Burning Sands doesn't work because we can donate lands to allow the opponent to sacrifice them off of their own creature deaths, which are cheap.
Unfortunately, I've found another big problem with Death Pit Offering setups.
It's possible, and previously thought to be safe, to have just one necromancer alongside a haste token, with no opponent necromancers. However, with one other creature, it's possible to repeatedly kill that creature in combat for value (by having one arcbond on a blocker) and have it be replaced by our necromancer.
This currently sets us back to shadowborn apostle decks again, but a possible way to salvage it might be to note that doing this also requires damaging an opponent's creature.
So we'd get rid of indestructible (anything that needs to be kept alive during a computation can be kept alive by kiora's +1 and/or output waterclocks), and we'd need to somehow make giving the opponent creatures as expensive as getting our own (outside of computations at least) - which would mean cutting Dowsing Dagger. But then, the problem becomes how do we give our opponent a large-ish number of creatures before using mirrorweave to make them necromancers, while also being as expensive as getting our own creatues? (Somewhere on the order of 2^2^1000 should do). We'd probably want to be able to make a large number of creatures and then donate them, but how do we do that? We can't kill a leige because it would allow us to get a haste token early. Perhaps we could donate a liege, kill it with something that could only hit opponent's stuff? Because liege's death trigger is symmetric, that would allow us to make a bunch of squirrels, and then donate them.
Edit: Ah, it's a lot simpler than that: Such a setup has no way of pumping our necromancer's toughness, or that of the haste token; so all we need to do to solve the issue is to cut Roar of Challenge.
While another "must block" effect would be an obvious replacement, it might be easier to use Caltrops - that way we wouldn't have to fiddle with managing how much combat damage gets assigned and which creatures are tapped - we can simply have everything be tapped, all attacks go through unblocked to face, but deal no damage due to Chameleon Blur.
I was trying to find a way to use Sarkhan's static to do this but couldn't find a way to reuse him after he's donated that didn't use up the card slot it would otherwise save.
Edit: Hmmm, unless I'm missing something, we don't actually need to donate anything in the second deck. So we can remove Harmless Offering, and then Burning Sands becomes safe.
Hmmm, I guess we don't have a way to kill off Symbiotic Wurm while the opponent still has the Primal Vigors, so that's no good. We don't really want to have a way to kill off creatures then either. Instead, we can have Reef Worm, and four copies of Doubling Season, to get 1 + 16 + 256 + 4096 = 4369 creatures at the start.
Since Starfield of Nyx only affects our own enchantments, we are still able to give the opponent a lot of Primal Vigors before getting the haste token. Although the number of extra tokens this gives through Reef Worm is negligable compared to the number we get from a single liege, I guess it's the best thing we can currently do with our remaining card slots.
What we'd really like is a repeatable way to get lots of doubling seasons or primal vigors.
An idea I had was the populate mechanic:
We would first get a Doubling Season token, by, say, giving the opponent some and using Aura Thief to steal them.
Then, we'd use Full Flowering to get a lot more of them, or more of any creature token we have.
We'd have to restructure the layers to put green mana (or there's also a couple of other suitable populate effects in white) above creatures.
We can make sure there's no way to get a token Necromancer so we couldn't populate those.
However, this plan doesn't get the full 3 layers out of Reef Worm as you couldn't reset the number of doubling seasons in between killing each kind of token, so I'm not sure it actually gains any layers at all.
Oh right - so we go back to the previous plan, although we don't quite have the slots to do all that we want.
Interesting idea. But yeah - while we would want to make as many Doubling Season tokens as possible before using the last populate on a creature token, we would get the same one layer that we would get without Doubling Season. (Or with just Doubling Season)
I do still have the dream of getting 3 extra layers out of Reef Worm! We would have to put Doubling Season lower in the layers somehow. We want some way to differentiate between the creature and enchantment tokens - pity there's no reverse version of Copy Artifact. I keep going back to the possibility of giving the opponent a lot of Primal Vigors, but I don't know how to do it. I guess there's Parallel Evolution, with an Opalescence on the battlefield - but that would double our normal creature tokens as well. Again, the reverse is easier - we can Populate lower down, then make more opponent tokens higher up.
I guess it's worth looking at various restructurings of the layers anyway, to see if any other one has a slight edge.
