You actually get more than 240 Golems after the second Rite of Replication. Remember, you get 6 triggers of Precursor Golem when you cast the Rite, and when each trigger resolves, it copies Rite of Replication for each Golem currently on the battlefield, not just the ones on the battlefield when you cast the Rite. I count 384 Precursor Golems and 3650 vanilla Golems, 4034 total.
It's actually better to cast unkicked Rite of Replications than kicked ones when you use Spellweaver Helix. Even though kicked Rites are putatively more powerful, casting N unkicked Rites will result in between 2^^(N+3) and 2^^(N+4) Golems, and the same result will be true if you cast kicked Rites. So you can either cast 576 kicked Rites and get between 2^^579 and 2^^580 Golems, or cast 2016 unkicked Rites and get between 2^^2019 and 2^^2020 Golems.
Each tapping of an Isochron Scepter will allow you to cast X Rites, resulting in 2^^X Golems. I don't see why we should save the fourth Isochron Scepter for later, so I will assume it is activated along with the first three. Each Blinkmoth Infusion, Turnabout, and Wild Ricochet will allow another four tappings of an Isochron Scepter, and Toils of Night and Day will allow two more. Reality Spasm is problematic; casting it with Omniscience is useless, since X will be defined to be 0. So we need blue mana, and there currently is no source for that. So I count 56 additional tappings of Isochron Scepter from our untapping spells. When we use Cranial Archive to reshuffle and redraw everything, we do get a blue mana source, namely Black Lotus, which we can copy a couple of times to cast all four Reality Spasms. So we get 72 untappings on the following go-arounds. When we are down to say one Cranial Archive and two Phyrexian metamorphs, we need to use one of the Metamorphs to copy Cranial Archive, so we can make one copy of Black Lotus, allowing for three Reality Spasms. Then for the last three go-arounds we have just the one Black Lotus for one Reality Spasm. All told I count 1388 tappings of Isochron Scepter. Since we start with 2016 Rites, which is between 2^^^2 and 2^^^3, we wind up with a final damage of between 2^^^1390 and 2^^^1391.
It's actually even better to use Sundering Growth instead of Rite of Replication. That way, even the copies that target a regular Golem will make more Precursors. You do need another spell to make the first token, but after that it's like a magical recycling center.
Basically, it works like this: Black Lotus comboey thing at the start draws basically your entire deck, with the blank on top. We use Inner Flame for a lot of mana.
We make a bunch of Precursor Golems, Golem Tokens, and Monastery Mentors
We make a bunch of monks, as well as making everything giant.
We play Eye of the Storm, which causes shenanigans
Now we play Vedalken Orrery for flash
We follow this with Empty the Warrens, gaining 4 copies
We play Mirrorweave, letting the 4 copies happen and making everything into a Precursor Golem. Since we get a huge amount of copies, we just need to target a Precursor Golem first, so each copy is redundant. We stack our 4 Empty the Warrens after 3 Mirrorweaves for a lot of extra tokens, which are all Precursor Golems
We play Retraction Helix, stacking our copies alternating Empty the Warrens above Retraction Helix above Mirrorweave and repeating.
After the first Retraction Helix, we use each of our creatures to bounce one of the original Precursor Golems (same golem each time, so Cathars' Crusade is useful), flashing it in between bounce. Then, Mirrorweave makes a bunch of Golem copies. We use our new, untapped Golems from entry triggers in conjunction with the next Retraction Helix to do it again, and again, and again.
Now, we cast Rite of Replication, not paying kicker. Rite is exiled, and we get extra casts from Eye of the Storm. We get 4 sets of Rite, Helix, and Mirrorweave.
When we cast the Rite copies, we have the option to pay Kicker, which we do.
We stack our copies like:
Rite
Empty the Warrens
Helix
Mirrorweave
and so on.
Since each Rite targets only a single Golem, and all of our creatures are Precursor Golems, we go from x creatures to 6x^2 creatures, whatever x is. Then, we do the thing with Helix and Mirrorweave, followed by repeating this combo 3 more times.
Now, we cast Battle Hymn, again kicking all of our Rites. We stack like:
Empty the Warrens
Rite
Helix
Mirrorweave
Battle Hymn
We do the Rite+Helix+Mirrorweave thing, and get a ton of mana from our Battle Hymns.
Lastly, we cast Unwilling Recruit, stacking like so:
Empty the Warrens
Rite
Helix
Mirrorweave
Battle Hymn
Unwilling Recruit
We do the thing yet AGAIN, but this time, Unwilling Recruit does work. We are able to untap all of our creatures, meaning we get a lot more bounces with Helix, giving us a lot more creatures, as well as giving us insane pumps to everything (Battle Hymn for 20,000,000 is awesome)
We have only used one copy of each of the above spells. We now dobasically the same thing 3 more tiems, fitting in the full 5 in the sequence shown above between each set of copies.
Eventually, we have a ridiculously large number of ridiculously large Precursor Golems.
Now we cast Time Reversal, drawing Enter the Infinite and doing it again.
And again.
And again.
Finally, we are ready to swing. We cast our last Unwilling Recruit (which takes all of our mana) last of all of our spells, and swing for significantly more than lethal.
I have no idea how to calculate this, but it feels insanely large. After just the first Helix+Weave+Rite+Hymn+Unwilling Recruit, factoring in Eye of the Storm, I think we have about 600 million creatures (rough estimate, but accurate-ish), each getting a HUGE pump from the 4 giant copies of Unwilling Recruit.
Does anyone have any idea how to calculate this? I'm just not good enough with big numbers, and Eye of the Storm, though awesome, makes everything difficult.
Also, sorry for my grammar here. I'm tired, and my keyboard is buggy, so typing is hard. It's also very possible that my list is all screwed up, because it took a long time to trim down to 60, and I might have done something stupid.
EDIT 1: I'm pretty sure Empty the Warrens is better than Cathars' crusade, because Eye of the Storm works with it. Crusade is still ridiculous, but a copy of Empty seems good.
I believe that when you cast an exiled instant or sorcery via Knowledge Pool, it will get exiled to Eye of the Storm, so that indeed is a good way to double the number of castings.
That is indeed the case. And when that thing is Mind's Desire (in a real game, not really advantageous here) people tend to scoop before you can figure out the outcome.
Most of the other cards you use don't effect the number enough to pass 2^^^6. For example, take Cathars' Crusade. Casting Cathars' Crusade gets you more than 2^^^5 copies of it, each one adding more than 2^^^5 +1/+1 counters to more than 2^^^5 creatures. So the total power increases by about X^3, where X is the number of Cathars' Crusades. That may sound a lot bigger than X when X is very large, but at this scale, the difference is unnoticeable. For example, if X = 2^2^Y, then X^3 < 2^2^(Y+2), so even for a relatively small number like X = 2^^10, cubing scarcely makes a difference, much less 2^^^5. Similarly for Hamletback Goliath, Gratuitous Violence, Fungal Sprouting, Moonveil Dragon, and Mirrorweave.
The idea behind the Cathers' Crusade was what it does later when the Radiates start raining down. It only cubes the power when you cast it initially, but having them there adds more "for each" into the mix later. For example, a single Rite of Replication resolving on a Doubling Season makes 5 * 2^(original number of Doubling Seasons) which is certainly dwarfing the previous number of doubling seasons into oblivion, so we can say you get [(# of Cathars' Crusades) * 2 ^ (5 * 2 ^ (original number of doubling seasons))] triggers each putting on [(# of creatures)*2^(new total doubling seasons)]. It's way more impact than just the original casting of Cathars' Crusade, but I can see how it's way less impact than just the doubling seasons.
