Yeah cutting niv doesn't look like it quite works. We can do a good chunk of what we need to for the next computation without flash, but I don't think it works out.
Previews have started and there's not much yet, Confront the past is a way to reanimate planeswalkers for black mana, I think previous planeswalker combos needed to actually recast the walker, which caused some issues with chrome mox.
Hmm, in our current system Confront the Past can be recast with Recoup, so at the hyperstage level. I don't see an obvious way to use Planeswalkers at that level.
Getting the effects of Doubling Season and Dual Nature for Standard would be very nice! Do we have a thread for the current Standard yet? We can start working on that, while still thinking about Vintage.
1 Black Lotus
2 Blue Sun's Zenith
3 Thousand-Year Storm
4 Dual Nature
5 Doubling Season
6 Opalescence
7 Drake Familiar
8 Mana Echoes
9 Vedalken Orrery
10 Dack Fayden
and we go:
Play Vedalken Orrery
Play Opalescence
Play Doubling Season
Play Dual Nature, get 3 copies total
Play Dack Fayden, and activate its ultimate
Play Mana Echoes, get 7 copies total
Play Drake Familiar, get 3 Dual Nature triggers and an ETB trigger
Resolve the ETB trigger first. Bounce Doubling Season and get 2059 copies
Resolve the first Dual Nature trigger, getting 2^2059 copies and 2^2059 ETB triggers
For the First ETB trigger, bounce Dual Nature
Resolve the exiling of Dual Nature tokens, but not the exiling of Doubling Season tokens
Replay Dual Nature, gettin 2^2059+1 copies
Resolve the exiling of Doubling Season tokens
For the second ETB trigger, bounce Doubling Season, resolving the exile triggers
Replay Doubling Season, getting more than 2^^(2^2059) Doubling Seasons
repeat this for all triggers, getting more than 2^^^(2^2058) Dual Natures and Doubling Seasons
Repeat for second and third Dual Nature triggers, increasing the number of Dual Natures and Doubling Seasons to more than 2^^^(2^^^(2^^^(2^2058))) each.
Play Thousand-Year Storm, getting more than 2^^^(2^^^(2^^^(2^2058))) copies
Play Black Lotus and tap for blue mana
Play Blue Sun's Zenith for a small number of cards, getting more than 2^^^(2^^^(2^^^(2^2058))) copies
I was typing up a small improvement to that line, by swapping mana echoes for mirrormade, because mana echoes basically just provides 1 mana, and accidentally found an infinite.
Mirrormade can copy black lotus for way cheaper than we can allow. (when a mirrormade token becomes an artifact its not an enchantment anymore.)
I think this is easily fixed with copy enchantment instead of mirrormade, without any harm to the deck, we have slightly fewer panharmonicons and vedalkin orrerys and other artifacts, but mostly nothing is worringly low.
Soul Separator is the only one that seems close, as we only get more every retract. I think its still fine, but might be a problem.
Edit:
Ok how many soul separators do we need?
Actually not that many, we basically only use it for drake familiar and desolation giant.
And that's between computations, and pull from eternities, and we can get a retract for every pull from eternity, so yeah we easily have enough without mirrormade.
Perhaps I am missing something I will admit the intricacies of the more modern deck are a bit beyond me but it seems like PO would be immensely helpful to streamline the early start up providing both mana and cards as well as a refresh for the ETBs later, it clearly has issues around going infinite however if we could cap the number of times it can be cast it seems it would have a tremendous positive impact on both mana and loop count. So the critical question becomes is there any way to put a card somewhere we can't get it later without fundamentally breaking the deck? It seems to me that there is not but you all are far more experienced in this art than myself so I at least wanted to get the idea out there into the collective consciousness.
Private Mod Note
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Generation 16: The first time you see this, add it to your sig, but add 1 to the number. Call it a social experiment.
The G/W centaur has been eliminated as the lifegain engine and I don't know if it is better but under the new split card rules supply demand is safe with dark dwellers due to having a CMC of 6. It is incredibly hard to wrap my head around all the dependencies in this deck so this may not be helpful but I saw a post wishing for it and now your wish is granted.
In the current deck, the core engine relies on not being able to do basically anything at instant speed during certain parts, so Paradoxical Outcome doesn't work. Goblin Dark-Dwellers is also not currently used.
So we can conclusively never get a card into a zone we can never get it back from? That is unfortunate but not at all unexpected with all the craziness so far. Also dark dwellers isn't in the most recent decks but it could be with that rules change(I don't think this actually works it's just worth noting if we need it later).
Private Mod Note
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Generation 16: The first time you see this, add it to your sig, but add 1 to the number. Call it a social experiment.
Well, we have to be very careful about how we can reuse our cards.
