Edit: I've been thinking again about having the primary stage be a creature token stage, but the standard ways of doing it seem to require Cowardice. The problem with Cowardice is that we can then bounce with our Arcbonds and Artificial Evolution, which allows us to profit from a hyperstage transition into Worldfire I think. So we want to avoid Cowardice.
We could avoid Cowardice with Brudiclad, Telchor Engineer and Soul Foundry, but I can't figure out how to avoid the problem of turning damaged creature tokens into Goblin Boom Keg and having them die at the start of combat.
The Bone Shredder version was another possibility, but that version ran into a number of problems, detailed in posts 3900 and 3901.
So, how can we get additional stages from here? The hyperstage mana color can be arbitrary, so we can use any two of white, green, and red for the additional stages, as well as life.
Heya! Sorry for not posting in a while. I'm catching up now.
@Deedlit11: There are some nice ideas in post #3954, but I'll skip over them for now since they won't matter too much if we get that additional stage working.
@Stakfish: great idea for using sacrifice lands and an aura for locking the state. That looks like it could be made to work!
Something I noticed about the lands: It doesn't seem to be necessary that they enter tapped, since the save from Guardian Zendikon is required to not lose them to the graveyard/library/exile zones when we activate the sacrifice ability. That opens up the search space should Axgard Armory not work out.
So the big problem right now seems to be that creating progress out of a BB computation uses up red, which is pretty much the only color of mana that can work for the extra stage. We need blue and black earlier for The Scarab God, green for Temur Sabertooth and white won't work because Axgard Armory produces it.
To create more artifact copies we currently use Master Transmuter, which requires blue mana and haste. Since the plan is to give haste to the sacrifice lands selectively we almost certainly need some donateable haste. That means we can't let the opponent get blue mana. We can accomplish that by using Seat of the Synod instead of Mox Sapphire. (Ignoring the start for now and I'm still assuming we use Fractured Identity)
So we really only have red mana down there because we can get a scaling amount from Battle Hymn or similar cards. Finding a replacement for that seems to be the most promising approach.
Immaculate Magistrate + Cryptic Trilobite doesn't quite seem to work. First, Dimir Signet would be donateable blue and black mana, which is not good. Second, if the opponent gets a hasty Magistrate they can use it to interrupt a BB computation at an arbitrary point.
I'll have to think about the creature bases hyperstage more. At first glance the Wrong Turn instead of Fractured Identity makes me uncomfortable.
One problem for the creature based primary stage is that we get a free creature bounce by returning it to hand in the higher stage and then preserving it through the transition. There are different ways we could deal with that:
1. make the bounce useless by using Mimic Vat instead of Soul Foundry. But I don't see how to get the necessary death and Mimic Vat can be used by the opponent to interrupt the BB computation unless we don't let them have any mana.
2. make the extra token required to put the new transition on the stack. This is what we do with the mana based primary stages. But I don't really see how we can require a token.
3. make it impossible to preserve the creature in hand through the transition. We are already planning to use Worldfire. This would mean we can't use Wormfang Behemoth. So we need to be able to retrieve all the cards we want available from exile/library/graveyard. We also want Auras to be stuck in there, so the only way I found to retrieve enchantments is Dance of the Manse. We can reuse that one every transition with Supply // Demand.
The third approach seems to work.
Another problem is that The Scarab God can create the valuable stage tokens. Even if we make black mana expensive we need to be able to create some during the hyperstage transitions to repeat the BB computation often enough. And then we can preserve the black mana through the transition to create the tokens on the wrong side.
Boldwyr Intimidator could modify normal Rotlung Reanimator tokens to have the necessary different creature type and replace The Scarab God. As long as the opponent can't get red mana no one can use it to interrupt a BB computation.
Without an easy way to get creature tokens and without haste for the originals we might run into problems with getting enough use out of the utility creatures. I also haven't checked if the colors work out for the extra stage. We are already using white, blue and red just for the fixes mentioned here.
In other news, I think we can get the Mirrorpool variant working. I'm hoping that I have not made a rules mistake here.
By using Comeuppance instead of Safe Passage we replace the damage that an Arcbonded creature would deal to us with damage to that creature. That makes the Arcbond effect equal on all creatures. We can then use only one arcbonded creature, but having multiples is fine, since it doesn't matter which trigger we resolve. They all deal the same amount of damage to all creatures.
