So, do we go infinite if we have 5-6 Rotlung Reanimators? FortyTwo described an infinite computation, but it had 12 RR's. What is the minimum number that is needed? It's worth figuring out I think.
I think not all of the RRs in my earlier construction are needed?
It's a little hard to say, but I think 3 can be cut for:
X->2Y,4ACX
Y->X,2BCY
and it still works?
Any system with only one triggering type can't sustain itself, as whichever RR recreates it will be the same size and die at the same time.
9 would be fine, we only have 6 even with Confessor. Is there some way to kill our first Zetalpa, or any indestructible legendary creature, without needing a second?
But actually we're still able to make our own tokens using the Mogg Infestation. An alternative is Desolation Giant, which in fact doesn't have the issue of being able to kill a donated BF (without also killing our own stuff anyway).
I don't see a way to transition from black to blue, so right now we are at like 10 -> 13X -> 11 before combat.
Edit: Hmmm, now that this version doesn't have Deepwood Elder, maybe jfb's idea to put in Natural Order and recycle some green creature for its ETB, can work? We could use something like Plant Elemental to sacrifice a Forest, or Quarry Beetle to return a land.
The problem is, it could also recycle Horned Kavu in the current deck. If we put green creatures above white creatures, then Horned Kavu could return the green creature that we are using for ETB. So we have a conflict. But, there could be other ways to use Return to the Ranks. Any ideas?
So, the only way I found to incorporate both creature layers was to put Kiora after Unstable Frontier, and then we end on opponent life rather than our own. So no Sunspring Expeditions unfortunately. Still, the main goal is another layer.
Hmm, Natural Order needs to be below any source of card draw, otherwise its effect can't be relevant, so in particular it needs to be below Kiora. But also we need a way to put the creature it fetches back into the library, without being able to put arbitrary creatures into the library. There's the Hunting Drake + Silver Drake + Panharmonicon setup, but then the question is how to reuse planeswalkers, as Sarkhan wouldn't work. God-Eternal Rhonas can put itself in the library, but then how do we profit from it? Perhaps something that triggers when a green creature enters, or when a nontoken enters?
Edit: That deck seems to work, although Morbid Bloom doesn't get a layers worth of creatures since we run out of creatures in the graveyard. (Kin-Tree Invocation works though)
We'd like to move Kiora earlier, so that we can go back to the Sunspring Expedition strategy. However, right now we have too many things transitioning down to mana - we have green creatures transitioning to Hidden Herbalist producing green mana, Quarry Beetle transitioning to a land producing white mana, and Unstable Frontier making Swamps to produce black mana. So there's no mana color left for Kiora to transition to, if we want to put it below Unstable Frontier. It looks like we would have to make one of the creature layers transition to something else. Kiora is the obvious choice - if we could find a creature that is green or of CMC <= 2 that can allow us to recycle Kiora, we could get Sunspring Expedition again.
More minor issue: Eureka can be used to put down lands, so we'd want green above Kiora; but that conflicts with wanting Natural Order below Kiora. A solution is to replace Eureka with Hypergenesis + a cascade card / some other way to cheat it out.
Hmm, making the sequence work is actually rather troublesome. We can't just replace Floodchaser, with, say, Svyelunite Temple. We need some way to get it back; and we can't just use Quarry Beetle, since that needs green mana for Natural Order. So we have to use green mana first. But what for? Splendid Reclamation is no good, because that's what we are saving Quarry Beetle for. So I'm not sure even how to start after blue mana.
Using green mana to recycle Kiora would be nice, since it would also save Eureka.
Edit: Is there a cheap way to return a land to the battlefield, as in something that doesn't require colored mana other than blue or red? I'm thinking of using life early on in the sequence, so we can use green mana for Stream of Life. But, I'm not sure how to transition to life from say blue mana.
Oof. After a more thorough look-through, it looks like I am missing Recoup, Harmless Offering, and Caged Sun from the deck. Which puts us one card over.
Do you guys see ways to cut card slots in this latest deck? If not, this may be the first deck that is otherwise working, but we have to reject due to the size limitation.
I won't pretend to fully understand the workings of the UTM part of this deck yet, but from what I've gathered so far, the restriction appears to basically be "we can't allow ourselves to do ANYTHING that might boost or even stop the Turing Machine, or we go infinite", hence the no Vedalken Orrery and layers only plus sorcery speed. But I think there may be away to allow some flash execution at the layer level while blocking it in the Turing machine by stealing a trick from the old n-stage framework: what if we made it so that in order to start the turing machine, you had to destroy the Vedalken Orrery?
