to our hand, so let's stop right before that last casting. Play Wormfang Behemoth, getting Dual Nature triggers and an ETB trigger; put the ETB trigger on the bottom of those triggers. Respond to those triggers by bouncing Dual Nature. Play Mox Emerald and the three Fountain of Youths to get 1 green mana and 3 life. Use those resources to pay for a flashback of Acorn Harvest, making sure that we have Spellweaver Volutes on Evacuation and Retract. Resolve those spells and bring all our creatures and artifacts back to our hand. Pay for a copy of Kiora's Dismissal to bring Spellweaver Volute back to our hand. Resolve a Wormfang Behemoth trigger, triggering its ETB ability, which exiles our hand. Resolve the Worldfire spell, which destroys the Wormfang Behemoth token and brings the exiled cards back to our hand.
Hmm, I wasn't able to get a green mana out of that. The problem seems to be that we can't take advantage of the last Retract, since we need to have our artifacts in our hand to be exiled. So, in order to gain a green mana we need to use a Retract triggered by either Worldfire or Flash of Defiance. But, we need to cast Wormfang Behemoth prior to that Retract, which means our hand will get exiled prior to Retract bringing artifacts back to our hand.
So, it looks like you were right after all. We would be fine if we could still use Leyline of Anticipation. Do you see any alternative line of play that could possibly get us green mana?
Let's look at it like this: Any Retract that is triggered by Acorn Harvest can't generate extra green, so if we want to generate green it needs to come from a Retract triggered by Flash of Defiance or another of the Spellweaver Helix triggered sorceries. If that retract is resolved before a Worldfire we have no time to sneak in a Wormfang Behemoth to save the Mox Emerald from getting exiled. If it is resolved after a Worldfire we have no opportunity to sneak the Mox onto the Battlefield before resolving Retract. If there is no Worldfire we lose red mana. Looks to me like we can't generate any green via Flash of Defiance.
Evacuation seems more friendly, since it doesn't have to eliminate Vedalken Orrery. But, it doesn't look like Elvish Spirit Guide works out either - in order to get a green mana back after casting Acorn Harvest, we need to use a Bloodbond March trigger. But eventually we will run out of Bloodbond March triggers, and we will have to use an Evacuation to just to reset the Bloodbond March triggers, and we will lose a green mana at that point.
It occurs to me that there could be a sorcery that could get us both green mana and life, if it could somehow allow us to make use of our artifacts. The first thing that came to mind was something like Open the Vaults - but that doesn't work out, because we can play Mox Emerald and Fountain of Youths with March of the Machines in play during the lower hyperstage, getting lots of token copies, and then when we get to the higher hyperstage we can cast Open the Vaults to bring the artifacts back to the battlefield. A sorcery that would work out would be something that could bounce a target artifact back to our hand. Then we could cast in on a Golem with Precursor Golem in play, and get a ton of copies. Unfortunately, I can't find any such sorcery! The closest thing I could find was Baral's Expertise, but that can target creatures as well. Another possibility would be to copy a target artifact, but again, the only sorceries I could find can also target a creature. There are a gajillion sorceries that can destroy a target artifact, but that does us no good.
EDIT: For the Riku of Two Reflections version, we can add Workhorse to add easy colorless mana without need for any bouncing of March of the Machines. But, that leaves us with the same number of cards for the smaller change version, and for the larger change version, we still need something else because of the blue mana we need for Kiora's Dismissal. So, still not quite fixed.
EDIT: Well, we could switch Marshaling the Troops with Displacement Wave and add Swarm Intelligence. Unfortunately, that means that Swarm Intelligence will be the extra card, not Precursor Golem, and I think Reality Spasm and Swarm Intelligence combine for just one layer. Is there some other instant/sorcery that can combine with Swarm Intelligence to get two layers? Can Displacement Wave be cast with X > 0 for some benefit? I'm thinking probably no to both questions.
Could Replenish replace Drake Familiar? The idea would be to put Spellweaver Helixes on Worldfire and Replenish, as a setup hyperstage. Putting Replenish before Worldfire seems to accomplish nothing, so it has to resolve after. But, we don't have a way to move Spellweaver Volute and our instants to the graveyard from exile after Worldfire resolves, so I guess it doesn't work. (Well, we could add Pull From Eternity to the deck, but that eliminates our card savings.)
EDIT: What if we try to use Replenish to replace both Drake Familiar and Marshaling the Troops? That's a potential two card savings, so we have one card to turn Replenish into something that gains life. The obvious thing would be some Aura. There are a number of Auras that can gain life (e.g. Ensoul Artifact), but I think Copy Enchantment turns them all infinite. What if we try to remove Copy Enchantment? That would require adding another Spellweaver Volute, and then something else like Drake Familiar to save the Spellweaver Volutes from being lost to the graveyard, so that would eliminate the card savings.
The Sands of Delirium can mill a bunch of enchantments and then the Replenish can, in addition to the Omniscience return Opalescence, Dual Nature and Copy Enchantment copying Dual Nature. We'd have 6 Dual Natures before we play Sphinx and could have set up more enchantments/graveyard stuff before drawing extra cards.
The only loss is the return to library ability of Perpetual Timepiece and with it the ability to reuse Black Lotus before casting Reality Spasm. So it is tough to generate blue. Well, worst case we use Perpetual Timepiece instead of Sands of Delirium. We'd only get one extra enchantment, but that is still better than the other starts.
EDIT: We'd need to use the goblins - thrulls version of stages, so our lands are allowed to produce blue at all. That means we can never reuse Black Lotus, but I think it is possible to get the full combo running with the Sands of Delirium version. On the other hand I realized that Copy Enchantment can't copy Dual Nature when they enter at the same time, so we only get 3 Dual Natures out of that start. A little less exciting.
After Replenish brings all the enchantments to the battlefield, we get four copies of Consecrated Sphinx and thus draw 10 cards with Words of Wisdom. We could theoretically have enough cards to implement a stage or hyperstage, but I believe we need Reality Spasm to get a hasted token, so I don't see how to make it work out. So, we will draw:
Cast Vedalken Orrery.
Cast Spellweaver Volute, putting it on Evacuation.
Cast Allay with Buyback; get three bouncings, getting 6 and then 13 Dual Natures, then 15 Psychic Battles.
Cast Allay, getting 16 bouncings. Get 13*2^15 Dual Natures for the first 15 bouncings. On the last bouncing, create 13*2^15 Spellweaver Volutes, enchanting Allay for all of them.
cast Acorn Harvest, triggering all the Spellweaver Volutes. Put the Evacuation trigger on the bottom, below all the Allays. Respond by casting Drake Familiar, getting 13*2^15 + 1 bouncings, using 13*2^15 - 1 to bounce all but the first Spellweaver Volute on Allay. Use the last two to bouncing Copy Enchantment twice, geting 13*2^16 Dual Natures and more than 13*2^16 Psychic Battles. Now, we can start resolving the 13*2^15 Allays. Each Allay takes the number of Dual Natures and Psychic Battles from X to more than 2^X, so at the end we have more than 2^^(13*2^15) Dual Natures and Psychic Battles. With the last Allay, we also bounce Opalescence (creating a token copy with Copy Enchantment to make it a creature) and March of the Machines. Resolve Evacuation to bring Drake Familiar and Consecrated Sphinx back to our hand. Put the original Spellweaver Volute on Words of Wisdom. Play Copy Enchantment, creating more than2^^(13*2^15) copies of Spellweaver Volute, putting one on Evacuation and the rest on Allay.
Cast Flash of Defiance, repeating the process to get more than 2^^(2^^(13*2^15)) > 2^^^5 Dual Natures, Psychic Battles, and Spellweaver Volutes. Cast Marshaling the Troops and repeat the process, getting more than 2^^^6 of everything.
Cast Spellweaver Helix, imprinting Flash of Defiance and Marshaling the Troops. Leave the Dual Nature triggers on the stack.
Cast Flash of Definace, triggering Volutes, and also triggering Helix to cast Marshaling the Troops, increasing to more than 2^^^8 of everything.
Resolve a Helix Dual Nature trigger, imprinting the new token on Flash of Defiance and Channel.
Cast the final Flash of Defiance, triggering both Channel and Marshaling the Troops. Increase to more than 2^^^11. Play Consecrated Sphinx, getting more than 2^^^11 copies, and resolve the Spellweaver Volute trigger on Words of Wisdom, triggering all the Consecrated Sphinxes.
Of course, all that matters for the final estimate is that we can draw the deck and at least 52 Reality Spasms, which will be enough to get F_{w^3+w12+2}(52).
Of course, we will then have to deal with getting mana. We need to cast Worldfire, so we have to figure out how to deal with that.
EDIT: Whoops, forgot about bringing our instants back to the graveyard. I guess it won't be quite as good.
EDIT: In an effort to bring back using bounceable artifacts for mana, I thought about replacing March of the Machines with Titania's Song. Titania's Song will mess up Vedalken Orrery, which might cause problems. But, perhaps it doesn't cause problems for any infinite.
EDIT: Hmm, I'm not seeing how to get profitable uses of multiple sorceries in the opening. To reuse Allay and Evacuation, we need to get copies of Mirror of Fate and Sands of Delirium. To get copies of Sands of Delirium, we need to cast Evacuation with March of the Machines on the battlefield. But, that will get rid of Vedalken Orrery, so we have to wait until the stack is cleared to recast March of the Machines and Sands of Delirium. After that, we need to bounce March of the Machines back to our hand to use the Sands of Delirium, but Allay is not in the graveyard yet. I suppse we could use Drake Familiar - but then, it will be on the battlefield when we cast our sorcery, and we need to respond with it to bounce the Spellweaver Volutes. So I guess we can use extra sorceries, but we only get one Allay each time, which is not noticeable. Do you see a better way to get started?
Opener: Black Lotus, Channel, Sands of Delirium, Saltcrusted Steppe, Replenish, Drake Familiar, Consecrated Sphinx.
Play Lotus, get 3 green, cast Channel, turn 16 life into mana. Cast Sands of Delirium, mill 7 cards. (4 life, 1 green, 6 colorless)
The milled cards are: Omniscience, Opalescence, Dual Nature, Copy Enchantment, Spellweaver Volute, Acorn Harvest, Words of Wisdom.
Play Saltcrusted Steppe, tap it for a counter and remove a counter for white. Cast Replenish. (4 life, 1 green, 1 colorless)
Enchantments enter the battlefield. Volute enchants the Words of Wisdom, the Copy Enchantment token copies Dual Nature.
Play Drake Familiar, returning the original Copy Enchantment to our hand. (We get 3 tokens, but without instant speed reaction I don't see anything useful for those bounces)
Play Copy enchantment, copying Dual Nature. We go up to 8 Dual Natures.
Play Sphinx, get 8 token copies.
Flashback Acorn Harvest (1 life, no mana). Volute on Word of Wisdom triggers, we resolve it and draw a total of 20 cards. (Also, the Volute dies)
That's the best I found for the first Words of Wisdom. I don't expect having Vedalken Orrery in play at that point is worth drawing less cards. With the next 20 cards I'd want to try generating the blue for Reality Spasm and hopefully do some initial stages. I'll think about it for a while and post/edit in a continuation later.
Nice start! I think you should have one more colorless mana after Replenish, so you could mill one more card if that helps at all. At the worst, we could mill another instant so that we don't have Spellweaver Volute go to the graveyard.
Nah, I think my mana is right there. 1 to put a counter on Saltcrusted Steppe, 1 to remove the counter, 3 for Replenish itself. total of 5 colorless used in that line.
Anyway slight modification to the start: use the extra Drake Familiar tokens to bounce Opalescence and then the original Omniscience. Replay the Opalescence before the next step, but now we have Omniscience in hand. Yay.
Then we continue from where we left off. Instead of listing all the cards we draw, I'll count them as they come up.
Play March of the Machines(1). Play Vedalken Orrery(2). In response to the Dual Nature triggers play Mirror of Fate(3). In response to the Dual Nature triggers play Retract(4). We pick up Orrery, Mirror and Sands of Delirium. Then we resolve triggers to get 8 Mirror tokens and 8 Orerry tokens. Replay Omniscience resolve all but one Dual Nature trigger. Replay Orrery, Mirror and Sands, getting all the tokens. Cast Marshaling the Troops(5), tapping all creatures, except for 2 Sands, 1 Mirror.
We gain a bunch of life. The exact number doesn't matter and can surely be increased at no cost by some cards we have in the hand, but not considered yet (i.e. play random creatures now). it should be well over 100, and after converting it to colorless via Channels effect, I'm just going to assume I have enough colorless from now on.
Play Titania, Protector of Argoth(7), return the Volcanic to the battlefield and tap it for blue. Leave two Dual Nature trigger for Titania on the stack.
Play Spellweaver Helix(8). Have one Helix exile Replenish and Flash of Defiance, another exile Worldfire and Flash of Defiance.
activate Sands and Mirror, but leave the activations on the stack.
Cast Flash of Defiance(9). Two Helixes trigger. Resolve the Replenish first. Put all the enchantments onto the battlefield. Volute enchants Words of Wisdom I guess.
Use buybacked Allay to get a second Opalescence and kill Volute.
Cast Wormfang Behemoth(10). In Response cast Evacuation(11) and return the entire battlefield except for lands to our hand. The Behemoth resolves exiling our hand. Resolve Worldfire. Behemoth gets exiled, Volute gets exiled, lands get exiled, some instants/sorceries in the graveyards might get exiled.
Behemoth returns our hand from exile. We resolve the mirror activation and put Volcanic Island, Saltcrusted Steppe and more stuff (?) into the library. We resolve the sands activation and put that stuff in the graveyard. We get the Titania tokens and return our lands to the battlefield. Tap the volcanic for the second blue. We resolve the final dual Nature trigger to get an Omniscience copy.
