Hmmm... fortunately, we can't have lifelinkers on both sides with the current deck, since currently there is only K'rrik as a lifelinker.
That does open up the possibility of, say, Engineered Explosives, only destroying permanents with converted mana cost 4. Not sure what that gets us though.
I looked at Nihilistic Glee again, and got something promising with:
We can respond to the Dual nature triggers and give the legend to them and then resolve the DN token
Edit: also if we are trying to use Engineered explosives, we need to be careful about the sunburst/march of the machines interaction.
Also I'm not sure how those layers work at the end? Magda, Brazen outlaw doesn't seem to do anything as we can't tap our creatures without haste, and how is Hellion Crucible getting untapped to even make hellions?
Oh yeah... So we get a lot of main phases and combat phases; each combat phase we untap all our creatures many times, including our animated Manascape Refractors; tapping a Manascape Refractor twice allows us to put a bunch of pressure counters on it, then sacrifice it to create a bunch of Hellion creation triggers; each creation trigger creates many Hellion creature tokens; We can put copies of Utopia Vow on our Hellion creature tokens, then tap them, each one triggering Magda, Brazen Outlaw many times; each trigger creates a bunch of Treasure tokens; we can sacrifice 5 Treasure tokens to shuffle our library, triggering many copies of Widespread Panic; and then it's the usual from there.
Not sure how to fix the haste problem though. as the hellions can just attack and trigger a computation where we have flash.
I can't see how to force a fog variant in the setup, as we can still get started without even casting the only one that does anything powerful: Blessed respite,
Maybe some shenanigans with Glacial Chasm?
Forcing us to cast a falter effect could also make attacking safe, but I don't see a way to do that. (though actual falter doesn't work due to Drake familiar flying, Bedlam would though if we could force us to have it.)
Oops no, the other ability to damage a tapped creature (such as a zombie token) is too strong and can start a computation.
Edit:
Did some more thinking on allowing us to have safe passage-d creatures during computation. and I can't find anything damning with that setup computation wise.
The tricky part is forcing us to get set up that way.
Any lifelinker seems to allow us to avoid casting safe passage at all, Unless we have animated artifacts that need to live like coat of arms.
So, what if we can't get rid of march of the machines? It dodges Granulate so we'd need safe passage to protect coat of arms so we can actually compute.
If march is animated though it can get killed by extra goblin boom kegs, and even putting an arcbond on Coat of Arms allows it to dodge the second wave of 3 damage, and kill the march before it would die.
So march can't be a creature.
So our enchantments can't be animated.
And march can't be easily killed/bounced. (even one bounce is enough to ruin things.)
And we still need to force march to be cast during setup...
this seems like a dead end.
Ok what if we remove lifelink instead? Then we need another way to keep our opponent alive, that does not work for us.
Some wort of warmth effect maybe? Sunscorch regent+Imps' Taunt seems like it keeps them alive. (we get to keep mana echoes around now)
But Imp's taunt targets, and can make dack's emblem mess with computation, except we don't need Dack if we keep our board between computations.
This seems like it has the potential to work and save a good amount of deck space.
Edit: Hmm possibly Warmth+whim of volrath to leave white creatures open?
Though that does mean the worldfire transition would need to not use basic mountain. maybe restore+some red land as it cant make mana from crucible of the spirit dragon. (cragcrown pathway is probably the best as it gives us 1 green with our land drop for the turn, assuming the rest is the same)
Probably worth making that swap anyway as green is worth more than a serra's sanctum tap.
Hmm, the issue is that we are currently using K'rrik, Son of Yawgmoth to turn black mana payments into life payments. So, we would need to think of some other way to pay life in the primary stage.
We also want to use life as the stage resource, so we need some way to get the 3 life back. Urborg Syphon-Mage and Faith of the Devoted give 2 life, so it doesn't quite match up. Nihilistic Glee gives one life, so it would work if we could triple it, but I don't know how to do so.
