Actually, this plan still has problems. Even if we can't immediately use Engineered Explosives without fizzling the combo, we can still pull it out, bounce it with the second Hurkyl's Recall, and then hold it there until we CAN get Wheel of Sun and Moon back. It takes two Muzzio, Visionary Architect activations to do it, but if we cast a Goryo's Vengeance we'll have plenty of those to work with, and can still bank one up to get out a Millikin to mill Goryo's again later on. So while it does fix the Thousand-Year Storm problem, we still need to make it harder to get Engineered Explosives back.
On the plus side, that seems like an easier problem than "find a way to keep track of our progress"...
I'm not following the bit with the second Hurkyl's Recall; isn't the point that, after we resolve the first Hurkyl's Recall, Vedalken Orrery is off the battlefield, so that we can't play anything (like Engineered Explosives), until we resolve down to a Mirrorworks trigger for Vedalken Orrery? So that has to be below a tapping of Anaba Ancestor. So we can get just one bouncing of Engineered Explosives per tapping of Anaba Ancestor, even though we can get many copies of Hurkyl's Recall via Thousand-Year Storm and multiple bouncings of Changeling Hero. What am I missing?
We can champion Vedalken Orrery]/c] under Changeling Hero, then remove the Hero with another Psychic Battle trigger to get Orrery back mid-transition. This is actually expected behavior in the Chalice deck, it's why the Chalice locks are there, but it makes a lot of things very risky.
Yeah, being able to champion basically everything makes the number of options drastically increase, causing all of the chalice confusion.
Edit: Oh, Wheel of sun and moon can target the opponent, and loop their graveyard into their library, that doesn't look like a problem yet, but we may need to be careful of putting cards into their graveyard.
Making Engineered Explosives harder to get back looks hard. I guess another possibility is to make us use up an Engineered Explosives with each hyperstage transition - not sure how though.
Hmm, another card that can kind of function as a chalice is Lavinia, Azorius Renegade, though that does bring it's own host of problems like how we are giving it to our opponent in the first place.
Well we can't even cast noncreature spells with cmc 1 or more while they have it because we only have one land. While Thousand year storm lets instants and sorceries through.
But yeah there are problems with it. We'd need to toggle too much at the top of the stack to make toggling in the transition expensive.
It is the only other card with a potentially useful "When ... cast a spell... counter that spell" ability like Chalice and Shrine.
There's another problem too: Thousand-Year Storm still isn't enough with Goryo's Vengeance to rebuild. Even though we get storm levels of copies of Vengeance, we only get to resolve one copy, because they go on the stack simultaneously. So even with Thousand-Year Storm, we still only get to reanimate equal to our permanent count, not our storm count and we have to resolve back down to the next Thousand-Year Storm trigger to rebuild.
If we can find a card which gets a benefit from each Psychic Battle trigger on it, or find a way to somehow go back to Battle Cry, that would save Thousand-Year Storm. But Vengeance alone isn't enough.
Hmm, that's a pity. It seems like we get that benefit from Smite the Monstrous though. Unfortunately, resolving down to the next Smite the Monstrous after a megastage transition is too long of a wait. That seems okay for the gigastage transition.
I believe our last solution was to use Sephara, Sky's Blade and Maze Glider for the megastage transition, and Mirrorwing Dragon and Hunting Pack for the gigastage transition? So perhaps we could use Thousand-Year Storm to handle the gigastage transition, and Sephara + Maze Glider to handle the megastage transition?
Ah yeah I was thinking each GV gets its own set of PB triggers to avoid fizzling, but you are right as all of the PB triggers have to resolve before the first GV.
But I think that is still fine, as we can have a bunch of TYS to trigger. Our permanent count will be higher than the number of instants and sorceries we've cast anyway.
Unfortunately, it won't be after a board wipe. After one of those, we need to recover our progress somehow, so we need something that isn't restricted to numbers we generate AFTER the board wipe.
