Change of Heart isn't a problem here because Cowardice is gone, otherwise it would absolutely be an issue. Living Twister, on the other hand, definitely is. I'm not sure about Raff Capashen, Ship's Mage... Are there any historic spells in the deck which can interact with the combo?
Re the new list: that looks good, besides the Living Twister thing (we can also spend a W to bounce Living Twister with Aegis Automaton, giving us the R we need to activate the extra ability), but we might still be able to find a different way around it. I don't think Sealed Fate works here without Recoup, though: we can just use a sorcery with a B flashback cost.
Okay, so the green stage is borked. New plan: We can go back to some very old tech - using cycling creatures, before Chrome Mox was a thing.
However, we need a way to put lands back into the library. Glowspore Shaman seems like a good candidate for a solution; I'll see what I can come up with.
I wasn't able to get a second additional layer, unfortunately. Disciple of Malice has protection from white, but it's black, so it is vulnerable to Escape Routes. I was thinking of using Homing Sliver to go with Dryad Arbor, but Dryad Arbor produces green, and we're back to the nontargeting Temur again.
So this isn't more stages than the previous deck, but we don't have the enchantment problem here at least. (Although I would still like to hear possible solutions to that)
There can be creatures on our side of the board during computation, because our Xathrid Necromancer can create some when we start one; and they can be bounced by Escape Routes messing up the computation.
They can also be flickered (and thus removed, as they're tokens) by our Cloudshift.
Oh, but I guess we can play Death Pit Offering from our hand to start with, and then mess things up with Cloudshift.
How else should we recycle Death Pit Offering? I guess if we can just retrieve it with Argivian Find, and play it from our hand. Maybe we just don't have a way to get rid of Starfield of Nyx, so enchantments are always creatures, and all will die each computation except for Starfield of Nyx.
Hmm, the issue there is that there's nothing requiring us to play the Starfield of Nyx in the first place; it's necessary to copy the Dralnu's Crusades but an interruptible infinite loop could be set up without them.
Edit: Hmm, an issue: Rings of Brighthearth can copy our cycling abilities, allowing us to potentially draw many lands. I don't think this is a problem with the Walker of Secret Ways stage, since we have to also bounce the Glowspore Shaman, and even though both the Jhessian Zombies and Glowspore Shaman can get a lot of copies of their abilities, we can't interweave them to recycle the Island more than once.
But, things are different with the Temur Sabertooth stage. If we have a bunch of blue mana, we can activate the Bloated Toad's cycling ability and get a lot of copies, and between each one we can bounce and replay the Glowspore Shaman to return the lands to the library. So, we get too much mana out of this.
Looking for alternatives, Illusionist's Bracers looks nice, except that it requires sorcery speed to equip, and the creatures that we equip them on will keep dying to Death Pit Offering. So that doesn't look like it works. But maybe Kurkesh, Onnake Ancient will work, if we couple it with Liquimetal Coating to turn our bouncing creatures into artifacts? That should be fine, I think.
Hmm, but then Bloated Toad will only fetch one land at a time. How do we gain life out of that stage?
Edit: Oh, never mind. Worldpurge borks up the landcycling strategy. So, it's back to the Chrome Mox version, I guess. But, there still is the enchantment problem.
Edit: So, one possible fix is if we didn't have any enchantments with colors that would cause problems. We can get rid of K'rrik, Son of Yawgmoth, and go back to using Flash of Defiance. Then, only white and blue colors would be troublesome.
For white, it seems like we need either Opalescence or Starfield of Nyx. I guess we could have no way to get them off the battlefield.
Edit: Yeah, I don't know about those last two. Maybe the best way is not to have a way to fetch enchantments from the graveyard. We could remove Starfield of Nyx to keep our enchantments from dying, and just have six copies of Dralnu's Crusade.
The problem then becomes Death Pit Offering. We can't fetch it from the graveyard, so we have to bounce or flicker it. But, we can't use nonrepeatable sorceries, whereas instants have the ability to mess up a computation. Perhaps an ability coming from a creature or artifact, that won't be around when the computation is going on? Does anyone know of anything like that?
If not, we may have to go back to Soulblast. The problem there is that we don't have flash for enchantments, so we won't be able to play our enchantments when Worldpurge brings them back to our hand. I guess Leonin Relic-Warder could take care of that. The other issue is that our artifacts will die at the start of a computation, so we need a way to bring them back. An artifact only version of Argivian Find would be good.
Hmm, maybe. The thing with creatures though is that we need to recycle those as well. One possibility is to switch Artful Dodge / Mirozel for Walker of Secret Ways, and then use Walker of Secret Ways to bounce all of our creatures. Then we can have Aegis Automaton bounce Voice of Reason or Guardian of the Guildpact. The problem there is, how do we use Aegis Automaton to gain life for the hyperstage? Aegis Automaton seemingly only additionally bounces creatures with protection from blue, and I don't think there is any protection from blue lifegain creatures.