Peace of mind is 3, but white is not a good color for so early and means we need a black stage instead of a white one. And I don't really see how that'd be possible.
Edit:
Oh my plan to keep them alive doesnt work as mana echoes is also MV4 and dies with the boom keg/flash
I suppose we have the other possibilities, of using mana or creature tokens as the primary stage resource. With mana, I didn't see how we would get additional stages the usual way, what with Worldpurge bouncing cards back to our hand. With creature tokens, I think we were able to get a deck together with one additional stage, but of course we need at least two to challenge for the best deck - not sure if our new ideas will help with that.
yeah, there is probably a way to get a bit further, though I'm not sure how to keep them alive anymore. mana echoes dying to the ratchet bomb means we run out of mana for our buyback spell.
Not really seeing another way to keep them alive that we couldn't just use also.
Edit:
Since there were a few updates I think the best working deck we have now is:
Hmm yeah, it's been a while since we did the Nihilistic Glee decks... perhaps the Glowspore Shaman combo is the way to go, although that does eliminate the usage of green mana later.
Edit: I was wondering of Battle for Bretagard, or something else that could copy artifacts, could help with the ending sequence. It looks like it won't go infinite, since we can't keep going without using a Retract to refresh our artifacts at some point, but by the same token, we can't really get a lot more Clue tokens if we can't do a computation during the copying. So it doesn't look like it helps.
Perhaps something like Mizzium Transreliquat, which can put Dual Nature triggers on the stack before copying a Clue token - but I don't see anything that doesn't go infinite. Perhaps Saheeli, Sublime Artificer, but that is hard to make work.
Any repeated way to copy artifacts probably goes infinite with black lotus, as we can play lotus copy it sac the copies then retract the original lotus and then play march of the machines and combo as normal. (Mirrormade, and Mizzium Transreliquat go infinite this way)
Battle for bretagard would as well due to doubling season. Though without doubling season it gets more complicated, but since it can copy our artifacts, I don't see why we would need to retract.
Saheeli is difficult to make work as planeswalkers are slow and difficult to recycle.
edit: Hmm marchesa's smuggler granting haste is almost unneeded. Replacing it with a second drake familiar would free up a card slot.
Well the idea is that attacking only triggers Search the Premises, and given that the clues it makes are less valuable than we hoped (due to march of the machines killing them) we might be able to go back to one of our other endings that didn't need to attack.
Edit: hmm that plan doesn't seem to work as it was due to needing amulet of vigor. I was thinking there would be some more useful beginning of combat triggers but they mostly don't work. Hadana's climb is close to being useful but doesn't seem to quite get there. Something like Shadrix silverquill's draw could be used but it's a white creature...
Making clues isn't quite as good as we thought it was, but it's still a layer better than just drawing a card, so we would have to make that up somehow. Right now it feels that creating more layers is the bigger bottleneck than freeing up card slots.
It looks like the Nihilistic Glee / Glowspore Shaman version has 14 slots available for the ending layers - but I can't get a competitive layer sequence due to losing green mana.
Yeah, layers are also difficult because of the worldfires that happen pretty regularly so anything that relies on something sticking around until we are ready to use the next one is not gonna work.
There's also not as much room as we'd like for layers because the computation and stages take up so much of the possibility space.
Everything in the computation is needed, (though I guess we technically don't need to make enchantments quite so easily.)
We need to have the computations limited by life in order for worldfire to work.
Black, green and red are the only valid life -> flashback sorcery colors, and black works the cleanest due to K'rrik, Son of Yawgmoth
Red is also very convenient for the worldfire transition thanks to Gravitic Punch
That leaves green blue and white, chrome mox is a clear candidate for efficient layers, we can maybe do better here?
Though green is pretty bad at bounce. There is like Hibernation to bounce green but not blue/white.
a quick look though green didn't find any promising creatures though. (maybe Murasa Sproutling? though I think that just goes infinite with itself..)
