Hmmm... So, I also needed to figure out how to retrieve our sorceries from the graveyard so that we can cast them. Anarchist seems like a good card to use, and we can cast Spitting Image to make a copy and trigger its ETB ability. We can get the mana using Priest of Titania. Priest of Titania can get green mana for all of the opponent's Elves, and we can use that mana to cast Spitting Image a gazillion times. So, that eliminates the need for Mana Echoes and Invulnerability.
As for getting everything back after a Worldfire, yeah, that's always tricky. I was thinking of using Open the Vaults to get our artifacts and enchantments back. I think that takes care of just about everything, except for Anarchist and Tidal Barracuda. How do we recycle those? We can't afford to wait for Escape Routes. On the other hand, if we add a way to bring Tidal Barracuda back from the graveyard to the hand or battlefield, or from the battlefield to our hand, that has the potential to mess up the blue mana stage. Perhaps something that takes Tidal Barracuda off the battlefield, but allows it to come back. Maybe something like Portcullis? The problem with Portcullis is that Tidal Barracuda will come back after Worldfire resolves, allowing us the freedom to give the opponent creatures, while a Starlight awaits further down the stack. So, this is a little troublesome.
Well, we need a stage creature token to be able to be activated to produce another token eventually, and we usually do that having the creature token target the nontoken creature, and the Horobi will trigger and destroy it, allowing is to impint it on Mimic Vat for another token. So, I guess we want something that taps to bring a Bone Shredder onto the battlefield. Nephalia Smuggler maybe? Hmmm, seems worth investigating.
To be honest, I was loving that the fact that the Ritual of Soot / Revival // Revenge stage was restricted to 3 CMC or less, so that we could still have blue and white mana stages following. But, it's all for naught if we can't figure out how to come back from Worldfire.
Edit: Okay, for a Mimic Vat stage, we need the creature token to both be able to send the nontoken creature to the graveyard, and also bounce it back to our hand, so that we can cast it for Bloodbond March triggers. Generally we have the combo of Horobi, Death's Wail and Cowardice for that. So, in addition to Bone Shredder we can add something like Aether Adept to be able to bounce the nontoken creature to our hand. But, we can also use it to bounce Bone Shredder and/or Aether Adept to our hand, and then we can play those cards when we choose. I'm pretty sure that will upset the balance of the stage.
Aether Adept can be played infinitely many times (if we have Omniscience) bouncing itself which often an issue (though can be worked around if careful).
Does just having Wizard Mentor bounce Bone Shredder work?
So, when we tap Wizard Mentor we need to get at least two usable copies for the stage to work. But, then we can use one ability to bounce Bone Shredder, play Bone Shredder immediately to destroy the nontoken Wizard Mentor, and get a token copy. Then, we can use the other ability to bounce Bone Shredder again, and then we can wait for Bloodbond March to bring the nontoken Wizard Mentor back into play, and then play Bone Shredder for another token. So, it looks like it doesn't work.
I see; a critical part of Horobi stages is the requirement that any horobi triggers must be resolved before resolving any bloodbond march triggers.
Nephalia smuggler could still work if we use a bounce creature that can't bounce Bone Shredder, such as Silver Drake. It still goes infinite with itself but if we don't have any storm cards (TYS is still ok) or cards that trigger when another creature ETBs then it could be fine.
In that scenario, we can use one flicker ability to flicker Bone Shredder and get another [c}Nephalia Smuggler[/c] token, and then another to flicker Silver Drake, and bounce Silver Drake our hand. We can then wait for the nontoken Nephalia Smuggler to come back to the battlefield, and bounce it. Nephalia Smugger can then be replayed for more Bloodbond March triggers, and we can repeat.
So yeah, we can't be allowed to delay either the destruction or bounce ability. If there is a version of Silver Drake that can bounce Nephalia Smuggler, but not Bone Shredder or itself, then it should work.
Edit: So, regarding the Worldfire deck: We have the choice between going with Tidal Barracuda (which allows for Soulblast), and with Vedalken Orrery. If we go with Tidal Barracuda, then we need some way to retrieve it after Worldfire. If we go with Vedalken Orrery, then we need some way to recycle Death Pit Offering. (and we need to retrieve Anarchist and the other enchantments and artifacts)
For recycling artifacts and enchantments, Stern Proctor seems like a natural choice. Unfortunately, being able to retrieve Stern Proctor with Revival // Revenge means we can cycle it in the blue mana stage too cheaply, without needing to use Bloodbond March triggers. Same with Leonin Relic-Warder and the white mana stage. We could perhaps go with Sharuum the Hegemon and Triton Cavalry, but Triton Cavalry being out of the range of Revival // Revenge means we still have the problem of retrieving it after Worldfire.
