Random thought: Perhaps we could have Snapcaster Mage and Worldpurge at the same time, if we can't successfully gain life by casting Worldpurge without casting the beneficial gigastage sorcery as well. Not sure how we would manage that though, we should be able to do whatever setup we need in the lower megastage.
It doesn't look like Simian Spirit Guide can work, since Engineered Explosives can destroy the Guide as well. Perhaps we will need to gain the red mana by destroying some permanent of CMC more than 4; nothing with CMC > 4 that is not an artifact directly produces red mana, it will have to be indirect somehow.
Then there's the life megastage. How do we spend life to activate a destructive sorcery? How would we gain the life back? So far, I'm stymied.
If we can make it so we don't have access to a color of mana necessary to play the beneficial gigastage sorcery, that should work fine. The problem is that Gerrard's Verdict is out: it costs enough that we can exile it with Spell Queller. I think Snapcaster Mage might just be a dead end.
Hmmm, you're right. Spirit Guide seems impossible. Going back a long way, I wonder if there's a way to get a landcycler to work as mana generator? We could use Tropical Island and Pale Recluse, Rootwater Alligator to sacrifice it where we can Mirror of Fate it into our library, cycle it back, etc. Just like the old school stages. That still doesn't fix the lifegain problem in the gigastage, though...
Edit: I wonder if, before we make a gigastage, we can first get the megastage going with Spellweaver Volute, then turn our current megastage into another consecutive hyperstage? That might be easier, and prove to be a stepping stone to the big one further down the line. It would also still beat the stuffing out of the current deck, w^3+w^2 is nothing to sneeze at.
One other thought: if our means of paying life is Vona, Butcher of Maghan (an extremely expensive choice of targeting, but...), then we can also use Sway of the Stars as the life resetter: both set the life total low enough that we can no longer use that ability.
Lets look at this gamestate: We have Engineered Explosives in hand, one Norritt is in the graveyard, the other Norritt is exiled under a Spell Queller token. All the instants and sorceries are under Spell Queller tokens as well and the same is true for Vedalken Orrery. Original Spell Queller is on the battlefield without an exiled card.
On the Battlefield we have at least one Orrery token, one hasty untapped Norritt token. We also have a bunch of Psychic Battles and Bloodbond Marches and the other usual stuff. None of the mentioned tokens was created by a Dual Nature that is still on the battlefield, so we can remove those without exiling the tokens.
On the stack is *a Dual Nature trigger for Vedalken Orrery* and say 10 layers worth of Metallurgeon PB and BM triggers.
Onto the infinite loop:
We can tap a Norritt token to get <enough> PB triggers.
We can use 2 of these triggers to resolve a Make a Stand copy:
-- If necessary use some Mana to bounce Dual Nature and clear all tokens.
-- Use 1st PB to bounce the original Spell Queller.
-- Replay Dual Nature.
-- Use 2nd PB to bounce the token that exiles Make a Stand. Cast Make a Stand and get a bunch of Swarm Intelligence triggers.
-- Cast and resolve Spell Queller. The original enters and triggers its own etb and Dual Nature triggers. Put the latter on top.
-- Spend some more Mana to bounce Dual Nature again and clear all tokens.
-- Resolve the Dual Nature trigger, get a Spell Queller token, have it exile the Make a Stand. Resolve other Dual Nature and Spell Queller triggers, but there are no other targets on the stack to exile.
-- Resolve Swarm Intelligence triggers to get copies and resolve Make a Stand.
We are back to where we were before, except with 2 PB triggers less and all creatures are now indestructible.
We can use the same procedure to cast any of the other instants/sorceries or us Bloodbond March for Norritt. So lets do that:
- Use 2 PB to bring Norritt to the battlefield.
- Cast Engineered Explosives from hand so that it gets 4 counters.
- Explode the Explosives, imprint Norritt on Mimic Vat. Create a hasty untapped token Norritt and move the card to the graveyard.
- spend some mana to kill an animated enchantment token and trigger Salvaging Station to bring the Explosives back to the battlefield.
- Use 2 PB to bounce all artifacts, including the Explosives.
- Use 1 PB to kill the Spell Queller token that exiles Vadalken Orrery. Cast and resolve that.
- Use 2 PB to make creatures indestructible again, including the new Norritt token and the Orrery.
- Use 2 PB to bring Norritt to the battlefield.
- Cast Engineered Explosives from hand so that it gets 4 counters.
- Explode the Explosives, imprint Norritt on Mimic Vat. Create a hasty untapped token Norritt and move the card to the graveyard.
- spend some mana to kill an animated enchantment token and trigger Salvaging Station to bring the Explosives back to the battlefield.
- Use 2 PB to bounce all artifacts, including the Explosives.
We are back to where we started except that we have one additional Norritt token and the Vedalken Orrery is not exiled under a Spell Queller any more. (And probably some other minor stuff, but going into that much detail would make this description even more tedious)
*Resolve the Dual Nature trigger to get back instant speed capability.*
Use the Metallurgeon layers to create 10 layers worth of hasty, tapped Metallurgeon tokens along with the 5 hasty untapped tokens we can get out of them. This also lets us top off on mana and vastly increase the numbers of our enchantments, so progress is made. The stack is now empty.
Tap one hasty Norritt token to get <enough> PB triggers. Use 2 PB to untap all those hasty Metallurgeons. Use 1 PB to bounce Spell Queller *and keep it in hand for a moment*.
Use the Metallurgeons to put 10 layers worth of triggers on the stack. Look at the rest of them and don't care because we are going infinite anyway~
*Cast Orrery, get a Dual Nature trigger and use one of the untapped Metallurgeons to bounce it again after removing the Dual Natures from the battlefield.* Cast Orrery, cast Queller and let a token exile the Orrery with approriate bounces of Dual Nature, just like for all the other spells above.
(Maybe I forgot to mention some Dual Nature bounces or replays. But It really shouldn't be hard to make sure it is there when we want it and not there when we don't want it. Progress can be saved through Dual Nature bounces due to say the Psychic Battle tokens or whatever)
_________
Changing Dual Nature to something else may or may not stop this infinite, depending on the alternative. But the alternatives that do stop this seem super restrictive and I don't have high hopes in that direction.