It seems to me that if we can find a way to 1. make the only way to deal damage to our Arcbond creatures be by destroying an artifact, 2. make the only way to destroy artifacts a global effect like Shatterstorm, 3. either replace Coat of Arms or make it survive the Shatterstorm,then we can make a 2-state framework around our UTM, where we can either be running the UTM or have the ability to cast spells with flash. Then any time you want to get going again, you need some way of getting back Vedalken Orrery (and Dowsing Dagger) that you couldn't do without Orrery already out.
I'm not sure what requirements there are around how the damage has to be dealt, but either Perilous Myr or Volatile Rig could turn total artifact destruction into damage, and no copies of either could survive a Shatterstorm. Indestructibility would save Coat of Arms without being able to save anything else, since it's an aura and we can't copy it, though we'd then have to prove we couldn't make a loop by having it save the Orrery instead. I don't have a good way to do that yet, but it doesn't seem impossible to crack: you just need to find a way to rebuy Orrery that doesn't work on Coat of Arms. And if we do, we unlock a LOT of new layers to fit in with fewer cards, maybe even a stage if we're lucky.
Welcome back Stakfish! Already with the cool ideas.
Edit: I think there's no worry about going infinite if we don't save Coat of Arms; then creatures' toughness is never boosted, so Arcbonded creatures will die in a set number of damage instances.
Edit: Okay, so the big issue is this: We need to not have a Xathrid Necromancer, or whatever we are using to create the tokens, on our side during the computation, or we can affect the outcome by choosing whether to resolve it before or after the Arcbond triggers. A lot of our machinations have been around making sure that a Xathrid Necromancer is not on our side during these computations. So your idea is really good, but to make it work, we need to have the Necromancer have to be gone somehow.
Edit: Hmmm, what about a destroy/sacrifice all creatures that we control, plus March of the Machines? So we have to kill off all our creatures and and artifacts in order to get the computation started. Looks like a possibility.
Of course, constantly killing off all our creatures means that we probably won't be able to have creature layers or stages. But, there are still the possibilities of mana and life stages.
So, we start a computation by playing Desolation Giant with March of the Machines on the battlefield, destroying all our creatures and enchantments. Killing off Perilous Myr allows us to damage an opponent's Arcbonded creature, and start the computation. Seething Anger allows us to bounce all our artifacts, which we can play and get copies of thanks to Mirrorworks. In particular, we can play Vedalken Orrery, get a copy, bounce it with Seething Anger, then play it again and get a Mirrorworks trigger. We can then respond to the trigger by playing the Desolation Giant, and after the computation is done, the Mirrorworks trigger will resolve, and we will get Vedalken Orrery back.
We can also animate Coat of Arms, Mirrorweave an opposing plant token into another copy of it, then put Indestructibility on Vedalken Orrery to go infinite. I think we can just cut Indestructibility at this point, I don't think that does anything.
But, our traditional stages made heavy use of creature types, which are messed up thanks to Artificial Evolution now. We can still use colors, but if try to use Chrome Mox for mana stages, it seems like we can't have both a stage creature and a transition creature, since the transition creature would have to be the same color as the stage creature, and having two creatures of the stage color along with Chrome Mox would go infinite. So it is somewhat harder to make stages than it was before.
Should we just shoot for the moon immediately? How would we go about getting a hyperstage?
We are destroying creatures every computation, so that seems to kill off the notion of creature stages. So the most we can get would be a hyperstage, going life / mana or mana / life, presumably with Worldpurge or Worldfire. Also, we are currently using Spellweaver Volute as a way of recasting our Arcbond and Artificial Evolution, so that removes that card from the process. And while there is still Goblin Dark-Dwellers and Spell Queller, the most likely prospect is probably Spellweaver Helix.
For the BB computation, we probably need to fuel it by some color of mana; so far we have been using red mana, because of Recoup. That would mean we would use Worldpurge over Worldfire, so we would go mana / life. Hmmm, but if we use Recoup, then we would have a cheap way of flashbacking Acorn Harvest, without needing to pay life for it. I guess we can try to use K'rrik, Son of Yawgmoth? So we would pay for the hyperstage using black mana / life. The primary stage could use green mana.
