MTG Salvation

Hello all! I've been away for this for quite a while, as I've been occupied with other things. I'm glad this is still being thought and talked about.

It would be great of that infinite doesn't work! But Iijil does have a point that something dangerous in the combo can rear its ugly head later if things change. I kinda do want to risk it though in pursuit of the most damage. Perhaps we can work on two fronts, trying to brave this danger while also looking at safer versions.

So long as the basic ideas behind the Busy Beaver computation and the hyperstage are sound, we should still be able to get something quite strong in a safer version. But I definitely have to reacquaint myself with everything that is going on!

Hmm I think I've rediscovered the worldfire transition without wasting a card slot on ivory mask.

So because of how TYS and helix interact, casting hungry for more can give the following stack:

top
TYS - lingering souls
TYS - divine congregation
TYS - worldfire
helix- worldfire
helix- lingering souls
helix- divine congregation
TYS - hunger
hungry for more

Which appears to allow us to exit the worldfire transition with 5 life, not one.

From there, we can use waiting soul foundry activations to Riftsweeper and Chromescale Drake to mill our cards and make archons.

Then we resolve a waiting spellweaver volute trigger, make a kaervek's spite targeting us. We sac the archons, get our enchantments back, gaining 2 life from pious interdiction on say cowardice, putting us to 7. Then resolving spite knocks us to 2.

now we can use a twinning glass activation to give us flash again, cast mox to remake red,

2 life is not enough to go infinite by casting lingering souls for another copy of the lower layer.

Does that look like it works to anyone else?

Hmm; that means the entire process of creating a full megastage transition, doing things with it, and then resolving back down to a repeatable state; must start on at least 3 life (as a volute trigger must be made), and ends up on 2 life. This means the lower hyperstage actually runs out of life on this exchange and fails to be a hyperstage.

Also, this setup means that ivory mask would go infinite (it allows the process to start on 3 life and end up on 7).

With ivory mask the solution to this is to ensure that any sorceries resolved after worldfire can't gain us life; the easiest way to do so seems to be replacing Divine Congregation for Starlight.

Without ivory mask we'd need to somehow gain exactly 5 or 6 life. (6 life being allowed because starting the process on 3 and ending on 4 doesn't go infinite). And I don't see how to do that.

(Also, waiting foundry activations for Riftsweeper and Chromescale drake don't work due to trapping those cards in exile, but simply waiting actual ETB triggers (as well as PB triggers for retargetting) + BBM triggers do work.)

Oh, there's another problem.
We can hide the enchantments on the stack. (at least once...)

Go through the transition like above, except we can have cephalid shrine in play to counter the spite, or just not spite at all and let the enchantments resolve.

That looks like it definitely goes infinite.

Actually the only way cephalid shrine can be in play to counter a spite is if it's on the opponent's side. Otherwise it's sacrificed first.

It would still trigger no? And we can waste the other spellweaver volute trigger on wrong turn if it matters.

The point is that we can hide some or even all of our enchantments on the stack below the transition, and then we don't need to take 5 to get archon triggers for them.

Hmm, that's too bad. It does seem like relying on the 5 life hit from Kaervek's Spite to keep things from going infinite (without losing too much life) is hard to make work.

Perhaps it is time to look back to a less ambitious version, maybe with 1 additional stage or none at all. Did the second additional stage force extra hoops to jump through that we can remove by dropping the stage?


Edit: Oh, it looks like Kaervek's Spite will not trigger Cephalid Shrine, the sacrifice is made before things trigger on the casting. But it looks like you're saying the Spite is not necessary at all - we can just put enchantments on the stack and never kill off Archon of Falling Stars.

I'm not sure how we missed this, but I don't see why this wouldn't work either.


Edit: It looks like the main culprit is Lingering Souls. There are various other flashback cards we can replace it with though, like like Skull Fracture. That removes the extra 4 life gain.

yeah, switching to either skull fracture or starlight as suggested above should work to prevent my line from going infinite.
(starlight looks slightly better?)

Though then we still have the issue of getting enchantments in play reliably after worldfire, we can only hide them on the stack for one transition at a time...

ivory mask seems to work though it unfortunately costs a card slot. It feels like there should be a better way, but we need a pretty niche effect so it's difficult for a a card to do double duty.

Edit: As for how we missed it, it is only possible because of the combination of weird spellweaver helix rules that normally don't matter, and hiding the actual enchantment cards on the stack, which would normally be a terrible line. I'm sure I'm not the only one who had thought about both of them individually before, but I just hadn't put them together until now.

So the problem is that Worldfire clears both sides, and we don't have a way to get Cephalid Shrine back before we would need to cast Kaervek's Spite. Hmmm...