Making Metallurgeon activations required to brong back Norritt or Engineered Explosives would stop the infinite as far as I can tell. Might be worth looking into.
Even if you do stop the infinite in the Hyperstage, having the Vedalken Orrery from Spellqueller around will also make getting a Mega and Ultra stage more difficult as it potentially lets us gain the expensive resources for every copy of say Worldfire.
Removing Swarm Intelligence without replacing it with something else to create those dangerous copies seems tough because the Spell Queller Hyperstage fizzles if we don't reexile the original spell, so we need to get a copy somehow if we want to resolve something.
EDIT: Oops, I messed up a bit and lost instant speed capability during the loop. Edited to fix that. Added bits marked with *.
You cannot have more than one Spell Queller token exiling spells.
We can only make those tokens with Dual Nature, so as soon as we bounce the nontoken Spell Queller or Dual Nature, a series of trigers will go on the stack to exile all tokens, which will eventually exile all the Spell Queller tokens. Even if all the tokens are exiled simultaneously, their "leaves the battlefield, cast" triggers will go on the stack at different places, so each spell will necessarily resolve before the next spell down goes on the stack at all. There's no way to prevent this by bouncing March or Dual Nature, since Spell Queller is inherently a creature. You also can't access other Psychic Battle triggers until the Dual Nature exile triggers resolve, so you have to spend a different Norritt token to exile each token/nontoken Spell Queller that's exiling a thing, so that all the spells we exile will be on the stack SIMULTANEOUSLY.
The earlier infinites worked because you only used one token Spell Queller to store anything, and the rest could go on the nontoken. That way, you would only spend one additional Skyshroud Archer, which you could replace with in the process of the infinite.
Edit: for example, take the Make a Stand part of your infinite there. When we bounce the nontoken Spell Queller all our Dual Natures will trigger to exile tokens. If we let those triggers resolve first, all our other spells will go on the stack, either one at a time or not one at a time, but either way it doesn't matter: they're resolving ABOVE the cast trigger for the nontoken Spell Queller, so if we play the nontoken and exile the spells under the tokens, we won't have a Spell Queller to cast to save the Make a Stand when it resolves. If we don't let the Dual Nature triggers resolve, then we won't have a Spell Queller available to save our Make a Stand.
And if we eliminate Dual Nature, that will start a cascading sequence of exiling Spell Queller before we get the chance to use a Psychic Battle trigger.
Dual Nature will never exile a Spell Queller token if you use it correctly. Just follow two simple rules:
1. Whenever a Dual Nature token of Spell Queller is about to enter the battlefield clear the board of all Dual Natures by bouncing the original while it is a creature and let the Dual Nature trigger exile all tokens. This ensures that the Dual Nature that is about to create the token has already left the battlefield, so the token can never be exiled by the last Dual Nature ability.
2. Whenever you are about to bounce the original Spell Queller clear the board of all Dual Natures by bouncing the original Dual Nature while it is a creature and let the Dual Nature trigger exile all tokens. Since no Dual Nature is there to witness the original Spell Queller leaving they won't attempt to exile any tokens with their second ability.
In both cases, the removal of Dual Natures doesn't interfere with any other Spell Queller tokens because we follow rule 1 every time.
Ahh, okay, THAT is gonna break it. Though, if we cut the indestructible granter and switch to a death trigger targeting chain, would that fix the problem? It feels like it would, since that way we really won't be able to include Orrery in the loop.
On that note, I've found a promising interaction: Driver of the Dead can bring back Tidebinder Mage, which can target Skyshroud Archer but not Metallurgeon. If we can find a way to kill Tidebinder without targeting it, that should eliminate the need for indestructibility.
Tidebinder Mage can only target a red or green creature an opponent controls.
Do we have to find a way to kill whatever is targeting the Skyshroud Archer without targeting it? That might be difficult. I was hoping that something like Goblin Tunneler could be the creature that targets both Skyshroud Archer and itself, but I am worried that it might go infinite.
If we can find a creature that can target Archer but not itself, we can use a limited sacrifice effect. For instance, if Tunneler couldn't target itself, Quickslither could kill it, but not bounce it.
I believe targeting itself does go infinite: we can use its own Bloodbond March triggers to bring it back, instead of driver. Though, doing that would require a psychic Battle trigger on it further down, using up a token, so that would just devolve into a stage....
Edit: Goblin Tunneler can also target Spell Queller, so that doesn't work. This is a hard one to crack, but it took about 6 years to get to an Ackermann stage, another year to get a hyperstage, I have every confidence we'll be able to get this working eventually.
In the meantime, I'd like to take a step back and look at this hyperstage structure on a more macro scale: essentially, what we have is a creature that, when it leaves the battlefield, sets off a trigger that does multiple things: battle Cry, rebuild, etc. But Spell Queller isn't the only creature with a potentially useful leaves-the-battlefield trigger, and we aren't using Volute at this level anymore so we aren't stuck with Instants.
One creature that we could also target with Skyshroud Archer, but which can't store Orrery for these combos, is Reveillark. We can tie it to destroying all artifacts and enchantments with, say, Bane of Progress. We could even save the Battle Cry combo by using Kaho, Minamo Historian or Elite Arcanist as the second creature. The question is then how to get the artifacts and enchantments back out of the graveyard, and how to turn Bane of Progress into an untapped hasty token. Another option might be to find some way to turn one activation into Goblin Dark-Dwellers, which would let us save the Battle Cry Rebuild structure, but not let is store Vedalken Orrery. The problem is, that's an enters trigger, not a leaves, so we would need some intervening step that causes a creature Leaving the battlefield to make Dark-Dwellers ENTER the battlefield. Maybe a champion creature? Boggart Mob?
Re-edit: I think there might be a better way to replace Dual Nature, assuming Mirrorworks is safe (I don't see why it wouldn't be): just cut the straight enchantments layer altogether.