Or, we could find some way to fuel the BB computation without using Recoup, which might free things up. Using K'rrik means we waste both black mana and life at the same time, which I don't like.
Ooh, nice ideas! It would be great if we could get a stage combo (or especially a hyperstage!) going on top of a BB-computation.
Btw the previous deck was not missing Recoup, only the other two cards, which puts it exactly within the limit. In fact, I think the Dowsing Dagger could also be cut since we can just donate our tokens.
Hmmm, I think that we can have creature stages after all. We can perform the BB computations at the top of the stack, when all our creature tokens are already tapped, so that killing them all won't be a problem. Killing the stage creature is not a problem, since the destruction effect will destroy the Mimic Vat as well. We can bounce the stage creature to our hand to keep it around.
Another issue though - if we are using the Bloodbond March stage paradigm, we need to update our Bloodbond March / Psychic Battle enchantments to our BB numbers. So, we want to be able to copy enchantments. Usually, we did this with Allay, but Allay is not good since it can destroy Dralnu's Crusades during a computation. We would like to use just red or colorless mana to get more copies of enchantments, if possible. We could use, say, Gleeful Sabotage, but that would use up both red and green mana at the base level. We don't want to use blue or white mana, since if we had those we could cast Worldpurge, and we don't want to use black mana, since the idea was to use life to pay for black mana at the hyperstage level. So, we're kinda running out of colors.
Okay, after some thought I think I might have a hyperstage. It's actually a lot harder than you'd think, because we can't key off creatures for it AT ALL: Cowardice is a massive nonbo with Artificial Evolution and Arcbond. I'm still using it combined with the targeting instants to bounce Desolation Giant, but nothing else. I'm also using Satyr's Cunning to make massive amounts of tokens we can Mirrorweave into copies of our scaling enchantments, while padding the Thousand-Year Storm count (I've included basically every scaling mechanism, since I'm not sure which are necessary).
We start by playing Flash of Defiance, paying 3 life. That lets us replay Gerrard's Verdict, which lets us replay Worldpurge, which lets us replay Refurbish. Note that any other order you cast the sorceries just fizzles, since Worldpurge either doesn't do anything, doesn't give you any value from Refurbish, or both.
I haven't paid too close attention to the resource management here so this probably has an infinite (I'm not sure how cheap to make red mana, for instance), but as a proof of concept this seems shockingly possible.
Edit: Red mana is way too cheap here, so that needs a fix. And this doesn't have a stage inside it, just a layer, so it still needs some work.
Okay new gameplan: The stage is now repeatedly casting Satyr's Cunning, which triggers the Volute, which activates Artificial Evolution, letting us bounce both Xathrid Necromancer and Desolation Giant to our hand. We can then imprint both of those on Chrome Mox, producing a B and an R, but forcing us to resolve a Bloodbond March to get them back on the battlefield. Every time we do, Desolation Giant triggers, and we can either set off our BB combo or not depending on how we sculpt our board state with Cowardice and Artificial Evolution. We can also use Evolution to bounce and replay Vedalken Orrery for Mirrorworks triggers, so we can have some waiting for us whenever we finish the computation. That gives us a stage worth of BB iterations, where the stage resource is red mana. We don't rely on Recoup anymore, which is nice, and Satyr's Cunning gives us tokens we can Mirrorweave, which is also nice.
Next up, the Hyperstage generates lots of red mana with Inner Fire, which we can then feed into our stage combo, which feeds into the Busy Beaver. When we run out of Inner Fire copies, we cast Worldpurge and use Gerrard's Verdict to gain the life back, same as the old megastage deck. Then to rebuild we resolve down to a Satyr's Cunning/Thousand-Year Storm trigger, generate a bajilion Satyrs, then resolve a Mana Echoes trigger below that to get enough mana to pay for any Mirrorworks triggers we need. That also lets us use Chrome Mox to get our critical red mana back via Desolation Giant.
As long as Desolation Giant is the only red creature in the deck moving forward, this should actually work!
I haven't digested the combo yet, but one possible issue: if the idea is to chain Spellweaver Helixes, I don't think that works. If the copy cast by Spellweaver Helix triggered another Spellweaver Helix, then it should trigger the same spellweaver Helix, so any time someone has a Spellweaver Helix they could be able to cast spells infinitely, which I'm pretty sure is not the case. But just having two Flash of Defiance and a Panharmonicon should be fine?
