So, I was wondering - what if we replaced Drake Familiar with Stern Proctor? Then, instead of using Retract to bring our artifacts back to our hand, we use Pull from Eternity to bring back Stern Proctor from exile, so we can make copies with Soul Separator and thus trigger artifact bounces.
Does that work? If so, I think we can drop Retract and Dack Fayden, which I think was only really needed for Retract.
I think stern proctor being targeted was a problem, but I don't remember exactly.
Cutting dack fayden would be nice, as there were some layers we would have liked without doubling season. (sagas + proliferate)
Edit: hmm it looks like it works?
We get a few fewer useful bounces with stern proctor as most of the DS(primal vigor/parallel lives/anointed procession) tokens fizzle, but we still get to bounce everything we want to whenever we activate SS. That lets us get more SSs
There's some last known information trickery with bouncing the token Spellweaver vollutes, but that seems fine.
Bouncing our opponent's enchantments should be safe as bouncing our own enchantments is safe.
Ok. As it should be obvious, this will need some explanation. I'm going to try, but bear with me, as I have only just recently started this little adventure.
We start with the Black Lotus, Show and Tell, into Omniscience bit. Casting spells no longer requires mana, allowing us to continue freely for a bit.
Now, I struggled figuring out the most efficient way to do this, but I think dropping all the effects which only need one copy of a card to work is best to do here. Each of these will draw a card as well upon entering:
Ormos, Archive Keeper - Keeps us from decking out, bonus of getting counters Mycosynth Lattice - Artifact permanents and the mana fixing are valuable Hostility - We will use a damaging spell in this build, which we need to mitigate, and creating more tokens is a huge bonus Leyline of Anticipation - Plenty of times we will want instant-speed casting Reconnaissance - We will go to combat quite a bit and be attacking, but that is not the way we want to finish Silver Wyvern - It will let us stack triggers how we need to later
We still have 4 cards in hand (each thing we've played since Omniscience drew a card). Cast Channel. This lets us use our life as mana of any color thanks to Mycosynth Lattice.
Cast Flameshadow Conjuring. Every nontoken permanent that hits our field now not only draws a card, it triggers a chance to copy it. Because it is animated by the Opalescence, it triggers itself. We pay the one life to copy.
Next we drop Sakashima of a Thousand Faces. We have it come in as a copy of our Flameshadow Conjuring. It triggers itself and the two copies we have in play. The important thing here is that the copies spawned off of this will have the "The 'legend rule' doesn't apply to permanents you control" ability (because of the weird way copy effects work). We use three more life to pay for those triggers, and we have 6 total copies of Flameshadow Conjuring.
We now cast Verdant Sun's Avatar, we stack the triggers so we always gain the life before paying the copy triggers, and thanks to the Opalescence, we gain life equal to the mana value instead of its base. We gain 7, pay 1, gain 14, pay 1, gain 21, pay 1, gain 28, pay 1, gain 35, pay 1, gain 42, pay 1, and finally, gain 49 life, ending with 206 life. Effective from this point forward, we will always gain far, far more life than we need to pay for pretty much everything.
Casting and resolving Arcane Adaptation next will trigger the copying effects, giving us six more copies, and letting us make everything Shamans, Allies, Wolves, Golems, Dragons, Elves, and Goblins. Now we cast Harmonic Prodigy. Because everything is a Shaman, the triggers of everything we control are increased by the number of Harmonic Prodigy copies we have, so the Flameshadow Conjuring copies each trigger twice and we end up with 13 copies of Harmonic Prodigy and a lot of life.
Doubling Season is next. When it hits, there are 6 Flameshadow Conjuring copies and 13 Harmonic Prodigy copies. This creates 84 triggers, each of which will see a previous amount of Doubling Seasons. I do not really know how many it ends up with, but I know it's large. Increasing the Doubling Seasons will generally be the most optimal way to increase the power of this deck.
At this point, we have our entire deck in our hand because of all the draw triggers. However, upon drawing the last card (and before resolving the other triggers), we want to cast Beacon of Immortality. We gain a huge amount of life, then it shuffles itself back in. Given that we only draw one card at a time, and Ormos, Archive Keeper protects us anyways (much more relevant later), we can now translate every draw trigger which isn't eaten for counters into "Double target player's life total."
Now, this is where I struggled the second time to figure out the most efficient path. I opted to drop the other two beginning setup cards here:
Thousand-Year Storm - Fairly obvious, but we want to copy the bejeezus out of our instants and sorceries Vigor - We plan to damage our creatures a whole bunch, and we need at least two of these to save each other
Master Biomancer is next. This will cause all of our creature cards and copies of creature cards to enter with many counters on them. (Note: An animated enchantment will NOT enter with the counters because it is not a creature until it is already in play - this is why we will be adding counters to them via other means)
Joraga Warcaller is the next card. The unbelievable synergy of this with Master Biomancer cannot be understated. Given that each Joraga Warcaller entering increases the power of every Master Biomancer by the total sum of their powers multiplied by the Doubling Season copies, this means in turn each new Joraga Warcaller will enter with even more counters than that. These two cards are the crux of growth in the deck thanks to Doubling Season.
We want to start actually expanding our board with what we currently have. This is going to start getting very complicated (for me, at least). The first card we will use is Song of the Worldsoul. Now, every cast allows us to copy a buttload of things. As a general rule, the way we will choose to do so will be to leave one copy of the trigger per item we want to copy and have all the rest copy Doubling Season. We resolve the Doubling Season populates first, maximizing the amount of tokens we get of the other parts. We need the Sakashima of a Thousand Faces copies of Flameshadow Conjuring, Harmonic Prodigy, Thousand-Year Storm, Master Biomancer, Joraga Warcaller, and Verdant Sun's Avatar - a total of six of the many, many Song of the Worldsoul triggers to resolve after making Doubling Season tokens. Every other trigger will copy Doubling Season first.
Incidentally, this is the reason we have Ormos, Archive Keeper. Whenever something EtBs, we draw a card, cast Beacon of Immortality, the cast triggers Song of the Worldsoul, the populated tokens trigger draw effects, but because Beacon of Immortality is still on the stack, we get counters on Ormos, Archive Keeper instead, then stack resolves down to the Beacon of Immortality, and we resolve each next draw in the same way. Now, every draw also has the added effect of populating for however many Song of the Worldsoul triggers we have, making Doubling Season tokens and a lot of the other pieces.
We now follow that with Restoration Angel. The very important part of this card is that it cannot flicker an Angel. This is why we have to never select Angel for Arcane Adaptation (there's only seven of them anyways, and we need all seven). This stack is very weird, but it will eventually resolve to nothing.
1. Cast Restoration Angel
2. Trigger Song of the Worldsoul, populate
3. Draw triggers are created
4. Cast Beacon of Immortality
5. Trigger Song of the Worldsoul, populate
6. Ormos, Archive Keeper gets counters
7. Beacon of Immortality eventually returns to the library
8. Restoration Angel EtBs, draw triggers and flicker targets are created, all flickers target the Silver Wyvern
9. Move a flicker target to Doubling Season, resolve the flicker
10. Draw triggers are created
11. Cast Beacon of Immortality
12. Trigger Song of the Worldsoul, populate (NOTE: Populating the Restoration Angel with Beacon of Immortality on the stack will eventually run out due to having no more populate triggers)
13. Ormos, Archive Keeper gets counters
14. Beacon of Immortality returns to the library
15. Repeat steps 9-14 until all but one trigger per nontoken creature we control (depending on the current stage) have resolved
16. Repeat steps 9-14, but move the flicker targets to the rest of the board, (Eidolon of Blossoms, Song of the Worldsoul, Restoration Angel, Sakashima of a Thousand Faces copies of Flameshadow Conjuring, Harmonic Prodigy, Thousand-Year Storm, Master Biomancer, Joraga Warcaller, and Verdant Sun's Avatar are the ones we will continue repeating along with any new things we drop, but everything else currently in play needs at least one flicker to make tokens of them)
It's tricky to see, but there is no loop due to the one spell (which is being repeatedly cast) being on the stack when the populated Restoration Angel copies EtB. I think you can technically resolve this for more effect in a differnt order, but either way, the choke point keeping it from going infinite is that the Beacon of Immoratilty is on the stack for everything between draw triggers, thus never allowing you to continue without first resolving down to it and, subsequently, the next draw trigger originally created by whichever inital thing we did. If we make 50 draw triggers, for example, everything that happens in between each of them (as described above) happens with Beacon of Immortality on the stack because drawing a card doesn't trigger anything else. It is the casting of Beacon of Immortality itself that creates a cascading effect, namely steps 11-14.
The reason we have been gaining an absolutely insane amount of life is two-fold: it is our mana source and it fuels Cradle of Vitality. For each one we have, each life gain trigger is turned into counters and multiplied by a huge amount due to Doubling Season effects. We are going to choose one random token copy of Joraga Warcaller as our target. This adds an enormous amount of power to our board and makes each new creature enter with even more counters due to Master Biomancer.
To start ramping up the raw amount of triggers, we will cast Chancellor of the Forge. The tokens it creates will be base 0/0 creatures, but they enter with counters equal to the total power of the Master Biomancer copies and get an additional bonus equal to the total of all the counters on the Joraga Warcaller copies.