For retrieving Anarchist and Triton Cavalry, I was looking at cards like Bloodline Necromancer and Grim Captain's Call. Unfortunately, we can respond to the casting of Bloodline Necromancer by casting a sorcery and triggering Artificial Evolution, allowing us to retrieve any creature type. If Bloodline Necromancer enters the battlefield without being cast, then the ability will get put on the stack before Artificial Evolution can change the text, so that will be safe. Grim Captain's Call seems to be safe as well, since its target gets picked when cast, and I'm pretty sure the TYS copies aren't affected by changes to the original text. But, we can't really afford to spend more black for creatures that will die in a computation. Not quite seeing the solution yet.
Perhaps the easiest way out is to just use Stern Proctor or Leonin Relic-Warder, and just accept the loss of the corresponding stage. That handles artifacts and enchantments, although we still need to retrieve Anarchist.
Edit: So, something I was thinking about was the use of Thrumming Stone, with Mirror Gallery to allow for lots of copies. With many copies of Thrumming Stone on the battlefield, casting a spell will trigger Ripple many times, allowing us to cast another copy of the spell from the library (assuming we can put the spell back in the library after it is done resolving) many times. Those spells in turn have multiple instances if Ripple, so they could fetch a third copy of the spell many times. So, with four copies of a spell, we can get 3 additional layers, or with N copies of something like Shadowborn Apostle we could get N-1 layers.
Of course, this is not a stage, since we need a card slot for each layer. I was wondering though whether there was some way to turn it into a stage, by using something that can free up the spells on the stack. Countering is the obvious thing to do, but unfortunately that doesn't actually increase the number of layers - we free up the card from the stack immediately, but that card will no longer go off the stack later when it originally was going to, so it's like we're increasing the size of a layer, rather than adding more. I guess what we need are things that can make copies of cards and cast them, like Spellweaver Volute and Spellweaver Helix. Also, we would need that to come at a cost of some resource, which we are able to get back as we resolve the combo. I'm not sure how we can do this, but if we can get another stage on the cheap, it would be well worth investigating.
Rhythm of the Wild gives non-evasive haste so that's no good. Swapping away from Soulblast at least prevents us from converting an arbitrary computation to damage.
Thrumming stone seems very likely to go infinite with any way to counter the original spell, and then put it back into the library. Given that we need to counter at the very least the spell that triggers spellweaver helix to be able to use it for the next transition, this seems very likely to go infinite.
IE:
Cast Haze of rage, get ripple/tys triggers, resolve tys copies, counter original, shuffle it in, reveal it to ripple, cast Haze of rage repeat.
Oh right, Soulblast allows us to deal arbitrarily large damage if we build up enough. So yeah, going back to Goblin Boom Keg seems like the way to go.
We can get around the countering of various things by restricting what we can counter, for example we can use Essence Scatter for creatures, and Mental Misstep for Chatter of the Squirrel or Bump in the Night. That allows us to either not be able to counter a particular spell, or counter it at a cost.
Non evasive haste is ok if there's no way to deal a large amount of damage to the opponent outside of combat, and no extra combat steps, and no first strike / double strike.
Yeah, it's just the Soulblast that we have to switch out of.
Edit: Hmmm, I guess in the Mimic Vat version, we don't need to worry about not creating copies of creatures. So we can just add something like Dual Nature, and that would probably remove the need to have Sharuum the Hegemon and Mirrormade.
Edit: I suppose we could replace Metallic Mastery with a token creator, like Kindred Charge. Would that eliminate the need for Dual Nature? That would save a card slot.
Edit: So, in the process of executing the combo, we will have to keep sacrificing all of our creatures, so we can't keep the creatures created by Kindred Charge around. Still, we get creatures from Xathrid Necromancer, so we still should be able to make copies of Illusionist's Bracers, and can do without copies of Mirrormade. But, we won't be able to get a Goblin Boom Keg token without Mirrorweave, and that would eliminate all Coat of Arms, so we would have to Mirrorweave back to that. So, Kindred Charge does not eliminate the need for Sharuum the Hegemon. But, I believe Dual Nature still does, and is probably more useful overall than Sharuum the Hegemon.
Edit: Ooh, instead of turning life into mana via Phyrexian Lens, we can use that life to allow us to deal damage to ourselves and trigger many copies of Pain Magnificiation, discarding cards many times. Each of those discards can trigger many copies of Telekinetic Bonds, which can untap permanents many times. That can untap a tapped white mana land, getting us two more layers than before.
Edit: We could maybe get another layer by replacing the tapped white land with Fountain of Cho, and adding a cheap proliferate spell. Or we could use Crucible of the Spirit Dragon, which would even save true white mana for possible use later. However, at this point we have many ways to get layers, and not enough deck slots.