With regards to getting the Pyromancer Ascensions active before casting the spells from Eye of the Storm, I have a solution for that. One thing we've been ignoring is that we don't have 1 Eye of the Storm, we have 30 * 2^(2^^^5) copies of it. In almost any other case, copies of Eye of the Storm are useless because they all trigger off of each card cast, they all resolve the trigger, and only one of them get's to exile the spell, so that the end result is that no matter how many copies there are of Eye of the Storm, you cast every spell exiled by any Eye of the storm exactly once. But here it matters, because we care about the order, so if we put the 2 copies of whatever spell is in the graveyard for Ascension activating into one Eye and then put our mighty pile of spells into another while always resolving the first eye's trigger first, the last patch of ascensions will always be active for the bulk of what we care about.
Note: When I say "a million billion" below here, I know that's not even close to the amount, it's just a lighthearted way to say "a lot."
But speaking of what we care about, we're about to make this number bigger. I looked at your description of alternating Doubling season and Dual Nature and thought "well that's so efficient, lets do some more of that." Take out the crusade and goliath and dragon and mirrorweave and gratuitous violence and fungal sprouting, and try playing some bounce instead. And if we want to bouncing these things, we may as well Supplant Form them for maximum value, but even if that bounces something and makes a million billion copies of it, those copies die to dual nature immediately after, so we'll have to abuse Copy Enchantment like in the other deck. And since we want to be able to target Copy enchantment each time, we'll need Vedalken Orrery to get it out inbetween each ascension trigger resolving. So now, casting Supplant Form targetting Copy Enchantment triggers every ascension, and we resolve them individually, each time targetting Copy Enchantment, making dual nature's with the supplant form copies, then flash copy enchantment back in making doubling seasons with the dual nature copies. We could make ascensions with the last copy if we wanted, but even more doubling seasons is probably better considering this whole time, we have a million billion radiates targetting a million billion rite of replications waiting to happen.
Deep breath.
But now lets do something totally different with this.
I was thinking "we could probably put seething songs in the derpy Eye since we only actually need 5 mana each iteration. But then why play Seething Songs at all instead of more versatile mana production for those kickers? Why not switch Black Lotus to permanent artifact mana that can be untapped and play Turnabout instead so that the excess copies can untap creatures? Why not keep Black Lotus and just play 1 mana dork and do all creature untaps? Ok, so that gives us creature untaps. Why do we want that? I don't know, Splinter Twin? Sure, we can even put splinter twin on a copy enchantment to make more splinter twins on more copy enchantments. Does that go infinite.... yes. But we can pretend for now that we can find a good tap outlet. We need haste to use it though, and if we replace In the Web of War with a haste spell, we get another iteration of spells. What's the bombiest haste spell we can think of. Insurrection? Lol, take control of no creatures... wait a second... reads card.... "untap all creatures, they gain haste." So we don't even need Turnabout. That one spell gives all our creatures haste and untaps them, and if our mana dork is something like Harabaz Druid, suddenly we have access to outrageous amounts of mana of every color and creature untaps. The best use of those taps and mana that I've found is even more bouncing in the form of Tradewind Rider and Barrin, Master Wizard to do even more explosive rounds of bounce and cast, and neither should go infinite because Tradewind Riders are limited by the finite number of haste generations, and Barrin is limited by the amount of mana we have which is also limited by the number of haste generations. I've also had the realization that we may want to be able to copy creatures in that cycle of bouncing, and we definitely always want more power, so we can replace Copy Enchantment with Quicksilver Gargantuan as a strictly better option.
Phew.
Recap of used deck slots. Black Lotus, Show and Tell, Omniscience, Enter the Infinite, Opalescence, 4 Doubling Season, 4 Dual Nature, Pyromancer Ascension, Eye of the Storm, Vedalken Orrery, Tradewind Rider, Quicksilver Gargantuan, Barrin, Master Wizard, Harabaz Druid, 3 of something to activate Acensions, Knowledge Pool, Rite of Replication, Insurrection, Supplant Form, and 4 Radiate. That's 31 cards leaving almost half of the deck open, more than half since those 3 cards to activate Ascension can definitely be made highly impactful. And if the Knowledge Pool and Eye triggers are used optimally, I'm pretty sure all 4 Radiates can be cast for every cast trigger, including their own, while having every existing Ascension activated every time. If we try to maximize Radiates, we can have 38 casts of it once they're all in the eye, with 30 instants or sorceries left which will trigger the eye 60 times, leading to a total of 278 casts of radiate (all copied a million billion times) without counting any fork effects.
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Zedruu: "This deck is not only able to go crazy - it also needs to do so."
The nice thing about the Lotus+S&T+Omniscience+Enter the Infinite opening is that as long as your god and deals at least 3,000,000-ish damage (pretty easy), you can claim that you deal and average of at least 100 damage on Turn 1 with perfect honesty (Yeah standard deviation, but whatever).
After reading this thread again, and paying more attention, I have determined that Precursor Golem is stupid. Thus, I have a new idea:
<snip>
I have no idea how to calculate this, but it feels insanely large. After just the first Helix+Weave+Rite+Hymn+Unwilling Recruit, factoring in Eye of the Storm, I think we have about 600 million creatures (rough estimate, but accurate-ish), each getting a HUGE pump from the 4 giant copies of Unwilling Recruit, not to mention all of the Cathars' Crusade triggers.
Does anyone have any idea how to calculate this? I'm just not good enough with big numbers, and Eye of the Storm, though awesome, makes everything difficult.
Also, sorry for my grammar here. I'm tired, and my keyboard is buggy, so typing is hard. It's also very possible that my list is all screwed up, because it took a long time to trim down to 60, and I might have done something stupid.
The list looks okay, but you won't be able to take advantage of having four Eye of the Storms like you want to. Each card you exile has to be exiled to one of the Eye of the Storms, and only that Eye of the Storm will copy the exiled card when you cast another instant or sorcery. So each exiled card will be copied once no matter how many Eye of the Storms you have.
Also, you can't use Time Reversal to do everything again, because Time Reversal doesn't get back the cards that you have exiled to Eye of the Storm. Perhaps you can cast the Time Reversals first, then cast Eye of the Storm to finish off.
Rite of Replication does more than you think; when you cast Rite, each Precursor Golem trigger copies the spell for each Golem, multiplying the number of Precursor Golems by 2 (unkicked) or 6 (kicked). This happens for each Precursor Golem, so X Precursor Golems becomes X*2^X or X*6^X Precursor Golems. (X*257^X or X*1281^X with the Doubling Seasons and Parallel Lives). Retraction Helix could potentially do something similar, except the new vanilla Golems that get created won't have haste, and won't get haste until Unwilling Recruit is cast, which is too infrequent. So you could use a card that continuously gives creatures haste so that Retraction Helix can exponentiate with the help of Mirrorweave.
As it is, Rite of Replication is doing all the heavy lifting here, so the goal is to cast it as many times as possible. The four Time Reversals get us 16 castings of Rite of Replication; for Eye of the Storm, it is best to cast the four Rites first, then cast the other 16 instant/sorceries you listed (You can squeeze more in the deck, but I won't worry about that yet), getting another 74 castings. So we get 90 castings of Rite of Replication. At the start, the Monastery Mentors (it's best to copy Monastery Mentor with our copy cards, since we're going to Mirrorweave them to Precursor Golems later anyway) wind up adding about 2500 creatures, then alternating Unwilling Recruits and Rectraction Helixes triple that number four times for about 200,000 creatures, which get Mirrorweaved into 200,000 Precursor Golems, or more than 2^^4 Precursor Golems. That gets bumped 90 times, so the final damage is between 2^^94 and 2^^95.