Currently we jump through kind of a lot of hoops to be able to chain together computations triggered by Desolation Giant killing Goblin boom keg. We need a new Arcbond, a fresh keg, and a new march of the machines before getting another Giant trigger. We recast Arcbond with copy enchantment tokens of Spellweaver volute, (keeping them around thanks to pull from eternity, and bouncing them all in response with drake familiar to abuse last known information) using Lingering Souls as the Sorcery. Dack Fayden's emblem allows us to efficiently steal back a few key permanents such as vedalken orrery, Omniscience, goblin boom keg, and soul seperator. We can now recast our enchantments, make a bunch of copies and bounce the real ones with soul separator on Drake familiar. (we can 'save' some progress by wrong turning some of the tokens back to the opponent) Then we are ready to make another Giant and trigger everything again.
This cycle costs us: a few Spellweaver volute triggers. (and a batch of X of them costs 2 life)
This cycle used to obviously just be limited by the volute triggers, but without mirrormade anymore, we need to track the artifacts too. However, since we are using retract anyway, we can include that in the volute rotation, steal the artifacts, retract, and use another spellweaver volute trigger to steal a token copy of orrery, and then we can replay them and get Dual Nature copies.
So then we just use some small constant number (~10?) of spellweaver volute triggers each computation.
Seems like a lot of hoops to jump through, but because of the later stuff in the deck, while something like "Bounce all of our stuff" would suffice, it limits what else we can do to repeat computations in a limited manner. Specifically, we don't want to be able to bounce creatures easily, but do want to be able to make copies of them easily. Also, because of fizzling it would be very convenient if our bounce effects didn't target. Currently we are using Retract, Drake familiar and Soul Seperator to manage all of that.
And Retract is pulling triple duty by enabling the Urborg Syphon-Mage stage.
Edit: I don't have a whole lot of hope for something from MH2, but interesting to note that Urza's Saga will be our first Enchantment Land ever, I cant remember when the last time we got a new card type combo was? Gotta be something more recent than Dryad arbor/Lucent Liminid? (Edit2: I guess legendary instants and sorceries in dominaria.)
Edit: As suspected MH2 has some very unique cards, but none that seem particularly useful? Dermotaxi allows for easy copying/reanimating creatures without triggering ETB effects. It can change what it is mid computation. The underworld cookbook is a new discard->life possibility, though it's second ability ruins it. Suspend can maybe do something with jhoira's timebug or Dust of moments, but its hard to ensure a cast in the setup.
Probably the most potential is Out of time, which looks like the best way to introduce phasing ever printed. if we can make it work.
Ooh, Harmonic Prodigy is potentially useful! We can use it in conjunction with something that adds a creature type or types, like Arcane Adaptation.
Currently, our triggered layers can get the layers by having many copies of the triggering permanent in play, so they don't really need Harmonic Prodigy. A notable exception is Kurkesh, Onakke Ancient which could use copies of its ability as it is legendary. So, Harmonic Prodigy looks good for the Kurkesh / Tomiyo's Journal deck.
Looks like it gets 11 layers, if I'm not mistaken.
Edit: Hmm, I just put in Consecrated Sphinx automatically, but I don't think it actually works. A clue can't make the opponent draw; Blue Sun's Zenith can, but only if we can refill the opponent's library. And if the refilling is too cheap, then Consecrated Sphinx + Blue Sun's Zenith goes infinite.
Taking Consecrated Sphinx out, we have 10 layers, with an extra card slot.
Edit: I guess the previous deck also gets ten layers, thanks to Harmonic Wizard plus Moraug, Fury of Akoum. Since having Moraug at the end allows us to double dip layer 10, this winds up slightly ahead of the Tamiyo's Journal deck.
Nice, I didnt notice it worked with Kurkesh, that makes it a nice improvement over Bolt Bend.
But since Kurkesh already has creature types, do we even need arcane adaptation?
Also, we need to swap back from Mirrormade to Copy enchantment, cheap copies of black lotus is easy infinite.
I guess Arcane Adaptation is only required for Spellweaver Helix. So we can choose whether we want to have Arcane Adaptation, or Panharmonicon. The start will probably determine which one is better.
Right, I keep forgetting to update the deck list with these corrections.
Ah I missed that panharmonicon was gone, but seems way better in the start than Arcane adaptation.
So we still have a slot we'd like to use for world at war taken up by the extra blue creature.
With Marchesa's Smuggler, we have 4 different blue creatures, short by 1. We can simply add a new blue creature, or repeat one of our blue creatures and take one away. I figured Drake Familiar was a good creature to duplicate, so I added one of those and took away Marchesa's Smuggler; but, the seoond Drake Familiar may not really make a difference, so it probably doesn't matter much which option we choose.
Ooh, I don't see anything wrong with going with Disruptive Student or Patron Wizard! Patron Wizard looks better, since we can tap any Wizard to counter. So, we should be able to add World at War, getting 11 layers.
Yeah the main concern with the wizards is that we can counter copies of things if we want, which we can't do with the Shrine. This might allow us to break the worldfire transition?