Edit: So, I just checked - not surprisingly, the Full Flowering version is the same 16 layers as the other versions, if we can only populate base creature tokens that we sacrifice with no additional payoff. If we can somehow create tokens of Liege of the Hollows, that would be 17 layers. (And Reef Worm with token doublers increasing with each token death would be 19 layers, lul.) But, I guess this is the same problem as with the other versions: How can we make tokens of Liege of the Hollows without being able to make tokens of Xathrid Necromancer?
Ooh, I think I have it: We use Unstable Shapeshifter, have it copy an enchantment, mirrorweave it onto an opponent's token, steal it with aura thief, and then we can start populating that. We can flicker a real liege to set all the shapeshifters to lieges before killing one. Copying necromancer isn't an issue as they would transform as soon as the necromancers trigger once. This should get the extra layer.
Edit: Actually, this might not work, since Unstable Shapeshifter is worded "becomes a copy and gains this ability" rather than "becomes a copy except it has this ability" as is more common; which means that making further copies of it won't have the ability. So this makes getting a token version of it harder, but also makes getting a token of it bad since the token could copy a necromancer which could then be populated into necromancer copies without the unstable shapeshifter ability.
I checked with judges and the oracle text is actually "except it has this ability", which *does* work the way we want it to. I was looking at the page for the card on this site which had outdated oracle text.
Edit: Oh, I guess we can have Unstable Shapeshifter tokens copy Fulminator Mage and sacrifice them. So perhaps 4 Unstable Frontiers, 3 Vesuvas, and 1 Lotus Vale, to get 9 Unstable Frontier plays. Any way to squeeze out more? Double Lotus Vales can sacrifice each other, and a Lotus Vale and a Lair land can recycle each other as well.
Ah, Unstable Shapeshifter tokens can copy necromancer, which while doesn't create a haltable infinite computation, does allow you to repeatedly kill a creature to get more back. And unlike in the 1-necromancer situation, the extra creatures are sufficient to keep everything involved alive. So this plan doesn't actually work. (The same is also true of a nontoken shapeshifter - so we lose those from the previous deck).
Although, this is only actually an issue if flickering creatures, to reset the shapeshifters, is cheap. If flickering creatures is at a higher layer than what's gained by killing them then it's not an issue, which maybe could be arranged by using white populate effects with white flicker effects. However, we'd then need to find an alternate way to reuse Kiora.
Hmmm, so that's the challenge. So far, the only successful strategy has been Settle Beyond Reality. It's unfortunate that Sek'Kuar is legendary, multicolored, and green, just about everything that Kiora is. Recycling blue would be nice, but I haven't been able to find anything that retrieves blue. (although there is nonblue) I thought about copy cards, but I guess they are pretty much all forbidden except for Unstable Shapeshifter.
I was thinking about Horned Kavu to bounce Sarkahn-animated PWs + colour or cmc limited reanimation - but reanimatable creatures have to be in a layer above kiling creatures for value, while sarkahn must be in a layer below creature flickering, which we want to have in the same layer as populating - argh.
I was also thinking about having the PW layer be below the artifact copying layer, so The Chain Veil could be used - but that would lose the Red Mana Battery layer.
I was looking for a way to end in Unstable Frontier rather than Kiora, since that seems to be the ending that gets the most applications of the final layer. I had an idea for recycing Kiora, using Syndicate Guildmage and Warden of the Eye; however, that requires being above flickering for Warden of the Eye. So Kiora has to be above white, and green has to transition to either black or perhaps life. But for green to transition to life, it has to go above black (for Boggart Birth Rite with Order of the Sacred Torch). So we can't have green below Kiora if we don't want Kiora to be at the top. So we either want blue to transition to life, or to black (if we can find a way for Kiora to transition to green). And, while there are blue pay lands, we need to be able to recycle it without using any of the higher colors, which I don't know how to do. I suppose we could transition to black with Sinkhole, but again we would need to find a cheap way to bring it back. So, this is what I have so far.
Ah, actually this plan to have flickering be as expensive as populating doesn't work to add a layer, since we need to pay a white mana every time we want to kill a shapeshifter-liege.
So we'd like to make it somehow cheap to bounce or flicker or otherwise reuse Liege, but expensive or not possible to do the same with Necromancer.
I was looking for alternatives to Necromancer to maybe allow different colour or cmc constraints on things like bouncing or reanimation, but the only things with that direct effect are Bishop of Wings, Rotlung Reanimator, and Xathrid Necromancer.
The other interesting case is Requiem Angel; perhaps a sequence of Dralnu's Crusades could be used such that "non-X" essentially means the same thing as Y for some other creature type Y?