I decided this was the point to start setting up for the end game, so here are the next few things to add:
Sphinx of the Second Sun - We are going to create a huge amount of combat steps followed by main phases, so having each of those be another begin phase will let us use a lot of upkeep-based triggers Iridescent Hornbeetle - We will win in the end step, and this is going to be a gigantic increaser prior to the conclusion Hamletback Goliath - There is practically no faster way to generate counters in this deck Towering Titan - It will effectively just add our total power multiplied many times over to the Hamletback Goliath copies Deadbridge Chant - We stack the EtB triggers to draw first, then resolve the mill so we don't lose our Beacon of Immortality, but the important part is each upkeep, we get whatever we want back from our grave to repeat the engines we create up to that point
This next set is mostly just to increase the life gain and capitalize off of it, which will make our counters increase greatly via Cradle of Vitality:
Rhox Faithmender - It simply speeds up just how many counters we add to the Joraga Warcaller copies, in turn making our board much more powerful Aetherflux Reservoir - By my count, it and its copies will gain life fast enough to compete with the Beacon of Immortality (and fuels it, as well) and will alow us to simply add counters to our chosen token Joraga Warcaller directly with life and Vigor in play Loxodon Lifechanter - By spending all our life between itself (via Channel) and Aetherflux reservoir, we can go from 1 life to our total toughness multiplied many times over Archangel of Thune - It can't be flickered by Restoration Angel, but the sheer volume of triggers from Verdant Sun's Avatar, Aetherflux Reservoir, and the Beacon of Immortality casts will allow us to add an absurd amount of counters to everything, including the animated noncreature things Kazuul Warlord - It doesn't really interact necessarily with the life gain, but this is a good spot to drop it so we can use EtBs as well as life gain to trigger an effect like similar to Cathars' Crusade (which we do not use)
At this point, I think it's a good place to start building for the combat steps we will be taking. It should be noted the reason we chose to use Sakashima of a Thousand Faces was for the next few cards, which include a few legendaries we want to copy.
Tanazir Quandrix is absolutely beautiful for both its EtB trigger and its attack trigger. I will explain a bit when we get there. All the doubling effects will target our special Joraga Warcaller token.
Ardent Speaker will let us effectively cast any instant or sorcery from our graveyard on attack. Because it does not target, we can choose the same spells over and over, so long as we stack things correctly. In general, it should resolve by putting something on the bottom, exilng both Beacon of Immortality and the card we chose to its effect, and Leyline of Anticipation will let us cast both using life from the Channel/Mycosynth Lattice synergy.
Rionya, Fire Dancer is a fairly obvious choice to translate our spell storm count into raw token counts. It effectively acts like Thousand-Year Storm, but turns the copies into tokens of our permanents instead.
Ghired, Conclave Exile not only creates a token on entering, it populates on attack. Very powerful in this setup.
Pathbreaker Ibex translates the highest power we control to everything we control - several times over.
The next part is creating a very strong way to use activated abilities with an ever increasing set of pwoer behind them. The first card in this sequence is Rowan Kenrith. It will enter with far more than enough counters to use the final ability, allowing us to copy activated abilities a huge amount of times. Because we will normally (more or less) resolve a stack to its end, every time we can, we will activate every unactivated Rowan Kenrith we can, getting as many emblems as we can. It should be noted, each one in turn will increase the number of emblems we get, as planeswalker abilities are activated abilities.
The next will be The Chain Veil. This will allow us to basically use the final ability of each Rowan Kenrith and our one other planeswalker all the way down to 0 once we have a few other things in play (if it doesn't already).
Now that we can use activated abilities more effectively, we want to get a few of them going. The best one in this deck is going to be Master of the Hunt. Because we have at least two copies of Vigor and everything is a Wolf, it effectively reads, "Target creature gains counters equal to the collective power of all creatures you control other than this one. Spread counters equal to that creature's new power amongst any creatures you control except the target and this creature." This means our token Joraga Warcaller we've been pumping is going to be very, very large, but we now have another Joraga Warcaller that will be even bigger.
We now have two concerns. The tokens copied by populate triggers do not have haste and we have no way to untap our creatures. Karrthus, Tyrant of Jund solves both problems because all of our creatures are Dragons, as well. Each EtB will untap all of our creatures multiple times and, just by existing in play, everything has haste.
Gnostro, Voice of the Crags gives us an activated ability with the option to either gain life or add counters to something based on our total storm count.
Hobgoblin Bandit Lord is an anthem effect and has the ability to add counters to a target equal to the number of things we have in play.
We can add a few more cards to the field now before we get to the real meat of the deck's combo:
Sphinx-Bone Wand - Makes every recast of Beacon of Immortality also do a very hefty amount of damage/adding of counters to our new big Joraga Warcaller Precursor Golem - This will be very powerful multiplier of our instants and sorceries Basri Ket - This will create an incredible amount of triggers at the beginning of every combat we will take Arcbound Ravager - The last permanent in the deck, it is our only sacrifice outlet and it can help distribute counters as well as generate them
Rite of Replication will target a Golem token created by the Precursor Golems. It will be kicked, of course. The resulting triggers will multiply the board many, many times. The reason we target the random Golem token is because it will be the last thing copied and it is by far the lease useful thing to be multiplied.
Supplant Form will allow us to perform a one time super multiplier to our board while also letting us recast all of our permanents again. We should have at least one token copy of the first few things we cast, including Omniscience and Leyline of Anticipation, if not, we'll make them now. This will let us respond to each Precursor trigger by flashing in something and triggering everything yet again. Because of the Silver Wyvern lets us redirect its targeted effects and spells, the best way to do things is typically stack every trigger and copied spell onto it and then allow things to resolve, move the target over to the same object again, then repeat until all triggers and spells are gone. This will get very complicated now that we have tokens being populated, because for each Silver Wyvern, we get a copy of our targeted spells per Precursor Golem.
We will now activate all activated abilities we can and sacrifice every nontoken permanent other than Opalescence to Arcbound Ravager. This includes the nontoken copy of Arcbound Ravager, which will donate its counters to the Joraga Warcaller we are pumping. The reason we do this is to follow all that up with Eerie Ultimatum, returning everything in our graveyard other than instants and sorceries to the battlefield, triggering everything again. Before the next copy resolves, we will sacrifice these permanents again, activating every ability we can from them each time. The planeswalkers will not be able to react, but we will have so many by the time its all done that we can just activate their abilities for a very impressive number of times. Either way, Eerie Ultimatum will basically let us redo our entire combo thus far multiple times over, each starting where the last one ended.
If you are counting, we only have 4 cards left to work with. The Beacon of Immortality is in the deck as the only card in that place. One we will be the very last card we cast, so we will get to that in a bit. The other three will include Chandra's Ignition. Because we have Hostility in play, we do not kill the opponent, but get a bunch of tokens instead and our creatures simply get bigger due to Vigor. Furthermore, we will also target the Silver Wyvern with every copy we can so we can redirect as necessary. I don't really know which creature is the biggest each time one of these resolves, but between all the Precursor Golems and such, we should be able to always target the biggest thing in play with any of the copies targeting a Silver Wyvern.
The next card will be World at War. This will generate an absolutely enormous amount of combat steps and main phases because of our ridiculous spell storm count. Each combat phase will create a huge influx of repetition due to the Ardent Dustspeaker tirgger, allowing us to copy the World at War many, many more times. Each one of those main phases will trigger the Sphinx of the Second Sun abilities. Each of those will trigger our upkeep abilities. The goal here will now be to copy that spell as many times as possible in this main phase, the combat phase, and during the first postcombat main phase. After that, the card has no effect, preventing us from going infinite.
The last card we have other than our finisher is Primal Command. The modes useful to us will be to shuffle our graveyard back into our deck and the creature tutor. The life is mostly irrelevant compared to what we already gain, and the only legal target for the noncreature permanent to bounce is our Opalescence, which would be bad for us to lose. After casting it we sacrifice all our nontoken permanents again (except Opalescence) and let the first one shuffle and find Harmomic Prodigy. We flash it in, creating the draw triggers to get everything else back out of our deck again, recast everything, sacrifice it all again, use Eerie Ultimatum to repeat everything again, cast the World at War, and finally repeat until all copies of Primal Command are complete. Activate every ability we can, starting with the Rowan Kenrith emblems.
We have only our finisher in hand. But, we are not ready for it. We start the first combat. There are so many triggers here, I'm not sure I even correctly got all of them. We need one of the Rionya, Fire Dancer abilities to resolve first, however. We need the ability to draw and cast the Beacon of Immortality to populate the Karrthus, Tyrant of Jund tokens so we can fully untap. From here on out, we will generally want to leave our stuff untapped after all triggers are considered. Rionya, Fire Dancer triggers should almost exclusively copy Doubling Season.