As before we relied on being unable to rebuild after resolving two worldfires in a row, so we couldn't cast worldfire while we had TYS in play. But now we could counter all but one of the worldfires.
So we just hide everything in the wormfang, resolve a worldfire, and then resolve some show and tells to put omniscience and vedalken orrery in play and rebuild without using any of the lower Dual Nature triggers.
Edit: Not really seeing other good options for subbing in a blue creature... Maybe Mistform Mutant for Arcane adaptation/panharmonicon? I don't think our opponent can make blue to mess with computation.
Ooh, good call... I didn't think about countering the spell copies.
Unfortunately, I don't think Mistform Mutant will take care of Spellweaver Helix, since it triggers upon entering the battlefield, and responding to the triggers will be too late.
Edit: I guess Sakashima's Student could copy Spellweaver Helix while being a Ninja... but a blue copy creature is not good, since it can copy an artifact or enchantment and get bounced easily.
Going through the deck looking for blue creatures as replacements:
Coat of Arms: unique
Xathrid Necromancer: nothing blue
Arcbond: unique
Artificial Evolution: unique
Wrong Turn: Sky swallower? seems REALLY awkward to make work, possibly impossible.
Dralnu's Crusade: unique
Opalescence: nothing blue
Desolation Giant: unique
Goblin Boom Keg: unique
March of the Machines: unique
Vedalken Orrery: Tidal Barracuda almost works but is symmetrical.
Dack Fayden: Master thief comes close, and others are close as well, but I don't think anything works.
Spellweaver Volute: unique
Pull from Eternity: unique
Copy enchantment: unique
Dual Nature: nothing blue
Bloodbond March: unique
Cephalid Shrine: A few close ones, but countering copies breaks the worldfire transition.
Thousand-Year Storm: unique
Mana Echoes: Deranged Assistant? but its just so inefficient at making mana early and we can't afford to mill too much...
Retract: needs to be an instant
Soul Separator: unique
Urborg Syphon-Mage: no blue options
Thousand-Year Elixir: unique
K'rrik, Son of Yawgmoth: unique
Lingering Souls: must be a sorcery
Drake Familiar: already blue
Safe Passage: no blue options
Spellweaver Helix: unique
Worldfire: sorcery
Gravitic Punch: sorcery
Gravitic Punch: dupe
Recoup: Snapcaster mage and Kess, dissident mage flashback instants
Journey for the Elixir: no blue options
Mountain: need to be a land
Harmonic Prodigy: unique
Arcane Adaptation/panharmonicon: nothing that works
Wormfang Behemoth: already blue
Distorting Wake: must be an X sorcery
Chrome Mox: unique
Aegis Automaton: must be artifact
Guardian of the Guildpact: unique
Kurkesh, Onakke Ancient: unique
Alhammarret's Archive: unique
Black Lotus: unique
Show and Tell: unique
Omniscience: Yusri, fortune's flame doesn't work
Sphinx of Enlightenment: already blue but limited casts. maybe Lore broker? Not sure if start is possible...
Break Through the Line/Marchesa's Smuggler: already a blue creature
Serra's Sanctum: land
Animist's Awakening: green
Blue Sun's Zenith: x instant
Consecrated Sphinx: already a blue creature
Widespread Panic: unique
Jester's Mask: nothing blue
Moraug, Fury of Akoum: nothing blue
Drake Familiar: already a blue creature
Doubling Season: unique
Drafna's Restoration: unique
Uproot: no blue creatures
Arcane Adaptation doesn't work because it allows an opponent's goblin Boom Keg to have creature types, and thus survive a computation with damage marked on it and later be killed.
Another possible replacement for Sphinx of Enlightenment: Floating-Dream Zubera? The trigger is much more cumbersome to deal with than ETB, but the advantage is that we can do the Chrome Mox loop without having to trigger the card draw. The trick will be getting started with the harder trigger.
Edit: Hmm, having to kill the FDZ's is a real problem, since it seems the only way to go get them back is using Bloodbond March. So, I don't think I can get started with FDZ unless we send them to the graveyard at the start.
But, even without getting an extra blue creature using FDZ, it still might be profitable to switch out Sphinx of Enlightenment for FDZ, just for the additional card draw. With Sphinx of Enlightenment, we get to make use of the opponent's 53 cards in their library prior to combat. With FDZ, we still can make use of those 53 cards using Blue Sun's Zenith, but we can also get a bunch of card draws using FDZ as well. We have 11 artifacts currently which we can put into the deck using Drafna's Restoration, and BSZ goes back into the library as well. So we can have FDZ die 12 times, for each creature type; that gives us a potential 255*12 FDZ deaths, each of which can have their trigger multiplied by Harmonic Prodigy. Of course, we won't quite be able to get 255*12 deaths, since we have to kill other creatures, but we should be able to get reasonably close, provided we can get started with FDZ.
