We do gain a token, but if I recall, we were arranging it so that, in order to get Omniscience back, you had to kill rector and resolve all the way down to a hyperstage layer trigger, so a gain of one Metallurgeon would be meaningless. Phyrexian Bloodstock was the link, I think.
Actually, let me just update the deck again, because the version I wrote out was partially from memory and misses multiple changes.
Edit: Hang on, I just noticed something. If we require a hyperstage-level trigger to restart the next megastage (for instance, a Krosan Constrictor trigger), do we even have to bother deleting the stage-level resources (all the metallurgeon tokens) at all?
Put another way: setting aside storing the trigger with Mimic Vat, if we had a card that said "destroy all Krosan Constrictor tokens and also Omniscience", and we had a way to cast it as a triggered ability, would that go infinite, or would it successfully implement the megastage?
Hmm, yes - I think if we destroy all the Krosan Constrictors in the megastage transition, and we need to use a Psychic Battle trigger from Krosan Constrictor to get Omniscience back, then we would need to restart the top hyperstage, and all the Metallurgeon tokens wind up getting destroyed anyway. But, we do need to handle a Mimic Vat imprinted with a Krosan Constrictor. Perhaps we could force yet another usage of Engineered Explosives.
Similarly, I think the gigastage transition, if it got rid of all green mana, and required restarting the next megastage to restart the gigastage, would not need to destroy all the Metallurgeons and Krosan Constrictors. Or, if it just required a PB trigger from a Krosan Constrictor, would not need to destroy all the Metallurgeons. But, Worldpurge seems to be about the only way to get rid of all mana, so there's not much in the way of alternatives. (Are there any life eliminators besides Worldfire and Sway of the Stars?) I remember someone mentioning Glissa Sunseeker as a way to limit our mana pool, but it doesn't seem like destroying artifacts is something we can move to high up.
Crazy idea: Add Skyfire Kirin, then replace Evacuation with Part the Veil. When we cast Roar of the Wurm, we trigger a whole bunch of Part the Veil casts, each of which will trigger Skyfire Kirin and can destroy Krosan Constrictor! Counter all of the Part the Veils, except for the last.
I was thinking more along the lines of "use a trigger to kill all tokens of the chosen name", which might eventually be worth exploring as an extensible n-stage framework. There's a lot to go on between here and there, of course, not least of which that Mimic Vat is a critical card that also lets us bank resources, but I'm making a note to explore the possibilities at some later time. If there is an extensible n-stage framework in the game, that would seem to be it.
Hmmm, Evacuation and Part the Veil are both interesting. My concern is, is there a way to get the same effect in between Part the Veil casts, given that they don't disappear Omniscience and Vedalken Orrery? It might make for a much more compact megastage, though.
Also, I'm afraid Patron of the Orochi and Verdant Succession are some bad juju: We can play Orochi, legend rule it to death, make a token, Mirror the Patron into the library, then get it back to the battlefield and repeat. So if we switch to Patron, we'll have to change up how we get back our creatures in the hyperstage. That's worth it in the abstract, but in a deck where we may only have 6 slots to work with for adding onto the gigastage, fitting Patron in might cost so much room we no longer have space for a stage.
Okay, so we require a trigger from the hyperstage transition before we are able to use the megastage transition properly again. I think that preserves the stage structure. For the purpose of going infinite I'd worry about the possibility of going through a partial megastage transition forever, but removing Omniscience seems pretty deadly.
The problem I see now is that we don't need a hyperstage transition trigger to get Omniscience back. We don't even need Academy Rector. We just have to imprint Omniscience on a Mimic Vat and put the activation on the stack before we transition. Right next to the tokencreation trigger for Vedalken Orrery. As long as Omniscience remains in exile the Mimic Vat trigger will create a token copy at the correct time, even if the Mimic Vat is gone by then.
Let's bring up an old rules question again. I don't remember if we answered it satisfactory last time it came up, I just know we concluded that it didn't matter for the old deck:
Assume we imprint Omniscience on Mimic Vat. Then we put a Mimic Vat activation on the stack. Next we destroy or bounce the Mimic Vat. Then we use Mirror of Fate to remove Omniscience from the exile zone. Only now do we resolve the Activation.
Do we (1.) get an Omniscience token or (2.) do not get any token?