Add in Skull of Orm, which can get back Copy Enchantment, March, Battle, whatever, from the graveyard. We can also throw it all over the floor with Psychic Battle triggers at the top level of the Metallurgeon stage, along with Perpetual Timepiece, Mimic Vat, and Mirror of Fate. We use Allay to kill an enchantment, and put it on Mimic Vat, spending some more colorless of Su-chi to make a hasty token. Then, we use a couple more Battle triggers to make Timepiece/mirror/whatever, use them to transfer the enchantment back to the graveyard, and use a Skull of Orm to bring it back to hand, where we can cast it again. We've used up a constant number of Psychic Battle triggers on Metallurgeon's ability to create one arbitrary token copy of any enchantment we want. Since we could get Dual Nature triggers for any artifact already, the only way for Mirrorworks to break it is if we relied on Dual Nature's exile ability to control the stack at some point, which, as lijil just pointed out (my bad for not realizing that, in hindsight if you couldn't do that the Metallurgeon stage would break, right?), that's no restriction at all.
From this combo, the top level of our stack becomes battle triggers on Metallurgeon at the top of our first stage, and it serves to roughly double the number of enchantments we create. That's a much smaller growth rate, but that doesn't matter, no?
With no Dual Nature, we have no way to create token copies of Spell Queller, and I think that our infinites get fixed. We don't even need to use Norritt anymore.
Ooh, very nice new base combo! We did use Dual Nature to put some token activations on the stack for after we destroyed everything, particularly Vedalken Orrery and Omniscience. I guess Mirrorworks can handle getting us token copies of Vedalken Orrery; for Omniscience, we can either make sure we have blue mana to hard cast it, or find some way to put enchantments into play.
The smaller growth rate doesn't matter, except for possibly "getting off the ground", i.e. having enough resources so that we don't stall. But usually that isn't a problem.
With just one Spell Queller, we can only avoid exiling Rebuild if we bounce and exile the Rebuild later, before it gets resolved. So it doesn't look like Iijil's scenario can work.
So, next up: we still need to figure out the megastage. We should still keep in mind using death triggers to get rid of Make a Stand, since we may need to use a sorcery that destroys rather than exiles or bounces. It does look like landcycling could allow us to use lands in the gigastage; landcyclers only retrieve lands with basic land types, so we could still have lifegain lands that could be bounced to our hand via Worldpurge, and then put back on the battlefield using say Walking Atlas.
I imagine Academy Rector can be useful for the Omniscience. Getting 3 blue Mana seems less than ideal when the best card sorcery for the megastage is probably Devastation Tide. Though, if we can use islandcyclers to get 5 Mana....
I also am leery about being able to hide other cards under the Spell Queller later on. Both Worldpurge and Devastation Tide bounce Omniscience as well, which definitely can't be hid under Spell Queller, so I think we can keep things safe that way in the higher levels, but we'll have to be very careful about what cards we use in the higher levels, to keep us from jump-starting them with just a Queller bounce.
With all that said, and knowing that there is definitely an infinite in here somewhere, here's a list. Roast me.
The gigastage is quite hard, because it needs to run off a sorcery that doesn't generate the right colors of Mana to hardcast it: otherwise, we could just loop it with Snapcaster. I used Grave Exchange, each of which can get back a Jhessian Zombies directly to hand. From there, we can cycle it and play/sac our island to generate 1 blue Mana per swarm Intelligence when we cast it. There's no intervening layer, just conversion, but I don't think that's an issue.
The global creature untap and extra combat phases leave us with very few options for stages up top, and I imagine we'll need at least 7 dedicated setup cards, since Black Lotus is unsafe, but there's still some room left: we only use 3 colors of Mana, so green and black are open for layers and stages. Opponent life total might be another, Night Dealings and company can come in. And by the looks of it, even with an involved setup, we'll still have 5-7 cards on top of this to build. That should get us to somewhere in the realm of f_w^4+3(n). But I'm getting way ahead of where we actually are. What have I missed?
We're reusing Snapcaster Mage: Snapcaster gives Dragonstorm flashback, at the cost of one red. R is only payable through Treasonous Ogre, which costs 3 life, so eventually we'll have to start gaining it back, enter Worldpurge.
Though hang on... You pointed out earlier, we can flashback Worldpurge directly now, and I think we can from there use an Atlas untap underneath it to gain life at any time, so that goes infinite. Ugh.
Yeah. I do think I see a way to a megastage + a hyperstage though; use Patron of the Orochi to untap the Skyshroud Archers, then use some instant to recycle the Patron in the megastage. Then, the additional hyperstage can have a creature stage, then we can use Spellweaver Helix to complete the stage using life, or another color of mana.
Every time I looked for megastage cards, Kederekt Leviathan looked so tempting, but combined with Dual Nature it trivially went off. But Dual Nature is gone now, so all we need is an instant that can turn into a Kederekt trigger. There are surprisingly few reanimation Instants with cmc>4 (it has to be reanimation, not targeting, or we'll be able to add intervening stuff before playing it from hand), but Miraculous Recovery works. Rescue from the Underworld lets us sac the Leviathan, but is too high up to impact the lower stage.
That releases us from Snapcaster, and lets us use any old flashback spell as the Volute starter. I went with green Mana, but it really doesn't matter. We also no longer need to worry about flashing back our untap instant, so Thoughtweft Gambit frees up a combat step layer further down the line.
I used Fumarole for the top level, which combines nicely with Nucklavee: we don't have any impactful blue Instants, and the only red sorcery is Fumarole. We can play it for free from hand, but it still costs 3 life. The best part is, because it targets, we don't even need a Mana generator afterwards: each Swarm Intelligence copy of Fumarole gives us N psychic battles, each of which can bounce a Jhessian Zombies.
When all is said and done, we still have blue, black, and red mana to work with, not to mention opponent life total, cards in library, and our own card drawing.
Edit: we no longer need the second zombies, but we do need a way to store progress after a Worldpurge. We also don't yet have a way to get Omniscience back after the megastage and gigastage transitions, and I'm not sure how to do it: we need it to require a lower-level trigger in some way, otherwise we're in danger of Spell Queller Orrery shenanigans.