Edit: Arggh... even with allowing FDZ to go to the graveyard, I'm still having problems getting started. It's quite problematic that Desolation Giant seems to be the only way to kill off FDZ, and in doing so it kills off all other creatures we own. And many creatures cannot be allowed to go the graveyard without having Bloodbond March triggers on the stack.
After the draw, we can't quite cast Blue Sun's Zenith yet, since we need 3 blue mana, and Black Lotus is still in the graveyard. (The other way to get three blue mana would be to use three Chrome Moxes imprinted with blue creatures, but I don't think that is happening yet.) So, it seems the only option is to kill off one or more FDZ's. It looks like that requires Soul Separator, which will require 10 generic mana for both FDZ and Desolation Giant. Assuming we have Mana Echoes, we need to put some creature types into play. I don't quite see how to get 10 though. The easy way is to put Opalescence into play, allowing us to have multiple token copies of Mana Echoes. But, then we will have our enchantments be creatures, so they will be killed off by Desolation Giant when we try to kill off the FDZ's, and we don't have any way of getting enchantments back. We can put in Drake Familiar to bounce our enchantments (or just Opalescence), but then we will have Drake Familiar on the battlefield, and we can't allow that to go to the graveyard without BM triggers either.
Hmm FDZ does seem interesting, let's see if i can get something going
Black Lotus
Show and Tell
Omniscience
Dual Nature
Panharmonicon
Floating-Dream Zubera
Desolation Giant
Left with 1 token giant in play draw 3x3= 9
March of the machines
Opalescence
Doubling season (I think we'd rather have more doubling seasons first than panharmonicons? This might be the wrong order)
Mana echoes
Bloodbond march
Cephalid shrine
Vedalken orrery
Soul separator
Drake familiar
This seems to be able to get us some soul separators, flash, a chunk of mana, and some BM triggers for the Drake
We don't have artificial evolution yet so we'd need to be careful not to make too many zuberas at once, we get them in powers of two so we probably want 3 doubling seasons for 8*11 cards.
Not sure how we'd be getting FDZ back from the yard at that point though...
Yeah, I don't see how to get FDZ back from the graveyard, so this would just be a card draw improvement. (So like from BB_{w^2 + w2 + 10} (BB_{w^2 + w2 + 10} (BB_{w^2 + w2 + 7}(52))) to around BB_{w^2 + w2 + 10} (BB_{w^2 + w2 + 10} (BB_{w^2 + w2 + 7}(3000))) )
But, I think the goal is to make as much progress as possible while killing off the fewest number of card types. So maybe hold back on how many FDZ's we create.
Well the goal was to swap out the sphinx for FDZ, so that we'd have enough ETB friendly blue creatures and sneak in World at War for 11 layers. But it doesn't seem like the start is possible... A slight improvement is nice, but we want that layer.
Sky swallower was another blue creature option, but it can donate lands and let the opponent activate Aegis automation during computation so we dont need to figure out if it can even work.
Another option is Lore Broker, but that needs Thousand-Year Elixir, so we get kinda cramped at the start:
Lotus S+T omni
Dual nature
Thousand year elixir
Lore Broker
Consecrated Sphinx
Gives us 2 lore brokers we can activate, the first one gives us a mill and 4 cards, and with a mana we can even get an extra activation untapping it with the Elixir
Something like
Mill Pull from Eternity
Draw 4:
Orrery
TYS
Harmonic prodigy
Artificial evolution (wizard->sphinx)
Then the next lore broker mills say arcbond
and gives us 6 sphinx triggers while we have flash
Alhammarret's Archive
+21 other cards should be enough to get going
Previews have started and there's not much yet, Confront the past is a way to reanimate planeswalkers for black mana, I think previous planeswalker combos needed to actually recast the walker, which caused some issues with chrome mox.
Some of the cards are more likely to be useful in the standard deck, Adrix and Nev, Twincasters can be mutated onto and start getting copied by Orvar, the All-Form (who we can also make non human with kargan intimidator) Together they do a pretty good Doubling season+Dual nature impersonation.
Getting the effects of Doubling Season and Dual Nature for Standard would be very nice! Do we have a thread for the current Standard yet? We can start working on that, while still thinking about Vintage.