In case of 1 we could make use of this technique as the standard way to get back Omniscience after every transition. It won't drain any resources, but it also won't need any extra cards. In case of 2 we can't use this as standard, because we would be unable to put a second megastage transition on the stack if Omniscience is still exiled for the transition that is already on the stack. It would be just a line of play with the potential to go infinite, which also means we can't rely on Omniscience recreation to drain resources.
Yeah, that unfortunately makes too much sense to me. On the subject of that other rules question, though, I think the answer there is "no token".
Preface: I am not a judge, all of this could be wrong.
I'm looking at the gatherer rulings for Mimic Vat, and I see this one: "the token created by the second ability will be a copy of whatever is exiled with Mimic Vat at the time the ability resolves". If no card is exiled when the ability resolves, there's nothing for it to choose to copy on resolution, so it makes nothing. That doesn't fix the issue here, of course. For one thing, we can just resolve down to some Metallurgeon activations, use Mirror and Timepiece to get Omniscience back into the graveyard from there, bring it back with Skull of Orm, and replay it for free, and we're back where we started.
So, let's talk about what we need to restart the megastage, in the Kederekt version (the Alara version is safe here I think, because it doesn't get any Explosives bounces we can use). We need 3 Winding Constrictors. We need [c]
Omniscience[/c]. We need Vedalken Orrery. We need some new tokens of our assorted artifacts and enchantments, as well as hasty token copies of Metallurgeon and Krosan Constrictor.
I don't see how to make any of those require a hyperstage resource. We might just have to get the Alara deck working.
On that note, one other option for a creature to kill the Berserker: Mercenaries. We can search up a Berserker, have its champion abilities trigger, exile Dwellers, then fail to exile for the next one down. Berserker gets sacrificed, we get our Dark-Dwellers activation, and then we can Timepiece the Berserker back into the library to be fetched by the next activation.
Another thing we need to do restart the megastage is generate a green mana - unfortunately, that is all too easy to do with Elvish Spirit Guide, but I wonder if there could be some other method of generating green mana that is harder?
The issue regarding Mimic Vat was whether, if the Mimic Vat left the battlefield while still imprinted with the exiled card, the ability would use "last known information" of the Mimic Vat to determine what card or cards could be copied. So I feel like that rule does not settle the matter, since Spellweaver Volute has a similar ruling, but also another ruling saying that if Spellweaver Volute leaves the battlefield, and then the enchanted instant is removed from the graveyard, the Volute ability will still copy the ability. So that does seem like a possibility for the Mimic Vat as well.
I have asked the question in the Q&A forum; so far, two responders have said, no token. So, I guess we will go with that.
Here's a real problem: Channel and Genesis Wave can both be cast with Goblin Dark-Dwellers, so neither of them are safe. Looking at what we have of the Alara deck, though, it doesn't look like anything goes infinite with Flash, so maybe we could have a Flash/Rector start, leading into Words of Wisdom? That would free up even more space for us.
Edit: okay, here's my attempt at a complete Alara list.
I'm using Explosives for 1 to kill Skyshroud Archer, which can target Coastal Drake and gets fetched back easily since it's a green creature, for the hyperstage regeneration. For the megastage, Gloomwidow's Feast frees later token stages. You can repeatedly get soulshift triggers by repeatedly killing Child of Alara, but with no way to get Spirit Guide from exile to graveyard in between, the extra ones aren't helpful. For the gigastage, I made the extra Explosives irrelevant by requiring a megastage-level instant to get our lands back: that's the only way to get two hasty Knight of the Reliquary tokens.
All told, if Flash is safe, that leaves 11 cards to work with. Some token stages are safe, but green and white creatures, multicolored creatures, flyers, and spirits are not. I was able to get 7 stages out of that, plus one layer for Consecrated Sphinx, for what I think is f_w^4+w7+1(?) Damage, where ? Is the number of cards in our opponents library by the time we are done setting up. What have I missed?
Edit: fixed one of the things I missed. I think that reduces the result to f_w^4+w7(X), where X is probably 6.
I thought Flash was a definite possibility, and I guess we may need to use it now.
Concerning the Skyfire KirinAdamaro, First to Desire problem: Perhaps we can avoid the infinite by just using Skyfire Kirin. At some point, we need to create a Mimic Vat token copy of the Kirin. Once we do, we can cast the nontoken Kirin, and it will trigger the token copy, and we can destroy some other creature with CMC 4. (say Skyshroud Poacher) We can counter the Kirin, let a Bloodbond March trigger return it to the battlefield, and then let the Kirin trigger return it to our hand - but if we do, we will destroy the token Kirin. So the best option is to let it sit in the graveyard, waiting for Promised Kannushi to bring it back.