We attack with every single thing with a trigger. The Ardent Dustspeaker triggers will put Primal Command below the Beacon of Immortality, exile both, and we will respond to each subsequent one with the whole process we did before. We will also cast the Channel and Show and Tell simply for the storm count and the opponent can drop the lands if they like, but they'll just die to being animated 0/0 creatures. As a general preference, we want to try resolve the World at War near last to get as many possible phases in, because we have a limited time frame to actually cast it. We still have Ghired, Conclave Exile triggers to resolve, choosing to make as many Doubling Season copies as possible before copying the rest of the important parts of the board. The Tanazir Quandrix triggers should resolve next, stacked such that we resolve them in a chain that loops back onto itself with the copies of the abilities from the Harmonic Prodigy copies. Because of the way counters and the bonuses from the Joraga Warcallers work with these abilities, we can stack the power pretty high. After those are complete, we finish with the Pathbreaker Ibex triggers outright multiplying everything.
We use Reconnaissance to completely remove all our attacking creatures from combat. All we wanted were the triggers.
When we move to our first postcombat main phase, we get a large number of triggers from the Sphinx of the Second Sun copies. We activate as many things as we can. This should Rowan Kenrith emblems and Basri Ket emblems first, and the others after that because we will get a pretty incredible amount of untap steps before our second combat. There aren't any spells we can cast right now aside from our finisher, but that's fine. We need to finish every other phase we have in this turn. The most important thing is that this is the last time World at War matters. We have no more ways to generate new combat phases or main phases.
However, we will get a pretty silly increase for each of those phases we actually do get. In each upkeep we get, the Deadbridge Chant will return Primal Command to our hand, which we will use to repeat everything. We will now start casting World at War as early as possible simply to increase the storm count, alongside Channel and Show and Tell (which do also do nothing but offer more triggers). Each upkeep also triggers the Master of the Wild Hunt token generation.
Once we repeat the whole thing each phase until we finally get to the end step, we have one final trick. All the counters we've been placing on things will make the Iridescent Hornbeetle triggers produce such a huge amount of creatures, each getting all the new counters, triggering everything again, and making each subsequent Iridescent Hornbeetle even more impressive.
With every tirgger done, every spell cast, and every ability activated possible, our final spell will be Soulblast. It will take every single thing in play other than Opalescence, add it together, and do the damage. Because it sacrifices ALL creatures you control, nothing will trigger off of it. It just resolves and blows the opponent's life total away.
Ok, well that's my deck. Please tell me what you see. I'd love to try fixing it. I'm working on a commander/EDH variant, but that's much, much harder. Thank you guys!
ok, good deck, especially for someone new to this. Very good writeup, and I dont see any infinites. I hadn't seen that trick with making rowan kenrith a shaman for harmonic prodigy. Also, using Silver Wyvern for retargeting is completely novel to me, and would have even been helpful in some of the recent iterations of the busy beaver deck replacing bolt bend when we needed an extra blue creature.
I'm not sure exactly how much that deals but probably between X->X->8 and X->X->11
Opalescence + Doubling season + flameshadow conjuring is even more powerful than you think, as they interact with each other very favorably as when you make more of one enchantment, the next time you make the other you make a lot more. This interaction is even still in the current prospective champion decks (though we use dual nature instead of flameshadow conjuring).
The main reason your deck does not do more damage is that so many cards are directly devoted to increasing power/life, and while these do stack, they don't stack as well as a supporting card would enable. Having multiple ways to increase the same output just means that the most efficient one crowds out the others. For example, adding something to the end of your combo like timetwister would allow you to do many more loops through your spells. The best results come from making as long of a chain of effects that feed into each other as possible.
To steal an example from the end of the in progress standard deck, that makes a lot of copies of any creature:
...combo stuff...
...combo stuff...
... by spending red mana
Tapping a Treasure token will generate a bunch of red mana thanks to many nyxbloom ancients
Venturing into a room gets many copies thanks to Hama Pasha, Ruin Seeker (nonlegendary via cowardly mutate shenanigans)
Attacking with many copies of Planar Ally allows us to venture into the dungeon many times
We can get a lot of combat phases thanks to Moraug, Fury of Akoum (and copying a manland)
Each 'layer' uses a small amount of one resource to make an increasing amount of another resource, so each time, the next treasure will make even more mana, the next venture will make more treasures and the next combat will have more venture triggers.
Another reason your deck can't do more is that some of your support cards are too general. Making everything an artifact/enchantment/creature that draws a card and having channel+lattice to make life into rainbow mana are combos that are just too generically powerful and will cause infinites when you try to expand. The rule of thumb is to try and use the most narrow cards possible to leave the maximum amount of 'space' open for other cards to combo without creating an infinite. Of course some cards like omniscience, Doubling season and thousand-year storm aren't exactly narrow and amplify/enable multiple parts of the combo.
I haven't had the time to look through your deck, but it looks like FortyTwo has got you covered. I will just add that "An animated enchantment will NOT enter with the counters because it is not a creature until it is already in play" is not correct - static effects that apply to permanents will apply as the permanent enters the battlefield, so if Opalescence and Enchanted Evening are in play, a permanent will enter the battlefield as a creature.
Thank you for the review! I am still a little unsure how to actually count the damage. If I understood that better, I think I could rework it with that concept in mind and weed out a lot of the stuff and focus it better. I did notice as I was even writing this up, I could improve, so I know it's nowhere near as good as it could be.
I will take some time and try again. This is a really, really bizarre exercise, lol
Which fits together much nicer than with Void stalker.
Though I guess now we can get back the Zubera via the saga, messing up our count of blue two drops. so we might need to swap the smuggler for break through the line? or switch back to Distorting wake?
@JonidCrushfire: So the way we do things is to count by layers. To deal a large amount of damage, generally you build more and more resources, so you have X of something that keeps increasing. We want to do as much recursion on X as possible.
A basic way to increase X is to double it, or multiply it by some fixed number. This is Layer 0. For example, if we have X creatures and cast Clone Legion, we'll have 2X creatures. The next step up is to double our number X times, which is equivalent to multiplying by 2^X. This is considered Layer 1. Then Layer 2 is performing Layer 1 X times, each time inputting the result from the previous operation into the next. So, if we have X copies of Swarm Intelligence, and cast Clone Legion, then we would get X copies of Clone Legion, multiplying our number of creatures by 2^X, for Layer 1. If we have an Opalescence in play, this will multiply our number of Swarm Intelligences by 2^X, so if we were to cast Clone Legion again, we would get 2^X copies, so we would multiply our number of Swarm Intelligences by 2^2^X. So, if we were able to cast Clone Legion X times for some resource X, we would multiply by 2^2^2^...^X with X 2's; this is basically 2^^X, or tetration (repeated exponentiation), Layer 2.
Note you have to be careful; if we didn't have Opalescence in play, then casting Clone Legion would multiply our number of creatures by 2^X, but our non-animated Swarm Intelligences would stay at the same number. So casting the next Clone Legion would multiply by 2^X again, not 2^2^X, and we would not get tetration out of casting X Clone Legions. So we always have to make sure that we are "updating" whatever resources are important to the number X that we are increasing, others the actual amount will fall far short of what we are going for.
In you deck, for example, you have Doubling Season and Opalescence. So, if we have X Doubling Seasons in play, if we create a token copy of Doubling Season, the number of tokens will be multiplied by 2^X. So this is Layer 1, and since the input and output are both the number of Doubling Seasons, we are indeed updating our required resource. So, creating X triggers, each of which can create a token copy of Doubling Season, will exponentiate X times, to get us to tetration, or Layer 2 (2^^X). This is done with Flameshadow Conjuring; if we have X Flameshadow Conjurings, and put a Sakashima of a Thousand Faces into play, then we get X triggers of Flameshadow Conjuring. If we then use the first X-1 triggers of Flameshadow Conjuring to create token copies of Doubling Season, then we will exponentiate the number of Doubling Seasons X-1 times, for something like 2^^(X-1) Doubling Seasons. If we then use the last trigger to create token copies of Flameshadow Conjuring, then we will have around 2^^X copies of Flameshadow Conjuring, so we are read for the next appearance of Sakashima; again it is important to update the number of Flameshadow Conjurings to make the recursion work out.
Then we add Restoration Angel - no wait, that goes infinite. You can have Sakashima enter the battlefield, copying nothing, then you get many triggers of Flameshadow Conjuring, and each of them can create many copies of Sakashima. We can have those copies become copies of Restoration Angel, and each of them can flicker the original Sakashima, going infinite. So that combo can't be in the deck.
But, I hope you are getting the basic idea for counting - If we then put in something that will allow us to flicker Sakashima X times (for example Flicker with X copies of Thousand-Year Storm), that will get us to 2^^^X, Layer 3. And next we want to do something that will perform Layer 3 X times to get to Layer 4, and so on.
Actually, that does help a good bit. I will keep working on it and see it I can compete at all, lol. Thank you guys so much for giving me a few more tools to work with!
I think Urza's saga can't be alive during computation due to being killed by opalescence. We need boom keg to be animated when we resolve the giant trigger and blow up our creatures, that means march of the machines is in play, If march of the machines is still in play while comboing we kill the Coat of arms so march of the machines also need to be animated, so opalescence needs to be in play. Therefore, any urza's sagas would die before being able to mess up computation.