We can repopulate the board with our enchantments and artifacts by casting them from hand and using a bunch of colorless mana for buybacked Allays.
this is good enough to cast Reality Spasm(12). Other cards we need for stages are Mimic Vat(13), Horobi, Death's Wail(14), Core Prowler(15) to generate mana and then some actual stage creatures. (Am I missing something?).
The Wormfang Behemoth and Spellweaver Volute ended up in exile. The Volute can be recovered with Replenish. To use that without extra card draws we need to be able to flashback Flash of Defiance, so to produce red I think Goblin Gardener has to be one of the cards we have drawn in the 20. Eventually we will need the Volute to cast Words of Wisdom again and trigger the next card draw.
I think we can only recover the Behemoth after more card draw, so no hyperhyperstage at this point. I was not able to rescue this cute fishy because the original eatsour hand when he enters the battlefield. If we react to the exile hand trigger to bounce it, then we lose our hand when the trigger resolves and never get it back. If we let the trigger resolve we need to trigger the bounce via flashback since our hand will be empty (duh). That looks too expensive.
But it looks like a hyperstage is actually possible right now.
EDIT: For reference, the decklist I'm working with right now:
To flash back Flash of Defiance and recover the Spellweaver Volute, we also need some life, so I guess the three Fountain of Youths should also be among the cards drawn. (We need those for the hyperstage anyway. That leaves 1 card for Metallurgeon.
To generate red mana via Goblin Gardener, we first create as many Psychic Battles as our colorless allows. Then we cast Reality Spasm and use psychic battle triggers from that alternately to kill gardener tokens and to bounce Titanias. occasionally we can also bounce the originial gardener if we need new tokens.
Along the way we should also kill the Metallurgeon and put it under a Mimic Vat. That Vat should then be the final target of reality spasm for an untap and a bonus token. Twice we should tap Volcanic Island for blue instead of red so we can cast our next Reality Spasm later.
Get life for the first flash of defiance via Fountains. After that generate more life via Marshaling the Troops. No need for Worldfires here, just go through hyperstages until you run out of red.
Very nice, we can get hyperstages! But, don't we do the following to save Wormfang Behemoth? When Wormfang Behemoth enters the battlefield put the ETB trigger below the Dual Nature creation triggers. Then, respond with Evacuation to bring all our creatures back to our hand. Resolve all the triggers created by Wormfang Behemoth entering; the first Dual Nature token exiles our hand, the remaining Dual Nature tokens and the original ETB trigger exiles nothing. Then Worldfire resolves, destroying the Dual Nature tokens and restoring our hand. Can we not do that here? It certainly looks like Dual Nature is available. Does that give us any hope for the hyperhyperstage?
Also, I notice that Worldfire can get Black Lotus out of the graveyard, so it can actually be used again, if we want it to. However, if we get rid of Volcanic Island, then we would need to use another Words of Wisdom draw to draw Black Lotus so that we could cast Reality Spasm, which seems suboptimal. That's too bad - being able to use Plateau in the opening hand would have allowed for two more mana.
EDIT: Wait a minute. I said that using a hyperstage that triggers Worldfire and Replenish as a setup hyperstage didn't work out, but I was thinking of resolving one hyperstage after the other. What if we put one hyperstage on top of the other? So we trigger a hyperstage that triggers Worldfire and Replenish, we resolve Replenish to bring Spellweaver Volute back to the battlefield, then we trigger a hyperstage that triggers Worldfire and Marshaling the Troops, and now we have both life and Spellweaver Volute. Does that work? I'm worried that we won't have enough resources during the Replenish hyperstage to get everything back, so maybe it doesn't.
EDIT: No wait, if we do that then Replenish will only save the Spellweaver Volute for the first higher hyperstage, then Worldfire kills it for the remainder of the hyperstages. What if we put the Replenish hyperstage on top and the Marshaling the Troops hyperstage on bottom? No, then we won't have Spellweaver Volute for the lower hyperstage, and we can't make the stage transitions. I guess it doesn't work out.
Hey cool, so we can save Wormfang Behemoth after all. That means that the full hyperhyperstage is accessible As we can get blue with Black Lotus later, there is also no need to save any blue before the draw, so our hyperhyperstage grows a little bit.
Play March of the Machines, get tokens.
Play Vedalken Orrery, leave the Dual Nature triggers on the stack.
Play Mirror of Fate, leave the Dual Nature triggers on the stack.
Play Spellweaver Helix, leave the Dual Nature triggers on the stack. Exile nothing with the ETB.
Play Mimic Vat, leave the Dual Nature triggers on the stack.
Play Core Prowler, leave the Dual Nature triggers on the stack.
Play Metallurgeon, leave the Dual Nature triggers on the stack.
Play Retract to bounce all those artifacts plus the Sands of Delirium. Get all the tokens. Still exile nothing with the Helix ETB.
Play Omniscience, resolve all but one Dual Nature trigger.
Play Titania Protector of Argoth, put the ETB trigger to the bottom of the stack and resolve all the dual Nature trigger. The token ETBs do nothing right now, but leave the ETB from the original on the stack.
Play Spellweaver Helix, put the ETB trigger to the bottom of the stack and resolve all the dual Nature trigger. Exile nothing with the token ETBs, but leave the ETB from the last token on the stack as well.
Play Vedalken Orrery, get tokens.
Play Mirror of Fate, get tokens.
Play Sands of Delirium, get tokens.
Play Mimic Vat, get tokens.
Play Core Prowler, get tokens.
Play Metallurgeon, get tokens.
Play Horobi, get tokens.
Play Goblin Gardener, get tokens.
Cast Marshaling the Troops and tap all creatures except for one Sands of Delirium for it. If my count is correct that means we gain 700 life. Convert it all into colorless mana.
Cast Allay with buyback to destroy Opalescence. Use Allay with with buyback 9 times to destroy all March of the Machines. (670 colorless)(We need all those casts since we can't allow Horobi's trigger to counter Allay)
resolve the Helix ETB triggers. one exiles Flash of Defiance + Replenish, the other exiles Flash of Defiance + Worldfire.
resolve the Titania ETB trigger. Return Volcanic Island to the battlefield and tap it for blue.
Cast Flash of Defiance, triggering two Helixes. Resolve the replenish first to put all enchantments on the battlefield. The Volute enchants some instant.
Cast Allay with buyback (659 colorless) to bounce the original Copy Enchantment, then redirect the Allay to Volute and resolve it, killing the Volute.
Replay the Copy Enchantment, copy Opalescence.
Cast Wormfang Behemoth. Put the ETB on the bottom of the stack, Dual Nature triggers above it. Cast Evacuation in response, returning all our nonland permanents to hand.
We now resolve triggers. The first Behemoth token we get exiles our hand. The rest of the Behemoth ETB triggers have no effect. We cast a Worldfire via Helix trigger and the lands get exiled. We also exile everything that is in the graveyard, but our hand is empty.
The Behemoth token triggers and our hand gets returned to us.
We resolve the last Dual Nature trigger on the stack to get a Omniscience copy.
Play Opalescence, Dual Nature, Copy Enchantment as itself, tokens as Dual Nature, Psychic Battle, Cowardice, March of the Machines, Vedalken Orrery.
Cast Allay with buyback (656 colorless). We could get 6 bounces, but use the last two to bounce Cowardice and have Ally destroy an extra March of the Machines token so that buyback works. So we get 4 bounces on Copy Enchantment. Use all of those to double our Dual Nature count, so we get 64 Dual Natures.
Cast Drake Familiar bouncing Copy Enchantment 65 times. all but the last of those bounces double out Dual Nature count, the last creates a set of Psychic Battles.
Repeatedly cast Allay with buyback to increase the Dual Nature and Psychic Battle count. We spend all but 2 colorless mana on this, so we get 218 more allays. We start with 64*2^64>2^^4 and each allay increases the last number by 1. We end up with more than 2^^222 Psychic Battles.
Close to the end of the last procedure cast Mirror of Fate, Sands of Delirium and Mimic Vat and then use a psychic battle trigger to bounce March of the Machines.
Activate a Mirror token to exile the library and then put Volcanic Island and Channel in the library.
Activate a Sands token to mill the Volcanic Island (1 colorless)
Play Titania to get that Volcanic Island onto the Battlefield. Tap it to generate a second blue.
Play Cephalid Shrine, Bloodbond March, Horobi, Goblin Gardener, Core Prowler and Metallurgeon. Counter the Metallurgeon and resolve one Bloodbond March trigger, leave the rest on the stack.
Use the rest of our Mana to cast Reality Spasm with X=1. We can use the 2^^222 Psychic Battle triggers from that to mostly create red mana. Out of two triggers one can bounce Titania, the second destroy a Goblin Gardener token. That allows us to reuse Volcanic Island. We use some of that mana to mill Saltcrusted steppe. we can get back the Steppe and tap it for a counter. We can then use one psychic battle trigger from the reality spasm to kill a Core Prowler token to get a second counter, which we can exchange for a white mana. We also use one trigger to kill the Metallurgeon and exile it with a Mimic Vat. We can then tap Vat and to get a Metallurgeon token and use the white to tap it. This generates more counter on Steppe by killing Coreprowler, so now we can use that mana for stuff instead of our precious red. Also bounce Vedalken Orrery at some point, but leave tokens in play via well timed play and bounce of March of the Machines. At the end let Reality Spasm resolve to untap the Mimic Vat. Tap it to get a new Metallurgeon token.
After we are done with the Reality Spasm triggers we have ~2^^222 red mana and are mostly set up for our combo.
Use some of our green/white mana to mill all our instants and sorceries, the Volute and Metallurgeon.
Use a Bloodbond March trigger to get Metallurgeon back. Tap the token and leave those Psychic Battle triggers on the stack.
Play Vedalken Orrery and leave a Dual Nature trigger for it on the stack.
Set up two Helixes, one with Flash of Defiance + Replenish, the other with Flash of Defiance + Marshaling the Troops. Make sure March of the Machines is not on the battlefield and then play the Fountain of Youths and tap them to gain 3 life. Then cast a Flash of Defiance and resolve Helix into Replenish to bring Volute back to the battlefield. Enchant Retract. The second Helix casting its sorcery triggers the Volute and retract makes sure our Fountains stay safe. Then we gain a bunch of life from Marshaling the troops.
We get a Vedalken Orrery token and have a layer of Psychic Battle triggers above a layer of Bloodbond March triggers on the stack. We can handle this situation as if we just resolved the lowest hyperstage transition in the lowest hyperstage of a hyperhyperstage.
We have all the ressources we need to go through the hyperhyperstage and the ability to set up 2^^222 hyperstages.
So we get to draw about f_{w^3}(2^^222) cards from our second Words of Wisdom.
EDIT: I'm slightly confused about how powerful the Allay repetition actually is. I think it is on the 2^^^#Allay level, but it might be 2^^#Allay ? I'm a bit unsure right now.
EDIT: Yeah I think the 2^^^221 is correct. Fixed some other stuff I noticed in the spoiler.
EDIT: And now I'm convinced Allay is only worth two up arrows. Sigh. Changed that again. Although at this point I'm wondering if we can get away without March of the Machines early. We'd get a lot less life, but if we can mill and replenish it instead of drawing we could instead draw Minion of Tevesh Szat and go to f_{w^3+w}.
Well, no we can't just do that, as we need a Spellweaver Helix token before we resolve Replenish. Without the double triggering from that I think we'd need another drawn sorcery or otherwise majorly rework the start.
Very nice! Yes, Allay is two arrows. I counted the creatures, and 700 life looks right. I'm not sure why Spellweaver Volute needs to be destroyed, but I guess it doesn't hurt anything to destroy it.
I'll keep looking around for card savings, but I'm running out of ideas.
[EDIT] Still looking for a way to get green, white, and blue mana for two cards that is cheap but not too cheap, so that we can use Izzet Guildmage. We can have cheap green and white with Dromoka Monument, and then have blue be not too cheap. The obvious candidate is Silver Myr - but if we use that, then we can't have Broken Ambitions, since then it will cost at least a blue to get a hasted token copy. So we can only get Kiora's Dismissal, and we wind up not saving a card.
EDIT: Tree of Tales can be recycled more cheaply than Mox Emerald, and we can get token copies of it. But, we can't play two lands in the same turn.
EDIT: Treva's Ruins could be a source of cheap green/white/blue mana, if there is an artifact that can return a land to the battlefield.
Can we use Azorius Signet to produce cheap blue and white mana to fuel Izzet Guildmage and Metallurgeon? we can create a bunch of that mana cheaply via bounces, but that doesn't go infinite with Retract, since we need green to flash back Acorn Harvest. We could produce green via Copper Myr, so that requires the hasty creatures from actual artifact targeting around to produce.
But we could use Izzet Guildmage to copy Retract or Hurkyl's Recall. Rebuild has cycling, which could be problematic. Although I don't see an infinite from that since it only gives one draw and unless it draws only itself that is the end of it. If it draws itself, I think we are just wasting ressources.
Can we use that to save a card via Broken Ambitions? If we assume for now a start is somehow possible without more cards than right now?
with some more changes for the start. We can't have Sands of Delirium any more, nor can we use Overeager Apprentice since we need black for later. So I guess we go back to the hard cast of Omniscience.
