With all 8 stages, it would be something like F_{w^4 + w8 + 2}(3).
I was thinking of something like [c}Steelbane Hydra[/c], to turn all the colorless mana we can have into artifact targetings. But, I suspect that probably goes infinite after a megastage transition, being able to increase our number of Clockwork Gnomes each time.
Edit: Hmm, is it at all possible that Riku of Two Reflections could be added? We can keep the spell copying expensive, so only creature copying is a factor in the hyperstage. Then we could keep bouncing and copying enchantments with mana. We could potentially get rid of Mirrorworks and one of the Muzzio, Visionary Architect, as with Riku, we can get two ability activations each Goryo's Vengeance. For the megastage transition, we could go to the K'rrik, Son of Yawgmoth version, and put in something that gains 2 life. (or 3 life with Army of the Damned)
Ok, it took a while but I think I'm a bit more comfortable with that deck and the very clever use of Chalice. Gonna look a bit more into other potential issues, but it is looking like it works.
Yeah we would need to turn colorless into enchantment targettings, so I guess the classic Allay might work? (though it might conflict with other stuff?)
I'm pretty sure Allay is fine, the only thing it does that Phantatog doesn't is bounce enchantments, and I don't see that screwing anything up. But, to get copies of enchantments we need something like Riku of Two Reflections, and that's the card that might mess with something.
Edit: Hey, what about using Copy Artifact? We can use Copy Artifact for all of our artifact needs, and then we can bounce it back to our hand with Allay. I don't see Copy Artifact interfering with anything, except for possibly Chalice of the Void. But Chalice of the Void could be a serious problem.
Ooh you're right, I forgot. So this is looking like a really good solution, I think!
Edit: Okay, now that it appears that we have a solution to the problem of restoring progress, let's look at the other aspects of the deck.
One thing that concerns me: Stakfish's plan for the megastage transition is to Champion the Vedalken Orrery under the Changeling Hero. Then, when Child of Alara's destruction trigger resolves, Changeling Hero dies, and Vedalken Orrery is returned back to the battlefield. That allows us to replay our artifacts, and we can use a Perpetual Timepiece to move Centaur Safeguard to the library, where it can be fetched by Verdant Succession.
This seems worrisome; allowing Vedalken Orrery to come back onto the battlefield means we don't have a way of preventing us from acting before the megastage transition is complete. Now Changeling Hero will be in the graveyard, so we can't repeat the same trick to kill Child of Alara again and gain more life. But, we can still have Smite the MonstrousPsychic Battle triggers on the stack, so I think we can now repeatedly play and bounce Goblin Dark-Dwellers to allow us to cast a bunch of instants. Does this allow an infinite? Or does the fact that we don't currently have Clockwork Gnomes tokens keep that from happening?
Yeah I think the transitions are more of a mess than I was originally thinking. My initial observation is that that lets us Goryo's Vengeance
a Muzzio, Visionary Architect to get the clockwork gnomes back, but from there things get more awkward with managing chalice again.
Next: We have that Changeling Hero goes to the graveyard during the megastage transition. How do we get it back? Waiting until a Bloodbond March trigger after a Smite the Monstrous from the next megastage transition is too long to wait.
Oh never mind, we can bounce Changeling Hero with Anaba Ancestor. So we can put Bloodbond March triggers on the stack not too far below the megastage transition. But that could impact the megastage transition in terms of resources.
That brings up the other question I was wondering about, how we are faring on Anaba Ancestor tokens and Clockwork Gnomes tokens after the megastage transition. According to Stakfish's explanation, putting Bloodbond March triggers for the Changeling Hero requires switching the Chalice to a 5, then back to a 4, which "requires at least 2 Anaba Ancestor tokens, so that should be safe". But we need to keep in mind that we can't afford to lose out on Anaba Ancestor tokens after a megastage transition, just like we can't afford to gain on Anaba Ancestor tokens. At first glance, losing two Anaba Ancestor tokens to retrieving Changeling Hero is too many. Normally, with Smite the Monstrous in the megastage, we can expect a potential gain of two Anaba Ancestor tokens in a megastage transition: One from returning Engineered Explosives back to our hand, another from returning Goblin Dark-Dwellers back to our hand. Bouncing Changeling Hero doesn't seem to add a Anaba Ancestor token. But, for this megastage transition, we are required to enter it with Goblin Dark-Dwellers in exile, Championed by Changeling Hero. So I think we lose out on one of the two potential Anaba Ancestor tokens?
Hmm, but we can then leave the megastage transition with a Muzzio, Visionary Architect on the battlefield. Does that add another Anaba Ancestor token? And we also have to keep track of all the Chalice of the Void switching through all this.
Edit: Another question is, how do we get everything back after a Worldfire. I suppose the idea is to bring back all the enchantments with Skull of Orm, all the artifacts with Muzzio, Visionary Architect, and bring back all our creatures using Bloodbond March triggers? But after a Worldfire, we have no cards in hand or on the battlefield, everything is in exile except the library. So I don't see how to get started from there.