I might be missing something then, because I thought the line was to float a bunch of mana before a board wipe, then after the board is cleared we get flash back and then use most of our floating mana to make a bunch of copies of enchantments and then use the rest of our mana to rebuild the next stage. (At least for the decks without infinite mana)
In many decks, that will work; for example, if you have Dual Nature + Copy Enchantment + Allay, you can create enchantments up to a number comparable to your amount of colorless mana, and that's something that you can carry over after a board wipe. Once we got rid of Dual Nature though, and started using Mimic Vat to create tokens of enchantments, our ability to create enchantments became limited by the number of Mimic Vats / Mirror of Fates / Perpetual Timepieces that we were able to create. And those generally required Metallurgeon / Clockwork Gnomes tappings to generate.
Forerunner of Slaughter was one way to resolve this, since it could bounce those artifacts at the cost of colorless mana.
Well, if we put Mirrorworks triggers on the stack, then proceed to a higher hyperstage/megastage, the number of Mirrorworks triggers we get will be comparable to our number prior to processing that higher hyperstage/megastage. So we wouldn't be getting the benefit from that higher hyperstage/megastage.
Ah, the number would be preset and not able to benefit from all the work we do in the meantime. We need to do more than get back to where we had been, we need to be able to grow much more than that.
If you are able to change the amount of the output you can still exponentially increase the total output of those floating triggers. So you can keep the amount of triggers the same and just manipulate the amount that they output. The easiest example would be something like amount of doubling seasons manipulation. If we use the resources from the object that originally triggered the mirrorworks to create more doubling seasons with the remaining triggers still on the stack we can systematically work through the mirrorworks triggers increasing our output. As long as our scaling allows for layer or even stage levels of scaling we should still be able to see drastic enough output scaling. I’m still a bit shaky on the exact mechanics of stages and such, but I believe stage level growth has been achieved with triggers(I believe it was rings of brighthearth) so I don’t see why this would be any different or why it should at least in theory be possible.
Also sorry I haven’t posted my list. Been a frustrating few weeks working on hammering out a primer. The list keeps changing and I keep finding new ways to optimize the sequencing that involve cards/ordering early enough in the play through that I feel the need to rewrite the primer. The hierarchy of what is powerful/rare in the deck hasn’t really changed I’ve just found more slot efficient cards and then managed to resequence the start to be very resource efficient. I’ve also tried to be pretty thorough in vetting the list so a lot of time has been checking for infinite’s all over the place.
Anyway been following the progress even if I haven’t chimed in much. Still super cool watching these things develop.
Maybe I'm not following what you are suggesting, but the issue is that, after a board wipe, we will reset to square 1. So, we will get no benefit from the hyperstage/megastage we just processed. We can still build up numbers in the lower hyperstage, same as if the higher hyperstage wasn't there - but it would just be that one hyperstage, we can't set up multiple hyperstages in a stack to any effect, since the higher hyperstage will be continually wiped out - unless we can somehow use some resource or number that keeps getting bigger each time, regardless of the board wipe. Possible solutions include floating mana, or storm/TYS count. There are probably some other possibilities as well, if anyone thinks of anything, please let us know!
If we are trying to do it with something like mirrorworks triggers we would have to make sure that the trigger generator in question would have had to have been updated to reflect all the stage progress(ie having hyper stage levels of mirrorworks in play). That way even if we wipe out from underneath it we still have a marker of progress that is keeping pace with where we were. If we can’t update mirrorworks then it won’t work. If we can do it with a spell via thousand year storm maybe that would be easier. Mirrorworks might be able to work if it can be updated. Something along the lines of having hyper stage level amounts of triggers for creating new mirror of fates would be a good way to have access to a resource to start rebuilding with. If we want to do the recreation of board state with spells on the stack, something like rebuild seems like a possibility. Though if the wipe in question is worldfire things get complicated. Mirror of fate seemed like a possibility to me though I don’t know the mechanics of this deck well enough as I’m pretty sure a bit of mana and some MW triggers for MoF might not be good enough anyway.
Sorry, I'm still not understanding. By the trigger generator, do you mean Mirrorworks? We can have a number of Mirrorworks comparable to however much progress we have made before going up to the higher hyperstage. While processing the higher hyperstage, we are above the megastage transition in the stack, so we can't affect those Mirrorworks triggers. So we can't get a number of triggers that reflects the progress from the higher hyperstage, since during the higher hyperstage we can't access that part of the stack.
Can you explain what you mean by updating the trigger generator?
Yes when referring to updating the generator I was indeed referring to updating the amount of the mirrorworks. If we can’t update number of MW to reflect higher stage progress we probably can’t use it as a good tracker of progress.