Casting Comeuppance more than once doesn't change the damage, because the damage to us can only be prevented once.
We would not be able to go infinite with multiple arcbonded creatures by not casting Comeuppance, because we would just die after a fixed number of steps.
Note that we still need to be careful about reusing instants because of Artificial Evolution. Also we can't use Spellweaver Volute with Spellweaver Helix and Fractured Identity because that would allow the opponent to cast their own Comeuppance, making Arcbond unequal again, with the triggering creature taking twice the damage. Also we can't use Thousand-Year Storm because it allows us to get too much life out of the transition by copying those sorceries.
Using Slayers' Stronghold to get a haste granting trigger for white mana. That allows us to keep using the Mobilize + Siege of Towers version of the transition. The other transitions you have been using seem to be vulnerable to switching the order pf the sorceries around to generate some of the resources on the wrong side of the transition and going infinite.
As it is there is probably an infinite in there: Using Eureka to drop land + Guardian Zendikon after Worldpurge followed by resolving Mobilize for the untap, generating a green mana on the wrong side of the transition. I'd love to go back to Hidden Strings to prevent this via targeting requirement. But Genesis Wave (and Wargate) allows us to get the sacrifice lands out of the library. So enchanting them isn't required to keep them around. So I'm trying to have it required to untap them.
There is also the potential that removing the aura after untapping avoids requiring the haste, but I think everything that gets rid of the aura also removes the land.
Oh, some very nice ideas! Comeuppance in particular is a very nice way to remove the creature asymmetry with Arcbond.
I'm wondering if we need to have Artificial Evolution uncounterable? It seems similar to the problem you fixed with Scarab God... If we counter, we can have copies of Artificial Evolution waiting on the stack, which I guess can hack permanents in play as well as cards on the stack. So I guess this is different.
Have you confirmed whether or not the infinite with Eureka is there? It does look problematic.
What about, rather than ensuring that we can survive both a Worldfire and a Worldpurge in a hyperstage transition, we make things so that we can recycle the lifelands using one or the other, but not be able to survive both? (or profit from both, if we could survive it) So perhaps add something like Molderhulk to retrieve our lifelands from the graveyard, and remove Eureka, replacing it with something like Patron of the Moon or Walking Atlas.
Perhaps removing Eureka could remove the problem we have with spell copying enabling us to recycle lifelands multiple times? Then perhaps we could add Thousand-Year Storm back in.
I did have some hope that we need to run Guardian Zendikon into Worldfire to recycle the mana producing instants. But as long as we don't need to recycle instants every time we can just bounce the Aura with Worldpurge and not use it immediately. So we can alternate between transitions with worldfire and those without and only play the Aura to gain extra triggers when it won't die.
The list currently has two mana producing instants, Dark Ritual to restore progress after transitions and Battle Hymn to scale to the computations output. That is certainly enough to skip one worldfire and so we go infinite.
With less rituals it depends on our ability to put a new transition on the stack without one. That is usually a very close thing. Also not really something I want to rely on, as it is easy to miss some line of play and accidentally leave an infinite in.
Getting the lifegain lands back from the graveyard has the problem that we can then get the life from transitions back without resolving Worldpurge. That means there is nothing that stops us from carrying all that green mana through it. So that is an infinite.
Right, putting only lands into play would work. Great idea.
Unfortunately Journey to the Oracle has Jadzi, Oracle of Arcavios on the front side, which goes infinite. I can't find any other suitable sorceries. We could use instants, but the only one I found that can't interrupt the computations is Atarka's Command. But that costs 2, so casting it would steal the Sea Gate Stormcaller triggers that we need to restore our progress later.
Getting creative, we could use sorceries to put creatures into play. We can use Tooth and Nail and have one of the creatures be Patron of the Moon.
By doing this we are committed to starting without Show and Tell, but a Genesis Wave start should be fine anyway. This could work
We get our required instants back by resolving a Worldfire, which puts our instants into exile, which we can then put into the library with Riftsweeper, and then back into our hand with Mystical Teachings.
Ah, that makes a lot more sense than the line I was trying to make work.
Looking at Comeuppance can we just replace one of the old versions that had safe passage with it in one of the earlier decks and have the old version back? like:
The problem was the arcbond asymmetry, and the ability to do either 123123 or 121212, but if we need to cast comeuppance to stay alive that is gone. I don't think there was another way to break it. So this should work again unless I'm missing something.