Edit: oh but then we can't give them any urza's sagas as Wrong turn requires it to be a creature.
I think we can go back to the previous deck, and insert Arbiter of the Ideal and Tolarian Kraken in between Black Lotus and Blue Sun's Zenith. Rather than BSZ drawing Black Lotus, it triggers many copies of Tolarian Kraken, which can tap and untap Arbiter of the Ideal to fetch Black Lotus from the library. This should add two more layers, up to 11.
Wow, you guys are implementing the Busy Beaver function! That is amazing!
I've not followed this thread and challenge for a while and coming back to see that leaves me in awe
Soooo, I'm sorry for being a year late with this, but I think there is problem with the Waterfall setup that is currently used. Admittedly I have only skimmed to page ~122 and then skipped to 145 to see if the problem is still relevant, because I wanted to post this today. It is very possible that I missed something and I hope you have already solved this somehow.
I think allowing 3 creatures with Arcbond cast on them goes infinite in the setup with Dralnu's Crusade and Coat of Arms. That is because we can "hack" the Waterclocks with Dralnus Crusade to not empty when they should in a proper setup. Example:
Setup a waterfall program with 4 clocks A, B, C and D:
A emptying adds 3 to itself, and 2 each to C and D. A starts on 3.
B emptying halts the program. We start with 3 B creatures on 3 (toughness-damage) each, all Arcbonded.
C and D emptying does nothing. As these aren't really proper clocks and only used to hack the system we can start with 0 of these.
? 4 4 4 4
3 3 0 2 2
3 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0
Usually B, the halting waterclock, would quickly run empty and the machine halts. But C is used to hack the B clock and prevent it from emptying. Then D is used to hack C and prevent them both from emptying.
Since B, C and D do nothing they only need to use one creature type. A uses two types as usual.
Hacking the clocks with extra Dralnu's Crusade:
C are B
C are D
- Every 3 Arcbond triggers A will empty, refill A to 3 and add 2 C and 2 D
-- Since C are D both of those gain 4 toughness from Coat of Arms, outpacing the 3 damage from Arcbond.
-- Since C are B our 3 B creatures with Arcbond gain 2 toughness from Coat of Arms.
- If we resolve 3 Arcbond triggers by chosing one from each of the B creatures they all take 2 damage and stay at the same (toughness - damage) difference. We can repeat this as long as we want, gaining a bunch of C and D.
- At any point we can choose to resolve 3 Arcbond triggers but not pick a trigger from one of the B creatures. Then that creature dies before the new C and D tokens come in to save it. Since that reduces the toughness of the other B creatures they also die immediatly. We get no new Arcbond triggers and "halt".
- We need to work through the Arcbond triggers that have accumulated on the stack, but we still gain new A, C and D after every 3 of them, just like before. At some point we properly run out of triggers. I don't think we can distinguish this situation from a calculation that was properly executed and halts normally.
The proof for multiple arcbond being safe (Lemma B from that old writeup) apparently relies on the dralnus crusade being setup "properly" to emulate the clocks in TWM, specifically when it comes to the death of fresh tokens that keep the Arcbond creatures alive. When going infinite we are not restricted to the "proper" setups.
Iijil!!! Welcome back! 3 years is too long to not have you around.
Hmm yes, that looks troubling. I'll wait for FortyTwo and jfb to chime in, but at first glance this seems to be an infinite. Not allowing for more than two Arcbonds means no normal spell copying I guess... we initially were starting under the assumption of no more than two Arcbonds, and I believe we can make it work. Stakfish's idea for recursing the Busy Beaver came much later, so we haven't thought about whether that can still be salvaged.
But great to hear from you again!
Edit: Oh right... if we can only ever cast two Arcbonds, there's no way to set up another computation. RIP BB recursion.
Still, the recursion idea does allow us to get started with Vedalken Orrery in play, so long as we have no way to damage creatures without killing off the Orrery.
Oh damn, that sets us back really far. The best strategy might now be to create a big stage/hyperstage, and at the very end start one big computation. The lack of being able to copy spells makes things really awkward though.
I wonder if there's any alternatives to arcbond. Its key property is that its triggered abilities can only ever be controlled by us, while the death triggers can only ever be controlled by the opponent, forcing an ordering on those two things that prevent meaningful choices to interfere with the computation.
Massacre girl actually seems fairly close to a potential replacement, but it can cause deaths to happen on our side of the battlefield.
What I've been hoping for, and what becomes of much greater significance now, is a proof that the computation with no Dralnu's Crusades is still Turing-complete. Then, we could just remove Dralnu's Crusade, and no DC shenanigans would be possible. The basic difference is that when a group of size X dies, we get X triggers rather than 1. It looks pretty difficult to try to prove though, and maybe it isn't Turing-complete after all.
If we can't find a way to fix this, then it does indeed look like the goal becomes making the biggest number prior to popping our computation. Looking at our gigastage, we had a level with Goblin Dark-Dwellers, and a level with Spellweaver Volute, neither of which seem to be allowable with Arcbond restricted. That leaves us with a basic stage, and Spellweaver Helix to potentially get a hyperstage. I suppose there's still Spell Queller, which wouldn't get us more Arcbonds with no way to copy it. Adding that is probably quite difficult though, so for now I'm setting a goal of getting a hyperstage before the Busy Beaver.
Some ideas for a potential Massacre Girl based setup:
- There could be no creatures with 1 toughness in the deck, or ways to make creature tokens with 1 toughness. That was, a Massacre girl ETB doesn't cause any deaths
- There's no way to get the massacre girl ETB more than once, or no way to copy it in order to kill it with the legend rule
- The only way to make any creatures die to start a computation is with something like desolation giant, killing our own creatures while the opponent has a computation setup
Then options for setting up the opponent's board become pretty limited. Either we need to give them vanilla creatures with something like Hunted horror and turn them into necromancers with Mirrorweave or Cytoshape (of which we've had issues with in the past related to using it to raise or lower the base toughness of something that has been damaged (or in this case shrunk) causing it to die at a bad time); or we need to use clone effects that only target nonlegendary things (of which the only option seems to be kiki-jiki, mirror breaker?), in order to avoid getting an extra massacre girl, to set up necromancers and then donate them.
Seems difficult but potentially doable?
Of course managing to prove that we don't need Dralnu's crusade would be amazing.
Edit: Could anything useful come from combining the different "when X dies make Y" effects? Bishop of Wings creates 1/1s with flying, whereas Xathrid necromancer and Rotlung reanimator make 2/2s. Could those differences be sufficient to distinguish one particular creature from each group in the way that crusade does?
Edit: How about a setup like this: Sephara, Sky's Blade makes the flying ones indestructible; so in each waterfall group we can have X fliers and 1 non flier. The fliers contribute toughness to the non-fliers, but only the non-flier can die, causing only one death trigger to recreate the non-flier, and make several fliers of other types.
Edit: But, it does seem to effect the model of computation; when a non-flyer dies, we will still have creatures of that creature type, and the new non-flyer will start off at a higher toughness, based on how many creatures have accumulated.
First off: Hi Iijil!!! Thanks for finding an infinite that we missed for over a year.
Second: That really looks bad. I was fairly confident the single 'hacking' case doesn't go infinite, but I had never considered 'double' hacking like that.
Minor point: the Ds would die in your setup, killing the Cs and Bs, but that can be fixed by making more than 2 of them per A cycle.
Third: your setup needs only three dralu's crusades: A->a, C->B, C->D so we can't fall back on the version without enchantment copying. (and I doubt that a two clock system could possibly be TC.)
Cutting dralu's crusade entirely might work, and is a ray of hope. But, 'flooding' waterclocks are not known to be TC or not, and I suspect not, though I don't have much support for that. I'll see if I can talk to ais523 or one of the others about it.
I'll keep thinking of workarounds, but that does seem to be a critical flaw.
Does that work? If so, I think we can drop Retract and Dack Fayden, which I think was only really needed for Retract.
Cutting dack fayden would be nice, as there were some layers we would have liked without doubling season. (sagas + proliferate)
Edit: hmm it looks like it works?
We get a few fewer useful bounces with stern proctor as most of the DS(primal vigor/parallel lives/anointed procession) tokens fizzle, but we still get to bounce everything we want to whenever we activate SS. That lets us get more SSs
There's some last known information trickery with bouncing the token Spellweaver vollutes, but that seems fine.
Bouncing our opponent's enchantments should be safe as bouncing our own enchantments is safe.