So, if we use Walker of Secret Ways, we can't get life from the white mana stage. If we use Mirozel, we can't bounce our creatures at that level. If we try to protect our creatures under a Portcullis or something, we could protect Xathrid Necromancer and bring it back.
If we don't use creatures, sorceries can't be repeated without Recoup. If we try to use instants, they always seem to be able to mess up the computation by holding them in our hand rather than following the plan.
So, I'm a little stymied at the moment.
Edit: Oh, I guess we can get life from the white mana stage. Add in Bloated Toad, and cycle it to get Beacon of Immortality from the library, which we can cast to gain life.
That gives us some hope for Walker of Secret Ways. But, Walker of Secret Ways can bounce itself, providing us with the mana that we need for the activation. So we can't have any more blue creatures, eliminating Triton Cavalry and Stern Proctor among others, both of which could have been very useful. We also can't have any more white creatures, so no Archon of Falling Stars. Sadly, that eliminates the two most useful creature colors for recycling enchantments and artifacts.
Edit: Stern Proctor and Eldrazi Displacer are enough to handle recycling of artifacts and enchantments. However, we have to go back to the Mirozel version, so we need to protect them somehow. Parallax Wave could do it, but if we exile Stern Proctor with Parallax Wave, we can't use Stern Proctor to bounce Parallax Wave. ¯\_( )_/¯
How exactly does repeating a computation work?
AFAIK we need to set things up such that a Vedalken Orrery or equivalent gets returned after a computation, and then cast a sorcery to trigger the instants and adjust creature numbers, and then get our artifacts/enchantments back. Does the current deck do all that?
Our plan to destroy all our artifacts also removes the Coat of arms. Is there a way to give one to the opponent without them losing their necromancers? Cytoshape might be safe.
The deck currently doesn't do that, because I haven't figured out a way to safely recycle our artifacts and enchantments, without enabling enchantments to be imprinted on Chrome Mox and recycled, and while keeping our creatures from dying.
If, for example, we could have Stern Proctor and Eldrazi Displacer, and have a way to keep them from dying in the Mirozel version, I think we would be okay. We can use Eldrazi Displacer to freely flicker Stern Proctor to bounce enchantments and artifacts as we please. We can first bounce Starfield of Nyx after we have copied over a bunch of Dralnu's Crusades over to the opponent, and from then on bounce Death Pit Offering to start computations when we want. We can bounce our artifacts, and replay them, to get Mirrorworks tokens, then bounce them back to our hand to keep them from dying. In particular, we can bounce Vedalken Orrery, get a Mirrorworks trigger, respond by bouncing Vedalken Orrery back to our hand, and then respond by starting a computation. We can use Artful Dodge to cast Arcbond and Artificial Evolution, while also bouncing Mirozel. So I think it should work out okay, once we find a way to protect our creatures.
For the Walker of the Secret Ways version, we would need a sorcery to trigger Arcbond and Artificial Evolution. Since Walker of Secret Ways can also bounce Xathrid Necromancer, we can use the black mana to cast a flashback black sorcery to trigger them. Walker of the Secret Ways can also bounce our creatures, but since we can't have Stern Proctor or Triton Cavalry, I don't know how to handle our enchantments and artifacts in this version.
Whoops, I did mean to switch out Mirrorweave for Cytoshape, but never got around to it.
Edit: Hmmm, I had an interesting idea. We use Stern Proctor and Eldrazi Displacer in the Mirozel version, and we protect them by using Aligned Hedron Network coupled with Dual Nature. We flicker Stern Proctor to put a Dual Nature trigger on the stack, then play Aligned Hedron Network to exile all our creatures, while March of the Machines is off the battlefield, so our artifacts don't get exiled. Then, we play March of the Machines, and then Death Pit Offering, to start the computation. Unfortunately, this will kill Aligned Hedron Network, allowing Xathrid Necromancer to come back into play, and affect the computation. So it doesn't quite work, but might be in the vicinity of a working idea.
Nyxbloom Ancient can get extra mana from our chrome mox which is bad.
How does the Reality Spasm thing work? Does Psychic Battle allow for redirecting targets that get chosen automatically by Precursor Golem? Or do we need Grip of Chaos for that?
Is it even worth a layer? It seems like the number of copies we get from Golems is around the same as the number of copies we get from TYS.
Oh, in fact the Marble Diamond could be Cytoshaped onto an untapped thing generating too much white mana early.
Oh, oof. Hmm... how do we get white mana? I guess tapped things don't work. A legendary permanent like Nyx Lotus would go to the graveyard, but we would still have a copy on the battlefield, which we could keep copying onto the next untapped creature. We would have to avoid using Death Pit Offering or Worldpurge - could we still go infinite? Yes, I think so.