(Also allowing the opponent to get a comeuppance is fine as it only prevents damage from sources you don't control.)
Edit: the three seasons goes infinite with that deck, we were fixing it when Iijil came in with the arcbond issue.
I imagine Iijil will probably find some issues with this deck, but if we can get everything fixed it will be a nice improvement, so we should definitely investigate.
I think we can probably improve the ending layers using the damage bouncing we were using in the more recent decks.
It's ok for the opponent to cast commupance, but if they're able to do that then they'd also be able to cast arcbond which we don't want. In decks using wrong turn that doesn't seem to be possible though.
How do the old decks fixed with commupance compare in terms of stages to the newer decks?
Oh comeuppance's damage is a trigger not a replacement effect, so we can just hide it under arcbonds forever?
We need wording that doesn't give us a trigger to order like Gideon's sacrifice?
Oh you are right, I thought that replacement effects like that needed to say "instead" but judgechat confirmed it is a replacement effect. (as does the oracle ruling)
One thing came up that needs to be handled by the old version somehow. I think we need a way to get Xathrid Necromancer variants that don't share a creature type with the tokens they trigger from or create.
So now I'll actually have to look at the old decks in detail. Could someone explain how the stage inside the hyperstage is supposed to work? I assume it is life based and uses Urborg Syphon-Mage somehow. But I can't figure it out.
Hmm, thats an interesting point about the necromancers.
Basically we can't get their 'human' creature type fully out of the way. so coat of arms will pump that type
So taking a random small example
with crusades to something like:
apes are atogs
bats are birds
cats are crabs
normal setup would be involve making necromancers so we are in this ballpark
Whenever an ape dies make an ape, two atogs, three birds and a crab
Whenever a bat dies, make a bat, an atog, three birds, and no crabs
Whenever a cat dies, make a cat, three atogs, seven birds, and two crabs
corresponding to this program
3 3 1
1 4 0
3 7 3
but those necromancers would increase the base power of the ape, bat and cat tokens by 7, 5 and 13, so this effectively behaves like a waterclock program with those added to the diagonals.
10 3 1
1 9 0
3 7 16
But we can reduce those two at a time by removing the original necromancers that contribute to the diagonal, (except the one that remakes the key type) we can get to something like:
6 3 1
1 3 0
3 7 12
Either way the diagonal entries will need to be by far the largest in their row, with their minimum being the sum of the row plus 2 for the necromancer that remakes the key type.
This does seem to call into question the TC ness of what we have.
Desolation Giant to start the computation is a problem, since it is a creature on our side. We can put Arcbond on it in response to its etb. Then we can keep it alive by generating an extra giant every two arcbonds and alternating resolving arcbonds from the Desolation Giant and some other creature. (Keep the other giants alive via Dralnu's Crusade overlap to some other growing token pool.) At an arbitrary point we can stop resolving arcbond triggers from the Giant to let it die. That death can trigger the stop of the computation.
Edit: Nevermind. Since Comeuppance wouldn't prevent the arcbond damage that the Giant deals to us we would die after a fixed number of steps when trying to keep the Giant alive.
What would be really nice is if we could prove that this restricted version of the Waterfall model still was Turing-complete. I thought about maybe using groups of waterclocks to represent a single waterclock, but I'm not sure if that would help.
But, Engineered Plague looks reasonable? I don't see anything wrong with using that at the moment.
Edit: Oh, bleah. Actually, it should be 3 blue creatures with the same mana value; to produce N mana, we need to bounce 2N-1 creatures. We can have one creature be the one we have Bloodbond March layers underneath, and that can produce a blue mana each time we bounce it. The other creatures require two bounces to cycle: One can bounce it to our hand, and the next time we can cast it to get Bloodbond March triggers before casting our Stolen By the Fae or whatever, and we can bounce and then imprint it on a Chrome Mox; it then winds up on the battlefield. So with 2 mana needed for Stolen by the Fae, we need 3 blue creatures. So we can replace Marchesa's Smuggler with Break Through the Line if we wind up using both Floating-Dream Zubera and Thrummingbird, or just use Marchesa's Smuggler if we only use one of the two.