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The last Deepwood Elder version doesn't create our own creature tokens, but we do have some of our own creatures. Besides Rayami and Bonded Fetch, we also have Xathrid Necromancer / Rotlung Reanimator, Deepwood Elder, Floodchaser, and two Zetalpas. We would like to have Confessor as well.
So, do we go infinite if we have 5-6 Rotlung Reanimators? FortyTwo described an infinite computation, but it had 12 RR's. What is the minimum number that is needed? It's worth figuring out I think.
It's a little hard to say, but I think 3 can be cut for:
X->2Y,4ACX
Y->X,2BCY
and it still works?
Any system with only one triggering type can't sustain itself, as whichever RR recreates it will be the same size and die at the same time.
But actually we're still able to make our own tokens using the Mogg Infestation. An alternative is Desolation Giant, which in fact doesn't have the issue of being able to kill a donated BF (without also killing our own stuff anyway).
I don't see a way to transition from black to blue, so right now we are at like 10 -> 13X -> 11 before combat.
Edit: Hmmm, now that this version doesn't have Deepwood Elder, maybe jfb's idea to put in Natural Order and recycle some green creature for its ETB, can work? We could use something like Plant Elemental to sacrifice a Forest, or Quarry Beetle to return a land.
The problem is, it could also recycle Horned Kavu in the current deck. If we put green creatures above white creatures, then Horned Kavu could return the green creature that we are using for ETB. So we have a conflict. But, there could be other ways to use Return to the Ranks. Any ideas?
Edit: So, how about the following:
2 Eureka
3 Omniscience
4 Thousand-Year Storm
5 Spellweaver Volute
6 Pull from Eternity
7 Recoup
8 Coat of Arms
9 Xathrid Necromancer
10 Arcbond
11 Artificial Evolution
12 Mirrorweave
13 Dowsing Dagger
14 Dralnu's Crusade
15 Starfield of Nyx
16 Caltrops
17 Chameleon Blur
18 Upwelling
19 Rayami, First of the Fallen
20 Bonded Fetch
21 Zetalpa, Primal Dawn
22 Zetalpa, Primal Dawn
23 Desolation Giant
25 Mana Echoes
26 Seize the Day
27 Great Furnace
28 Rings of Brighthearth
29 Amulet of Vigor
30 Echo Storm
31 Floodchaser
32 Blessings of Nature
33 Hidden Herbalists
34 Panharmonicon
35 Return to the Ranks
36 Icatian Town
37 Ruins of Trokair
38 Quarry Beetle
39 Natural Order
40 Hunting Drake
41 Silver Drake
42 Morbid Bloom
44 Kiora, the Crashing Wave
45 Sarkhan the Masterless
46 Yawgmoth's Bargain
47 Angelheart Vial
48 Flame Rift
49 Alhammerret's Archive
50 Mirror Gallery
51 Temple Bell
52 Spiritual Focus
53 Coercion
54 Possessed Portal
55 Leyline of Punishment
4 Soul Scourge
1 Laquatus's Champion
So, the only way I found to incorporate both creature layers was to put Kiora after Unstable Frontier, and then we end on opponent life rather than our own. So no Sunspring Expeditions unfortunately. Still, the main goal is another layer.
Edit: That deck seems to work, although Morbid Bloom doesn't get a layers worth of creatures since we run out of creatures in the graveyard. (Kin-Tree Invocation works though)
Edit 2: How are we getting Unstable Frontier into the hand?
We'd like to move Kiora earlier, so that we can go back to the Sunspring Expedition strategy. However, right now we have too many things transitioning down to mana - we have green creatures transitioning to Hidden Herbalist producing green mana, Quarry Beetle transitioning to a land producing white mana, and Unstable Frontier making Swamps to produce black mana. So there's no mana color left for Kiora to transition to, if we want to put it below Unstable Frontier. It looks like we would have to make one of the creature layers transition to something else. Kiora is the obvious choice - if we could find a creature that is green or of CMC <= 2 that can allow us to recycle Kiora, we could get Sunspring Expedition again.
In this case, we can have both Red Mana Battery and Angelheart Vial, to limit the damage to just one layer. With Angelheart Vial, there's no hope of ending in our life, so no Sunspring Expedition.