We could get the four enchantments on the battlefield via Replenish, but that requires that we cast a Broken Ambitions first. We don't want to just cast Broken Ambitions from the graveyard via Spellweaver Volute and resolve it, since then Broken Ambitions will be in exile and we won't be able to get it back to the graveyard. So, we need to put a Spellweaver Volute on Broken Ambitions, cast a sorcery of some kind to trigger it, put Izzet Guildmage on the battlefield, and then generate a blue mana somehow. So, we can play Retract to bring Azorius Signet back to our hand. We would like to play March of the Machines, so we play it and then play Kiora's Dismissal to bounce it back to our hand. That will get us four copies of Azorius Signet, which should be good to start with. Then, we play Spellweaver Helix and imprint Replenish and Flash of Defiance, then play a second Flash of Defiance to trigger it. Meh, that's eight cards already, we won't have room for Metallurgeon/Mimic Vat/Mirror of Fate. So maybe a stage is too ambitious.
EDIT: So, if no stage is possible, we just want to get as many Kiora's Dismissals as we can:
Play March of the Machines and Vedalken Orrery. Respond to the Dual Nature triggers for Vedalken Orrery by playing Rebuild. Vedalken Orrery and Azorius Signet get bounced back to our hand. Resolve the Dual Nature triggers to get three Vedalken Orrery tokens. Play Psychic Battle, Cowardice, and Izzet Guildmage, getting three token copies of each. Play Kiora's Dismissal; we get five bounces. The first four increase the number of Dual Natures to 48. We respond to the fifth bounce by playing Azorius Signet, getting 48 copies. We use the fifth bounce to bounce March of the Machines, and the token copies get exiled. Play Spellweaver Volute on Kiora's Dismissal. Play Acorn Harvest. This triggers Spellweaver Volute, and Kiora's Dismissal goes on the stack. (This seems like waste of a sorcery, but I couldn't find something better.) The Spellweaver Volute gets placed on Broken Ambitions. We currently have 14 life and 49 Azorius Signets; we spend 2 life and 1 Azorius Signet to copy Kiora's Dismissal, getting five bounces again. We increase the number of Dual Natures to 48*2^4 = 768, and increase the number of Psychic Battles to 771, using the last Copy Enchantment token to copy Spellweaver Volute. Put the Spellweaver Volute token on Rebuild. Play Vedalken Orrery, but don't let the Dual Nature triggers resolve. Cast Marshaling the Troops, triggering Broken Ambitions and Rebuild. The Broken Ambitions counters the Acorn Harvest spell, and mills four cards into our graveyard, including Evacuation. Copy Kiora's Dismissal four more times, spending 8 life and 4 Azorius Signets. We start with 771 > 2^^3 Psychic Battles, so we wind up with more than 2^^7 Psychic Battles and Dual Natures. Rebuild resolves and brings our artifacts back to our hand. (But not before we tap all of our Signets for mana!) Marshaling the Troops resolves and gives us more than 2^^7 life. Use our life and our remaining 44 blue mana to copy 44 more Kiora's Dismissals; we wind up with more than 2^^51 Dual Natures and Psychic Battles. After the second to last bounce, we play Azorius Signet with March of the Machines on the battlefield, getting more then 2^^51 token copies. Copy Kiora's Dismissal more than 2^^51 times, getting more than 2^^2^^51 Dual Natures and Psychic Battles. On the final replaying of Copy Enchantment, make sure to have Spellweaver Volutes on Evacuation and Words of Wisdom. (The original can be on Words of Wisdom.) Also, make sure to bounce Opalescence and March of the Machines. Finally, we use our floating one green mana and 3 life to flashback Acorn Harvest, which triggers Evacuation and Words of Wisdom. Evacuation brings Consecrated Sphinx back to our hand, and we replay it for more than 2^^2^^51 copies. Then Words of Wisdom resolves, allowing us to more than 2^^2^^51 Consecrated Sphinx triggers, drawing two cards at a time.
That seems pretty good, although I had hoped to get more uses of Rebuild. But, that would require making use of Mirror of Fate and more Broken Ambitions, which seems difficult.
EDIT: It would be nice to use Replenish to get more enchantments onto the battlefield. But, I don't see how to do it without using at least a couple of enchantments first, which makes it less worth it.
EDIT: Or maybe, work in Reality Spasm and Precursor Golem. Each bouncing of Azorius Signet can implement a double arrow operation, so Reality Spasm should implement quadruple arrows. So a big improvement should be possible.
Play March of the Machines, Psychic Battle Cowardice[/c], Izzet Guildmage, and Vedalken Orrery, getting three copies of each. Play Kiora's Dismissal, getting five bouncings. The first three bounces pump the Dual Natures to 6, 12, and 24; for the fourth, we copy Dual Nature with the original Copy Enchantment, pumping the total number to 50. After the fifth bounce, we respond to the Dual Nature destruction triggers to play Copy Enchantment again, bumping the number of Dual Natures to 98.
Play Spellweaver Volute on Kiora's Dismissal. Play Acorn Harvest, triggering Spellweaver Volute to cast Kiora's Dismissal again. Leave the spell on the stack. Put the Spellweaver Volute on Broken Ambitions.
Play Precursor Golem, getting 98 Precursor Golem token copies, and 198 regular Golem tokens. Play Terashi's Grasp, triggering Broken Ambitions and all the Precursor Golems. Resolve the Broken Ambitions, countering the Acorn Harvest, and milling four cards, including Evacuation. Resolve the first Precursor Golem trigger; we get 296 copies of Terashi's Grasp, each one getting five bounces, for 1480 total. We alternate between bouncing Azorius Signet, playing Azorius Signet, and bouncing March of the Machines, then tapping the Azorius Signets for mana. We then spend the mana to copy Kiora's Dismissal many times. The first time, we get 99 Azorius Signets, which we combine with 12 life to get 37 Kiora's Dismissals, which increases our number of Dual Natures to more than 2^^39, which is more than 2^^^3. Each bouncing of Azorius Signet increases the last number by one, so we wind up with more than 2^^^741 after 739 bouncings, or more than 2^^^^3. We then bounce Copy Enchantment, and the Precursor Golem, to refresh our number of Golems. Each Precursor Golem trigger increases the final number, so we get more than 2^^^^101 Dual Natures. We make sure to have Spellweaver Volutes on Evacuate and Words of Wisdom, and to use at least one Terashi's Grasp to actually gain life, so that we have at least 4. Also, bounce Opalescence and March of the Machines.
We finally flashback Acorn Harvest, which triggers Evacuation and Words of Wisdom. Evacuation brings Consecrated Sphinx back to our hand, which we replay to get more than 2^^^^101 copies. Finally we resolve Words of Wisdom, and draw more than 2^^^^101 cards, two at a time.
Cast Rebuild, returning Signet to hand. replay it and tap it.
Play Guildmage, get tokens.
Play Vedalken Orrery.
Play Harmony. Volute triggers and we cast Broken Ambitions targeting the Acorn Harvest. Volute ends up on Rebuild. Use Guildmageto create a copy of Broken Ambitions. (1 red, 1 green, 1 white, 7 colorless, 4 life)
Mill 8 cards: March of the Machines, Psychic Battle, Cowardice, Mountain, Acorn Harvest, Flash of Defiance x2, ? .
Leave Harmony on the stack.
Play Precursor Golem, leave golem and Dual Nature triggers on the stack.
Play Titania, get tokens, return the mountain. Tap it.
Play Helix, exile a Flash of Defiance and Replenish.
Flash back Flash of Defiance. (1 green, 1 white, 6 colorless, 1 life)
Helix and Volute trigger. Volute triggers again from casting the Replenish. Chose to not cast the spell on the second Volute.
The enchantments end up on the Battlefield, Volute on Words of Wisdom and Signet, Orrery, Helix and Golem in our hand.
We resolve the Golem and Dual Nature triggers that are still on the stack. We resolve the Harmony tapping all available creatures. That should gain us 164 life. Convert 151 life into colorless mana. (1 green, 1 white, 167 colorless, 4 life)
Play Vedalken Orrery, get tokens.
Play Kiora's Dismissal getting 4 Psychic Battle trigger. We bounce Copy Enchantment 5 times and replay it to double our Dual Nature count 4 times. We have 48 Dual Natures. After the last bounce let Kiora's get countered from lack of target. Then replay Copy Enchantment and have 1 token become a copy of Volute, enchanting the Kiora's. The rest of the tokens become Psychic Battles. We have 51 Psychic Battles.
Flash back Acorn Harvest, triggering the Volutes. Put the Words of Wisdom Volute to the bottom of the stack. (1 white, 166 colorless, 1 life)
After casting Kiora's we use the Psychic Battle triggers to get 52 bounces for enchantments. with 51 of these we double the Dual Nature count. We have 48*2^51 Dual Natures.
Before resolving the last Psychic Battle trigger play Azorius Signet. Get 48*2^51 tokens. Then resolve the Psychic Battle trigger and bounce March of the Machines. Dual Nature removes March of the Machines tokens. Leave Kiora's Dismissal on the stack.
Tap all the Signets for Mana. We now have 168+48*2^51 mana, enough of it blue to not care about the colors anymore. We use all but 3 mana with Izzet Guildmage to copy Kiora's 55+2^55 times.
Everytime we create such a copy all our Psychic Battles trigger and we use those to double our Dual Nature count and top up on Psychic Battles. We end up with over 2^^(2^55) Dual Natures.
Play Precursor Golem, get tokens.
Cast Reality Spasm with X=1, targeting a golem. We get 2^^(2^55) Golem triggers. When we resolve these we get a bunch of Psychic Battle triggers that can each be usesd to bounce Signet and repeat the process above.
We end up with about 2^^^^(2^^(2^55)) Dual Natures.
Along use a Psychic Battle trigger to bounce Sphinx.
Play Sphinx, get tokens.
Resolve the stack. After Words of Wisdom we get to draw 2^^^^(2^^(2^55)) cards in chunks of two.
I have one card to mill open, not sure what is best for that. There is more stuff that could be changed around, like drawing the land directly instead of via Titania. But nothing seems to provide improvements. Specifically I tried to fit in Evacuation to bounce the Signet, but that is extremely hard to work in, with the need to keep a Kiora's on the stack and it bouncing Orrery as well. If you try to play it early it ends up bouncing Omniscience...
Anyway, we get to draw enough cards and no card seems irrecoverable. We could even leave Kiora's on the stack below the draws if the extra mill is another Flash of Defiance to cast Words of Wisdom above it. But saving life for the extra flashback of course means fewer draws, so I don't think that is worth it.
Oh, I replaced Marshaling the Troops with Harmony because of Izzet Guildmage, but on second thought the life won't help use to regain red mana, so Marshaling is still fine.
Very clever start! Yes, I used Terashi's Grasp instead of Harmony of Nature, which should work because we have Precursor Golem available. But, your start wound up better. Do you think you could use Terashi's Grasp to improve your start even more? Getting multiple quadruple arrows would be awesome.
Yeah, I can make room for Terashi's Grasp in our hand. Nice thinking with the Precursor Golem there. Without Harmony of Nature we get close to running out of mana/life, but it seems to work out.
Cast Rebuild, returning Signet to hand. replay it and tap it.
Play Guildmage, get tokens.
Play Vedalken Orrery.
Play Acorn Harvest. Volute triggers and we cast Broken Ambitions targeting the Acorn Harvest. Volute ends up on Rebuild. Use Guildmage to create a copy of Broken Ambitions. (1 red, 1 green, 1 white, 4 colorless, 7 life)
Mill 8 cards: March of the Machines, Psychic Battle, Cowardice, Mountain, Kiora's Dismissal, Flash of Defiance x2, ? .
Resolve Acorn Harvest.
Play Precursor Golem, leave golem and Dual Nature triggers on the stack.
Play Titania, get tokens, return the mountain. Tap it.
Play Helix, exile a Flash of Defiance and Replenish.
Flash back Flash of Defiance. (1 green, 1 white, 3 colorless, 4 life)
Helix and Volute trigger. Volute triggers again from casting the Replenish. Chose to not cast the spell on the second Volute.
The enchantments end up on the Battlefield, Volute on Kiora's Dismissal, and Signet, Orrery, Helix and Golem in our hand.
We resolve the Golem and Dual Nature triggers that are still on the stack.
Play Vedalken Orrery, get tokens.
Flash back Acorn Harvest, triggering the Volute. (1 white, 2 colorless, 1 life)
After casting Kiora's Volute ends up on Words of Wisdom and we use the Psychic Battle triggers to get 5 bounces for enchantments. with 4 of these we double the Dual Nature count. We have 48 Dual Natures.
Before resolving the last Psychic Battle trigger play Azorius Signet. Get 48 tokens. Then resolve the Psychic Battle trigger and bounce March of the Machines. Dual Nature removes March of the Machines tokens. Leave Kiora's Dismissal on the stack.
Tap all the Signets for Mana. We now have 52 mana, enough of it blue to not care about the colors anymore. We use 51 mana with Izzet Guildmage to copy Kiora's 17 times.
Everytime we create such a copy all our Psychic Battles trigger and we use those to double our Dual Nature count and top up on Psychic Battles. The first time we have 4 Psychic battles, so we go from 48 to 3*2^8 Dual Natures and this time we also top up on Psychic Battles. We are between 2^^3 and 2^^4 and every Kiora's copy increases the right number by 1. So we end up with over 2^^19 Dual Natures.
Play Precursor Golem, get tokens.
Cast Tereshi's Grasp, targeting a golem. We get 2^^19 Golem triggers. When we resolve these we get a bunch of Psychic Battle triggers that can each be usesd to bounce Signet and repeat the process above. Before we resolve the next Golem trigger we also bounce and replay the Precursor Golem.
We end up with about 2^^^^(2^^19) Dual Natures.
The initial Tereshi's Grasp also triggered Volute on Words of Wisdom. Put that on the stack below all the golem and psychic battle triggers and leave it there.
Play Precursor Golem, get tokens.