Oh, I see. So, if you wanted to make a waterclock with Baboons and a special creature Ape, then we have [c]Dralnu's Crusade[c]s making every other waterclock creature into a Baboon. So if we want X waterclocks, we would need 2X(X-1) Dralnu's Crusades. For 6 waterclocks and a halting waterclock, we don't have to worry about the halting creatures making other creatures, so I think we need 2*6 for each of the normal waterclocks, for 2*6*6 = 72 total.
I guess the actual number doesn't matter all that much, it just means we can't go with having nontoken copies of every Dralnu's Crusade, and will just Mirrorweave copies.
Any ideas on what to do with Requiem Angel? It's white, flying, and has high CMC and power/toughness. So there are a lot of things that could potentially affect other things but not the Angel.
Edit: Is the solution as simple as adding Hibernation? Then we can bounce the Liege at will, but we can't do the same with Xathrid Necromancer.
Edit: No, Kiora is green.
Edit: What about switching back to using green after creatures, and using Revive to bring back the Liege?
How does bringing back Sek'Kuar go infinite again? It will allow us to get more hasted tokens, but we already them.
I guess Revive doesn't really solve the problem though - then we can't have green below where we use creatures, whereas if we use green to populate the Unstable Shapeshifters, we won't get the extra layer.
Bringing back sek'kuar allows us to get more haste tokens after mirrorweaving for our own necromancers.
Idea: Horned Kavu + Panharmonicon makes bouncing green and red creatures free, so shapeshifters can be freely set to lieges, without it being possible to bounce necromancers which would be bad.
Edit: Hmmm, could it be at all possible to get layers through Soulshift?
I guess we have the same problem as with Reef Worm - how to get full layers by making more copies of Primal Vigor, without being able to make more copies of the Soulshift creatures.
Hmmm, it seems like we just can't have Unstable Shapeshifter then. Which seemed to be the only copy card that we could use, so currently we just don't have a plan to make copies of the Liege. (unless there was some way to make a restricted token copy? I'm not aware of anything like that.)
So, without the extra layer, the best that we can currently do looks like:
One thing we could do is implement your idea of putting planeswalkers below the artifact layer. (I assume to generate red mana?) An interesting option is Jaya Ballard, which can generate red mana, but only for instant and sorcery spells. That would free up the possible usage of red mana for abilities later on.
Do you know any good uses for red mana in abilities, or possible things to do with counters?
Edit: Oh right - we can't have anything that can add or remove creatures at instant speed. Damn, that's so restricting.
Edit: Instead of Sek'Kuar, can we just use a creature with Unearth? That could solve all the problems we are having with Sek'Kuar.
Edit: No, I guess we can hold on bringing the Unearth creature back until we Mirroweave more Necromancers.
Jaya doesn't work because of her -8 which allows AE to be cast during a computation.
Kiora could still be used, perhaps with another colour in between so a bounce land can be used, or just using Great Furnace + having it be cheap to bounce it.
I was thinking we could get a layer out of 1 untapped chain veil = X pw uses, but that doesn't work since a pw use doesn't update the number of Rings of Brighthearth.
Unless, Rowan Kenrith could be used, since she makes an embelem that's basically Rings; but the -2 ability dealing damage might be an issue, as that can kill creatures to get haste tokens early. Perhaps we could try to ensure that there's no way to tap creatures before combat (so, Orb of Dreams -> Root Maze) but then we'd lose Deepwood Elder.
Edit: I had another idea to replace sek'kuar, but it doesn't work: Bonded Fetch + Cairn Wanderer, which needs Bonded Fetch to be in the gy to have haste. But it can simply be played after mirrorweaving for more necromancers.
Unfortunately, I've found another big problem with Death Pit Offering setups.
It's possible, and previously thought to be safe, to have just one necromancer alongside a haste token, with no opponent necromancers. However, with one other creature, it's possible to repeatedly kill that creature in combat for value (by having one arcbond on a blocker) and have it be replaced by our necromancer.
This currently sets us back to shadowborn apostle decks again, but a possible way to salvage it might be to note that doing this also requires damaging an opponent's creature.