It is about that time, new Standard thread created. (here)
We can have an initial draw of:
1 Black Lotus
2 Show and Tell
3 Omniscience
4 Drafna's Restoration
5 Alhammarret's Archive
6 Consecrated Sphinx
7 Sphinx of Enlightenment
Cast them in that order, using Drafna's Restoration to put Black Lotus on top of the library. With Sphinx of Enlightment we draw 10 cards:
1 Black Lotus
2 Blue Sun's Zenith
3 Thousand-Year Storm
4 Dual Nature
5 Doubling Season
6 Opalescence
7 Drake Familiar
8 Mana Echoes
9 Vedalken Orrery
10 Dack Fayden
and we go:
Play Vedalken Orrery
Play Opalescence
Play Doubling Season
Play Dual Nature, get 3 copies total
Play Dack Fayden, and activate its ultimate
Play Mana Echoes, get 7 copies total
Play Drake Familiar, get 3 Dual Nature triggers and an ETB trigger
Resolve the ETB trigger first. Bounce Doubling Season and get 2059 copies
Resolve the first Dual Nature trigger, getting 2^2059 copies and 2^2059 ETB triggers
For the First ETB trigger, bounce Dual Nature
Resolve the exiling of Dual Nature tokens, but not the exiling of Doubling Season tokens
Replay Dual Nature, gettin 2^2059+1 copies
Resolve the exiling of Doubling Season tokens
For the second ETB trigger, bounce Doubling Season, resolving the exile triggers
Replay Doubling Season, getting more than 2^^(2^2059) Doubling Seasons
repeat this for all triggers, getting more than 2^^^(2^2058) Dual Natures and Doubling Seasons
Repeat for second and third Dual Nature triggers, increasing the number of Dual Natures and Doubling Seasons to more than 2^^^(2^^^(2^^^(2^2058))) each.
Play Thousand-Year Storm, getting more than 2^^^(2^^^(2^^^(2^2058))) copies
Play Black Lotus and tap for blue mana
Play Blue Sun's Zenith for a small number of cards, getting more than 2^^^(2^^^(2^^^(2^2058))) copies
and we should be golden from there.
Mirrormade can copy black lotus for way cheaper than we can allow. (when a mirrormade token becomes an artifact its not an enchantment anymore.)
I think this is easily fixed with copy enchantment instead of mirrormade, without any harm to the deck, we have slightly fewer panharmonicons and vedalkin orrerys and other artifacts, but mostly nothing is worringly low.
Soul Separator is the only one that seems close, as we only get more every retract. I think its still fine, but might be a problem.
Edit:
Ok how many soul separators do we need?
Actually not that many, we basically only use it for drake familiar and desolation giant.
And that's between computations, and pull from eternities, and we can get a retract for every pull from eternity, so yeah we easily have enough without mirrormade.
Currently we jump through kind of a lot of hoops to be able to chain together computations triggered by Desolation Giant killing Goblin boom keg. We need a new Arcbond, a fresh keg, and a new march of the machines before getting another Giant trigger. We recast Arcbond with copy enchantment tokens of Spellweaver volute, (keeping them around thanks to pull from eternity, and bouncing them all in response with drake familiar to abuse last known information) using Lingering Souls as the Sorcery. Dack Fayden's emblem allows us to efficiently steal back a few key permanents such as vedalken orrery, Omniscience, goblin boom keg, and soul seperator. We can now recast our enchantments, make a bunch of copies and bounce the real ones with soul separator on Drake familiar. (we can 'save' some progress by wrong turning some of the tokens back to the opponent) Then we are ready to make another Giant and trigger everything again.
This cycle costs us: a few Spellweaver volute triggers. (and a batch of X of them costs 2 life)
This cycle used to obviously just be limited by the volute triggers, but without mirrormade anymore, we need to track the artifacts too. However, since we are using retract anyway, we can include that in the volute rotation, steal the artifacts, retract, and use another spellweaver volute trigger to steal a token copy of orrery, and then we can replay them and get Dual Nature copies.
So then we just use some small constant number (~10?) of spellweaver volute triggers each computation.
Seems like a lot of hoops to jump through, but because of the later stuff in the deck, while something like "Bounce all of our stuff" would suffice, it limits what else we can do to repeat computations in a limited manner. Specifically, we don't want to be able to bounce creatures easily, but do want to be able to make copies of them easily. Also, because of fizzling it would be very convenient if our bounce effects didn't target. Currently we are using Retract, Drake familiar and Soul Seperator to manage all of that.
And Retract is pulling triple duty by enabling the Urborg Syphon-Mage stage.
Edit: I don't have a whole lot of hope for something from MH2, but interesting to note that Urza's Saga will be our first Enchantment Land ever, I cant remember when the last time we got a new card type combo was? Gotta be something more recent than Dryad arbor/Lucent Liminid? (Edit2: I guess legendary instants and sorceries in dominaria.)
Edit: As suspected MH2 has some very unique cards, but none that seem particularly useful?
Dermotaxi allows for easy copying/reanimating creatures without triggering ETB effects.It can change what it is mid computation.The underworld cookbook is a new discard->life possibility, though it's second ability ruins it.
Suspend can maybe do something with jhoira's timebug or Dust of moments, but its hard to ensure a cast in the setup.
Probably the most potential is Out of time, which looks like the best way to introduce phasing ever printed. if we can make it work.
Out of time might be useful, though we'd have to be careful about the possibility of hiding things through a hyperstage transition.
Currently, our triggered layers can get the layers by having many copies of the triggering permanent in play, so they don't really need Harmonic Prodigy. A notable exception is Kurkesh, Onakke Ancient which could use copies of its ability as it is legendary. So, Harmonic Prodigy looks good for the Kurkesh / Tomiyo's Journal deck.