Not sure what the best way to recycle Promised Kannushi is. There was a really nice way to recycle green 1CMC creatures, using Green Sun's Zenith and Izzet Guildmage; but unfortunately, Green Sun's Zenith is a sorcery, and would be too cheap. We could instead go with Izzet Guildmage and Disembowel, but then we wouldn't need Engineered Explosives to destroy the Kannushi. Ranger of Eos? It could be Championed along with Goblin Dark-Dwellers, so that might work.
Looking back again, I see one problem, quite solvable: I left out any way to get Coastal Drake back to hand in the hyperstage. That requires adding a second Drake, probably dragging us down to just 6 stages. However, that seems like the easiest part to improve, since I mostly copied my notes for the final staging from the old deck, and I'm guessing there's a more efficient sequence anyway. We also might be able to instead replace Sphinx and Wisdom with Wheel of Fortune, now that I think of it...
Now that I think of it, Engineered Explosives can destroy some of the end stage creatures, which is no good. I think CMC 3 is safe, since exploding for CMC 3 will destroy all Mimic Vats as well. But it looks like CMC 1,2, and 4 are out. I think we can make CMC 4 safe by eliminating black mana, but either way we can't use Possessed Barbarian and Paragon of Open Graves. Perhaps if Coastal Drake could be replaced by a flier that doesn't cost mana, then we could add another mana and still have CMC 4 safe.
As it is, we can replace Goblin Tunneler by Dwarven Warriors, and still have five stages. We can probably add at least one more stage, I imagine.
Is it actually unsafe to be able to kill them with explosives? Once you kill those creatures, there's no way to get them back from the graveyard without using a Bloodbond March trigger lower down on the stack, and we've got no way of generating new Bloodbond March triggers for that creature until we do. And both Child of Alara and Worldpurge will wipe out the hasty token we get from that, so we have to use it beforehand and can't bank it up.
If not, I don't think we have much hope past that: I only turned to Coastal Drake after exhausting what I think is every possibility. Even still, five stages isn't bad!
We can use the Explosives to kill a stage creature without using a token. So we wind up with an extra token - and while it's true that we can't bank the tokens, we can just create a longer stage with the extra token, so that it will never run out. So yeah, it's unsafe.
Wait, how do we gain life with just megastage resources? Once Radiant Fountain and Glimmerpost are on the battlefield, we can't get them off without Worldpurge, I thought. If we switch to Elvish Pioneer, how do we get the Forests out of the graveyard after we sacrifice them?
Oh huh, you're right, we can't sacrifice those, my mistake. So Knight should be fine.
Hmmmm, that makes an infuriating amount of sense. Though actually, would it be possible to save 4cmc, because at 4cmc you also kill all Vedalken Orrery? I guess not, because you could imprint Orrery on mimic Vat. Damn.
Actually, hang on: if we cut out black at the artifact level, but add in Ancient Ziggurat, that lets us produce the black mana for paragon and barbarian, but not to spend that Mana on Explosives. It's another slot, but is that safe?
And yeah, they both go infinite because they're fliers and can be hit by Gloomwidow's Feast. Hence the annoying Royal Assassin shenanigans to fill out the stages.
Edit: right, right, Ziggurat only casts. Damn. Well, we still might find room for a sixth stage, perhaps built around black or red Mana?
Ohhhhhh, my mistake. Yeah, those sadly don't work. There's an infinite if the creature can target itself: you can just use its own Psychic Battle trigger to put it on Mimic Vat, no Rebuild required. Otherwise, they'd be perfect.
That's true, but then how are we keeping more than one token on the way back down the megastage? We need to have multiple tokens in existence at once. So I'm not sure Baron Sengir works at all, unless you guys have some brilliant anti-legend stage tech u don't know about.
Edit: Oh shoot, I've found a problem. Even though Child of Alara doesn't bounce Engineered Explosives back to our hand, we can still enter the hyperstage with the Explosives in the graveyard, and exit the hyperstage with it in our hand, since we bounce the Explosives during the hyperstage. So, unless we find some way to prevent us from doing the above (I don't see how), we still need to find a way to soak up the extra Explosives.
Yeah, we need to drain at least one Engineered Explosives after the Megastage transition, because we can bounce it with the top hyperstage transition.