I think we also need Wormfang Behemoth too, since we need to bring back more than seven cards back to our hand.
Does Academy Rector and something like Misery Charm work? We can exile Misery Charm on Spell Queller, then put an activation of Skyshroud Archer on the stack prior to casting Roar of the Wurm or Fumarole. After the higher n-stage, we get Vedalken Orrery back first, cast Academy Rector for cheap white mana, then resolve a PB trigger for Skyshroud Archer to bounce the Spell Queller, casting Misery Charm and destroying the Academy Rector, getting back Omniscience. Maybe we need two Academy Rectors to get them back onto the battlefield.
Is this it - do we actually have a gigastage?
Edit: Actually, Misery Charm returns Clerics to the battlefield - no second Rector needed!
Edit: Sigh. Nucklavee can return Thoughtweft Gambit to our hand, without having to transition to a higher hyperstage. We need to get access to Fumarole without accessing the Gambit.
I don't think Misery Charm works: that will let us finish the megastage transition with Omniscience already in play, which might be fine, but if we can do some shenanigans with Spell Queller to skip an Orrery trigger there, too....
I think it's safer, at least until lijil gives it the okay, to have us use up a lower trigger to target rector. The most compact way I found was Abzan Falconer and Dearly Departed, which will give Rector flying so we can target it with a Skyshroud Archer.
Add in Workfang, as you said, and I think we have it, with about 10 cards left to set up!
Edit: I think I've found a way to, at the cost of a card, allow for Black Lotus in the setup, which will probably save more slots than it costs in the long run. If we replace Salvaging Station with a second explosives and Mishra, Artificer Prodigy, we can use the same trick we did rebuying the Archer to rebuy Explosives. That means we can no longer reanimate Black Lotus whenever we want, so we can add it in and probably save at least 3 slots that would otherwise have gone to Chancellor of the Tangle or something. It might even add a layer, now that Mirrorworks can make lots of Black Lotus copies.
Edit: that's no problem, we can just go back to Savage Beating and forget about combat step layers.
Yeah, Savage Beating should work. The other troublesome blue instant is Rebuild. Free cycling is very bad, so replace Rebuild with Retract; does this go infinite, or is the cost of resetting the megastage/gigastage more than we get from an extra retraction of Engineered Explosives?
I don't think I follow: how does retract get an extra explosives?
Also, I think we /might/ be able to get Gambit back, because I'm not sure how we can get another Nucklavee trigger from just returning Gambit: we also need to bounce it or kill and return it, and I don't immediately see any way to do that. But it's also probably not worth the effort to even check: I haven't counted but after Lotus Channel Genesis Wave I'm guessing we have at most 7 card slots to build on what we've got. That's probably enough that we can find better ways to fill those slots.
Edit: we also need a way to save the Instants we leave under Spell Queller in between megastage and gigastage transitions. Any way to return Instants from graveyard to hand (that we can't target) should work. Something something Scrivener?
We can let Retract go to the graveyard, then after a megastage/gigastage transition, we can cast Nucklavee and return Retract to our hand. This gives us a free cast of Retract without needing to bounce Spell Queller with Skyshroud Archer, and after we bring Engineered Explosives back to our hand, we can sacrifice it to destroy a nontoken Skyshroud Archer, and gain one hasted token. This is bad, unless we can make it so that resetting the megastage/gigastage transition costs us at least one hasted Skyshroud Archer.
It's possible Nucklavee won't work then, actually, I don't see any instants that reset artifacts and aren't blue. The rest of the megastage and even the gigastage look pretty solid, though, so we just need to find a way to get Fumarole back in hand...
What if we also had a Liliana's Spoils, which can bring back a Fumarole from our library and not much else? We can counter the original hardcast Fumarole with Cephalid Shrine and put it in the library with a Timepiece before the rest of the stack resolves, then a Helix copy of the Spoils can draw it back to hand. Are there any other black cards we can break with that?
Hmm, then the only dangerous card is Fated Return. Which should ordinarily be completely unsafe for so cheap, but, since it grants the creature indestructibility, it doesn't look like we can take advantage of it. It actually looks safe.
Homarid Spawning Bed and Princess Lucrezia are unsafe, because they make hardcasting Omniscience after the megastage too easy, so we need another way to bin Kederekt Leviathan so we can reanimate it again. We also need to find some way to preserve the Spell Queller instants after we resolve Kederekt Leviathan, so both of those are unsolved problems. Setting aside one slot for each of those, we are left with 5 card slots to work with on top of the gigastage. We have open blue, black, and red mana (though we should prioritize black and red, in case we do need Homarid Spawning Bed lower down), combat phases, and the usual opponent resources.
EDIT: I believe Synthetic Destiny can get the Leviathan back into our graveyard, without breaking anything else.
RE-EDIT: is there ever a point in this deck where we are mana restricted in how we can cast a creature? Not activate it, cast.
If not, Pillar of Origins can produce lots of blue mana for us to cast Spell Queller with, but can't be used to cast Omniscience or anything else we really need. We can use it to save the Queller spells after the megastage. That won't work for the gigastage, though....
RE-RE-EDIT: even better, if we replace Make a Stand with Heroic Intervention (do we go infinite if we make noncreatures indestructible, too?), we can use Firemind's Foresight to get back Retract, Heroic Intervention, and Battle Cry, after they resolve, if we can get them from our graveyard to our library beforehand. Psychic Spiral can reshuffle them in, at the cost of preventing us from using the 53-cards-in-opponent's-library limit.
Hmm, so close. I don't see any way to save the instants without bringing them back to our hand, which will give us an advantage after the megastage/gigastage transitions. The only thing I can think of is to somehow make restarting the transition really expensive. It's hard to find the right price though... We can't spend a green mana on the megastage transition, so we have to spend... a couple of Archer tokens? I don't know how to make that work.
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It doesn't look like Simian Spirit Guide can work, since Engineered Explosives can destroy the Guide as well. Perhaps we will need to gain the red mana by destroying some permanent of CMC more than 4; nothing with CMC > 4 that is not an artifact directly produces red mana, it will have to be indirect somehow.
