Rowan doesn’t copy mana abilities unfortunately Yes our life will be increasing faster than pretty much anything else. If we syphon it all back into biomancer that is(through our damage chains ending on him or one of his clone). If we do it this way every creature that comes in will be larger in p/t than the number of creatures we have already. This was true when I was running cathars crusade but it might not be true anymore. I’m pretty sure if we chain correctly that this will still be true. This is why I chose chorus over the ally life gain creature. Also it gives another wave of mirror/exemplar combo versus a creature.
I think TYS has merit just because it’s a permanent and that’s the easiest thing for us to abuse, tho I could be wrong in that regard.
Also this is my mess of a deck but it’s just an idea. I think as we see inefficient avenues they can potentially be cut all together. I just figured redoing everything was better than just redoing a few things.
I don't actually know the context, cause reading the whole last page is a lot of words, but if it helps, abailities that target can't be mana abilities, nor abilities that trigger off non-mana abilities, so there are some mana producing abilties Rowan can copy if it helps.
Private Mod Note
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Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Zedruu: "This deck is not only able to go crazy - it also needs to do so."
You are definitely right about Rowan, but I am confident that doesn't matter.
Yea life as I see it would grow the most with the following:
Other creatures:highest power to lowest-> cats until you can alternate between one cat and one avatar (with all mizziums changed to become avatars), again highest to lowest -> biomancer, you guessed it, highest to lowest.
I believe that this would result in the largest creatures for the future, which yields larger life gains and more powerful biomancers.
However, there may be some merit to only hitting one biomancer at the end and the rest at the end of the other creature phase.
Yeah I think putting the biomancers at the end im a mini chain of their own to finish things off is probably correct at least in some fashion. It’s pretty how fast the chains actaully accelrate. I did a small one to try to figure out how it would actaully play out and with a Riku, a avatar, a biomancer, a DS, 2 vigor and maybe 1 other creature the 3 chains(assuming only 1 intruder alarm) u get for 1 new non token creature + it’s riku tokens went from 40ish power total to around 12 billion total. It was pretty nuts and the thing and that that doesn’t reset on the next entering tokens, it sticks around and just continues to power up the entire board chain after chain. I’ve thought about adding in a damage doubler. Before it was only effecting our total damage at the end but now it will also effect the chains as well. That way it’s more doing a 4x rather than just a straight 2x.
Deedlit - a small maybe inconsequential note on the initial layer or chains: if we point the outcome of that chain at biomancer the next wave will start at that level x doubling seasons. Also the life gain also effects the chains because Serra avatar is growing with each life gain trigger and that is growing the chains etc. I’m not sure it’s super substantial but it’s actaully growing faster than u think.
What you say is true, but it doesn't affect the growth rate too much; it's still exponential. Let's say we just finished a token creation of A Doubling Seasons. This will eventually create a Master Biomancer with roughly 2^[cA^3] power, where c is much less than A. (c is about (B+1)(C+1), where B is the number of Intruder Alarms and C is the number of Rowan Kenrith emblems.) Our life total will also be at the level of 2^(cA^3). We then proceed to make another token creation of Doubling Seasons, which will create about 2^A Doubling Seasons this time. If you want, we can also create a Serra Avatar, but this is going to turn out not to be better than another Doubling Season. So we start out with Serra Avatar with a power of roughly 2^(cA^3), and we can add +1/+1 counters via Master Biomancer, which adds 2^(cA^3) * 2^(2^A) counters. This is roughly 2^(2^A) since 2^A is so much larger than cA^3 for large A. We can add counters to all our new creatures, which gets 2^2^A for all 2^A of them, and this increases our life by roughly 2^(2^A). So our Serra Angel still winds up at roughly 2^(2^A). We can then start tapping creatures for our damage chain; as I said previously, we can tap (2^A)^2(B+1)(C+1) times, and each time we take the power P of the tapper and add (2^(2^A))P +1/+1 tokens to the target, so each time the power gets multiplied by 2^(2^A). So we wind up with (2^(2^A)) * (2^(2^A))^((2^A)^2(B+1)(C+1)) = 2^[(2^A)^3 (B+1)(C+1) + 2^A]. Note that adding 2^A at the end is a very small difference, so it is roughly 2^(c(2^A)^3) where c = (B+1)(C+1). So now our Master Biomancer tokens and life is roughly 2^(c(2^A)^3), our the same formula over our new Doubling Season total of 2^A. The next token creation will bump our Doubling Seasons to 2^(2^A) and our Master Biomancer to 2^(c(2^(2^A))^3). So our number of creatures will be an ever-growing exponential tower, and the Master Biomancer counters will be an exponential tower of height one more.
TLDR: Life total gains will grow so much more than anything else this game, Diublecast + bonus round instead of TYS.
Well, Doublecast + Bonus Round doesn't work well alone; we need a spell copier like Djinn Illuminatus to make it go. And, while Doublecast + Bonus Round + Djinn Illuminatus is better than just Djinn Illuminatus, it's not as good as Djinn Illuminatus plus two exile-for-retrieval spells. Again, each exile-for-retrieval spell cast implements an incredibly fast-growing function f(x), so rather than using Doublecast + Bonus Round + Djinn Illuminatus to increase this to f(3x), with two more cards we can implement f(f(f(x)), which is much greater.
Actually I disagree since each djinn can only copy the spell a number of times equal to the mana you can pump into at the time.
Double cast + bonus round (which btw doesnt take any cards out the deck as we are 55) also gets recast every iteration of the deck, at an arbitrarily more larger life total to copy double casts.
TYS doesnt come even close because it is limited by the number of permanents we have, but our life far surpassed that long ago. Doublecast and bonus round Re limited by life, which has an incrimental exponential growth each step of the deck.
My point is this:
Double cast + bonus round will get a 3:2 ratio for time twisters (compared to just djinn), an 8:2 for preators, 2 7:2 ratios for 2 ETT, 6:2 for another and 5:2 for the last (with 4 copies of each) and that's just the number of copies you get for that iteration, and as with the just djinn strategy, it grows even bigger each time.
The thing is that you get that many more copies and then get to reiterate the TT part that many more times, which causes our life to grow that many more times, which causes the number of doublecast + bonus round grows that much more as well (times the number of extra TT).
I am pretty sure that copying each spell that many more times will make up for kissing out on one spell slot (which currently even that isn't an issue)
Now if you could find a way to fill the remaining 5 slots with ETT, I may consider that would be better.
None of them return the entity of your graveyard to your hand though. So you lose out on one iteration of the deck per casting (and copies thereof). Mayne we can use some of those to fill out the deck though.
Also even if any of those did, I would still think that doublecast and bonus round could beat it.
I will make an actual theory craft post soon (maybe this weekend, maybe not until Monday).
Also I am just realizing life link doesnt work because vigor is a replacement effect so that portion of it is less better but still the best mana generation by far.
Also since that portion doesnt work all biomancers should go to the end of of the wave.
So I’ve been thinking about what u guys have said and brought to my attention. I think I can make some improvements.
I do think that we want the better mirage mirror, so I think that is just a straight swap. We will have to be careful as it adds some lines of play that could be problematic depending on what we choose to add later.
So because we are adding the better mirror I think we also add TYS. So yes it’s possible that double cast and bonus round can scale better than TYS on its own but with adding our better mirror in we actaully scale way past them. So TYS when combined with the ability to change cards gets kinda nuts. It might actaully make Riku replaceable.
For example we now can do lines of play that optimize our value at all points of the game for all types of spells.
So normally non creature permanent about to be cast: make sure all mizzium transreliquats(MT) are doubling season. Then once all our etbs are on the stack we can swap it again into being the land(if we already have it in play) or something else possibly.
Ins/sorcery: swap MT into TYS before cast. After cast but before resolving, repeat steps from above.
Creature? Again repeat DS into land shift.
With the lines of play now online it makes Riku really only essential as a token maker. If that is the case I think he can be replaced. If we do dual nature we can simply sac the original off before any tokens get made at all so we are free to reuse it on the next iteration through. Just repeat the resolve, hold priority, and sac before tokens come online process each time through. I believe this will mean we get all the tokens and won’t have to sac any of them. This swap saves us 2 mana on every old Riku trigger. That’s 2/3 of a RR(or TT)copy by itself which is pretty decent.
Also we want MT for later once we start casting CC. I think it might be better as TYS on cast but it might be correct specifically in the case of CC to shift it into being precursor golems. This way we get way more waves of CC for our entire team. Not sure which would be better, maybe a mix of both?
I’m most appreciative of the thoughts and suggestions. I was kinda burned out working on it as I kinda felt stuck. Now with a few new ideas it’s kinfa fun to look at again.
Deedlit or anyone else who thinks they have an answer: I jump through a lot of hoops to make chorus a very potent mana generator, do u think I could possibly just skip many or even all of those hoops and just try to go super wide on pure token generation and rely solely on mana echos? It’s fun seeing what chains etc can do but I’m totally up for dropping inefficient coolness for more optimized lines.
Thanks again, jkibbs
Deedlit: thanks for the clarification on the chains. I figured it might not have mattered but thank u for explaining it. When u where explaining the arrow adding in the layers of my deck I was curious in the RR layer. RR actaully gets 2 casts of CC for each copy resolving not just 1(1 from hand another 1 from grave before going back to exile). I didn’t know if that was accounted for but I figured there should have been a 2 in the math somewhere. Again many thanks
Edit: nevermid on dual nature. It’ll get really messy with flectomancer tokens getting sac’ed. Flameshadow contouring might be usable, tho I think Riku might strictly be better than it as it also gets copies of spells too.
Edit: wait I was doing the chains wrong. There’s a way better way to do it. So the ordering I think is still correct but I want to change how we go big on each activation of the damage ability. So currently we have creatures doing x damage y times where x is thier power and y is emblems. But if we indeed target our next creature with the initial damage ability and then when the Rowan emblems kick in we use all of these damage abilities, which importantly will resolve first, to target themselves. This way we actaully get the chain to look way more powerful. We start getting basically the final ability instead of doing just xy damage to deal some sort of weird function that would normally double but instead doubles doubling season number of times and does that emblem number of times and then finally passes all that to the next creature. That’s far more potent.
Deedlit or anyone else who thinks they have an answer: I jump through a lot of hoops to make chorus a very potent mana generator, do u think I could possibly just skip many or even all of those hoops and just try to go super wide on pure token generation and rely solely on mana echos? It’s fun seeing what chains etc can do but I’m totally up for dropping inefficient coolness for more optimized lines.