Using green mana to recycle Kiora would be nice, since it would also save Eureka.
Edit: Is there a cheap way to return a land to the battlefield, as in something that doesn't require colored mana other than blue or red? I'm thinking of using life early on in the sequence, so we can use green mana for Stream of Life. But, I'm not sure how to transition to life from say blue mana.
Edit: Okay, another proposed deck:
2 Violent Outburst
3 Hypergenesis
4 Omniscience
5 Thousand-Year Storm
6 Spellweaver Volute
7 Pull from Eternity
8 Recoup
9 Coat of Arms
10 Xathrid Necromancer
11 Arcbond
12 Artificial Evolution
13 Mirrorweave
14 Dowsing Dagger
15 Dralnu's Crusade
16 Starfield of Nyx
17 Caltrops
18 Chameleon Blur
19 Upwelling
21 Bonded Fetch
22 Zetalpa, Primal Dawn
23 Zetalpa, Primal Dawn
24 Desolation Giant
25 Mystic Speculation
26 Fuel for the Cause
27 Mana Echoes
28 Seize the Day
29 Red Mana Battery
30 Great Furnace
31 Rings of Brighthearth
32 Amulet of Vigor
33 Echo Storm
34 Svyelunite Temple
35 Splendid Reclamation
36 Hidden Herbalists
37 Panharmonicon
38 Return to the Ranks
39 Icatian Town
41 Kiora, the Crashing Wave
42 Sarkhan the Masterless
43 Carven Caryatid
44 Natural Order
45 Hunting Drake
46 Silver Drake
47 Kin-Tree Invocation
48 Unstable Frontier
49 Victorious Destruction
50 Angelheart Vial
51 Flame Rift
52 Alhammerret's Archive
53 Mirror Gallery
54 Temple Bell
55 Spiritual Focus
56 Coercion
57 Possessed Portal
58 Leyline of Punishment
Other than that, not seeing an issue with the deck.
- Enchantment bounce for help with the setup (Stern Proctor should work); this can replace Flame Rift.
- Caged Sun to go with the Unstable Frontier
- Harmless Offering to give the opponent their Alhammeret's Archives.
(also Seize the day should be Relentless Assault)
Do you guys see ways to cut card slots in this latest deck? If not, this may be the first deck that is otherwise working, but we have to reject due to the size limitation.
I won't pretend to fully understand the workings of the UTM part of this deck yet, but from what I've gathered so far, the restriction appears to basically be "we can't allow ourselves to do ANYTHING that might boost or even stop the Turing Machine, or we go infinite", hence the no Vedalken Orrery and layers only plus sorcery speed. But I think there may be away to allow some flash execution at the layer level while blocking it in the Turing machine by stealing a trick from the old n-stage framework: what if we made it so that in order to start the turing machine, you had to destroy the Vedalken Orrery?
It seems to me that if we can find a way to 1. make the only way to deal damage to our Arcbond creatures be by destroying an artifact, 2. make the only way to destroy artifacts a global effect like Shatterstorm, 3. either replace Coat of Arms or make it survive the Shatterstorm,then we can make a 2-state framework around our UTM, where we can either be running the UTM or have the ability to cast spells with flash. Then any time you want to get going again, you need some way of getting back Vedalken Orrery (and Dowsing Dagger) that you couldn't do without Orrery already out.
I'm not sure what requirements there are around how the damage has to be dealt, but either Perilous Myr or Volatile Rig could turn total artifact destruction into damage, and no copies of either could survive a Shatterstorm. Indestructibility would save Coat of Arms without being able to save anything else, since it's an aura and we can't copy it, though we'd then have to prove we couldn't make a loop by having it save the Orrery instead. I don't have a good way to do that yet, but it doesn't seem impossible to crack: you just need to find a way to rebuy Orrery that doesn't work on Coat of Arms. And if we do, we unlock a LOT of new layers to fit in with fewer cards, maybe even a stage if we're lucky.
Edit: I think there's no worry about going infinite if we don't save Coat of Arms; then creatures' toughness is never boosted, so Arcbonded creatures will die in a set number of damage instances.