Edit: Hmm, is using Death Pit Offering to destroy or bounce Nephalia Smuggler a problem? Death Pit Offering will destroy Tidal Barracuda, but we must have the means to deal with it if the deck is to work in the first place. A typical thing is to use a copy of Nephalia Smuggler's ability to flicker Tidal Barracuda, triggering Dual Nature. We can then respond by playing Death Pit Offering, and that will destroy all the creatures, but we have a Dual Nature trigger for creating a token copy of Tidal Barracuda on the stack. So it looks like we can destroy the nontoken Nephalia Smuggler, and create a token copy this way. Of course, we do have to spend a Nephalia Smuggler ability this way, so maybe it is okay? Same for bouncing we, we have to flicker Tidal Barracuda so it costs us a Smuggler ability there as well. So maybe it is okay. It's worth checking carefully though.
If there are no problems, then this should get BB_{w^2 + w + 13}(X) damage.
The other version under consideration is a Worldfire version, which I somewhat outlined as the second deck in post #3211. (We need to switch out of Soulblast.) This appears to also get a hyperstage + 1 stage, but it doesn't look like it can get as many additional layers, so I have been focusing on the other version. On the other hand, perhaps we could get this to 2 additional stages, which would be really nice.
Edit: Hmmm, I don't think we actually need Change of Heart and Mana Echoes. We can turn all of the opponent's creatures into Bloodbond Marches using Mirrorweave, and that will boost the primary stage up to the appropriate level. I guess we may be in need of mana - perhaps adding a Blue Mana Battery is a good idea. That still saves us a card.
One possible thorn with it is that because of APNAP, it would automatically be stacked over any of our cast triggers, fortunately you had already swapped to fuel for the cause as a counterspell so it seems to not interfere.
One possible avenue of improvement: We can perhaps be able to use Mana Reflection or Nyxbloom Ancient to get lots of mana, if we switch our hyperstage land to one of those storage lands that taps for a counter, then spends the counter to get a mana. We would have to get rid of Fuel for the Cause, but that's fine since Mana Reflection gets us the layer we were getting from Fuel for the Cause anyway. I was looking at ways to use this with perhaps Treasure tokens from Smothering Tithe, but I haven't found anything better than what we currently have yet.
Edit: Okay, I guess Recoup doesn't work, since we can cast it using Spellweaver Helix without having to pay red mana. Is there some other way we can recycle Stream of Life? We can either have something expensive, and that will then feed into higher layers, or we can have somethng cheap, and have the next layer be green mana for Stream of Life. Or, are there other good ways to give the opponent life?
Edit: I haven't found a good way to continue after [c}Stream of Life[/c], but we can still do pretty well ending there thanks to Thrumming Stone shenanigans:
I'm still nervous about Thrumming stone, but it looks safe as long as we are very limited in how we get things back into the library.
It doesn't look like there's any way to get Stunted Growth to ripple into itself?
I feel like there's some kind of infinite in there, but haven't been able to find it...
Yeah, once we cast Stunted Growth, we don't have a way of getting it back to our hand.
Edit: Hmmm, I guess the Worldfire deck doesn't actually work at the moment. Instead of killing our stage creature with Ritual of Soot, we can just use Death Pit Offering.
I think there is still potential for the Worldfire deck to get one or two additional stages, but having the primary stage be destroy and bring back seems problematic, as our computation starter will have to destroy our creatures.
I think Dowsing Dagger giving toughness is the problem I couldn't put my finger on before. But I dont think that actually causes any issues as they fall off when march of the machines is in play which it needs to be so goblin boom keg can die.
Yeah, needing to start with a self wrath so we don't have flash or any necromancers really limits our options for other stages.
Though now that it looks like it works without worldfire, I do wonder if there's some possibility for another higher order stage. Unfortunately it seems like there's not really another good way to gate a transition. We already pretty much need to use Spellweaver volute for the setup, and are already using spellweaver's helix, I think there was an old attempt to make Spell Queller work? (nice synergy with Revival and ritual of soot aside, it has flash and will mess up computation.)
Looking at the cards since then doesn't yield much either...
Goblin Dark-Dwellers is another card we could use to trigger multiple spells. But, while there are sorceries with CMC or 3 or less that can recycle the primary stage (e.g. Mobilize), I don't recall any such sorceries that worked as a board clearer. Note that Kederekt Leviathan and Child of Alara can already be activated by the primary stage.
Edit: There are various Chandras that can cast red instants and sorceries from the graveyard, and one that can casts instants and sorceries of CMC 3 or less. We could use Teferi, Time Reveler to be able to use loyalty abilities as instants perhaps. Then the Spellweaver Helix stage level could use Worldpurge.
Hmm, another problem though is how each destruction effect gets the corresponding resource back. In the gigastage deck, the hyperstage could only recycle certain creatures. Then the megastage recycled Centaur Safeguard for life, and the gigastage recycled lands for mana. Since our primary stage currently can hit creatures in general, we need two other things for two more stage levels, and only one of them can be lands.
Well, I suppose if we are using Chandra in the hyperstage, that could be what we recycle. So a red sorcery that hit nonland permanents could do the trick.