Unfortunately yes, while the damage chain is really cool, it is not really worth all the cards that it takes to set up. As I mentioned earlier, the damage chain will create mana equal to an exponential tower one higher than the exponential tower describing the number of Doubling Seasons. This is not enough to make a difference in the higher recursive layers. To put things in somewhat simple terms, without the damage chain, casting a noncreature spell with X Rikus results in roughly X^^(X+1) (an exponential tower of height X+1) new token creatures after the entire process is resolved. With the damage chain, casting a White Suns' Zenith with the same resources will get you roughly X^^(X+2) (an exponential tower of height X+2) mana after the entire process is resolved. Will that affect the higher layers? Let's see: in the first scenario, we start with X Rikus. Casting one noncreature spell gets us Y Rikus, where why is more than X^^X but less than X^^(X+1). Casting one more noncreature spell will result in Z Rikus, where Z is more than Y^^Y but less than Y^^(Y+1), so it winds up in between X^^(X^^X) and X^^(X^^(X+1)). Note that the former is X^^^3, and the latter is much less than X^^^4 = X^^(X^^(X^^X)). Another iteration gets us between X^^(X^^(X^^X)) and X^^(X^^(X^^(X+1))), or between X^^^4 and X^^^5. For the second scenario, after the first White Suns' Zenith we will get between X^^(X+1) and X^^(X+2), which is between X^^^2 and X^^^3. After the second White Suns' Zenith we will get between X^^(X^^(X+1)) and X^^(X^^(X+2)), which is between X^^^3 and X^^^4. So in both cases, after N spells we wind up between X^^^(N+1) and X^^^(N+2), so the difference is not enough to be discernable from the perspective of triple arrows. In fact, the difference is a long way away from being discernable, since the difference is between the final number being X+1 or X+2, whereas we would have to go past X^^X to get to X^^^(N+2).
I hope that is at least somewhat understandable.
Deedlit: thanks for the clarification on the chains. I figured it might not have mattered but thank u for explaining it. When u where explaining the arrow adding in the layers of my deck I was curious in the RR layer. RR actaully gets 2 casts of CC for each copy resolving not just 1(1 from hand another 1 from grave before going back to exile). I didn’t know if that was accounted for but I figured there should have been a 2 in the math somewhere. Again many thanks
I was aware of the ability to cast Cackling Counterpart twice per copy of Runic Repetition, but, as above, it doesn't make a difference in the higher layers. The reasoning is the same as before. Casting X copies of Cackling Counterpart takes you from X to about X^^^^^^X. So, with 2 castings of Cackling Counterpart per Runic Repetition copy instead of one, we iterate the function that takes X to X^^^^^^(2X) rather than X^^^^^^X. In a certain sense, this is a MUCH more powerful function, since taking X to X^^^^^X is such a powerful function and X^^^^^^(2X) is applying that function twice as many times. But it is not significant from the viewpoint of 7-arrows. Iterating the function X^^^^^^(2X), we get X^^^^^^(2* X^^^^^^(2X)), which is bigger than X^^^^^^(X^^^^^^(2X)), but MUCH less than X^^^^^^(X^^^^^^(2X+1)). Iterating the function again, we get a number that is bigger than X^^^^^^(X^^^^^^(X^^^^^^(2X))) but much less than X^^^^^^(X^^^^^^(X^^^^^^(2X+1)))). After N iterations, we will get a number between a sequence of N "X^^^^^^" followed by a 2X, and a sequence of N "X^^^^^^"'s followed by a 2X+1. Since 2X and 2X+1 are both much less than X^^^^^^X, the resulting value will be greater than X^^^^^^^(N+1) but much less than X^^^^^^^(N+2). So the 2X at the 6-arrow level is insignifcant at the 7-arrow level.
Hope this helps, and good luck with improving your deck!
Hey guys sorry I haven't been able to post like I said I would. I have had a really crazy week.
I
However, I have made some interesting realizations.
I will try to post tomorrow.
so a lot of carry over from my original list but with combat steps added. need persecutor to keep our opponents alive through our tricks. seize the day adds combat phases for each creature i have in play per golem spread. it gets a bit weird when i start doing non combat loops. because i can't move into combat while i still have exile twisters/twister/runic on the stack i'm torn what to do while those loops are on going. seize gets me 2 casts of identity per combat, which is 4 before i need to get it back with RR so its actually a bit more efficient than just looping CC with runic. idk,there's a ton of interaction going on here. cradle of vitality is similar to serra avatar from my last list, but far more well rounded. it still allows some chains of sorts by pointing the AK abilities at my opponents face which gets me sliver better lifelink triggers and that gets cradle triggers and i can move the counters onto the next one to fire off damage. sanguine bond just amplifies this damage along with all my angelic chorus triggered life gain too. this puts my opponents life total going down at a very fast rate and my life going up quickly as well. this means i'm accelerating my mana from my flip land and also from neheb, the eternal. neheb also gets really good as we move into combat and then into the next main phase(which seize grants). tiloualli's summoner combined with upwelling lets us generate a ton of mana pre combat and then save it as we change phase and then pump it all into the first summoner(btw we can make our mizzium swapper friend can be turned into summoners as we declare attackers and then into doubling season before the summoner ability resolves(btbtw mizzium is gonna be swapping around A LOT, to our benifit) and then into other stuff as triggers start to resolve). these summoner abilities will all go on the stack and we can generate mana between each through echoes and intruder alarm stuff to do similar things to what we did with WSZ in my last build. and this is each combat. we sac a non essential body to our samurai lord to give our team double strike and we get a slew of life gain triggers and also we get a cast of stolen identity in our first damage step. do team and mana building as we move onto regular damage step. again we gain a bunch of life do a bunch of stuff and get ready to move into our next post combat main phase. we get neheb mana(again mizzium is just insane here as we change before leaving combat get a bunch of extra neheb triggers). so looping our twisters and exile twisters is pretty much the same as before but we will be taking breaks as we get to places where the stack is actually fully clear. we will use these breaks to fire off a bunch of accumulated combat phases to dole out a slew of damage and in that advancing our board state even more. we can do a similar thing by spacing out the castings of RR and have combat steps between each of these(if we have an empty stack anyway). this lets us compound our resources as much as possible when we have the opportunity to do so. we will basically have this type of staging as we progress through the playing of the deck. while pointing our AK abilities at our opponents will gain us some ground, getting into combat is where we are gonna start to see the stupid stuff happen. mizzium bouncing around being different things is quite frankly a bigger task than i have chosen to take on just yet, but the possibilities are pretty nuts. i've looked into some of it and it being able to change between triggers resolving makes these weird chains that make our triggers stacks just so much better for us. i'm sure i've missed some interactions already but its just kinda nuts what it adds to the deck. oh, and if we need to win for it to be legal for the challange we can sac our abyssal's off after we have done as much as we can. pretty sure they are, in fact, dead
TLDR; simialr to last time but can now abuse combat. made some changes slimmed some stuff down a bit and then used remaining slots to get as much out of combat as possible. also i could have just added seize the day and persecutor to original list but this feels a bit better than just doing that, although i could be wrong. also i don't see any infinites but i haven't had as much time to go through it as much as my last list, something might have slipped past me. also, a full 60 this time! some cuts where actually really tough.
thanks again to anyone whose taken an interest in my project and can explain the math for what i'm actually doing
Okay, some interesting interactions there. Seize the Day can get a lot of copies and create a lot of new combat phases, and each one can allow Stolen Identity to be cast twice. And then Stolen Identity can get two layers for Precursor Golem. (Seize the Day does not get two layers, since we have to resolve all the copies of Seize the Day before we actually get to process all the new combat phases and gain all those layers worth of new Golems.) So, if we feed this into Teferi, Temporal Mage / White Suns' Zenith / Ojutai Exemplars, we would wind up with one more layer then before, getting us to 2^^^^^^^^^^22 (10 arrows).
However, without Teferi and White Suns' Zenith, I don't see anything as powerful to do with Stolen Identity; we can create more Mizzium Transreliquats, which can turn into Doubling Seasons or whatever we need it to, but that's just the first layer. The other thing we can do with Seize the Day is to get combat phases we can use for Tilonalli's Summoner and Neheb, the Eternal. But this doesn't look as powerful either. Let's let C,D,E,I,X be the number of Cradle of Vitality's, Doubling Seasons, Essence Slivers, Intruder Alarms, and creatures that we have. (Of course we can turn all our Transreliquats into the appropriate creatures at the appropriate times.) Let T be the number of extra mana we spend on Tilonalli's Summoner. Then we get T*2^D new creatures, each of which triggers I alarms, each of which untaps X creatures, so we get X*I*T*2^D untaps in all. For each untap, we can tap it to deal P damage where P is its power; this triggers E Essence Slivers, each of which triggers C Cradle of Vitalities, each of which adds P*2^D +1/+1 counters to some creature, which can itself be tapped. So the power P of one creature tranfers to a power P*(E*C*2^D) to the next creature. This happens X*I*T*2^D times, so after the damage chain is complete we go from a creature of power P to a creature of power P*(E*C*2^D)^(X*I*T*2^D), and we get about that much life, our opponent loses about that much life, and we get access to about that much mana. Note that this is just multiplication, albeit by a relatively big number. Each combat phase we also get to cast Stolen Identity twice, so our number of creatures gets 3 layers worth if improvement (i.e. if we have X creatures before, we will get about X^^^X creatures afterwards), but the damage chain itself is just an exponential chain 2 levels higher, so it will not be fundamentally bigger.
So, as far as I can see this gets a smaller final damage number than before, although that could be fixed by readding in Teferi, Temporal Archmage and White Suns' Zenith.
Always great to see more minds working on this challenge!
I haven't been able to go all the way through your write-up yet, but I have a few suggestions. Feel free to ignore these if I'm actually just missing a major interaction:
1. I see a lot of effects that are doubled up in your deck. You have Angelic Chorus, but also Essence Sliver to gain ever greater amounts of life. You have Thousand-Year Storm, Djinn Illuminatus, and Riku of Two Reflections to make copies of spells. This is usually less efficient than finding a way to only use one, and then spending the remaining slots on cards to repeatedly copy it.
Take spell casting, for example. When you cast a Cackling Counterpart, you get X triggers from Riku (one for each Riku), Y triggers from Thousand-Year Storm, and Z triggers from Djinn Illuminatus. But since all those triggers go on at the same time, only one of them will really matter for your total. One of them (probably Thousand-Year Storm or the Djinn) will dominate, and the other ones won't matter. It'll be like that card slot was wasted.
If you look at the current list for our challenger (page 72, I think?), this is why it's almost all singletons. We're trying to cram as many different effects in as possible. And while there are a few that are similar (Child of Alara and Worldfire), we've found some way to exploit the small differences between them, so they do a different job.
2. While I love the Moonmist/Azor's Gateway combo, I'm not sure it's necessary here. You have Mana Echoes, and you are making a LOT of tokens. And with Mycosynth Lattice out, you don't have to worry about colors. Let me put it this way: most of the mana you're spending will either be on Mirage Mirror/Mizzium Transreliquat, or on copy making abilities. Every copy trigger you have costs 2 mana, and each creature entering the battlefield will make way, WAY more than 2 mana. So I'm not sure why that bit is important. Even later on, the mana from Mana Echoes will dwarf the amount from just tapping Azor's Gateway.
3. Speaking of Mycosynth Lattice... cards like it seem useful but can secretly be real traps in this challenge. It closes off a lot of options for adding more cards on top of your deck to add more of those juicy juicy arrows. For example, it would be really nice to have something like Aegis Automaton in your deck. You could use it to bounce your creatures back, then replay them to make lots of copies, Intruder Alarm untaps, etc. Then, you could have some way to produce a lot of white mana (Serra's Sanctum, perhaps?). Then, finally, you have some way to turn combat steps into untapping your Serra's Sanctum. But you can't, because the color of mana doesn't matter to your deck.