What other options? There's the opponent's library - Smothering Tithe doesn't work though, since we can copy any Treasure tokens. Opponent's life? Not sure how to make mana out of that.
Combat would be better, if we can figure out a way to do it safely. I was wondering about 0 power creatures with haste, but Coat of Arms means anything with a type can get positive power.
Ooh, nice ideas for combat. Clearing the stack should be fine, since we're at the very end of our combo; we don't have anything that uses the stack after it.
Oh yeah, we need colorless mana. And wow, we can't use Mana Echoes anymore. That's tricky. A mana rock like Mana Crypt won't work, since we can get many copies of Eldrazi Displacer's and Stern Proctor's abilities.
Another issue: Since Cytoshape doesn't target the thing that it copies, other creatures can be turned into Mirozel and thus bounced cheaply. I think Mirrorweave is fine; we can give the opponent Coat of arms and then remove March of the Machines to give them necromancers.
This also prevents a potential issue in which the opponent could be given an Eldrazi Displacer, though it's not actually an issue if there's no way to give them mana to use it. Show and Tell lets them play one Wastes; then Marble Diamond could give them more mana but that's broken anyway. But with Mirrorweave they can't have necromancers and Displacers at the same time avoiding the issue altogether.
I think King Macar should be fine. I was wondering whether we could untap it during an infinite computation, to exile a creature and halt it. But, we can't have King Macar on our side during a computation, and we can't Mirrorweave both King Macar and Xathrid Necromancers over to the opponent.
It would be nice to save one card slot, for a fourth Reality Spasm.
Edit: Hmm, are there some cheap ways to keep the opponent alive at negative life? I was thinking of replacing Bloated Toad and Beacon of Immortality with Abyssal Maw, but we have to keep the opponent alive somehow.
Is this an infinite?
- Have at least 2 Bloodbond Marches (using a copy enchantment)
- Repeatedly play and bounce Mirozel until almost out of red/colourless mana; for lots of BBM triggers
- Exile Mirozel to a Chrome Mox for a blue mana
- Cast Artful Dodge, triggering a few copies of Spellweaver Volute (using more copy enchantments)
- Set up and run a computation from the instants, netting lots of red mana
- Have Pull From Eternity resolve after the computation, getting back the instants and the mirozel
- Resolve a BBM trigger to get Mirozel back onto the battlefield
- Bounce and replay Mirozel, repeat this process for infinite BBM triggers.
Oh, oof. Yeah, we want to bounce Mirozel for a blue mana, and nothing cheaper.
We could replace Eldrazi Displacer with Nephalia Smuggler, using Thousand-Year Elixir to allow us to use it. Does this allow us to flicker creatures often enough? I believe so. The second Artful Dodge / Nephalia Smuggler layer in the Mirozel stage allows to repeat the top layer many times, allowing us many uses of Nephalia Smuggler. So I think this is a fix.
Seems good.
How exactly does the Mirozel stage work now? Are there supposed to be a lot of Bloodbond March triggers? There currently aren't since there's no way to copy enchantments a large number of times.
Is it a problem or is it intended that the only way to get the Mirozel out of exile from a Chrome Mox is to resolve a Pull From Eternity that gets cast off of an Artful Dodge? This makes it not possible to get back blue mana that gets spent on a Smuggler.
Hmm okay, that's a problem. Nephalia Smuggler is only cheap if we get back the blue mana that we spend on it.
I think what we want is a cheaper sorcery. It looks like Mana Echoes is safe now, since we need to use Nephalia Smuggler to bounce Death Pit Offering now. So we can go back to Mystic Speculation.
Edit: Oh, it's okay that there aren't that many Bloodbond Marches. Then the Bloodbond March sections of the stage aren't really layers, they're more like separators for the Astral Dodge layers. Each Astral Dodge layer will still build off of the one below. We do need at least two Bloodbond Marches, since we use up one when building up the stage.
Ok, cool.
The issue with cheap sorceries is that they cast the instants cheaply which bounce the Mirozel. But Goblin Dark Dwellers could work instead of Spellweaver Volute.
So we'd activate the Smuggler, get a ton of Rings of Brighthearth triggers, then we can use them to run computations by flickering the GDD for instants as well as flickering other things; and getting back the Mirozel for blue mana would require resolving a BBM trigger. So this works as a stage.
Does freeing up Volute allow potential for a megastage?
Yeah, the megastage is something we should explore, to see if we can do it, or rule it out. So, we need things that can trigger both the beneficial and destructive effects for the hyperstage and megastage, which we potentially have with Spellweaver Volute and Spellweaver Helix. We also need three different resources, which can be creature tokens, mana, and life. It seems the most convenient to have creatures on the bottom, since each stage level has to eliminate the resources from the previous level. So if we went mana, creatures, life, then the second two stage levels would both have to eliminate mana; if we went life, mana, creatures, the second two stage levels would both have to eliminate life. So far, we've only found Worldpurge and Worldfire to be particularly suited to eliminating mana and life, respectively. Sway of the Stars leaves us at 7 life, which is probably too much. Someone had the interesting idea to use Glissa Sunseeker to control our mana levels. But, Glissa isn't an instant/sorcery, so it would be hard to fit into our paradigm.