With regards to getting the Pyromancer Ascensions active before casting the spells from Eye of the Storm, I have a solution for that. One thing we've been ignoring is that we don't have 1 Eye of the Storm, we have 30 * 2^(2^^^5) copies of it. In almost any other case, copies of Eye of the Storm are useless because they all trigger off of each card cast, they all resolve the trigger, and only one of them get's to exile the spell, so that the end result is that no matter how many copies there are of Eye of the Storm, you cast every spell exiled by any Eye of the storm exactly once. But here it matters, because we care about the order, so if we put the 2 copies of whatever spell is in the graveyard for Ascension activating into one Eye and then put our mighty pile of spells into another while always resolving the first eye's trigger first, the last patch of ascensions will always be active for the bulk of what we care about.
I don't think that quite works. It's true that the first Eye will activate the Pyromancer Ascensions when it resolves, allowing the first Radiate in the second Eye to take advantage of it. But if the second Eye has more than one Radiate or copy spell, we need to activate the new Ascensions in between each pair. So the castings have to go Radiate, activating spell, Radiate, activating spell, ... . I don't see how the extra Eye helps us do that.
Recap of used deck slots. Black Lotus, Show and Tell, Omniscience, Enter the Infinite, Opalescence, 4 Doubling Season, 4 Dual Nature, Pyromancer Ascension, Eye of the Storm, Vedalken Orrery, Tradewind Rider, Quicksilver Gargantuan, Barrin, Master Wizard, Harabaz Druid, 3 of something to activate Acensions, Knowledge Pool, Rite of Replication, Insurrection, Supplant Form, and 4 Radiate. That's 31 cards leaving almost half of the deck open, more than half since those 3 cards to activate Ascension can definitely be made highly impactful. And if the Knowledge Pool and Eye triggers are used optimally, I'm pretty sure all 4 Radiates can be cast for every cast trigger, including their own, while having every existing Ascension activated every time. If we try to maximize Radiates, we can have 38 casts of it once they're all in the eye, with 30 instants or sorceries left which will trigger the eye 60 times, leading to a total of 278 casts of radiate (all copied a million billion times) without counting any fork effects.
Okay - each casting of Radiate still takes X activated Pyromancer Ascensions to 2^^^X Doubling Seasons. But your new combos are more powerful. Each bouncing of {c}Quicksilver Gargantuan[/c] triggers X Dual Natures, and each trigger takes X Doubling Seasons to 2^X Doubling Seasons, so we wind up with 2^^X Doubling Seasons as well as Dual Natures and any other creature we're using. So each copy of Supplant Form applies X to 2^^X; so does each activation of Tradewind Rider, so Insurrection untaps X Tradwind Riders and takes X Doubling Seasons to 2^^^X Doubling Seasons. Best of all, though, is the Barrin, Master Wizard combo. Each two mana applies X to 2^^X, so each tapping of Harabaz Druid gets lots of mana and takes X to 2^^^X, and each copy of Insurrection untaps lots of Harabaz Druids and takes X to 2^^^^X. So with X Pyromancer Ascensions, a casting of Insurrection will generate 2^^^^^X Doubling Seasons. So the goal now is to cast Insurrection, activating spell, Insurrection, activating spell, etc. as many times as possible, with Radiate becoming completely insignificant at this point. If say you can cast 278 Insurrections, that will get you a final damage of about 2^^^^^^281.
I think I have this pretty well exhausted. There should be no infinite loops because there are no looping triggers, no recursive permanents, and all recursive spells are terminal.
You start with the standard Lotus --> Show --> Omni --> Infinite play (leaving Past). Then March and Lattice to make everything a creature. Play Nature and Season followed by Leyline/Bounty and Thune. Then play each other enchantment (for each Xenograft you choose Saproling/Golem/Plant and ignore the rest) artifact, and creature in response to the previous ending with Avenger (tapping every creature for mana because of Limb).
From here you do a series of Rites/Legions/Evolutions multiplying every permanent each time in an explosive manner due to the Ascensions/Seasons/Golems/Avengers, adding even more counters from landfall/Bounty/Thune/Season triggers (remember every creature is a plant and a land) and from those counters generating even more mana from every Alarm/Sage/Reflection (not to mention every other creature).
After each of those is used you play a Spiral which gets multiplied by an unimaginable amount of active Ascensions. Between the resolution of each copy you replay Infinite and every Rite/Legion/Evolution (thanks to Leyline) multiplying by every active Precursor (for Rite)/Ascension exploding everything you have to astronomical counts. Then you repeat this for every Spiral/Reversal/Counsel/Gains/Restock leaving the Lotus on as the only card in the deck the final time you cast Infinite. Now cast past in flames so you can cast each one more time (because you can).
Finally... Use all the mana in your pool (which is beyond ridiculous) to pop a Basket and resolve all subsequent Season/Bounty/landfall/Bounty/Thune/Season/Alarm/Sage/Reflection blah blah... use that mana to feed another Basket... then another... until every one is popped. Now use the entire pool of mana to cast a Recruit (because Lattice allows you, and why not) which hits everything for every Precursor since every creature is a golem and is copied for every active Ascension which you use to target a single Beastmaster. You then attack with everything, first resolving all Hydra triggers, then all Beastmaster triggers (starting with the mega-Recruited one). Then all damage is doubled for every gazillion-bagillion Dictates.
Interesting deck... there are a lot of various effects going on, but the dominant effect is Rite of Replication with Xenograft turning all creatures into Golems, including all the Doubling Seasons. Each time a copy of Rite of Replcation targets a Doubling Season with X Doubling Seasons on the battlefield, you add 5*2^X Doubling Season tokens. Each Precursor Golem trigger off Rite of Replication causes all X Doubling Seasons to be targeted, increasing the number of Doubling Seasons to 2^^X; and when you cast Rite of Replication with X Precursor Golems in play, the X triggers create 2^^^X Doubling Seasons, which leads to 2^^^X of all the other creatures so long as you resolve the Rites targeting them after the ones targeting the Doubling Seasons. This is a much bigger effect then all the other ones adding creatures and +1/+1 counters; for example, look at the effect of a Rite of Replication copy on Precursor Golem with X Doubling Seasons as well as Y Primeval Bountys and Z Archangel of Thunes in play. The Rite of Replication adds 2^X Precursor Golems, which causes Y*2^X triggers of Primeval Bounty adding 3 life, which causes YZ*2^X triggers of Archangel of Thune adding +1/+1 counters, and that gets increased by all the Doubling Seasons, for a total of YZ*2^(2X) +1/+1 counters added to each creature. This isn't appreciably greater than the 2^X Precursor Golems we have, certainly less than 2^(# of Precursor Golems), and exponentiation is unnoticeable once we get to notations like 2^^^X. Also, the Clone Legions and Parallel Evolutions do comparatively little; with X Doubling Seasons on the battlefield, each one adds X*2^X Doubling Seasons, and this time we don't get Precursor Golem copies. We do get Pyromancer Ascension copies, but that just takes it to 2^^X, which is still completely dominated by Rite's 2^^^X. Then we have the 20 retrieval spells; each one gets copied X times by Pyromancer Ascensions, allowing us to cast 4X Rite of Replications, achieving 2^^^^X. With 20 of them, we get to about 2^^^^^23 final damage. (Past in Flames does relatively little, since copying it X times doesn't allow us to cast X Rites from the graveyard.) Very nice.
If say you can cast 278 Insurrections, that will get you a final damage of about 2^^^^^^281.
Now we're getting to some serious numbers!
Ok, let's cast way more than 278 Insurrections and stick at least a couple more arrows in there! I now need to change my method of draw because in order to crank that number up, I need to get cards back into my hand (or library as I intend to), and as crazy as it sounds to me, if I leave in Enter the Infinite, I will in fact Enter the Infinite.