Using Forked-Branch Garami to get Elvish Spirit Guide into hand is a cool idea. Though I don't see a way to get Karami and Child of Alara back onto the battlefield. For Verdant Succession they'd need to be in the library and I don't think we can get them there fast enough after Alara goes off.
For the Hyperstage that sacrificing a champion creature to the additional champion triggers tech goes infinite when we can bounce the champion creature. For example with Changeling Berserker in hand we can play it to trigger Bloodbond Marches, counter it, bring it back with the first trigger, champion Goblin Dark-Dwellers and sacrifice the Changeling. Now we get to cast our spells and after that is over we bring the Changeling back to the battlefield with the next Bloodbond March trigger. We get almost the same effect as if we were able to bounce Goblin Dark-Dwellers directly.
Fetching a championer out of the library with i.e. mercnary tech seems fine.
A tap creature chain for the hyperstage tokens doesn't work. With 2 Coastal Drakes we can convert 2 Skyshroud Archer tokens into 3 Coastal Drake tokens: Tap Archer #1 to destroy 1 drake (+1 token) and bounce the other. Play Drake to get Bloodbond March triggers and briong both drakes back to the battlefield. Tap Archer #2 to destroy both drakes (+2 tokens) and bring both back to the battlefield with Bloodbond March triggers from before.
In general we can convert X Archer tokens into 2X-1 Drakes. Too many. If we only have a single Drake card we would only get X-1 Drakes out of X Archers. Too few.
Bringing any creature back would destroy our basic Ackermann stage. We could use that instead of Bloodbond March to bring back Metallurgeons.
Maybe if we use Gravewalker but have the black mana something that is only generated in the hyperstage transition, but then we need to make sure we generate exactly the correct amount of black mana. Seems very difficult to make something like that work. Introducing more parts will offer more potential interactions that could go infinite.
Was there a reason to switch the hyperstage around when using Child of Alara in the Megastage?
Doing so in an attempt to keep creature stages around or not cut off cards we think we might want for the start seems too aggressive to me. We should stay as safe as we can while trying to get working n-stage structures. Any optimizations can come afterwards when we have something that actually works as a baseline. As far as I can tell we are still a long way away from that.
Switching away from Spell Queller was in order to bring back the use of Acorn Harvest, which so far is the only way we know how to force a usage of green mana in the gigastage.
Switching away from Krosan Constrictor was to avoid being able to target Child of Alara and destroy it outside of the megastage transition.
Although, come to think of it, if we used something like Aethermage's Touch to bring back Child of Alara and Forked-Branch Garami, then we could only bring back Child of Alara during a megastage transition. Destroying Child of Alara with say Krosan Constrictor would not then go infinite, since we needed to cast Roar of the Wurm to bring it back, and once we destroyed Child of Alara, any further Aethermage's Touches would not be able to bring it back.
Edit: So, here is my idea:
We will use Cabal Surgeon to bring back Child of Alara and Forked-Branch Garami to the battlefield. To use it, we need to use Engineered Explosives with four charge counters to destroy Cabal Surgeon. We can have two Cabal Surgeons, so that we can return both Child of Alara and Forked-Branch Garami. Using the Explosives for CMC 4 will also destroy Skyfire Kirin, allowing us to create a token copy. We can then use Engineered Explosives for CMC 1 to destroy Promised Kannushi, which will bring Skyfire Kirin back to our hand. We can then cast the Kirin and counter it; this allows us to target creatures with CMC 4. We will destroy one Cabal Surgeon, and bounce the other to get more Bloodbond March triggers; we replay the bounced Cabal Surgeon to bring the other one back to the battlefield. Promised Kannushi can be returned with, say, Ranger of Eos.
As far as I can tell, this handles all of the problems Iijil mentioned. Does this work? What are the remaining problems?
Hmmm, yeah those are both some issues. The second one seems easier than the first, though: in order to continue with the next hyperstage, we not only need an untapped hasty Metallurgeon, we also need an untapped hasty hyperstage creature, let's say Cateran Slaver. We already are using an Engineered Explosives to generate one in the hyperstage transitions (which we still need to figure out), so it can be required to create that.
The first one is a bigger deal. The mercenary shenanigans are nice, but much harder to link together with a death trigger.
We switched hyperstage configurations for the Alara deck because the old version used Engineered Explosives and Make a Stand to generate the hasty token, which no longer works with Child of Alara, which destroys: we'll bank up all our stage and hyperstage creatures. So, we need a death trigger chain that starts with Explosives and ends with a hasty hyperstage token.