So we'd get rid of indestructible (anything that needs to be kept alive during a computation can be kept alive by kiora's +1 and/or output waterclocks), and we'd need to somehow make giving the opponent creatures as expensive as getting our own (outside of computations at least) - which would mean cutting Dowsing Dagger. But then, the problem becomes how do we give our opponent a large-ish number of creatures before using mirrorweave to make them necromancers, while also being as expensive as getting our own creatues? (Somewhere on the order of 2^2^1000 should do). We'd probably want to be able to make a large number of creatures and then donate them, but how do we do that? We can't kill a leige because it would allow us to get a haste token early. Perhaps we could donate a liege, kill it with something that could only hit opponent's stuff? Because liege's death trigger is symmetric, that would allow us to make a bunch of squirrels, and then donate them.
Edit: Ah, it's a lot simpler than that: Such a setup has no way of pumping our necromancer's toughness, or that of the haste token; so all we need to do to solve the issue is to cut Roar of Challenge.
While another "must block" effect would be an obvious replacement, it might be easier to use Caltrops - that way we wouldn't have to fiddle with managing how much combat damage gets assigned and which creatures are tapped - we can simply have everything be tapped, all attacks go through unblocked to face, but deal no damage due to Chameleon Blur.
I was trying to find a way to use Sarkhan's static to do this but couldn't find a way to reuse him after he's donated that didn't use up the card slot it would otherwise save.
Edit: Hmmm, unless I'm missing something, we don't actually need to donate anything in the second deck. So we can remove Harmless Offering, and then Burning Sands becomes safe.
Hmmm, I guess we don't have a way to kill off Symbiotic Wurm while the opponent still has the Primal Vigors, so that's no good. We don't really want to have a way to kill off creatures then either. Instead, we can have Reef Worm, and four copies of Doubling Season, to get 1 + 16 + 256 + 4096 = 4369 creatures at the start.
What we'd really like is a repeatable way to get lots of doubling seasons or primal vigors.
An idea I had was the populate mechanic:
We would first get a Doubling Season token, by, say, giving the opponent some and using Aura Thief to steal them.
Then, we'd use Full Flowering to get a lot more of them, or more of any creature token we have.
We'd have to restructure the layers to put green mana (or there's also a couple of other suitable populate effects in white) above creatures.
We can make sure there's no way to get a token Necromancer so we couldn't populate those.
However, this plan doesn't get the full 3 layers out of Reef Worm as you couldn't reset the number of doubling seasons in between killing each kind of token, so I'm not sure it actually gains any layers at all.
Interesting idea. But yeah - while we would want to make as many Doubling Season tokens as possible before using the last populate on a creature token, we would get the same one layer that we would get without Doubling Season. (Or with just Doubling Season)
I do still have the dream of getting 3 extra layers out of Reef Worm! We would have to put Doubling Season lower in the layers somehow. We want some way to differentiate between the creature and enchantment tokens - pity there's no reverse version of Copy Artifact. I keep going back to the possibility of giving the opponent a lot of Primal Vigors, but I don't know how to do it. I guess there's Parallel Evolution, with an Opalescence on the battlefield - but that would double our normal creature tokens as well. Again, the reverse is easier - we can Populate lower down, then make more opponent tokens higher up.
I guess it's worth looking at various restructurings of the layers anyway, to see if any other one has a slight edge.
Edit: So, I just checked - not surprisingly, the Full Flowering version is the same 16 layers as the other versions, if we can only populate base creature tokens that we sacrifice with no additional payoff. If we can somehow create tokens of Liege of the Hollows, that would be 17 layers. (And Reef Worm with token doublers increasing with each token death would be 19 layers, lul.) But, I guess this is the same problem as with the other versions: How can we make tokens of Liege of the Hollows without being able to make tokens of Xathrid Necromancer?
Edit: Actually, this might not work, since Unstable Shapeshifter is worded "becomes a copy and gains this ability" rather than "becomes a copy except it has this ability" as is more common; which means that making further copies of it won't have the ability. So this makes getting a token version of it harder, but also makes getting a token of it bad since the token could copy a necromancer which could then be populated into necromancer copies without the unstable shapeshifter ability.
Edit: Eh, the Oracle wording is "except it has this ability".