Then there's the life megastage. How do we spend life to activate a destructive sorcery? How would we gain the life back? So far, I'm stymied.
Hmmm, you're right. Spirit Guide seems impossible. Going back a long way, I wonder if there's a way to get a landcycler to work as mana generator? We could use Tropical Island and Pale Recluse, Rootwater Alligator to sacrifice it where we can Mirror of Fate it into our library, cycle it back, etc. Just like the old school stages. That still doesn't fix the lifegain problem in the gigastage, though...
Edit: I wonder if, before we make a gigastage, we can first get the megastage going with Spellweaver Volute, then turn our current megastage into another consecutive hyperstage? That might be easier, and prove to be a stepping stone to the big one further down the line. It would also still beat the stuffing out of the current deck, w^3+w^2 is nothing to sneeze at.
One other thought: if our means of paying life is Vona, Butcher of Maghan (an extremely expensive choice of targeting, but...), then we can also use Sway of the Stars as the life resetter: both set the life total low enough that we can no longer use that ability.
Lets look at this gamestate: We have Engineered Explosives in hand, one Norritt is in the graveyard, the other Norritt is exiled under a Spell Queller token. All the instants and sorceries are under Spell Queller tokens as well and the same is true for Vedalken Orrery. Original Spell Queller is on the battlefield without an exiled card.
On the Battlefield we have at least one Orrery token, one hasty untapped Norritt token. We also have a bunch of Psychic Battles and Bloodbond Marches and the other usual stuff. None of the mentioned tokens was created by a Dual Nature that is still on the battlefield, so we can remove those without exiling the tokens.
On the stack is *a Dual Nature trigger for Vedalken Orrery* and say 10 layers worth of Metallurgeon PB and BM triggers.
Onto the infinite loop:
We can tap a Norritt token to get <enough> PB triggers.
We can use 2 of these triggers to resolve a Make a Stand copy:
-- If necessary use some Mana to bounce Dual Nature and clear all tokens.
-- Use 1st PB to bounce the original Spell Queller.
-- Replay Dual Nature.
-- Use 2nd PB to bounce the token that exiles Make a Stand. Cast Make a Stand and get a bunch of Swarm Intelligence triggers.
-- Cast and resolve Spell Queller. The original enters and triggers its own etb and Dual Nature triggers. Put the latter on top.
-- Spend some more Mana to bounce Dual Nature again and clear all tokens.
-- Resolve the Dual Nature trigger, get a Spell Queller token, have it exile the Make a Stand. Resolve other Dual Nature and Spell Queller triggers, but there are no other targets on the stack to exile.
-- Resolve Swarm Intelligence triggers to get copies and resolve Make a Stand.
We are back to where we were before, except with 2 PB triggers less and all creatures are now indestructible.
We can use the same procedure to cast any of the other instants/sorceries or us Bloodbond March for Norritt. So lets do that:
- Use 2 PB to bring Norritt to the battlefield.
- Cast Engineered Explosives from hand so that it gets 4 counters.
- Explode the Explosives, imprint Norritt on Mimic Vat. Create a hasty untapped token Norritt and move the card to the graveyard.
- spend some mana to kill an animated enchantment token and trigger Salvaging Station to bring the Explosives back to the battlefield.
- Use 2 PB to bounce all artifacts, including the Explosives.
- Use 1 PB to kill the Spell Queller token that exiles Vadalken Orrery. Cast and resolve that.
- Use 2 PB to make creatures indestructible again, including the new Norritt token and the Orrery.
- Use 2 PB to bring Norritt to the battlefield.
- Cast Engineered Explosives from hand so that it gets 4 counters.
- Explode the Explosives, imprint Norritt on Mimic Vat. Create a hasty untapped token Norritt and move the card to the graveyard.
- spend some mana to kill an animated enchantment token and trigger Salvaging Station to bring the Explosives back to the battlefield.
- Use 2 PB to bounce all artifacts, including the Explosives.
We are back to where we started except that we have one additional Norritt token and the Vedalken Orrery is not exiled under a Spell Queller any more. (And probably some other minor stuff, but going into that much detail would make this description even more tedious)
*Resolve the Dual Nature trigger to get back instant speed capability.*
Use the Metallurgeon layers to create 10 layers worth of hasty, tapped Metallurgeon tokens along with the 5 hasty untapped tokens we can get out of them. This also lets us top off on mana and vastly increase the numbers of our enchantments, so progress is made. The stack is now empty.
Tap one hasty Norritt token to get <enough> PB triggers. Use 2 PB to untap all those hasty Metallurgeons. Use 1 PB to bounce Spell Queller *and keep it in hand for a moment*.
Use the Metallurgeons to put 10 layers worth of triggers on the stack. Look at the rest of them and don't care because we are going infinite anyway~
*Cast Orrery, get a Dual Nature trigger and use one of the untapped Metallurgeons to bounce it again after removing the Dual Natures from the battlefield.* Cast Orrery, cast Queller and let a token exile the Orrery with approriate bounces of Dual Nature, just like for all the other spells above.
(Maybe I forgot to mention some Dual Nature bounces or replays. But It really shouldn't be hard to make sure it is there when we want it and not there when we don't want it. Progress can be saved through Dual Nature bounces due to say the Psychic Battle tokens or whatever)
_________
Changing Dual Nature to something else may or may not stop this infinite, depending on the alternative. But the alternatives that do stop this seem super restrictive and I don't have high hopes in that direction.
Making Metallurgeon activations required to brong back Norritt or Engineered Explosives would stop the infinite as far as I can tell. Might be worth looking into.
Even if you do stop the infinite in the Hyperstage, having the Vedalken Orrery from Spellqueller around will also make getting a Mega and Ultra stage more difficult as it potentially lets us gain the expensive resources for every copy of say Worldfire.
Removing Swarm Intelligence without replacing it with something else to create those dangerous copies seems tough because the Spell Queller Hyperstage fizzles if we don't reexile the original spell, so we need to get a copy somehow if we want to resolve something.