Edit: one problem I see is that we can also bring back Elvish Spirit Guide with Kannushi. It's hard for me to tell how much of a problem that is without a list, but it probably means we need another way to generate the green Mana.
One other observation: we can potentially make one Engineered Explosives necessary post-megastage-transition by making that be the only way to get a hasty token copy of our hyperstage creature, if that's something we need to kick start the hyperstage.
Actually, let me just update the deck again, because the version I wrote out was partially from memory and misses multiple changes.
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 Tooth of Ramos
18 Battle Cry
19 Rebuild
20 Make a Stand
21 Swarm Intelligence
22 Goblin Dark-Dwellers
23 Boggart Mob
24 Krosan Constrictor
25 Panharmonicon
26 Engineered Explosives
27 Salvaging Station
28 Winding Constrictor
29 Verdant Succession
30 Spellweaver Volute
31 Thoughtweft Gambit
32 Synthetic Destiny
33 Fated Return
34 Kederekt Leviathan
35 Roar of the Wurm
36 Elvish Spirit Guide
37 Academy Rector
38 Phyrexian Bloodstock
40 Vile Redeemer
41 Spellweaver Helix
42 March of the Returned
43 Worldpurge
44 Acorn Harvest
45 Acorn Harvest
46 Radiant Fountain
47 Glimmerpost
48 Walking Atlas
Again, sorry about the bum list.
Edit: Hang on, I just noticed something. If we require a hyperstage-level trigger to restart the next megastage (for instance, a Krosan Constrictor trigger), do we even have to bother deleting the stage-level resources (all the metallurgeon tokens) at all?
Put another way: setting aside storing the trigger with Mimic Vat, if we had a card that said "destroy all Krosan Constrictor tokens and also Omniscience", and we had a way to cast it as a triggered ability, would that go infinite, or would it successfully implement the megastage?
Similarly, I think the gigastage transition, if it got rid of all green mana, and required restarting the next megastage to restart the gigastage, would not need to destroy all the Metallurgeons and Krosan Constrictors. Or, if it just required a PB trigger from a Krosan Constrictor, would not need to destroy all the Metallurgeons. But, Worldpurge seems to be about the only way to get rid of all mana, so there's not much in the way of alternatives. (Are there any life eliminators besides Worldfire and Sway of the Stars?) I remember someone mentioning Glissa Sunseeker as a way to limit our mana pool, but it doesn't seem like destroying artifacts is something we can move to high up.
Yes, Patron of the Orochi should clear the way for token stages.
Edit: So, if we replaced Kederekt Leviathan with say Evacuation, then we would gain two uses of Engineered Explosives, one from Goblin Dark-Dwellers being bounced back to our hand, and one from a Mimic Vat imprinted with Krosan Constrictor. So the two uses needed for Winding Constrictor could balance it out nicely?
Crazy idea: Add Skyfire Kirin, then replace Evacuation with Part the Veil. When we cast Roar of the Wurm, we trigger a whole bunch of Part the Veil casts, each of which will trigger Skyfire Kirin and can destroy Krosan Constrictor! Counter all of the Part the Veils, except for the last.
Hmmm, Evacuation and Part the Veil are both interesting. My concern is, is there a way to get the same effect in between Part the Veil casts, given that they don't disappear Omniscience and Vedalken Orrery? It might make for a much more compact megastage, though.
Also, I'm afraid Patron of the Orochi and Verdant Succession are some bad juju: We can play Orochi, legend rule it to death, make a token, Mirror the Patron into the library, then get it back to the battlefield and repeat. So if we switch to Patron, we'll have to change up how we get back our creatures in the hyperstage. That's worth it in the abstract, but in a deck where we may only have 6 slots to work with for adding onto the gigastage, fitting Patron in might cost so much room we no longer have space for a stage.
The problem I see now is that we don't need a hyperstage transition trigger to get Omniscience back. We don't even need Academy Rector. We just have to imprint Omniscience on a Mimic Vat and put the activation on the stack before we transition. Right next to the tokencreation trigger for Vedalken Orrery. As long as Omniscience remains in exile the Mimic Vat trigger will create a token copy at the correct time, even if the Mimic Vat is gone by then.