So, we would have a creature token stage at the bottom, probably. The big problem is that we probably don't want Cowardice, because of our targeting instants. So, we need creatures that bounce themselves. I've been working with Cowardice for so long, I don't know which ones those are.
I guess it doesn't have to be a traditional Bloodbond March stage, but if it isn't, we would have to come up with something. Stakfish, I would love to hear your thoughts on the possibilities of a megastage!
An issue: Currently, setting up a computation requires sequences involving playing Vedalken Orrery, then responding to its Mirrorworks trigger by bouncing it again. However, doing this requires activating Nephalia Smuggler again, spending extra blue mana.
A solution could be to just allow the real Orrery to die, and later get it out of the graveyard with a creature ETB or a cheap spell.
So to start a computation we use a Rings of Brighthearth trigger to flicker Stern Proctor, bouncing the nontoken Orrery. There are also some more Stern Proctor triggers due to Panharmonicon. We then play it, get a Mirrorworks trigger, and respond to that with Day of the Dragons, March of the Machines, and Death Pit Offering.
The computation happens, then the mirrorworks trigger resolves for an Orrery, then a Stern Proctor trigger resolves bouncing Day of the Dragons getting back our creatures. One of them is Goblin Dark-Dwellers which casts Ritual of Restoration returning the nontoken orrery to hand. So this works.
Then, the start is a little different as we can't use Black Lotus - but starting Mana CryptIslandShow and Tell works.
Is it an issue for Goblin Dark-Dwellers to be able to cast Show and Tell? I don't think so since all it really does play out lands, which aren't cheaply recycled. It also allows the opponent to play out their lands but there's nothing they can use them on.
Edit: Actually, we don't need to make changes:
We flicker Stern Proctor bouncing nontoken Orrery and keeping an extra trigger, then flicker GDD casting Show and Tell, and in response start the computation. Then we resolve Show and Tell putting down the Orrery, then resolve a Stern Proctor trigger to get the creatures back.
Re the new list: that looks good, besides the Living Twister thing (we can also spend a W to bounce Living Twister with Aegis Automaton, giving us the R we need to activate the extra ability), but we might still be able to find a different way around it. I don't think Sealed Fate works here without Recoup, though: we can just use a sorcery with a B flashback cost.
However, we need a way to put lands back into the library. Glowspore Shaman seems like a good candidate for a solution; I'll see what I can come up with.
Edit: Okay, so I got:
2 Xathrid Necromancer
3 Arcbond
4 Artificial Evolution
5 Mirrorweave
6 Dowsing Dagger
7 Dralnu's Crusade
8 Starfield of Nyx
9 Death Pit Offering
10 March of the Machines
11 Goblin Boom Keg
12 Vedalken Orrery
13 Cloudshift
15 Pull from Eternity
16 Argivian Find
17 Mana Echoes
18 Invulnerability
19 Thousand-Year Storm
20 Glowspore Shaman
21 Escape Routes
22 Jhessian Zombies
23 Bloodbond March
24 Cephalid Shrine
25 Rings of Brighthearth
26 Island
28 Worldpurge
29 Lingering Souls
30 Lingering Souls
31 Panharmonicon
32 Svylenuite Temple
33 Radiant Fountain
34 K'rrik, Son of Yawgmoth
35 Aegis Automaton
36 Valley Rannet
37 Plateau
38 Centaur Safeguard
I wasn't able to get a second additional layer, unfortunately. Disciple of Malice has protection from white, but it's black, so it is vulnerable to Escape Routes. I was thinking of using Homing Sliver to go with Dryad Arbor, but Dryad Arbor produces green, and we're back to the nontargeting Temur again.
So this isn't more stages than the previous deck, but we don't have the enchantment problem here at least. (Although I would still like to hear possible solutions to that)
They can also be flickered (and thus removed, as they're tokens) by our Cloudshift.
Oh, but I guess we can play Death Pit Offering from our hand to start with, and then mess things up with Cloudshift.
How else should we recycle Death Pit Offering? I guess if we can just retrieve it with Argivian Find, and play it from our hand. Maybe we just don't have a way to get rid of Starfield of Nyx, so enchantments are always creatures, and all will die each computation except for Starfield of Nyx.
So maybe just get rid of Cloudshift?
I guess we can replace Escape Routes with Walker of the Ways, and Valley Rannet with Bloated Toad. The question is, how to gain life with Aegis Automaton - there probably aren't any life gaining creatures with protection from blue.