Every deck in this challenge that I've ever seen boils down to the same basic principle. They're all really good at taking some resource (Draw-7s in your deck), and turning that into lots of some other resource (combat steps, I think), and turning that into lots of ANOTHER resource (creature tokens?), and so on, until eventually you're turning something into damage. The more of those resources you can fit between whatever you're starting with and "damage", the more you'll deal. Mycosynth Lattice makes that harder, because it cuts off a lot of resources before you start. You can't count white mana, blue mana, red mana, etc. separately.
Switching back to our challenger, Deedlit, two things:
1. Your most recent list looks pretty neat, but I'm not sure how we reuse Perpetual Timepiece. That seems fixable, but it's gonna be tricky. I also don't see a way to actually bounce or killGodtoucher in the hyperstage. What am I missing?
2. I've been tinkering with that Anaba Ancestor/Chalice of the Void idea we had a while back, and I might have found a way to make it work. I'm still vetting it myself, because the stack has gotten /really/ complicated in the hyperstage, but if I don't find anything I'll post my new list and how it works some time next week!
I also think we should all at some point take a look at what we can do in Standard now. I haven't put much serious thought into it, but Thousand-Year Storm seems ripe for abuse. We probably won't be able to match the insanity that was last rotation's deck, but that was a fluke anyways.
With Soul Foundry, we don't need to actually bounce or kill Godtoucher! It is enough to bring it from the graveyard/library into our hand, so that we can imprint it onto Soul Foundry. So Wirewood Herald will do the trick. I just noticed, though, that if we use the Herald to bring back Godtoucher, we won't be able to bring back the Herald as well. So I guess we can go back to using Verdant Succession, which will require rejuggling the end stage sequence. Using double Heralds plus Assembly Hall is another possibility.
I'm certainly interested in what we can do in Standard, although I'm not quite familiar with exactly which cards are in Standard, and it's something of a pain to keep checking which cards are in Standard and which aren't. So I'll let you take the lead Stakfish, and I'll contribute what I can.
Interesting. I’m quite surprised the newer build didn’t top out even to where the old build was. I’m not gonna spend too much time looking to see where the math might be off because I’m already making improvements and some pretty major changes. I do really like the idea of multiple combat steps though and that will certainly be carrying over into the next build. While I’m working on that build I’m always just jotting down interesting cards I see and wonky interactions I can think of to try and break in some way(lol, not too far tho :)). I really do find this project very interesting and am doing my best to try to wrap my head around some of the stuff you guys are talking about.
Stak: yeah I’m kinda seeing that about overly redundant pieces. There’s a bit more separation than it seems but I get your point. I’m beginning to feel that TYS might not be that great in my more combat driven lists. Precursor + everything being golems actually scales much faster on single target spells than TYS does(1 PG = 1 copy per thing I have per cast and TYS = per cast I get played ins/sor count copies, which I will always have way more things in play than spells cast). As of right now I’m going to keep my lattice/march combo just because it does make PG so incredibly good. I may at some point be able to move away from that start but for now it’s too easy and compact to let go just yet. Aegis goes infi in my deck but not because of lattice. Basically anything that can be bounced, or retrieved, by a copy of itself creates an infinite mana loop(and infi etb) which lead to unbound damage. It’s why I can only run 1 real regrowth effect(currently timetwister) and the rest have to be self-exiling.
I do think MT is really, really powerful. It’s very mana hungry to do some of it’s potential chains but it’s payoff is huge. Because of the blink combo I have it’s very easy for me to amass a very large number of my swapper as the deck just plays out it’s engine pieces. So a small example of it’s chaining would be this: pre cast of Single target spell: swap all MT into being PG, once all PG spread triggers are on the stack but before they start to resolve we swap MT again, this time into doubling seasons, now our first of the spread copies resolves and all resulting etbs have been put onto the stack including all angelic chorus triggers, before AC triggers resolve we swap MT into being cradle of vitality's, we can even swap back between cradle and DS between cradle triggers resolving to get even better buffs. Obviously the full chain for all etbs is even more nuts but this just illustrates that MT can really be very useful at pretty much every stage of our stacks be it etb or even cast or maybe even larger still if I can figure out how to do it. It is undeniably mana hungry so I’m looking at how much mana I need to set aside to actaully be able to fully chain all MT and if that cost is too high and how I can reduce that cost if possible without going infinite.
I am looking at trying to go more convoluted as I go. I realized early on that more steps meant larger eventual payoff. That being said being more convoluted just makes processing how it works that much more problematic and harder to be sure if I’ve pushed too far. I do have a few more abstract things I’m working on trying to get written down but building engines that are 10-15 cards deep can get quite messy and frustrating so those are more slow burn sub projects I hope to slowly work on as I focus on more immediate things like my current list. Hopefully there is enough cross pollination with my ideas that I can do a little bit of both and move them all forward simaltanioulsy.
I’m trying to play red rituals and soulfire grand master(SGM) in a list together. SGM doesn’t allow me to loop rituals infinitely if they aren’t being cast from hand. My question is if I get complete control of luck/draws etc can I use that ability to ensure I never have a ritual to loop in my hand? Or if does it work that if I could choose a path that goes infinite(like a ritual in my opening hand) the deck is deemed illegal?
FWIW the deck won’t be able to draw cards at all so all I need to avoid is the rituals in my opening hand. I haven’t even figured out if I could get them to loop infinitely but I’m pretty sure I can if I did decide to have one of the rituals in my opener.
If there is no maximum to the amount of damage your deck can deal, using any possible sequence of play, then the deck is illegal. So you can't just make a choice that prevents the deck from going infinite, the deck will still be illegal.
J_kibbs: That would be infinite, yes. The formal rule we have is basically, "you give me your deck, and I pick a number. If there is a line of play in your deck that can deal more damage than the number I picked, no matter what my number was, it goes infinite".
In other words, there may be ways you can set up your opening hand that are only finite. But if there is even one way to go infinite, even if it's not the one you intended, the deck is disqualified.
As your deck becomes more complex, it will help it if you can break it down into distinct stages. That way, it's not one group of 60 crazy cards, but 10 groups of 6 crazy cards. If you look at our list over the last several pages, as the cards inside it change, the shape of the list as we post it here doesn't. You've got a group of 12 engine cards to start, then a module to make copies of enchantments, and then a series of modules that feed into each other in different ways.
Another advantage of this structure is, when you make it that way, if one of those modules has a problem and goes infinite in a way you didn't realize, you don't have to do as much thinking to get it all working again - you just cut that module and replace it with another one
One last thing: as you look at improvements, something you want to think about is whether what you're doing is meaningfully impacting the total. Let's say you added a creature like Thromok the Insatiable and a way to grant haste to your creatures. That would square the amount of damage you dealt at the end, which sounds great. But the numbers we're talking about, like 2^^^^5 and such, are so large that we actually can't describe the difference between that number and that number squared. We just discount differences that small. So even though you would have vastly improved the deck, you won't have changed the damage total as far as this challenge is concerned.
I think that's why your new deck doesn't deal as much damage in the last one. You're optimizing, and doing a great job at finding new interactions, but those new interactions aren't happening in the right order or with the right size to matter for the final total.
@Deedlit: I haven't done that thorough of a search for infinites because I'm still vetting this Anaba Ancestor deck, but that deck looks good for the most part! Thanks for the clarification on Soul Foundry.
My Anaba Ancestor list only has one stage more than your list and the same number of layers, so it looks like we are (finally!) converging on a damage total for the gigastage deck, somewhere in the range of f_{w^4+wX+5}(n), 5<X<8. Not bad for government work
Edit: I think creatures we can kill with Explosives are still unsafe in that list. We can still use the topmost layer to make Bloodbond March triggers, then crack Explosives to make a token copy. That should only hurt the stage configuration at the top, though, not the meat of the deck.
Past versions of this deck have relied on making the graveyard, exile, and library essentially interchangeable zones. That’s been useful to us in the past, but it makes Ancestor go infinite. This version prevents that by severely limiting the ways different cards can move between zones. Here are the basics:
Any creature (or card that has become a creature) dying can easily be moved from the graveyard to exile via Mimic Vat.
Cards in exile can always be moved into the library, by activating a Mirror of Fate token. Additionally, if they are imprinted under a Mimic Vat, they can be moved back into the graveyard with the following process: kill a green enchantment like Bloodbond March, imprinting the enchantment on the same Mimic Vat and triggering Verdant Succession. Mimic Vat dumps the old card back in the graveyard. Activate Mirror of Fate, putting the green enchantment back in the library. Use a Verdant Succession trigger to put it back on the battlefield.
Cards in the library can be moved into the graveyard by tapping a Millikin. This requires a hasty token copy of Millikin, which constrains how often you can to this early on. Crucially, this is the only way to get back instants and sorceries post-exile: you shuffle them back in with Mirror, then mill them with Millikin.
Finally, noncreature artifacts can be exiled from the graveyard with a hasty Myr Welder token. This is the only way to get back an Engineered Explosives after cracking it: you exile it with a hasty Myr Welder, shuffle it back in with Mirror of Fate, and pull it back out with a Muzzio, Visionary Architect activation.
The early stages of the combo are mostly the same, with the exception that we now counter spells using Chalice of the Void, not Cephalid Shrine. Most of the time, Chalice will be set to 4. This conflicts with Bloodbond March (which we can get back with Verdant Succession instead), and Vedalken Orrery (which we only have to copy at times when Chalice isn’t set to 4).
For the stage creature, we use Clockwork Gnomes. We can’t use a 2-drop or 3-drop, because if it were, we would be able to use Chalice on both it and one of Millikin and Myr Welder, and we can’t allow the deck to generate Bloodbond March triggers for either creature that cheaply.
The Hyperstage creature is a 2-drop, so for each transition, we have to safely go from a Chalice-on-4 configuration to a Chalice-on-2 configuration, and back, to rebuild our token base. That means resolving Hurkyl’s Recall twice. You also can’t resolve any of the spells in the hyperstage transition while Chalice of the Void is on 2: both Hurkyl’s Recall and Goryo’s Vengeance cost 2 mana.
First, we activate the Anaba Ancestor, targeting Changeling Hero and putting N Psychic Battle triggers on the stack. We use the Battle triggers to repeatedly bounce Changeling Hero, blinking Goblin Dark-Dwellers. Goblin Dark-Dwellers casts Goryo’s Vengeance each time, returning Muzzio, Visionary Architect (a copy with haste).
Crucially, we have 2 Muzzios. When we reanimate one nontoken, the other should already be out. That means every other Vengeance cast gets us 3 Muzzio activations: one from the new nontoken, one from the token made with Mimic Vat from the old nontoken, and one from the token we get when the new nontoken gets legend-ruled. We use two to profit one Gnomes Token, and the last one to get a Millikin token. We use the Millikin token to mill Goryo’s Vengeance, allowing us to do it again.
To get back the second Muzzio, we use an additional Battle Trigger from the Vengeance above to kill Millikin again, without bringing it back or tapping it. Then, the next Dark-Dwellers cast brings back the nontoken Muzzio, legend-ruling the token. We tap the token Millikin to mill Vengeance again, then activate the nontoken Muzzio to get back the nontoken Millikin. We are now back where we started, minus two Psychic Battle triggers on Anaba Ancestor and plus one Clockwork Gnomes token.