Let's bring up an old rules question again. I don't remember if we answered it satisfactory last time it came up, I just know we concluded that it didn't matter for the old deck:
Assume we imprint Omniscience on Mimic Vat. Then we put a Mimic Vat activation on the stack. Next we destroy or bounce the Mimic Vat. Then we use Mirror of Fate to remove Omniscience from the exile zone. Only now do we resolve the Activation.
Do we (1.) get an Omniscience token or (2.) do not get any token?
In case of 1 we could make use of this technique as the standard way to get back Omniscience after every transition. It won't drain any resources, but it also won't need any extra cards. In case of 2 we can't use this as standard, because we would be unable to put a second megastage transition on the stack if Omniscience is still exiled for the transition that is already on the stack. It would be just a line of play with the potential to go infinite, which also means we can't rely on Omniscience recreation to drain resources.
Preface: I am not a judge, all of this could be wrong.
I'm looking at the gatherer rulings for Mimic Vat, and I see this one: "the token created by the second ability will be a copy of whatever is exiled with Mimic Vat at the time the ability resolves". If no card is exiled when the ability resolves, there's nothing for it to choose to copy on resolution, so it makes nothing. That doesn't fix the issue here, of course. For one thing, we can just resolve down to some Metallurgeon activations, use Mirror and Timepiece to get Omniscience back into the graveyard from there, bring it back with Skull of Orm, and replay it for free, and we're back where we started.
So, let's talk about what we need to restart the megastage, in the Kederekt version (the Alara version is safe here I think, because it doesn't get any Explosives bounces we can use). We need 3 Winding Constrictors. We need [c]
Omniscience[/c]. We need Vedalken Orrery. We need some new tokens of our assorted artifacts and enchantments, as well as hasty token copies of Metallurgeon and Krosan Constrictor.
I don't see how to make any of those require a hyperstage resource. We might just have to get the Alara deck working.
On that note, one other option for a creature to kill the Berserker: Mercenaries. We can search up a Berserker, have its champion abilities trigger, exile Dwellers, then fail to exile for the next one down. Berserker gets sacrificed, we get our Dark-Dwellers activation, and then we can Timepiece the Berserker back into the library to be fetched by the next activation.
Nice interaction with the Berserker. Other options are Seahunter and Skyshroud Poacher. (But not Moggcatcher, I guess)
The issue regarding Mimic Vat was whether, if the Mimic Vat left the battlefield while still imprinted with the exiled card, the ability would use "last known information" of the Mimic Vat to determine what card or cards could be copied. So I feel like that rule does not settle the matter, since Spellweaver Volute has a similar ruling, but also another ruling saying that if Spellweaver Volute leaves the battlefield, and then the enchanted instant is removed from the graveyard, the Volute ability will still copy the ability. So that does seem like a possibility for the Mimic Vat as well.
I have asked the question in the Q&A forum; so far, two responders have said, no token. So, I guess we will go with that.
Edit: Actually, maybe Moggcatcher is fine, if we do not have an easy way to sacrifice the Goblin Dark-Dwellers.
Edit: okay, here's my attempt at a complete Alara list.
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 Perpetual Timepiece
13 Allay
14 Skull of Orm
15 Mirrorworks
16 Obelisk of Esper
17 Metallurgeon
18 Battle Cry
19 Rebuild
20 Swarm Intelligence
21 Goblin Dark-Dwellers
22 Changeling Berserker
23 Coastal Drake
24 Coastal Drake
25 Panharmonicon
26 Engineered Explosives
27 Salvaging Station
28 Skyshroud Archer
29 Verdant Succession
31 Roar of the Wurm
32 Gloomwidow’s Feast
33 Brace for Impact
34 Child of Alara
35 Elvish Spirit Guide
36 Forked-Branch Garami
37 Wormfang Behemoth
38 Vile Redeemer
39 Spellweaver Helix
40 Rude Awakening
41 Worldpurge
42 Acorn Harvest
43 Acorn Harvest
44 Radiant Fountain
45 Glimmerpost
46 Knight of the Reliquary
47 Yavimaya Dryad
48 Breeding Pool
49 Flash
50 Academy Rector
52 Streambed Aquitects
53 Ghosthelm Courier
54 Royal Assassin
55 Devout Chaplain
56 Goblin Tunneler
57 Possessed Barbarian
58 Paragon of Open Graves
59 Tidewater Minion
60 Memory Jar
I'm using Explosives for 1 to kill Skyshroud Archer, which can target Coastal Drake and gets fetched back easily since it's a green creature, for the hyperstage regeneration. For the megastage, Gloomwidow's Feast frees later token stages. You can repeatedly get soulshift triggers by repeatedly killing Child of Alara, but with no way to get Spirit Guide from exile to graveyard in between, the extra ones aren't helpful. For the gigastage, I made the extra Explosives irrelevant by requiring a megastage-level instant to get our lands back: that's the only way to get two hasty Knight of the Reliquary tokens.