Hmmm... it seems like Murasa Sproutling would go infinite when combined with Panharmonicon or Harmonic Prodigy, provided we both have an initial target and a way to change targets later. If we don't have an available initial target, it doesn't seem to do anything. What if we have an initial target, but no way to change targets? If we just have two Murasa Sproutlings, we can play one to bring the other from the graveyard to our hand. So we start with a Sproutling in hand and one in the graveyard, and end with one Sproutling in our hand and one on the battlefield, at the cost of a green mana. Does that do anything useful? It doesn't seem to fit with our current way of making stages...
With three Sproutlings, if we have two in our hand and one in the graveyard, then we can gain a green mana by discarding one to Chrome Mox. We can then spend it by playing a Sproutling with kicker, bringing the other two back to our hand. Then we kill off the Sproutling on the battlefield, with say [c}Desolation Giant[/c]. So we can loop infinitely like this... if there is another creature with kicker, than we can gain infinite mana with Chrome Mox, assuming it is nonartifact and has a color.
desolation giant has kicker so we can always have an initial target. This would need to output red mana anyway so its kinda convenient.
I was thinking the interaction was more powerful than it is, we don't get panharmonicon/harmonic prodigy triggers, we just get lots of murasa sproutling triggers, We have no bolt bend so we can only retarget if there are legal ones at the time, many triggers will fizzle.
so one sproutling just seems to fizzle, Maybe the two sproutling line has some merit but I don't quite see it working yet...
Three sproutlings definitely goes infinite with your line.
Edit: Another possibility is Multani, yavimaya's avatar, going from hand to imprint to grave to hand loop that gains a red but needs a restore, but this loop doesn't seem to leak green the way we would need it to so I think it's an infinite.
Yeah, there are a lot more abilities that bring cards back from the graveyard to your hand, then bring them back from the battlefield to your hand. Unfortunately, only the latter requires our Bloodbond March triggers to make the stage work.
Finding a non-Bloodbond March way to make a stage would certainly be a breakthrough.
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I'm not sure about the computation now.
One other problem i see is if there are lifelinkers on both sides, then we don't need safe passage and can definitely mess with computation.
Edit: hmm yeah not sure how to keep the opponent alive and force us to cast safe passage if we can have creatures during computation.
An effect like worship or a soul warden could just keep us alive
Cards like warmth we can't trigger enough. Maybe Shield Mare + buyback spell?
Also there aren't a lot of good sweeper options that kill boom keg + orrery, and not Coat of Arms or all of the necromancers.
But there are some:
Ratchet bomb/Engineered explosives on 4
Languish and other -4/-4 effects
Granulate
That does open up the possibility of, say, Engineered Explosives, only destroying permanents with converted mana cost 4. Not sure what that gets us though.
I looked at Nihilistic Glee again, and got something promising with:
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 Nihilistic Glee
24 Rowan Kenrith
25 Alhammarret's Archive
26 K'rrik, Son of Yawgmoth
27 Lingering Souls
28 Drake Familiar
29 Safe Passage
30 Spellweaver Helix
31 Worldfire
32 Gravitic Punch
33 Gravitic Punch
34 Recoup
35 Mountain
36 Molderhulk
37 Harmonic Prodigy
38 Wormfang Behemoth
39 Stolen by the Fae
40 Chrome Mox
42 Guardian of the Guildpact
43 Kurkesh, Onakke Ancient
44 Black Lotus
45 Show and Tell
46 Omniscience
47 Drake Familiar
48 Sphinx of Enlightenment
49 The First Iroan Games
50 Contentious Plan
51 Widespread Panic
52 Magda, Brazen Outlaw
53 Hellion Crucible
54 Utopia Vow
55 Manascape Refractor
56 Moraug, Fury of Akoum
57 World at War
58 Doubling Season
which appears to get 10 layers with 58 cards. Unfortunately, we can't allow hasted creatures to be put into play, like the Hellion tokens.
Edit: also if we are trying to use Engineered explosives, we need to be careful about the sunburst/march of the machines interaction.