Edit: Okay, revised deck:
2 Xathrid Necromancer
3 Arcbond
4 Artificial Evolution
5 Mirrorweave
6 Dowsing Dagger
7 Dralnu's Crusade
8 Starfield of Nyx
9 Death Pit Offering
10 March of the Machines
11 Goblin Boom Keg
12 Vedalken Orrery
14 Pull from Eternity
15 Argivian Find
16 Mana Echoes
17 Invulnerability
18 Thousand-Year Storm
19 Glowspore Shaman
20 Walker of Secret Ways
21 Jhessian Zombies
22 Bloodbond March
23 Cephalid Shrine
24 Rings of Brighthearth
25 Island
27 Worldpurge
28 Lingering Souls
29 Lingering Souls
30 Panharmonicon
31 Svylenuite Temple
32 Radiant Fountain
33 K'rrik, Son of Yawgmoth
34 Temur Sabertooth
35 Bloated Toad
36 Forest
37 Plains
38 Ancestral Tribute
Edit: Hmm, an issue: Rings of Brighthearth can copy our cycling abilities, allowing us to potentially draw many lands. I don't think this is a problem with the Walker of Secret Ways stage, since we have to also bounce the Glowspore Shaman, and even though both the Jhessian Zombies and Glowspore Shaman can get a lot of copies of their abilities, we can't interweave them to recycle the Island more than once.
But, things are different with the Temur Sabertooth stage. If we have a bunch of blue mana, we can activate the Bloated Toad's cycling ability and get a lot of copies, and between each one we can bounce and replay the Glowspore Shaman to return the lands to the library. So, we get too much mana out of this.
Looking for alternatives, Illusionist's Bracers looks nice, except that it requires sorcery speed to equip, and the creatures that we equip them on will keep dying to Death Pit Offering. So that doesn't look like it works. But maybe Kurkesh, Onnake Ancient will work, if we couple it with Liquimetal Coating to turn our bouncing creatures into artifacts? That should be fine, I think.
Hmm, but then Bloated Toad will only fetch one land at a time. How do we gain life out of that stage?
Edit: Oh, never mind. Worldpurge borks up the landcycling strategy. So, it's back to the Chrome Mox version, I guess. But, there still is the enchantment problem.
Edit: So, one possible fix is if we didn't have any enchantments with colors that would cause problems. We can get rid of K'rrik, Son of Yawgmoth, and go back to using Flash of Defiance. Then, only white and blue colors would be troublesome.
For white, it seems like we need either Opalescence or Starfield of Nyx. I guess we could have no way to get them off the battlefield.
For blue, it looks like we have four enchantments: Omniscience, Cephalid Shrine, March of the Machines, and Thousand-Year Storm. As jfb mentioned, Omniscience can be replaced by Tamiyo, Field Researcher. What about the other ones? Cephalid Shrine looks like it should be replaceable, the other ones could be tough.
Edit: Hmmm, maybe Thousand-Year Storm could be replaced by Cogwork Assembler, Mirari, and Mirror Gallery. Since Cogwork Assember will die before the computation, we can't use it to mess it up.
Edit: Yeah, I don't know about those last two. Maybe the best way is not to have a way to fetch enchantments from the graveyard. We could remove Starfield of Nyx to keep our enchantments from dying, and just have six copies of Dralnu's Crusade.
The problem then becomes Death Pit Offering. We can't fetch it from the graveyard, so we have to bounce or flicker it. But, we can't use nonrepeatable sorceries, whereas instants have the ability to mess up a computation. Perhaps an ability coming from a creature or artifact, that won't be around when the computation is going on? Does anyone know of anything like that?
If not, we may have to go back to Soulblast. The problem there is that we don't have flash for enchantments, so we won't be able to play our enchantments when Worldpurge brings them back to our hand. I guess Leonin Relic-Warder could take care of that. The other issue is that our artifacts will die at the start of a computation, so we need a way to bring them back. An artifact only version of Argivian Find would be good.
Edit: Hmm, Triton Cavalry seems like a good possibility. We can target it with Artful Dodge, using the first bounce to bounce Starfield of Nyx back to our hand, and from then on we can bounce and replay Death Pit Offering.
So, if we use Walker of Secret Ways, we can't get life from the white mana stage. If we use Mirozel, we can't bounce our creatures at that level. If we try to protect our creatures under a Portcullis or something, we could protect Xathrid Necromancer and bring it back.
If we don't use creatures, sorceries can't be repeated without Recoup. If we try to use instants, they always seem to be able to mess up the computation by holding them in our hand rather than following the plan.
So, I'm a little stymied at the moment.
Edit: Oh, I guess we can get life from the white mana stage. Add in Bloated Toad, and cycle it to get Beacon of Immortality from the library, which we can cast to gain life.
That gives us some hope for Walker of Secret Ways. But, Walker of Secret Ways can bounce itself, providing us with the mana that we need for the activation. So we can't have any more blue creatures, eliminating Triton Cavalry and Stern Proctor among others, both of which could have been very useful. We also can't have any more white creatures, so no Archon of Falling Stars. Sadly, that eliminates the two most useful creature colors for recycling enchantments and artifacts.
