I had an interesting idea. We could add Protean Thaumaturge, which can become a copy of an animated Nyx Lotus with its ability. But, then the Legendary rule kicks in, and we either sacrifice the Thaumaturge, and then nothing is accomplished, or we sacrifice the Nyx Lotus. If we do the latter, we can tap the Thaumaturge (now a Nyx Lotus) for a lot of red mana. But, to do this again, we need to get an animated Nyx Lotus on the battlefield again, so we need to cast Dance of the Manse, and use a white mana. So this is how we lead into white.
So if this works, we could go:
Layer 1: Casting Electrodominance can create a large third stage.
Layer 2: Tapping a Nyx Lotus Thaumaturge will generate a lot of red mana.
Layer 3: Casting Dance of the Manse will get many copies, to animate Nyx Lotus many times.
Layer 4: A few proliferates will generate a lot of Gold tokens using The First Iroan Games.
Layer 5: Putting a land into play will trigger a lot of Evolution Sages.
Layer 5: Tapping a white mana land generates a lot of white mana.
Layer 6: We can put a lot of Plains on the battlefield.
It seemed like we had a workable configuration with Thrill of Possibility + Fry, but unfortunately Fry can target Saheeli. We could switch to Oko, the Trickster, but I don't see how to get the same layer out of Oko, since we can only tap him once, so we would be back to the same 5 layers we currently have.
Hmm, you seem to be right. Being able to hold on to the Crushing Canopy lets kill the pixies another time.
Looking at the other way:
QQQQDDDDDD floating 1U
I guess it's the same thing, we can fetch the pixies, cast canopy, and fetch the pixies again. So we get two uses of the pixies (or I guess just one pixie).
That was potentially dangerous, but it works out well - we can drop a pixie and add one more Plains.
Yeah it was the same thing we ran into with the white locket last year.
Fortunately the same problem is not present in the other stages,
Ritual of soot and Gruesome menagerie are our cheapest ways to interact with the skull prophet.
Same with shock/crash through with the parrot/mutate.
This does make the start trickier.
The simple patch is to add a gyre engineer for the cut pixie, but i'm not sure if that is necessary.
I think Gyre Engineer could also be fetched for additional blue, so that's a problem. Oh wait, we can't kill it cheaply, so it's okay.
Once we can cast Dance of the Manse for enough mana, we're pretty much home free, at least with Happily Ever After. Hmm, but getting to that point without a second Pixie might be hard.
Hmmm - currently we add two cards to get started, Gyre Engineer and Happily Ever After. Ideally we could replace those with just one card, but I'm not sure what it would be.
I thought about Emergency Powers for a bit, but it doesn't seem all that promising... it's an extra mana, and filling our hand isn't all that good since mana is what we are shortest on.
I don't suppose there is anything that gets us a one-time burst of mana? Probably not.
Edit: So, I really like the card Mythos of Illuna. But, it currently messes up the Landfall part of the layer sequence. However, it looks like we can get an extra layer using it, thanks to Yarok, the Desecrated.
So, what about:
Layer 1: Resolving an ETB trigger from Mythos of Illuna gains us a lot of life.
Layer 2: Casting a Mythos of Illuna causes a lot of ETB triggers thanks to Yarok, the Descrated.
Layer 3: Tapping a Nyx Lotus generates a lot of red mana.
Layer 5: We can put a lot of Wilderness Reclamations into play.
A tricky part is giving a bunch of Guildpact Informants haste. Smelt-Ward Ignus is safe, but the problem is getting red mana for it in the first place. There are some other options that also untap, so they run afoul of our Porcuparrot. Still, even if we can't give our Informant tokens haste, we can attack still with 8 creatures for 8 proliferates, getting us a lot of Wilderness Reclamations.
nothing useable, Cling to dust is the best limited card draw/lifegain option. Creeping chill can be even cheaper, but would exile itself.
I had thought that all untap spells were out of the question, but blink/flicker effect like justiciar's portal obviously don't untap the nyx lotus and also break up mutate stacks so we'd still need to also kill+draw the nonparrot mutator.
Oh, I think I see a solution. We can play a red tapland in the first turn, and have it untapped so that it can tap for a lot of red mana on the third turn. We can then use one red mana for Cavalier of Flame, to give all our creatures haste, including a whole bunch of Guildpact Informants.
Hmm, is Justiciar's Portal a step towards a white mana stage? I have no idea how it would work though.
Edit: Oh, Cavalier of Flame has a bad ETB ability. But, we can still use Smelt-Ward Ignus, and just spend all the red mana from our land to give haste to as many Guildpact Informants as possible.
