We have had issues before with Show and Tell allowing hyperstage transitions to be self-contained without consuming any triggers below them. We should ensure that isn't the case here - what does the intended hyperstage transition sequence look like?
Oh, I think what I thought might be a problem actually isn't a problem. The key thing is that it is fatal to allow two Worldfires to resolve in succession, since that will exile everything that we brought to our hand, and we can't recover from that. So, we can't have any Thousand-Year Storms on the battlefield when we resolve the Spellweaver Helix trigger, so we get just one of each of the sorceries that are imprinted. I don't believe we can gain life after Worldfire that way.
So, the hyperstage transition: One thing we do want to do before we start the hyperstage transition, is to play Vedalken Orrery with March of the Machines and Dual Nature on the battlefield, to get that Dual Nature ETB trigger on the stack. We then spend the mana to cast Recoup, which will trigger Spellweaver Helix, which will be imprinted with another copy of Recoup and all our other sorceries that we need. We can have the sorceries in the order Starlight, Restore, Worldfire, and Show and Tell. We resolve Starlight, which gives us a lot of life and allows us to implement a higher stage, and we keep going up to higher and higher stages as long as we have red mana. After all the higher stages are done, we resolve Restore, to bring back a red mana land sitting in our graveyard. We tap the land for a red mana. We also need to prepare for Worldfire, so we bounce all our nontoken artifacts and enchantments back to our hand. We use a Soul Separator token to create a copy of Wormfang Behemoth, which will exile the cards in our hand. We can then resolve Worldfire, which will drop our life total to one, and exile all of our cards from our hand and graveyard, but at the same time bring back the cards exiled with the Wormfang Behemoth token, which will be exiled by Worldfire. We then resolve Show and Tell to put Omniscience onto the battlefield. We now go to the lower stage, where we resolve our Dual Nature trigger for Vedalken Orrery, and we get a token copy. Next up on the stack are the Pull from Eternity triggers from our last cast of this stage, which we will use to bring back the cards that were exiled from our graveyard.
So it looks like we do need to use up triggers each time we do the hyperstage, in that we need to use up some Pull from Eternities in order to retrieve the cards from exile to our graveyard.
Very nice, even if we put something else (vedalken orrery) in for the show and tell I think we still need to resolve a tys trigger for pull from eternity to get the freshly exiled recoup back in the yard. So we still wind down.
Ok, first lets show we can make as many of our artifacts as we need without them being removed by Dual Nature.
So first say we have a bunch of Pull From Eternity copies on the stack (or rather Repeated Reverberation triggers for PFE), one Panharmonicon, and Soul Separator in hand.
We cast Soul Separator, get two copies from Dual Nature (triggering twice). Use a copy, and bounce March of the machines followed by the original [preventing Dual Nature removing the other token as it won't be a creature]. Resolve a PFE, and replay March and Soul Sep. In response to the Dual Nature triggers, use the other token Soul Sep to bounce Dual Nature followed by the soul sep. Then, the net result is 2 token soul seps not created by any Dual Nature. We can repeat this process for as many soul separators as needed.
Then, use a soul sep to bounce Dual Nature + Panharmonicon, replay both, and in response to triggers use another soul sep to bounce them both; netting token panharmonicons.
Then we can repeat this process for any other artifacts, and have plenty of spare proctor triggers to move Mirrormades around.
This process also nets as many copies of other creatures (such as necromancers and vanilla zombies) as we need using spare soul seps.
The current deck uses Tidal Barracuda, but it would be nice to show that it works with Vedalken Orrerey instead - and we want to make sure we don't lose the orrery during an intermediate step where we need it. Assume that there's already a nontoken orrery and a token one that may have been created by an active DN. First, bounce march + nontoken orrery. Resolve a PFE, then replay them, and in response to DN triggers, bounce DN. It removes the tokens created by it, but then we get fresh orrery tokens afterwards.
Now, to start a computation, assuming it has already been prepared by casting the instants:
We first bounce all the nontoken artifacts, bouncing March first so the tokens don't get removed by DN.
The Mirrormades need to be on Dralnu's Crusade before this point, as they need to have been around when Artificial Evolution was cast.
We use a Soul Sep to make a Tidal Baracuda, and in response tap another for Desolation Giant. Start the computation, then when it finishes we get flash and can rebuild from just nontokens using the above process.
In Orrery decks, instead we can put Orrery-DN triggers on the stack, then make a giant.
PROBLEM: As we need March of the machines on the battlefield to start a computation, it will still be around during it. However, then the opponent's Coat of Arms dies. So, we need to either give it indestructible or prevent damage dealt to it. Note that a spell that gives indestructible is incompatible with Desolation Giant, but Death Pit Offferring works just as well.
Showing that the stage process works is a little more tricky.
Set the Mirrormades to Bloodbond March.