Cards we are definitely cutting:
Enter the Infinite
Tradewind Rider
Knowledge Pool
Supplant Form
Radiate
Rite of Replication
Before I start listing what I've come up with since, I'm going to explain more clearly how the multiple Eyes are helping. Pretend for a moment that we had Opalescence, 2 Eye of the Storms, and 1 Pyromancer Ascension. We have a Healing Salve in the graveyard, 2 Healing Salves in one Eye of the Storm, and 1 Cackling Counterpart in the other, and for the sake of arguement, no counters on Pyromancer Ascension. If we cast an instant or sorcery, both Eyes trigger. We put the one with Cackling Counterpart on bottom and the one with Healing Salves on top. The one on top resolves, exiling the spell we cast, and then casting out a copy of the spell we cast in, healing salve, and healing salve. Both Healing Salves are cast while having the same name as a card in the graveyard, so Pyromancer Ascension triggers the ability to add a counter twice. Then all three spells resolve leaving only the other Eye of the Storm trigger on the stack. When it resolves, it casts Cackling Counterpart, which triggers the copy ability of Pyromancer Ascension since it acquired its 2 counters. So two copies of the spell makes 2 more Ascensions. If we cast another spell and stack the triggers the same, those copies will have 2 counters as well before we get back around to Cackling Counterpart again. The spells cast out of a single Eye of the Storm all happen all at once without chance for Pyromancer Ascension triggers to go on the stack until after they're all cast, so there is no wizardry to get more triggers out of the same Eye. I apologize if that's what it sounded like I was getting at. It's all irrelevant now though, because the only spell we care to have copied a million billion times anymore is Insurrection.
Now we play the second copy of Parallel Evolution which goes into an Eye of the Storm and casts out, activating the Pyromancer Ascensions that existed before it resolved. Next we cast Insurrection which copies on the first cast, is eaten by an empty Eye, copies out of Eye of the Storm, and then the other Eye with Parallel Evolution resolves multiplying everything again. Mostly, we got our first big Barrin/Druid/Gargantuan bump. Then we cast the 3rd and final Parallel Evolution, putting it into the Eye with the other one and activating every Ascension not made by those two, and then resolving the Eye trigger with Insurrection doing the second big Insurrection bump. 3 cards left in hand, we cast Boon Reflection which is really a million billion of them. 2 cards left in hand, we cast Bargain, having the opponent draw 1 and gaining 7 x 2^million billion life ourselves. It doesn't matter which Eye eats Bargain, we're going to decline to cast it nearly every time we have the option anyway. With 1 card of wiggle room, we can now draw the rest of the library. And with an empty library, we can move onto my next big plan.
Play Possibility Storm. I chose Knowledge Pool over Possibility Storm earlier because it's easier to control when just going for 2 cast triggers, but Knowledge Pool gets in the way of the Barrin bounce/cast combo. With an empty library, 2 Possibility Storms will get you what you originally cast by failing to find on the first trigger and then finding the card the second time. Possibility Storm also has no intervening if clause, so if you have a million billion of them, they will attempt to cast a matching card from your library a million billion times. We now have a million billion Possibility Storms. Now we cast the saddest spell in the universe, because it's going to stay on the bottom of the stack waiting for a the end of the game. It doesn't matter what the spell is, so for comedy's sake, I'm going to call is Storm Crow. In response to Storm Crow, Hinder it. All the Possibility Storms Trigger, all the Eye of the Storms trigger, all the Pyromancer Ascensions trigger. Allow one Pyromancer Ascension Trigger to happen, copying Hinder and using it to target the original Hinder. The copy resolves, putting Hinder on the top or bottom of the library (doesn't matter which, same thing). The two relevant Eyes do their thing and raise the number of permanents to some rediculous exponent of their previous state.
And then the Possibility Storm triggers start resolving. The first one to resolve looks for an instant and finds Hinder and casts it which retriggers ever Eye and Ascension all over again (because neither of those things care if the spell was cast from hand). This process of casting Hinder and triggering things will repeat once for every single copy of Possibility Storm that existed when Hinder was cast from hand. Eventually it runs out, and on the last copy of the trigger, Hinder gets put onto the bottom of the library and stays there. After one more round of Insurrections, Stor Crow can finally see the light of day as it tries to resolve, so we pay 1 life to draw Hinder and reignite the process with a million billion times as many Possibility Storms. We repeat the whole process a million billion times until we get down to 1 life, and on that cycle of casts, we'll choose to cast 1 copy of Bargain, putting our life back up to astronomical, so we can do the whole thing over again until we've cast Bargain 53 times and the opponent has no cards left to draw.
And that is the deck so far, 33 unused decks slots remaining.
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Zedruu: "This deck is not only able to go crazy - it also needs to do so."
Before I start listing what I've come up with since, I'm going to explain more clearly how the multiple Eyes are helping. Pretend for a moment that we had Opalescence, 2 Eye of the Storms, and 1 Pyromancer Ascension. We have a Healing Salve in the graveyard, 2 Healing Salves in one Eye of the Storm, and 1 Cackling Counterpart in the other, and for the sake of arguement, no counters on Pyromancer Ascension. If we cast an instant or sorcery, both Eyes trigger. We put the one with Cackling Counterpart on bottom and the one with Healing Salves on top. The one on top resolves, exiling the spell we cast, and then casting out a copy of the spell we cast in, healing salve, and healing salve. Both Healing Salves are cast while having the same name as a card in the graveyard, so Pyromancer Ascension triggers the ability to add a counter twice. Then all three spells resolve leaving only the other Eye of the Storm trigger on the stack. When it resolves, it casts Cackling Counterpart, which triggers the copy ability of Pyromancer Ascension since it acquired its 2 counters. So two copies of the spell makes 2 more Ascensions. If we cast another spell and stack the triggers the same, those copies will have 2 counters as well before we get back around to Cackling Counterpart again. The spells cast out of a single Eye of the Storm all happen all at once without chance for Pyromancer Ascension triggers to go on the stack until after they're all cast, so there is no wizardry to get more triggers out of the same Eye. I apologize if that's what it sounded like I was getting at. It's all irrelevant now though, because the only spell we care to have copied a million billion times anymore is Insurrection.
Ah, okay - that works so long as we have just one Cackling Counterpart. My issue was that we would want to exile a whole bunch of Insurrections to Eye of the Storm, so we would need a whole bunch of activating spells exiled as well. But in your new deck it looks like you need just one, so all is good.
Play Possibility Storm. I chose Knowledge Pool over Possibility Storm earlier because it's easier to control when just going for 2 cast triggers, but Knowledge Pool gets in the way of the Barrin bounce/cast combo. With an empty library, 2 Possibility Storms will get you what you originally cast by failing to find on the first trigger and then finding the card the second time. Possibility Storm also has no intervening if clause, so if you have a million billion of them, they will attempt to cast a matching card from your library a million billion times. We now have a million billion Possibility Storms. Now we cast the saddest spell in the universe, because it's going to stay on the bottom of the stack waiting for a the end of the game. It doesn't matter what the spell is, so for comedy's sake, I'm going to call is Storm Crow. In response to Storm Crow, Hinder it. All the Possibility Storms Trigger, all the Eye of the Storms trigger, all the Pyromancer Ascensions trigger. Allow one Pyromancer Ascension Trigger to happen, copying Hinder and using it to target the original Hinder. The copy resolves, putting Hinder on the top or bottom of the library (doesn't matter which, same thing). The two relevant Eyes do their thing and raise the number of permanents to some rediculous exponent of their previous state.
Okay, so the Eye of the Storms want to exile the Hinder, but they can't since the spell is countered and changes zones. I think that's right.