// 5 Artifact
1 Aetherflux Reservoir
1 Black Lotus
1 Mycosynth Lattice
1 Sphinx-Bone Wand
1 The Chain Veil
// 31 Creature
1 Arcbound Ravager
1 Archangel of Thune
1 Ardent Dustspeaker
1 Chancellor of the Forge
1 Eidolon of Blossoms
1 Ghired, Conclave Exile
1 Gnostro, Voice of the Crags
1 Hamletback Goliath
1 Harmonic Prodigy
1 Hobgoblin Bandit Lord
1 Hostility
1 Iridescent Hornbeetle
1 Joraga Warcaller
1 Karrthus, Tyrant of Jund
1 Kazuul Warlord
1 Loxodon Lifechanter
1 Master Biomancer
1 Master of the Wild Hunt
1 Ormos, Archive Keeper
1 Pathbreaker Ibex
1 Precursor Golem
1 Restoration Angel
1 Rhox Faithmender
1 Rionya, Fire Dancer
1 Sakashima of a Thousand Faces
1 Silver Wyvern
1 Sphinx of the Second Sun
1 Tanazir Quandrix
1 Towering Titan
1 Verdant Sun's Avatar
1 Vigor
1 Arcane Adaptation
1 Cradle of Vitality
1 Deadbridge Chant
1 Doubling Season
1 Enchanted Evening
1 Flameshadow Conjuring
1 Leyline of Anticipation
1 Omniscience
1 Opalescence
1 Reconnaissance
1 Song of the Worldsoul
1 Thousand-Year Storm
// 3 Instant
1 Beacon of Immortality
1 Soulblast
1 Supplant Form
// 2 Planeswalker
1 Basri Ket
1 Rowan Kenrith
// 7 Sorcery
1 Chandra's Ignition
1 Channel
1 Eerie Ultimatum
1 Primal Command
1 Rite of Replication
1 Show and Tell
1 World at War
Ok. As it should be obvious, this will need some explanation. I'm going to try, but bear with me, as I have only just recently started this little adventure.
We start with the Black Lotus, Show and Tell, into Omniscience bit. Casting spells no longer requires mana, allowing us to continue freely for a bit.
Then, we drop Eidolon of Blossoms, drawing a card. We follow that with Opalescence and Enchanted Evening, drawing two more and ensuring everything that hits the field draws us a card.
Now, I struggled figuring out the most efficient way to do this, but I think dropping all the effects which only need one copy of a card to work is best to do here. Each of these will draw a card as well upon entering:
Ormos, Archive Keeper - Keeps us from decking out, bonus of getting counters
Mycosynth Lattice - Artifact permanents and the mana fixing are valuable
Hostility - We will use a damaging spell in this build, which we need to mitigate, and creating more tokens is a huge bonus
Leyline of Anticipation - Plenty of times we will want instant-speed casting
Reconnaissance - We will go to combat quite a bit and be attacking, but that is not the way we want to finish
Silver Wyvern - It will let us stack triggers how we need to later
We still have 4 cards in hand (each thing we've played since Omniscience drew a card). Cast Channel. This lets us use our life as mana of any color thanks to Mycosynth Lattice.
Cast Flameshadow Conjuring. Every nontoken permanent that hits our field now not only draws a card, it triggers a chance to copy it. Because it is animated by the Opalescence, it triggers itself. We pay the one life to copy.
Next we drop Sakashima of a Thousand Faces. We have it come in as a copy of our Flameshadow Conjuring. It triggers itself and the two copies we have in play. The important thing here is that the copies spawned off of this will have the "The 'legend rule' doesn't apply to permanents you control" ability (because of the weird way copy effects work). We use three more life to pay for those triggers, and we have 6 total copies of Flameshadow Conjuring.
We now cast Verdant Sun's Avatar, we stack the triggers so we always gain the life before paying the copy triggers, and thanks to the Opalescence, we gain life equal to the mana value instead of its base. We gain 7, pay 1, gain 14, pay 1, gain 21, pay 1, gain 28, pay 1, gain 35, pay 1, gain 42, pay 1, and finally, gain 49 life, ending with 206 life. Effective from this point forward, we will always gain far, far more life than we need to pay for pretty much everything.
Casting and resolving Arcane Adaptation next will trigger the copying effects, giving us six more copies, and letting us make everything Shamans, Allies, Wolves, Golems, Dragons, Elves, and Goblins. Now we cast Harmonic Prodigy. Because everything is a Shaman, the triggers of everything we control are increased by the number of Harmonic Prodigy copies we have, so the Flameshadow Conjuring copies each trigger twice and we end up with 13 copies of Harmonic Prodigy and a lot of life.
Doubling Season is next. When it hits, there are 6 Flameshadow Conjuring copies and 13 Harmonic Prodigy copies. This creates 84 triggers, each of which will see a previous amount of Doubling Seasons. I do not really know how many it ends up with, but I know it's large. Increasing the Doubling Seasons will generally be the most optimal way to increase the power of this deck.
At this point, we have our entire deck in our hand because of all the draw triggers. However, upon drawing the last card (and before resolving the other triggers), we want to cast Beacon of Immortality. We gain a huge amount of life, then it shuffles itself back in. Given that we only draw one card at a time, and Ormos, Archive Keeper protects us anyways (much more relevant later), we can now translate every draw trigger which isn't eaten for counters into "Double target player's life total."
Now, this is where I struggled the second time to figure out the most efficient path. I opted to drop the other two beginning setup cards here:
Thousand-Year Storm - Fairly obvious, but we want to copy the bejeezus out of our instants and sorceries
Vigor - We plan to damage our creatures a whole bunch, and we need at least two of these to save each other
Master Biomancer is next. This will cause all of our creature cards and copies of creature cards to enter with many counters on them. (Note: An animated enchantment will NOT enter with the counters because it is not a creature until it is already in play - this is why we will be adding counters to them via other means)
Joraga Warcaller is the next card. The unbelievable synergy of this with Master Biomancer cannot be understated. Given that each Joraga Warcaller entering increases the power of every Master Biomancer by the total sum of their powers multiplied by the Doubling Season copies, this means in turn each new Joraga Warcaller will enter with even more counters than that. These two cards are the crux of growth in the deck thanks to Doubling Season.
We want to start actually expanding our board with what we currently have. This is going to start getting very complicated (for me, at least). The first card we will use is Song of the Worldsoul. Now, every cast allows us to copy a buttload of things. As a general rule, the way we will choose to do so will be to leave one copy of the trigger per item we want to copy and have all the rest copy Doubling Season. We resolve the Doubling Season populates first, maximizing the amount of tokens we get of the other parts. We need the Sakashima of a Thousand Faces copies of Flameshadow Conjuring, Harmonic Prodigy, Thousand-Year Storm, Master Biomancer, Joraga Warcaller, and Verdant Sun's Avatar - a total of six of the many, many Song of the Worldsoul triggers to resolve after making Doubling Season tokens. Every other trigger will copy Doubling Season first.
Incidentally, this is the reason we have Ormos, Archive Keeper. Whenever something EtBs, we draw a card, cast Beacon of Immortality, the cast triggers Song of the Worldsoul, the populated tokens trigger draw effects, but because Beacon of Immortality is still on the stack, we get counters on Ormos, Archive Keeper instead, then stack resolves down to the Beacon of Immortality, and we resolve each next draw in the same way. Now, every draw also has the added effect of populating for however many Song of the Worldsoul triggers we have, making Doubling Season tokens and a lot of the other pieces.
We now follow that with Restoration Angel. The very important part of this card is that it cannot flicker an Angel. This is why we have to never select Angel for Arcane Adaptation (there's only seven of them anyways, and we need all seven). This stack is very weird, but it will eventually resolve to nothing.
1. Cast Restoration Angel
2. Trigger Song of the Worldsoul, populate
3. Draw triggers are created
4. Cast Beacon of Immortality
5. Trigger Song of the Worldsoul, populate
6. Ormos, Archive Keeper gets counters
7. Beacon of Immortality eventually returns to the library
8. Restoration Angel EtBs, draw triggers and flicker targets are created, all flickers target the Silver Wyvern
9. Move a flicker target to Doubling Season, resolve the flicker
10. Draw triggers are created
11. Cast Beacon of Immortality
12. Trigger Song of the Worldsoul, populate (NOTE: Populating the Restoration Angel with Beacon of Immortality on the stack will eventually run out due to having no more populate triggers)
13. Ormos, Archive Keeper gets counters
14. Beacon of Immortality returns to the library
15. Repeat steps 9-14 until all but one trigger per nontoken creature we control (depending on the current stage) have resolved
16. Repeat steps 9-14, but move the flicker targets to the rest of the board, (Eidolon of Blossoms, Song of the Worldsoul, Restoration Angel, Sakashima of a Thousand Faces copies of Flameshadow Conjuring, Harmonic Prodigy, Thousand-Year Storm, Master Biomancer, Joraga Warcaller, and Verdant Sun's Avatar are the ones we will continue repeating along with any new things we drop, but everything else currently in play needs at least one flicker to make tokens of them)
It's tricky to see, but there is no loop due to the one spell (which is being repeatedly cast) being on the stack when the populated Restoration Angel copies EtB. I think you can technically resolve this for more effect in a differnt order, but either way, the choke point keeping it from going infinite is that the Beacon of Immoratilty is on the stack for everything between draw triggers, thus never allowing you to continue without first resolving down to it and, subsequently, the next draw trigger originally created by whichever inital thing we did. If we make 50 draw triggers, for example, everything that happens in between each of them (as described above) happens with Beacon of Immortality on the stack because drawing a card doesn't trigger anything else. It is the casting of Beacon of Immortality itself that creates a cascading effect, namely steps 11-14.