Use a PFE to put a proctor in the graveyard without using it
Play Sanctum Plowbeast, get 3 BBM triggers; resolve one.
Use the proctor and bounce the beast.
Cycle it for 2 life.
Resolve the other BBM triggers
Use another PFEto bounce the beast.
We're now where we started, but have traded a few PFEs for life.
Hmmm. So the problem is that one of our stage abilities has a delayed effect, where we can wait to actually bounce the stage creature.
Well, that was my idea for how to get around having to use an instant which bounced directly, like Into Thin Air. So, that makes both the Faith of the Devoted and Nihilistic Glee decks not work at the moment.
I don't recall there being any more decks that had an additional stage that don't have known problems. I don't think we ever got the Jokulhaups deck to the point where we could add an additional stage, so Worldfire seems still to be the most promising one. If we give up on an artifact primary stage, we could go to a creature primary stage, and still get an additional stage. Ideally, we would like a nonwhite primary stage, and use white mana for the additional, so that we could use Aegis Automaton and Guardian of the Guildpact. But we could also make the additional stage with Displacement Wave, which would allow for white creatures like Ghost-Lit Redeemer.
Some of our standard stages have had the property of being able to use something both before and after casting one of the stage spells (such as the blue stage in our last one allowing Crushing Canopy to be used before and after the Devious Cover Up is cast before Quasiduplicate was needed) but this idea doesn't seem to be compatible with Bloodbond March based stages.
Edit: So the possible ways to make stages include:
- Mana stages; then the hyperstage card basically has to be Woldpurge which makes further stages very difficult.
- Life stages; then the resetter is Worldfire. Could work though this plan doesn't.
- Creature token stages, with the hyperstage card being something like Jokulhaups
-- Mimic Vat doesn't work without Horobi - Bone Shredder didn't work due to this same problem of delaying it
-- Soul Foundry doesn't give the tokens haste. However, Brudiclad could work, as the previous problem with it involved Mirrorweave, which we're no longer using.
Yeah, I've thought on and off about making stages that aren't built around Bloodbond March, but I haven't come up with anything interesting. One problem is that our standard stages typically have one ability that brings a creature onto the battlefield, and the other ability destroys it. But that doesn't seem to be compatible with being able to destroy creatures for the computation.
Oh, that's right, Soul Foundry perhaps works now! It's so tough to keep track of how card changes affect all the old ideas and decks that we are no longer thinking about.
Sharum the Hegemon goes infinite: When a copy is on the battlefield (such as from Soul Foundry), and the original enters, it can immediately die to the legend rule, and then target itself to bring itself back, and loop. Combined with Panharmonicon this gets infinite mana from the Black Lotus.
Y'know, I don't think that we need Sharuum. I believe the original intention was to bring back Goblin Boom Keg from the graveyard, but we can make a token copy with Mirrormade, and bounce the original back to our hand with Stern Proctor.
Ah, it seems like part of the original problem with Brudiclad. Telchor Engineer still exists, which is that it can turn a damaged creature into Goblin Boom Keg. Seems like the only way around that is to not allow token copies of artifacts.
Hmmm, if we don't have the ability to make copies of artifacts, I don't see how we can make copies of anything else, since we have March of the Machines. There's nothing that specifically makes token copies of enchantments, I don't think. Before, we were able to Mirrorweave to make enough copies of permanents, but of course we can't have Mirrorweave. There are cards that make specific tokens or copies of themselves, but those don't seem useful unless we can turn those into copies of other things, and then we have the problem above. So, I don't know how to fix this.
Edit: How about using Retract for the discard decks? It would replace Stern Proctor. We would still need a way to bounce enchantments - perhaps Drake Familiar would be good.
The main issue I'm seeing now is that it doesn't look like Drake Familiar can be used often enough. It needs to be used multiple times in the stage process to move the mirrormades around, but there's no Pull From Eternity to get it back into the graveyard between these uses, as we'd rather have a bunch of Retracts on the stack.
No that has other problems, is there another way we can repeatedly cheat out omniscience?
Or maybe we can start with tamiyo, field researcher's ult instead?