And then the Possibility Storm triggers start resolving. The first one to resolve looks for an instant and finds Hinder and casts it which retriggers ever Eye and Ascension all over again (because neither of those things care if the spell was cast from hand). This process of casting Hinder and triggering things will repeat once for every single copy of Possibility Storm that existed when Hinder was cast from hand. Eventually it runs out, and on the last copy of the trigger, Hinder gets put onto the bottom of the library and stays there. After one more round of Insurrections, Stor Crow can finally see the light of day as it tries to resolve, so we pay 1 life to draw Hinder and reignite the process with a million billion times as many Possibility Storms. We repeat the whole process a million billion times until we get down to 1 life, and on that cycle of casts, we'll choose to cast 1 copy of Bargain, putting our life back up to astronomical, so we can do the whole thing over again until we've cast Bargain 53 times and the opponent has no cards left to draw.
And that is the deck so far, 33 unused decks slots remaining.
Okay, so each casting of Insurrection from Eye of the Storm takes X to 2^^^^^X, each casting of Hinder from our hand causes it to be cast X times from X Possibility Storms, so it takes X to 2^^^^^^X. Each casting of Bargain adds X life and allows us to draw Hinder X times, taking X to 2^^^^^^^X. Finally, we cast Bargain 53 times - the first Bargain is done before we really have a lot of Boon Reflections, but after some inspection, the first Bargain will take us to more than 2^^^^^^^^3, and then each of the remaining 52 Bargains will bump that by 1, so we wind up with between 2^^^^^^^^55 and 2^^^^^^^^56 damage. I guess you could bump that to between 2^^^^^^^^56 and 2^^^^^^^^57 by dropping a Dual Nature and a Doubling Season, so that the first Bargain could be cast after Hinder is first cast.
I'm a little worried there might be an infinite in there somewhere, but I don't see one. SadisticMystic and plopfill are much better at finding these infinites than I am.
Oh, and you don't actually need three Parallel Evolutions; when you trigger Pyromancer Ascension's first ability you add a gazillion quest counters thanks to the Doubling Seasons. So two is enough.
I'm a little worried there might be an infinite in there somewhere, but I don't see one. SadisticMystic and plopfill are much better at finding these infinites than I am.
It should be safe, each level of nonsense has an independent fundamental restriction. I'm limited on my number of every permanent by the amount of Quicksilver Gargantuan casts I can do. I'm limited on Quicksilver Gargantuan cats by the mana I can make. I'm limited on the mana I can make by the Harabaz Druids I can tap. I'm limited on the Harabaz Druids I can tap by the amount of Insurrections I can resolve. I'm limited on the amount of Insurrections I can resolve by the amount I can cast. In Eye of the Storm, I'm limited on the amount of Insurrections I can cast by the amount of instant or sorcery cards I can cast. The only way I can cast an Instant or Sorcery card is casting it from hand or casting it from Possibility Storm. And Possibility Storm only triggers off of cards cast from hand, so my instant and sorcery cards cast is limited by the number of instant and sorceries I can cast from my hand. I'm limited on the number of instants and sorceries I can get in hand by the number of cards I can draw. I'm limited on the number of card I can draw by the amount of life I can spend. And I'm limited on the amount of life I can spend by the amount of cards my opponent can draw.
Oh, and you don't actually need three Parallel Evolutions; when you trigger Pyromancer Ascension's first ability you add a gazillion quest counters thanks to the Doubling Seasons. So two is enough.
Nice catch!
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Zedruu: "This deck is not only able to go crazy - it also needs to do so."
As in the current champion deck, each time we play Copy Enchantment with X Dual Natures in play, we get X Dual Nature triggers, each of which takes X Doubling Seasons to 2^X Doubling Seasons, so we wind up with 2^^X Doubling Seasons and 2^^X Dual Natures. (approximately) Each time we cast Allay, it triggers X Grip of Chaoses, and each Grip of Chaos triggers X Psychic Battles. Each time Psychic Battle resolves, we redirect the target to the nontoken Copy Enchantment, and Cowardice triggers, bouncing it back to hand. So each Psychic Battle trigger takes X to 2^^X, each Grip of Chaos takes X to 2^^^X, and each casting of Allay takes X to 2^^^^X.
Next in the sequence is Thran Dynamo. Much like Mana Crypt in the above link, Thran Dynamo is worth five recursive layers, so each casting of Thran Dynamo takes X to 2 -> X -> 9. Then comes Reclamation Sage - this is an ETB effect that targets, so it is worth nine recursive layers, so each casting takes X Doubling Seasons to 2 -> X -> 18 Doubling Seasons.
Now the new combo starts. We have Ezuri, Renegade Leader on the battlefield, and Elvish Spirit Guide in our hand. Let's say we have one green mana in our mana pool. We cast Elvish Spirit Guide, triggering X Bloodbond Marches and also Cephalid Shrine. We allow Cephalid Shrine to counter Elvish Spirit Guide, and we let the first Bloodbond March trigger resolve, and bring Elvish Spirit Guide from the graveyard to the battlefield. Now we spend our one green mana and activate Ezuri, Renegade leader, triggering X Rings of Brighthearths. Each time we resolve a Rings of Brighthearth trigger, we trigger X Grip of Chaoses, and each time we resolve a Grip of Chaos, we trigger X Psychic Battles. So the stack looks like:
Psychic Battle trigger
...
Psychic Battle trigger
Grip of Chaos trigger
...
Grip of Choas trigger
Rings of Brighthearth trigger
...
Rings of Brighthearth trigger
Bloodbond March trigger
...
Bloodbond March trigger
each time we resolve a Psychic Battle trigger, we reselect the target to be Reclamation Sage, and Cowardice will bounce it back to hand, allowing us to apply another X to 2 -> X -> 18. Each Grip of Chaos trigger will create X Psychic Battle triggers, and will take X to 2 -> X -> 19, and each Rings of Brighthearth trigger will trigger X Grip of Chaos triggers, taking X to 2 -> X -> 20.
When all the Rings of Brightheart triggers, are gone, we use the last Psychic Battle trigger prior to the Bloodbond March triggers resolving to bounce Elvish Spirit Guide to hand rather than Reclamation Sage. Now, we exile Elvish Spirit Guide to give us a green mana. We use Mirror of Fate to shuffle Elvish Spirit Guide into our library (with all our castings of Reclamation Sage, we can insure that we have a spare Mirror of Fate to use), and use Millikin to mill Elvish Spirit Guide from our library into our graveyard. We resolve the next Bloodbond March trigger, bringing Elvish Spirit Guide back to the battlefield. We now have a green mana, so we can activate Ezuri, Renegade Leader again, getting us our stack of Rings of Brightheart triggers, Grip of Choas triggers, and Psychic Battle triggers again, and we do the whole process over again. We repeat this process for each Bloodbond March; each Bloodbond March trigger takes X to 2 -> X -> 21, and the whole process takes X Bloodbond Marches to 2 -> X -> 22.
Now, let's see what happens when we have two green mana. As before, we cast and counter Elvish Spirit Guide, and use the first Bloodbond March trigger to bring the Guide to the battlefield. We spend one of the two green mana to activate Ezuri, Renegade Leader, getting Rings of Brighthearth triggers, Grip of Choas triggers, and Psychic Battle triggers. We use our first Psychic Battle trigger to bounce Elvish Spirit Guide. We now cast and counter Elvish Spirit Guide, use the first Bloodbond March to bring it to the battlefield again. Now we use the second of our green mana to activate Ezuri, Renegade Leader for the second time, getting us a cascade of triggers again. Now our stack looks like
Psychic Battle trigger
...
Psychic Battle trigger
Grip of Chaos trigger
...
Grip of Choas trigger
Rings of Brighthearth trigger
...
Rings of Brighthearth trigger
Bloodbond March trigger
...
Bloodbond March trigger
Psychic Battle trigger
...
Psychic Battle trigger
Grip of Chaos trigger
...
Grip of Choas trigger
Rings of Brighthearth trigger
...
