Upon FortyTwo's advice, I've decided to create a discussion thread for the Modern version of the max damage challenge.
So, the challenge is to create a 60-card Modern legal deck that deals the most damage without going infinite, on as early a turn as possible.
Here are the rules, modified from Stakfish's exposition on his webpage about the Standard version of this challenge:
The Rules of the Game
I’ve taken the liberty of adapting the rules from the original vintage challenge to this one. I’ve relaxed them in some places to allow for the limited cardpool, but for the most part I’ve left them as-is.
-Start with a Modern-legal deck of exactly 60 cards. No less, of course, and if we allowed more, you could deal arbitrary but finite damage by including as many copies of Rat Colony as you feel like, and it wouldn’t break the other rules.
-Conditions caused by randomness can resolve any way you like. In this deck, that mostly means that every single card draw is a Demonic Tutor in disguise: you can assume that the order of your deck is exactly what you want it to be. This veers pretty heavily into magical christmasland, but if we didn’t do it this way you’d have to figure out the average amount of damage a deck could deal, which is probably impossible.
-The opponent is a goldfish with a deck of 60 Wastes. However, they are still playing to stop you: if you give your opponent a choice, they will pick whichever one is worse for you. The only exception is that they won’t concede the game. This is a sadistic goldfish that wants to make you play it out.
-In the old challenge, you had to go off on turn one. For this challenge, you pick a turn N for which you deal the measured damage. The fewer turns required, the better. No one is impressed that you can deal a lot of damage on turn 50, or 50 million for that matter.
-No going infinite on turn N. Infinite really means “arbitrary” in magic, most of the time, so we define it like this: when you make your deck, I pick a finite number, say, a million, or Graham’s Number, or four. If, no matter what number I pick, there’s a line your deck can take that will deal at least that much damage on turn N, your deck goes infinite and is disqualified.
-This doesn’t matter to our deck, but other rules of magic apply: if I put 80,000,000 copies of Shock on the stack and target my opponent with each one, they’ll die on the tenth one, and I’ll have dealt only 20 damage. In practice, that means you’re either winning with a giant X-spell or by attacking with a lot of very big creatures.
So it's much the same as the other challenges, except it uses the Modern format. Certainly I would expect that we can create several stages at least, but perhaps we can implement a hyperstage or more.
Perhaps the first task is to see if we can access our whole deck and have any necessary mana on turn 1, or if not, find the earliest turn that we can go off on.
Then, we come to what appears to be the most damaging loss: both Psychic Battle and Grip of Chaos are gone. So the normal way of processing our Vintage stage is no longer available. The best thing I can think of is to use Rings of Brighthearth in their place. This means that we can't use Mimic Vat for stages, since we could use Rings of Brighthearth on it and get multiple creature tokens per activation. So no more creature stages, back to mana stages.
Now, the champion of the mana stages previously was Chrome Mox - but it's banned in Modern! Oh well.
So, we can start perhaps by going all the way back to the very early days of our stage decks, using creatures that can discarded to create mana. These include landcyclers, the Spirit Guides, and Skirge Familiar. Some of the landcyclers are gone, as are Elvish Spirit Guide and Skirge Familliar. So it might be tough to get a full 6/7 mana stages. (and a life stage maybe?)
Of course, we could try to create a stage some other way, perhaps using the ideas from the recent Standard decks.
Chaining some mana stages doesn't seem so hard, but we need to figure out some things in the basic setup: How to go off on first turn (or decide that it isn't possible), figure out a replacement for Cephalid Shrine, and figure out how to make many copies of Bloodbond March and/or Rings of Brighthearth, now that Dual Nature is gone.
here a real one
starting hand , Arrester's Zeal, Sigarda's Aid, Colossus Hammer * 2, plains * 2, kor duelist * 2
turn 1, play plains, one of the duelist
turn 2, draw plains, play it, play the aid, play the second kor duelist, attack for 2
turn 3, play plains, play one of the hammer targetting one of the kor, play arrester's zeal on one of them, attack with both, first strike deal 15 and play the other hammer, deal 24 on normal strike
Total: 41 damage turn 3
So, the challenge is to create a 60-card Modern legal deck that deals the most damage without going infinite, on as early a turn as possible.
Here are the rules, modified from Stakfish's exposition on his webpage about the Standard version of this challenge:
So it's much the same as the other challenges, except it uses the Modern format. Certainly I would expect that we can create several stages at least, but perhaps we can implement a hyperstage or more.
Perhaps the first task is to see if we can access our whole deck and have any necessary mana on turn 1, or if not, find the earliest turn that we can go off on.
The first thing that I noticed among card legalities is the absence of Opalescence. At first I thought that this would be extremely damaging, but then I realized that Starfield of Nyx could be a suitable substitite. Among other cards, Bloodbond March, Cowardice, Omniscience, and Leyline of Anticipation / Vedalken Orrery are all legal. But Cephalid Shrine is not - does anyone know a good substitute for Cephalid Shrine? Declaration of Naught and Draining Whelk are possibilities, although they require blue mana and recycling a creature respectively.
Then, we come to what appears to be the most damaging loss: both Psychic Battle and Grip of Chaos are gone. So the normal way of processing our Vintage stage is no longer available. The best thing I can think of is to use Rings of Brighthearth in their place. This means that we can't use Mimic Vat for stages, since we could use Rings of Brighthearth on it and get multiple creature tokens per activation. So no more creature stages, back to mana stages.
Now, the champion of the mana stages previously was Chrome Mox - but it's banned in Modern! Oh well.
So, we can start perhaps by going all the way back to the very early days of our stage decks, using creatures that can discarded to create mana. These include landcyclers, the Spirit Guides, and Skirge Familiar. Some of the landcyclers are gone, as are Elvish Spirit Guide and Skirge Familliar. So it might be tough to get a full 6/7 mana stages. (and a life stage maybe?)
Of course, we could try to create a stage some other way, perhaps using the ideas from the recent Standard decks.
Chaining some mana stages doesn't seem so hard, but we need to figure out some things in the basic setup: How to go off on first turn (or decide that it isn't possible), figure out a replacement for Cephalid Shrine, and figure out how to make many copies of Bloodbond March and/or Rings of Brighthearth, now that Dual Nature is gone.
ok ok I'm out
here a real one
starting hand , Arrester's Zeal, Sigarda's Aid, Colossus Hammer * 2, plains * 2, kor duelist * 2
turn 1, play plains, one of the duelist
turn 2, draw plains, play it, play the aid, play the second kor duelist, attack for 2
turn 3, play plains, play one of the hammer targetting one of the kor, play arrester's zeal on one of them, attack with both, first strike deal 15 and play the other hammer, deal 24 on normal strike
Total: 41 damage turn 3