Also I'm not sure how those layers work at the end? Magda, Brazen outlaw doesn't seem to do anything as we can't tap our creatures without haste, and how is Hellion Crucible getting untapped to even make hellions?
Not sure how to fix the haste problem though. as the hellions can just attack and trigger a computation where we have flash.
I can't see how to force a fog variant in the setup, as we can still get started without even casting the only one that does anything powerful: Blessed respite,
Maybe some shenanigans with Glacial Chasm?
Edit:
Hmm can't we use Rowan Kenrith instead of Alhammarret's Archive in the Urborg syphon-mage deck?
That opens up mirror gallery
Oops no, the other ability to damage a tapped creature (such as a zombie token) is too strong and can start a computation.
Edit:
Did some more thinking on allowing us to have safe passage-d creatures during computation. and I can't find anything damning with that setup computation wise.
The tricky part is forcing us to get set up that way.
Any lifelinker seems to allow us to avoid casting safe passage at all, Unless we have animated artifacts that need to live like coat of arms.
So, what if we can't get rid of march of the machines? It dodges Granulate so we'd need safe passage to protect coat of arms so we can actually compute.
If march is animated though it can get killed by extra goblin boom kegs, and even putting an arcbond on Coat of Arms allows it to dodge the second wave of 3 damage, and kill the march before it would die.
So march can't be a creature.
So our enchantments can't be animated.
And march can't be easily killed/bounced. (even one bounce is enough to ruin things.)
And we still need to force march to be cast during setup...
this seems like a dead end.
Ok what if we remove lifelink instead? Then we need another way to keep our opponent alive, that does not work for us.
Some wort of warmth effect maybe?
Sunscorch regent+Imps' Taunt seems like it keeps them alive. (we get to keep mana echoes around now)
But Imp's taunt targets, and can make dack's emblem mess with computation, except we don't need Dack if we keep our board between computations.
This seems like it has the potential to work and save a good amount of deck space.
Edit: Hmm possibly Warmth+whim of volrath to leave white creatures open?
Though that does mean the worldfire transition would need to not use basic mountain. maybe restore+some red land as it cant make mana from crucible of the spirit dragon. (cragcrown pathway is probably the best as it gives us 1 green with our land drop for the turn, assuming the rest is the same)
Probably worth making that swap anyway as green is worth more than a serra's sanctum tap.
Though how are we getting another Granulate? as a sorcery its a bit trickier to recast.
Edit: oh right we have other options Engineered explosives could maybe be easier, though sunburst makes things complicated.
So probably Ratchet bomb + thousand-year elixir would be the easiest.
Peace of mind is 3, but white is not a good color for so early and means we need a black stage instead of a white one. And I don't really see how that'd be possible.
Edit:
Oh my plan to keep them alive doesnt work as mana echoes is also MV4 and dies with the boom keg/flash
Not really seeing another way to keep them alive that we couldn't just use also.
Edit:
Since there were a few updates I think the best working deck we have now is:
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 Restore
35 Cragcrown Pathway
36 Harmonic Prodigy
37 Panharmonicon
38 Wormfang Behemoth
39 Stolen By the Fae
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 Floating-Dream Zubera
49 Marchesa's Smuggler
50 Crucible of the Spirit Dragon
51 Amulet of Vigor
52 Animist's Awakening
53 Blue Sun's Zenith
54 Search the Premises
55 Moraug, Fury of Akoum
56 World at War
57 Doubling Season
58 Drafna's Restoration
59 Uproot
60 Void Stalker
Maybe we can do a little better with:
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 Nihilistic Glee
24 Rowan Kenrith
25 Alhammarret's Archive
26 K'rrik, Son of Yawgmoth
27 Lingering Souls
28 Drake Familiar
29 Safe Passage
30 Spellweaver Helix
31 Worldfire
32 Gravitic Punch
33 Gravitic Punch
34 Recoup
35 Mountain
36 Restore
37 Panharmonicon
38 Harmonic Prodigy
39 Wormfang Behemoth
40 Stolen by the Fae
41 Chrome Mox
43 Guardian of the Guildpact
44 Kurkesh, Onakke Ancient
45 Black Lotus
46 Show and Tell
47 Omniscience
48 Drake Familiar
49 Sphinx of Enlightenment
50 Crucible of the Spirit Dragon
51 Amulet of Vigor
52 Animist's Awakening
53 The First Iroan Games
54 Contentious Plan
55 Widespread Panic
56 Magda, Brazen Outlaw
57 Myr Battlesphere
58 Moraug, Fury of Akoum
59 Doubling Season
60 Uproot
which gets 10 layers, barring errors.