Hmmm, that's an interesting idea. So, in FortyTwo's example, he has 11 Necromancers that are cats making a cat, three atogs, and seven birds, pumping up the number of cats by 11. That's 9 more than we want, and is the most that any type is being pumped up. So, we could have various creatures with two types, one of which will be Wizards that don't die, and the other types can be various types that pump all the other creature types, so that everything gets pumped up by the same amount. So, instead of
3 3 1
1 4 0
3 7 3
we would have
12 12 10
10 13 9
9 16 12
This pumps everything up by an additional 9 whenever something dies, so that we will simply wait another 9 ticks to get to where the normal waterfall would go to immediately. Yeah, I don't see why this wouldn't work!
We can get all the tokens to have the same toughness, say 100. But there is only 1 Coat of Arms. So when during a computation a token is added it prevents the already existing tokens from dying for 1 tick. They can die after 2 ticks. If they do the fresh token sticks around with only 2 damage marked and can mess up the computation in the future. We have deviated from the Waterfall Model.
Trying to add more Coat of Arms raises the toughness of the creatures by a proportional amount.
In the other case we can have the Coat of Arms boost equal to the toughness of the secondary tokens. But the creatures that the Necromancers look for will then have a lot more toughness. There are complicated ways to build any waterfall program (well, an equivalent one) if you assume that all tokens of the same type die simultaneously. But because of the toughness difference they don't necessarily do that in this case either. And we kind of need that to ensure that we compute the program we want.
I do think we need something to get rid of the overlapping creature type. The idea for reducing the toughness of creature types would also work. Either way we need to change/add a card to be able to do that.
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Perhaps use Hunted Phantasm to give the opponent a lot of creatures, then Cultural Exchange to switch those with the creatures we want to give them. We can drop Kinnan, Bonder Prodigy, and have 4 layers.
Edit: I've been thinking again about having the primary stage be a creature token stage, but the standard ways of doing it seem to require Cowardice. The problem with Cowardice is that we can then bounce with our Arcbonds and Artificial Evolution, which allows us to profit from a hyperstage transition into Worldfire I think. So we want to avoid Cowardice.
We could avoid Cowardice with Brudiclad, Telchor Engineer and Soul Foundry, but I can't figure out how to avoid the problem of turning damaged creature tokens into Goblin Boom Keg and having them die at the start of combat.
The Bone Shredder version was another possibility, but that version ran into a number of problems, detailed in posts 3900 and 3901.
Edit: Oh, I guess if we don't have March of the Machines, a Goblin Boom Keg won't die due to damage.
I will try to see if I can assemble a creature stage deck then.
Edit: Okay, I figure I'll just try something out, like:
2 Opalescence
3 Vedalken Orrery
4 Gravebreaker Lamia
6 Coat of Arms
7 Rotlung Reanimator
8 Dralnu's Crusade
9 Arcbond
10 Arcbond
11 Wrong Turn
12 Artificial Evolution
13 Sea Gate Stormcaller
14 Kaervek's Spite
15 Avacyn, Guardian Angel
16 Goblin Boom Keg
18 Immaculate Magistrate
19 Rage Weaver
20 Mirrorworks
21 Master Transmuter
22 Mox Sapphire
23 Mox Jet
24 Thopter Engineer
25 Bloodbond March
26 The Scarab God
27 Rings of Brighthearth
28 Riftsweeper
29 Sunscape Master
30 Soul Foundry
31 Brudiclad, Telchor Engineer
32 Soulsworn Jury
34 Worldfire
35 Chatter of the Squirrel
36 Chatter of the Squirrel
37 Forest
38 Molderhulk
39 Panharmonicon
40 Spellweaver Helix
41 Wormfang Behemoth
42 Deathgrip
43 Wild Research
44 Show and Tell
45 Channel
So, how can we get additional stages from here? The hyperstage mana color can be arbitrary, so we can use any two of white, green, and red for the additional stages, as well as life.
@Deedlit11: There are some nice ideas in post #3954, but I'll skip over them for now since they won't matter too much if we get that additional stage working.
@Stakfish: great idea for using sacrifice lands and an aura for locking the state. That looks like it could be made to work!
Something I noticed about the lands: It doesn't seem to be necessary that they enter tapped, since the save from Guardian Zendikon is required to not lose them to the graveyard/library/exile zones when we activate the sacrifice ability. That opens up the search space should Axgard Armory not work out.
So the big problem right now seems to be that creating progress out of a BB computation uses up red, which is pretty much the only color of mana that can work for the extra stage. We need blue and black earlier for The Scarab God, green for Temur Sabertooth and white won't work because Axgard Armory produces it.