For the Hyperstage Transition, you need Engineered Explosives on the battlefield, at least 5 Psychic Battle triggers in the Anaba Ancestor batch, an untapped Muzzio, and a lot of floating mana.
First, we resolve a Battle trigger, blinking Dark-Dwellers and casting Hurkyl’s Recall. Before it resolves, we replay Changeling Hero, championing Vedalken Orrery instead. Hurkyl’s Recall resolves, and all our artifacts (including Chalice and Explosives) get bounced.
Next, we resolve another trigger, bouncing the Hero and getting back Vedalken Orrery. From there, we replay Mirrorworks, Mimic Vat (make a token, 2 Vats) Karn, Silver Golem, Mirror of Fate, etc. We cast Chalice for 2, then play both Millikin and Anaba Ancestor into it, getting Bloodbond March triggers. We play Explosives for 2 (we can add extra colorless to the X to prevent it getting countered) and crack it, killing both Millikin and Ancestor and putting them on both our vats. We make token copies of each, then get them back with Bloodbond March.
Note: This is also where any additional copies of Ancestor come in. If we have untapped Ancestor tokens lying around, we can activate them to create a normal stage chain before cracking Explosives. While we only have 2 Mimic Vats and 1 token Mirror of Fate, we can chain them by using spare Psychic Battle activations in our stack to blink Changeling Hero, using it to blink Mimic Vat and Mirror of Fate as needed to get more tokens.
So far so good, but now Explosives is in our graveyard. We can only get it back from the library, and we can only put it in the library from exile. To exile it, we need to activate a Myr Welder token, which we can’t possibly have at this point: Hurkyl’s Recall bounced them all, and we have no way to target Welder to get one back.
In other words, we have to resolve back down the stack to an earlier Gnomes activation to proceed!
We only have one other resource to use up, the untapped Muzzio. Its role is resetting Chalice. We have to bounce Chalice again before we reach the Psychic Battle triggers from the next Hyperstage down, otherwise we won’t be able to set it to 4. But we can only bounce it with Hurkyl’s Recall, which costs 2. Chalice is on 2 now, so Recall will get countered. We solve this by animating Chalice with Karn. Chalice becomes a 0/0, dies, and gets exiled under a Mimic Vat. We use a Mirror of Fate to put it back in the library, then activate our last Muzzio to put the Chalice back on the field, now with 0 counters.
After that, we use a battle trigger to bounce the nontoken Ancestor again, then use the last two to repeat the Hurkyl’s Recall/Vedalken Orrery process.
After that, we can use Goryo’s Vengeance to get back Muzzio again, but we still won’t have any Clockwork Gnomes. No Gnomes, no hasty Millikins to bin Vengeance again. This will actually fizzle the entire combo.
For the Megastage transition, we let Child of Alara kill Changeling Hero, getting back Orrery and letting us tuck Centaur Safeguard back in the deck to find it again. That means Hero is dead after the megastage transition. We need a Bloodbond March trigger to get it back, which means that at some point Chalice had to be set to 5. Putting Chalice on 5, then back on 4 without letting triggers from when it was on 5 resolve requires at least 2 Anaba Ancestor tokens, so that should be safe.
Whew, that's a lot of stuff. If all that works, and that's a reasonably big "if", that's 7 stages above the gigastage, 2 layers for Reality Spasm and Precursor Golem (we can't use Tribal Unity with no enchantment copiers), plus the same 2 layers from combat+draw, plus World at War. There may be a way to cram an eighth stage in there, but I haven't been able to find one.
Ah right, I forgot for a moment we still needed Mimic Vat in the Soul Foundry deck, in order to make more enchantments. So that kills off any later 1,2, or 4 CMC creatures. Does anyone have an idea for how to make lots of enchantments without Mimic Vat? Dual Nature is off the table, since we have Brudiclad, Telchor Engineer.
Ooh, that latest deck looks very nice! I don't see any immediate problems. One thing that I'm worried about: We have to make sure that we don't gain any Anaba Ancestor tokens by going through the megastage, but we also have to make sure that we don't lose any either. Otherwise, we lose a token or tokens each time we go to the higher hyperstage and back down again, so we won't get the full recursion going. Of course, it is okay to tap one or more Anaba Ancestor tokens to complete the transition, so long as we get them back later.
It does seem like there is plenty of room for an eighth stage. Also, white mana is still left open. White mana can target white creatures, green creatures, Humans, Birds, Clerics, Merfolk, or Kithkin - those are all I can remember. I can't see anything that will work though. Too many mana producers are in the 1 or 2 CMC range, or green. It's too bad that Wilderness Hypnotist is a Wizard, as well.
Is Verdant Succession indispensable for this deck? It's really good, but it does mess up green for the end stages.
Edit: No wait, having copies of Hurkyl's Recall won't help, since resolving one copy will bring all copies of Vedalken Orrery back to our hand, and we need to wait for a trigger to bring Vedalken Orrery back. So it seems like we can have Thousand-Year Storm and Sphinx's Revelation.
And sadly, spell copier effects are still unsafe there. The problem is that the copies won't get countered by Chalice of the Void, so they'll still resolve. And if we can resolve a resolve a Hurkyl's Recall through a Chalice on 2 during the Hyperstage transition, we can bank a Muzzio into the next level down, which lets us go infinite.
I'm not sure if it changes the calculus for the megastage transition yet, but we'll also need to put Chalice on 3 temporarily, to keep Phantatog around. If that does cause a fizzle, we can just go back to Allay. Worldfire will exile it, but I'm pretty sure we can cast it from our graveyard with Goblin Dark-Dwellers and buy it back. It's not like flashback where it gets exiled no matter what.
For the eighth stage, one card I've had in my sights for a while is Sea Snidd. It can generate any color of mana, and is immune to everything but Xathrid Gorgon. If we can find a way to turn white mana into "target blue creature", that could be number 8.
It'd be a lot easier if the gigastage keyed of white mana instead of black, and we could use "target nonblack creature" to differentiate at this level, but as far as I can tell there is not a single sorcery cmc>3 in the game that you can innately cast from the graveyard using white mana plus some amount of blue, green, and generic.
All good points. It still might be nice if there were another way to get Centaur Safeguard back. Assembly Hall always comes to my mind, but I guess it will allow Muzzio to go infinite once we get one Muzzio in the graveyard, one in our hand and a token copy on the battlefield, which shouldn't be too hard to manage. Perhaps some way to use the fact that Centaur Safeguard is multicolored? Reborn Hope and Supply // Demand would be nice ways to bring it back, except they are cheap sorceries. It can get various properties with the Maze cards, including flying...
We can switch black mana with red mana if we so desire - the Simian Spirit Guide / Goblin Kites stage is nice, but it's worth considering all avenues.
We can use it to target any blue creature, but only if there's an island out. For us to have an island, we need to have already activated a Sea Snidd to turn Bayou into an island. So it goes: tap the Snidd to make an island, do a mini-gigastage to cast Reign of Chaos, get N Psychic Battles on Sea Snidd, use them to bounce/kill Old Man of the Sea and the Snidd as needed?
It seems like it should work, but I don't think we've ever tried a stage where the battle triggers can be separated from the tap ability.
As for Skull of Orm... don't we really need a way to make copies of Psychic Battle? otherwise I'd say go for it, cause we can already make as many as we want of Bloodbond March, but with no spell copiers Psychic Battle is the only thing building up our hyperstage and megastage.
That's gonna get us somewhere in the realm of f_{w^4+w8+2}(3), I'm guessing. Assuming we can get it off the ground. Recasting Reforge the Soul more than once will be much more difficult this time, since we need to somehow generate a hasty Millikin to get a flashback spell back.
Nice, that's very clever. I don't see a problem with being able to delay the targeting ability after the tapping ability, but I guess it's something we should keep an eye on.
For the ending layers, it will be better to have Consecrated Sphinx rather than Precursor Golem, since then we will be able to get through the deck much more quickly, and probably the last five Reforges will be able to access the whole deck. The first Reforge draws seven cards, of which four can be two copies of Spider Spawning, Spellweaver Helix, and Consecrated Sphinx. Then we still have three more cards, and the second Reforge allows us to draw 21 more cards, which should be enough to get going; if we need to, we can get the third Reforge cast by drawing another Spider Spawning. (It would be nice to get another copy of Consecrated Sphinx for the second cast, but I don't see an easy way to do that with the remaining three cards.)
Edit: Unfortunately, I have found a serious problem with the deck, and I don't know how to fix it. Each time we resolve Child of Alara or Worldfire, we eliminate all of our permanents, so we need to find a way to build it back up somehow. We do have all the floating mana that we can carry over, so the idea was the use this to rebuiild our enchantments. This was fine when we were using Allay to bounce Copy Enchantment to make more Dual Nature copies. But, now, creating more enchantments relies crucially on our Mimic Vats and Mirror of Fates. So we will only be able to create a relatively small number of enchantments, and the lion share of our mana is left floating.
Cogwork Assembler won't work because it targets and gives haste. If we could use Thousand-Year Storm, that should work once we resolve down to the next casting of an instant/sorcery, since the storm count keeps rising throughout a hyperstage/megastage. But it looks like this deck relies on not having any spell copiers around.
Rowan doesn’t copy mana abilities unfortunately Yes our life will be increasing faster than pretty much anything else. If we syphon it all back into biomancer that is(through our damage chains ending on him or one of his clone). If we do it this way every creature that comes in will be larger in p/t than the number of creatures we have already. This was true when I was running cathars crusade but it might not be true anymore. I’m pretty sure if we chain correctly that this will still be true. This is why I chose chorus over the ally life gain creature. Also it gives another wave of mirror/exemplar combo versus a creature.
I think TYS has merit just because it’s a permanent and that’s the easiest thing for us to abuse, tho I could be wrong in that regard.
Also this is my mess of a deck but it’s just an idea. I think as we see inefficient avenues they can potentially be cut all together. I just figured redoing everything was better than just redoing a few things.
I don't actually know the context, cause reading the whole last page is a lot of words, but if it helps, abailities that target can't be mana abilities, nor abilities that trigger off non-mana abilities, so there are some mana producing abilties Rowan can copy if it helps.
Yea life as I see it would grow the most with the following:
Other creatures:highest power to lowest-> cats until you can alternate between one cat and one avatar (with all mizziums changed to become avatars), again highest to lowest -> biomancer, you guessed it, highest to lowest.
I believe that this would result in the largest creatures for the future, which yields larger life gains and more powerful biomancers.
However, there may be some merit to only hitting one biomancer at the end and the rest at the end of the other creature phase.