Hmm might need to add wormfang to save our hand from worldfire.
I am still thinking about chalice and how we are resetting it, it certainly complicates things. What sequence of values does it have? something like 4,2,4,5,4?
sorry I havent had much time lately, I'll try to look into this more on the weekend and get more comfortable with the way the stack is manipulated with this deck. Hopefully get a bit more in depth with how the chalice changes.
Currently I don't see how it counts up to 7 stages before the transition?
By 7 stages, do you mean the 7 stages at the end? It's just the 7 creature stages starting with Vastwood Animist / Grassland Crusader and ending in with Xathrid Gorgon. In the decklist I posted, there are 8 stages. But, we made need to give up one or two if we have to make some changes.
Oh, I was confused I misread the estimate as essentially (w^4)*8 and didn't see how we were getting that power, w^4+w8 makes more sense. anything we get from being closer to infinite in the stage/hyperstage in comparison to the other decks we are analyzing is minuscule vs the additional card slots to squeeze more creature stages in. I was trying to count upside down. I still want to dig into the chalice changes because its a weird workaround, but the initial point wasn't to have more at the very top, but to save cardslots for the finish.
The thorough examination of the chalice deck will need to involve carefully tracking all of the zone changes, and how they are managed, we have 6 relevant zones (hand, stack, play, library, gy, exile) and lots of way of interacting with them for certain card types as well as properties like being tapped or championed that make it a bit trickier than that.
In terms of general optimizations, I wonder if it is possible to fit a hyperstage in the end instead of a bunch of "normal" stages? To get a w^4+w^2 approximation. We would have access to like 12+ card slots for it, but do have to obey a bunch of other requirements from the rest of the deck.
Also, as a longshot possible TYS friendlier alternative to chalice, donating a Lavinia, Azorius renegade could be interesting. Letting us counter the creatures we play via omniscience while not even letting us cast the spells. The actual mechanics of that would probably be more awkward and it seems impossible to be compatible with the rest of the combo (especially Child of Alara).
I admit I haven't really gotten around to a thorough examination of all the interactions in the Chalice of the Void deck; in particular, I'm not totally familiar with the exact reasons why the Clockwork Gnomes / Muzzio, Visionary Architect and Anaba Ancestor / Changeling Hero combos don't go infinite with the Chalice of the Void interactions, when they do go infinite in non-Chalice of the Void decks. So we do need to get to that at some point.
Getting to w^4 + w^2 would be great! The reason we have been satisfied with getting just stages at the end, is that stages are relatively free, in terms of what you have to do to get them. By contrast, hyperstages and higher seem to require the combo of triggering both a beneficial effect (that creates a lot of the stage resource), and a destructive effect (that restores the spent hyperstage resource, while getting rid of all of the stage resources). That requires something that can trigger multiple effects (Spell Queller? Or maybe something that triggers multiple abilities of permanents in play), and also another hyperstage resource. So in some ways we have to find the same things we need for a terastage. On the plus side, the construction doesn't have to be as delicate. For example, if we tried to add a terastage on top of the current gigastage, we would need our destructive effect to get rid of all our black/green mana and all our excess life; for an additional hyperstage, we won't need to do that. So it's reasonable that we could have a hyperstage that uses creature tokens and an unused color of mana as our two resources. But, how will we trigger our effects? The most likely possibility seems to me to be activating something that can trigger multiple abilities on permanents, e.g. "Whenever you sacrifice a permanent" or "Whenever you cycle a card", something like that. This is something that is rather unexplored, we have definitely been focusing on instants/sorceries getting triggered. If we found a good combo with that, we could use it for the additional hyperstage, or we could try to stick it into the gigastage, and then use the Spellweaver Helix for the additional hyperstage. If it is really promising, we could try for a terastage, and go to gigastage + hyperstage as a back up. But both things, terastage and gigastage + hyperstage, require getting another transition combo.
Lavinia, Azorius Renegade looks quite interesting, but yeah, it seems rather hard to make it work in our deck.
Yeah it looks like chalice not going infinite hinges on two things it does different from the shrine:
It can only be on one value at a time, so we can't get Bloodbond March triggers for a creature without resetting the chalice.
It is not optional (this looks to be why TYS goes infinite). In particular chalice on 2 for anaba ancestor stops goryo's vengance and hurkyl's recall.
But this definitely requires a very careful look.
Needing to be less delicate is very nice as there aren't many ways we can clear all of our mana. (I still kinda think an extra combat step transition from something like aggravated assault or najeela, the blade-blossom might be somehow possible, but tricky)
Edit: (Aggravated assault is probably not the best example)
Spell queller is definitely one of the few guys who can make two things happen at once, other triggers like sacrificing a guy are way too easy to make happen in this deck. Another possibility is landfall, but most of those triggers are either just pumps or otherwise useless or can target freely. proliferate can put counters on a bunch of things at the same time.
Hmm, again it seems hard to construct a stage or higher out of multiple combat phases, due to the stack having to be emptied many times.