Edit: Yikes... there is a problem with the Jokulhaups deck as well. Being able to bring Bone Shredder back to our hand looks to be too good. We can do the following:
With one token copy of Nephalia Smuggler, we tap it get a bunch of Illusionist's Bracers copies. We can use one ability to flicker Bone Shredder, and destroy the nontoken Nephalia Smuggler, allowing us to imprint it on a Mimic Vat. We can then use Together Forever (flickering it if necessary) to target Bone Shredder with its ability, and then we can play Death Pit Offering to sacrifice our creatures, and bounce Bone Shredder to our hand. We want to preserve Mimic Vat through this, but we can do that by just not having March of the Machines on the battlefield. After the destruction, we can tap the Mimic Vat to create a Nephalia Smugger token, cast Artful Dodge to trigger Pull from Eternity and bring the nontoken Nephalia Smuggler back to the graveyard, and resolve a Bloodbond March trigger to bring it back to the battlefield. We can then play Bone Shredder from our hand, and destroy the nontoken Nephalia Smuggler (preparing another untapped Mimic Vat if necessary), allowing us to create a Nephalia Smuggler token, and we wind up ahead.
So, I'm not sure how to fix this. We do need to preserve the Mimic Vat through the destruction, so if there were some destruction effect that destroyed both our creatures and our artifacts... I didn't see a suitable card though. Another thing I thought of was if we got rid of Eye of Ramos, and carefully meted out our blue mana so that we couldn't do the above cheaply enough... I kinda doubt that that will work though.
So, we currently don't have a working hyperstage with an additional stage. Anyone have any ideas for either version?
Kaevrek's Spite can be a self-sweeper that just hits everything, but it's really awkward to work with (we'd like to counter it to prevent anyone from losing life to it, but we no longer have Omniscience, or a hand).
Perhaps we could somehow give the opponent Avacyn, Angel of Hope and use a symmetric sweeper, but then there are several issues with that (how do we give the opponent avacyn? Mirrorweave doesn't work on legends and also wouldn't work anyway as then they won't have necromancers; Donate is bad if we can give the opponent mana + ways to use it during a computation; Cytoshape is bad as it can turn damaged creatures into goblin boom keg while keeping flash; additionally, the computation wouldn't work if the opponent has an indestructible board - is it ok to give creatures wither? Might be fine as long as there's no proliferate.
Also, another issue with the deck I think is that Mirrorweave can turn the creatures with protection into something else to make them bouncable.
Actually; Wrong Turn might solve several of our problems - assuming we can make clones of whatever we need, we can set up our opponent's board with it instead of Mirrorweave, cutting back on the issues with that card as well as not having the issues of Donate as long as we restrict our mana sources to things that can't be creatures.
Hmm, so we could use Wrong Turn to give the opponent Avacyn, Angel of Hope, and then start the computation with a symmetric sweeper. Ooh, maybe we get to use Boompile!
Oh, but Avacyn gives everything indestructible, so nothing will die and the game will turn into a draw. And of course if we put in a way to stop the computation, we can get arbitrarily high numbers.
Oh, you mentioned wither. Interesting, might work.
Edit: So, I saw 4 cards that give wither: Everlasting Torment, Fang Skulkin, Fists of the Demigod, and Blight Sickle. Everlasting Torment looks like something that we would want, except that it prevents damage from being prevented, so that's undesirable. (Although acceptable if we have no other choice) The other three all give us a choice on which creatures we give wither, which is fine, I suppose. It's worth at least checking though. Fang Skulkin looks like the best of the choices.
As for getting everything back after a Worldfire, yeah, that's always tricky. I was thinking of using Open the Vaults to get our artifacts and enchantments back. I think that takes care of just about everything, except for Anarchist and Tidal Barracuda. How do we recycle those? We can't afford to wait for Escape Routes. On the other hand, if we add a way to bring Tidal Barracuda back from the graveyard to the hand or battlefield, or from the battlefield to our hand, that has the potential to mess up the blue mana stage. Perhaps something that takes Tidal Barracuda off the battlefield, but allows it to come back. Maybe something like Portcullis? The problem with Portcullis is that Tidal Barracuda will come back after Worldfire resolves, allowing us the freedom to give the opponent creatures, while a Starlight awaits further down the stack. So, this is a little troublesome.
To be honest, I was loving that the fact that the Ritual of Soot / Revival // Revenge stage was restricted to 3 CMC or less, so that we could still have blue and white mana stages following. But, it's all for naught if we can't figure out how to come back from Worldfire.
Edit: Okay, for a Mimic Vat stage, we need the creature token to both be able to send the nontoken creature to the graveyard, and also bounce it back to our hand, so that we can cast it for Bloodbond March triggers. Generally we have the combo of Horobi, Death's Wail and Cowardice for that. So, in addition to Bone Shredder we can add something like Aether Adept to be able to bounce the nontoken creature to our hand. But, we can also use it to bounce Bone Shredder and/or Aether Adept to our hand, and then we can play those cards when we choose. I'm pretty sure that will upset the balance of the stage.