So, how about:
2 Xathrid Necromancer
3 Arcbond
4 Artificial Evolution
5 Wrong Turn
6 Dralnu's Crusade
7 Opalescence
8 Desolation Giant
9 Goblin Boom Keg
10 March of the Machines
11 Vedalken Orrery
12 Dack Fayden
13 Spellweaver Volute
14 Pull from Eternity
15 Mirrormade
16 Dual Nature
17 Bloodbond March
18 Cephalid Shrine
19 Thousand-Year Storm
20 Mana Echoes
22 Soul Separator
23 Urborg, Syphon-Mage
24 Thousand-Year Elixir
25 K'rrik, Son of Yawgmoth
26 Lingering Souls
27 Drake Familiar
28 Safe Passage
29 Spellweaver Helix
30 Worldfire
31 Gravitic Punch
32 Gravitic Punch
33 Recoup
34 Restore
35 Mountain
36 Harmonic Prodigy
37 Arcane Adaptation
38 Wormfang Behemoth
39 Distorting Wake
40 Chrome Mox
42 Guardian of the Guildpact
43 Kurkesh, Onakke Ancient
44 Alhammarret's Archive
45 Black Lotus
46 Show and Tell
47 Omniscience
48 Sphinx of Enlightenment
49 Marchesa's Smuggler
50 Crucible of the Spirit Dragon
51 Amulet of Vigor
52 Animist's Awakening
53 Blue Sun's Zenith
54 Consecrated Sphinx
55 Tamiyo's Journal
56 Sphinx of the Second Sun
57 World at War
58 Doubling Season
59 Drafna's Restoration
60 Uproot
Looks like it gets 11 layers, if I'm not mistaken.
Edit: Hmm, I just put in Consecrated Sphinx automatically, but I don't think it actually works. A clue can't make the opponent draw; Blue Sun's Zenith can, but only if we can refill the opponent's library. And if the refilling is too cheap, then Consecrated Sphinx + Blue Sun's Zenith goes infinite.
Taking Consecrated Sphinx out, we have 10 layers, with an extra card slot.
Edit: I guess the previous deck also gets ten layers, thanks to Harmonic Wizard plus Moraug, Fury of Akoum. Since having Moraug at the end allows us to double dip layer 10, this winds up slightly ahead of the Tamiyo's Journal deck.
Edit: Harmonic Prodigy also makes our artifact shufflers like Jester's Mask and Renegade Map more effective. So something like:
2 Xathrid Necromancer
3 Arcbond
4 Artificial Evolution
5 Wrong Turn
6 Dralnu's Crusade
7 Opalescence
8 Desolation Giant
9 Goblin Boom Keg
10 March of the Machines
11 Vedalken Orrery
12 Dack Fayden
13 Spellweaver Volute
14 Pull from Eternity
15 Mirrormade
16 Dual Nature
17 Bloodbond March
18 Cephalid Shrine
19 Thousand-Year Storm
20 Mana Echoes
22 Soul Separator
23 Urborg, Syphon-Mage
24 Thousand-Year Elixir
25 K'rrik, Son of Yawgmoth
26 Lingering Souls
27 Drake Familiar
28 Safe Passage
29 Spellweaver Helix
30 Worldfire
31 Gravitic Punch
32 Gravitic Punch
33 Recoup
34 Journey for the Elixir
35 Mountain
36 Harmonic Prodigy
37 Arcane Adaptation
38 Wormfang Behemoth
39 Distorting Wake
40 Chrome Mox
42 Guardian of the Guildpact
43 Kurkesh, Onakke Ancient
44 Alhammarret's Archive
45 Black Lotus
46 Show and Tell
47 Omniscience
48 Sphinx of Enlightenment
49 Break Through the Line
50 Serra's Sanctum
51 Animist's Awakening
52 Blue Sun's Zenith
53 Consecrated Sphinx
54 Widespread Panic
55 Jester's Mask
56 Moraug, Fury of Akoum
57 Drake Familiar
58 Doubling Season
59 Drafna's Restoration
60 Uproot
gets 10 layers.
Unfortunately, we have to waste a card to get enough blue creatures. If we can free up a card slot, we can add World at War for 11 layers.
But since Kurkesh already has creature types, do we even need arcane adaptation?
Also, we need to swap back from Mirrormade to Copy enchantment, cheap copies of black lotus is easy infinite.
Right, I keep forgetting to update the deck list with these corrections.
So we still have a slot we'd like to use for world at war taken up by the extra blue creature.
The obvious thing I see is adding Marchesa's Smuggler for Break Through the Line, but i think that breaks something?
Another thought is to replace Cephalid Shrine shrine with something like Disruptive student or Patron Wizard.
Ooh, I don't see anything wrong with going with Disruptive Student or Patron Wizard! Patron Wizard looks better, since we can tap any Wizard to counter. So, we should be able to add World at War, getting 11 layers.