To create more artifact copies we currently use Master Transmuter, which requires blue mana and haste. Since the plan is to give haste to the sacrifice lands selectively we almost certainly need some donateable haste. That means we can't let the opponent get blue mana. We can accomplish that by using Seat of the Synod instead of Mox Sapphire. (Ignoring the start for now and I'm still assuming we use Fractured Identity)
So we really only have red mana down there because we can get a scaling amount from Battle Hymn or similar cards. Finding a replacement for that seems to be the most promising approach.
Immaculate Magistrate + Cryptic Trilobite doesn't quite seem to work. First, Dimir Signet would be donateable blue and black mana, which is not good. Second, if the opponent gets a hasty Magistrate they can use it to interrupt a BB computation at an arbitrary point.
I'll have to think about the creature bases hyperstage more. At first glance the Wrong Turn instead of Fractured Identity makes me uncomfortable.
The creature-based primary stage will probably take some work, but I feel like it opens more space for additional stages/layers.
1. make the bounce useless by using Mimic Vat instead of Soul Foundry. But I don't see how to get the necessary death and Mimic Vat can be used by the opponent to interrupt the BB computation unless we don't let them have any mana.
2. make the extra token required to put the new transition on the stack. This is what we do with the mana based primary stages. But I don't really see how we can require a token.
3. make it impossible to preserve the creature in hand through the transition. We are already planning to use Worldfire. This would mean we can't use Wormfang Behemoth. So we need to be able to retrieve all the cards we want available from exile/library/graveyard. We also want Auras to be stuck in there, so the only way I found to retrieve enchantments is Dance of the Manse. We can reuse that one every transition with Supply // Demand.
The third approach seems to work.
Another problem is that The Scarab God can create the valuable stage tokens. Even if we make black mana expensive we need to be able to create some during the hyperstage transitions to repeat the BB computation often enough. And then we can preserve the black mana through the transition to create the tokens on the wrong side.
Boldwyr Intimidator could modify normal Rotlung Reanimator tokens to have the necessary different creature type and replace The Scarab God. As long as the opponent can't get red mana no one can use it to interrupt a BB computation.
Without an easy way to get creature tokens and without haste for the originals we might run into problems with getting enough use out of the utility creatures. I also haven't checked if the colors work out for the extra stage. We are already using white, blue and red just for the fixes mentioned here.
In other news, I think we can get the Mirrorpool variant working. I'm hoping that I have not made a rules mistake here.
By using Comeuppance instead of Safe Passage we replace the damage that an Arcbonded creature would deal to us with damage to that creature. That makes the Arcbond effect equal on all creatures. We can then use only one arcbonded creature, but having multiples is fine, since it doesn't matter which trigger we resolve. They all deal the same amount of damage to all creatures.
Casting Comeuppance more than once doesn't change the damage, because the damage to us can only be prevented once.
We would not be able to go infinite with multiple arcbonded creatures by not casting Comeuppance, because we would just die after a fixed number of steps.
Note that we still need to be careful about reusing instants because of Artificial Evolution. Also we can't use Spellweaver Volute with Spellweaver Helix and Fractured Identity because that would allow the opponent to cast their own Comeuppance, making Arcbond unequal again, with the triggering creature taking twice the damage. Also we can't use Thousand-Year Storm because it allows us to get too much life out of the transition by copying those sorceries.
So here's my try at the deck:
2 Opalescence
3 Dual Nature
4 Vedalken Orrery
5 Riftsweeper
6 Gravebreaker Lamia
7 Thopter Engineer
8 Coat of Arms
9 Rotlung Reanimator
10 Dralnu's Crusade
11 Arcbond
12 Fractured Identity
13 Artificial Evolution
14 Sea Gate Stormcaller
15 Kaervek's Spite
16 Comeuppance
17 Goblin Boom Keg
18 Battle Hymn
19 Mirrorworks
20 Master Transmuter
21 Seat of the Synod
23 The Scarab God
24 Rings of Brighthearth
25 Temur Sabertooth
26 Elvish Spirit Guide
27 Mobilize
28 Siege of Towers
29 Stomping Ground
30 Worldfire
31 Worldpurge
32 Acorn Harvest
33 Acorn Harvest
34 Radiant Fountain
35 Akoum Refuge
36 Eureka
37 Wood Elves
38 Dark Ritual
39 Panharmonicon
40 Spellweaver Helix
41 Wormfang Behemoth
42 Deathgrip
43 Mystical Teachings
45 Mirrorpool
46 Genesis Wave
47 Guardian Zendikon
48 Tinder Farm
49 Soaring Hope
50 Arbiter of the Ideal
51 Harmonic Prodigy
52 Tolarian Kraken
53 Sylvan Echoes
54 Sentry Oak
55 Chancellor of the Tangle
56 Chancellor of the Tangle
57 Chancellor of the Tangle
58 Channel
Using Slayers' Stronghold to get a haste granting trigger for white mana. That allows us to keep using the Mobilize + Siege of Towers version of the transition. The other transitions you have been using seem to be vulnerable to switching the order pf the sorceries around to generate some of the resources on the wrong side of the transition and going infinite.