2 Eureka
3 Omniscience
4 Thousand-Year Storm
5 Spellweaver Volute
6 Pull from Eternity
7 Recoup
8 Coat of Arms
9 Xathrid Necromancer
10 Arcbond
11 Artificial Evolution
12 Mirrorweave
13 Dowsing Dagger
14 Dralnu's Crusade
15 Starfield of Nyx
16 Roar of Challenge
17 Forebear's Blade
18 Chameleon Blur
19 Upwelling
20 Orb of Dreams
22 Sek'Kuar, Deathkeeper
23 Mystic Speculation
24 Steady Progress
25 Nexus of Fate
26 Mana Echoes
27 Seize the Day
28 Red Mana Battery
29 Amulet of Vigor
30 Echo Storm
31 Izzet Boilerworks
32 Kiora, the Crashing Wave
33 Sarkhan the Masterless
34 Settle Beyond Reality
35 Sunbaked Canyon
36 Cartographer
37 Caged Sun
38 Angelheart Vial
39 Flame Rift
41 Mirror Gallery
42 Harmless Offering
43 Unstable Shapeshifter
44 Aura Thief
45 Liege of the Hollows
46 Sylvok Lifestaff
47 Full Flowering
48 Great Furnace
49 Deepwood Elder
50 Thousand-Year Elixir
51 Boggart Birth Rite
52 Boggart Birth Rite
4 Unstable Frontier
4 Fulminator Mage
Edit: Oh, I guess we can have Unstable Shapeshifter tokens copy Fulminator Mage and sacrifice them. So perhaps 4 Unstable Frontiers, 3 Vesuvas, and 1 Lotus Vale, to get 9 Unstable Frontier plays. Any way to squeeze out more? Double Lotus Vales can sacrifice each other, and a Lotus Vale and a Lair land can recycle each other as well.
Although, this is only actually an issue if flickering creatures, to reset the shapeshifters, is cheap. If flickering creatures is at a higher layer than what's gained by killing them then it's not an issue, which maybe could be arranged by using white populate effects with white flicker effects. However, we'd then need to find an alternate way to reuse Kiora.
I was also thinking about having the PW layer be below the artifact copying layer, so The Chain Veil could be used - but that would lose the Red Mana Battery layer.
2 Eureka
3 Omniscience
4 Thousand-Year Storm
5 Spellweaver Volute
6 Pull from Eternity
7 Recoup
8 Coat of Arms
9 Xathrid Necromancer
10 Arcbond
11 Artificial Evolution
12 Mirrorweave
13 Dowsing Dagger
14 Dralnu's Crusade
15 Starfield of Nyx
16 Roar of Challenge
17 Forebear's Blade
18 Chameleon Blur
19 Upwelling
20 Orb of Dreams
22 Sek'Kuar, Deathkeeper
23 Mystic Speculation
24 Steady Progress
25 Nexus of Fate
26 Mana Echoes
27 Seize the Day
28 Red Mana Battery
29 Amulet of Vigor
30 Echo Storm
31 Svyelunite Temple
32 Splendid Reclamation
33 Great Furnace
34 Deepwood Elder
35 Thousand-Year Elixir
36 Boggart Birth Rite
37 Boggart Birth Rite
38 Nurturing Peatland
39 Flame Rift
40 Alhammarret's Archive
41 Mirror Gallery
42 Harmless Offering
43 Unstable Shapeshifter
44 Aura Thief
45 Liege of the Hollows
46 Sylok Lifestaff
47 Wake the Reflections
48 Settle Beyond Reality
49 Unstable Frontier
50 Soratami Mirror-Guard
4 Kiora, the Crashing Wave
1 Oath of Teferi
4 Nissa, Genesis Mage
1 Garruk, Wildspeaker
I was looking for a way to end in Unstable Frontier rather than Kiora, since that seems to be the ending that gets the most applications of the final layer. I had an idea for recycing Kiora, using Syndicate Guildmage and Warden of the Eye; however, that requires being above flickering for Warden of the Eye. So Kiora has to be above white, and green has to transition to either black or perhaps life. But for green to transition to life, it has to go above black (for Boggart Birth Rite with Order of the Sacred Torch). So we can't have green below Kiora if we don't want Kiora to be at the top. So we either want blue to transition to life, or to black (if we can find a way for Kiora to transition to green). And, while there are blue pay lands, we need to be able to recycle it without using any of the higher colors, which I don't know how to do. I suppose we could transition to black with Sinkhole, but again we would need to find a cheap way to bring it back. So, this is what I have so far.
So we'd like to make it somehow cheap to bounce or flicker or otherwise reuse Liege, but expensive or not possible to do the same with Necromancer.
I was looking for alternatives to Necromancer to maybe allow different colour or cmc constraints on things like bouncing or reanimation, but the only things with that direct effect are Bishop of Wings, Rotlung Reanimator, and Xathrid Necromancer.