One possibility is a replacement for Cephalid Shrine that could counter or neutralize Kaervek's Spite without being on the battlefield. I don't know an example, just thought it might exist.

Well yeah or a better way to get enchantments back after Worldfire. We had used Wormfang behemoth before, but that not only requires us to remove TYS before worldfire-ing, but also doesn't help in the start the way the Chromescale Drake does. Also I'm not sure it even works with the rest of the combo any more. (and making the triggers happen at the right time is more than a bit more awkward to set up, but certainly doable)


Though maybe with Infectious inquiry we have a bite more wiggle room for getting started?

Edit: yeah something like:
Crypt, Sapphire, Dig, Ruby, Shreikhorn, Replenish x1 (Omni+TYS), Infectious inquiry x2
Draw 4, lose 4, opp gets 2 poison.

draw helix, hunger, hunger, SOMETHING. (not sure what the last card should be, panharmonicon? some spell?)
cast hunger x3, cast the SOMETHING? (x4?), helix, exile hunger and inquiry, cast hunger x4(x5?) helix casts inquiry x5(x6?)

draw 10 or 12 cards

from here we need to use FDZ to draw the rest, which requires saccing our board to spite, so we also need to save our artifacts/enchantments.

something like
1. FDZ
2. fated
3. opal
4. cowardice
5. march
6. volute
7. orrery
8. lingering souls
9. PB
10. spite
11? archon

looks like its enough to make TYS tokens, then make tokens of everything and set up what we need: 5-6 zubera (35-37 cards left in deck), cast omniscience via a copy of it so we can twinning glass it later, bounce the originals via PB triggers, and clear out our TYS so we don't accidentally kill our opponent. Hide our hand on the stack, and sac everything to spite.

This draws most of the rest of the deck, which should be more than enough to finish setting up.

I'm sure there's a more optimal line, but this at least seems to be good without losing too many unrecoverable resources.

Looks like a good start - so, if we add Ivory Mask and remove Precursor Golem, our current deck looks like:



which we are hoping to get us to something like BB_{w^2 + w2 + 2}(X) where X is 15,000+.

This is assuming that jfb's above argument is correct about Iijil's infinite not being possible, and that the stage and hyperstage transitions work correctly now.

We can look at Wormfang Behemoth as a possibility to not have to use Ivory Mask, or other optimizations as well.

I realized that unfortunately wormfang behemoth doesn't work to recycle our moxen the way chromescale drake does, so its no good for this version.

I'm pretty certain that the infinite needed imprint to work with last known information, but it doesn't.

I think arcanist's owl is really close to working, because it only gives us pious interdiction after exiling it, and we only exile it to worldfire. an extra 2 life might seem like a lot to gain here, but I think the awkwardness of only having 2 copies of spellweaver volute might prevent us from going infinite, as the actual setup/transition involves several flashbacks of lingering souls, so 2 extra life is not enough to go infinite. I might be missing something though
I haven't fully worked it out yet, but it seems like it could possibly work.

Also, that list needs Starlight over divine congregation. (I think Starlight is just better anyway? We no longer need it to cost more than three.) Profane transfusion might be even better, as the opponent's life total will be much higher than their creature count, and it can't gain us life after resolving a worldfire.

I forgot that Hungry for more also costs life; and while it can trigger volutes, they can't do anything meaningful (like gain back the life) after resolving helix.
So this means the minimum life to start a helix transition is 3; and with Arcanist's owl you end up on 3 after playing pious. So it looks like that actually does work (and without it it actually wouldn't work).

I though it might still be tricky to ensure the opponent survives the next spite when we get to it; however we can now simply donate a cephalid shrine with one of the wrong turn triggers that is normally at the top of a typical volute transition.

Oh, right, yeah that makes sense, saves me some headache too.

Owl lets us optimize the start a bit too.

Hungry for more, panharmonicon, owl, hungry for more.
double owl trigger draws helix and orrery for us to cast
then cast the other hunger to trigger the helix.

Now we get to act in response to the triggers, and we have owl already to let fated infatuation draw some of our artifacts and enchantments before the first Spite.

And we get to leave a TYS trigger for Replenish on the stack too, pretty nice.

Hmm, if Arcanist's Owl requires another card slot though, we won't be able to pull another card from the Layer section. So either we would need to find another card slot optimization, or reoptimize the deck around a single additional stage.

Arcanists's Owl replaces Chromescale drake and Ivory mask

Ah, good then. Latest deck:

Yeah, that seems to be good.