As it is there is probably an infinite in there: Using Eureka to drop land + Guardian Zendikon after Worldpurge followed by resolving Mobilize for the untap, generating a green mana on the wrong side of the transition. I'd love to go back to Hidden Strings to prevent this via targeting requirement. But Genesis Wave (and Wargate) allows us to get the sacrifice lands out of the library. So enchanting them isn't required to keep them around. So I'm trying to have it required to untap them.
There is also the potential that removing the aura after untapping avoids requiring the haste, but I think everything that gets rid of the aura also removes the land.
I'm wondering if we need to have Artificial Evolution uncounterable? It seems similar to the problem you fixed with Scarab God... If we counter, we can have copies of Artificial Evolution waiting on the stack, which I guess can hack permanents in play as well as cards on the stack. So I guess this is different.
Have you confirmed whether or not the infinite with Eureka is there? It does look problematic.
What about, rather than ensuring that we can survive both a Worldfire and a Worldpurge in a hyperstage transition, we make things so that we can recycle the lifelands using one or the other, but not be able to survive both? (or profit from both, if we could survive it) So perhaps add something like Molderhulk to retrieve our lifelands from the graveyard, and remove Eureka, replacing it with something like Patron of the Moon or Walking Atlas.
Perhaps removing Eureka could remove the problem we have with spell copying enabling us to recycle lifelands multiple times? Then perhaps we could add Thousand-Year Storm back in.
The list currently has two mana producing instants, Dark Ritual to restore progress after transitions and Battle Hymn to scale to the computations output. That is certainly enough to skip one worldfire and so we go infinite.
With less rituals it depends on our ability to put a new transition on the stack without one. That is usually a very close thing. Also not really something I want to rely on, as it is easy to miss some line of play and accidentally leave an infinite in.
Getting the lifegain lands back from the graveyard has the problem that we can then get the life from transitions back without resolving Worldpurge. That means there is nothing that stops us from carrying all that green mana through it. So that is an infinite.
Unfortunately Journey to the Oracle has Jadzi, Oracle of Arcavios on the front side, which goes infinite. I can't find any other suitable sorceries. We could use instants, but the only one I found that can't interrupt the computations is Atarka's Command. But that costs 2, so casting it would steal the Sea Gate Stormcaller triggers that we need to restore our progress later.
Getting creative, we could use sorceries to put creatures into play. We can use Tooth and Nail and have one of the creatures be Patron of the Moon.
By doing this we are committed to starting without Show and Tell, but a Genesis Wave start should be fine anyway. This could work
I'm getting caught up on the discussion here, nice to see that it looks like we can still get some of the higher order stage structures.
What's the trick we decided on for repeating BB computations? I cant quite see how it works in the most recent deck.
We get our required instants back by resolving a Worldfire, which puts our instants into exile, which we can then put into the library with Riftsweeper, and then back into our hand with Mystical Teachings.
Looking at Comeuppance can we just replace one of the old versions that had safe passage with it in one of the earlier decks and have the old version back? like:
2 Xathrid Necromancer
3 Arcbond
4 Artificial Evolution
5 Wrong Turn
6 Dralnu's Crusade
7 Opalescence
8 Desolation Giant
9 Goblin Boom Keg
10 March of the Machines
11 Vedalken Orrery
12 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 Comeuppance
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
(Also allowing the opponent to get a comeuppance is fine as it only prevents damage from sources you don't control.)
Edit: the three seasons goes infinite with that deck, we were fixing it when Iijil came in with the arcbond issue.
I think we can probably improve the ending layers using the damage bouncing we were using in the more recent decks.
How do the old decks fixed with commupance compare in terms of stages to the newer decks?