The reason we have been gaining an absolutely insane amount of life is two-fold: it is our mana source and it fuels Cradle of Vitality. For each one we have, each life gain trigger is turned into counters and multiplied by a huge amount due to Doubling Season effects. We are going to choose one random token copy of Joraga Warcaller as our target. This adds an enormous amount of power to our board and makes each new creature enter with even more counters due to Master Biomancer.
To start ramping up the raw amount of triggers, we will cast Chancellor of the Forge. The tokens it creates will be base 0/0 creatures, but they enter with counters equal to the total power of the Master Biomancer copies and get an additional bonus equal to the total of all the counters on the Joraga Warcaller copies.
I decided this was the point to start setting up for the end game, so here are the next few things to add:
Sphinx of the Second Sun - We are going to create a huge amount of combat steps followed by main phases, so having each of those be another begin phase will let us use a lot of upkeep-based triggers
Iridescent Hornbeetle - We will win in the end step, and this is going to be a gigantic increaser prior to the conclusion
Hamletback Goliath - There is practically no faster way to generate counters in this deck
Towering Titan - It will effectively just add our total power multiplied many times over to the Hamletback Goliath copies
Deadbridge Chant - We stack the EtB triggers to draw first, then resolve the mill so we don't lose our Beacon of Immortality, but the important part is each upkeep, we get whatever we want back from our grave to repeat the engines we create up to that point
This next set is mostly just to increase the life gain and capitalize off of it, which will make our counters increase greatly via Cradle of Vitality:
Rhox Faithmender - It simply speeds up just how many counters we add to the Joraga Warcaller copies, in turn making our board much more powerful
Aetherflux Reservoir - By my count, it and its copies will gain life fast enough to compete with the Beacon of Immortality (and fuels it, as well) and will alow us to simply add counters to our chosen token Joraga Warcaller directly with life and Vigor in play
Loxodon Lifechanter - By spending all our life between itself (via Channel) and Aetherflux reservoir, we can go from 1 life to our total toughness multiplied many times over
Archangel of Thune - It can't be flickered by Restoration Angel, but the sheer volume of triggers from Verdant Sun's Avatar, Aetherflux Reservoir, and the Beacon of Immortality casts will allow us to add an absurd amount of counters to everything, including the animated noncreature things
Kazuul Warlord - It doesn't really interact necessarily with the life gain, but this is a good spot to drop it so we can use EtBs as well as life gain to trigger an effect like similar to Cathars' Crusade (which we do not use)
At this point, I think it's a good place to start building for the combat steps we will be taking. It should be noted the reason we chose to use Sakashima of a Thousand Faces was for the next few cards, which include a few legendaries we want to copy.
Tanazir Quandrix is absolutely beautiful for both its EtB trigger and its attack trigger. I will explain a bit when we get there. All the doubling effects will target our special Joraga Warcaller token.
Ardent Speaker will let us effectively cast any instant or sorcery from our graveyard on attack. Because it does not target, we can choose the same spells over and over, so long as we stack things correctly. In general, it should resolve by putting something on the bottom, exilng both Beacon of Immortality and the card we chose to its effect, and Leyline of Anticipation will let us cast both using life from the Channel/Mycosynth Lattice synergy.
Rionya, Fire Dancer is a fairly obvious choice to translate our spell storm count into raw token counts. It effectively acts like Thousand-Year Storm, but turns the copies into tokens of our permanents instead.
Ghired, Conclave Exile not only creates a token on entering, it populates on attack. Very powerful in this setup.
Pathbreaker Ibex translates the highest power we control to everything we control - several times over.
The next part is creating a very strong way to use activated abilities with an ever increasing set of pwoer behind them. The first card in this sequence is Rowan Kenrith. It will enter with far more than enough counters to use the final ability, allowing us to copy activated abilities a huge amount of times. Because we will normally (more or less) resolve a stack to its end, every time we can, we will activate every unactivated Rowan Kenrith we can, getting as many emblems as we can. It should be noted, each one in turn will increase the number of emblems we get, as planeswalker abilities are activated abilities.
The next will be The Chain Veil. This will allow us to basically use the final ability of each Rowan Kenrith and our one other planeswalker all the way down to 0 once we have a few other things in play (if it doesn't already).
Now that we can use activated abilities more effectively, we want to get a few of them going. The best one in this deck is going to be Master of the Hunt. Because we have at least two copies of Vigor and everything is a Wolf, it effectively reads, "Target creature gains counters equal to the collective power of all creatures you control other than this one. Spread counters equal to that creature's new power amongst any creatures you control except the target and this creature." This means our token Joraga Warcaller we've been pumping is going to be very, very large, but we now have another Joraga Warcaller that will be even bigger.
We now have two concerns. The tokens copied by populate triggers do not have haste and we have no way to untap our creatures. Karrthus, Tyrant of Jund solves both problems because all of our creatures are Dragons, as well. Each EtB will untap all of our creatures multiple times and, just by existing in play, everything has haste.
Gnostro, Voice of the Crags gives us an activated ability with the option to either gain life or add counters to something based on our total storm count.
Hobgoblin Bandit Lord is an anthem effect and has the ability to add counters to a target equal to the number of things we have in play.
We can add a few more cards to the field now before we get to the real meat of the deck's combo:
Sphinx-Bone Wand - Makes every recast of Beacon of Immortality also do a very hefty amount of damage/adding of counters to our new big Joraga Warcaller
Precursor Golem - This will be very powerful multiplier of our instants and sorceries
Basri Ket - This will create an incredible amount of triggers at the beginning of every combat we will take
Arcbound Ravager - The last permanent in the deck, it is our only sacrifice outlet and it can help distribute counters as well as generate them
Rite of Replication will target a Golem token created by the Precursor Golems. It will be kicked, of course. The resulting triggers will multiply the board many, many times. The reason we target the random Golem token is because it will be the last thing copied and it is by far the lease useful thing to be multiplied.
Supplant Form will allow us to perform a one time super multiplier to our board while also letting us recast all of our permanents again. We should have at least one token copy of the first few things we cast, including Omniscience and Leyline of Anticipation, if not, we'll make them now. This will let us respond to each Precursor trigger by flashing in something and triggering everything yet again. Because of the Silver Wyvern lets us redirect its targeted effects and spells, the best way to do things is typically stack every trigger and copied spell onto it and then allow things to resolve, move the target over to the same object again, then repeat until all triggers and spells are gone. This will get very complicated now that we have tokens being populated, because for each Silver Wyvern, we get a copy of our targeted spells per Precursor Golem.
We will now activate all activated abilities we can and sacrifice every nontoken permanent other than Opalescence to Arcbound Ravager. This includes the nontoken copy of Arcbound Ravager, which will donate its counters to the Joraga Warcaller we are pumping. The reason we do this is to follow all that up with Eerie Ultimatum, returning everything in our graveyard other than instants and sorceries to the battlefield, triggering everything again. Before the next copy resolves, we will sacrifice these permanents again, activating every ability we can from them each time. The planeswalkers will not be able to react, but we will have so many by the time its all done that we can just activate their abilities for a very impressive number of times. Either way, Eerie Ultimatum will basically let us redo our entire combo thus far multiple times over, each starting where the last one ended.
If you are counting, we only have 4 cards left to work with. The Beacon of Immortality is in the deck as the only card in that place. One we will be the very last card we cast, so we will get to that in a bit. The other three will include Chandra's Ignition. Because we have Hostility in play, we do not kill the opponent, but get a bunch of tokens instead and our creatures simply get bigger due to Vigor. Furthermore, we will also target the Silver Wyvern with every copy we can so we can redirect as necessary. I don't really know which creature is the biggest each time one of these resolves, but between all the Precursor Golems and such, we should be able to always target the biggest thing in play with any of the copies targeting a Silver Wyvern.
The next card will be World at War. This will generate an absolutely enormous amount of combat steps and main phases because of our ridiculous spell storm count. Each combat phase will create a huge influx of repetition due to the Ardent Dustspeaker tirgger, allowing us to copy the World at War many, many more times. Each one of those main phases will trigger the Sphinx of the Second Sun abilities. Each of those will trigger our upkeep abilities. The goal here will now be to copy that spell as many times as possible in this main phase, the combat phase, and during the first postcombat main phase. After that, the card has no effect, preventing us from going infinite.
The last card we have other than our finisher is Primal Command. The modes useful to us will be to shuffle our graveyard back into our deck and the creature tutor. The life is mostly irrelevant compared to what we already gain, and the only legal target for the noncreature permanent to bounce is our Opalescence, which would be bad for us to lose. After casting it we sacrifice all our nontoken permanents again (except Opalescence) and let the first one shuffle and find Harmomic Prodigy. We flash it in, creating the draw triggers to get everything else back out of our deck again, recast everything, sacrifice it all again, use Eerie Ultimatum to repeat everything again, cast the World at War, and finally repeat until all copies of Primal Command are complete. Activate every ability we can, starting with the Rowan Kenrith emblems.
We have only our finisher in hand. But, we are not ready for it. We start the first combat. There are so many triggers here, I'm not sure I even correctly got all of them. We need one of the Rionya, Fire Dancer abilities to resolve first, however. We need the ability to draw and cast the Beacon of Immortality to populate the Karrthus, Tyrant of Jund tokens so we can fully untap. From here on out, we will generally want to leave our stuff untapped after all triggers are considered. Rionya, Fire Dancer triggers should almost exclusively copy Doubling Season.