Edit: Stern Proctor and Eldrazi Displacer are enough to handle recycling of artifacts and enchantments. However, we have to go back to the Mirozel version, so we need to protect them somehow. Parallax Wave could do it, but if we exile Stern Proctor with Parallax Wave, we can't use Stern Proctor to bounce Parallax Wave. ¯\_( )_/¯
AFAIK we need to set things up such that a Vedalken Orrery or equivalent gets returned after a computation, and then cast a sorcery to trigger the instants and adjust creature numbers, and then get our artifacts/enchantments back. Does the current deck do all that?
Our plan to destroy all our artifacts also removes the Coat of arms. Is there a way to give one to the opponent without them losing their necromancers? Cytoshape might be safe.
If, for example, we could have Stern Proctor and Eldrazi Displacer, and have a way to keep them from dying in the Mirozel version, I think we would be okay. We can use Eldrazi Displacer to freely flicker Stern Proctor to bounce enchantments and artifacts as we please. We can first bounce Starfield of Nyx after we have copied over a bunch of Dralnu's Crusades over to the opponent, and from then on bounce Death Pit Offering to start computations when we want. We can bounce our artifacts, and replay them, to get Mirrorworks tokens, then bounce them back to our hand to keep them from dying. In particular, we can bounce Vedalken Orrery, get a Mirrorworks trigger, respond by bouncing Vedalken Orrery back to our hand, and then respond by starting a computation. We can use Artful Dodge to cast Arcbond and Artificial Evolution, while also bouncing Mirozel. So I think it should work out okay, once we find a way to protect our creatures.
For the Walker of the Secret Ways version, we would need a sorcery to trigger Arcbond and Artificial Evolution. Since Walker of Secret Ways can also bounce Xathrid Necromancer, we can use the black mana to cast a flashback black sorcery to trigger them. Walker of the Secret Ways can also bounce our creatures, but since we can't have Stern Proctor or Triton Cavalry, I don't know how to handle our enchantments and artifacts in this version.
Whoops, I did mean to switch out Mirrorweave for Cytoshape, but never got around to it.
Edit: Hmmm, I had an interesting idea. We use Stern Proctor and Eldrazi Displacer in the Mirozel version, and we protect them by using Aligned Hedron Network coupled with Dual Nature. We flicker Stern Proctor to put a Dual Nature trigger on the stack, then play Aligned Hedron Network to exile all our creatures, while March of the Machines is off the battlefield, so our artifacts don't get exiled. Then, we play March of the Machines, and then Death Pit Offering, to start the computation. Unfortunately, this will kill Aligned Hedron Network, allowing Xathrid Necromancer to come back into play, and affect the computation. So it doesn't quite work, but might be in the vicinity of a working idea.
Edit: Ooh, I think I might have the solution: Use Day of the Dragons instead of Aligned Hedron Network. The plan is the same, have a Stern Proctor ETB or Dual Nature trigger on the stack, play Day of the Dragons with March of the Machines off the battlefield, all our creatures get safely tucked away. Then we play March of the Machines and Death Pit Offering, and the computation starts. The difference is, if we don't have Starfield of Nyx, Day of the Dragons won't die.
Edit: Okay, new decklist.
2 Xathrid Necromancer
3 Arcbond
4 Artificial Evolution
5 Cytoshape
6 Dowsing Dagger
7 Dralnu's Crusade
8 Mirrorweave
9 Mirrorweave
10 Mirrorweave
11 Mirrorweave
12 Copy Enchantment
13 Death Pit Offering
14 March of the Machines
15 Goblin Boom Keg
16 Vedalken Orrery
17 Spellweaver Volute
18 Pull from Eternity
20 Invulnerability
21 Thousand-Year Storm
22 Mirrorworks
23 Stern Proctor
24 Eldrazi Displacer
25 Day of the Dragons
26 Artful Dodge
27 Mirozel
28 Bloodbond March
29 Cephalid Shrine
30 Rings of Brighthearth
31 Chrome Mox
32 Rude Awakening
33 Worldpurge
34 Gerrard's Verdict
35 Flash of Defiance
36 Flash of Defiance
37 Panharmonicon
38 Svyelunite Temple
39 Drownyard Temple
40 Spellweaver Helix
42 Silent-Chant Zubera
43 Marble Diamond
44 Reality Spasm
45 Reality Spasm
46 Reality Spasm
47 Reality Spasm
48 Precursor Golem
49 Psychic Battle
50 Nyxbloom Ancient
51 Black Lotus
52 Show and Tell
53 Omniscience
54 Squee's Revenge
55 Chameleon Blur
56 Energy Bolt
Nyxbloom Ancient can get extra mana from our chrome mox which is bad.