What you say is true, but it doesn't affect the growth rate too much; it's still exponential. Let's say we just finished a token creation of A Doubling Seasons. This will eventually create a Master Biomancer with roughly 2^[cA^3] power, where c is much less than A. (c is about (B+1)(C+1), where B is the number of Intruder Alarms and C is the number of Rowan Kenrith emblems.) Our life total will also be at the level of 2^(cA^3). We then proceed to make another token creation of Doubling Seasons, which will create about 2^A Doubling Seasons this time. If you want, we can also create a Serra Avatar, but this is going to turn out not to be better than another Doubling Season. So we start out with Serra Avatar with a power of roughly 2^(cA^3), and we can add +1/+1 counters via Master Biomancer, which adds 2^(cA^3) * 2^(2^A) counters. This is roughly 2^(2^A) since 2^A is so much larger than cA^3 for large A. We can add counters to all our new creatures, which gets 2^2^A for all 2^A of them, and this increases our life by roughly 2^(2^A). So our Serra Angel still winds up at roughly 2^(2^A). We can then start tapping creatures for our damage chain; as I said previously, we can tap (2^A)^2(B+1)(C+1) times, and each time we take the power P of the tapper and add (2^(2^A))P +1/+1 tokens to the target, so each time the power gets multiplied by 2^(2^A). So we wind up with (2^(2^A)) * (2^(2^A))^((2^A)^2(B+1)(C+1)) = 2^[(2^A)^3 (B+1)(C+1) + 2^A]. Note that adding 2^A at the end is a very small difference, so it is roughly 2^(c(2^A)^3) where c = (B+1)(C+1). So now our Master Biomancer tokens and life is roughly 2^(c(2^A)^3), our the same formula over our new Doubling Season total of 2^A. The next token creation will bump our Doubling Seasons to 2^(2^A) and our Master Biomancer to 2^(c(2^(2^A))^3). So our number of creatures will be an ever-growing exponential tower, and the Master Biomancer counters will be an exponential tower of height one more.
Well, Doublecast + Bonus Round doesn't work well alone; we need a spell copier like Djinn Illuminatus to make it go. And, while Doublecast + Bonus Round + Djinn Illuminatus is better than just Djinn Illuminatus, it's not as good as Djinn Illuminatus plus two exile-for-retrieval spells. Again, each exile-for-retrieval spell cast implements an incredibly fast-growing function f(x), so rather than using Doublecast + Bonus Round + Djinn Illuminatus to increase this to f(3x), with two more cards we can implement f(f(f(x)), which is much greater.
Double cast + bonus round (which btw doesnt take any cards out the deck as we are 55) also gets recast every iteration of the deck, at an arbitrarily more larger life total to copy double casts.
TYS doesnt come even close because it is limited by the number of permanents we have, but our life far surpassed that long ago. Doublecast and bonus round Re limited by life, which has an incrimental exponential growth each step of the deck.
My point is this:
Double cast + bonus round will get a 3:2 ratio for time twisters (compared to just djinn), an 8:2 for preators, 2 7:2 ratios for 2 ETT, 6:2 for another and 5:2 for the last (with 4 copies of each) and that's just the number of copies you get for that iteration, and as with the just djinn strategy, it grows even bigger each time.
The thing is that you get that many more copies and then get to reiterate the TT part that many more times, which causes our life to grow that many more times, which causes the number of doublecast + bonus round grows that much more as well (times the number of extra TT).
I am pretty sure that copying each spell that many more times will make up for kissing out on one spell slot (which currently even that isn't an issue)
Now if you could find a way to fill the remaining 5 slots with ETT, I may consider that would be better.
All Suns' Dawn
Bound // Determined
Flood of Recollection
Ill-Gotten Gains
Nostalgic Dreams
Treasured Find
Vengeful Rebirth
Volcanic Vision
Wildest Dreams
Woodland Guidance
So that's another 40 cards we could add right there.
Also even if any of those did, I would still think that doublecast and bonus round could beat it.
I will make an actual theory craft post soon (maybe this weekend, maybe not until Monday).
Also I am just realizing life link doesnt work because vigor is a replacement effect so that portion of it is less better but still the best mana generation by far.
Also since that portion doesnt work all biomancers should go to the end of of the wave.
I do think that we want the better mirage mirror, so I think that is just a straight swap. We will have to be careful as it adds some lines of play that could be problematic depending on what we choose to add later.
So because we are adding the better mirror I think we also add TYS. So yes it’s possible that double cast and bonus round can scale better than TYS on its own but with adding our better mirror in we actaully scale way past them. So TYS when combined with the ability to change cards gets kinda nuts. It might actaully make Riku replaceable.
For example we now can do lines of play that optimize our value at all points of the game for all types of spells.
So normally non creature permanent about to be cast: make sure all mizzium transreliquats(MT) are doubling season. Then once all our etbs are on the stack we can swap it again into being the land(if we already have it in play) or something else possibly.
Ins/sorcery: swap MT into TYS before cast. After cast but before resolving, repeat steps from above.
Creature? Again repeat DS into land shift.
With the lines of play now online it makes Riku really only essential as a token maker. If that is the case I think he can be replaced. If we do dual nature we can simply sac the original off before any tokens get made at all so we are free to reuse it on the next iteration through. Just repeat the resolve, hold priority, and sac before tokens come online process each time through. I believe this will mean we get all the tokens and won’t have to sac any of them. This swap saves us 2 mana on every old Riku trigger. That’s 2/3 of a RR(or TT)copy by itself which is pretty decent.
Also we want MT for later once we start casting CC. I think it might be better as TYS on cast but it might be correct specifically in the case of CC to shift it into being precursor golems. This way we get way more waves of CC for our entire team. Not sure which would be better, maybe a mix of both?
I’m most appreciative of the thoughts and suggestions. I was kinda burned out working on it as I kinda felt stuck. Now with a few new ideas it’s kinfa fun to look at again.
Deedlit or anyone else who thinks they have an answer: I jump through a lot of hoops to make chorus a very potent mana generator, do u think I could possibly just skip many or even all of those hoops and just try to go super wide on pure token generation and rely solely on mana echos? It’s fun seeing what chains etc can do but I’m totally up for dropping inefficient coolness for more optimized lines.
Thanks again, jkibbs
Deedlit: thanks for the clarification on the chains. I figured it might not have mattered but thank u for explaining it. When u where explaining the arrow adding in the layers of my deck I was curious in the RR layer. RR actaully gets 2 casts of CC for each copy resolving not just 1(1 from hand another 1 from grave before going back to exile). I didn’t know if that was accounted for but I figured there should have been a 2 in the math somewhere. Again many thanks
Edit: nevermid on dual nature. It’ll get really messy with flectomancer tokens getting sac’ed. Flameshadow contouring might be usable, tho I think Riku might strictly be better than it as it also gets copies of spells too.
Edit: wait I was doing the chains wrong. There’s a way better way to do it. So the ordering I think is still correct but I want to change how we go big on each activation of the damage ability. So currently we have creatures doing x damage y times where x is thier power and y is emblems. But if we indeed target our next creature with the initial damage ability and then when the Rowan emblems kick in we use all of these damage abilities, which importantly will resolve first, to target themselves. This way we actaully get the chain to look way more powerful. We start getting basically the final ability instead of doing just xy damage to deal some sort of weird function that would normally double but instead doubles doubling season number of times and does that emblem number of times and then finally passes all that to the next creature. That’s far more potent.
Unfortunately yes, while the damage chain is really cool, it is not really worth all the cards that it takes to set up. As I mentioned earlier, the damage chain will create mana equal to an exponential tower one higher than the exponential tower describing the number of Doubling Seasons. This is not enough to make a difference in the higher recursive layers. To put things in somewhat simple terms, without the damage chain, casting a noncreature spell with X Rikus results in roughly X^^(X+1) (an exponential tower of height X+1) new token creatures after the entire process is resolved. With the damage chain, casting a White Suns' Zenith with the same resources will get you roughly X^^(X+2) (an exponential tower of height X+2) mana after the entire process is resolved. Will that affect the higher layers? Let's see: in the first scenario, we start with X Rikus. Casting one noncreature spell gets us Y Rikus, where why is more than X^^X but less than X^^(X+1). Casting one more noncreature spell will result in Z Rikus, where Z is more than Y^^Y but less than Y^^(Y+1), so it winds up in between X^^(X^^X) and X^^(X^^(X+1)). Note that the former is X^^^3, and the latter is much less than X^^^4 = X^^(X^^(X^^X)). Another iteration gets us between X^^(X^^(X^^X)) and X^^(X^^(X^^(X+1))), or between X^^^4 and X^^^5. For the second scenario, after the first White Suns' Zenith we will get between X^^(X+1) and X^^(X+2), which is between X^^^2 and X^^^3. After the second White Suns' Zenith we will get between X^^(X^^(X+1)) and X^^(X^^(X+2)), which is between X^^^3 and X^^^4. So in both cases, after N spells we wind up between X^^^(N+1) and X^^^(N+2), so the difference is not enough to be discernable from the perspective of triple arrows. In fact, the difference is a long way away from being discernable, since the difference is between the final number being X+1 or X+2, whereas we would have to go past X^^X to get to X^^^(N+2).
I hope that is at least somewhat understandable.
I was aware of the ability to cast Cackling Counterpart twice per copy of Runic Repetition, but, as above, it doesn't make a difference in the higher layers. The reasoning is the same as before. Casting X copies of Cackling Counterpart takes you from X to about X^^^^^^X. So, with 2 castings of Cackling Counterpart per Runic Repetition copy instead of one, we iterate the function that takes X to X^^^^^^(2X) rather than X^^^^^^X. In a certain sense, this is a MUCH more powerful function, since taking X to X^^^^^X is such a powerful function and X^^^^^^(2X) is applying that function twice as many times. But it is not significant from the viewpoint of 7-arrows. Iterating the function X^^^^^^(2X), we get X^^^^^^(2* X^^^^^^(2X)), which is bigger than X^^^^^^(X^^^^^^(2X)), but MUCH less than X^^^^^^(X^^^^^^(2X+1)). Iterating the function again, we get a number that is bigger than X^^^^^^(X^^^^^^(X^^^^^^(2X))) but much less than X^^^^^^(X^^^^^^(X^^^^^^(2X+1)))). After N iterations, we will get a number between a sequence of N "X^^^^^^" followed by a 2X, and a sequence of N "X^^^^^^"'s followed by a 2X+1. Since 2X and 2X+1 are both much less than X^^^^^^X, the resulting value will be greater than X^^^^^^^(N+1) but much less than X^^^^^^^(N+2). So the 2X at the 6-arrow level is insignifcant at the 7-arrow level.
Hope this helps, and good luck with improving your deck!
I
However, I have made some interesting realizations.
I will try to post tomorrow.