Rings of Brighthearth trigger
Bloodbond March trigger
...
Bloodbond March trigger
We use each Psychic Battle trigger to bounce Reclamation Sage, until we have used all of the Rings of Brighthearth, Grip of Chaos and Psychic Battle triggers at the top level, and our down to our last Psychic Battle trigger. This time, we use the Psychic Battle to bounce Elvish Spirit Guide. Then we exile Elvish Spirit Guide to get a green mana back, use Mirror of Fate to shuffle the Guide, into our library, use Millikin to bring it to the graveyard, and the next Bloodbond March trigger to bring it back to the battlefield. With our new green mana, we activate Ezuri, Renegade Leader again, and the combo continues as before.
So far, this is the same as the combo with one mana. When we get down to our last Bloodbond March trigger, we use it to bring Elvish Spirit Guide back to the battlefield, but rather than use our one green mana to activate Ezuri, Renegade Leader, we use the following Psychic Battle trigger to bring Elvish Spirit Guide back to our hand. Now we cast and counter Elvish Spirit Guide, creating a whole new stack of Bloodbond March triggers, and we have saved our one green mana, so we can do the whole top level combo again at the cost of one Psychic Battle trigger at the lower level.
So, the top four stacks of triggers works as before, getting us X to 2 -> X -> 22. Each Psychic Battle trigger on the lower level gets us X to 2 -> X -> 22, each Grip of Chaos trigger gets us X to 2 -> X -> 23, each Rings of Brighthearth trigger gets us X to 2 -> X -> 24, each Bloodbond March trigger gets us X to 2 -> X -> 25, and the whole combo with two green mana gets us to 2 -> X -> 26.
So, we see that each additional green mana that we start the combo with gets us four more stacks of triggers in the combo, each one adding a recursive layer. So starting with X green mana, we get 4X + 18 layers in the end. If we start with 100 green mana (easy to generate), we'll get 418 layers, beating the current megacombo. If we have a green mana source that we can iterate at least 64 times (say with Mana Reflection), we'll beat Graham's Number!
The crucial question of course is whether there is a way to make this go infinite. I don't think so, because to create a stack of triggers, we have to use up a trigger in the next stack below it, so we have the same one-way traffic priciple that keeps the current decks from going infinite. Note that we always save the bouncing of Elvish Spirit Guide until the very last Psychic Battle trigger before the following stack of Bloodbond March triggers; one might wonder if there is profit to be had by bouncing Elvish Spirit Guide before then. I believe the answer is no, because we can't exile Elvish Spirit Guide until we have a Bloodbond March trigger waiting on the stack to bring it back. We could cast the Guide again, but doing that and bouncing it back to hand costs us a green mana, so doing this prematurely will only hurt the combo. We could bounce the Guide prematurely and then exile it, and then wait until the next Bloodbond March trigger comes up, but this has the same effect as just waiting to bounce the Guide until the Bloodbond March trigger is ready. So I don't see any infinite.
So, is this it? Is this the coveted Ackermann combo that has eluded us until now? Or is the some crucial snafu that I am missing?
So, is this it? Is this the coveted Ackermann combo that has eluded us until now? Or is the some crucial snafu that I am missing?
I apologize if this is heartbreaking to an alarming degree, but the creature you're trying to use is in fact Elvish SPIRIT Guide.
Omniscience, Cowardice, Clash of Realities, Elvish Spirit Guide, and any non-spirit creature (like Reclamation Sage) turns into infinite creature casts and ETBs.
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Zedruu: "This deck is not only able to go crazy - it also needs to do so."
Oh no, not at all... we can just replace Clash of Realities with Gruul Ragebeast (along with a donatable creature like Akroan Horse or Sleeper Agent) or Frontier Siege (along with Akroan Horse and Elspeth, Sun's Champion). So, no worries yet. In fact, we can dismantle much of the original combo, if it's necessary to preserve the new one, since the new one is so much more powerful. So the whole Gruul Ragebeast / Guilty Conscience / Rite of Passage / Sinking Feeling sequence can be removed if necessary, as can Mimic Vat.
It looks like that all checks out, so we have something new to build around.
The obvious question, then, is if we can do something similar with Simian Spirit Guide at a later point. ESG + SSG + land is enough to cast Chaos Warp from the opening hand, so we wouldn't need to downgrade to Mana Crypt just for a usable bootstrap. SSG is a lot harder to single out, though, and the red mana activated abilities are far less friendly. The only one that looks promising (while leaving room for at least a red mana producer above it) is Paragon of Fierce Defiance, which probably fails both for granting haste and for giving +1/+1 in greater and greater numbers with its ability to bounce other copies of itself.
Even if it does pan out, these numbers still won't approach Graham, not without about 63 separate analogs of the ESG step. An ESG-based deck should be able to get somewhere around 2 -> X -> (2 -> Y -> 300), which will comfortably beat G_2, and if SSG can work somehow then it'll be over G_3, but still a long way off.
If we go on to use Frontier Siege, I think the most efficient way to set it up involves a Scrambleverse that gives them a few copies of Rite of Passage and nothing else. With Primal Vigor, a single Rite of Passage donation would be enough, but Frontier Guide requires Elspeth which requires Doubling Season, since Primal Vigor doesn't double loyalty counters. Or if we're going to use Avacyn, donating a token of that (in response to a Dual Nature trigger to get back another token) works just as well--the idea is to set it up so that nothing on either side will ever die as a result of the fights. Obviously with Scrambleverse potentially doubling as an "untap all" spell, we can't run Mnemonic Wall or anything like that with the potential to return it, but since a Frontier Siege-based setup will probably top out at Chaos Warp and Yawgmoth's Bargain anyway, Scrambleverse plays right into that direction.
Oh no, not at all... we can just replace Clash of Realities with Gruul Ragebeast (along with a donatable creature like Akroan Horse or Sleeper Agent) or Frontier Siege (along with Akroan Horse and Elspeth, Sun's Champion). So, no worries yet. In fact, we can dismantle much of the original combo, if it's necessary to preserve the new one, since the new one is so much more powerful. So the whole Gruul Ragebeast / Guilty Conscience / Rite of Passage / Sinking Feeling sequence can be removed if necessary, as can Mimic Vat.
Thanks for the heads up!
Ok, so in case you haven't noticed, I'm not an expert on the mathematics here, but I think your suggested procedure doesn't scale the way you want it to because the Rings of Brighthearth triggers are a set amount from when you activate Ezuri, so to scale it to another layer, you need that many activations of Ezuri (I think).
If it does work, you're welcome to slot it into what I have so far, since Cowardice should be safely non-infinite when my only targetted ability so far is Barrin and I'm already making upward arrows worth of green mana, and if each 1 mana adds 4 arrows, we've broken the viability of that number system without embedding it into istelf.
--------------------- Ideas for my list ---------------------
With the new goal of playing with Possibility Storm triggers as much at possible, I did a quick search of things that trigger off of casts, and realized that I can also do nonsense with Bloodbond March myself. Every time I bounce and cast Quicksilver Gargantuan, it's triggers the Possibility Storms, one of which recasts the Gargantuan, each cast can trigger a Bloodbond March. Where you bounce, cast, counter, recur, I can't do that efficiently because bouncing is my non-free mechanism and if I find a way to make the mana keep up, it would go infinite. So instead, I'll resolve the March triggers with the creature still on the stack each time by using a second Gargantuan and a sac outlet (I'm picking Vish Kal, Blood Arbiter).