So the starting lands would be Rugged highlands, swamp, swamp to cast Skull prophet on turn 2 and Bolas's citadel on turn 3? We still need a white though so we'd need early Azusa to play a plains.
Though, with Mythos of Illuna we might not even need dance of the manse? That does kind of help with our early mana problems. (though we'd need to demote the gainland to a guildgate)
I was originally thinking of justiciar's portal as a way to make a bunch of mana after animating TYS, while also being something that might be useful in the other parts of the combo. (maybe somehow worth a layer? IDK)
White mana is pretty difficult to single out. So a stage seems very unlikely.
The big issue with Mythos of Illuna is that is that after using it once with all the colours, the fight effect is part of that permanent's copiable values, meaning it retains the ability when copied by Quasiduplicateand thus can gain life (and kill stuff) way too cheaply
Oh, phooey. I guess we could try to fix it by getting rid of Role Reversal, but that would eliminate the Mythos of Illuna combo that gets us an extra layer.
Layer 2: We can tap a red mana land for a lot of red mana, thanks to Nikya of the Old Ways.
Layer 3: We can untap the red mana land by casting Awakening of Vitu-Ghazi on it, and then untapping it using High Alert, say. We can generate a lot of white mana by tapping a Nyx Lotus.
Edit: Oh, I see, with mythos we won't need dance at all to copy our TYSs. And if we can't make an enchantment have any other type, or remove OWTS, then the opponent can't get anything other than an enchantment.
The last 22 cards can be devoted to getting as much red mana and life as possible. Happily Ever After can gain us 265 life, and Cauldron Familiar can gain us another 19 life. If there is no other way to gain life or red mana, then the remainder of the cards can be devoted to allowing us to spend the least amount of life to get going. Milling and returning artifacts and enchantments using Dance of the Manse was a nice efficient way to get all our enchantments, but it's not available anymore.
The issue with giving all creatures haste with Domri is that you can have a bunch of hasted porcuparrot tokens, and go through the life stage mutating onto the tokens instead of the nontoken one. Then, every 4th porcuparrot gets killed for free by the pings from 3 others plus itself, saving the use of a shock and thus generating life. Some pings (and shocks) can then be directed at the Domri to recycle it, going infinite.
Ah - Domri can be replaced, but the problem with animating Nyx Lotus, I don't know how to deal with. There don't seem to be any enchantment artifacts, which is rather surprising to me.
Edit: Wishclaw Talisman is the sort of thing we would like to have, except that it's ability allows us to fetch Migratory Greathorn too cheaply.
turn 3:
Bolas's Citadel 21 life 2 cards in hand
Rhythm of the Wild 18
Kinnan 16
Pixie 3G2U 14
Leafkin Avenger 8G2U 10
Ashiok, Dream Render 8G2U 7
Crushing Canopy 8G2U 4
Plains 8G2UW 4
Dance of the Manse, GU 4, animate both leylines, TYS, KBtSG, Nyx Lotus
Justiciar's Portal, 10G U 6U/B, 2 life
Quasiduplicate, 9G 5U/B, 2 life, make 4 copies of TYS
Crash Through, 9G 5U/B, 1 life, 21 copies
So at that point we get a bunch of card draws, with which we can draw Ritual of Soot and Gruesome Menagerie, and get started on a small black stage. Then, we can use most of the remaining draws to draw Migratory Greathorn and gain a life each time, allowing for repeated casts of Shock. So we should have a suitably large number before we start putting more lands into play.
This allows for another Mountain, getting us to 10 -> 10 -> 10 -> 10 -> 27 -> 5.
Nice use of Ashiok as the leafkin avenger target, always nice when cards are useful in the setup and the combo.
However, that startup isn't quite fully set up as it still needs to get all of the blue stage cards, even drawing the creatures costs 5G4U mana to cast (or 12G2U to kinnan them up)
We really want just one more blue or a little bit more life so we can cast Quasiduplicate before Justicar's portal.
Layer 5: Tapping a Plains generates a lot of white mana.
Layer 6: We can put a lot of Plains into play.
where we would use Response // Resurgence to get all the additional combats that we needed. However, we don't have a way of keeping the white mana that we generate when combat starts, so the above seems roughly the same as our current layer sequence.
I was also thinking of going back to The Akroan War, which loses a layer versus Kiora above, but keeps both red and white mana live. But, it seems hard to hook into red and white mana above a Saga.
Edit: Ah, I think I have an improvement:
Layer 1: Paying a red mana to Leafkin Avenger gains us a lot of life.