I thought about Spell Queller for a little bit. It seems that a natural place to put it would be between the current hyperstage and megastage, since Smite the Monstrous is a 4 CMC instant. Since life and mana seem to need to be the last two stage levels, the first three stage levels would have to have tokens as resources. So whatever destructive spell Spell Queller casts, it would have to get rid of all artifacts and whatever we use as the resource for the Goblin Dark-Dwellers stage level, without killing off the resource we are using for the Spell Queller stage level. Is there some spell that gets rid of all artifacts and some subset of creatures? That seems to be troublesome. If it were a instant with more than 4 CMC, we could try moving Spell Queller up past Spellweaver Volute. But either way it is looking difficult.
The most promising avenue seems to be leaving the gigastage as is, and having the additional hyperstage work by triggering multiple permanents. As you have noted, triggering off a permanent sacrifice is probably not going to work, but there have got to be many possibilities for triggering events that can trigger multiple cards, other than the ones I mentioned and Landfall. Of course, those triggered abilities have to be useful. But it might be worth looking for.
Well the idea is that the combat steps we have queued would act as a stack. I still don't see a good way to make it work though.
Landfall is probably the best option we have as it is a fairly controllable trigger that fits pretty naturally into what we have. Landfall can give us energy, proliferate, life, draw, various vanilla creatures, and target an elemental. (Though omnath does have other problems)
another fairly widespread shared trigger is casting a spirit or arcane spell, there's a fair amount of effects from kamigawa (but goryo's vengance is arcane.)
Morph could also be useful, though it doesn't seem like there's a suitable unmorph trigger.
I'm still catching up a bit on some of what you guys have done in my absence (the K'rrik bit is pure genius, by the way, kudos), but the chalice piles are kinda in my wheelhouse, so I'm gonna try to help where I can.
You guys have pretty much hit the nail on the head with why Chalice of the Void works where Cephalid Shrine doesn't: because you have to bounce and replay it to reset it each time, and the only way to do that is with Rebuild, which also removes all Vedalken Orrery copies, you're very limited in how you layer the different Bloodbond March triggers. I'm confident that the hyper stage works. I'm much less confident, however, about the mega stage transition. At that point, the Chalice transitions got so complicated I couldn't work them out in my head, and while I'm pretty sure it can't go infinite, it may consume too many resources.
We do have some flexibility in the megastage transition, though: if it turns out that switching to 5 is too expensive we can use Changeling Berserker and have our champion creature only cost 4. That might just make us go infinite, but if not, that is an option. We also can cast Goblin Dark-Dwellers while Chalice is on 5 and get a pile of Bloodbond March triggers, which may help negate the cost.
On Copy Artifact/Mirrormade: unfortunately, I don't think those actually work. You can destroy one of them, then reanimate it with Mimic Vat and make it into a copy of Clockwork Gnomes. Then you can activate the token to get PB triggers, and use them to make copies of Skull of Orm and such to get the original enchantment back from under the Mimic Vat. So I don't think that saving progress has actually been solved here.
How dangerous is populate here? Song of the Worldsoul combined with Allay would let us turn mana into token copies of any other token we've made, including our enchantments. It definitely doesn't break with Mimic Vat, but as of now it breaks with Goblin Dark-Dwellers: we can hit it with Smite the Monstrous, put it on Mimic Vat, make a token, and now we can make copies of it instead. And since I don't think we can avoid ever being able to target Dark-Dwellers, I guess that won't work.
Is there a way to give enchantments, and only enchantments, indestructible? That way, all our Psychic Battles and such would survive the mega stage transition, and we wouldn't need to worry about rebuilding them at all.
Hmmm... a key piece to getting an additional hyperstage is, what will be the destructive effect? Looking up some cards, the only triggered effect I could find that got rid of a bunch of things was Celestial Kirin. The question though is, what can destroying all permanents of a given converted mana cost get us, that we couldn't get with Child of Alara or Worldfire? One possibility is, it can actually destroy lands rather than exile them. So something that triggers off of land destruction might come in useful here. Dingus Egg? But, lands have CMC 0, so we would only be destroying permanents of CMC 0. I don't know of any creature stages that have CMC 0 creatures.
Could we possibly put Celestial Kirin earlier? Maybe have the hyperstage use a CMC 4 creature as its resource (Moggcatcher perhaps, going back to the earlier Human deck?). Then we could have a CMC 4 Arcane spell (haven't found a good harmless instant, perhaps Overblaze, and either empty our hand or counter it with no TYS on the battlefield) be cast with perhaps Spell Queller. Then Celestial Kirin will trigger, and we will get rid of all Moggcatchers, Clockwork Gnomes, and Vedalken Orrery to boot. But it wouldn't hit whatever the megastage resource creature was, which wouldn't be CMC 4. The question is then, how will we get back a hasted token of the megastage resource creature? It has to be tied to the Celestial Kirin destruction effect somehow, or else we could just not put Celestial Kirin on the battlefield. Perhaps some other CMC 4 creature will get hit, and it dying will trigger a targeting of the megastage resource creature. A bit of a start, perhaps.