So, the hyperstage transition: One thing we do want to do before we start the hyperstage transition, is to play Vedalken Orrery with March of the Machines and Dual Nature on the battlefield, to get that Dual Nature ETB trigger on the stack. We then spend the mana to cast Recoup, which will trigger Spellweaver Helix, which will be imprinted with another copy of Recoup and all our other sorceries that we need. We can have the sorceries in the order Starlight, Restore, Worldfire, and Show and Tell. We resolve Starlight, which gives us a lot of life and allows us to implement a higher stage, and we keep going up to higher and higher stages as long as we have red mana. After all the higher stages are done, we resolve Restore, to bring back a red mana land sitting in our graveyard. We tap the land for a red mana. We also need to prepare for Worldfire, so we bounce all our nontoken artifacts and enchantments back to our hand. We use a Soul Separator token to create a copy of Wormfang Behemoth, which will exile the cards in our hand. We can then resolve Worldfire, which will drop our life total to one, and exile all of our cards from our hand and graveyard, but at the same time bring back the cards exiled with the Wormfang Behemoth token, which will be exiled by Worldfire. We then resolve Show and Tell to put Omniscience onto the battlefield. We now go to the lower stage, where we resolve our Dual Nature trigger for Vedalken Orrery, and we get a token copy. Next up on the stack are the Pull from Eternity triggers from our last cast of this stage, which we will use to bring back the cards that were exiled from our graveyard.
So it looks like we do need to use up triggers each time we do the hyperstage, in that we need to use up some Pull from Eternities in order to retrieve the cards from exile to our graveyard.
I think that we might need to pay a bit of extra attention to managing the Mirrormades, as they need to be Dralnu's Crusades for every computation, Spellweaver volutes when we cast a sorcery, Faith of the devoted when we need to gain life, and Bloodbond march whenever we cast a creature, which seems like a lot of work for Stern proctor.
We might even want extra Dual Natures, or Panharmonicons.
So first say we have a bunch of Pull From Eternity copies on the stack (or rather Repeated Reverberation triggers for PFE), one Panharmonicon, and Soul Separator in hand.
We cast Soul Separator, get two copies from Dual Nature (triggering twice). Use a copy, and bounce March of the machines followed by the original [preventing Dual Nature removing the other token as it won't be a creature]. Resolve a PFE, and replay March and Soul Sep. In response to the Dual Nature triggers, use the other token Soul Sep to bounce Dual Nature followed by the soul sep. Then, the net result is 2 token soul seps not created by any Dual Nature. We can repeat this process for as many soul separators as needed.
Then, use a soul sep to bounce Dual Nature + Panharmonicon, replay both, and in response to triggers use another soul sep to bounce them both; netting token panharmonicons.
Then we can repeat this process for any other artifacts, and have plenty of spare proctor triggers to move Mirrormades around.
This process also nets as many copies of other creatures (such as necromancers and vanilla zombies) as we need using spare soul seps.
The current deck uses Tidal Barracuda, but it would be nice to show that it works with Vedalken Orrerey instead - and we want to make sure we don't lose the orrery during an intermediate step where we need it. Assume that there's already a nontoken orrery and a token one that may have been created by an active DN. First, bounce march + nontoken orrery. Resolve a PFE, then replay them, and in response to DN triggers, bounce DN. It removes the tokens created by it, but then we get fresh orrery tokens afterwards.
Now, to start a computation, assuming it has already been prepared by casting the instants:
We first bounce all the nontoken artifacts, bouncing March first so the tokens don't get removed by DN.
The Mirrormades need to be on Dralnu's Crusade before this point, as they need to have been around when Artificial Evolution was cast.
We use a Soul Sep to make a Tidal Baracuda, and in response tap another for Desolation Giant. Start the computation, then when it finishes we get flash and can rebuild from just nontokens using the above process.
In Orrery decks, instead we can put Orrery-DN triggers on the stack, then make a giant.
PROBLEM: As we need March of the machines on the battlefield to start a computation, it will still be around during it. However, then the opponent's Coat of Arms dies. So, we need to either give it indestructible or prevent damage dealt to it. Note that a spell that gives indestructible is incompatible with Desolation Giant, but Death Pit Offferring works just as well.
Showing that the stage process works is a little more tricky.
We cant use a copy of Soul separator while march of the machines is in play as they don't have haste.
Thousand-Year Elixir would fix it. (but breaks Jester's Mask at the end...)
Darksteel forge seems like the easiest way to fix the issue with coat of arms, but there might be something better.
Edit: actually we might not need the Elixir?
I wonder if we can avoid the need for Thousand-Year Elixir by always having Rings of Brighthearth triggers for Soul Separator on the stack before a computation, just like we put on a trigger for either Tidal Barracuda or Vedalken Orrery. I haven't worked out the line yet though.
Start with a bunch of PFEs on the stack.
Set the Mirrormades to Bloodbond March.
Use a PFE to put a proctor in the graveyard without using it
Play Sanctum Plowbeast, get 3 BBM triggers; resolve one.
Use the proctor and bounce the beast.
Cycle it for 2 life.
Resolve the other BBM triggers
Use another PFEto bounce the beast.
We're now where we started, but have traded a few PFEs for life.
Well, that was my idea for how to get around having to use an instant which bounced directly, like Into Thin Air. So, that makes both the Faith of the Devoted and Nihilistic Glee decks not work at the moment.