Does just having Wizard Mentor bounce Bone Shredder work?
Nephalia smuggler could still work if we use a bounce creature that can't bounce Bone Shredder, such as Silver Drake. It still goes infinite with itself but if we don't have any storm cards (TYS is still ok) or cards that trigger when another creature ETBs then it could be fine.
So yeah, we can't be allowed to delay either the destruction or bounce ability. If there is a version of Silver Drake that can bounce Nephalia Smuggler, but not Bone Shredder or itself, then it should work.
Together Forever seems superior to Demonic Vigor, unless we find a way to use +1/+1 counters in the final layers.
So, how about:
2 Xathrid Necromancer
3 Arcbond
4 Artificial Evolution
5 Mirrorweave
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 Change of Heart
17 Mana Echoes
18 Stern Proctor
19 Sharuum the Hegemon
20 Wizard Mentor
21 Mimic Vat
22 Artful Dodge
23 Chrome Mox
24 Bloodbond March
25 Nix
26 Illusionist's Bracers
27 Mirrormade
28 Leonin Shikari
29 Bone Shredder
30 Together Forever
32 Jokulhaups
33 Metallic Mastery
34 Chatter of the Squirrel
35 Chatter of the Squirrel
36 Panharmonicon
37 Restore
38 Tropical Island
39 Aegis Automaton
40 Guardian of the Guildpact
41 Great Sable Stag
42 Chameleon Blur
43 Leyline of Punishment
44 Mana Crypt
45 Show and Tell
46 Omniscience
47 Phyrexian Lens
48 Sanguine Sacrament
49 Boon Reflection
50 Blue Sun's Zenith
51 Consecrated Sphinx
52 Farsight Mask
53 Stream of Life
54 Recoup
55 Xenagos, the Reveler
56 Repeated Reverberation
57 Xenagos, the Reveler
58 Xenagos, the Reveler
59 Xenagos, the Reveler
60 Oath of Teferi
Edit: So, regarding the Worldfire deck: We have the choice between going with Tidal Barracuda (which allows for Soulblast), and with Vedalken Orrery. If we go with Tidal Barracuda, then we need some way to retrieve it after Worldfire. If we go with Vedalken Orrery, then we need some way to recycle Death Pit Offering. (and we need to retrieve Anarchist and the other enchantments and artifacts)
For recycling artifacts and enchantments, Stern Proctor seems like a natural choice. Unfortunately, being able to retrieve Stern Proctor with Revival // Revenge means we can cycle it in the blue mana stage too cheaply, without needing to use Bloodbond March triggers. Same with Leonin Relic-Warder and the white mana stage. We could perhaps go with Sharuum the Hegemon and Triton Cavalry, but Triton Cavalry being out of the range of Revival // Revenge means we still have the problem of retrieving it after Worldfire.
For retrieving Anarchist and Triton Cavalry, I was looking at cards like Bloodline Necromancer and Grim Captain's Call. Unfortunately, we can respond to the casting of Bloodline Necromancer by casting a sorcery and triggering Artificial Evolution, allowing us to retrieve any creature type. If Bloodline Necromancer enters the battlefield without being cast, then the ability will get put on the stack before Artificial Evolution can change the text, so that will be safe. Grim Captain's Call seems to be safe as well, since its target gets picked when cast, and I'm pretty sure the TYS copies aren't affected by changes to the original text. But, we can't really afford to spend more black for creatures that will die in a computation. Not quite seeing the solution yet.
Perhaps the easiest way out is to just use Stern Proctor or Leonin Relic-Warder, and just accept the loss of the corresponding stage. That handles artifacts and enchantments, although we still need to retrieve Anarchist.
2 Xathrid Necromancer
3 Arcbond
4 Artificial Evolution
5 Mirrorweave
6 Dowsing Dagger
7 Dralnu's Crusade
8 Starfield of Nyx
9 Soulblast
10 Tidal Barracuda
11 Spellweaver Volute
12 Pull from Eternity
14 Spitting Image
15 Priest of Titania
16 Ritual of Soot
17 Revival // Revenge
18 Graveyard Robbers
19 Alhammaret's Archive
20 K'rrik, Son of Yawgmoth
21 Spellweaver Helix
22 Worldfire
23 Starlight
24 Restore
25 Haze of Rage
26 Haze of Rage
27 Haze of Rage
28 Haze of Rage
29 Mountain
31 Guardian of the Guildpact
34 Kurkesh, Onakke Ancient
35 Rhythm of the Wild
36 Somberwald Sage
37 Anarchist
38 Bloodline Necromancer
39 Stern Proctor
Edit: So, something I was thinking about was the use of Thrumming Stone, with Mirror Gallery to allow for lots of copies. With many copies of Thrumming Stone on the battlefield, casting a spell will trigger Ripple many times, allowing us to cast another copy of the spell from the library (assuming we can put the spell back in the library after it is done resolving) many times. Those spells in turn have multiple instances if Ripple, so they could fetch a third copy of the spell many times. So, with four copies of a spell, we can get 3 additional layers, or with N copies of something like Shadowborn Apostle we could get N-1 layers.