Edit: Stakfish, welcome back!
Edit: So, a question to start things off: How are we getting everything back after Worldfire hits? I see that we have ways to bring back artifacts and enchantments, but after Worldfire, everything but our library is put into the exile zone. Hmm, I suppose that with Mirrorworks, we can put token copies on the stack for our various artifacts, so we can get a copy of Mirror of Fate and Perpetual Timepiece, and Skull of Orm. And I suppose Goryo's Vengeance can be on the stack, and we can get a hasted Muzzio back if we can mill it. Is that enough to get going? Then we would need all our creatures back through Bloodbond March triggers, I suppose.
The other thing that concerned me was Changeling Hero Championing Vedalken Orrery. Once the Orrery is back, we are free to act again, with Smite the Monstrous copies still on the stack. That looks very dangerous, although I guess I didn't see an infinite, with Changeling Hero now in the graveyard.
Stakfish! Thanks, K'rrik was fun to come up with and added a lot of flexibility to the life totals we could hit. And acorn harvest continues to be an amazing card
Yeah chalice makes things super confusing, I think things work but haven't been able to properly prove it to myself. The lines here are super subtle and full of traps.
The closets I see to giving a card type indestructable is just artifacts via darksteel forge or guardian beast creatures with something like dauntless escort but those don't really work. The upcoming Theros is enchantment themed so maybe we get the card you want?
I think I /mostly/ get the three decks at the top of page 86 now, though I have a couple corrections/questions:
1. Right now, you have Obelisk of Bant instead of Azorius Keyrune as the top-level mana fixer. I'm assuming that's a holdover from an older list, because it goes infinite in the gigastage and there's no need for green that high up.
2. Is there a reason for using Chancellor instead of Elvish Spirit Guide, and for using the infinite mana combo instead of Mana Vault? I can see there would be problems in the Iname lists, but for the others, I don't see any problem with using Spirit Guide, and the Mana Vault start should let us go back to Tribal Unity and add a layer on the top.
3. What cards do we actually NEED to save in hand with Wormfang Behemoth in the gigastage? I don't see any cards that can't be brought back from other zones. Maybe I'm missing something, but I think we can cut Behemoth from the current lists and add another layer to the deck.
Edit: after Worldfire doesn't matter, I think: we can just resolve back down to the next Megastage transition and rebuild from there. That Sephara combo should solve the progress-saving problem. Assuming that's right, we have something like this:
That gives f_{w^4+w7+3}(4)-ish, trading a stage for a couple layers on the safer decks. That's an improvement, but without those two-extra slots it may not wind up being worth it once we really optimize your lists.
3. That was the topic of my previous question - can we get everything back after a Worldfire? It seems like it might be possible in the Chalice of the Void deck, but I think we need to go over it carefully. In the Razorfin Abolisher decks, I don't think we have a way of getting back artifacts - if there is another card that can do the job, or if we can do it with no cards at all, that would be great! Goblin Welder didn't seem to work, as I didn't see how to get hasted copies.
Edit: Hmm, I don't think Sephara is enough to protect us from Worldfire. The Sephara combo only protects Bloodbond Marches from being destroyed, it won't restore what's been lost already. So Worldfire will set us back to square 1, then Sepahra will keep us from losing more from Child of Alara, but the ones we lost from Worldfire are gone for good.
But, I think the Mirrorwing Dragon plus Hunting Pack combo that you were talking about earlier could fit the bill. We couldn't get it to work for the megastage transition, since we only cast Smite the Monstrous once per transition, and the benefits of Smite the Monstrous above the megastage transition won't transfer to the hyperstage below.
But, could we get it to work for the gigastage transition? It seems like after a Worldfire, we should be able to afford a Smite the Monstrous.
Yes, I think so. After a gigastage transition, we don't immediately restore progress to the hyperstage below. So that particular hyperstage will be crippled. But, when we go through the next megastage transition on down, and transition back up, then we will cast Smite the Monstrous, and then we can restore progress. So then we can do the higher megastages at full blast, and we just have the one crippled hyperstage.
For an alternative solution: Vital Splicer and Master Splicer. Now, we can bounce Precursor Golem for 1 and replay it to get additional tokens. And because it's been pumped to power 4, we can now target it with Smite the Monstrous. So now, instead of getting only Psychic Battle triggers, we get 2 layers underneath the Psychic Battles, both of which are keyed only off how much mana we've generated so far! I think that lets us get away without crippling either of the higher n-stages.
A bit more on #2. The start is why we currently have the infinite mana combo in, we know things work with it, and haven't worked out the start with mana vault. I'm not even sure we need karn over March of the machines in those decks (Sunburst is weird and will give a creature EE +1/+1 counters instead of charge counters), it was something we had earmarked to look into more later.