2 show and tell
3 omnisciencee
4 enter the infinite
5 master biomancer
6 mana echoes
7 march of the machines
8 mycosynth lattice
9 ojutai exemplars
10 riku of two reflections
11 mirror gallery
12 mizzium transreliquat
13 doubling season
14 cradle of vitality
15 angelic chorus
16 abyssal persecutor
17 sanguine bond
18 essence sliver
19 arcane adaptation
20 arlinn kord
21 azor's gateway
22 moonmist
23 intruder alarm
24 upwelling
25 vedalkan orrery
26 thousand-year storm
27 precursor golem
28 djinn illuminatus
29 goblin flectomancer
30 neheb, the eternal
31 iizuka the ruthless
32 tilonalli's summoner
33 stolen identity
34 cackling counterpart
35 seize the day
36 runic repetition
37 runic repetition
38 runic repetition
39 runic repetition
40 timetwister
41-60 exile twisters
so a lot of carry over from my original list but with combat steps added. need persecutor to keep our opponents alive through our tricks. seize the day adds combat phases for each creature i have in play per golem spread. it gets a bit weird when i start doing non combat loops. because i can't move into combat while i still have exile twisters/twister/runic on the stack i'm torn what to do while those loops are on going. seize gets me 2 casts of identity per combat, which is 4 before i need to get it back with RR so its actually a bit more efficient than just looping CC with runic. idk,there's a ton of interaction going on here. cradle of vitality is similar to serra avatar from my last list, but far more well rounded. it still allows some chains of sorts by pointing the AK abilities at my opponents face which gets me sliver better lifelink triggers and that gets cradle triggers and i can move the counters onto the next one to fire off damage. sanguine bond just amplifies this damage along with all my angelic chorus triggered life gain too. this puts my opponents life total going down at a very fast rate and my life going up quickly as well. this means i'm accelerating my mana from my flip land and also from neheb, the eternal. neheb also gets really good as we move into combat and then into the next main phase(which seize grants). tiloualli's summoner combined with upwelling lets us generate a ton of mana pre combat and then save it as we change phase and then pump it all into the first summoner(btw we can make our mizzium swapper friend can be turned into summoners as we declare attackers and then into doubling season before the summoner ability resolves(btbtw mizzium is gonna be swapping around A LOT, to our benifit) and then into other stuff as triggers start to resolve). these summoner abilities will all go on the stack and we can generate mana between each through echoes and intruder alarm stuff to do similar things to what we did with WSZ in my last build. and this is each combat. we sac a non essential body to our samurai lord to give our team double strike and we get a slew of life gain triggers and also we get a cast of stolen identity in our first damage step. do team and mana building as we move onto regular damage step. again we gain a bunch of life do a bunch of stuff and get ready to move into our next post combat main phase. we get neheb mana(again mizzium is just insane here as we change before leaving combat get a bunch of extra neheb triggers). so looping our twisters and exile twisters is pretty much the same as before but we will be taking breaks as we get to places where the stack is actually fully clear. we will use these breaks to fire off a bunch of accumulated combat phases to dole out a slew of damage and in that advancing our board state even more. we can do a similar thing by spacing out the castings of RR and have combat steps between each of these(if we have an empty stack anyway). this lets us compound our resources as much as possible when we have the opportunity to do so. we will basically have this type of staging as we progress through the playing of the deck. while pointing our AK abilities at our opponents will gain us some ground, getting into combat is where we are gonna start to see the stupid stuff happen. mizzium bouncing around being different things is quite frankly a bigger task than i have chosen to take on just yet, but the possibilities are pretty nuts. i've looked into some of it and it being able to change between triggers resolving makes these weird chains that make our triggers stacks just so much better for us. i'm sure i've missed some interactions already but its just kinda nuts what it adds to the deck. oh, and if we need to win for it to be legal for the challange we can sac our abyssal's off after we have done as much as we can. pretty sure they are, in fact, dead
TLDR; simialr to last time but can now abuse combat. made some changes slimmed some stuff down a bit and then used remaining slots to get as much out of combat as possible. also i could have just added seize the day and persecutor to original list but this feels a bit better than just doing that, although i could be wrong. also i don't see any infinites but i haven't had as much time to go through it as much as my last list, something might have slipped past me. also, a full 60 this time! some cuts where actually really tough.
thanks again to anyone whose taken an interest in my project and can explain the math for what i'm actually doing
However, without Teferi and White Suns' Zenith, I don't see anything as powerful to do with Stolen Identity; we can create more Mizzium Transreliquats, which can turn into Doubling Seasons or whatever we need it to, but that's just the first layer. The other thing we can do with Seize the Day is to get combat phases we can use for Tilonalli's Summoner and Neheb, the Eternal. But this doesn't look as powerful either. Let's let C,D,E,I,X be the number of Cradle of Vitality's, Doubling Seasons, Essence Slivers, Intruder Alarms, and creatures that we have. (Of course we can turn all our Transreliquats into the appropriate creatures at the appropriate times.) Let T be the number of extra mana we spend on Tilonalli's Summoner. Then we get T*2^D new creatures, each of which triggers I alarms, each of which untaps X creatures, so we get X*I*T*2^D untaps in all. For each untap, we can tap it to deal P damage where P is its power; this triggers E Essence Slivers, each of which triggers C Cradle of Vitalities, each of which adds P*2^D +1/+1 counters to some creature, which can itself be tapped. So the power P of one creature tranfers to a power P*(E*C*2^D) to the next creature. This happens X*I*T*2^D times, so after the damage chain is complete we go from a creature of power P to a creature of power P*(E*C*2^D)^(X*I*T*2^D), and we get about that much life, our opponent loses about that much life, and we get access to about that much mana. Note that this is just multiplication, albeit by a relatively big number. Each combat phase we also get to cast Stolen Identity twice, so our number of creatures gets 3 layers worth if improvement (i.e. if we have X creatures before, we will get about X^^^X creatures afterwards), but the damage chain itself is just an exponential chain 2 levels higher, so it will not be fundamentally bigger.
So, as far as I can see this gets a smaller final damage number than before, although that could be fixed by readding in Teferi, Temporal Archmage and White Suns' Zenith.
I haven't been able to go all the way through your write-up yet, but I have a few suggestions. Feel free to ignore these if I'm actually just missing a major interaction:
1. I see a lot of effects that are doubled up in your deck. You have Angelic Chorus, but also Essence Sliver to gain ever greater amounts of life. You have Thousand-Year Storm, Djinn Illuminatus, and Riku of Two Reflections to make copies of spells. This is usually less efficient than finding a way to only use one, and then spending the remaining slots on cards to repeatedly copy it.
Take spell casting, for example. When you cast a Cackling Counterpart, you get X triggers from Riku (one for each Riku), Y triggers from Thousand-Year Storm, and Z triggers from Djinn Illuminatus. But since all those triggers go on at the same time, only one of them will really matter for your total. One of them (probably Thousand-Year Storm or the Djinn) will dominate, and the other ones won't matter. It'll be like that card slot was wasted.
If you look at the current list for our challenger (page 72, I think?), this is why it's almost all singletons. We're trying to cram as many different effects in as possible. And while there are a few that are similar (Child of Alara and Worldfire), we've found some way to exploit the small differences between them, so they do a different job.
2. While I love the Moonmist/Azor's Gateway combo, I'm not sure it's necessary here. You have Mana Echoes, and you are making a LOT of tokens. And with Mycosynth Lattice out, you don't have to worry about colors. Let me put it this way: most of the mana you're spending will either be on Mirage Mirror/Mizzium Transreliquat, or on copy making abilities. Every copy trigger you have costs 2 mana, and each creature entering the battlefield will make way, WAY more than 2 mana. So I'm not sure why that bit is important. Even later on, the mana from Mana Echoes will dwarf the amount from just tapping Azor's Gateway.
3. Speaking of Mycosynth Lattice... cards like it seem useful but can secretly be real traps in this challenge. It closes off a lot of options for adding more cards on top of your deck to add more of those juicy juicy arrows. For example, it would be really nice to have something like Aegis Automaton in your deck. You could use it to bounce your creatures back, then replay them to make lots of copies, Intruder Alarm untaps, etc. Then, you could have some way to produce a lot of white mana (Serra's Sanctum, perhaps?). Then, finally, you have some way to turn combat steps into untapping your Serra's Sanctum. But you can't, because the color of mana doesn't matter to your deck.
Every deck in this challenge that I've ever seen boils down to the same basic principle. They're all really good at taking some resource (Draw-7s in your deck), and turning that into lots of some other resource (combat steps, I think), and turning that into lots of ANOTHER resource (creature tokens?), and so on, until eventually you're turning something into damage. The more of those resources you can fit between whatever you're starting with and "damage", the more you'll deal. Mycosynth Lattice makes that harder, because it cuts off a lot of resources before you start. You can't count white mana, blue mana, red mana, etc. separately.
Switching back to our challenger, Deedlit, two things:
1. Your most recent list looks pretty neat, but I'm not sure how we reuse Perpetual Timepiece. That seems fixable, but it's gonna be tricky. I also don't see a way to actually bounce or killGodtoucher in the hyperstage. What am I missing?
2. I've been tinkering with that Anaba Ancestor/Chalice of the Void idea we had a while back, and I might have found a way to make it work. I'm still vetting it myself, because the stack has gotten /really/ complicated in the hyperstage, but if I don't find anything I'll post my new list and how it works some time next week!
I also think we should all at some point take a look at what we can do in Standard now. I haven't put much serious thought into it, but Thousand-Year Storm seems ripe for abuse. We probably won't be able to match the insanity that was last rotation's deck, but that was a fluke anyways.
Yeah, that seems to be a problem with Perpetual Timepiece. We can get by without losing any cards by replacing Cephalid Shrine with Broken Ambitions to keep our ability to mill, and then replace Perpetual Timepiece with some card that can shuffle cards in our graveyard into our library, like Canal Dredger.
With Soul Foundry, we don't need to actually bounce or kill Godtoucher! It is enough to bring it from the graveyard/library into our hand, so that we can imprint it onto Soul Foundry. So Wirewood Herald will do the trick. I just noticed, though, that if we use the Herald to bring back Godtoucher, we won't be able to bring back the Herald as well. So I guess we can go back to using Verdant Succession, which will require rejuggling the end stage sequence. Using double Heralds plus Assembly Hall is another possibility.
So how about:
2 Psychic Battle
3 Cowardice
4 Brudiclad, Telchor Engineer
5 Bloodbond March
6 Broken Ambitions
7 Soul Foundry
8 Omniscience
9 Vedalken Orrery
10 Pull from Eternity
11 Izzet Guildmage
12 Karn, Silver Golem
13 Canal Dredger
14 Mimic Vat
15 Ray of Revelation
16 Skull of Orm
17 Mana Vault
18 Obelisk of Bant
19 Metallurgeon
20 Battle Cry
21 Rebuild
22 Goblin Dark-Dwellers
23 Boggart Mob
24 Godtoucher
25 Wirewood Herald
26 Verdant Succession
27 Engineered Explosives
28 Salvaging Station
30 Acorn Harvest
31 Smite the Monstrous
32 Thousand-Year Storm
33 Child of Alara
34 Tireless Mercenaries
35 Celestial Gatekeeper
36 Celestial Gatekeeper
37 Spellweaver Helix
38 Worldfire
39 Spider Spawning
40 Spider Spawning
41 Molderhulk
42 Divine Congregation
43 Undiscovered Paradise
44 Eureka
45 Mox Emerald
46 Cloud of Faeries
47 Nectar Faerie
48 Goblin Skycutter
49 Flamestick Courier
51 Empress Galina
52 Mirror Gallery
53 Streambed Aquitects
54 Old Man of the Sea
55 Xathrid Gorgon
56 Tribal Unity
57 Sylvan Echoes
48 Sentry Oak
59 World at War
60 Reforge the Soul
I'm certainly interested in what we can do in Standard, although I'm not quite familiar with exactly which cards are in Standard, and it's something of a pain to keep checking which cards are in Standard and which aren't. So I'll let you take the lead Stakfish, and I'll contribute what I can.