Of course, this is not a stage, since we need a card slot for each layer. I was wondering though whether there was some way to turn it into a stage, by using something that can free up the spells on the stack. Countering is the obvious thing to do, but unfortunately that doesn't actually increase the number of layers - we free up the card from the stack immediately, but that card will no longer go off the stack later when it originally was going to, so it's like we're increasing the size of a layer, rather than adding more. I guess what we need are things that can make copies of cards and cast them, like Spellweaver Volute and Spellweaver Helix. Also, we would need that to come at a cost of some resource, which we are able to get back as we resolve the combo. I'm not sure how we can do this, but if we can get another stage on the cheap, it would be well worth investigating.
Thrumming stone seems very likely to go infinite with any way to counter the original spell, and then put it back into the library. Given that we need to counter at the very least the spell that triggers spellweaver helix to be able to use it for the next transition, this seems very likely to go infinite.
IE:
Cast Haze of rage, get ripple/tys triggers, resolve tys copies, counter original, shuffle it in, reveal it to ripple, cast Haze of rage repeat.
We can get around the countering of various things by restricting what we can counter, for example we can use Essence Scatter for creatures, and Mental Misstep for Chatter of the Squirrel or Bump in the Night. That allows us to either not be able to counter a particular spell, or counter it at a cost.
Edit: Hmmm, I guess in the Mimic Vat version, we don't need to worry about not creating copies of creatures. So we can just add something like Dual Nature, and that would probably remove the need to have Sharuum the Hegemon and Mirrormade.
Edit: I suppose we could replace Metallic Mastery with a token creator, like Kindred Charge. Would that eliminate the need for Dual Nature? That would save a card slot.
Edit: So, in the process of executing the combo, we will have to keep sacrificing all of our creatures, so we can't keep the creatures created by Kindred Charge around. Still, we get creatures from Xathrid Necromancer, so we still should be able to make copies of Illusionist's Bracers, and can do without copies of Mirrormade. But, we won't be able to get a Goblin Boom Keg token without Mirrorweave, and that would eliminate all Coat of Arms, so we would have to Mirrorweave back to that. So, Kindred Charge does not eliminate the need for Sharuum the Hegemon. But, I believe Dual Nature still does, and is probably more useful overall than Sharuum the Hegemon.
Edit: Ooh, instead of turning life into mana via Phyrexian Lens, we can use that life to allow us to deal damage to ourselves and trigger many copies of Pain Magnificiation, discarding cards many times. Each of those discards can trigger many copies of Telekinetic Bonds, which can untap permanents many times. That can untap a tapped white mana land, getting us two more layers than before.
Edit: We could maybe get another layer by replacing the tapped white land with Fountain of Cho, and adding a cheap proliferate spell. Or we could use Crucible of the Spirit Dragon, which would even save true white mana for possible use later. However, at this point we have many ways to get layers, and not enough deck slots.
Edit: Hmm, is using Death Pit Offering to destroy or bounce Nephalia Smuggler a problem? Death Pit Offering will destroy Tidal Barracuda, but we must have the means to deal with it if the deck is to work in the first place. A typical thing is to use a copy of Nephalia Smuggler's ability to flicker Tidal Barracuda, triggering Dual Nature. We can then respond by playing Death Pit Offering, and that will destroy all the creatures, but we have a Dual Nature trigger for creating a token copy of Tidal Barracuda on the stack. So it looks like we can destroy the nontoken Nephalia Smuggler, and create a token copy this way. Of course, we do have to spend a Nephalia Smuggler ability this way, so maybe it is okay? Same for bouncing we, we have to flicker Tidal Barracuda so it costs us a Smuggler ability there as well. So maybe it is okay. It's worth checking carefully though.
2 Xathrid Necromancer
3 Arcbond
4 Artificial Evolution
5 Mirrorweave
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 Change of Heart
17 Mana Echoes
18 Dual Nature
19 Nephalia Smuggler
20 Mimic Vat
21 Artful Dodge
22 Chrome Mox
23 Bloodbond March
24 Fuel for the Cause
25 Illusionist's Bracers
26 Mirrormade
27 Leonin Shikari
28 Bone Shredder
29 Demonic Vigor
31 Jokulhaups
32 Kindred Charge
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 Chameleon Blur
42 Leyline of Punishment
43 Black Lotus
44 Show and Tell
45 Omniscience
46 Noggle Ransacker
46 Fountain of Cho
47 Telekinetic Bonds
48 Pain Magnification
49 Sanguine Sacrament
50 Boon Reflection
51 Blue Sun's Zenith
52 Consecrated Sphinx
53 Farsight Mask
54 Stream of Life
55 Recoup
56 Xenagos, the Reveler
57 Repeated Reverberation
59 Stunted Growth
If there are no problems, then this should get BB_{w^2 + w + 13}(X) damage.