So plus Bloodbond March, Vish Kal, and a duplicate Gargantuan, now instead of having 1 Gargantuan enter for each Barrin bounce, we have 1 for every Bloodbond March followed by another for every March that exists after the Gargantuan copies finish entering allowing Possibility Storm to cast the Gargantuan a second time. Now if only we could get the Gargantuan back in the deck like Hinder to use ALL of the Possibility Storm triggers. Good news! With its cloning ability and the newly acquired sac outlet, we are one Mirage common away from doing just that. If Quicksilver Gargantuan copies Gravebane Zombie when it enters the battlefield, we can sacrifice it to Vish Kal to put it back on top before each Possibility Storm trigger resolves. So our Doubling Seasons explode for every Doubling Season for every Dual Nature for every Bloodbond March for every Possibility Storm for 1/2 every Harabaz Druid for every Harabaz Druid for Insurrections for every Pyromancer Ascension for every Possibility Storm for every Boon Reflection for every Bargain cast which, as of right now, is 53 times. And then at the end, the attack power on the swing gets increased whatever amount more because instead of stopping the cycle after the last Insurrection because anything else made wouldn't have haste, we can continute making creatures until we absolutely exhaust the mana supply and simultaneously raising the power to some rediculous exponent by sacrificing every other creature to Vish Kal.
That should put the deck at 24 slots used, 36 left open, and access to the full procedure from Hinder down for 3 full cycles before the first casting of bargain (8 if we play Possibility Storm before any of the creatures and use the duplicate Possibility Storms to pull every creature out of the deck). So that's a lot of efficiency gained while simultaneously pumping the output up a couple levels.
Things we have access to for those other 36 cards: mega mana, mega creature ETB's, mega creature casts, mega instant and sorcery casts, mega death triggers, and mega +1/+1 counters on Vish Kal.
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Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Zedruu: "This deck is not only able to go crazy - it also needs to do so."
It looks like that all checks out, so we have something new to build around.
The obvious question, then, is if we can do something similar with Simian Spirit Guide at a later point. ESG + SSG + land is enough to cast Chaos Warp from the opening hand, so we wouldn't need to downgrade to Mana Crypt just for a usable bootstrap. SSG is a lot harder to single out, though, and the red mana activated abilities are far less friendly. The only one that looks promising (while leaving room for at least a red mana producer above it) is Paragon of Fierce Defiance, which probably fails both for granting haste and for giving +1/+1 in greater and greater numbers with its ability to bounce other copies of itself.
Even if it does pan out, these numbers still won't approach Graham, not without about 63 separate analogs of the ESG step. An ESG-based deck should be able to get somewhere around 2 -> X -> (2 -> Y -> 300), which will comfortably beat G_2, and if SSG can work somehow then it'll be over G_3, but still a long way off.
If we go on to use Frontier Siege, I think the most efficient way to set it up involves a Scrambleverse that gives them a few copies of Rite of Passage and nothing else. With Primal Vigor, a single Rite of Passage donation would be enough, but Frontier Guide requires Elspeth which requires Doubling Season, since Primal Vigor doesn't double loyalty counters. Or if we're going to use Avacyn, donating a token of that (in response to a Dual Nature trigger to get back another token) works just as well--the idea is to set it up so that nothing on either side will ever die as a result of the fights. Obviously with Scrambleverse potentially doubling as an "untap all" spell, we can't run Mnemonic Wall or anything like that with the potential to return it, but since a Frontier Siege-based setup will probably top out at Chaos Warp and Yawgmoth's Bargain anyway, Scrambleverse plays right into that direction.
That's great to hear! I do think that you're greatly underestimating the size of the numbers that we'll get though.
Let's say we add Nantuko Elder. We get a hasty token version, and say we put Sinking Feeling on it and activate it with 100 Rings of Brighthearths on the battlefield. This will allow us to tap Nantuko Elder 102 times. Let's also say we have 10 Mana Reflections on the battlefield. We tap Nantuko Elder the first time, and this gives us 1024 green mana. By the aforementioned combo, this will allow us to generate more than 10 -> 10 -> 4096 Doubling Seasons, and also Mana Reflections. (more than G_1) Once that combo is done, we untap and tap Nantuko the second time, and this time we get more than 10 -> 10 -> 4096 mana. So, since with X green mana we can generated more than 10 -> 10 -> 4X Doubling Seasons, this gives us more than 10 -> 10 -> (10 -> 10 -> 4096) Doubling Seasons and Mana Reflections, which is more than G_2. We get that much mana on the third tapping of Nantuko Elder, so we get more than 10 -> 10 -> (10 -> 10 -> (10 -> 10 -> 4096)), or more than G_3. After the 64th tapping, we have nested this expression 64 times, and we've beaten Graham's number!
So, the first layer above the "big" Ackermann layer (Ackermann stage, maybe?) will iterate the function X to 10 -> 10 -> X many times, which gives us 10 -> 10 -> X -> 2; the second layer will iterate X to 10 -> 10 -> X -> 2 many times, which takes us to 10 -> 10 -> X -> 3, and so on. Getting a second "Ackermann stage" via Simian Spirit Guide will put X into the fourth number in the chain, so we get something like 10 -> 10 -> 10 -> X. Then, adding layers on top of that will bump up the fifth number, so we should potentially get something like 10 -> 10 -> 10 -> X -> 300+.
Ok, so in case you haven't noticed, I'm not an expert on the mathematics here, but I think your suggested procedure doesn't scale the way you want it to because the Rings of Brighthearth triggers are a set amount from when you activate Ezuri, so to scale it to another layer, you need that many activations of Ezuri (I think).
If by "set amount", you mean that there are the same number of Rings of Brightherath triggers each time we activate Ezuri, that's not true - activating Ezuri allows us to bounce Reclamation Sage, and Reclamation Sage allows us to bounce Rings of Brighthearth and get many more of them.
With the new goal of playing with Possibility Storm triggers as much at possible, I did a quick search of things that trigger off of casts, and realized that I can also do nonsense with Bloodbond March myself. Every time I bounce and cast Quicksilver Gargantuan, it's triggers the Possibility Storms, one of which recasts the Gargantuan, each cast can trigger a Bloodbond March. Where you bounce, cast, counter, recur, I can't do that efficiently because bouncing is my non-free mechanism and if I find a way to make the mana keep up, it would go infinite. So instead, I'll resolve the March triggers with the creature still on the stack each time by using a second Gargantuan and a sac outlet (I'm picking Vish Kal, Blood Arbiter).
So plus Bloodbond March, Vish Kal, and a duplicate Gargantuan, now instead of having 1 Gargantuan enter for each Barrin bounce, we have 1 for every Bloodbond March followed by another for every March that exists after the Gargantuan copies finish entering allowing Possibility Storm to cast the Gargantuan a second time. Now if only we could get the Gargantuan back in the deck like Hinder to use ALL of the Possibility Storm triggers. Good news! With its cloning ability and the newly acquired sac outlet, we are one Mirage common away from doing just that. If Quicksilver Gargantuan copies Gravebane Zombie when it enters the battlefield, we can sacrifice it to Vish Kal to put it back on top before each Possibility Storm trigger resolves. So our Doubling Seasons explode for every Doubling Season for every Dual Nature for every Bloodbond March for every Possibility Storm for 1/2 every Harabaz Druid for every Harabaz Druid for Insurrections for every Pyromancer Ascension for every Possibility Storm for every Boon Reflection for every Bargain cast which, as of right now, is 53 times. And then at the end, the attack power on the swing gets increased whatever amount more because instead of stopping the cycle after the last Insurrection because anything else made wouldn't have haste, we can continute making creatures until we absolutely exhaust the mana supply and simultaneously raising the power to some rediculous exponent by sacrificing every other creature to Vish Kal.
That should put the deck at 24 slots used, 36 left open, and access to the full procedure from Hinder down for 3 full cycles before the first casting of bargain (8 if we play Possibility Storm before any of the creatures and use the duplicate Possibility Storms to pull every creature out of the deck). So that's a lot of efficiency gained while simultaneously pumping the output up a couple levels.