One thing I noticed going through is that only having 2 volutes really complicates things, even more than it looks from jfb's analysis last page.
Keeping track of K'rrik, I think everything works fine, and we just have a very odd stage structure. We might be able to be more efficient while building up the stack while we still have TYSes, but that doesn't impact the ending analysis, and we still have the same amount of life to work with.

Edit:
Optimizing the start is a bit tricky, we want to minimize primarily minimize the number of poison counters they get and secondarily, the number of typed creatures that die, as those are our key limiting factors at the bottom of our layers.
We care more about poison because 13 types die in computation anyway, so deaths of those types don't affect the number of draws of SSA we get after we start computing.

Speaking of Smoke Spirits' Aid it is quite difficult to cast for the first time. We have already used our moxen and land drop, so we don't have easy access to colored mana. It seems we must cast worldfire from hand to exile the ruby and that requires a good bit of setup, with waiting triggers and the like. It doesn't look impossible, just awkward. For example, SSA's trigger will kill either player after a worldfire, unless they are on exactly k'rrik. Or we use arcbond + krrik + boom keg to give the opponent life.

Also, I'm not sure if Profane transfusion is actually better than starlight because in order to make the first cast of it good, we need to run a pseudo-computation, which at the very least kills a typed creature in k'rrik. It seems to limit our ability to grow before having access to true computations...

Krirk isn't the only lifelinker in the deck; there's also the tokens from Hungry for more. That gives access to at least one easier pseudo-computation without needing to juggle BBM triggers for krirk, which should provide enough life to set up a decent hyperstage; as well as safe SSA resolutions. But it does look like the first SSA cast needs to use up one of our draws, if the necessary mana can only come from worldfire.

But we can use up all the available draws from the 13 computation types to amass as many resources as we can before the first true computations. (minus a few for the required deaths in non-computational stage transitions - which I think are just thrull and archon. my setup above also kills riftsweeper without a chance to AE it, but I think that can be replaced with keeping actual riftsweeper triggers on the stack rather than BBM triggers); so using up one of these draws for the first SSA is fine.

Oh the hungry for more token having lifelink makes things much easier, and makes the shenanigans in the volute stage to sometimes get more computations way cleaner. (no need for a wrong turn volute every time)

Yeah I think just archons and Thrulls get used up without being able to AE them enough, so we can definitely start with real BB computations even for the worst case approximations of how inefficient the encoding of a UTM is.

I went through the whole combo and only noticed two things:
one was a scare I had with Pious Interdiction when I noticed that the thrulls sacrificed themselves, theoretically giving us a cheap way to put pious in the yard and use archon triggers to cheat more life, but those archon triggers still require a spite to sacrifice everything so the pious would be in the grave anyway.

The second, related thing I noticed is that I think we have one fewer layer than we thought: The only way to draw from FDZ is by sacrificing it to Spite, this makes us lose flash until after the death trigger(s), and so the Harmonic prodigy copies of the triggers will cause us to deck as we can't respond to them or in between them.

I believe wrong turn volutes are still needed each transition to safely store orrery and other nontoken artifacts that aren't easily recurred, however

Hmm, I've just noticed a significant issue though. FDZ death triggers can cause us to draw instants before starting a computation.

hmm, wow that's kinda really bad huh?

this was fine for the pull from eternity versions, but not with riftsweeper.

I don't see a way to save it and keep FDZ which is sad because its one of my favorite cards. And getting to use AE on it was a super cute optimization.

What other draw engines even work?
Body count is pretty awful. Dream salvage, knollspine dragon also don't work, nor change of fortune.

The one ring would work if it kept its counters, but it doesn't.

Yeah that's a shame; I also really liked that final limitation being the number of creature types there are. (and therefore that the deck technically gets better over time without changing any cards)

Probably the best draw engine is one limited by the turn structure; e.g. Leinore, Autumn Sovreign. That also gets the layer that FDZ didn't end up having anyway.

The problem with that is that I think we need to draw those cards too early.

our start is pretty locked into giving them 2 poison, then we can use owl to get some of the other cards but there are still a dozen creatures we need to actually draw.

I thought memory jar could be a possibility, as facedown cards can't be returned by riftsweeper, but worldfire exiles their hand face up.

Using multiple combats would be nice if combat damage wasn't a way to start illegal computations.

Yeah and making the deck able to take multiple combat steps is difficult; allowed haste enablers are Thousand year elixir (ability is way too strong) and Tyvar, Jubilent Brawler (potentially safer, but difficult to recur at the right frequency). Also, Hungry for more wouldn't work.

Potentially something like Lead the stampede could work to draw extra creatures but that's a whole card slot.
Would Aetherworks marvel work as a replacememnt for Arcanists's owl to cast nonlands from the library?