EDIT: Oops, I messed up a bit and lost instant speed capability during the loop. Edited to fix that. Added bits marked with *.
We can only make those tokens with Dual Nature, so as soon as we bounce the nontoken Spell Queller or Dual Nature, a series of trigers will go on the stack to exile all tokens, which will eventually exile all the Spell Queller tokens. Even if all the tokens are exiled simultaneously, their "leaves the battlefield, cast" triggers will go on the stack at different places, so each spell will necessarily resolve before the next spell down goes on the stack at all. There's no way to prevent this by bouncing March or Dual Nature, since Spell Queller is inherently a creature. You also can't access other Psychic Battle triggers until the Dual Nature exile triggers resolve, so you have to spend a different Norritt token to exile each token/nontoken Spell Queller that's exiling a thing, so that all the spells we exile will be on the stack SIMULTANEOUSLY.
The earlier infinites worked because you only used one token Spell Queller to store anything, and the rest could go on the nontoken. That way, you would only spend one additional Skyshroud Archer, which you could replace with in the process of the infinite.
Edit: for example, take the Make a Stand part of your infinite there. When we bounce the nontoken Spell Queller all our Dual Natures will trigger to exile tokens. If we let those triggers resolve first, all our other spells will go on the stack, either one at a time or not one at a time, but either way it doesn't matter: they're resolving ABOVE the cast trigger for the nontoken Spell Queller, so if we play the nontoken and exile the spells under the tokens, we won't have a Spell Queller to cast to save the Make a Stand when it resolves. If we don't let the Dual Nature triggers resolve, then we won't have a Spell Queller available to save our Make a Stand.
And if we eliminate Dual Nature, that will start a cascading sequence of exiling Spell Queller before we get the chance to use a Psychic Battle trigger.
1. Whenever a Dual Nature token of Spell Queller is about to enter the battlefield clear the board of all Dual Natures by bouncing the original while it is a creature and let the Dual Nature trigger exile all tokens. This ensures that the Dual Nature that is about to create the token has already left the battlefield, so the token can never be exiled by the last Dual Nature ability.
2. Whenever you are about to bounce the original Spell Queller clear the board of all Dual Natures by bouncing the original Dual Nature while it is a creature and let the Dual Nature trigger exile all tokens. Since no Dual Nature is there to witness the original Spell Queller leaving they won't attempt to exile any tokens with their second ability.
In both cases, the removal of Dual Natures doesn't interfere with any other Spell Queller tokens because we follow rule 1 every time.
The loop above follows those rules.
On that note, I've found a promising interaction: Driver of the Dead can bring back Tidebinder Mage, which can target Skyshroud Archer but not Metallurgeon. If we can find a way to kill Tidebinder without targeting it, that should eliminate the need for indestructibility.
Do we have to find a way to kill whatever is targeting the Skyshroud Archer without targeting it? That might be difficult. I was hoping that something like Goblin Tunneler could be the creature that targets both Skyshroud Archer and itself, but I am worried that it might go infinite.
I believe targeting itself does go infinite: we can use its own Bloodbond March triggers to bring it back, instead of driver. Though, doing that would require a psychic Battle trigger on it further down, using up a token, so that would just devolve into a stage....
Edit: Goblin Tunneler can also target Spell Queller, so that doesn't work. This is a hard one to crack, but it took about 6 years to get to an Ackermann stage, another year to get a hyperstage, I have every confidence we'll be able to get this working eventually.
In the meantime, I'd like to take a step back and look at this hyperstage structure on a more macro scale: essentially, what we have is a creature that, when it leaves the battlefield, sets off a trigger that does multiple things: battle Cry, rebuild, etc. But Spell Queller isn't the only creature with a potentially useful leaves-the-battlefield trigger, and we aren't using Volute at this level anymore so we aren't stuck with Instants.
One creature that we could also target with Skyshroud Archer, but which can't store Orrery for these combos, is Reveillark. We can tie it to destroying all artifacts and enchantments with, say, Bane of Progress. We could even save the Battle Cry combo by using Kaho, Minamo Historian or Elite Arcanist as the second creature. The question is then how to get the artifacts and enchantments back out of the graveyard, and how to turn Bane of Progress into an untapped hasty token. Another option might be to find some way to turn one activation into Goblin Dark-Dwellers, which would let us save the Battle Cry Rebuild structure, but not let is store Vedalken Orrery. The problem is, that's an enters trigger, not a leaves, so we would need some intervening step that causes a creature Leaving the battlefield to make Dark-Dwellers ENTER the battlefield. Maybe a champion creature? Boggart Mob?
Re-edit: I think there might be a better way to replace Dual Nature, assuming Mirrorworks is safe (I don't see why it wouldn't be): just cut the straight enchantments layer altogether.
Add in Skull of Orm, which can get back Copy Enchantment, March, Battle, whatever, from the graveyard. We can also throw it all over the floor with Psychic Battle triggers at the top level of the Metallurgeon stage, along with Perpetual Timepiece, Mimic Vat, and Mirror of Fate. We use Allay to kill an enchantment, and put it on Mimic Vat, spending some more colorless of Su-chi to make a hasty token. Then, we use a couple more Battle triggers to make Timepiece/mirror/whatever, use them to transfer the enchantment back to the graveyard, and use a Skull of Orm to bring it back to hand, where we can cast it again. We've used up a constant number of Psychic Battle triggers on Metallurgeon's ability to create one arbitrary token copy of any enchantment we want. Since we could get Dual Nature triggers for any artifact already, the only way for Mirrorworks to break it is if we relied on Dual Nature's exile ability to control the stack at some point, which, as lijil just pointed out (my bad for not realizing that, in hindsight if you couldn't do that the Metallurgeon stage would break, right?), that's no restriction at all.
From this combo, the top level of our stack becomes battle triggers on Metallurgeon at the top of our first stage, and it serves to roughly double the number of enchantments we create. That's a much smaller growth rate, but that doesn't matter, no?