The other interesting case is Requiem Angel; perhaps a sequence of Dralnu's Crusades could be used such that "non-X" essentially means the same thing as Y for some other creature type Y?
I guess the actual number doesn't matter all that much, it just means we can't go with having nontoken copies of every Dralnu's Crusade, and will just Mirrorweave copies.
Any ideas on what to do with Requiem Angel? It's white, flying, and has high CMC and power/toughness. So there are a lot of things that could potentially affect other things but not the Angel.
Edit: Is the solution as simple as adding Hibernation? Then we can bounce the Liege at will, but we can't do the same with Xathrid Necromancer.
Edit: No, Kiora is green.
Edit: What about switching back to using green after creatures, and using Revive to bring back the Liege?
I guess Revive doesn't really solve the problem though - then we can't have green below where we use creatures, whereas if we use green to populate the Unstable Shapeshifters, we won't get the extra layer.
Idea: Horned Kavu + Panharmonicon makes bouncing green and red creatures free, so shapeshifters can be freely set to lieges, without it being possible to bounce necromancers which would be bad.
Edit: Hmmm, could it be at all possible to get layers through Soulshift?
I guess we have the same problem as with Reef Worm - how to get full layers by making more copies of Primal Vigor, without being able to make more copies of the Soulshift creatures.
So, without the extra layer, the best that we can currently do looks like:
2 Eureka
3 Omniscience
4 Thousand-Year Storm
5 Spellweaver Volute
6 Pull from Eternity
7 Recoup
8 Coat of Arms
9 Xathrid Necromancer
10 Arcbond
11 Artificial Evolution
12 Mirrorweave
13 Dowsing Dagger
14 Dralnu's Crusade
15 Starfield of Nyx
16 Roar of Challenge
17 Forebear's Blade
18 Chameleon Blur
19 Upwelling
20 Orb of Dreams
22 Sek'Kuar, Deathkeeper
23 Mystic Speculation
24 Steady Progress
25 Nexus of Fate
26 Mana Echoes
27 Seize the Day
28 Red Mana Battery
29 Amulet of Vigor
30 Echo Storm
31 Izzet Boilerworks
32 Kiora, the Crashing Wave
33 Sarkhan the Masterless
34 Settle Beyond Reality
35 Sunbaked Canyon
36 Cartographer
37 Caged Sun
39 Flame Rift
40 Alhammarret's Archive
41 Mirror Gallery
42 Harmless Offering
43 Chatter of the Squirrel
44 Sylvok Lifestaff
45 Great Furnace
46 Deepwood Elder
47 Thousand-Year Elixir
48 Boggart Birth Rite
49 Boggart Birth Rite
4 Unstable Frontier
2 Vesuva
4 Fulminator Mage
1 Barbarian Riftcutter
Edit: Hmmm, if we get rid of Steady Progress, then Custodi Soulbinders can be one layer better than Liege of the Hollows. We would lose the Red Mana Battery layer, but with better potential for counter layers, perhaps that could be made up.
One thing we could do is implement your idea of putting planeswalkers below the artifact layer. (I assume to generate red mana?) An interesting option is Jaya Ballard, which can generate red mana, but only for instant and sorcery spells. That would free up the possible usage of red mana for abilities later on.
Do you know any good uses for red mana in abilities, or possible things to do with counters?
Edit: Oh right - we can't have anything that can add or remove creatures at instant speed. Damn, that's so restricting.
Edit: Instead of Sek'Kuar, can we just use a creature with Unearth? That could solve all the problems we are having with Sek'Kuar.
Edit: No, I guess we can hold on bringing the Unearth creature back until we Mirroweave more Necromancers.
Kiora could still be used, perhaps with another colour in between so a bounce land can be used, or just using Great Furnace + having it be cheap to bounce it.
I was thinking we could get a layer out of 1 untapped chain veil = X pw uses, but that doesn't work since a pw use doesn't update the number of Rings of Brighthearth.
Unless, Rowan Kenrith could be used, since she makes an embelem that's basically Rings; but the -2 ability dealing damage might be an issue, as that can kill creatures to get haste tokens early. Perhaps we could try to ensure that there's no way to tap creatures before combat (so, Orb of Dreams -> Root Maze) but then we'd lose Deepwood Elder.
Edit: I had another idea to replace sek'kuar, but it doesn't work: Bonded Fetch + Cairn Wanderer, which needs Bonded Fetch to be in the gy to have haste. But it can simply be played after mirrorweaving for more necromancers.