Yeah we don't want each worldfire to put us entirely back to zero, so we need to care about something that worldfire doesn't reset. Other than mana (if we can remove the infinite), Storm is probably the best option, but none of the cards worked on their own (Thousand Year Storm goes infinite with chalice lists right?). It looks like Hunting Pack+Mirrorwing dragon does give us an increasing amount of PB triggers and so it should work. I'm a little worried that crippling the next hyperstage might be too steep a cost though? It can still rebuild properly though, just not yet with increasing power? That should be fine.
Edit: Hmm, I thought for a moment that the Splicers might mean we don't need the Sephara combo anymore, but I think we still need it. The Splicers magnify the effect of Smite the Monstrous, but if we lose all our progress after a megastage transition, it's too long to wait until the next megastage transition. So we still need the Sephara combo.
So we can go Sephara + Mirrorwing, or Sephara + Splicers. I think the Mirrorwing combo might also need Copy Enchantment, since I don't see how to manage with just casting one of the instants at a time. The Splicers require Precursor Golem, but that actually adds to the final layers.
I dont think we need copy enchantment, we can use spellweaver helix to put hunting pack under the worldfire so we have them when we smite next. this does make us have to wait a bit for the payoff but we get there soon enough.
(I guess that needs another spider spawning then though? is panharmonicon ok?)
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I was thinking of something like [c}Steelbane Hydra[/c], to turn all the colorless mana we can have into artifact targetings. But, I suspect that probably goes infinite after a megastage transition, being able to increase our number of Clockwork Gnomes each time.
Edit: Hmm, is it at all possible that Riku of Two Reflections could be added? We can keep the spell copying expensive, so only creature copying is a factor in the hyperstage. Then we could keep bouncing and copying enchantments with mana. We could potentially get rid of Mirrorworks and one of the Muzzio, Visionary Architect, as with Riku, we can get two ability activations each Goryo's Vengeance. For the megastage transition, we could go to the K'rrik, Son of Yawgmoth version, and put in something that gains 2 life. (or 3 life with Army of the Damned)
Yeah we would need to turn colorless into enchantment targettings, so I guess the classic Allay might work? (though it might conflict with other stuff?)
Edit: Hey, what about using Copy Artifact? We can use Copy Artifact for all of our artifact needs, and then we can bounce it back to our hand with Allay. I don't see Copy Artifact interfering with anything, except for possibly Chalice of the Void. But Chalice of the Void could be a serious problem.
Edit: Okay, now that it appears that we have a solution to the problem of restoring progress, let's look at the other aspects of the deck.
One thing that concerns me: Stakfish's plan for the megastage transition is to Champion the Vedalken Orrery under the Changeling Hero. Then, when Child of Alara's destruction trigger resolves, Changeling Hero dies, and Vedalken Orrery is returned back to the battlefield. That allows us to replay our artifacts, and we can use a Perpetual Timepiece to move Centaur Safeguard to the library, where it can be fetched by Verdant Succession.
This seems worrisome; allowing Vedalken Orrery to come back onto the battlefield means we don't have a way of preventing us from acting before the megastage transition is complete. Now Changeling Hero will be in the graveyard, so we can't repeat the same trick to kill Child of Alara again and gain more life. But, we can still have Smite the Monstrous Psychic Battle triggers on the stack, so I think we can now repeatedly play and bounce Goblin Dark-Dwellers to allow us to cast a bunch of instants. Does this allow an infinite? Or does the fact that we don't currently have Clockwork Gnomes tokens keep that from happening?
a Muzzio, Visionary Architect to get the clockwork gnomes back, but from there things get more awkward with managing chalice again.
Oh never mind, we can bounce Changeling Hero with Anaba Ancestor. So we can put Bloodbond March triggers on the stack not too far below the megastage transition. But that could impact the megastage transition in terms of resources.
That brings up the other question I was wondering about, how we are faring on Anaba Ancestor tokens and Clockwork Gnomes tokens after the megastage transition. According to Stakfish's explanation, putting Bloodbond March triggers for the Changeling Hero requires switching the Chalice to a 5, then back to a 4, which "requires at least 2 Anaba Ancestor tokens, so that should be safe". But we need to keep in mind that we can't afford to lose out on Anaba Ancestor tokens after a megastage transition, just like we can't afford to gain on Anaba Ancestor tokens. At first glance, losing two Anaba Ancestor tokens to retrieving Changeling Hero is too many. Normally, with Smite the Monstrous in the megastage, we can expect a potential gain of two Anaba Ancestor tokens in a megastage transition: One from returning Engineered Explosives back to our hand, another from returning Goblin Dark-Dwellers back to our hand. Bouncing Changeling Hero doesn't seem to add a Anaba Ancestor token. But, for this megastage transition, we are required to enter it with Goblin Dark-Dwellers in exile, Championed by Changeling Hero. So I think we lose out on one of the two potential Anaba Ancestor tokens?
Hmm, but we can then leave the megastage transition with a Muzzio, Visionary Architect on the battlefield. Does that add another Anaba Ancestor token? And we also have to keep track of all the Chalice of the Void switching through all this.