Cast Reality Spasm with X=1, targeting a golem. We get 2^^^^(2^^19) Golem triggers. When we resolve these we get a bunch of Psychic Battle triggers that can each be usesd to bounce Signet and repeat the process above. Before we resolve the next Golem trigger we also bounce and replay the Precursor Golem.
We end up with about 2^^^^2^^^^(2^^19) Dual Natures.
Along the way use a Psychic Battle trigger to bounce Sphinx.
Play Sphinx, get tokens.
Resolve the Words of Wisdom.
We get 2^^^^2^^^^(2^^19) draws.
EDIT: Changed the number of Dual Natures before playing Precursor Golem from 2^^17 to 2^^19. Somehow I previously forgot to take into account the inital supply and just put the number of Izzet Guildmage uses after the arrows.
I was wondering about whether we can deal with having to use Psychic Battle while using Broken Ambitions to counter spells and mill cards. In my initial analysis, it seems okay. The most frequent use of Broken Ambitions will be to counter and mill Metallurgeon; if we don't put a card other than Metallurgeon at least that fast, then we will eventually run out of cards in the library. The only thing that can exile that fast is Spellweaver Helix I think, but Spellweaver Helix and Mirror of Fate should have no problems putting sorceries from the graveyard into the library, so I don't see any problem.
EDIT: Minute improvement: For the last Copy Enchantment bounce for the first Kiora's Dismissal, have it copy Dual Nature rather than copy nothing. That gets you 50 Dual Natures, hence 54 mana and 18 bouncings. Bouncing Copy Enchantment then destroys the Dual Nature tokens, so after five bouncings we wind up with 17 Dual Natures and 20 Psychic Battles. (Doing the trick of copying Dual Nature on the second to last playing, and copying Psychic Battle on the final playing) This is more than 2^^3, so after 18 Kiora's Dismissal we will have more than 2^^20 Dual Natures, and the final number will be more than 2^^^^(2^^^^(2^^20)).
Slight problem with that improvement: If we use all of our mana for the 18th bounce. But then we don't have any mana left in the pool to tap the next Azorius Signets we create and can't continue.
EDIT: Hmm, I guess we can manage to let a Terashi's Grasp copy resolve on some artifact token to gain life and thus mana via Channel. So the improvement is still in.
If we change the start around a bit we can use Spellweaver Helix to cast Terashi's Grasp a second time. So lets get another set of quad arrows in there.
Play Volcanic Island and tap it for blue.
Play Guildmage, get tokens.
Play Vedalken Orrery.
Play Kiora's Dismissal and leave it on the stack.
Play Precursor Golem, get tokens.
Play Terashi's Grasp, targeting a Golem token. Volute and Golems trigger and we resolve Volute first to cast Broken Ambitions targeting the Terashi's. Volute ends up on Words of Wisdom. Use Guildmage to create a copy of Broken Ambitions. ( 1 green, 11 colorless, 1 life)
Mill 8 cards: March of the Machines, Psychic Battle, Cowardice, Flash of Defiance x2, ? , ? , ? .
Leave the Precursor triggers on the stack.
Play Helix, exile a Flash of Defiance and Replenish.
Play Flash of Defiance. Helix and Volute trigger. Volute triggers again from casting the Replenish. Chose to not cast the spell on the Volutes.
The enchantments end up on the Battlefield.
We resolve the first Precursor trigger and get 11 copies of Terashi's targeting our Golems. Cowardice triggers and we will end up bouncing them all. We also trigger a total of 44 Psychic Battles.
With the first we bounce Azorius Signet. We replay it and get tokens.
With the second we bounce March of the Machines. We tap all the Signets for mana. (1 green , 13 colorless/white, 4 blue, 1 life)
We use that mana to create Guildmage copies of Kiora's 3 times. The first triggers 4 Psichic battles and gets us to 48 Dual Natures plus 52 Psychic Battles. That's more than 2^^3. The second and third copy get us to 2^^5. (1 green, 7 colorless/white, 1 blue, 1 life)
Replay March of the Machines and use the third Psychic Battle trigger to bounce Signet again. Then activate Guildmage again to create more Dual Natures. Play Signet, get tokens and bounce MArch of the Machines with the last Guildmage Psychic Battle trigger. This gets us ~2^^6 blue mana. We use that as beforeto go to 2^^2^^6 Dual Natures / Psychic Battles, or more than 2^^^4
Use the remaining 41 triggers the same way, getting us to 2^^^45 Dual Natures
Replay Precursor Golem and resolve the second Precursor trigger after getting tokens.
Repeat the process above to go to ~2^^^2^^^45 > 2^^^^4 Dual Natures.
Do the same for trigger three and four to go to more than 2^^^^6.
Towards the end make sure to let some Terashi's resolve to gain at least 3 life.
Play Precursor Golem, get tokens.
Cast Reality Spasm with X=1, targeting a golem. We get 2^^^^6 Golem triggers. When we resolve these we get a bunch of Psychic Battle triggers that can each be usesd to bounce Signet and repeat the process above.
We end up with ~2^^^^2^^^^6 Dual Natures.
Towards the end bounce Sphinx, bounce Helix and let a Reality Spasm copy resolve on Volcanic Island. Tap the Volcanic for red.
Play Helix, exile Terashi's Grasp and Flash of Defiance.
Flash back Flash of Defiance. We put the Volute trigger below the Helix Trigger. When we resolve the Helix trigger Volute triggers again and we chose not to cast with that one.
When we cast Tereshi's Grasp from under the Helix we target a golem and get ~2^^^^2^^^^6 Golem triggers. When we resolve these we get a bunch of Psychic Battle triggers that can each be usesd to bounce Signet and repeat the process above. Before we resolve the next Golem trigger we also bounce and replay the Precursor Golem.
We end up with ~2^^^^2^^^^2^^^^6 Dual Natures.
Play Sphinx, get tokens.
Resolve the Words of Wisdom.
We get 2^^^^2^^^^2^^^^6 draws, which is more than 2^^^^^5.
Starting with that setup seems pretty tough. We lose Drake Familiar, which was really strong so far, and we also lose the ability to ever get Black Lotus out of the graveyard. Unless I'm missing something the only source for blue mana before casting Reality Spasm would be the Calciform Pools, and we'd need to use Worldfire to get the second blue out of it. So while it looks technically possible, it also looks like it will be really hard.
EDIT: I noticed a problem with the Broken Ambitions plan after all. Mox Emerald is not strong enough to produce the green mana we require. It can produce ressources at the same rate as Fountain of Youth, so it will provide exactly enough green mana to use Acorn Harvest while going through the hyperstage. But we do not have a Marshaling the Troops equivalent to generate the green mana when we transition in the hyper^2stage. So we would not be able to set up a new hyperstage and our combo fails.
We start with the same seven cards, and again draw Vedalken Orrery, Dual Nature and Evacuation. We play Evacuation to bounce Consecrated Sphinx and Selvala's Enforcer back to our hand, and replay them to get two of each. This time we will need both Selvala's Enforcer ETB abilities, which will draw five cards each. The ten cards we draw will include:
Opalescence
Copy Enchantment
Psychic Battle
Cowardice
Kiora's Dismissal
Spellweaver Volute
Flash of Defiance
I'm not sure what other three cards to pick; we don't need them yet.
Play Opalescence and Copy Enchantment, copying Dual Nature. We will get two more Dual Nature tokens. Play Psychic Battle and Cowardice, getting five copies of each. Play Kiora's Dismissal, getting five Psychic Battle triggers, allowing us six bounces. Bounce Copy Enchantment six times. The first five times we replay Copy Enchantment we will create 2,4,8,16, and then 34 Dual Natures (Copy Dual Nature with the original on the fifth replay.). Bouncing Copy Enchantment will put Dual Nature destruction triggers on the stack, which we will leave at the bottom. Play Spellweaver Volute on Evacuation. Play Copy Enchantment again; copy nothing, and get 33 copies of Copy Enchantment. Have 32 of them copy Psychic Battle, and one copy Spellweaver Volute, putting it on Kiora's Dismissal. We should now have 33 Dual Natures and 34 Psychic Battles. Cast Flash of Defiance, triggering both Spellweaver Volutes. Resolve Kiora's Dismissal first. We get 35 bouncings; the first 34 will bounce Copy Enchantment, increasing the number of Dual Natures to 33*2^34. The last will switch the target to Opalescence and bounce it. Resolve Evacuation, bringing Consecrated Sphinx and Selvala's Enforcer back to our hand...
Oh shoot. We can't replay Selvala's Enforcer now, there are too many Dual Natures and we don't have a way to get rid of them. How best to handle this?
EDIT: Hmm, I see the problem. What about Elvish Spirit Guide? We can reuse Elvish Spirit Guide once per Evacuation, so we can generate a green mana for a few blue mana using the Spellweaver Volute trick. This should be plenty, I think.
EDIT: No, with the Bloodbond March stack problems I guess we can only get one green mana per stage. Oh well.
EDIT: Maybe we can find a cheaper way to return all creatures to our hand? I haven't found one though. Kederekt Leviathan can return the Fountain of Youths. Awoken Horror and Waterspout Elementals will return all creatures but themselves, and returning them will be a problem.
I also notice that, in the Broken Ambitions version, we don't go infinite with cheap green mana, so we could put in some artifact that gets green mana cheaply. But, I don't know how to add the second green mana at the start other than the three cards we've already mentioned.
EDIT: Okay, how about this: Replace Mirror of Fate with Pull From Eternity, then replace March of the Machines with Karn, Silver Golem. The effect if this is to eliminate token copies of our noncreature artifacts. So if we removed Calciform Pools and Core Prowler, we could add Obelisk of Bant. Pulling artifacts back to our hand then wouldn't get enough mana to reset the stage, so we are safe.
The problem seems to be Mimic Vat. Can we somehow get by with one Mimic Vat? I seem to recall this is what we were doing earlier, but I don't know about the current setup.
I guess even without the other switch going for Obelisk of Bant would still save a card if it works out. Intuitively I'd say a single Mimic Vat is good enough. I don't think we ever needed to dealy activating the Vat after it gets a creature and the lowest creature that needs to go under the Vat is conveniently destroyed by a trigger that can also bounce the Vat to refresh it.
A problem that I don't see how to fix without adding another card is that we can't get Vedalken Orrery into play after Retract or Worldfire. Previously we set up a Dual Nature to put a token copy on the battlefield at the right time.
I think Mirrorworks can save Mirror of Fate too, so that handles that problem as well.
EDIT: Hmm, Mirrorworks can copy Fountain of Youth. This would be good if the number of Fountain of Youths was even, but it's odd. We could previously make it even by having an instant that gains 1 life, but we can't do that anymore. Is there any way to gain exactly one life in the hyperstage transition other than Fountain of Youth? If so, we could cut the number of Fountain of Youths down to one, which would be great.
EDIT: Heh, we can just have two Mirrorworks to replace two Fountain of Youths. So the Mirrorworks don't actually cost us any card slots, and I think we still have a two card savings.
EDIT: No, the first Mirrorworks can copy the second... so it doesn't quite work. Phooey.
EDIT: So, I don't see how to fix the Vedalken Orrery problem without something that creates copies of it, and Mirrorworks was the only reasonable card I found. But I can't figure out how to make Mirrorworks compatible with Fountain of Youth.
Here's another crazy idea: Replace Dual Nature with Riku of Two Reflections. Then we can go back to March of the Machines without allowing too much mana to be created by Retract. So we have:
smaller change:
replace
Dual Nature
Saltcrusted Steppe
Core Prowler
with
Riku of Two Reflections
Tigereye Cameo
bigger change:
replace
Dual Nature
Saltcrusted Steppe
Core Prowler
Drake Familiar
Allay
Cephalid Shrine
Perpetual Timepiece
with
Riku of Two Reflections
Obelisk of Bant
Izzet Guildmage
Kiora's Dismissal
Broken Ambitions
The problem seems to be, how on Earth can we get started with something as weak as Riku of Two Reflections? We will need to generate a bunch of mana somehow. For the second change, we do have a two card savings, so we could use another card if it helps get things going.
EDIT: Hmm, I thought at first that a single Allay or Kiora's Dismissal could bounce March of the Machines a bunch of times, and therefore we could get multiple uses out of Obelisk of Bant. But now I realize that we can't coordinate the bouncings from Kiora's Dismissal and Metallurgeon to get multiple uses, so we only get one use per Kiora's Dismissal, and so we don't generate mana. I don't see an obvious way to fix it either; any artifact that we need to tap will come at that stiff price of three mana, or two mana for a copy. Sacrificing will come at the cost of two mana to pay for Riku of Two Reflections. About the only thing that can keep up with the cost is Gilded Lotus, and that can produce forbidden red mana. What would be nice if we had some artifact/enchantment that generated mana upon entering the battlefield, but I don't know of any. Mana Reflection is out, since we need to control red mana in the hyperhyperstage.
EDIT: Okay, I have a theory that maybe we don't need more green mana in the original Izzet Guildmage version. Now, the hyperstage does not generate any green mana, since we get one mana back for each mana we spend, whether we use Mox Emerald or Elvish Spirit Guide, I think. But, we do get three green mana for each hyperhyperstage transition, for the three sorceries that we cast. The highest hyperstage then only extends by three stages each repetition, so it does not qualify as a real hyperstage. But for the second hyperstage, we will gain a boatload of green mana each time we repeat it, comparable to the number of Dual Natures on the battlefield. So the second hyperstages on down qualify as real hyperstages, and we have a working hyperhyperstage. Does this make sense?