To be fair almost anything that generates triggers could possibly be used. I’m not a huge fan of thousand-year storm, at least not as a 1 of. If we are updating the amount of TYS in play then it feels like it should be a fine tracker. I don’t know enough about the mechanics of this particular deck to be able to see what might be doable. Something like the spell portion of rebuild seemed possible off of TYS but only if we can update the number of TYS to reflect the higher stage progressions.
But unfortunately child of alara and worldfire both reset our enchantments. If they just got "artifact and creatures" and "artifacts and creatures and lands", respectfully, we'd be in a better spot.
The problem is we need something from the higher (on the stack) operations to carry down to be used after the sweeper resolves. But it looks like the only two things we can bring 'down' like that without going infinite are storm and Mana.
Mirrorworks and similar triggers aren't enough because they'd need to be set before the worldfire copy got put on the stack. And therefore wouldn't make use of anything we do with worldfire on the stack.
There are a few random things, like energy and experience counters, although those look a bit doubtful. And, there are cards like the Zuberas, which count the number of times certain things have happened. I haven't seen anything that looks really promising, but maybe something to look out for. There is of course Vile Redeemer, but that just gives us colorless mana. (It also gives us creatures, but we can also get those with Hunting Pack.)
An older deck used phasing on storage lands with counters to save our progress. That required a bunch of cards though.
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On the plus side, that seems like an easier problem than "find a way to keep track of our progress"...
Edit: Oh, Wheel of sun and moon can target the opponent, and loop their graveyard into their library, that doesn't look like a problem yet, but we may need to be careful of putting cards into their graveyard.
But yeah there are problems with it. We'd need to toggle too much at the top of the stack to make toggling in the transition expensive.
It is the only other card with a potentially useful "When ... cast a spell... counter that spell" ability like Chalice and Shrine.
Sphinx of the Final Word is also kind of interesting, but doesn't quite work.
If we can find a card which gets a benefit from each Psychic Battle trigger on it, or find a way to somehow go back to Battle Cry, that would save Thousand-Year Storm. But Vengeance alone isn't enough.
I believe our last solution was to use Sephara, Sky's Blade and Maze Glider for the megastage transition, and Mirrorwing Dragon and Hunting Pack for the gigastage transition? So perhaps we could use Thousand-Year Storm to handle the gigastage transition, and Sephara + Maze Glider to handle the megastage transition?
But I think that is still fine, as we can have a bunch of TYS to trigger. Our permanent count will be higher than the number of instants and sorceries we've cast anyway.
Forerunner of Slaughter was one way to resolve this, since it could bounce those artifacts at the cost of colorless mana.
Could we save our progress via mirrorworks triggers (on mirrorworks) to make the initial batch of artifacts? Or is that too expensive?
Also sorry I haven’t posted my list. Been a frustrating few weeks working on hammering out a primer. The list keeps changing and I keep finding new ways to optimize the sequencing that involve cards/ordering early enough in the play through that I feel the need to rewrite the primer. The hierarchy of what is powerful/rare in the deck hasn’t really changed I’ve just found more slot efficient cards and then managed to resequence the start to be very resource efficient. I’ve also tried to be pretty thorough in vetting the list so a lot of time has been checking for infinite’s all over the place.
Anyway been following the progress even if I haven’t chimed in much. Still super cool watching these things develop.
Jkibbs
Can you explain what you mean by updating the trigger generator?
To be fair almost anything that generates triggers could possibly be used. I’m not a huge fan of thousand-year storm, at least not as a 1 of. If we are updating the amount of TYS in play then it feels like it should be a fine tracker. I don’t know enough about the mechanics of this particular deck to be able to see what might be doable. Something like the spell portion of rebuild seemed possible off of TYS but only if we can update the number of TYS to reflect the higher stage progressions.
The problem is we need something from the higher (on the stack) operations to carry down to be used after the sweeper resolves. But it looks like the only two things we can bring 'down' like that without going infinite are storm and Mana.
Mirrorworks and similar triggers aren't enough because they'd need to be set before the worldfire copy got put on the stack. And therefore wouldn't make use of anything we do with worldfire on the stack.
An older deck used phasing on storage lands with counters to save our progress. That required a bunch of cards though.