Stak: yeah I’m kinda seeing that about overly redundant pieces. There’s a bit more separation than it seems but I get your point. I’m beginning to feel that TYS might not be that great in my more combat driven lists. Precursor + everything being golems actually scales much faster on single target spells than TYS does(1 PG = 1 copy per thing I have per cast and TYS = per cast I get played ins/sor count copies, which I will always have way more things in play than spells cast). As of right now I’m going to keep my lattice/march combo just because it does make PG so incredibly good. I may at some point be able to move away from that start but for now it’s too easy and compact to let go just yet. Aegis goes infi in my deck but not because of lattice. Basically anything that can be bounced, or retrieved, by a copy of itself creates an infinite mana loop(and infi etb) which lead to unbound damage. It’s why I can only run 1 real regrowth effect(currently timetwister) and the rest have to be self-exiling.
I do think MT is really, really powerful. It’s very mana hungry to do some of it’s potential chains but it’s payoff is huge. Because of the blink combo I have it’s very easy for me to amass a very large number of my swapper as the deck just plays out it’s engine pieces. So a small example of it’s chaining would be this: pre cast of Single target spell: swap all MT into being PG, once all PG spread triggers are on the stack but before they start to resolve we swap MT again, this time into doubling seasons, now our first of the spread copies resolves and all resulting etbs have been put onto the stack including all angelic chorus triggers, before AC triggers resolve we swap MT into being cradle of vitality's, we can even swap back between cradle and DS between cradle triggers resolving to get even better buffs. Obviously the full chain for all etbs is even more nuts but this just illustrates that MT can really be very useful at pretty much every stage of our stacks be it etb or even cast or maybe even larger still if I can figure out how to do it. It is undeniably mana hungry so I’m looking at how much mana I need to set aside to actaully be able to fully chain all MT and if that cost is too high and how I can reduce that cost if possible without going infinite.
I am looking at trying to go more convoluted as I go. I realized early on that more steps meant larger eventual payoff. That being said being more convoluted just makes processing how it works that much more problematic and harder to be sure if I’ve pushed too far. I do have a few more abstract things I’m working on trying to get written down but building engines that are 10-15 cards deep can get quite messy and frustrating so those are more slow burn sub projects I hope to slowly work on as I focus on more immediate things like my current list. Hopefully there is enough cross pollination with my ideas that I can do a little bit of both and move them all forward simaltanioulsy.
I’m trying to play red rituals and soulfire grand master(SGM) in a list together. SGM doesn’t allow me to loop rituals infinitely if they aren’t being cast from hand. My question is if I get complete control of luck/draws etc can I use that ability to ensure I never have a ritual to loop in my hand? Or if does it work that if I could choose a path that goes infinite(like a ritual in my opening hand) the deck is deemed illegal?
FWIW the deck won’t be able to draw cards at all so all I need to avoid is the rituals in my opening hand. I haven’t even figured out if I could get them to loop infinitely but I’m pretty sure I can if I did decide to have one of the rituals in my opener.
In other words, there may be ways you can set up your opening hand that are only finite. But if there is even one way to go infinite, even if it's not the one you intended, the deck is disqualified.
As your deck becomes more complex, it will help it if you can break it down into distinct stages. That way, it's not one group of 60 crazy cards, but 10 groups of 6 crazy cards. If you look at our list over the last several pages, as the cards inside it change, the shape of the list as we post it here doesn't. You've got a group of 12 engine cards to start, then a module to make copies of enchantments, and then a series of modules that feed into each other in different ways.
Another advantage of this structure is, when you make it that way, if one of those modules has a problem and goes infinite in a way you didn't realize, you don't have to do as much thinking to get it all working again - you just cut that module and replace it with another one
One last thing: as you look at improvements, something you want to think about is whether what you're doing is meaningfully impacting the total. Let's say you added a creature like Thromok the Insatiable and a way to grant haste to your creatures. That would square the amount of damage you dealt at the end, which sounds great. But the numbers we're talking about, like 2^^^^5 and such, are so large that we actually can't describe the difference between that number and that number squared. We just discount differences that small. So even though you would have vastly improved the deck, you won't have changed the damage total as far as this challenge is concerned.
I think that's why your new deck doesn't deal as much damage in the last one. You're optimizing, and doing a great job at finding new interactions, but those new interactions aren't happening in the right order or with the right size to matter for the final total.
@Deedlit: I haven't done that thorough of a search for infinites because I'm still vetting this Anaba Ancestor deck, but that deck looks good for the most part! Thanks for the clarification on Soul Foundry.
One small issue: if we use Broken Ambitions, we can't have Sylvan Echoes/Sentry Oak as our draw level in the late game. Kithkin Mourncallers/Militia's Pride should be an easy swap though.
My Anaba Ancestor list only has one stage more than your list and the same number of layers, so it looks like we are (finally!) converging on a damage total for the gigastage deck, somewhere in the range of f_{w^4+wX+5}(n), 5<X<8. Not bad for government work
Edit: I think creatures we can kill with Explosives are still unsafe in that list. We can still use the topmost layer to make Bloodbond March triggers, then crack Explosives to make a token copy. That should only hurt the stage configuration at the top, though, not the meat of the deck.
2 Psychic Battle
3 Cowardice
4 Horobi, Death's Wail
5 Bloodbond March
6 Chalice of the Void
7 Mimic Vat
8 Omniscience
9 Vedalken Orrery
10 Mirror of Fate
11 Karn, Silver Golem
12 Millikin
13 Phantatog
14 Mirrorworks
15 Mana Vault
16 Simic Keyrune
17 Skull of Orm
18 Clockwork Gnomes
19 Goryo's Vengeance
20 Muzzio, Visionary Architect
21 Muzzio, Visionary Architect
22 Hurkyl's Recall
23 Goblin Dark-Dwellers
24 Changeling Hero
25 Anaba Ancestor
26 Engineered Explosives
27 Myr Welder
29 Acorn Harvest
30 Smite the Monstrous
31 Child of Alara
32 Centaur Safeguard
33 Verdant Succession
34 Spellweaver Helix
35 Worldfire
36 Spider Spawning
37 Spider Spawning
38 Spider Spawning
39 Titania, Protector of Argoth
40 Multani's Decree
41 Bayou
42 Eureka
43 Elvish Spirit Guide
44 Vastwood Animist
45 Grassland Crusader
46 Western Paladin
47 Frightshroud Courier
49 Ghosthelm Courier
50 Devout Chaplain
51 Royal Assassin
52 Simian Spirit Guide
53 Goblin Kites
54 Old Man of the Sea
55 Xathrid Gorgon
56 Reality Spasm
57 Precursor Golem
58 Military Intelligence
59 World at War
60 Reforge the Soul
Past versions of this deck have relied on making the graveyard, exile, and library essentially interchangeable zones. That’s been useful to us in the past, but it makes Ancestor go infinite. This version prevents that by severely limiting the ways different cards can move between zones. Here are the basics:
The early stages of the combo are mostly the same, with the exception that we now counter spells using Chalice of the Void, not Cephalid Shrine. Most of the time, Chalice will be set to 4. This conflicts with Bloodbond March (which we can get back with Verdant Succession instead), and Vedalken Orrery (which we only have to copy at times when Chalice isn’t set to 4).
For the stage creature, we use Clockwork Gnomes. We can’t use a 2-drop or 3-drop, because if it were, we would be able to use Chalice on both it and one of Millikin and Myr Welder, and we can’t allow the deck to generate Bloodbond March triggers for either creature that cheaply.
The Hyperstage creature is a 2-drop, so for each transition, we have to safely go from a Chalice-on-4 configuration to a Chalice-on-2 configuration, and back, to rebuild our token base. That means resolving Hurkyl’s Recall twice. You also can’t resolve any of the spells in the hyperstage transition while Chalice of the Void is on 2: both Hurkyl’s Recall and Goryo’s Vengeance cost 2 mana.
First, we activate the Anaba Ancestor, targeting Changeling Hero and putting N Psychic Battle triggers on the stack. We use the Battle triggers to repeatedly bounce Changeling Hero, blinking Goblin Dark-Dwellers. Goblin Dark-Dwellers casts Goryo’s Vengeance each time, returning Muzzio, Visionary Architect (a copy with haste).
Crucially, we have 2 Muzzios. When we reanimate one nontoken, the other should already be out. That means every other Vengeance cast gets us 3 Muzzio activations: one from the new nontoken, one from the token made with Mimic Vat from the old nontoken, and one from the token we get when the new nontoken gets legend-ruled. We use two to profit one Gnomes Token, and the last one to get a Millikin token. We use the Millikin token to mill Goryo’s Vengeance, allowing us to do it again.
To get back the second Muzzio, we use an additional Battle Trigger from the Vengeance above to kill Millikin again, without bringing it back or tapping it. Then, the next Dark-Dwellers cast brings back the nontoken Muzzio, legend-ruling the token. We tap the token Millikin to mill Vengeance again, then activate the nontoken Muzzio to get back the nontoken Millikin. We are now back where we started, minus two Psychic Battle triggers on Anaba Ancestor and plus one Clockwork Gnomes token.
For the Hyperstage Transition, you need Engineered Explosives on the battlefield, at least 5 Psychic Battle triggers in the Anaba Ancestor batch, an untapped Muzzio, and a lot of floating mana.
First, we resolve a Battle trigger, blinking Dark-Dwellers and casting Hurkyl’s Recall. Before it resolves, we replay Changeling Hero, championing Vedalken Orrery instead. Hurkyl’s Recall resolves, and all our artifacts (including Chalice and Explosives) get bounced.
Next, we resolve another trigger, bouncing the Hero and getting back Vedalken Orrery. From there, we replay Mirrorworks, Mimic Vat (make a token, 2 Vats) Karn, Silver Golem, Mirror of Fate, etc. We cast Chalice for 2, then play both Millikin and Anaba Ancestor into it, getting Bloodbond March triggers. We play Explosives for 2 (we can add extra colorless to the X to prevent it getting countered) and crack it, killing both Millikin and Ancestor and putting them on both our vats. We make token copies of each, then get them back with Bloodbond March.
Note: This is also where any additional copies of Ancestor come in. If we have untapped Ancestor tokens lying around, we can activate them to create a normal stage chain before cracking Explosives. While we only have 2 Mimic Vats and 1 token Mirror of Fate, we can chain them by using spare Psychic Battle activations in our stack to blink Changeling Hero, using it to blink Mimic Vat and Mirror of Fate as needed to get more tokens.
So far so good, but now Explosives is in our graveyard. We can only get it back from the library, and we can only put it in the library from exile. To exile it, we need to activate a Myr Welder token, which we can’t possibly have at this point: Hurkyl’s Recall bounced them all, and we have no way to target Welder to get one back.
In other words, we have to resolve back down the stack to an earlier Gnomes activation to proceed!