With no Dual Nature, we have no way to create token copies of Spell Queller, and I think that our infinites get fixed. We don't even need to use Norritt anymore.
The smaller growth rate doesn't matter, except for possibly "getting off the ground", i.e. having enough resources so that we don't stall. But usually that isn't a problem.
With just one Spell Queller, we can only avoid exiling Rebuild if we bounce and exile the Rebuild later, before it gets resolved. So it doesn't look like Iijil's scenario can work.
So, next up: we still need to figure out the megastage. We should still keep in mind using death triggers to get rid of Make a Stand, since we may need to use a sorcery that destroys rather than exiles or bounces. It does look like landcycling could allow us to use lands in the gigastage; landcyclers only retrieve lands with basic land types, so we could still have lifegain lands that could be bounced to our hand via Worldpurge, and then put back on the battlefield using say Walking Atlas.
I also am leery about being able to hide other cards under the Spell Queller later on. Both Worldpurge and Devastation Tide bounce Omniscience as well, which definitely can't be hid under Spell Queller, so I think we can keep things safe that way in the higher levels, but we'll have to be very careful about what cards we use in the higher levels, to keep us from jump-starting them with just a Queller bounce.
With all that said, and knowing that there is definitely an infinite in here somewhere, here's a list. Roast me.
2 Psychic Battle
3 Cowardice
4 Horobi, Death’s Wail
5 Bloodbond March
6 Cephalid Shrine
7 Mimic Vat
8 Omnsicience
9 Vedalken Orrery
10 Mirror of Fate
11 March of the Machines
12 Perpetual Timepiece
13 Allay
14 Skull of Orm
15 Mirroworks
16 Su-Chi
17 Farrelite Priest
19 Battle Cry
20 Rebuild
21 Make a Stand
22 Swarm Intelligence
23 Spell Queller
24 Skyshroud Archer
25 Skyshroud Archer
26 Panharmonicon
27 Engineered Explosives
28 Salvaging Station
29 Snapcaster Mage
30 Spellweaver Volute
31 Savage Beating
31 Devastation Tide
33 Jhessian Zombies
34 Jhessian Zombies
35 Wand of the Elements
36 Island
37 Walking Atlas
39 Grave Exchange
40 Spellweaver Helix
41 Worldpurge
42 Dragonstorm
43 Dragonstorm
44 Radiant Fountain
45 Glimmerpost
The gigastage is quite hard, because it needs to run off a sorcery that doesn't generate the right colors of Mana to hardcast it: otherwise, we could just loop it with Snapcaster. I used Grave Exchange, each of which can get back a Jhessian Zombies directly to hand. From there, we can cycle it and play/sac our island to generate 1 blue Mana per swarm Intelligence when we cast it. There's no intervening layer, just conversion, but I don't think that's an issue.
The global creature untap and extra combat phases leave us with very few options for stages up top, and I imagine we'll need at least 7 dedicated setup cards, since Black Lotus is unsafe, but there's still some room left: we only use 3 colors of Mana, so green and black are open for layers and stages. Opponent life total might be another, Night Dealings and company can come in. And by the looks of it, even with an involved setup, we'll still have 5-7 cards on top of this to build. That should get us to somewhere in the realm of f_w^4+3(n). But I'm getting way ahead of where we actually are. What have I missed?
What's forcing us to cast Worldpurge?
How are we casting and retrieving Dragonstorm?
Edit: Oh, we need Worldpurge to get the lifelands, duh. But, then we can cast Worldpurge cheaply via Snapcaster Mage to get easy life.
Though hang on... You pointed out earlier, we can flashback Worldpurge directly now, and I think we can from there use an Atlas untap underneath it to gain life at any time, so that goes infinite. Ugh.
2 Psychic Battle
3 Cowardice
4 Horobi, Death’s Wail
5 Bloodbond March
6 Cephalid Shrine
7 Mimic Vat
8 Omnsicience
9 Vedalken Orrery
10 Mirror of Fate
11 March of the Machines
12 Perpetual Timepiece
13 Allay
14 Skull of Orm
15 Mirroworks
16 Su-Chi
17 Farrelite Priest
19 Battle Cry
20 Rebuild
21 Make a Stand
22 Swarm Intelligence
23 Spell Queller
24 Skyshroud Archer
25 Skyshroud Archer
26 Panharmonicon
27 Engineered Explosives
28 Salvaging Station
29 Spellweaver Volute
30 Thoughtweft Gambit
31 Rescue from the Underworld
32 Miraculous Recovery
33 Kederekt Leviathan
34 Roar of the Wurm
35 Jhessian Zombies
36 Wand of the Elements
37 Tropical Island
38 Walking Atlas
40 Nucklavee
41 Spellweaver Helix
42 Worldpurge
43 Fumarole
44 Fumarole
45 Radiant Fountain
46 Glimmerpost
Every time I looked for megastage cards, Kederekt Leviathan looked so tempting, but combined with Dual Nature it trivially went off. But Dual Nature is gone now, so all we need is an instant that can turn into a Kederekt trigger. There are surprisingly few reanimation Instants with cmc>4 (it has to be reanimation, not targeting, or we'll be able to add intervening stuff before playing it from hand), but Miraculous Recovery works. Rescue from the Underworld lets us sac the Leviathan, but is too high up to impact the lower stage.
That releases us from Snapcaster, and lets us use any old flashback spell as the Volute starter. I went with green Mana, but it really doesn't matter. We also no longer need to worry about flashing back our untap instant, so Thoughtweft Gambit frees up a combat step layer further down the line.
I used Fumarole for the top level, which combines nicely with Nucklavee: we don't have any impactful blue Instants, and the only red sorcery is Fumarole. We can play it for free from hand, but it still costs 3 life. The best part is, because it targets, we don't even need a Mana generator afterwards: each Swarm Intelligence copy of Fumarole gives us N psychic battles, each of which can bounce a Jhessian Zombies.
When all is said and done, we still have blue, black, and red mana to work with, not to mention opponent life total, cards in library, and our own card drawing.