EDIT: Actually, I think even the first hyperstage is a working hyperstage, it just takes another layer to get going. Normally, we would expect every few Psychic Battle triggers from the top of the second hyperstage would reset the first hyperstage, with a number of stages equal to the output of the previous hyperstage. In this case, we get a hyperstage with three more stages for every few Psychic Battle triggers. But, we have a whole lot of Psychic Battle triggers, and when we resolve the first Bloodbond March trigger from the next layer group, we get a group of Psychic Battle triggers comparable to the output of the previous first hyperstages. After that group of Psychic Battle triggers gets resolved, we will indeed have reached a number of stages in the first hyperstage greater than the output at the end of the previous group of Psychic Battle triggers. So even the first hyperstage works, it just takes another layer from the second hyperstage to each the same result.
I think I get the gist of what you are saying about Mox Emerald. Cast Flash of Defiance multiple times and build up green mana from that since we don't have to spent it. But I can't see how it would actually play out. From the triggered sorceries and instants it is hard to generate mana, because, well, they are triggered so we can't put things on the stack in the middle. In particualar if we try to generate mana with Retract we lose the ability to respond at instant speed with Vedalken Orrery. If we go for Evacuation and Elvish Spirit Guide we can't get Bloodbond Marches in the correct position. Our normal transition as I remember it also uses Evacuation in response to Wormfang Behemoth's Dual Nature trigger, to get our hand exiled under the token and did in general use instants without care for the ressources. Essentially we can waste some of the life in the higher hyperstage to regain the small amount of life we need in the lower hyperstage to be at the correct place there. If we try to generate the green mana via those transitions we obviously can't just disregard the cost of casting instants for the transition, so stuff gets more complicated.
Can you break down your plan into a play by play sequence? I think timing is important enough here to look at it in detail.
So, let's say we are ready to transition to a higher hyperstage.
Let's say we have Vedalken Orrery and Omniscience in hand, and token copies on the battlefield. If Dual Nature is not on the battlefield, play it, so that there are at least two copies on the battlefield. Play Vedalken Orrery, getting Dual Nature triggers. Bounce the Dual Nature, destroying all copies. Resolve a Dual Nature trigger and get a copy of Vedalken Orrery. Bounce the Vedalken Orrery by tapping a Metallurgeon. Leave the rest of the Vedalken Orrery token triggers on the stack.
Do the same for Omniscience to get a token on the battlefield and token triggers on the stack.
Flashback Flash of Defiance, spending 1 red mana and 3 life. This should take us down to 1 life. The casting triggers both Spellweaver Helixes and a bunch of Spellweaver Volutes. Resolve the triggers in the order Marshaling the Troops, all the Battle Crys, and then Worldfire. Resolve Marshaling the Troops, getting a lot of life. We haven't progressed at all, so no new Battle Cries. Resolve the Battle Cries, iterating the Metallurgeon stage each time. Resolve the Spellweaver trigger for Worldfire, but leave the spell on the stack. Next, we implement the hyperstage using the available green mana. Run the hyperstage as far as you can, but do not run it to the point where you lose green mana permanently. (I'm not sure if you can do that, but if you can, stop right before that point.) We need to use the very last Acorn Harvest to bring all our permanents back to our hand, so let's stop right before that last casting. Play Wormfang Behemoth, getting Dual Nature triggers and an ETB trigger; put the ETB trigger on the bottom of those triggers. Respond to those triggers by bouncing Dual Nature. Play Mox Emerald and the three Fountain of Youths to get 1 green mana and 3 life. Use those resources to pay for a flashback of Acorn Harvest, making sure that we have Spellweaver Volutes on Evacuation and Retract. Resolve those spells and bring all our creatures and artifacts back to our hand. Pay for a copy of Kiora's Dismissal to bring Spellweaver Volute back to our hand. Resolve a Wormfang Behemoth trigger, triggering its ETB ability, which exiles our hand. Resolve the Worldfire spell, which destroys the Wormfang Behemoth token and brings the exiled cards back to our hand.
Hmm, I wasn't able to get a green mana out of that. The problem seems to be that we can't take advantage of the last Retract, since we need to have our artifacts in our hand to be exiled. So, in order to gain a green mana we need to use a Retract triggered by either Worldfire or Flash of Defiance. But, we need to cast Wormfang Behemoth prior to that Retract, which means our hand will get exiled prior to Retract bringing artifacts back to our hand.
So, it looks like you were right after all. We would be fine if we could still use Leyline of Anticipation. Do you see any alternative line of play that could possibly get us green mana?
It occurs to me that there could be a sorcery that could get us both green mana and life, if it could somehow allow us to make use of our artifacts. The first thing that came to mind was something like Open the Vaults - but that doesn't work out, because we can play Mox Emerald and Fountain of Youths with March of the Machines in play during the lower hyperstage, getting lots of token copies, and then when we get to the higher hyperstage we can cast Open the Vaults to bring the artifacts back to the battlefield. A sorcery that would work out would be something that could bounce a target artifact back to our hand. Then we could cast in on a Golem with Precursor Golem in play, and get a ton of copies. Unfortunately, I can't find any such sorcery! The closest thing I could find was Baral's Expertise, but that can target creatures as well. Another possibility would be to copy a target artifact, but again, the only sorceries I could find can also target a creature. There are a gajillion sorceries that can destroy a target artifact, but that does us no good.
Going back to the Karn, Silver Golem version, we can fix Vedalken Orrery by adding Copper Gnomes. But, we would still need to fix either Mirror of Fate or Pull From Eternity, and we can no longer afford to add a card.
EDIT: For the Riku of Two Reflections version, we can add Workhorse to add easy colorless mana without need for any bouncing of March of the Machines. But, that leaves us with the same number of cards for the smaller change version, and for the larger change version, we still need something else because of the blue mana we need for Kiora's Dismissal. So, still not quite fixed.
EDIT: Well, we could switch Marshaling the Troops with Displacement Wave and add Swarm Intelligence. Unfortunately, that means that Swarm Intelligence will be the extra card, not Precursor Golem, and I think Reality Spasm and Swarm Intelligence combine for just one layer. Is there some other instant/sorcery that can combine with Swarm Intelligence to get two layers? Can Displacement Wave be cast with X > 0 for some benefit? I'm thinking probably no to both questions.
EDIT: Alternate start: Black Lotus, Overeager Apprentice, Plateau, Replenish, Omniscience. Same number of cards in the deck and in hand. It might be minutely better because we don't have to spend any life.
Could Replenish replace Drake Familiar? The idea would be to put Spellweaver Helixes on Worldfire and Replenish, as a setup hyperstage. Putting Replenish before Worldfire seems to accomplish nothing, so it has to resolve after. But, we don't have a way to move Spellweaver Volute and our instants to the graveyard from exile after Worldfire resolves, so I guess it doesn't work. (Well, we could add Pull From Eternity to the deck, but that eliminates our card savings.)
EDIT: What if we try to use Replenish to replace both Drake Familiar and Marshaling the Troops? That's a potential two card savings, so we have one card to turn Replenish into something that gains life. The obvious thing would be some Aura. There are a number of Auras that can gain life (e.g. Ensoul Artifact), but I think Copy Enchantment turns them all infinite. What if we try to remove Copy Enchantment? That would require adding another Spellweaver Volute, and then something else like Drake Familiar to save the Spellweaver Volutes from being lost to the graveyard, so that would eliminate the card savings.
Black Lotus, Channel, Sands of Delirium, Saltcrusted Steppe, Replenish, Consecrated Sphinx, Words of Wisdom.
The Sands of Delirium can mill a bunch of enchantments and then the Replenish can, in addition to the Omniscience return Opalescence, Dual Nature and Copy Enchantment copying Dual Nature. We'd have 6 Dual Natures before we play Sphinx and could have set up more enchantments/graveyard stuff before drawing extra cards.
The only loss is the return to library ability of Perpetual Timepiece and with it the ability to reuse Black Lotus before casting Reality Spasm. So it is tough to generate blue. Well, worst case we use Perpetual Timepiece instead of Sands of Delirium. We'd only get one extra enchantment, but that is still better than the other starts.
EDIT: We'd need to use the goblins - thrulls version of stages, so our lands are allowed to produce blue at all. That means we can never reuse Black Lotus, but I think it is possible to get the full combo running with the Sands of Delirium version. On the other hand I realized that Copy Enchantment can't copy Dual Nature when they enter at the same time, so we only get 3 Dual Natures out of that start. A little less exciting.
So, looking at the start:
Use Sands of Delirium to mill 10 cards, which will be:
Bloodbond March
Cephalid Shrine
Copy Enchantment
Cowardice
Dual Nature
March of the Machines
Omniscience
Opalescence
Psychic Battle
Evacuation
After Replenish brings all the enchantments to the battlefield, we get four copies of Consecrated Sphinx and thus draw 10 cards with Words of Wisdom. We could theoretically have enough cards to implement a stage or hyperstage, but I believe we need Reality Spasm to get a hasted token, so I don't see how to make it work out. So, we will draw:
Drake Familiar
Spellweaver Volute
Allay
Acorn Harvest
Flash of Defiance
Marshaling the Trooops
Flash of Defiance
Flash of Defiance
Spellweaver Helix
Vedalken Orrery
Cast Vedalken Orrery.
Cast Spellweaver Volute, putting it on Evacuation.
Cast Allay with Buyback; get three bouncings, getting 6 and then 13 Dual Natures, then 15 Psychic Battles.
Cast Allay, getting 16 bouncings. Get 13*2^15 Dual Natures for the first 15 bouncings. On the last bouncing, create 13*2^15 Spellweaver Volutes, enchanting Allay for all of them.
cast Acorn Harvest, triggering all the Spellweaver Volutes. Put the Evacuation trigger on the bottom, below all the Allays. Respond by casting Drake Familiar, getting 13*2^15 + 1 bouncings, using 13*2^15 - 1 to bounce all but the first Spellweaver Volute on Allay. Use the last two to bouncing Copy Enchantment twice, geting 13*2^16 Dual Natures and more than 13*2^16 Psychic Battles. Now, we can start resolving the 13*2^15 Allays. Each Allay takes the number of Dual Natures and Psychic Battles from X to more than 2^X, so at the end we have more than 2^^(13*2^15) Dual Natures and Psychic Battles. With the last Allay, we also bounce Opalescence (creating a token copy with Copy Enchantment to make it a creature) and March of the Machines. Resolve Evacuation to bring Drake Familiar and Consecrated Sphinx back to our hand. Put the original Spellweaver Volute on Words of Wisdom. Play Copy Enchantment, creating more than2^^(13*2^15) copies of Spellweaver Volute, putting one on Evacuation and the rest on Allay.
Cast Flash of Defiance, repeating the process to get more than 2^^(2^^(13*2^15)) > 2^^^5 Dual Natures, Psychic Battles, and Spellweaver Volutes. Cast Marshaling the Troops and repeat the process, getting more than 2^^^6 of everything.
Cast Spellweaver Helix, imprinting Flash of Defiance and Marshaling the Troops. Leave the Dual Nature triggers on the stack.
Cast Flash of Definace, triggering Volutes, and also triggering Helix to cast Marshaling the Troops, increasing to more than 2^^^8 of everything.
Resolve a Helix Dual Nature trigger, imprinting the new token on Flash of Defiance and Channel.
Cast the final Flash of Defiance, triggering both Channel and Marshaling the Troops. Increase to more than 2^^^11. Play Consecrated Sphinx, getting more than 2^^^11 copies, and resolve the Spellweaver Volute trigger on Words of Wisdom, triggering all the Consecrated Sphinxes.
Of course, all that matters for the final estimate is that we can draw the deck and at least 52 Reality Spasms, which will be enough to get F_{w^3+w12+2}(52).
Of course, we will then have to deal with getting mana. We need to cast Worldfire, so we have to figure out how to deal with that.
EDIT: Whoops, forgot about bringing our instants back to the graveyard. I guess it won't be quite as good.
EDIT: In an effort to bring back using bounceable artifacts for mana, I thought about replacing March of the Machines with Titania's Song. Titania's Song will mess up Vedalken Orrery, which might cause problems. But, perhaps it doesn't cause problems for any infinite.
EDIT: Hmm, I'm not seeing how to get profitable uses of multiple sorceries in the opening. To reuse Allay and Evacuation, we need to get copies of Mirror of Fate and Sands of Delirium. To get copies of Sands of Delirium, we need to cast Evacuation with March of the Machines on the battlefield. But, that will get rid of Vedalken Orrery, so we have to wait until the stack is cleared to recast March of the Machines and Sands of Delirium. After that, we need to bounce March of the Machines back to our hand to use the Sands of Delirium, but Allay is not in the graveyard yet. I suppse we could use Drake Familiar - but then, it will be on the battlefield when we cast our sorcery, and we need to respond with it to bounce the Spellweaver Volutes. So I guess we can use extra sorceries, but we only get one Allay each time, which is not noticeable. Do you see a better way to get started?
I haven't figured out how to get mana yet.
Opener: Black Lotus, Channel, Sands of Delirium, Saltcrusted Steppe, Replenish, Drake Familiar, Consecrated Sphinx.
Play Lotus, get 3 green, cast Channel, turn 16 life into mana. Cast Sands of Delirium, mill 7 cards. (4 life, 1 green, 6 colorless)
The milled cards are: Omniscience, Opalescence, Dual Nature, Copy Enchantment, Spellweaver Volute, Acorn Harvest, Words of Wisdom.
Play Saltcrusted Steppe, tap it for a counter and remove a counter for white. Cast Replenish. (4 life, 1 green, 1 colorless)
Enchantments enter the battlefield. Volute enchants the Words of Wisdom, the Copy Enchantment token copies Dual Nature.
Play Drake Familiar, returning the original Copy Enchantment to our hand. (We get 3 tokens, but without instant speed reaction I don't see anything useful for those bounces)
Play Copy enchantment, copying Dual Nature. We go up to 8 Dual Natures.
Play Sphinx, get 8 token copies.