We only have one other resource to use up, the untapped Muzzio. Its role is resetting Chalice. We have to bounce Chalice again before we reach the Psychic Battle triggers from the next Hyperstage down, otherwise we won’t be able to set it to 4. But we can only bounce it with Hurkyl’s Recall, which costs 2. Chalice is on 2 now, so Recall will get countered. We solve this by animating Chalice with Karn. Chalice becomes a 0/0, dies, and gets exiled under a Mimic Vat. We use a Mirror of Fate to put it back in the library, then activate our last Muzzio to put the Chalice back on the field, now with 0 counters.
After that, we use a battle trigger to bounce the nontoken Ancestor again, then use the last two to repeat the Hurkyl’s Recall/Vedalken Orrery process.
After that, we can use Goryo’s Vengeance to get back Muzzio again, but we still won’t have any Clockwork Gnomes. No Gnomes, no hasty Millikins to bin Vengeance again. This will actually fizzle the entire combo.
For the Megastage transition, we let Child of Alara kill Changeling Hero, getting back Orrery and letting us tuck Centaur Safeguard back in the deck to find it again. That means Hero is dead after the megastage transition. We need a Bloodbond March trigger to get it back, which means that at some point Chalice had to be set to 5. Putting Chalice on 5, then back on 4 without letting triggers from when it was on 5 resolve requires at least 2 Anaba Ancestor tokens, so that should be safe.
Whew, that's a lot of stuff. If all that works, and that's a reasonably big "if", that's 7 stages above the gigastage, 2 layers for Reality Spasm and Precursor Golem (we can't use Tribal Unity with no enchantment copiers), plus the same 2 layers from combat+draw, plus World at War. There may be a way to cram an eighth stage in there, but I haven't been able to find one.
Ooh, that latest deck looks very nice! I don't see any immediate problems. One thing that I'm worried about: We have to make sure that we don't gain any Anaba Ancestor tokens by going through the megastage, but we also have to make sure that we don't lose any either. Otherwise, we lose a token or tokens each time we go to the higher hyperstage and back down again, so we won't get the full recursion going. Of course, it is okay to tap one or more Anaba Ancestor tokens to complete the transition, so long as we get them back later.
It does seem like there is plenty of room for an eighth stage. Also, white mana is still left open. White mana can target white creatures, green creatures, Humans, Birds, Clerics, Merfolk, or Kithkin - those are all I can remember. I can't see anything that will work though. Too many mana producers are in the 1 or 2 CMC range, or green. It's too bad that Wilderness Hypnotist is a Wizard, as well.
Is Verdant Succession indispensable for this deck? It's really good, but it does mess up green for the end stages.
Edit: I thought about maybe transitioning from Grassland Crusader into Hazduhr the Abbot, supplemented by Mirror Gallery, but Hazduhr could be brought back by Goryo's Vengeance.
Another possibility was to use Sphinx's Revelation supplemented by Thousand-Year Storm, into Druids' Repository for the final layers. But, I'm guessing that we need to avoid Thousand-Year Storm, in order for two Hurkyl's Recalls to require two Anaba Ancestor taps, to nullify two extra tokens we get from Engineered Explosives and Goblin Dark-Dwellers being brought back to our hand.
Edit: No wait, having copies of Hurkyl's Recall won't help, since resolving one copy will bring all copies of Vedalken Orrery back to our hand, and we need to wait for a trigger to bring Vedalken Orrery back. So it seems like we can have Thousand-Year Storm and Sphinx's Revelation.
A few small issues with the decklist: we both have cut Panharmonicon because it's unsafe with champion, but without it we need 3 copies of Spider Spawning, not 2. So that cuts one space out of our room. My list also needs Reforge the Soul, because without either of Consecrated Sphinx or Thousand-Year Storm, there's no way we're getting through the setup with just Words of Wisdom.
And sadly, spell copier effects are still unsafe there. The problem is that the copies won't get countered by Chalice of the Void, so they'll still resolve. And if we can resolve a resolve a Hurkyl's Recall through a Chalice on 2 during the Hyperstage transition, we can bank a Muzzio into the next level down, which lets us go infinite.
I'm not sure if it changes the calculus for the megastage transition yet, but we'll also need to put Chalice on 3 temporarily, to keep Phantatog around. If that does cause a fizzle, we can just go back to Allay. Worldfire will exile it, but I'm pretty sure we can cast it from our graveyard with Goblin Dark-Dwellers and buy it back. It's not like flashback where it gets exiled no matter what.
For the eighth stage, one card I've had in my sights for a while is Sea Snidd. It can generate any color of mana, and is immune to everything but Xathrid Gorgon. If we can find a way to turn white mana into "target blue creature", that could be number 8.
It'd be a lot easier if the gigastage keyed of white mana instead of black, and we could use "target nonblack creature" to differentiate at this level, but as far as I can tell there is not a single sorcery cmc>3 in the game that you can innately cast from the graveyard using white mana plus some amount of blue, green, and generic.
We can switch black mana with red mana if we so desire - the Simian Spirit Guide / Goblin Kites stage is nice, but it's worth considering all avenues.
Edit: Wait, how about:
2 Psychic Battle
3 Cowardice
4 Horobi, Death's Wail
5 Bloodbond March
6 Chalice of the Void
7 Mimic Vat
8 Omniscience
9 Vedalken Orrery
10 Mirror of Fate
11 Karn, Silver Golem
12 Millikin
13 Phantatog
14 Mirrorworks
15 Mana Vault
16 Simic Keyrune
17 Skull of Orm
18 Clockwork Gnomes
19 Goryo's Vengeance
20 Muzzio, Visionary Architect
21 Muzzio, Visionary Architect
22 Hurkyl's Recall
23 Goblin Dark-Dwellers
24 Changeling Hero
25 Anaba Ancestor
26 Engineered Explosives
27 Myr Welder
29 Acorn Harvest
30 Smite the Monstrous
31 Child of Alara
32 Centaur Safeguard
33 Verdant Succession
34 Spellweaver Helix
35 Worldfire
36 Spider Spawning
37 Spider Spawning
38 Spider Spawning
39 Titania, Protector of Argoth
40 Multani's Decree
41 Bayou
42 Eureka
43 Elvish Spirit Guide
44 Vastwood Animist
45 Grassland Crusader
46 Western Paladin
47 Frightshroud Courier
49 Ghosthelm Courier
50 Devout Chaplain
51 Royal Assassin
52 Phantasmal Mount
53 Old Man of the Sea
54 Sea Snidd
55 Slingshot Goblin
56 Xathrid Gorgon
57 Reality Spasm
58 Precursor Golem
59 Consecrated Sphinx
60 Reforge the Soul
Edit: Nope, keep forgetting about having too low of a CMC.
I guess we have no other way to bring back our enchantments, so we could drop Skull of Orm?
Okay, here's a weird one: does Reign of Chaos work?
We can use it to target any blue creature, but only if there's an island out. For us to have an island, we need to have already activated a Sea Snidd to turn Bayou into an island. So it goes: tap the Snidd to make an island, do a mini-gigastage to cast Reign of Chaos, get N Psychic Battles on Sea Snidd, use them to bounce/kill Old Man of the Sea and the Snidd as needed?
It seems like it should work, but I don't think we've ever tried a stage where the battle triggers can be separated from the tap ability.
As for Skull of Orm... don't we really need a way to make copies of Psychic Battle? otherwise I'd say go for it, cause we can already make as many as we want of Bloodbond March, but with no spell copiers Psychic Battle is the only thing building up our hyperstage and megastage.
In any case, that gives us:
2 Psychic Battle
3 Cowardice
4 Horobi, Death's Wail
5 Bloodbond March
6 Chalice of the Void
7 Mimic Vat
8 Omniscience
9 Vedalken Orrery
10 Mirror of Fate
11 Karn, Silver Golem
12 Millikin
13 Phantatog
14 Mirrorworks
15 Mana Vault
16 Simic Keyrune
17 Skull of Orm
18 Clockwork Gnomes
19 Goryo's Vengeance
20 Muzzio, Visionary Architect
21 Muzzio, Visionary Architect
22 Hurkyl's Recall
23 Goblin Dark-Dwellers
24 Changeling Hero
25 Anaba Ancestor
26 Engineered Explosives
27 Myr Welder
29 Acorn Harvest
30 Smite the Monstrous
31 Child of Alara
32 Centaur Safeguard
33 Verdant Succession
34 Spellweaver Helix
35 Worldfire
36 Spider Spawning
37 Spider Spawning
38 Spider Spawning
39 Titania, Protector of Argoth
40 Multani's Decree
41 Bayou
42 Eureka
43 Elvish Spirit Guide
44 Vastwood Animist
45 Grassland Crusader
46 Western Paladin
47 Frightshroud Courier
49 Ghosthelm Courier
50 Devout Chaplain
51 Royal Assassin
52 Simian Spirit Guide
53 Goblin Kites
54 Old Man of the Sea
55 Sea Snidd
56 Reign of Chaos
57 Xathrid Gorgon
58 Reality Spasm
59 Precursor Golem
60 Reforge the Soul
That's gonna get us somewhere in the realm of f_{w^4+w8+2}(3), I'm guessing. Assuming we can get it off the ground. Recasting Reforge the Soul more than once will be much more difficult this time, since we need to somehow generate a hasty Millikin to get a flashback spell back.
For the ending layers, it will be better to have Consecrated Sphinx rather than Precursor Golem, since then we will be able to get through the deck much more quickly, and probably the last five Reforges will be able to access the whole deck. The first Reforge draws seven cards, of which four can be two copies of Spider Spawning, Spellweaver Helix, and Consecrated Sphinx. Then we still have three more cards, and the second Reforge allows us to draw 21 more cards, which should be enough to get going; if we need to, we can get the third Reforge cast by drawing another Spider Spawning. (It would be nice to get another copy of Consecrated Sphinx for the second cast, but I don't see an easy way to do that with the remaining three cards.)
Edit: Unfortunately, I have found a serious problem with the deck, and I don't know how to fix it. Each time we resolve Child of Alara or Worldfire, we eliminate all of our permanents, so we need to find a way to build it back up somehow. We do have all the floating mana that we can carry over, so the idea was the use this to rebuiild our enchantments. This was fine when we were using Allay to bounce Copy Enchantment to make more Dual Nature copies. But, now, creating more enchantments relies crucially on our Mimic Vats and Mirror of Fates. So we will only be able to create a relatively small number of enchantments, and the lion share of our mana is left floating.
Cogwork Assembler won't work because it targets and gives haste. If we could use Thousand-Year Storm, that should work once we resolve down to the next casting of an instant/sorcery, since the storm count keeps rising throughout a hyperstage/megastage. But it looks like this deck relies on not having any spell copiers around.
One idea is to replace Simic Keyrune with Obelisk of Bant, and then replace Mirrorworks with Vitu-Ghazi Guildmage. Unfortunately, that gives us access to white mana, which lets us destroy Centaur Safeguard without casting Acorn Harvest. Sundered Growth is too expensive when cast with Goblin Dark-Dwellers; adding Izzet Guildmage makes the artifact targeting too cheap, and Izzet Guildmage will be able to cast Hurkyl's Recall.
Using storm cards is a possibility, but I didn't see anything useful. Anything we can do with a lot of Goblins or Beasts?
Someone mentioned gaining experience counters; we could also gain energy counters, but I don't know what to do with either.