How does the Reality Spasm thing work? Does Psychic Battle allow for redirecting targets that get chosen automatically by Precursor Golem? Or do we need Grip of Chaos for that?
Is it even worth a layer? It seems like the number of copies we get from Golems is around the same as the number of copies we get from TYS.
Oh, in fact the Marble Diamond could be Cytoshaped onto an untapped thing generating too much white mana early.
What other options? There's the opponent's library - Smothering Tithe doesn't work though, since we can copy any Treasure tokens. Opponent's life? Not sure how to make mana out of that.
Combat? Grand Warlord Radha can make green mana, if we switch to green. Oh, but for green mana we use Temur Sabertooth, which means no other green creatures. Druids' Repository seems like it could work. We could then use Finest Hour and World at War.
Oh, but if we use combat, how would we avoid getting a computation started with Xathrid Necromancer still in play?
Edit: Hmmm, I guess we can't copy Treasure tokens, since they will die immediately with March of the Machines in play. So, with 16 Smothering Tithes / Mirrorweaves / Copy Enchantments / Estrid's Invocations on the battlefield, we can get 53 * 16 = 848 white mana, provided we have the space for it.
Combat would be better, if we can figure out a way to do it safely. I was wondering about 0 power creatures with haste, but Coat of Arms means anything with a type can get positive power.
Also, Eldrazi Displacer requires colourless mana; how are we generating that? Mana Echoes wouldn't work as that triggers from resolving a Bloodbond March trigger for Mirozel which are cheap to get.
Oh yeah, we need colorless mana. And wow, we can't use Mana Echoes anymore. That's tricky. A mana rock like Mana Crypt won't work, since we can get many copies of Eldrazi Displacer's and Stern Proctor's abilities.
I guess Iceberg works as a mana filter.
Another issue: Since Cytoshape doesn't target the thing that it copies, other creatures can be turned into Mirozel and thus bounced cheaply. I think Mirrorweave is fine; we can give the opponent Coat of arms and then remove March of the Machines to give them necromancers.
This also prevents a potential issue in which the opponent could be given an Eldrazi Displacer, though it's not actually an issue if there's no way to give them mana to use it. Show and Tell lets them play one Wastes; then Marble Diamond could give them more mana but that's broken anyway. But with Mirrorweave they can't have necromancers and Displacers at the same time avoiding the issue altogether.
Hmm, can we use King Macar, the Gold-Cursed? We can then use Reality Spasm to untap it, aided by Precursor Golem.
Edit: Silent-Chant Zubera doesn't work, since we can Cytoshape it onto tokens, and let them die from Death Pit Offering for some cheap life. We can replace it with Serra Angel (just a random white creature), Bloated Toad, and Beacon of Immortality. This section seems rather inefficient, could use improvement.
I think King Macar should be fine. I was wondering whether we could untap it during an infinite computation, to exile a creature and halt it. But, we can't have King Macar on our side during a computation, and we can't Mirrorweave both King Macar and Xathrid Necromancers over to the opponent.
So, new decklist:
2 Xathrid Necromancer
3 Arcbond
4 Artificial Evolution
5 Mirrorweave
6 Dowsing Dagger
7 Dralnu's Crusade
8 Mirrormade
9 Mirrormade
10 Mirrormade
11 Mirrormade
12 Copy Enchantment
13 Death Pit Offering
14 March of the Machines
15 Goblin Boom Keg
16 Vedalken Orrery
17 Spellweaver Volute
18 Pull from Eternity
19 Brightstone Ritual
20 Invulnerability
21 Thousand-Year Storm
23 Stern Proctor
24 Eldrazi Displacer
25 Day of the Dragons
26 Artful Dodge
27 Mirozel
28 Bloodbond March
29 Cephalid Shrine
30 Rings of Brighthearth
31 Chrome Mox
32 Rude Awakening
33 Worldpurge
34 Gerrard's Verdict
35 Flash of Defiance
36 Flash of Defiance
37 Panharmonicon
38 Island
39 Drownyard Temple
40 Spellweaver Helix
41 Aegis Automaton
42 Serra Angel
43 Bloated Toad
44 Beacon of Immortality
46 Show and Tell
47 Omniscience
48 Squee's Revenge
49 Chameleon Blur
50 Energy Bolt
51 Iceberg
52 Marchesa's Smuggler
53 Druids' Repository
54 World at War
55 King Macar, the Gold-Cursed
56 Reality Spasm
57 Reality Spasm
58 Reality Spasm
59 Precursor Golem
60 Grip of Chaos
It would be nice to save one card slot, for a fourth Reality Spasm.
Edit: Hmm, are there some cheap ways to keep the opponent alive at negative life? I was thinking of replacing Bloated Toad and Beacon of Immortality with Abyssal Maw, but we have to keep the opponent alive somehow.