Edit: Another question is, how do we get everything back after a Worldfire. I suppose the idea is to bring back all the enchantments with Skull of Orm, all the artifacts with Muzzio, Visionary Architect, and bring back all our creatures using Bloodbond March triggers? But after a Worldfire, we have no cards in hand or on the battlefield, everything is in exile except the library. So I don't see how to get started from there.
I am still thinking about chalice and how we are resetting it, it certainly complicates things. What sequence of values does it have? something like 4,2,4,5,4?
Currently I don't see how it counts up to 7 stages before the transition?
The thorough examination of the chalice deck will need to involve carefully tracking all of the zone changes, and how they are managed, we have 6 relevant zones (hand, stack, play, library, gy, exile) and lots of way of interacting with them for certain card types as well as properties like being tapped or championed that make it a bit trickier than that.
In terms of general optimizations, I wonder if it is possible to fit a hyperstage in the end instead of a bunch of "normal" stages? To get a w^4+w^2 approximation. We would have access to like 12+ card slots for it, but do have to obey a bunch of other requirements from the rest of the deck.
Also, as a longshot possible TYS friendlier alternative to chalice, donating a Lavinia, Azorius renegade could be interesting. Letting us counter the creatures we play via omniscience while not even letting us cast the spells. The actual mechanics of that would probably be more awkward and it seems impossible to be compatible with the rest of the combo (especially Child of Alara).
Getting to w^4 + w^2 would be great! The reason we have been satisfied with getting just stages at the end, is that stages are relatively free, in terms of what you have to do to get them. By contrast, hyperstages and higher seem to require the combo of triggering both a beneficial effect (that creates a lot of the stage resource), and a destructive effect (that restores the spent hyperstage resource, while getting rid of all of the stage resources). That requires something that can trigger multiple effects (Spell Queller? Or maybe something that triggers multiple abilities of permanents in play), and also another hyperstage resource. So in some ways we have to find the same things we need for a terastage. On the plus side, the construction doesn't have to be as delicate. For example, if we tried to add a terastage on top of the current gigastage, we would need our destructive effect to get rid of all our black/green mana and all our excess life; for an additional hyperstage, we won't need to do that. So it's reasonable that we could have a hyperstage that uses creature tokens and an unused color of mana as our two resources. But, how will we trigger our effects? The most likely possibility seems to me to be activating something that can trigger multiple abilities on permanents, e.g. "Whenever you sacrifice a permanent" or "Whenever you cycle a card", something like that. This is something that is rather unexplored, we have definitely been focusing on instants/sorceries getting triggered. If we found a good combo with that, we could use it for the additional hyperstage, or we could try to stick it into the gigastage, and then use the Spellweaver Helix for the additional hyperstage. If it is really promising, we could try for a terastage, and go to gigastage + hyperstage as a back up. But both things, terastage and gigastage + hyperstage, require getting another transition combo.
Lavinia, Azorius Renegade looks quite interesting, but yeah, it seems rather hard to make it work in our deck.
It can only be on one value at a time, so we can't get Bloodbond March triggers for a creature without resetting the chalice.
It is not optional (this looks to be why TYS goes infinite). In particular chalice on 2 for anaba ancestor stops goryo's vengance and hurkyl's recall.
But this definitely requires a very careful look.
Needing to be less delicate is very nice as there aren't many ways we can clear all of our mana. (I still kinda think an extra combat step transition from something like aggravated assault or najeela, the blade-blossom might be somehow possible, but tricky)
Edit: (Aggravated assault is probably not the best example)
Spell queller is definitely one of the few guys who can make two things happen at once, other triggers like sacrificing a guy are way too easy to make happen in this deck. Another possibility is landfall, but most of those triggers are either just pumps or otherwise useless or can target freely. proliferate can put counters on a bunch of things at the same time.
I thought about Spell Queller for a little bit. It seems that a natural place to put it would be between the current hyperstage and megastage, since Smite the Monstrous is a 4 CMC instant. Since life and mana seem to need to be the last two stage levels, the first three stage levels would have to have tokens as resources. So whatever destructive spell Spell Queller casts, it would have to get rid of all artifacts and whatever we use as the resource for the Goblin Dark-Dwellers stage level, without killing off the resource we are using for the Spell Queller stage level. Is there some spell that gets rid of all artifacts and some subset of creatures? That seems to be troublesome. If it were a instant with more than 4 CMC, we could try moving Spell Queller up past Spellweaver Volute. But either way it is looking difficult.
The most promising avenue seems to be leaving the gigastage as is, and having the additional hyperstage work by triggering multiple permanents. As you have noted, triggering off a permanent sacrifice is probably not going to work, but there have got to be many possibilities for triggering events that can trigger multiple cards, other than the ones I mentioned and Landfall. Of course, those triggered abilities have to be useful. But it might be worth looking for.
Landfall is probably the best option we have as it is a fairly controllable trigger that fits pretty naturally into what we have. Landfall can give us energy, proliferate, life, draw, various vanilla creatures, and target an elemental. (Though omnath does have other problems)
another fairly widespread shared trigger is casting a spirit or arcane spell, there's a fair amount of effects from kamigawa (but goryo's vengance is arcane.)