Edit: I was wondering of Battle for Bretagard, or something else that could copy artifacts, could help with the ending sequence. It looks like it won't go infinite, since we can't keep going without using a Retract to refresh our artifacts at some point, but by the same token, we can't really get a lot more Clue tokens if we can't do a computation during the copying. So it doesn't look like it helps.
Perhaps something like Mizzium Transreliquat, which can put Dual Nature triggers on the stack before copying a Clue token - but I don't see anything that doesn't go infinite. Perhaps Saheeli, Sublime Artificer, but that is hard to make work.
Battle for bretagard would as well due to doubling season. Though without doubling season it gets more complicated, but since it can copy our artifacts, I don't see why we would need to retract.
Saheeli is difficult to make work as planeswalkers are slow and difficult to recycle.
edit: Hmm marchesa's smuggler granting haste is almost unneeded. Replacing it with a second drake familiar would free up a card slot.
Edit: hmm that plan doesn't seem to work as it was due to needing amulet of vigor. I was thinking there would be some more useful beginning of combat triggers but they mostly don't work. Hadana's climb is close to being useful but doesn't seem to quite get there. Something like Shadrix silverquill's draw could be used but it's a white creature...
It looks like the Nihilistic Glee / Glowspore Shaman version has 14 slots available for the ending layers - but I can't get a competitive layer sequence due to losing green mana.
There's also not as much room as we'd like for layers because the computation and stages take up so much of the possibility space.
Everything in the computation is needed, (though I guess we technically don't need to make enchantments quite so easily.)
We need to have the computations limited by life in order for worldfire to work.
Black, green and red are the only valid life -> flashback sorcery colors, and black works the cleanest due to K'rrik, Son of Yawgmoth
Red is also very convenient for the worldfire transition thanks to Gravitic Punch
That leaves green blue and white, chrome mox is a clear candidate for efficient layers, we can maybe do better here?
Though green is pretty bad at bounce. There is like Hibernation to bounce green but not blue/white.
a quick look though green didn't find any promising creatures though. (maybe Murasa Sproutling? though I think that just goes infinite with itself..)
With three Sproutlings, if we have two in our hand and one in the graveyard, then we can gain a green mana by discarding one to Chrome Mox. We can then spend it by playing a Sproutling with kicker, bringing the other two back to our hand. Then we kill off the Sproutling on the battlefield, with say [c}Desolation Giant[/c]. So we can loop infinitely like this... if there is another creature with kicker, than we can gain infinite mana with Chrome Mox, assuming it is nonartifact and has a color.
I was thinking the interaction was more powerful than it is, we don't get panharmonicon/harmonic prodigy triggers, we just get lots of murasa sproutling triggers, We have no bolt bend so we can only retarget if there are legal ones at the time, many triggers will fizzle.
so one sproutling just seems to fizzle, Maybe the two sproutling line has some merit but I don't quite see it working yet...
Three sproutlings definitely goes infinite with your line.
Edit: Another possibility is Multani, yavimaya's avatar, going from hand to imprint to grave to hand loop that gains a red but needs a restore, but this loop doesn't seem to leak green the way we would need it to so I think it's an infinite.
Finding a non-Bloodbond March way to make a stage would certainly be a breakthrough.