Flashback Acorn Harvest (1 life, no mana). Volute on Word of Wisdom triggers, we resolve it and draw a total of 20 cards. (Also, the Volute dies)
That's the best I found for the first Words of Wisdom. I don't expect having Vedalken Orrery in play at that point is worth drawing less cards. With the next 20 cards I'd want to try generating the blue for Reality Spasm and hopefully do some initial stages. I'll think about it for a while and post/edit in a continuation later.
Anyway slight modification to the start: use the extra Drake Familiar tokens to bounce Opalescence and then the original Omniscience. Replay the Opalescence before the next step, but now we have Omniscience in hand. Yay.
Then we continue from where we left off. Instead of listing all the cards we draw, I'll count them as they come up.
Play March of the Machines(1). Play Vedalken Orrery(2). In response to the Dual Nature triggers play Mirror of Fate(3). In response to the Dual Nature triggers play Retract(4). We pick up Orrery, Mirror and Sands of Delirium. Then we resolve triggers to get 8 Mirror tokens and 8 Orerry tokens. Replay Omniscience resolve all but one Dual Nature trigger. Replay Orrery, Mirror and Sands, getting all the tokens. Cast Marshaling the Troops(5), tapping all creatures, except for 2 Sands, 1 Mirror.
We gain a bunch of life. The exact number doesn't matter and can surely be increased at no cost by some cards we have in the hand, but not considered yet (i.e. play random creatures now). it should be well over 100, and after converting it to colorless via Channels effect, I'm just going to assume I have enough colorless from now on.
Cast Allay(6) with buyback to destroy March of the Machines. Tap a Sand to mill more cards: Volcanic Island, Flash of Defiance x2, Worldfire, Bloodbond March, Cowardice, Psychic Battle, Cephalid Shrine.
Play Titania, Protector of Argoth(7), return the Volcanic to the battlefield and tap it for blue. Leave two Dual Nature trigger for Titania on the stack.
Play Spellweaver Helix(8). Have one Helix exile Replenish and Flash of Defiance, another exile Worldfire and Flash of Defiance.
activate Sands and Mirror, but leave the activations on the stack.
Cast Flash of Defiance(9). Two Helixes trigger. Resolve the Replenish first. Put all the enchantments onto the battlefield. Volute enchants Words of Wisdom I guess.
Use buybacked Allay to get a second Opalescence and kill Volute.
Cast Wormfang Behemoth(10). In Response cast Evacuation(11) and return the entire battlefield except for lands to our hand. The Behemoth resolves exiling our hand. Resolve Worldfire. Behemoth gets exiled, Volute gets exiled, lands get exiled, some instants/sorceries in the graveyards might get exiled.
Behemoth returns our hand from exile. We resolve the mirror activation and put Volcanic Island, Saltcrusted Steppe and more stuff (?) into the library. We resolve the sands activation and put that stuff in the graveyard. We get the Titania tokens and return our lands to the battlefield. Tap the volcanic for the second blue. We resolve the final dual Nature trigger to get an Omniscience copy.
We can repopulate the board with our enchantments and artifacts by casting them from hand and using a bunch of colorless mana for buybacked Allays.
this is good enough to cast Reality Spasm(12). Other cards we need for stages are Mimic Vat(13), Horobi, Death's Wail(14), Core Prowler(15) to generate mana and then some actual stage creatures. (Am I missing something?).
The Wormfang Behemoth and Spellweaver Volute ended up in exile. The Volute can be recovered with Replenish. To use that without extra card draws we need to be able to flashback Flash of Defiance, so to produce red I think Goblin Gardener has to be one of the cards we have drawn in the 20. Eventually we will need the Volute to cast Words of Wisdom again and trigger the next card draw.
I think we can only recover the Behemoth after more card draw, so no hyperhyperstage at this point. I was not able to rescue this cute fishy because the original eatsour hand when he enters the battlefield. If we react to the exile hand trigger to bounce it, then we lose our hand when the trigger resolves and never get it back. If we let the trigger resolve we need to trigger the bounce via flashback since our hand will be empty (duh). That looks too expensive.
But it looks like a hyperstage is actually possible right now.
EDIT: For reference, the decklist I'm working with right now:
2 Psychic Battle
3 Cowardice
4 Horobi, Death's Wail
5 Bloodbond March
6 Cephalid Shrine
7 Mimic Vat
8 Omniscience
9 Vedalken Orrery
10 Mirror of Fate
11 March of the Machines
12 Drake Familiar
13 Sands of Delirium
14 Dual Nature
15 Copy Enchantment
16 Allay
17 Saltcrusted Steppe
18 Core Prowler
19 Metallurgeon
20 Acorn Harvest
21 Battle Cry
22 Retract
23 Spellweaver Volute
24 Fountain of Youth
25 Fountain of Youth
26 Fountain of Youth
28 Wormfang Behemoth
29 Marshaling the Troops
30 Worldfire
31 Flash of Defiance
32 Flash of Defiance
33 Flash of Defiance
34 Spellweaver Helix
35 Titania, Protector of Argoth
36 Volcanic Island
37 Goblin Gardener
38 Mad Auntie
39 Facevaulter
40 Basal Thrull
41 Thrull Champion
42 Godtoucher
43 Everglove Courier
44 Nectar Faerie
45 Ghosthelm Courier
46 Possessed Aven
48 Maze Glider
49 Possessed Centaur
50 Eastern Paladin
51 Frightshroud Courier
52 Dwarven Warriors
53 Possessed Barbarian
54 Minion of Tevesh Szat
55 Reality Spasm
56 Consecrated Sphinx
57 Words of Wisdom
58 Channel
59 Replenish
60 Black Lotus
So how do we get the hyperstage?
To flash back Flash of Defiance and recover the Spellweaver Volute, we also need some life, so I guess the three Fountain of Youths should also be among the cards drawn. (We need those for the hyperstage anyway. That leaves 1 card for Metallurgeon.
To generate red mana via Goblin Gardener, we first create as many Psychic Battles as our colorless allows. Then we cast Reality Spasm and use psychic battle triggers from that alternately to kill gardener tokens and to bounce Titanias. occasionally we can also bounce the originial gardener if we need new tokens.
Along the way we should also kill the Metallurgeon and put it under a Mimic Vat. That Vat should then be the final target of reality spasm for an untap and a bonus token. Twice we should tap Volcanic Island for blue instead of red so we can cast our next Reality Spasm later.
Get life for the first flash of defiance via Fountains. After that generate more life via Marshaling the Troops. No need for Worldfires here, just go through hyperstages until you run out of red.
Also, I notice that Worldfire can get Black Lotus out of the graveyard, so it can actually be used again, if we want it to. However, if we get rid of Volcanic Island, then we would need to use another Words of Wisdom draw to draw Black Lotus so that we could cast Reality Spasm, which seems suboptimal. That's too bad - being able to use Plateau in the opening hand would have allowed for two more mana.
EDIT: Wait a minute. I said that using a hyperstage that triggers Worldfire and Replenish as a setup hyperstage didn't work out, but I was thinking of resolving one hyperstage after the other. What if we put one hyperstage on top of the other? So we trigger a hyperstage that triggers Worldfire and Replenish, we resolve Replenish to bring Spellweaver Volute back to the battlefield, then we trigger a hyperstage that triggers Worldfire and Marshaling the Troops, and now we have both life and Spellweaver Volute. Does that work? I'm worried that we won't have enough resources during the Replenish hyperstage to get everything back, so maybe it doesn't.
EDIT: No wait, if we do that then Replenish will only save the Spellweaver Volute for the first higher hyperstage, then Worldfire kills it for the remainder of the hyperstages. What if we put the Replenish hyperstage on top and the Marshaling the Troops hyperstage on bottom? No, then we won't have Spellweaver Volute for the lower hyperstage, and we can't make the stage transitions. I guess it doesn't work out.
Opener: Black Lotus, Channel, Sands of Delirium, Saltcrusted Steppe, Replenish, Drake Familiar, Consecrated Sphinx.
Play Lotus, get 3 green, cast Channel, turn 16 life into mana. Cast Sands of Delirium, mill 7 cards. (4 life, 1 green, 6 colorless)
The milled cards are: Omniscience, Opalescence, Dual Nature, Copy Enchantment, Spellweaver Volute, Acorn Harvest, Words of Wisdom.
Play Saltcrusted Steppe, tap it for a counter and remove a counter for white. Cast Replenish. (4 life, 1 green, 1 colorless)
Enchantments enter the battlefield. Volute enchants the Words of Wisdom, the Copy Enchantment token copies Dual Nature.
Play Drake Familiar, returning the original Copy Enchantment to our hand. We get 3 tokens. Use the first to bounce Opalescence. Use the second to bounce the original Omniscience. Nothing to bounce for the third, so sacrifice it.
Play Opalescence. Play Copy enchantment, copying Dual Nature. We go up to 8 Dual Natures.
Play Sphinx, get 8 token copies.
Flashback Acorn Harvest (1 life, no mana). Volute on Word of Wisdom triggers, we resolve it and draw a total of 20 cards. (Also, the Volute dies)
The cards we draw are: March of the Machines, Vedalken Orrery, Mirror of Fate, Retract, Marshaling the Troops, Allay, Titania, Protector of Argoth, Spellweaver Helix, Flash of Defiance, Wormfang Behemoth, Evacuation, Reality Spasm, Mimic Vat, Horobi, Death's Wail, Core Prowler, Goblin Gardener, Metallurgeon, Fountain of Youth x3.
Play March of the Machines, get tokens.
Play Vedalken Orrery, leave the Dual Nature triggers on the stack.
Play Mirror of Fate, leave the Dual Nature triggers on the stack.
Play Spellweaver Helix, leave the Dual Nature triggers on the stack. Exile nothing with the ETB.
Play Mimic Vat, leave the Dual Nature triggers on the stack.
Play Core Prowler, leave the Dual Nature triggers on the stack.
Play Metallurgeon, leave the Dual Nature triggers on the stack.
Play Retract to bounce all those artifacts plus the Sands of Delirium. Get all the tokens. Still exile nothing with the Helix ETB.
Play Omniscience, resolve all but one Dual Nature trigger.
Play Titania Protector of Argoth, put the ETB trigger to the bottom of the stack and resolve all the dual Nature trigger. The token ETBs do nothing right now, but leave the ETB from the original on the stack.
Play Spellweaver Helix, put the ETB trigger to the bottom of the stack and resolve all the dual Nature trigger. Exile nothing with the token ETBs, but leave the ETB from the last token on the stack as well.
Play Vedalken Orrery, get tokens.
Play Mirror of Fate, get tokens.
Play Sands of Delirium, get tokens.
Play Mimic Vat, get tokens.
Play Core Prowler, get tokens.
Play Metallurgeon, get tokens.
Play Horobi, get tokens.
Play Goblin Gardener, get tokens.
Cast Marshaling the Troops and tap all creatures except for one Sands of Delirium for it. If my count is correct that means we gain 700 life. Convert it all into colorless mana.
Cast Allay with buyback to destroy Opalescence. Use Allay with with buyback 9 times to destroy all March of the Machines. (670 colorless)(We need all those casts since we can't allow Horobi's trigger to counter Allay)
tap Sands to mill 8 cards (662 colorless): Volcanic Island, Flash of Defiance x2, Worldfire, Bloodbond March, Cowardice, Psychic Battle, Cephalid Shrine.
resolve the Helix ETB triggers. one exiles Flash of Defiance + Replenish, the other exiles Flash of Defiance + Worldfire.
resolve the Titania ETB trigger. Return Volcanic Island to the battlefield and tap it for blue.
Cast Flash of Defiance, triggering two Helixes. Resolve the replenish first to put all enchantments on the battlefield. The Volute enchants some instant.
Cast Allay with buyback (659 colorless) to bounce the original Copy Enchantment, then redirect the Allay to Volute and resolve it, killing the Volute.
Replay the Copy Enchantment, copy Opalescence.
Cast Wormfang Behemoth. Put the ETB on the bottom of the stack, Dual Nature triggers above it. Cast Evacuation in response, returning all our nonland permanents to hand.
We now resolve triggers. The first Behemoth token we get exiles our hand. The rest of the Behemoth ETB triggers have no effect. We cast a Worldfire via Helix trigger and the lands get exiled. We also exile everything that is in the graveyard, but our hand is empty.
The Behemoth token triggers and our hand gets returned to us.
We resolve the last Dual Nature trigger on the stack to get a Omniscience copy.
Play Opalescence, Dual Nature, Copy Enchantment as itself, tokens as Dual Nature, Psychic Battle, Cowardice, March of the Machines, Vedalken Orrery.
Cast Allay with buyback (656 colorless). We could get 6 bounces, but use the last two to bounce Cowardice and have Ally destroy an extra March of the Machines token so that buyback works. So we get 4 bounces on Copy Enchantment. Use all of those to double our Dual Nature count, so we get 64 Dual Natures.
Cast Drake Familiar bouncing Copy Enchantment 65 times. all but the last of those bounces double out Dual Nature count, the last creates a set of Psychic Battles.
Repeatedly cast Allay with buyback to increase the Dual Nature and Psychic Battle count. We spend all but 2 colorless mana on this, so we get 218 more allays. We start with 64*2^64>2^^4 and each allay increases the last number by 1. We end up with more than 2^^222 Psychic Battles.
Close to the end of the last procedure cast Mirror of Fate, Sands of Delirium and Mimic Vat and then use a psychic battle trigger to bounce March of the Machines.
Activate a Mirror token to exile the library and then put Volcanic Island and Channel in the library.
Activate a Sands token to mill the Volcanic Island (1 colorless)
Play Titania to get that Volcanic Island onto the Battlefield. Tap it to generate a second blue.