We attack with every single thing with a trigger. The Ardent Dustspeaker triggers will put Primal Command below the Beacon of Immortality, exile both, and we will respond to each subsequent one with the whole process we did before. We will also cast the Channel and Show and Tell simply for the storm count and the opponent can drop the lands if they like, but they'll just die to being animated 0/0 creatures. As a general preference, we want to try resolve the World at War near last to get as many possible phases in, because we have a limited time frame to actually cast it. We still have Ghired, Conclave Exile triggers to resolve, choosing to make as many Doubling Season copies as possible before copying the rest of the important parts of the board. The Tanazir Quandrix triggers should resolve next, stacked such that we resolve them in a chain that loops back onto itself with the copies of the abilities from the Harmonic Prodigy copies. Because of the way counters and the bonuses from the Joraga Warcallers work with these abilities, we can stack the power pretty high. After those are complete, we finish with the Pathbreaker Ibex triggers outright multiplying everything.
We use Reconnaissance to completely remove all our attacking creatures from combat. All we wanted were the triggers.
When we move to our first postcombat main phase, we get a large number of triggers from the Sphinx of the Second Sun copies. We activate as many things as we can. This should Rowan Kenrith emblems and Basri Ket emblems first, and the others after that because we will get a pretty incredible amount of untap steps before our second combat. There aren't any spells we can cast right now aside from our finisher, but that's fine. We need to finish every other phase we have in this turn. The most important thing is that this is the last time World at War matters. We have no more ways to generate new combat phases or main phases.
However, we will get a pretty silly increase for each of those phases we actually do get. In each upkeep we get, the Deadbridge Chant will return Primal Command to our hand, which we will use to repeat everything. We will now start casting World at War as early as possible simply to increase the storm count, alongside Channel and Show and Tell (which do also do nothing but offer more triggers). Each upkeep also triggers the Master of the Wild Hunt token generation.
Once we repeat the whole thing each phase until we finally get to the end step, we have one final trick. All the counters we've been placing on things will make the Iridescent Hornbeetle triggers produce such a huge amount of creatures, each getting all the new counters, triggering everything again, and making each subsequent Iridescent Hornbeetle even more impressive.
With every tirgger done, every spell cast, and every ability activated possible, our final spell will be Soulblast. It will take every single thing in play other than Opalescence, add it together, and do the damage. Because it sacrifices ALL creatures you control, nothing will trigger off of it. It just resolves and blows the opponent's life total away.
Ok, well that's my deck. Please tell me what you see. I'd love to try fixing it. I'm working on a commander/EDH variant, but that's much, much harder. Thank you guys!
I'm not sure exactly how much that deals but probably between X->X->8 and X->X->11
Opalescence + Doubling season + flameshadow conjuring is even more powerful than you think, as they interact with each other very favorably as when you make more of one enchantment, the next time you make the other you make a lot more. This interaction is even still in the current prospective champion decks (though we use dual nature instead of flameshadow conjuring).
The main reason your deck does not do more damage is that so many cards are directly devoted to increasing power/life, and while these do stack, they don't stack as well as a supporting card would enable. Having multiple ways to increase the same output just means that the most efficient one crowds out the others. For example, adding something to the end of your combo like timetwister would allow you to do many more loops through your spells. The best results come from making as long of a chain of effects that feed into each other as possible.
To steal an example from the end of the in progress standard deck, that makes a lot of copies of any creature:
...combo stuff...
...combo stuff...
... by spending red mana
Tapping a Treasure token will generate a bunch of red mana thanks to many nyxbloom ancients
Venturing into a room gets many copies thanks to Hama Pasha, Ruin Seeker (nonlegendary via cowardly mutate shenanigans)
Attacking with many copies of Planar Ally allows us to venture into the dungeon many times
We can get a lot of combat phases thanks to Moraug, Fury of Akoum (and copying a manland)
Each 'layer' uses a small amount of one resource to make an increasing amount of another resource, so each time, the next treasure will make even more mana, the next venture will make more treasures and the next combat will have more venture triggers.
Another reason your deck can't do more is that some of your support cards are too general. Making everything an artifact/enchantment/creature that draws a card and having channel+lattice to make life into rainbow mana are combos that are just too generically powerful and will cause infinites when you try to expand. The rule of thumb is to try and use the most narrow cards possible to leave the maximum amount of 'space' open for other cards to combo without creating an infinite. Of course some cards like omniscience, Doubling season and thousand-year storm aren't exactly narrow and amplify/enable multiple parts of the combo.
If you are interested in learning more I suggest starting with the old writeups in the OP. (http://www.soniccenter.org/sm/mtg/megacombo.html)
I haven't had the time to look through your deck, but it looks like FortyTwo has got you covered. I will just add that "An animated enchantment will NOT enter with the counters because it is not a creature until it is already in play" is not correct - static effects that apply to permanents will apply as the permanent enters the battlefield, so if Opalescence and Enchanted Evening are in play, a permanent will enter the battlefield as a creature.
Going back to our deck - it does look like Stern Proctor, so we have two more card slots. One possible improvement - we can replace Search the Premises, Void Stalker, and Doubling Season by Thrummingbird, Elspeth Conquers Death, Teferi, Temporal Archmage, Repeated Reverberation, and Primal Vigor. We get a lot of proliferates from Thrummingbird after each attack; each pair of proliferate can bring many copies of Elspeth Conquers Death to stage 3; and each time we bring Teferi back we can use it to fetch many cards thanks to Repeated Reverberation. That's one more layer than Search the Premises, getting us to 10 layers.
I will take some time and try again. This is a really, really bizarre exercise, lol
How about making them shuffle via like the three seasons or Urza's Saga? and using the Widespread panic layers?
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 Spellweaver Volute
13 Pull from Eternity
14 Copy Enchantment
15 Dual Nature
16 Bloodbond March
17 Cephalid Shrine
18 Thousand-Year Storm
19 Mana Echoes
20 Soul Separator
21 Urborg Syphon-Mage
22 Thousand-Year Elixir
23 K'rrik, Son of Yawgmoth
24 Lingering Souls
25 Stern proctor
26 Safe Passage
28 Worldfire
29 Gravitic Punch
30 Gravitic Punch
31 Recoup
32 Restore
33 Cragcrown Pathway
34 Harmonic Prodigy
35 Panharmonicon
36 Wormfang Behemoth
37 Stolen By the Fae
38 Chrome Mox
39 Aegis Automaton
40 Guardian of the Guildpact
41 Kurkesh, Onakke Ancient
42 Alhammarret's Archive
43 Black Lotus
44 Show and Tell
45 Omniscience
46 Floating-Dream Zubera
47 Marchesa's Smuggler
49 Amulet of Vigor
50 Animist's Awakening
51 Blue Sun's Zenith
52 Consecrated sphinx
53 Widespread Panic
54 The Three Seasons
55 Thrummingbird
56 Moraug, Fury of Akoum
57 World at War
58 Parallel Lives
59 Drafna's Restoration
60 Uproot
Which fits together much nicer than with Void stalker.
Though I guess now we can get back the Zubera via the saga, messing up our count of blue two drops. so we might need to swap the smuggler for break through the line? or switch back to Distorting wake?
Edit: oh Crucible of the spirit dragon kinda liked having doubling season around...
A basic way to increase X is to double it, or multiply it by some fixed number. This is Layer 0. For example, if we have X creatures and cast Clone Legion, we'll have 2X creatures. The next step up is to double our number X times, which is equivalent to multiplying by 2^X. This is considered Layer 1. Then Layer 2 is performing Layer 1 X times, each time inputting the result from the previous operation into the next. So, if we have X copies of Swarm Intelligence, and cast Clone Legion, then we would get X copies of Clone Legion, multiplying our number of creatures by 2^X, for Layer 1. If we have an Opalescence in play, this will multiply our number of Swarm Intelligences by 2^X, so if we were to cast Clone Legion again, we would get 2^X copies, so we would multiply our number of Swarm Intelligences by 2^2^X. So, if we were able to cast Clone Legion X times for some resource X, we would multiply by 2^2^2^...^X with X 2's; this is basically 2^^X, or tetration (repeated exponentiation), Layer 2.
Note you have to be careful; if we didn't have Opalescence in play, then casting Clone Legion would multiply our number of creatures by 2^X, but our non-animated Swarm Intelligences would stay at the same number. So casting the next Clone Legion would multiply by 2^X again, not 2^2^X, and we would not get tetration out of casting X Clone Legions. So we always have to make sure that we are "updating" whatever resources are important to the number X that we are increasing, others the actual amount will fall far short of what we are going for.