As before we relied on being unable to rebuild after resolving two worldfires in a row, so we couldn't cast worldfire while we had TYS in play. But now we could counter all but one of the worldfires.
So we just hide everything in the wormfang, resolve a worldfire, and then resolve some show and tells to put omniscience and vedalken orrery in play and rebuild without using any of the lower Dual Nature triggers.
Edit: Not really seeing other good options for subbing in a blue creature... Maybe Mistform Mutant for Arcane adaptation/panharmonicon? I don't think our opponent can make blue to mess with computation.
Unfortunately, I don't think Mistform Mutant will take care of Spellweaver Helix, since it triggers upon entering the battlefield, and responding to the triggers will be too late.
Edit: I guess Sakashima's Student could copy Spellweaver Helix while being a Ninja... but a blue copy creature is not good, since it can copy an artifact or enchantment and get bounced easily.
Clones are no good as you mentioned.
Going through the deck looking for blue creatures as replacements:
Coat of Arms: unique
Xathrid Necromancer: nothing blue
Arcbond: unique
Artificial Evolution: unique
Wrong Turn: Sky swallower? seems REALLY awkward to make work, possibly impossible.
Dralnu's Crusade: unique
Opalescence: nothing blue
Desolation Giant: unique
Goblin Boom Keg: unique
March of the Machines: unique
Vedalken Orrery: Tidal Barracuda almost works but is symmetrical.
Dack Fayden: Master thief comes close, and others are close as well, but I don't think anything works.
Spellweaver Volute: unique
Pull from Eternity: unique
Copy enchantment: unique
Dual Nature: nothing blue
Bloodbond March: unique
Cephalid Shrine: A few close ones, but countering copies breaks the worldfire transition.
Thousand-Year Storm: unique
Mana Echoes: Deranged Assistant? but its just so inefficient at making mana early and we can't afford to mill too much...
Retract: needs to be an instant
Soul Separator: unique
Urborg Syphon-Mage: no blue options
Thousand-Year Elixir: unique
K'rrik, Son of Yawgmoth: unique
Lingering Souls: must be a sorcery
Drake Familiar: already blue
Safe Passage: no blue options
Spellweaver Helix: unique
Worldfire: sorcery
Gravitic Punch: sorcery
Gravitic Punch: dupe
Recoup: Snapcaster mage and Kess, dissident mage flashback instants
Journey for the Elixir: no blue options
Mountain: need to be a land
Harmonic Prodigy: unique
Arcane Adaptation/panharmonicon: nothing that works
Wormfang Behemoth: already blue
Distorting Wake: must be an X sorcery
Chrome Mox: unique
Aegis Automaton: must be artifact
Guardian of the Guildpact: unique
Kurkesh, Onakke Ancient: unique
Alhammarret's Archive: unique
Black Lotus: unique
Show and Tell: unique
Omniscience: Yusri, fortune's flame doesn't work
Sphinx of Enlightenment: already blue but limited casts. maybe Lore broker? Not sure if start is possible...
Break Through the Line/Marchesa's Smuggler: already a blue creature
Serra's Sanctum: land
Animist's Awakening: green
Blue Sun's Zenith: x instant
Consecrated Sphinx: already a blue creature
Widespread Panic: unique
Jester's Mask: nothing blue
Moraug, Fury of Akoum: nothing blue
Drake Familiar: already a blue creature
Doubling Season: unique
Drafna's Restoration: unique
Uproot: no blue creatures
Another possible replacement for Sphinx of Enlightenment: Floating-Dream Zubera? The trigger is much more cumbersome to deal with than ETB, but the advantage is that we can do the Chrome Mox loop without having to trigger the card draw. The trick will be getting started with the harder trigger.
Edit: Hmm, having to kill the FDZ's is a real problem, since it seems the only way to go get them back is using Bloodbond March. So, I don't think I can get started with FDZ unless we send them to the graveyard at the start.
But, even without getting an extra blue creature using FDZ, it still might be profitable to switch out Sphinx of Enlightenment for FDZ, just for the additional card draw. With Sphinx of Enlightenment, we get to make use of the opponent's 53 cards in their library prior to combat. With FDZ, we still can make use of those 53 cards using Blue Sun's Zenith, but we can also get a bunch of card draws using FDZ as well. We have 11 artifacts currently which we can put into the deck using Drafna's Restoration, and BSZ goes back into the library as well. So we can have FDZ die 12 times, for each creature type; that gives us a potential 255*12 FDZ deaths, each of which can have their trigger multiplied by Harmonic Prodigy. Of course, we won't quite be able to get 255*12 deaths, since we have to kill other creatures, but we should be able to get reasonably close, provided we can get started with FDZ.
Edit: Arggh... even with allowing FDZ to go to the graveyard, I'm still having problems getting started. It's quite problematic that Desolation Giant seems to be the only way to kill off FDZ, and in doing so it kills off all other creatures we own. And many creatures cannot be allowed to go the graveyard without having Bloodbond March triggers on the stack.