Play Cephalid Shrine, Bloodbond March, Horobi, Goblin Gardener, Core Prowler and Metallurgeon. Counter the Metallurgeon and resolve one Bloodbond March trigger, leave the rest on the stack.
Use the rest of our Mana to cast Reality Spasm with X=1. We can use the 2^^222 Psychic Battle triggers from that to mostly create red mana. Out of two triggers one can bounce Titania, the second destroy a Goblin Gardener token. That allows us to reuse Volcanic Island. We use some of that mana to mill Saltcrusted steppe. we can get back the Steppe and tap it for a counter. We can then use one psychic battle trigger from the reality spasm to kill a Core Prowler token to get a second counter, which we can exchange for a white mana. We also use one trigger to kill the Metallurgeon and exile it with a Mimic Vat. We can then tap Vat and to get a Metallurgeon token and use the white to tap it. This generates more counter on Steppe by killing Coreprowler, so now we can use that mana for stuff instead of our precious red. Also bounce Vedalken Orrery at some point, but leave tokens in play via well timed play and bounce of March of the Machines. At the end let Reality Spasm resolve to untap the Mimic Vat. Tap it to get a new Metallurgeon token.
After we are done with the Reality Spasm triggers we have ~2^^222 red mana and are mostly set up for our combo.
Use some of our green/white mana to mill all our instants and sorceries, the Volute and Metallurgeon.
Use a Bloodbond March trigger to get Metallurgeon back. Tap the token and leave those Psychic Battle triggers on the stack.
Play Vedalken Orrery and leave a Dual Nature trigger for it on the stack.
Set up two Helixes, one with Flash of Defiance + Replenish, the other with Flash of Defiance + Marshaling the Troops. Make sure March of the Machines is not on the battlefield and then play the Fountain of Youths and tap them to gain 3 life. Then cast a Flash of Defiance and resolve Helix into Replenish to bring Volute back to the battlefield. Enchant Retract. The second Helix casting its sorcery triggers the Volute and retract makes sure our Fountains stay safe. Then we gain a bunch of life from Marshaling the troops.
We get a Vedalken Orrery token and have a layer of Psychic Battle triggers above a layer of Bloodbond March triggers on the stack. We can handle this situation as if we just resolved the lowest hyperstage transition in the lowest hyperstage of a hyperhyperstage.
We have all the ressources we need to go through the hyperhyperstage and the ability to set up 2^^222 hyperstages.
So we get to draw about f_{w^3}(2^^222) cards from our second Words of Wisdom.
EDIT: I'm slightly confused about how powerful the Allay repetition actually is. I think it is on the 2^^^#Allay level, but it might be 2^^#Allay ? I'm a bit unsure right now.
EDIT: Yeah I think the 2^^^221 is correct. Fixed some other stuff I noticed in the spoiler.
EDIT: And now I'm convinced Allay is only worth two up arrows. Sigh. Changed that again. Although at this point I'm wondering if we can get away without March of the Machines early. We'd get a lot less life, but if we can mill and replenish it instead of drawing we could instead draw Minion of Tevesh Szat and go to f_{w^3+w}.
Well, no we can't just do that, as we need a Spellweaver Helix token before we resolve Replenish. Without the double triggering from that I think we'd need another drawn sorcery or otherwise majorly rework the start.
I'll keep looking around for card savings, but I'm running out of ideas.
[EDIT] Still looking for a way to get green, white, and blue mana for two cards that is cheap but not too cheap, so that we can use Izzet Guildmage. We can have cheap green and white with Dromoka Monument, and then have blue be not too cheap. The obvious candidate is Silver Myr - but if we use that, then we can't have Broken Ambitions, since then it will cost at least a blue to get a hasted token copy. So we can only get Kiora's Dismissal, and we wind up not saving a card.
EDIT: Tree of Tales can be recycled more cheaply than Mox Emerald, and we can get token copies of it. But, we can't play two lands in the same turn.
EDIT: Treva's Ruins could be a source of cheap green/white/blue mana, if there is an artifact that can return a land to the battlefield.
But we could use Izzet Guildmage to copy Retract or Hurkyl's Recall. Rebuild has cycling, which could be problematic. Although I don't see an infinite from that since it only gives one draw and unless it draws only itself that is the end of it. If it draws itself, I think we are just wasting ressources.
Can we use that to save a card via Broken Ambitions? If we assume for now a start is somehow possible without more cards than right now?
So we can switch
Core Prowler
Saltcrusted Steppe
Drake Familiar
Allay
Cephalid Shrine
Perpetual Timepiece
with
Azorius Keyrune
Copper Myr
Izzet Guildmage
Kiora's Dismissal
Broken Ambitions
with some more changes for the start. We can't have Sands of Delirium any more, nor can we use Overeager Apprentice since we need black for later. So I guess we go back to the hard cast of Omniscience.
EDIT: Looks like we can do:
Black Lotus
Channel
Azorius Signet
Broken Ambitions
Replenish
Consecrated Sphinx
Words of Wisdom
and milling
Omniscience
Opalescence
Dual Nature
Copy Enchantment
so we get the 10 card draw again.
EDIT: I wonder if we can get a stage going with those 10 cards. It looks like we will need:
Metallurgeon
Mimic Vat
Psychic Battle
Cowardice
Horobi, Death's Wail
Spellweaver Volute
a sorcery
Retract
March of the Machines
Kiora's Dismissal
Izzet Guildmage
We could get the four enchantments on the battlefield via Replenish, but that requires that we cast a Broken Ambitions first. We don't want to just cast Broken Ambitions from the graveyard via Spellweaver Volute and resolve it, since then Broken Ambitions will be in exile and we won't be able to get it back to the graveyard. So, we need to put a Spellweaver Volute on Broken Ambitions, cast a sorcery of some kind to trigger it, put Izzet Guildmage on the battlefield, and then generate a blue mana somehow. So, we can play Retract to bring Azorius Signet back to our hand. We would like to play March of the Machines, so we play it and then play Kiora's Dismissal to bounce it back to our hand. That will get us four copies of Azorius Signet, which should be good to start with. Then, we play Spellweaver Helix and imprint Replenish and Flash of Defiance, then play a second Flash of Defiance to trigger it. Meh, that's eight cards already, we won't have room for Metallurgeon/Mimic Vat/Mirror of Fate. So maybe a stage is too ambitious.
EDIT: So, if no stage is possible, we just want to get as many Kiora's Dismissals as we can:
We will draw:
Kiora's Dismissal
Spellweaver Volute
Rebuild
March of the Machines
Psychic Battle
Cowardice
Izzet Guildmage
Acorn Harvest
Marshaling the Troops
Vedalken Orrery
Play March of the Machines and Vedalken Orrery. Respond to the Dual Nature triggers for Vedalken Orrery by playing Rebuild. Vedalken Orrery and Azorius Signet get bounced back to our hand. Resolve the Dual Nature triggers to get three Vedalken Orrery tokens. Play Psychic Battle, Cowardice, and Izzet Guildmage, getting three token copies of each. Play Kiora's Dismissal; we get five bounces. The first four increase the number of Dual Natures to 48. We respond to the fifth bounce by playing Azorius Signet, getting 48 copies. We use the fifth bounce to bounce March of the Machines, and the token copies get exiled. Play Spellweaver Volute on Kiora's Dismissal. Play Acorn Harvest. This triggers Spellweaver Volute, and Kiora's Dismissal goes on the stack. (This seems like waste of a sorcery, but I couldn't find something better.) The Spellweaver Volute gets placed on Broken Ambitions. We currently have 14 life and 49 Azorius Signets; we spend 2 life and 1 Azorius Signet to copy Kiora's Dismissal, getting five bounces again. We increase the number of Dual Natures to 48*2^4 = 768, and increase the number of Psychic Battles to 771, using the last Copy Enchantment token to copy Spellweaver Volute. Put the Spellweaver Volute token on Rebuild. Play Vedalken Orrery, but don't let the Dual Nature triggers resolve. Cast Marshaling the Troops, triggering Broken Ambitions and Rebuild. The Broken Ambitions counters the Acorn Harvest spell, and mills four cards into our graveyard, including Evacuation. Copy Kiora's Dismissal four more times, spending 8 life and 4 Azorius Signets. We start with 771 > 2^^3 Psychic Battles, so we wind up with more than 2^^7 Psychic Battles and Dual Natures. Rebuild resolves and brings our artifacts back to our hand. (But not before we tap all of our Signets for mana!) Marshaling the Troops resolves and gives us more than 2^^7 life. Use our life and our remaining 44 blue mana to copy 44 more Kiora's Dismissals; we wind up with more than 2^^51 Dual Natures and Psychic Battles. After the second to last bounce, we play Azorius Signet with March of the Machines on the battlefield, getting more then 2^^51 token copies. Copy Kiora's Dismissal more than 2^^51 times, getting more than 2^^2^^51 Dual Natures and Psychic Battles. On the final replaying of Copy Enchantment, make sure to have Spellweaver Volutes on Evacuation and Words of Wisdom. (The original can be on Words of Wisdom.) Also, make sure to bounce Opalescence and March of the Machines. Finally, we use our floating one green mana and 3 life to flashback Acorn Harvest, which triggers Evacuation and Words of Wisdom. Evacuation brings Consecrated Sphinx back to our hand, and we replay it for more than 2^^2^^51 copies. Then Words of Wisdom resolves, allowing us to more than 2^^2^^51 Consecrated Sphinx triggers, drawing two cards at a time.
That seems pretty good, although I had hoped to get more uses of Rebuild. But, that would require making use of Mirror of Fate and more Broken Ambitions, which seems difficult.
EDIT: It would be nice to use Replenish to get more enchantments onto the battlefield. But, I don't see how to do it without using at least a couple of enchantments first, which makes it less worth it.
EDIT: Or maybe, work in Reality Spasm and Precursor Golem. Each bouncing of Azorius Signet can implement a double arrow operation, so Reality Spasm should implement quadruple arrows. So a big improvement should be possible.
EDIT: Okay, I think I got it.
We draw:
Kiora's Dismissal
Spellweaver Volute
March of the Machines
Psychic Battle
Cowardice
Izzet Guildmage
Acorn Harvest
Vedalken Orrery
Precursor Golem
Terashi's Grasp
Play March of the Machines, Psychic Battle Cowardice[/c], Izzet Guildmage, and Vedalken Orrery, getting three copies of each. Play Kiora's Dismissal, getting five bouncings. The first three bounces pump the Dual Natures to 6, 12, and 24; for the fourth, we copy Dual Nature with the original Copy Enchantment, pumping the total number to 50. After the fifth bounce, we respond to the Dual Nature destruction triggers to play Copy Enchantment again, bumping the number of Dual Natures to 98.
Play Spellweaver Volute on Kiora's Dismissal. Play Acorn Harvest, triggering Spellweaver Volute to cast Kiora's Dismissal again. Leave the spell on the stack. Put the Spellweaver Volute on Broken Ambitions.
Play Precursor Golem, getting 98 Precursor Golem token copies, and 198 regular Golem tokens. Play Terashi's Grasp, triggering Broken Ambitions and all the Precursor Golems. Resolve the Broken Ambitions, countering the Acorn Harvest, and milling four cards, including Evacuation. Resolve the first Precursor Golem trigger; we get 296 copies of Terashi's Grasp, each one getting five bounces, for 1480 total. We alternate between bouncing Azorius Signet, playing Azorius Signet, and bouncing March of the Machines, then tapping the Azorius Signets for mana. We then spend the mana to copy Kiora's Dismissal many times. The first time, we get 99 Azorius Signets, which we combine with 12 life to get 37 Kiora's Dismissals, which increases our number of Dual Natures to more than 2^^39, which is more than 2^^^3. Each bouncing of Azorius Signet increases the last number by one, so we wind up with more than 2^^^741 after 739 bouncings, or more than 2^^^^3. We then bounce Copy Enchantment, and the Precursor Golem, to refresh our number of Golems. Each Precursor Golem trigger increases the final number, so we get more than 2^^^^101 Dual Natures. We make sure to have Spellweaver Volutes on Evacuate and Words of Wisdom, and to use at least one Terashi's Grasp to actually gain life, so that we have at least 4. Also, bounce Opalescence and March of the Machines.
We finally flashback Acorn Harvest, which triggers Evacuation and Words of Wisdom. Evacuation brings Consecrated Sphinx back to our hand, which we replay to get more than 2^^^^101 copies. Finally we resolve Words of Wisdom, and draw more than 2^^^^101 cards, two at a time.
Play Lotus, crack for green, play channel, play Signet, tap it, cast replenish and try to counter it with broken ambitions for X=0. (1 green, 10 colorless, 4 life)
Mill 4 cards: Omniscience, Opalescence, Dual Nature, Copy Enchantment.
Don't let replenish get countered, resolve it to get those enchantments into play. The Copy Enchantment token copies Dual Nature.
Play Sphinx, get 3 tokens.
Play Words of Wisdom, Draw 10 cards: Rebuild, Izzet Guildmage, Spellweaver Volute, Harmony of Nature, Spellweaver Helix, Titania, Protector of Argoth, Vedalken Orrery, Precursor Golem, Kiora's Dismissal, Reality Spasm.
Cast Rebuild, returning Signet to hand. replay it and tap it.
Play Guildmage, get tokens.
Play Vedalken Orrery.
Play Harmony. Volute triggers and we cast Broken Ambitions targeting the Acorn Harvest. Volute ends up on Rebuild. Use Guildmageto create a copy of Broken Ambitions. (1 red, 1 green, 1 white, 7 colorless, 4 life)
Mill 8 cards: March of the Machines, Psychic Battle, Cowardice, Mountain, Acorn Harvest, Flash of Defiance x2, ? .