Morph could also be useful, though it doesn't seem like there's a suitable unmorph trigger.
I'm still catching up a bit on some of what you guys have done in my absence (the K'rrik bit is pure genius, by the way, kudos), but the chalice piles are kinda in my wheelhouse, so I'm gonna try to help where I can.
You guys have pretty much hit the nail on the head with why Chalice of the Void works where Cephalid Shrine doesn't: because you have to bounce and replay it to reset it each time, and the only way to do that is with Rebuild, which also removes all Vedalken Orrery copies, you're very limited in how you layer the different Bloodbond March triggers. I'm confident that the hyper stage works. I'm much less confident, however, about the mega stage transition. At that point, the Chalice transitions got so complicated I couldn't work them out in my head, and while I'm pretty sure it can't go infinite, it may consume too many resources.
We do have some flexibility in the megastage transition, though: if it turns out that switching to 5 is too expensive we can use Changeling Berserker and have our champion creature only cost 4. That might just make us go infinite, but if not, that is an option. We also can cast Goblin Dark-Dwellers while Chalice is on 5 and get a pile of Bloodbond March triggers, which may help negate the cost.
On Copy Artifact/Mirrormade: unfortunately, I don't think those actually work. You can destroy one of them, then reanimate it with Mimic Vat and make it into a copy of Clockwork Gnomes. Then you can activate the token to get PB triggers, and use them to make copies of Skull of Orm and such to get the original enchantment back from under the Mimic Vat. So I don't think that saving progress has actually been solved here.
How dangerous is populate here? Song of the Worldsoul combined with Allay would let us turn mana into token copies of any other token we've made, including our enchantments. It definitely doesn't break with Mimic Vat, but as of now it breaks with Goblin Dark-Dwellers: we can hit it with Smite the Monstrous, put it on Mimic Vat, make a token, and now we can make copies of it instead. And since I don't think we can avoid ever being able to target Dark-Dwellers, I guess that won't work.
Is there a way to give enchantments, and only enchantments, indestructible? That way, all our Psychic Battles and such would survive the mega stage transition, and we wouldn't need to worry about rebuilding them at all.
Could we possibly put Celestial Kirin earlier? Maybe have the hyperstage use a CMC 4 creature as its resource (Moggcatcher perhaps, going back to the earlier Human deck?). Then we could have a CMC 4 Arcane spell (haven't found a good harmless instant, perhaps Overblaze, and either empty our hand or counter it with no TYS on the battlefield) be cast with perhaps Spell Queller. Then Celestial Kirin will trigger, and we will get rid of all Moggcatchers, Clockwork Gnomes, and Vedalken Orrery to boot. But it wouldn't hit whatever the megastage resource creature was, which wouldn't be CMC 4. The question is then, how will we get back a hasted token of the megastage resource creature? It has to be tied to the Celestial Kirin destruction effect somehow, or else we could just not put Celestial Kirin on the battlefield. Perhaps some other CMC 4 creature will get hit, and it dying will trigger a targeting of the megastage resource creature. A bit of a start, perhaps.
Edit: Stakfish, welcome back!
Edit: So, a question to start things off: How are we getting everything back after Worldfire hits? I see that we have ways to bring back artifacts and enchantments, but after Worldfire, everything but our library is put into the exile zone. Hmm, I suppose that with Mirrorworks, we can put token copies on the stack for our various artifacts, so we can get a copy of Mirror of Fate and Perpetual Timepiece, and Skull of Orm. And I suppose Goryo's Vengeance can be on the stack, and we can get a hasted Muzzio back if we can mill it. Is that enough to get going? Then we would need all our creatures back through Bloodbond March triggers, I suppose.
The other thing that concerned me was Changeling Hero Championing Vedalken Orrery. Once the Orrery is back, we are free to act again, with Smite the Monstrous copies still on the stack. That looks very dangerous, although I guess I didn't see an infinite, with Changeling Hero now in the graveyard.
Yeah chalice makes things super confusing, I think things work but haven't been able to properly prove it to myself. The lines here are super subtle and full of traps.
The closets I see to giving a card type indestructable is just artifacts via darksteel forge or guardian beast creatures with something like dauntless escort but those don't really work. The upcoming Theros is enchantment themed so maybe we get the card you want?
I guess we can save the bloodbond marches with Sephara, sky's blade and maze glider?
Though we also need to rebuild after worldfire and indestructability doesn't really help with that.
I think I /mostly/ get the three decks at the top of page 86 now, though I have a couple corrections/questions:
1. Right now, you have Obelisk of Bant instead of Azorius Keyrune as the top-level mana fixer. I'm assuming that's a holdover from an older list, because it goes infinite in the gigastage and there's no need for green that high up.
2. Is there a reason for using Chancellor instead of Elvish Spirit Guide, and for using the infinite mana combo instead of Mana Vault? I can see there would be problems in the Iname lists, but for the others, I don't see any problem with using Spirit Guide, and the Mana Vault start should let us go back to Tribal Unity and add a layer on the top.