All told, if Flash is safe, that leaves 11 cards to work with. Some token stages are safe, but green and white creatures, multicolored creatures, flyers, and spirits are not. I was able to get 7 stages out of that, plus one layer for Consecrated Sphinx, for what I think is f_w^4+w7+1(?) Damage, where ? Is the number of cards in our opponents library by the time we are done setting up. What have I missed?
Edit: fixed one of the things I missed. I think that reduces the result to f_w^4+w7(X), where X is probably 6.
Concerning the Skyfire Kirin Adamaro, First to Desire problem: Perhaps we can avoid the infinite by just using Skyfire Kirin. At some point, we need to create a Mimic Vat token copy of the Kirin. Once we do, we can cast the nontoken Kirin, and it will trigger the token copy, and we can destroy some other creature with CMC 4. (say Skyshroud Poacher) We can counter the Kirin, let a Bloodbond March trigger return it to the battlefield, and then let the Kirin trigger return it to our hand - but if we do, we will destroy the token Kirin. So the best option is to let it sit in the graveyard, waiting for Promised Kannushi to bring it back.
Not sure what the best way to recycle Promised Kannushi is. There was a really nice way to recycle green 1CMC creatures, using Green Sun's Zenith and Izzet Guildmage; but unfortunately, Green Sun's Zenith is a sorcery, and would be too cheap. We could instead go with Izzet Guildmage and Disembowel, but then we wouldn't need Engineered Explosives to destroy the Kannushi. Ranger of Eos? It could be Championed along with Goblin Dark-Dwellers, so that might work.
Edit: Looking good so far!
As it is, we can replace Goblin Tunneler by Dwarven Warriors, and still have five stages. We can probably add at least one more stage, I imagine.
If not, I don't think we have much hope past that: I only turned to Coastal Drake after exhausting what I think is every possibility. Even still, five stages isn't bad!
Edit: here's another problem: Yavimaya Dryad can be killed and brought back with Child of Alara and Verdant Succession, letting the megastage resources gain life. That's fixable with just an Elvish Pioneer and two Forests over the Yavimaya Dryad, but doing it with fewer than 2 wasted slots seems difficult...
I take it that Baron Sengir and Nectar Faerie go infinite?
Wait, how do we gain life with just megastage resources? Once Radiant Fountain and Glimmerpost are on the battlefield, we can't get them off without Worldpurge, I thought. If we switch to Elvish Pioneer, how do we get the Forests out of the graveyard after we sacrifice them?
Hmmmm, that makes an infuriating amount of sense. Though actually, would it be possible to save 4cmc, because at 4cmc you also kill all Vedalken Orrery? I guess not, because you could imprint Orrery on mimic Vat. Damn.
Actually, hang on: if we cut out black at the artifact level, but add in Ancient Ziggurat, that lets us produce the black mana for paragon and barbarian, but not to spend that Mana on Explosives. It's another slot, but is that safe?
And yeah, they both go infinite because they're fliers and can be hit by Gloomwidow's Feast. Hence the annoying Royal Assassin shenanigans to fill out the stages.
Edit: right, right, Ziggurat only casts. Damn. Well, we still might find room for a sixth stage, perhaps built around black or red Mana?
Hmm, Streambed Aquitects is not a Wizard, so we have to redo that part of the stage sequence.
Edit: I suppose we can go with:
Judge of Currents
Streambed Aquitects
Paragon of Gathering Mists
Royal Assassin
Devout Chaplain
Dwarven Warriors
Minion of Tevesh Szat
Edit: Oh shoot, I've found a problem. Even though Child of Alara doesn't bounce Engineered Explosives back to our hand, we can still enter the hyperstage with the Explosives in the graveyard, and exit the hyperstage with it in our hand, since we bounce the Explosives during the hyperstage. So, unless we find some way to prevent us from doing the above (I don't see how), we still need to find a way to soak up the extra Explosives.
The curse of the extra Explosives strikes again!