Edit: we no longer need the second zombies, but we do need a way to store progress after a Worldpurge. We also don't yet have a way to get Omniscience back after the megastage and gigastage transitions, and I'm not sure how to do it: we need it to require a lower-level trigger in some way, otherwise we're in danger of Spell Queller Orrery shenanigans.
Does Academy Rector and something like Misery Charm work? We can exile Misery Charm on Spell Queller, then put an activation of Skyshroud Archer on the stack prior to casting Roar of the Wurm or Fumarole. After the higher n-stage, we get Vedalken Orrery back first, cast Academy Rector for cheap white mana, then resolve a PB trigger for Skyshroud Archer to bounce the Spell Queller, casting Misery Charm and destroying the Academy Rector, getting back Omniscience. Maybe we need two Academy Rectors to get them back onto the battlefield.
Is this it - do we actually have a gigastage?
Edit: Actually, Misery Charm returns Clerics to the battlefield - no second Rector needed!
Edit: Sigh. Nucklavee can return Thoughtweft Gambit to our hand, without having to transition to a higher hyperstage. We need to get access to Fumarole without accessing the Gambit.
I think it's safer, at least until lijil gives it the okay, to have us use up a lower trigger to target rector. The most compact way I found was Abzan Falconer and Dearly Departed, which will give Rector flying so we can target it with a Skyshroud Archer.
Also, our reanimation and sacrifice combo makes Rector too cheap. Swap in Fated Return and Homarid Spawning Bed and add a Princess Lucrezia to make blue Mana plentiful at that point.
Add in Workfang, as you said, and I think we have it, with about 10 cards left to set up!
Edit: I think I've found a way to, at the cost of a card, allow for Black Lotus in the setup, which will probably save more slots than it costs in the long run. If we replace Salvaging Station with a second explosives and Mishra, Artificer Prodigy, we can use the same trick we did rebuying the Archer to rebuy Explosives. That means we can no longer reanimate Black Lotus whenever we want, so we can add it in and probably save at least 3 slots that would otherwise have gone to Chancellor of the Tangle or something. It might even add a layer, now that Mirrorworks can make lots of Black Lotus copies.
Edit: that's no problem, we can just go back to Savage Beating and forget about combat step layers.
Also, I think we /might/ be able to get Gambit back, because I'm not sure how we can get another Nucklavee trigger from just returning Gambit: we also need to bounce it or kill and return it, and I don't immediately see any way to do that. But it's also probably not worth the effort to even check: I haven't counted but after Lotus Channel Genesis Wave I'm guessing we have at most 7 card slots to build on what we've got. That's probably enough that we can find better ways to fill those slots.
Edit: we also need a way to save the Instants we leave under Spell Queller in between megastage and gigastage transitions. Any way to return Instants from graveyard to hand (that we can't target) should work. Something something Scrivener?
It's possible Nucklavee won't work then, actually, I don't see any instants that reset artifacts and aren't blue. The rest of the megastage and even the gigastage look pretty solid, though, so we just need to find a way to get Fumarole back in hand...
What if we also had a Liliana's Spoils, which can bring back a Fumarole from our library and not much else? We can counter the original hardcast Fumarole with Cephalid Shrine and put it in the library with a Timepiece before the rest of the stack resolves, then a Helix copy of the Spoils can draw it back to hand. Are there any other black cards we can break with that?
2 Psychic Battle
3 Cowardice
4 Horobi, Death’s Wail
5 Bloodbond March
6 Cephalid Shrine
7 Mimic Vat
8 Omnsicience
9 Vedalken Orrery
10 Mirror of Fate
11 March of the Machines
12 Perpetual Timepiece
13 Allay
14 Skull of Orm
15 Mirroworks
16 Su-Chi
17 Farrelite Priest
18 Metallurgeon
19 Battle Cry
20 Retract
21 Make a Stand
22 Swarm Intelligence
23 Spell Queller
24 Skyshroud Archer
25 Skyshroud Archer
26 Panharmonicon
27 Engineered Explosives
28 Engineered Explosives
29 Mishra, Artificer Prodigy
31 Thoughtweft Gambit
32 Synthetic Destiny
33 Fated Return
34 Kederekt Leviathan
35 Roar of the Wurm
36 Pale Recluse
37 Wand of the Elements
38 Tropical Island
39 Walking Atlas
40 Academy Rector
41 Abzan Falconer
42 Dearly Departed
43 Wormfang Behemoth
44 Vile Redeemer
45 WAY TO SAVE QUELLER INSTANTS BETWEEN N-STAGES
46 Liliana's Spoils
47 Spellweaver Helix
48 Worldpurge
49 Fumarole
50 Fumarole
51 Radiant Fountain
52 Glimmerpost
54 Channel
55 Black Lotus
Homarid Spawning Bed and Princess Lucrezia are unsafe, because they make hardcasting Omniscience after the megastage too easy, so we need another way to bin Kederekt Leviathan so we can reanimate it again. We also need to find some way to preserve the Spell Queller instants after we resolve Kederekt Leviathan, so both of those are unsolved problems. Setting aside one slot for each of those, we are left with 5 card slots to work with on top of the gigastage. We have open blue, black, and red mana (though we should prioritize black and red, in case we do need Homarid Spawning Bed lower down), combat phases, and the usual opponent resources.
EDIT: I believe Synthetic Destiny can get the Leviathan back into our graveyard, without breaking anything else.
RE-EDIT: is there ever a point in this deck where we are mana restricted in how we can cast a creature? Not activate it, cast.
If not, Pillar of Origins can produce lots of blue mana for us to cast Spell Queller with, but can't be used to cast Omniscience or anything else we really need. We can use it to save the Queller spells after the megastage. That won't work for the gigastage, though....
RE-RE-EDIT: even better, if we replace Make a Stand with Heroic Intervention (do we go infinite if we make noncreatures indestructible, too?), we can use Firemind's Foresight to get back Retract, Heroic Intervention, and Battle Cry, after they resolve, if we can get them from our graveyard to our library beforehand. Psychic Spiral can reshuffle them in, at the cost of preventing us from using the 53-cards-in-opponent's-library limit.