3. What cards do we actually NEED to save in hand with Wormfang Behemoth in the gigastage? I don't see any cards that can't be brought back from other zones. Maybe I'm missing something, but I think we can cut Behemoth from the current lists and add another layer to the deck.
Edit: after Worldfire doesn't matter, I think: we can just resolve back down to the next Megastage transition and rebuild from there. That Sephara combo should solve the progress-saving problem. Assuming that's right, we have something like this:
2 Psychic Battle
3 Cowardice
4 Horobi, Death's Wail
5 Bloodbond March
6 Chalice of the Void
7 Mimic Vat
8 Omniscience
9 Vedalken Orrery
10 Mirror of Fate
11 Karn, Silver Golem
12 Millikin
13 Phantatog
14 Mirrorworks
15 Mana Vault
16 Simic Keyrune
17 Skull of Orm
18 Clockwork Gnomes
19 Goryo's Vengeance
20 Muzzio, Visionary Architect
21 Muzzio, Visionary Architect
22 Hurkyl's Recall
23 Goblin Dark-Dwellers
24 Changeling Hero
25 Anaba Ancestor
26 Engineered Explosives
27 Myr Welder
29 Acorn Harvest
30 Smite the Monstrous
31 Child of Alara
32 Centaur Safeguard
33 Verdant Succession
34 Sephara, Sky's Blade
35 Maze Glider
36 Spellweaver Helix
37 Worldfire
38 Spider Spawning
39 Spider Spawning
40 Spider Spawning
41 Titania, Protector of Argoth
42 Multani's Decree
43 Bayou
44 Eureka
45 Elvish Spirit Guide
46 Vastwood Animist
47 Grassland Crusader
49 Frightshroud Courier
50 Havengul Runebinder
51 Ghosthelm Courier
52 Devout Chaplain
53 Royal Assassin
54 Simian Spirit Guide
55 Goblin Kites
56 Old Man of the Sea
57 Xathrid Gorgon
58 Reality Spasm
59 Precursor Golem
60 Reforge the Soul
That gives f_{w^4+w7+3}(4)-ish, trading a stage for a couple layers on the safer decks. That's an improvement, but without those two-extra slots it may not wind up being worth it once we really optimize your lists.
1. Oh yes, that should be Azorius Keyrune.
2. Elvish Spirit Guide is fine, and yeah, Mana Vault could get us that extra layer, provided we can get started.
3. That was the topic of my previous question - can we get everything back after a Worldfire? It seems like it might be possible in the Chalice of the Void deck, but I think we need to go over it carefully. In the Razorfin Abolisher decks, I don't think we have a way of getting back artifacts - if there is another card that can do the job, or if we can do it with no cards at all, that would be great! Goblin Welder didn't seem to work, as I didn't see how to get hasted copies.
Edit: Hmm, I don't think Sephara is enough to protect us from Worldfire. The Sephara combo only protects Bloodbond Marches from being destroyed, it won't restore what's been lost already. So Worldfire will set us back to square 1, then Sepahra will keep us from losing more from Child of Alara, but the ones we lost from Worldfire are gone for good.
But, I think the Mirrorwing Dragon plus Hunting Pack combo that you were talking about earlier could fit the bill. We couldn't get it to work for the megastage transition, since we only cast Smite the Monstrous once per transition, and the benefits of Smite the Monstrous above the megastage transition won't transfer to the hyperstage below.
But, could we get it to work for the gigastage transition? It seems like after a Worldfire, we should be able to afford a Smite the Monstrous.
Yes, I think so. After a gigastage transition, we don't immediately restore progress to the hyperstage below. So that particular hyperstage will be crippled. But, when we go through the next megastage transition on down, and transition back up, then we will cast Smite the Monstrous, and then we can restore progress. So then we can do the higher megastages at full blast, and we just have the one crippled hyperstage.
Yeah we don't want each worldfire to put us entirely back to zero, so we need to care about something that worldfire doesn't reset. Other than mana (if we can remove the infinite), Storm is probably the best option, but none of the cards worked on their own (Thousand Year Storm goes infinite with chalice lists right?). It looks like Hunting Pack+Mirrorwing dragon does give us an increasing amount of PB triggers and so it should work. I'm a little worried that crippling the next hyperstage might be too steep a cost though? It can still rebuild properly though, just not yet with increasing power? That should be fine.
Edit: Hmm, I thought for a moment that the Splicers might mean we don't need the Sephara combo anymore, but I think we still need it. The Splicers magnify the effect of Smite the Monstrous, but if we lose all our progress after a megastage transition, it's too long to wait until the next megastage transition. So we still need the Sephara combo.
So we can go Sephara + Mirrorwing, or Sephara + Splicers. I think the Mirrorwing combo might also need Copy Enchantment, since I don't see how to manage with just casting one of the instants at a time. The Splicers require Precursor Golem, but that actually adds to the final layers.
(I guess that needs another spider spawning then though? is panharmonicon ok?)