Edit: Okay, so the big issue is this: We need to not have a Xathrid Necromancer, or whatever we are using to create the tokens, on our side during the computation, or we can affect the outcome by choosing whether to resolve it before or after the Arcbond triggers. A lot of our machinations have been around making sure that a Xathrid Necromancer is not on our side during these computations. So your idea is really good, but to make it work, we need to have the Necromancer have to be gone somehow.
Edit: Hmmm, what about a destroy/sacrifice all creatures that we control, plus March of the Machines? So we have to kill off all our creatures and and artifacts in order to get the computation started. Looks like a possibility.
Of course, constantly killing off all our creatures means that we probably won't be able to have creature layers or stages. But, there are still the possibilities of mana and life stages.
Edit: Okay, so here's a starting idea:
2 Xathrid Necromancer
3 Arcbond
4 Artificial Evolution
5 Mirrorweave
6 Dowsing Dagger
7 Dralnu's Crusade
8 Starfield of Nyx
10 March of the Machines
11 Perilous Myr
12 Indestructibility
13 Vedalken Orrery
14 Spellweaver Volute
15 Pull from Eternity
16 Recoup
18 Mirrorworks
So, we start a computation by playing Desolation Giant with March of the Machines on the battlefield, destroying all our creatures and enchantments. Killing off Perilous Myr allows us to damage an opponent's Arcbonded creature, and start the computation. Seething Anger allows us to bounce all our artifacts, which we can play and get copies of thanks to Mirrorworks. In particular, we can play Vedalken Orrery, get a copy, bounce it with Seething Anger, then play it again and get a Mirrorworks trigger. We can then respond to the trigger by playing the Desolation Giant, and after the computation is done, the Mirrorworks trigger will resolve, and we will get Vedalken Orrery back.
Perilous Myr doesn't work here, because it's a creature whether or not March of the Machines is out. We can just swap that for Goblin Boom Keg.
We can also animate Coat of Arms, Mirrorweave an opposing plant token into another copy of it, then put Indestructibility on Vedalken Orrery to go infinite. I think we can just cut Indestructibility at this point, I don't think that does anything.
I don't actually see how we're rebuying Desolation Giant here, or how Seething Anger rebuys Vedalken Orrery. You guys cut Cowardice, right?
Looking at potential stages, Eternal Dragon and Cut the Tethers could probably do something together.
2 Xathrid Necromancer
3 Arcbond
4 Artificial Evolution
5 Mirrorweave
6 Dowsing Dagger
7 Dralnu's Crusade
8 Starfield of Nyx
10 March of the Machines
11 Goblin Boom Keg
12 Vedalken Orrery
13 Spellweaver Volute
14 Pull from Eternity
16 Cowardice
17 Mirrorworks
I've got a good feeling about this idea.
Edit: So, contemplating stages - the easiest and most prolific way to make stages seems to be the Bloodbond March / Rings of Brighthearth/Psychic Battle/Grip of Chaos method. Of couse, we can also try to add other ideas to add on to this.
But, our traditional stages made heavy use of creature types, which are messed up thanks to Artificial Evolution now. We can still use colors, but if try to use Chrome Mox for mana stages, it seems like we can't have both a stage creature and a transition creature, since the transition creature would have to be the same color as the stage creature, and having two creatures of the stage color along with Chrome Mox would go infinite. So it is somewhat harder to make stages than it was before.
This seems very tricky to pull off, but that's a promising start already
.
We are destroying creatures every computation, so that seems to kill off the notion of creature stages. So the most we can get would be a hyperstage, going life / mana or mana / life, presumably with Worldpurge or Worldfire. Also, we are currently using Spellweaver Volute as a way of recasting our Arcbond and Artificial Evolution, so that removes that card from the process. And while there is still Goblin Dark-Dwellers and Spell Queller, the most likely prospect is probably Spellweaver Helix.
For the BB computation, we probably need to fuel it by some color of mana; so far we have been using red mana, because of Recoup. That would mean we would use Worldpurge over Worldfire, so we would go mana / life. Hmmm, but if we use Recoup, then we would have a cheap way of flashbacking Acorn Harvest, without needing to pay life for it. I guess we can try to use K'rrik, Son of Yawgmoth? So we would pay for the hyperstage using black mana / life. The primary stage could use green mana.
Or, we could find some way to fuel the BB computation without using Recoup, which might free things up. Using K'rrik means we waste both black mana and life at the same time, which I don't like.