Layer 2: Tapping a red mana land will generate a lot of red mana.
Layer 3: Casting On Alert will untap the red mana land many times.
Layer 4: Making the opponent draw a card will gain us a lot of Treasure tokens thanks to Smothering Tithe.
Layer 5: We can make the opponent draw a bunch of times.
Edit: Oh, I think I see how to add Nyx Lotus! We can use Role Reversal on Kiora Bests the Sea God itself. So we transfer about half of our Kioras to the opponent, trigger a proliferate, and Nyx Lotus bounces between us and the opponent, untapping each time.
So:
Layer 1: Paying a red mana to Leafkin Avenger gains us a lot of life.
Layer 2: Tapping a red mana land will generate a lot of red mana.
Layer 3: Casting On Alert will untap the red mana land many times.
Layer 4: Tapping a Nyx Lotus will gain us a lot of white mana.
I had an interesting idea. We could add Protean Thaumaturge, which can become a copy of an animated Nyx Lotus with its ability. But, then the Legendary rule kicks in, and we either sacrifice the Thaumaturge, and then nothing is accomplished, or we sacrifice the Nyx Lotus. If we do the latter, we can tap the Thaumaturge (now a Nyx Lotus) for a lot of red mana. But, to do this again, we need to get an animated Nyx Lotus on the battlefield again, so we need to cast Dance of the Manse, and use a white mana. So this is how we lead into white.
So if this works, we could go:
Layer 1: Casting Electrodominance can create a large third stage.
Layer 2: Tapping a Nyx Lotus Thaumaturge will generate a lot of red mana.
Layer 3: Casting Dance of the Manse will get many copies, to animate Nyx Lotus many times.
Layer 4: A few proliferates will generate a lot of Gold tokens using The First Iroan Games.
Layer 5: Putting a land into play will trigger a lot of Evolution Sages.
Layer 6: We can put a bunch of lands into play.
Edit: Hmmm, can we change the configuration of the life stage so that we can't target Planeswalkers? I was hoping for something like:
Layer 1: Electrodominance.
Layer 2: Tapping a Nyx Lotus.
Layer 3: Saheeli, Sublime Artificer turns a lot of artifacts into Nyx Lotuses.
Layer 4: Heliod's Intervention can gain the opponent a lot of life, allowing us to use Bolas's Citadel.
Layer 5: Tapping a white mana land generates a lot of white mana.
Layer 6: We can put a lot of Plains on the battlefield.
It seemed like we had a workable configuration with Thrill of Possibility + Fry, but unfortunately Fry can target Saheeli. We could switch to Oko, the Trickster, but I don't see how to get the same layer out of Oko, since we can only tap him once, so we would be back to the same 5 layers we currently have.
How about Thrill of Possibility + Jaya's Greeting?
Edit: Oh never mind, Porcuparrot can ping anything. :/
stack is: bottom DDDDDQQQQQQQQQQQQQ top floating 1 U (D=Devious cover-up Q=Quasiduplicate)
Qs return all our spells, kill the pixies and return crushing canopy again if needed.
excess Qs make TYS
stack is: bottom DDDDD top floating 1 U
Reshuffle the pixies and refetch them
stack is: bottom DDDD top floating 3 U
cast crushing canopy, reshuffle the pixies and refetch them
stack is: bottom DDD top floating 5 U
Cast Quasiduplicate, use the first few to reset.
stack is: bottom DDDQQ...QQ top floating 3 U
This seems to imply that one copy of the pixie is actually enough?
Unless I'm missing something?
Looking at the other way:
QQQQDDDDDD floating 1U
I guess it's the same thing, we can fetch the pixies, cast canopy, and fetch the pixies again. So we get two uses of the pixies (or I guess just one pixie).
That was potentially dangerous, but it works out well - we can drop a pixie and add one more Plains.
Fortunately the same problem is not present in the other stages,
Ritual of soot and Gruesome menagerie are our cheapest ways to interact with the skull prophet.
Same with shock/crash through with the parrot/mutate.
This does make the start trickier.
The simple patch is to add a gyre engineer for the cut pixie, but i'm not sure if that is necessary.
Once we can cast Dance of the Manse for enough mana, we're pretty much home free, at least with Happily Ever After. Hmm, but getting to that point without a second Pixie might be hard.
The Gyre Engineer seems the most likely cut, though that does squeeze our starting mana.
I don't suppose there is anything that gets us a one-time burst of mana? Probably not.
Edit: So, I really like the card Mythos of Illuna. But, it currently messes up the Landfall part of the layer sequence. However, it looks like we can get an extra layer using it, thanks to Yarok, the Desecrated.