Leave Harmony on the stack.
Play Precursor Golem, leave golem and Dual Nature triggers on the stack.
Play Titania, get tokens, return the mountain. Tap it.
Play Helix, exile a Flash of Defiance and Replenish.
Flash back Flash of Defiance. (1 green, 1 white, 6 colorless, 1 life)
Helix and Volute trigger. Volute triggers again from casting the Replenish. Chose to not cast the spell on the second Volute.
The enchantments end up on the Battlefield, Volute on Words of Wisdom and Signet, Orrery, Helix and Golem in our hand.
We resolve the Golem and Dual Nature triggers that are still on the stack. We resolve the Harmony tapping all available creatures. That should gain us 164 life. Convert 151 life into colorless mana. (1 green, 1 white, 167 colorless, 4 life)
Play Vedalken Orrery, get tokens.
Play Kiora's Dismissal getting 4 Psychic Battle trigger. We bounce Copy Enchantment 5 times and replay it to double our Dual Nature count 4 times. We have 48 Dual Natures. After the last bounce let Kiora's get countered from lack of target. Then replay Copy Enchantment and have 1 token become a copy of Volute, enchanting the Kiora's. The rest of the tokens become Psychic Battles. We have 51 Psychic Battles.
Flash back Acorn Harvest, triggering the Volutes. Put the Words of Wisdom Volute to the bottom of the stack. (1 white, 166 colorless, 1 life)
After casting Kiora's we use the Psychic Battle triggers to get 52 bounces for enchantments. with 51 of these we double the Dual Nature count. We have 48*2^51 Dual Natures.
Before resolving the last Psychic Battle trigger play Azorius Signet. Get 48*2^51 tokens. Then resolve the Psychic Battle trigger and bounce March of the Machines. Dual Nature removes March of the Machines tokens. Leave Kiora's Dismissal on the stack.
Tap all the Signets for Mana. We now have 168+48*2^51 mana, enough of it blue to not care about the colors anymore. We use all but 3 mana with Izzet Guildmage to copy Kiora's 55+2^55 times.
Everytime we create such a copy all our Psychic Battles trigger and we use those to double our Dual Nature count and top up on Psychic Battles. We end up with over 2^^(2^55) Dual Natures.
Play Precursor Golem, get tokens.
Cast Reality Spasm with X=1, targeting a golem. We get 2^^(2^55) Golem triggers. When we resolve these we get a bunch of Psychic Battle triggers that can each be usesd to bounce Signet and repeat the process above.
We end up with about 2^^^^(2^^(2^55)) Dual Natures.
Along use a Psychic Battle trigger to bounce Sphinx.
Play Sphinx, get tokens.
Resolve the stack. After Words of Wisdom we get to draw 2^^^^(2^^(2^55)) cards in chunks of two.
I have one card to mill open, not sure what is best for that. There is more stuff that could be changed around, like drawing the land directly instead of via Titania. But nothing seems to provide improvements. Specifically I tried to fit in Evacuation to bounce the Signet, but that is extremely hard to work in, with the need to keep a Kiora's on the stack and it bouncing Orrery as well. If you try to play it early it ends up bouncing Omniscience...
Anyway, we get to draw enough cards and no card seems irrecoverable. We could even leave Kiora's on the stack below the draws if the extra mill is another Flash of Defiance to cast Words of Wisdom above it. But saving life for the extra flashback of course means fewer draws, so I don't think that is worth it.
EDIT: Just saw your start. Can we use Terashi's Grasp instead of Harmony of Nature somehow? or how do you fit that in the deck?
Oh, I replaced Marshaling the Troops with Harmony because of Izzet Guildmage, but on second thought the life won't help use to regain red mana, so Marshaling is still fine.
Play Lotus, crack for green, play channel, play Signet, tap it, cast replenish and try to counter it with broken ambitions for X=0. (1 green, 7 colorless, 7 life)
Mill 4 cards: Omniscience, Opalescence, Dual Nature, Copy Enchantment.
Don't let replenish get countered, resolve it to get those enchantments into play. The Copy Enchantment token copies Dual Nature.
Play Sphinx, get 3 tokens.
Play Words of Wisdom, Draw 10 cards: Rebuild, Izzet Guildmage, Spellweaver Volute, Acorn Harvest, Spellweaver Helix, Titania, Protector of Argoth, Vedalken Orrery, Precursor Golem, Terashi's Grasp, Reality Spasm.
Cast Rebuild, returning Signet to hand. replay it and tap it.
Play Guildmage, get tokens.
Play Vedalken Orrery.
Play Acorn Harvest. Volute triggers and we cast Broken Ambitions targeting the Acorn Harvest. Volute ends up on Rebuild. Use Guildmage to create a copy of Broken Ambitions. (1 red, 1 green, 1 white, 4 colorless, 7 life)
Mill 8 cards: March of the Machines, Psychic Battle, Cowardice, Mountain, Kiora's Dismissal, Flash of Defiance x2, ? .
Resolve Acorn Harvest.
Play Precursor Golem, leave golem and Dual Nature triggers on the stack.
Play Titania, get tokens, return the mountain. Tap it.
Play Helix, exile a Flash of Defiance and Replenish.
Flash back Flash of Defiance. (1 green, 1 white, 3 colorless, 4 life)
Helix and Volute trigger. Volute triggers again from casting the Replenish. Chose to not cast the spell on the second Volute.
The enchantments end up on the Battlefield, Volute on Kiora's Dismissal, and Signet, Orrery, Helix and Golem in our hand.
We resolve the Golem and Dual Nature triggers that are still on the stack.
Play Vedalken Orrery, get tokens.
Flash back Acorn Harvest, triggering the Volute. (1 white, 2 colorless, 1 life)
After casting Kiora's Volute ends up on Words of Wisdom and we use the Psychic Battle triggers to get 5 bounces for enchantments. with 4 of these we double the Dual Nature count. We have 48 Dual Natures.
Before resolving the last Psychic Battle trigger play Azorius Signet. Get 48 tokens. Then resolve the Psychic Battle trigger and bounce March of the Machines. Dual Nature removes March of the Machines tokens. Leave Kiora's Dismissal on the stack.
Tap all the Signets for Mana. We now have 52 mana, enough of it blue to not care about the colors anymore. We use 51 mana with Izzet Guildmage to copy Kiora's 17 times.
Everytime we create such a copy all our Psychic Battles trigger and we use those to double our Dual Nature count and top up on Psychic Battles. The first time we have 4 Psychic battles, so we go from 48 to 3*2^8 Dual Natures and this time we also top up on Psychic Battles. We are between 2^^3 and 2^^4 and every Kiora's copy increases the right number by 1. So we end up with over 2^^19 Dual Natures.
Play Precursor Golem, get tokens.
Cast Tereshi's Grasp, targeting a golem. We get 2^^19 Golem triggers. When we resolve these we get a bunch of Psychic Battle triggers that can each be usesd to bounce Signet and repeat the process above. Before we resolve the next Golem trigger we also bounce and replay the Precursor Golem.
We end up with about 2^^^^(2^^19) Dual Natures.
The initial Tereshi's Grasp also triggered Volute on Words of Wisdom. Put that on the stack below all the golem and psychic battle triggers and leave it there.
Play Precursor Golem, get tokens.
Cast Reality Spasm with X=1, targeting a golem. We get 2^^^^(2^^19) Golem triggers. When we resolve these we get a bunch of Psychic Battle triggers that can each be usesd to bounce Signet and repeat the process above. Before we resolve the next Golem trigger we also bounce and replay the Precursor Golem.
We end up with about 2^^^^2^^^^(2^^19) Dual Natures.
Along the way use a Psychic Battle trigger to bounce Sphinx.
Play Sphinx, get tokens.
Resolve the Words of Wisdom.
EDIT: Changed the number of Dual Natures before playing Precursor Golem from 2^^17 to 2^^19. Somehow I previously forgot to take into account the inital supply and just put the number of Izzet Guildmage uses after the arrows.
I was wondering about whether we can deal with having to use Psychic Battle while using Broken Ambitions to counter spells and mill cards. In my initial analysis, it seems okay. The most frequent use of Broken Ambitions will be to counter and mill Metallurgeon; if we don't put a card other than Metallurgeon at least that fast, then we will eventually run out of cards in the library. The only thing that can exile that fast is Spellweaver Helix I think, but Spellweaver Helix and Mirror of Fate should have no problems putting sorceries from the graveyard into the library, so I don't see any problem.
EDIT: Minute improvement: For the last Copy Enchantment bounce for the first Kiora's Dismissal, have it copy Dual Nature rather than copy nothing. That gets you 50 Dual Natures, hence 54 mana and 18 bouncings. Bouncing Copy Enchantment then destroys the Dual Nature tokens, so after five bouncings we wind up with 17 Dual Natures and 20 Psychic Battles. (Doing the trick of copying Dual Nature on the second to last playing, and copying Psychic Battle on the final playing) This is more than 2^^3, so after 18 Kiora's Dismissal we will have more than 2^^20 Dual Natures, and the final number will be more than 2^^^^(2^^^^(2^^20)).
EDIT: Hmm, I guess we can manage to let a Terashi's Grasp copy resolve on some artifact token to gain life and thus mana via Channel. So the improvement is still in.
Metallurgeon
Mimic Vat
Horobi, Death's Wail
Izzet Guildmage
Mirror of Fate
Terashi's Grasp
Titania, Protector of Argoth
Spellweaver Volute
Spellweaver Helix
Vedalken Orrery
But, we don't have Rebuild, meaning we can only mill 4 cards, not enough. So I guess we are a bit short of a stage.
Play Lotus, crack for green, play channel, play Signet, tap it, cast replenish and try to counter it with broken ambitions for X=0. (1 green, 13 colorless, 1 life)
Mill 4 cards: Omniscience, Opalescence, Dual Nature, Copy Enchantment.
Don't let replenish get countered, resolve it to get those enchantments into play. The Copy Enchantment token copies Dual Nature.
Play Sphinx, get 3 tokens.
Play Words of Wisdom, Draw 10 cards: Kiora's Dismissal, Izzet Guildmage, Spellweaver Volute, Flash of Defiance, Spellweaver Helix, Volcanic Island, Vedalken Orrery, Precursor Golem, Terashi's Grasp, Reality Spasm.
Play Volcanic Island and tap it for blue.
Play Guildmage, get tokens.
Play Vedalken Orrery.
Play Kiora's Dismissal and leave it on the stack.
Play Precursor Golem, get tokens.
Play Terashi's Grasp, targeting a Golem token. Volute and Golems trigger and we resolve Volute first to cast Broken Ambitions targeting the Terashi's. Volute ends up on Words of Wisdom. Use Guildmage to create a copy of Broken Ambitions. ( 1 green, 11 colorless, 1 life)
Mill 8 cards: March of the Machines, Psychic Battle, Cowardice, Flash of Defiance x2, ? , ? , ? .
Leave the Precursor triggers on the stack.
Play Helix, exile a Flash of Defiance and Replenish.
Play Flash of Defiance. Helix and Volute trigger. Volute triggers again from casting the Replenish. Chose to not cast the spell on the Volutes.
The enchantments end up on the Battlefield.
We resolve the first Precursor trigger and get 11 copies of Terashi's targeting our Golems. Cowardice triggers and we will end up bouncing them all. We also trigger a total of 44 Psychic Battles.
With the first we bounce Azorius Signet. We replay it and get tokens.
With the second we bounce March of the Machines. We tap all the Signets for mana. (1 green , 13 colorless/white, 4 blue, 1 life)
We use that mana to create Guildmage copies of Kiora's 3 times. The first triggers 4 Psichic battles and gets us to 48 Dual Natures plus 52 Psychic Battles. That's more than 2^^3. The second and third copy get us to 2^^5. (1 green, 7 colorless/white, 1 blue, 1 life)
Replay March of the Machines and use the third Psychic Battle trigger to bounce Signet again. Then activate Guildmage again to create more Dual Natures. Play Signet, get tokens and bounce MArch of the Machines with the last Guildmage Psychic Battle trigger. This gets us ~2^^6 blue mana. We use that as beforeto go to 2^^2^^6 Dual Natures / Psychic Battles, or more than 2^^^4
Use the remaining 41 triggers the same way, getting us to 2^^^45 Dual Natures
Replay Precursor Golem and resolve the second Precursor trigger after getting tokens.
Repeat the process above to go to ~2^^^2^^^45 > 2^^^^4 Dual Natures.
Do the same for trigger three and four to go to more than 2^^^^6.
Towards the end make sure to let some Terashi's resolve to gain at least 3 life.
Play Precursor Golem, get tokens.
Cast Reality Spasm with X=1, targeting a golem. We get 2^^^^6 Golem triggers. When we resolve these we get a bunch of Psychic Battle triggers that can each be usesd to bounce Signet and repeat the process above.
We end up with ~2^^^^2^^^^6 Dual Natures.
Towards the end bounce Sphinx, bounce Helix and let a Reality Spasm copy resolve on Volcanic Island. Tap the Volcanic for red.
Play Helix, exile Terashi's Grasp and Flash of Defiance.
Flash back Flash of Defiance. We put the Volute trigger below the Helix Trigger. When we resolve the Helix trigger Volute triggers again and we chose not to cast with that one.
When we cast Tereshi's Grasp from under the Helix we target a golem and get ~2^^^^2^^^^6 Golem triggers. When we resolve these we get a bunch of Psychic Battle triggers that can each be usesd to bounce Signet and repeat the process above. Before we resolve the next Golem trigger we also bounce and replay the Precursor Golem.
We end up with ~2^^^^2^^^^2^^^^6 Dual Natures.
Play Sphinx, get tokens.
Resolve the Words of Wisdom.