The other version under consideration is a Worldfire version, which I somewhat outlined as the second deck in post #3211. (We need to switch out of Soulblast.) This appears to also get a hyperstage + 1 stage, but it doesn't look like it can get as many additional layers, so I have been focusing on the other version. On the other hand, perhaps we could get this to 2 additional stages, which would be really nice.
Edit: Hmmm, I don't think we actually need Change of Heart and Mana Echoes. We can turn all of the opponent's creatures into Bloodbond Marches using Mirrorweave, and that will boost the primary stage up to the appropriate level. I guess we may be in need of mana - perhaps adding a Blue Mana Battery is a good idea. That still saves us a card.
One possible thorn with it is that because of APNAP, it would automatically be stacked over any of our cast triggers, fortunately you had already swapped to fuel for the cause as a counterspell so it seems to not interfere.
One possible avenue of improvement: We can perhaps be able to use Mana Reflection or Nyxbloom Ancient to get lots of mana, if we switch our hyperstage land to one of those storage lands that taps for a counter, then spends the counter to get a mana. We would have to get rid of Fuel for the Cause, but that's fine since Mana Reflection gets us the layer we were getting from Fuel for the Cause anyway. I was looking at ways to use this with perhaps Treasure tokens from Smothering Tithe, but I haven't found anything better than what we currently have yet.
Edit: Okay, I guess Recoup doesn't work, since we can cast it using Spellweaver Helix without having to pay red mana. Is there some other way we can recycle Stream of Life? We can either have something expensive, and that will then feed into higher layers, or we can have somethng cheap, and have the next layer be green mana for Stream of Life. Or, are there other good ways to give the opponent life?
Edit: I haven't found a good way to continue after [c}Stream of Life[/c], but we can still do pretty well ending there thanks to Thrumming Stone shenanigans:
2 Xathrid Necromancer
3 Arcbond
4 Artificial Evolution
5 Mirrorweave
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 Dual Nature
17 Eye of Ramos
18 Nephalia Smuggler
19 Mimic Vat
20 Artful Dodge
21 Chrome Mox
22 Bloodbond March
23 Fuel for the Cause
24 Illusionist's Bracers
25 Leonin Shikari
26 Bone Shredder
27 Together Forever
29 Jokulhaups
30 Kindred Charge
31 Bump in the Night
32 Bump in the Night
33 Panharmonicon
34 Restore
35 Mountain
36 Aegis Automaton
37 Guardian of the Guildpact
38 Wildfire Emissary
39 Chameleon Blur
40 Leyline of Punishment
41 Black Lotus
42 Show and Tell
43 Omniscience
44 Noggle Ransacker
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
This should get BB_{w^2 + w + 13}(X) again, barring any problems.
It doesn't look like there's any way to get Stunted Growth to ripple into itself?
I feel like there's some kind of infinite in there, but haven't been able to find it...
Edit: Hmmm, I guess the Worldfire deck doesn't actually work at the moment. Instead of killing our stage creature with Ritual of Soot, we can just use Death Pit Offering.
I think there is still potential for the Worldfire deck to get one or two additional stages, but having the primary stage be destroy and bring back seems problematic, as our computation starter will have to destroy our creatures.
Yeah, needing to start with a self wrath so we don't have flash or any necromancers really limits our options for other stages.
Though now that it looks like it works without worldfire, I do wonder if there's some possibility for another higher order stage. Unfortunately it seems like there's not really another good way to gate a transition. We already pretty much need to use Spellweaver volute for the setup, and are already using spellweaver's helix, I think there was an old attempt to make Spell Queller work? (nice synergy with Revival and ritual of soot aside, it has flash and will mess up computation.)
Looking at the cards since then doesn't yield much either...
Edit: There are various Chandras that can cast red instants and sorceries from the graveyard, and one that can casts instants and sorceries of CMC 3 or less. We could use Teferi, Time Reveler to be able to use loyalty abilities as instants perhaps. Then the Spellweaver Helix stage level could use Worldpurge.
Hmm, another problem though is how each destruction effect gets the corresponding resource back. In the gigastage deck, the hyperstage could only recycle certain creatures. Then the megastage recycled Centaur Safeguard for life, and the gigastage recycled lands for mana. Since our primary stage currently can hit creatures in general, we need two other things for two more stage levels, and only one of them can be lands.
Well, I suppose if we are using Chandra in the hyperstage, that could be what we recycle. So a red sorcery that hit nonland permanents could do the trick.