We need wording that doesn't give us a trigger to order like Gideon's sacrifice?
maybe Pariah?
I've explained it a bit more in post#3873.
So now I'll actually have to look at the old decks in detail. Could someone explain how the stage inside the hyperstage is supposed to work? I assume it is life based and uses Urborg Syphon-Mage somehow. But I can't figure it out.
4000 posts.
Basically we can't get their 'human' creature type fully out of the way. so coat of arms will pump that type
So taking a random small example
with crusades to something like:
apes are atogs
bats are birds
cats are crabs
normal setup would be involve making necromancers so we are in this ballpark
Whenever an ape dies make an ape, two atogs, three birds and a crab
Whenever a bat dies, make a bat, an atog, three birds, and no crabs
Whenever a cat dies, make a cat, three atogs, seven birds, and two crabs
corresponding to this program
3 3 1
1 4 0
3 7 3
but those necromancers would increase the base power of the ape, bat and cat tokens by 7, 5 and 13, so this effectively behaves like a waterclock program with those added to the diagonals.
10 3 1
1 9 0
3 7 16
But we can reduce those two at a time by removing the original necromancers that contribute to the diagonal, (except the one that remakes the key type) we can get to something like:
6 3 1
1 3 0
3 7 12
Either way the diagonal entries will need to be by far the largest in their row, with their minimum being the sum of the row plus 2 for the necromancer that remakes the key type.
This does seem to call into question the TC ness of what we have.
Adding a way to change the creature type (the scarab god, Hour of eternity, Croaking counterpart, others?) or just remove the human from the typeline?
Another thought is using like engineered plagues to counteract the offset?
Desolation Giant to start the computation is a problem, since it is a creature on our side. We can put Arcbond on it in response to its etb. Then we can keep it alive by generating an extra giant every two arcbonds and alternating resolving arcbonds from the Desolation Giant and some other creature. (Keep the other giants alive via Dralnu's Crusade overlap to some other growing token pool.) At an arbitrary point we can stop resolving arcbond triggers from the Giant to let it die. That death can trigger the stop of the computation.
Edit: Nevermind. Since Comeuppance wouldn't prevent the arcbond damage that the Giant deals to us we would die after a fixed number of steps when trying to keep the Giant alive.
Edit2: do I understand correctly that Stolen by the Fae is supposed to be a uu mana stage with Chrome Mox? It's been a while since I thought about chrome mox stages with more than 1 mana. But shouldn't it only be able to bounce 2 blue creatures with a given cast? Because with X=2 it can target Stern Proctor, Floating-Dream Zubera, Marchesa's Smuggler and Thrummingbird.
But, Engineered Plague looks reasonable? I don't see anything wrong with using that at the moment.
Edit: Oh, bleah. Actually, it should be 3 blue creatures with the same mana value; to produce N mana, we need to bounce 2N-1 creatures. We can have one creature be the one we have Bloodbond March layers underneath, and that can produce a blue mana each time we bounce it. The other creatures require two bounces to cycle: One can bounce it to our hand, and the next time we can cast it to get Bloodbond March triggers before casting our Stolen By the Fae or whatever, and we can bounce and then imprint it on a Chrome Mox; it then winds up on the battlefield. So with 2 mana needed for Stolen by the Fae, we need 3 blue creatures. So we can replace Marchesa's Smuggler with Break Through the Line if we wind up using both Floating-Dream Zubera and Thrummingbird, or just use Marchesa's Smuggler if we only use one of the two.
3 3 1
1 4 0
3 7 3
we would have
12 12 10
10 13 9
9 16 12
This pumps everything up by an additional 9 whenever something dies, so that we will simply wait another 9 ticks to get to where the normal waterfall would go to immediately. Yeah, I don't see why this wouldn't work!
Trying to add more Coat of Arms raises the toughness of the creatures by a proportional amount.
In the other case we can have the Coat of Arms boost equal to the toughness of the secondary tokens. But the creatures that the Necromancers look for will then have a lot more toughness. There are complicated ways to build any waterfall program (well, an equivalent one) if you assume that all tokens of the same type die simultaneously. But because of the toughness difference they don't necessarily do that in this case either. And we kind of need that to ensure that we compute the program we want.
I do think we need something to get rid of the overlapping creature type. The idea for reducing the toughness of creature types would also work. Either way we need to change/add a card to be able to do that.