I don't recall there being any more decks that had an additional stage that don't have known problems. I don't think we ever got the Jokulhaups deck to the point where we could add an additional stage, so Worldfire seems still to be the most promising one. If we give up on an artifact primary stage, we could go to a creature primary stage, and still get an additional stage. Ideally, we would like a nonwhite primary stage, and use white mana for the additional, so that we could use Aegis Automaton and Guardian of the Guildpact. But we could also make the additional stage with Displacement Wave, which would allow for white creatures like Ghost-Lit Redeemer.
Edit: So the possible ways to make stages include:
- Mana stages; then the hyperstage card basically has to be Woldpurge which makes further stages very difficult.
- Life stages; then the resetter is Worldfire. Could work though this plan doesn't.
- Creature token stages, with the hyperstage card being something like Jokulhaups
-- Mimic Vat doesn't work without Horobi - Bone Shredder didn't work due to this same problem of delaying it
-- Soul Foundry doesn't give the tokens haste. However, Brudiclad could work, as the previous problem with it involved Mirrorweave, which we're no longer using.
So, to get the ball rolling:
2 Xathrid Necromancer
3 Arcbond
4 Artificial Evolution
5 Wrong Turn
6 Dowsing Dagger
7 Dralnu's Crusade
8 Starfield of Nyx
9 Death Pit Offering
10 Goblin Boom Keg
11 Tidal Barracuda
12 March of the Machines
13 Spellweaver Volute
14 Pull from Eternity
15 Thousand-Year Storm
16 Invulnerability
17 Mana Echoes
18 Stern Proctor
19 Sharuum the Hegemon
20 Wizard Mentor
21 Soul Foundry
22 Artful Dodge
23 Chrome Mox
24 Bloodbond March
25 Nix
26 Illusionist's Bracers
27 Mirrormade
28 Leonin Shikari
29 Brudiclad, Telchor Engineer
31 Jokulhaups
32 Metallic Mastery
33 Chatter of the Squirrel
34 Chatter of the Squirrel
35 Panharmonicon
36 Restore
37 Tropical Island
38 Aegis Automaton
39 Guardian of the Guildpact
40 Great Sable Stag
41 Platinum Emperion
42 Mana Crypt
43 Show and Tell
44 Omniscience
45 Fountain of Cho
46 Telekinetic Bonds
47 Pain Magnification
48 Sanguine Sacrament
49 Sanguine Sacrament
50 Sanguine Sacrament
51 Sanguine Sacrament
52 Thrumming Stone
53 Mirror Gallery
54 Boon Reflection
55 Blue Sun's Zenith
56 Consecrated Sphinx
57 Farsight Mask
58 Stream of Life
60 Stunted Growth
As to the new deck:
Pulse of the Forge makes infinite storm with Platinum Emperion
I think that deck is missing Dual Nature or similar? to make copies of enchantments.
And I don't think we need both Wrong Turn and Dowsing Dagger (Leonin Shikari also makes toughness boosting equipment dangerous)
Hmmm, Pulse of the Forge can be replaced by Flame Jet.
We don't want Dual Nature, since it goes infinite with Brudiclad, Telchor Engineer. I think if we replace Metallic Mastery with Clone Legion, we can make it work.
Edit: How about using Retract for the discard decks? It would replace Stern Proctor. We would still need a way to bounce enchantments - perhaps Drake Familiar would be good.
2 Xathrid Necromancer
3 Arcbond
4 Artificial Evolution
5 Wrong Turn
6 Dralnu's Crusade
7 Dralnu's Crusade
8 Dralnu's Crusade
9 Dralnu's Crusade
10 Mirrormade
11 Mirrormade
12 Desolation Giant
13 Goblin Boom Keg
14 March of the Machines
15 Tidal Barracuda
16 Spellweaver Volute
17 Pull from Eternity
18 Bloodbond March
19 Cephalid Shrine
20 Thousand-Year Storm
21 Invulnerability
22 Mana Echoes
24 Retract
25 Soul Separator
26 Sanctum Plowbeast
27 Faith of the Devoted
28 Army of the Damned
29 K'rrik, Son of Yawgmoth
30 Rings of Brighthearth
31 Dual Nature
32 Repeated Reverberation
33 Drake Familiar
34 Spellweaver Helix
35 Worldfire
36 Starlight
37 Restore
38 Recoup
39 Recoup
40 Panharmonicon
41 Molten Slagheap
42 Wormfang Behemoth
44 Aegis Automaton
45 Guardian of the Guildpact
46 Black Lotus
47 Show and Tell
48 Omniscience
49 Sphinx of Enlightenment
50 Chrome Mox
51 Drafna's Restoration
52 Blue Sun's Zenith
53 Consecrated Sphinx
54 Widespread Panic
55 Jester's Mask
56 Sphinx of the Second Sun
57 World at War
Edit: Potential solution is Auratog + Crystal Chimes.