Using Forked-Branch Garami to get Elvish Spirit Guide into hand is a cool idea. Though I don't see a way to get Karami and Child of Alara back onto the battlefield. For Verdant Succession they'd need to be in the library and I don't think we can get them there fast enough after Alara goes off.
For the Hyperstage that sacrificing a champion creature to the additional champion triggers tech goes infinite when we can bounce the champion creature. For example with Changeling Berserker in hand we can play it to trigger Bloodbond Marches, counter it, bring it back with the first trigger, champion Goblin Dark-Dwellers and sacrifice the Changeling. Now we get to cast our spells and after that is over we bring the Changeling back to the battlefield with the next Bloodbond March trigger. We get almost the same effect as if we were able to bounce Goblin Dark-Dwellers directly.
Fetching a championer out of the library with i.e. mercnary tech seems fine.
A tap creature chain for the hyperstage tokens doesn't work. With 2 Coastal Drakes we can convert 2 Skyshroud Archer tokens into 3 Coastal Drake tokens: Tap Archer #1 to destroy 1 drake (+1 token) and bounce the other. Play Drake to get Bloodbond March triggers and briong both drakes back to the battlefield. Tap Archer #2 to destroy both drakes (+2 tokens) and bring both back to the battlefield with Bloodbond March triggers from before.
In general we can convert X Archer tokens into 2X-1 Drakes. Too many. If we only have a single Drake card we would only get X-1 Drakes out of X Archers. Too few.
Edit: I guess we can't be allowed to bring back the Championing creature too cheaply.
Maybe if we use Gravewalker but have the black mana something that is only generated in the hyperstage transition, but then we need to make sure we generate exactly the correct amount of black mana. Seems very difficult to make something like that work. Introducing more parts will offer more potential interactions that could go infinite.
Goryo's Vengeance would be good.
Was there a reason to switch the hyperstage around when using Child of Alara in the Megastage?
Doing so in an attempt to keep creature stages around or not cut off cards we think we might want for the start seems too aggressive to me. We should stay as safe as we can while trying to get working n-stage structures. Any optimizations can come afterwards when we have something that actually works as a baseline. As far as I can tell we are still a long way away from that.
Switching away from Krosan Constrictor was to avoid being able to target Child of Alara and destroy it outside of the megastage transition.
Although, come to think of it, if we used something like Aethermage's Touch to bring back Child of Alara and Forked-Branch Garami, then we could only bring back Child of Alara during a megastage transition. Destroying Child of Alara with say Krosan Constrictor would not then go infinite, since we needed to cast Roar of the Wurm to bring it back, and once we destroyed Child of Alara, any further Aethermage's Touches would not be able to bring it back.
Edit: So, here is my idea:
We will use Cabal Surgeon to bring back Child of Alara and Forked-Branch Garami to the battlefield. To use it, we need to use Engineered Explosives with four charge counters to destroy Cabal Surgeon. We can have two Cabal Surgeons, so that we can return both Child of Alara and Forked-Branch Garami. Using the Explosives for CMC 4 will also destroy Skyfire Kirin, allowing us to create a token copy. We can then use Engineered Explosives for CMC 1 to destroy Promised Kannushi, which will bring Skyfire Kirin back to our hand. We can then cast the Kirin and counter it; this allows us to target creatures with CMC 4. We will destroy one Cabal Surgeon, and bounce the other to get more Bloodbond March triggers; we replay the bounced Cabal Surgeon to bring the other one back to the battlefield. Promised Kannushi can be returned with, say, Ranger of Eos.
As far as I can tell, this handles all of the problems Iijil mentioned. Does this work? What are the remaining problems?
The first one is a bigger deal. The mercenary shenanigans are nice, but much harder to link together with a death trigger.
We switched hyperstage configurations for the Alara deck because the old version used Engineered Explosives and Make a Stand to generate the hasty token, which no longer works with Child of Alara, which destroys: we'll bank up all our stage and hyperstage creatures. So, we need a death trigger chain that starts with Explosives and ends with a hasty hyperstage token.
Edit: one problem I see is that we can also bring back Elvish Spirit Guide with Kannushi. It's hard for me to tell how much of a problem that is without a list, but it probably means we need another way to generate the green Mana.
One other observation: we can potentially make one Engineered Explosives necessary post-megastage-transition by making that be the only way to get a hasty token copy of our hyperstage creature, if that's something we need to kick start the hyperstage.