In you deck, for example, you have Doubling Season and Opalescence. So, if we have X Doubling Seasons in play, if we create a token copy of Doubling Season, the number of tokens will be multiplied by 2^X. So this is Layer 1, and since the input and output are both the number of Doubling Seasons, we are indeed updating our required resource. So, creating X triggers, each of which can create a token copy of Doubling Season, will exponentiate X times, to get us to tetration, or Layer 2 (2^^X). This is done with Flameshadow Conjuring; if we have X Flameshadow Conjurings, and put a Sakashima of a Thousand Faces into play, then we get X triggers of Flameshadow Conjuring. If we then use the first X-1 triggers of Flameshadow Conjuring to create token copies of Doubling Season, then we will exponentiate the number of Doubling Seasons X-1 times, for something like 2^^(X-1) Doubling Seasons. If we then use the last trigger to create token copies of Flameshadow Conjuring, then we will have around 2^^X copies of Flameshadow Conjuring, so we are read for the next appearance of Sakashima; again it is important to update the number of Flameshadow Conjurings to make the recursion work out.
Then we add Restoration Angel - no wait, that goes infinite. You can have Sakashima enter the battlefield, copying nothing, then you get many triggers of Flameshadow Conjuring, and each of them can create many copies of Sakashima. We can have those copies become copies of Restoration Angel, and each of them can flicker the original Sakashima, going infinite. So that combo can't be in the deck.
But, I hope you are getting the basic idea for counting - If we then put in something that will allow us to flicker Sakashima X times (for example Flicker with X copies of Thousand-Year Storm), that will get us to 2^^^X, Layer 3. And next we want to do something that will perform Layer 3 X times to get to Layer 4, and so on.
Oh, yeah without Doubling Season, Crucible of the Spirit Dragon loses a layer. Still 10 layers, which is an improvement.
Urza's Saga also doesn't work as it makes constructs during computations.
The Elspeth Cocquers Death line might work with a retargetting spell
Edit: oh but then we can't give them any urza's sagas as Wrong turn requires it to be a creature.
I think we can go back to the previous deck, and insert Arbiter of the Ideal and Tolarian Kraken in between Black Lotus and Blue Sun's Zenith. Rather than BSZ drawing Black Lotus, it triggers many copies of Tolarian Kraken, which can tap and untap Arbiter of the Ideal to fetch Black Lotus from the library. This should add two more layers, up to 11.
Also I'm glad that the new arena/digital only cards from jumpstart aren't very good for this deck, because that would be really unfortunate.
I've not followed this thread and challenge for a while and coming back to see that leaves me in awe
Soooo, I'm sorry for being a year late with this, but I think there is problem with the Waterfall setup that is currently used. Admittedly I have only skimmed to page ~122 and then skipped to 145 to see if the problem is still relevant, because I wanted to post this today. It is very possible that I missed something and I hope you have already solved this somehow.
I think allowing 3 creatures with Arcbond cast on them goes infinite in the setup with Dralnu's Crusade and Coat of Arms. That is because we can "hack" the Waterclocks with Dralnus Crusade to not empty when they should in a proper setup. Example:
Setup a waterfall program with 4 clocks A, B, C and D:
A emptying adds 3 to itself, and 2 each to C and D. A starts on 3.
B emptying halts the program. We start with 3 B creatures on 3 (toughness-damage) each, all Arcbonded.
C and D emptying does nothing. As these aren't really proper clocks and only used to hack the system we can start with 0 of these.
? 4 4 4 4
3 3 0 2 2
3 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0
Usually B, the halting waterclock, would quickly run empty and the machine halts. But C is used to hack the B clock and prevent it from emptying. Then D is used to hack C and prevent them both from emptying.
Since B, C and D do nothing they only need to use one creature type. A uses two types as usual.
Hacking the clocks with extra Dralnu's Crusade:
C are B
C are D
- Every 3 Arcbond triggers A will empty, refill A to 3 and add 2 C and 2 D
-- Since C are D both of those gain 4 toughness from Coat of Arms, outpacing the 3 damage from Arcbond.
-- Since C are B our 3 B creatures with Arcbond gain 2 toughness from Coat of Arms.
- If we resolve 3 Arcbond triggers by chosing one from each of the B creatures they all take 2 damage and stay at the same (toughness - damage) difference. We can repeat this as long as we want, gaining a bunch of C and D.
- At any point we can choose to resolve 3 Arcbond triggers but not pick a trigger from one of the B creatures. Then that creature dies before the new C and D tokens come in to save it. Since that reduces the toughness of the other B creatures they also die immediatly. We get no new Arcbond triggers and "halt".
- We need to work through the Arcbond triggers that have accumulated on the stack, but we still gain new A, C and D after every 3 of them, just like before. At some point we properly run out of triggers. I don't think we can distinguish this situation from a calculation that was properly executed and halts normally.
The proof for multiple arcbond being safe (Lemma B from that old writeup) apparently relies on the dralnus crusade being setup "properly" to emulate the clocks in TWM, specifically when it comes to the death of fresh tokens that keep the Arcbond creatures alive. When going infinite we are not restricted to the "proper" setups.
Please convince me I'm wrong
Hmm yes, that looks troubling. I'll wait for FortyTwo and jfb to chime in, but at first glance this seems to be an infinite. Not allowing for more than two Arcbonds means no normal spell copying I guess... we initially were starting under the assumption of no more than two Arcbonds, and I believe we can make it work. Stakfish's idea for recursing the Busy Beaver came much later, so we haven't thought about whether that can still be salvaged.
But great to hear from you again!
Edit: Oh right... if we can only ever cast two Arcbonds, there's no way to set up another computation. RIP BB recursion.
Still, the recursion idea does allow us to get started with Vedalken Orrery in play, so long as we have no way to damage creatures without killing off the Orrery.
I wonder if there's any alternatives to arcbond. Its key property is that its triggered abilities can only ever be controlled by us, while the death triggers can only ever be controlled by the opponent, forcing an ordering on those two things that prevent meaningful choices to interfere with the computation.
Massacre girl actually seems fairly close to a potential replacement, but it can cause deaths to happen on our side of the battlefield.
If we can't find a way to fix this, then it does indeed look like the goal becomes making the biggest number prior to popping our computation. Looking at our gigastage, we had a level with Goblin Dark-Dwellers, and a level with Spellweaver Volute, neither of which seem to be allowable with Arcbond restricted. That leaves us with a basic stage, and Spellweaver Helix to potentially get a hyperstage. I suppose there's still Spell Queller, which wouldn't get us more Arcbonds with no way to copy it. Adding that is probably quite difficult though, so for now I'm setting a goal of getting a hyperstage before the Busy Beaver.
In terms of limited spell copying, we have various ways to copy spells with CMC 2 or less, like Sea Gate Stormcaller; Lucky Clover copies Adventure spells; Cloven Casting copies multicolor spells; Verazol, the Split Current copies kicker spells. Anything else?
Edit: Also Spell Queller is flash, which we probably can't make work with the computation.
- There could be no creatures with 1 toughness in the deck, or ways to make creature tokens with 1 toughness. That was, a Massacre girl ETB doesn't cause any deaths
- There's no way to get the massacre girl ETB more than once, or no way to copy it in order to kill it with the legend rule
- The only way to make any creatures die to start a computation is with something like desolation giant, killing our own creatures while the opponent has a computation setup
Then options for setting up the opponent's board become pretty limited. Either we need to give them vanilla creatures with something like Hunted horror and turn them into necromancers with Mirrorweave or Cytoshape (of which we've had issues with in the past related to using it to raise or lower the base toughness of something that has been damaged (or in this case shrunk) causing it to die at a bad time); or we need to use clone effects that only target nonlegendary things (of which the only option seems to be kiki-jiki, mirror breaker?), in order to avoid getting an extra massacre girl, to set up necromancers and then donate them.
Seems difficult but potentially doable?
Of course managing to prove that we don't need Dralnu's crusade would be amazing.
Edit: Could anything useful come from combining the different "when X dies make Y" effects? Bishop of Wings creates 1/1s with flying, whereas Xathrid necromancer and Rotlung reanimator make 2/2s. Could those differences be sufficient to distinguish one particular creature from each group in the way that crusade does?
Edit: How about a setup like this: Sephara, Sky's Blade makes the flying ones indestructible; so in each waterfall group we can have X fliers and 1 non flier. The fliers contribute toughness to the non-fliers, but only the non-flier can die, causing only one death trigger to recreate the non-flier, and make several fliers of other types.
Edit: But, it does seem to effect the model of computation; when a non-flyer dies, we will still have creatures of that creature type, and the new non-flyer will start off at a higher toughness, based on how many creatures have accumulated.
First off: Hi Iijil!!! Thanks for finding an infinite that we missed for over a year.
Second: That really looks bad. I was fairly confident the single 'hacking' case doesn't go infinite, but I had never considered 'double' hacking like that.
Minor point: the Ds would die in your setup, killing the Cs and Bs, but that can be fixed by making more than 2 of them per A cycle.
Third: your setup needs only three dralu's crusades: A->a, C->B, C->D so we can't fall back on the version without enchantment copying. (and I doubt that a two clock system could possibly be TC.)
Cutting dralu's crusade entirely might work, and is a ray of hope. But, 'flooding' waterclocks are not known to be TC or not, and I suspect not, though I don't have much support for that. I'll see if I can talk to ais523 or one of the others about it.
I'll keep thinking of workarounds, but that does seem to be a critical flaw.