We can start off with
Black Lotus
Show and Tell
Omniscience
Dual Nature
Doubling Season
Floating-Dream Zubera
Desolation Giant
to draw 9 cards. We can also use Panharmonicon isntead of Doubling Season, or perhaps Alhammarret's Archive to draw 8 instead of 9, but killing off fewer creature types.
After the draw, we can't quite cast Blue Sun's Zenith yet, since we need 3 blue mana, and Black Lotus is still in the graveyard. (The other way to get three blue mana would be to use three Chrome Moxes imprinted with blue creatures, but I don't think that is happening yet.) So, it seems the only option is to kill off one or more FDZ's. It looks like that requires Soul Separator, which will require 10 generic mana for both FDZ and Desolation Giant. Assuming we have Mana Echoes, we need to put some creature types into play. I don't quite see how to get 10 though. The easy way is to put Opalescence into play, allowing us to have multiple token copies of Mana Echoes. But, then we will have our enchantments be creatures, so they will be killed off by Desolation Giant when we try to kill off the FDZ's, and we don't have any way of getting enchantments back. We can put in Drake Familiar to bounce our enchantments (or just Opalescence), but then we will have Drake Familiar on the battlefield, and we can't allow that to go to the graveyard without BM triggers either.
So, it's looking tricky at the moment.
Black Lotus
Show and Tell
Omniscience
Dual Nature
Panharmonicon
Floating-Dream Zubera
Desolation Giant
Left with 1 token giant in play draw 3x3= 9
March of the machines
Opalescence
Doubling season (I think we'd rather have more doubling seasons first than panharmonicons? This might be the wrong order)
Mana echoes
Bloodbond march
Cephalid shrine
Vedalken orrery
Soul separator
Drake familiar
This seems to be able to get us some soul separators, flash, a chunk of mana, and some BM triggers for the Drake
We don't have artificial evolution yet so we'd need to be careful not to make too many zuberas at once, we get them in powers of two so we probably want 3 doubling seasons for 8*11 cards.
Not sure how we'd be getting FDZ back from the yard at that point though...
Hmm, I'm not sure how to get 3 Doubling Seasons, other than to put one into play with Dual Nature and Opalescence in play, but not Panharmonicon. Although I guess we can bounce excess Doubling Seasons with Drake Familiar.
But, I think the goal is to make as much progress as possible while killing off the fewest number of card types. So maybe hold back on how many FDZ's we create.
Sky swallower was another blue creature option, but it can donate lands and let the opponent activate Aegis automation during computation so we dont need to figure out if it can even work.
Another option is Lore Broker, but that needs Thousand-Year Elixir, so we get kinda cramped at the start:
Lotus S+T omni
Dual nature
Thousand year elixir
Lore Broker
Consecrated Sphinx
Gives us 2 lore brokers we can activate, the first one gives us a mill and 4 cards, and with a mana we can even get an extra activation untapping it with the Elixir
Something like
Mill Pull from Eternity
Draw 4:
Orrery
TYS
Harmonic prodigy
Artificial evolution (wizard->sphinx)
Then the next lore broker mills say arcbond
and gives us 6 sphinx triggers while we have flash
Alhammarret's Archive
+21 other cards should be enough to get going
So lore broker seems like it works.
I think we get to 11 layers with this:
2 Xathrid Necromancer
3 Arcbond
4 Artificial Evolution
5 Wrong Turn
6 Dralnu's Crusade
7 Opalescence
8 Desolation Giant
9 Goblin Boom Keg
10 March of the Machines
11 Vedalken Orrery
12 Dack Fayden
13 Spellweaver Volute
14 Pull from Eternity
15 Copy enchantment
16 Dual Nature
17 Bloodbond March
18 Cephalid Shrine
19 Thousand-Year Storm
20 Mana Echoes
22 Soul Separator
23 Urborg Syphon-Mage
24 Thousand-Year Elixir
25 K'rrik, Son of Yawgmoth
26 Lingering Souls
27 Drake Familiar
28 Safe Passage
29 Spellweaver Helix
30 Worldfire
31 Gravitic Punch
32 Gravitic Punch
33 Recoup
34 Journey for the Elixir
35 Mountain
36 Harmonic Prodigy
37 Panharmonicon
38 Wormfang Behemoth
39 Distorting Wake
40 Chrome Mox
42 Guardian of the Guildpact
43 Kurkesh, Onakke Ancient
44 Alhammarret's Archive
45 Black Lotus
46 Show and Tell
47 Omniscience
48 Lore broker
49 Marchesa's smuggler
50 Serra's Sanctum
51 Animist's Awakening
52 Blue Sun's Zenith
53 Consecrated Sphinx
54 Widespread Panic
55 Jester's Mask
56 Moraug, Fury of Akoum
57 World at war
58 Doubling Season
59 Drafna's Restoration
60 Uproot
Edit: fixed decklist a little.