So, what about:
Layer 1: Resolving an ETB trigger from Mythos of Illuna gains us a lot of life.
Layer 2: Casting a Mythos of Illuna causes a lot of ETB triggers thanks to Yarok, the Descrated.
Layer 3: Tapping a Nyx Lotus generates a lot of red mana.
Layer 4: A couple of proliferates can trigger many copies of Kiora Bests the Sea God.
Layer 5: We can attack with many copies of Guildpact Informant.
Layer 3: Tapping a red mana land generates a lot of red mana.
Layer 4: Resolving a Wilderness Reclamation can untap a lot of red mana lands.
Layer 5: We can put a lot of Wilderness Reclamations into play.
A tricky part is giving a bunch of Guildpact Informants haste. Smelt-Ward Ignus is safe, but the problem is getting red mana for it in the first place. There are some other options that also untap, so they run afoul of our Porcuparrot. Still, even if we can't give our Informant tokens haste, we can attack still with 8 creatures for 8 proliferates, getting us a lot of Wilderness Reclamations.
I had thought that all untap spells were out of the question, but blink/flicker effect like justiciar's portal obviously don't untap the nyx lotus and also break up mutate stacks so we'd still need to also kill+draw the nonparrot mutator.
We can't play a red land on the second turn, since we have to cast Skull Prophet or Maraleaf Pixie (if we went for Emergency Powers). A red shockland is no good.
Hmm, is Justiciar's Portal a step towards a white mana stage? I have no idea how it would work though.
Edit: Oh, Cavalier of Flame has a bad ETB ability. But, we can still use Smelt-Ward Ignus, and just spend all the red mana from our land to give haste to as many Guildpact Informants as possible.
Though, with Mythos of Illuna we might not even need dance of the manse? That does kind of help with our early mana problems. (though we'd need to demote the gainland to a guildgate)
I was originally thinking of justiciar's portal as a way to make a bunch of mana after animating TYS, while also being something that might be useful in the other parts of the combo. (maybe somehow worth a layer? IDK)
White mana is pretty difficult to single out. So a stage seems very unlikely.
How about the following:
Layer 1: Electrodominance can implement a large third stage.
Layer 2: We can tap a red mana land for a lot of red mana, thanks to Nikya of the Old Ways.
Layer 3: We can untap the red mana land by casting Awakening of Vitu-Ghazi on it, and then untapping it using High Alert, say. We can generate a lot of white mana by tapping a Nyx Lotus.
Layer 4: A couple of proliferates will trigger many copies of Kiora Bests the Sea God.
Layer 5: We can attack with many copies of Guildpact Informant to get a lot of proliferates.
Of course, we are still using Role Reversal, so we still have the problem with Mythos of Illuna. We could switch to Dance of the Manse, but it's a bit of an issue how we get that white mana to first cast it. But, what if we didn't give the opponent any creatures? We can give the opponent Captive Audience. Then, we can turn Nyx Lotus into a creature with Karn, the Great Creator or Animating Faerie, then turn it into an enchantment with One With the Stars. So the opponent never gets a creature.
Edit: Oh, I see, with mythos we won't need dance at all to copy our TYSs. And if we can't make an enchantment have any other type, or remove OWTS, then the opponent can't get anything other than an enchantment.
Prospective deck:
1 Leyline of abundance
2 Leyline of abundance
3 Leyline of abundance
4 Ketria Triome
5 Watery Grave
6 Skull Prophet
7 Watery Grave
8 Bolas's Citadel
engines:
9 Thousand-Year Storm
10 Leyline of anticipation
11 Rhythm of the Wild
U stage:
12 Maraleaf Pixie
13 Frilled Mystic
14 Shipwreck Dowser
15 Kinnan, Bonder prodigy
16 Mythos of Illuna
17 Devious Cover-Up
18 Collision // Colossus
19 Ritual of Soot
20 Gruesome Menagerie
Life stage
21 Duskfang mentor
22 Porcuparrot
23 Migratory Greathorn
24 Shock
25 Crash through
Red mana
26 Leafkin Avenger
27 Nikya of the Old Ways
White mana
28 Awakening of Vitu-Ghazi
29 Gauntlet of Light
30 Nyx Lotus
Saga
31 Kiora Bests the Sea God
32 Role Reversal
33 Captive Audience
34 Karn, the Great Creator
35 One with the Stars
36 Guildpact Informant
37 Domri, City Smasher
38 Gideon Blackblade
Extra Stuff
39 Happily Ever After
40 Cauldron Familiar
The last 22 cards can be devoted to getting as much red mana and life as possible. Happily Ever After can gain us 265 life, and Cauldron Familiar can gain us another 19 life. If there is no other way to gain life or red mana, then the remainder of the cards can be devoted to allowing us to spend the least amount of life to get going. Milling and returning artifacts and enchantments using Dance of the Manse was a nice efficient way to get all our enchantments, but it's not available anymore.