- Have at least 2 Bloodbond Marches (using a copy enchantment)
- Repeatedly play and bounce Mirozel until almost out of red/colourless mana; for lots of BBM triggers
- Exile Mirozel to a Chrome Mox for a blue mana
- Cast Artful Dodge, triggering a few copies of Spellweaver Volute (using more copy enchantments)
- Set up and run a computation from the instants, netting lots of red mana
- Have Pull From Eternity resolve after the computation, getting back the instants and the mirozel
- Resolve a BBM trigger to get Mirozel back onto the battlefield
- Bounce and replay Mirozel, repeat this process for infinite BBM triggers.
We could replace Eldrazi Displacer with Nephalia Smuggler, using Thousand-Year Elixir to allow us to use it. Does this allow us to flicker creatures often enough? I believe so. The second Artful Dodge / Nephalia Smuggler layer in the Mirozel stage allows to repeat the top layer many times, allowing us many uses of Nephalia Smuggler. So I think this is a fix.
How exactly does the Mirozel stage work now? Are there supposed to be a lot of Bloodbond March triggers? There currently aren't since there's no way to copy enchantments a large number of times.
Is it a problem or is it intended that the only way to get the Mirozel out of exile from a Chrome Mox is to resolve a Pull From Eternity that gets cast off of an Artful Dodge? This makes it not possible to get back blue mana that gets spent on a Smuggler.
I think what we want is a cheaper sorcery. It looks like Mana Echoes is safe now, since we need to use Nephalia Smuggler to bounce Death Pit Offering now. So we can go back to Mystic Speculation.
Edit: Oh, it's okay that there aren't that many Bloodbond Marches. Then the Bloodbond March sections of the stage aren't really layers, they're more like separators for the Astral Dodge layers. Each Astral Dodge layer will still build off of the one below. We do need at least two Bloodbond Marches, since we use up one when building up the stage.
The issue with cheap sorceries is that they cast the instants cheaply which bounce the Mirozel. But Goblin Dark Dwellers could work instead of Spellweaver Volute.
So we'd activate the Smuggler, get a ton of Rings of Brighthearth triggers, then we can use them to run computations by flickering the GDD for instants as well as flickering other things; and getting back the Mirozel for blue mana would require resolving a BBM trigger. So this works as a stage.
Does freeing up Volute allow potential for a megastage?
Yeah, the megastage is something we should explore, to see if we can do it, or rule it out. So, we need things that can trigger both the beneficial and destructive effects for the hyperstage and megastage, which we potentially have with Spellweaver Volute and Spellweaver Helix. We also need three different resources, which can be creature tokens, mana, and life. It seems the most convenient to have creatures on the bottom, since each stage level has to eliminate the resources from the previous level. So if we went mana, creatures, life, then the second two stage levels would both have to eliminate mana; if we went life, mana, creatures, the second two stage levels would both have to eliminate life. So far, we've only found Worldpurge and Worldfire to be particularly suited to eliminating mana and life, respectively. Sway of the Stars leaves us at 7 life, which is probably too much. Someone had the interesting idea to use Glissa Sunseeker to control our mana levels. But, Glissa isn't an instant/sorcery, so it would be hard to fit into our paradigm.
So, we would have a creature token stage at the bottom, probably. The big problem is that we probably don't want Cowardice, because of our targeting instants. So, we need creatures that bounce themselves. I've been working with Cowardice for so long, I don't know which ones those are.
I guess it doesn't have to be a traditional Bloodbond March stage, but if it isn't, we would have to come up with something. Stakfish, I would love to hear your thoughts on the possibilities of a megastage!
A solution could be to just allow the real Orrery to die, and later get it out of the graveyard with a creature ETB or a cheap spell.
So to start a computation we use a Rings of Brighthearth trigger to flicker Stern Proctor, bouncing the nontoken Orrery. There are also some more Stern Proctor triggers due to Panharmonicon. We then play it, get a Mirrorworks trigger, and respond to that with Day of the Dragons, March of the Machines, and Death Pit Offering.
The computation happens, then the mirrorworks trigger resolves for an Orrery, then a Stern Proctor trigger resolves bouncing Day of the Dragons getting back our creatures. One of them is Goblin Dark-Dwellers which casts Ritual of Restoration returning the nontoken orrery to hand. So this works.
Then, the start is a little different as we can't use Black Lotus - but starting Mana Crypt Island Show and Tell works.
Is it an issue for Goblin Dark-Dwellers to be able to cast Show and Tell? I don't think so since all it really does play out lands, which aren't cheaply recycled. It also allows the opponent to play out their lands but there's nothing they can use them on.
Edit: Actually, we don't need to make changes:
We flicker Stern Proctor bouncing nontoken Orrery and keeping an extra trigger, then flicker GDD casting Show and Tell, and in response start the computation. Then we resolve Show and Tell putting down the Orrery, then resolve a Stern Proctor trigger to get the creatures back.