Edit: Yikes... there is a problem with the Jokulhaups deck as well. Being able to bring Bone Shredder back to our hand looks to be too good. We can do the following:
With one token copy of Nephalia Smuggler, we tap it get a bunch of Illusionist's Bracers copies. We can use one ability to flicker Bone Shredder, and destroy the nontoken Nephalia Smuggler, allowing us to imprint it on a Mimic Vat. We can then use Together Forever (flickering it if necessary) to target Bone Shredder with its ability, and then we can play Death Pit Offering to sacrifice our creatures, and bounce Bone Shredder to our hand. We want to preserve Mimic Vat through this, but we can do that by just not having March of the Machines on the battlefield. After the destruction, we can tap the Mimic Vat to create a Nephalia Smugger token, cast Artful Dodge to trigger Pull from Eternity and bring the nontoken Nephalia Smuggler back to the graveyard, and resolve a Bloodbond March trigger to bring it back to the battlefield. We can then play Bone Shredder from our hand, and destroy the nontoken Nephalia Smuggler (preparing another untapped Mimic Vat if necessary), allowing us to create a Nephalia Smuggler token, and we wind up ahead.
So, I'm not sure how to fix this. We do need to preserve the Mimic Vat through the destruction, so if there were some destruction effect that destroyed both our creatures and our artifacts... I didn't see a suitable card though. Another thing I thought of was if we got rid of Eye of Ramos, and carefully meted out our blue mana so that we couldn't do the above cheaply enough... I kinda doubt that that will work though.
So, we currently don't have a working hyperstage with an additional stage. Anyone have any ideas for either version?
Kaevrek's Spite can be a self-sweeper that just hits everything, but it's really awkward to work with (we'd like to counter it to prevent anyone from losing life to it, but we no longer have Omniscience, or a hand).
Perhaps we could somehow give the opponent Avacyn, Angel of Hope and use a symmetric sweeper, but then there are several issues with that (how do we give the opponent avacyn? Mirrorweave doesn't work on legends and also wouldn't work anyway as then they won't have necromancers; Donate is bad if we can give the opponent mana + ways to use it during a computation; Cytoshape is bad as it can turn damaged creatures into goblin boom keg while keeping flash; additionally, the computation wouldn't work if the opponent has an indestructible board - is it ok to give creatures wither? Might be fine as long as there's no proliferate.
Also, another issue with the deck I think is that Mirrorweave can turn the creatures with protection into something else to make them bouncable.
Actually; Wrong Turn might solve several of our problems - assuming we can make clones of whatever we need, we can set up our opponent's board with it instead of Mirrorweave, cutting back on the issues with that card as well as not having the issues of Donate as long as we restrict our mana sources to things that can't be creatures.
Oh, but Avacyn gives everything indestructible, so nothing will die and the game will turn into a draw. And of course if we put in a way to stop the computation, we can get arbitrarily high numbers.
Oh, you mentioned wither. Interesting, might work.
Edit: So, I saw 4 cards that give wither: Everlasting Torment, Fang Skulkin, Fists of the Demigod, and Blight Sickle. Everlasting Torment looks like something that we would want, except that it prevents damage from being prevented, so that's undesirable. (Although acceptable if we have no other choice) The other three all give us a choice on which creatures we give wither, which is fine, I suppose. It's worth at least checking though. Fang Skulkin looks like the best of the choices.
Just making minimal changes, let's start with:
2 Xathrid Necromancer
3 Arcbond
4 Artificial Evolution
5 Wrong Turn
6 Dralnu's Crusade
7 Starfield of Nyx
8 Boompile
9 Goblin Boom Keg
10 Tidal Barracuda
11 Avacyn, Angel of Hope
12 Fang Skulkin
13 Spellweaver Volute
14 Pull from Eternity
15 Thousand-Year Storm
16 Dual Nature
17 March of the Machines
18 Nephalia Smuggler
19 Mimic Vat
20 Artful Dodge
21 Chrome Mox
22 Bloodbond March
23 Cephalid Shrine
24 Illusionist's Bracers
25 Leonin Shikari
26 Bone Shredder
27 Together Forever
29 Jokulhaups
30 Kindred Charge
31 Bump in the Night
32 Bump in the Night
33 Panharmonicon
34 Restore
35 Mountain
36 Aegis Automaton
37 Guardian of the Guildpact
38 Wildfire Emissary
39 Chameleon Blur
40 Leyline of Punishment
41 Black Lotus
42 Show and Tell
43 Omniscience
44 Noggle Ransacker
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
We need the Brightstone Ritual + buyback spell system back now that we don't have Mirrorweave to make a ton of Bloodbond Marchs. Which as we can't use Mana Echoes unfortunately loses a colour of mana.
How does the Nephalia Smuggler stage actually work? In particular, where does the blue mana to activate the ability come from?