Hmm, Drowned Secrets + Eerie Ultimatum looks really good!
The issue with giving all creatures haste with Domri is that you can have a bunch of hasted porcuparrot tokens, and go through the life stage mutating onto the tokens instead of the nontoken one. Then, every 4th porcuparrot gets killed for free by the pings from 3 others plus itself, saving the use of a shock and thus generating life. Some pings (and shocks) can then be directed at the Domri to recycle it, going infinite.
Edit: Wishclaw Talisman is the sort of thing we would like to have, except that it's ability allows us to fetch Migratory Greathorn too cheaply.
It's mainly a skeleton right now, and filled in by stuff copy pasted from last year.
turn 1:
Leylinex3
jungle hollow
turn 2:
Swamp
Skull prophet
turn 3:
Bolas's Citadel 21 life 2 cards in hand
Rhythm of the Wild 18
Kinnan 16
Pixie 3G2U 14
Leafkin Avenger 8G2U 10
Ashiok, Dream Render 8G2U 7
Crushing Canopy 8G2U 4
Plains 8G2UW 4
Dance of the Manse, GU 4, animate both leylines, TYS, KBtSG, Nyx Lotus
Justiciar's Portal, 10G U 6U/B, 2 life
Quasiduplicate, 9G 5U/B, 2 life, make 4 copies of TYS
Crash Through, 9G 5U/B, 1 life, 21 copies
So at that point we get a bunch of card draws, with which we can draw Ritual of Soot and Gruesome Menagerie, and get started on a small black stage. Then, we can use most of the remaining draws to draw Migratory Greathorn and gain a life each time, allowing for repeated casts of Shock. So we should have a suitably large number before we start putting more lands into play.
This allows for another Mountain, getting us to 10 -> 10 -> 10 -> 10 -> 27 -> 5.
However, that startup isn't quite fully set up as it still needs to get all of the blue stage cards, even drawing the creatures costs 5G4U mana to cast (or 12G2U to kinnan them up)
We really want just one more blue or a little bit more life so we can cast Quasiduplicate before Justicar's portal.
Layer 1: Paying a red mana to Leafkin Avenger gains us a lot of life.
Layer 2: Tapping a Nyx Lotus generates a lot of red mana.
Layer 3: A couple of proliferates triggers a bunch of Kiora Bests the Sea God.
Layer 4: Casting Heliod's Intervention gives the opponent a lot of life, so that we can safely attack with many Guildpact Informants.
Layer 5: Tapping a Plains generates a lot of white mana.
Layer 6: We can put a lot of Plains into play.
where we would use Response // Resurgence to get all the additional combats that we needed. However, we don't have a way of keeping the white mana that we generate when combat starts, so the above seems roughly the same as our current layer sequence.
I was also thinking of going back to The Akroan War, which loses a layer versus Kiora above, but keeps both red and white mana live. But, it seems hard to hook into red and white mana above a Saga.
Edit: Ah, I think I have an improvement:
Layer 1: Paying a red mana to Leafkin Avenger gains us a lot of life.
Layer 2: Tapping a red mana land will generate a lot of red mana.
Layer 3: Casting On Alert will untap the red mana land many times.
Layer 4: Making the opponent draw a card will gain us a lot of Treasure tokens thanks to Smothering Tithe.
Layer 5: We can make the opponent draw a bunch of times.
Layer 4: A few proliferates will trigger many copies of The First Iroan Games.
Layer 5: We can attack with many copies of Guildpact Informant.
Edit: Oh, I think I see how to add Nyx Lotus! We can use Role Reversal on Kiora Bests the Sea God itself. So we transfer about half of our Kioras to the opponent, trigger a proliferate, and Nyx Lotus bounces between us and the opponent, untapping each time.
So:
Layer 1: Paying a red mana to Leafkin Avenger gains us a lot of life.
Layer 2: Tapping a red mana land will generate a lot of red mana.
Layer 3: Casting On Alert will untap the red mana land many times.
Layer 4: Tapping a Nyx Lotus will gain us a lot of white mana.
Layer 5: A couple of proliferates will trigger many copies of Kiora Bests the Sea God.
Layer 6: We can attack with many copies of Guildpact Informant, triggering many proliferates.