Btw the previous deck was not missing Recoup, only the other two cards, which puts it exactly within the limit. In fact, I think the Dowsing Dagger could also be cut since we can just donate our tokens.
Hmmm, I think that we can have creature stages after all. We can perform the BB computations at the top of the stack, when all our creature tokens are already tapped, so that killing them all won't be a problem. Killing the stage creature is not a problem, since the destruction effect will destroy the Mimic Vat as well. We can bounce the stage creature to our hand to keep it around.
Another issue though - if we are using the Bloodbond March stage paradigm, we need to update our Bloodbond March / Psychic Battle enchantments to our BB numbers. So, we want to be able to copy enchantments. Usually, we did this with Allay, but Allay is not good since it can destroy Dralnu's Crusades during a computation. We would like to use just red or colorless mana to get more copies of enchantments, if possible. We could use, say, Gleeful Sabotage, but that would use up both red and green mana at the base level. We don't want to use blue or white mana, since if we had those we could cast Worldpurge, and we don't want to use black mana, since the idea was to use life to pay for black mana at the hyperstage level. So, we're kinda running out of colors.
2 Xathrid Necromancer
3 Arcbond
4 Artificial Evolution
5 Mirrorweave
6 Dowsing Dagger
7 Dralnu's Crusade
8 Starfield of Nyx
9 Desolation Giant
10 March of the Machines
11 Goblin Boom Keg
12 Vedalken Orrery
14 Pull from Eternity
15 Cowardice
16 Mirrorworks
17 Bloodbond March
18 Cephalid Shrine
19 Thousand-Year Storm
20 Satyr's Cunning
21 Mana Echoes
22 Scrap Trawler
23 Chrome Mox
25 Inner Fire
26 Worldpurge
27 Worldpurge
28 Gerrard's Verdict
29 Gerrard's Verdict
30 Flash of Defiance
31 Flash of Defiance
32 Drownyard Temple
We start by playing Flash of Defiance, paying 3 life. That lets us replay Gerrard's Verdict, which lets us replay Worldpurge, which lets us replay Refurbish. Note that any other order you cast the sorceries just fizzles, since Worldpurge either doesn't do anything, doesn't give you any value from Refurbish, or both.
Refurbish lets you repeatedly rebuy Vedalken Orrery, Goblin Boom Keg, etc., iterating the BB combo each time. Worldpurge erases all the progress while bouncing Drownyard Temple, which can be discarded to the Gerrard's Verdict to gain life. Then, we can resolve back down, get some Mana Echoes triggers, use those to pay for Mirrorworks on Red Mana Battery, and rebuild from there.
I haven't paid too close attention to the resource management here so this probably has an infinite (I'm not sure how cheap to make red mana, for instance), but as a proof of concept this seems shockingly possible.
Edit: Red mana is way too cheap here, so that needs a fix. And this doesn't have a stage inside it, just a layer, so it still needs some work.
Okay new gameplan: The stage is now repeatedly casting Satyr's Cunning, which triggers the Volute, which activates Artificial Evolution, letting us bounce both Xathrid Necromancer and Desolation Giant to our hand. We can then imprint both of those on Chrome Mox, producing a B and an R, but forcing us to resolve a Bloodbond March to get them back on the battlefield. Every time we do, Desolation Giant triggers, and we can either set off our BB combo or not depending on how we sculpt our board state with Cowardice and Artificial Evolution. We can also use Evolution to bounce and replay Vedalken Orrery for Mirrorworks triggers, so we can have some waiting for us whenever we finish the computation. That gives us a stage worth of BB iterations, where the stage resource is red mana. We don't rely on Recoup anymore, which is nice, and Satyr's Cunning gives us tokens we can Mirrorweave, which is also nice.
Next up, the Hyperstage generates lots of red mana with Inner Fire, which we can then feed into our stage combo, which feeds into the Busy Beaver. When we run out of Inner Fire copies, we cast Worldpurge and use Gerrard's Verdict to gain the life back, same as the old megastage deck. Then to rebuild we resolve down to a Satyr's Cunning/Thousand-Year Storm trigger, generate a bajilion Satyrs, then resolve a Mana Echoes trigger below that to get enough mana to pay for any Mirrorworks triggers we need. That also lets us use Chrome Mox to get our critical red mana back via Desolation Giant.
As long as Desolation Giant is the only red creature in the deck moving forward, this should actually work!