Things we have access to for those other 36 cards: mega mana, mega creature ETB's, mega creature casts, mega instant and sorcery casts, mega death triggers, and mega +1/+1 counters on Vish Kal.
Ah, nice. So Quicksilver Gargantuan copying Doubling Season and Dual Nature gets you two layers, Bloodbond March is worth a layer, Possibility Storm on Quicksilver Gargantuan is worth a layer, mana for the Harabaz Druid is worth a layer, all the Harabaz Druids that get hasted is worth a layer, all the Pyromancer Ascensions on Insurrection is worth a layer, all the Possibility Storms on Insurrection is worth a layer, and all the life you get with Bargain is worth a layer. So that's nine layers, and 53 activations take you to more than 2^^^^^^^^^^55 damage.
EDIT: Okay, on to constructing an actual deck. Yeah, the only possibilities I see for red mana are Paragon of Fierce Defiance and Break Through the Line. But not only does Break Through the Lines probably cut out more potential cards, it kills the Sinking Feeling part of the combo, which will really cut down on the number of layers. So I think Paragon of Heart Defense is the winner. I don't see that haste is a problem; we don't want something like Empress Galina to get haste because it could target itself, but anything red will get targeted by Break Through the Lines anyway so it doesn't matter. Similarly, we add +1/+1 to red creatures, but those are cut out anyway by the Paragon targetting them, so no difference.
Okay, so the next question is how to transition from Elvish Spirit Guide to Simian Spirit Guide. Well, we just need a red creature that generates green mana, but not red mana and is not an Elf. Which - is scarcer than I thought. The only possibility I see is Zhur-Taa Druid, which does damage to the opponent. So I guess we add Abyssal Persecutor as well.
I count Devout Lightcaster at level 312; I didn't bother counting how many times Words of Wisdom can draw Devout Lightcaster, since I doubt this will be the last iteration of the deck, but it's probably about 30, so the damage will be about 10 -> 10 -> 10 -> ~30 -> 313.
Okay, so the next question is how to transition from Elvish Spirit Guide to Simian Spirit Guide. Well, we just need a red creature that generates green mana, but not red mana and is not an Elf. Which - is scarcer than I thought. The only possibility I see is Zhur-Taa Druid, which does damage to the opponent. So I guess we add Abyssal Persecutor as well.
Consider me still unconvinced at your sudden ability to multiply arrows. I understand that when you have X of each thing and go from one to the next, like Grip of Chaos to Psychic Battle, multiplying them along the way, you get X iteration of raising X to itself, which is pretty much adding one of those arrows by definition. Why is adding iterations of Ezuri on top of that multiplicative of the arrows, and not just adding one more layer? And if you leave the Rings of Brighthearth triggers floating around, they don't multiply, so when you eventually resolve back down to them, you get way less than the current X number of iterations, where the other pieces of the chain multiply better as you go. So it would be most efficient to resolve them first rather than leave them on the stack waiting. Much like you were questioning whether the Pyromancer Ascensions would be active in time for the next round, you're artificially holding a level back by stacking it like that.
Also, if you play Abyssal Persecutor, your opponent can't draw out and you go infinite.
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Zedruu: "This deck is not only able to go crazy - it also needs to do so."
The deck is based around how many Descents can be cast.
I start as before (adding the Copy Enchantment trick I missed), but this time I also have two Arcanists (one with a Bioshift and the other with Radiate). I also have a Portal with Chimes imprinted. I cast the Bioshift/Radiate in hand to get them in my graveyard and with the Arcanists I can take advantage of (i.e. abuse) the Alarm triggers, each time Shifting with Ascendency copies and Radiating with Ascendency copies each meandering through a series of Grips and Battles culminating with my +1/+1 counters moving from creatures A->B->C->... sweeping up all counters and eventually bouncing back and forth each time taking advantage of the Seasons until all counters end on a Sage.
After all permanents are on board I cast Descent (copying for each Ascendency and through the Battle/Grips). I choose to destroy every Scorpion, Barishi, Precursor (and friends) and Avenger. I stack all Barishi shuffle triggers on the bottom, then the Scorpion triggers on every Scorpion and Precursor dying for every Scorpion that was in play again weaving through the Battle/Grips targeting the Portal sans one. I then have my creatures each move through the Vat (saving my Barishi from permanent exile) tapping once to produce Avengers, untapping with the final Scorpion target and tapping to produce Precursors. Then all the Presence triggers resolve yadda yadda. After that I use Healer to sac the Opal so my enchantments are no longer creatures and will not incur the Nature exile. I then use Healer on all remaining non-token enchantments sans Nature.
From there I tap the Portal to produce a large number of Chimes. I pop a chime to return all enchantments in my graveyard to hand and recast them. Opal first, then Season, Copy, etc... each time creating a bajillion tokens, counters and subsequent untap triggers on my Arcanists for my Shifting fun. I then destroy the Opal then the others again and pop the next Chime. After each Chime token has popped, the first untap will resolve allowing me to tap the Portal for even more token Chimes. The process repeats until all untaps have resolved and the final chime has popped. At that point I use Healer to sac the Copy Enchantment (since nothing shares its name I don't have to worry about losing any tokens) and it goes into the Vat, releasing my Precursor.
That is when the first Barishi shuffle trigger resolves, returning all my creatures in my graveyard to my library. I use my Horde's ability to cast each one from the top of my library. I then repeat the previous step for each shuffle trigger until they have all resolved. Once all shuffles have resolved, the next Descent will wipe my board as before and all previous steps are repeated until I have spent every Descent.
After all descents have been used, I begin using my terminal Restocks, Pulls, Finds, Visions and Guidances. I chose those because they target and allow better abuse with the Grip/Battles over the non-targeting Spirals/Reversals I was using previously. I also threw in Rites because I had the space, but I no longer have the Spiral/Reversal shuffle triggers to reuse them.
Consider me still unconvinced at your sudden ability to multiply arrows. I understand that when you have X of each thing and go from one to the next, like Grip of Chaos to Psychic Battle, multiplying them along the way, you get X iteration of raising X to itself, which is pretty much adding one of those arrows by definition. Why is adding iterations of Ezuri on top of that multiplicative of the arrows, and not just adding one more layer? And if you leave the Rings of Brighthearth triggers floating around, they don't multiply, so when you eventually resolve back down to them, you get way less than the current X number of iterations, where the other pieces of the chain multiply better as you go. So it would be most efficient to resolve them first rather than leave them on the stack waiting. Much like you were questioning whether the Pyromancer Ascensions would be active in time for the next round, you're artificially holding a level back by stacking it like that.
Also, if you play Abyssal Persecutor, your opponent can't draw out and you go infinite.
Well, iterations of Ezuri aren't really "multiplicative of the arrows"; to put it more precisely, having X green mana allows us to create a stack of 4X groups of different triggers, and each of thiose groups contributes a layer. Let me go into greater detail.
Okay, so the basic idea behind getting these huge Knuth arrow numbers is that we have a bunch of different resources, call them X1, X2, ... up to Xn. Also, you have to ability to decrease X2 by 1 (or a fixed amount) to increase X1 by more; the ability to decrease X3 by 1 to increase X2 by X1 or thereabouts, the ability to decrease X4 by 1 to increase X3 by X1 or thereabouts, and so on up to Xn. This allows us to create a number with n Knuth arrows.
So for example, take your deck. We have
X1 = Doubling Seasons
X2 = Dual Natures
X3 = Bloodbond Marches on Quicksilver Gargantuan
X4 = Possibility Storms on Quicksilver Gargantuan
X5 = activations of Barrin / amount of mana
X6 = Tappings of Harabaz Druid
X7 = Pyromancer Ascensions on Insurrection
X8 = Possibility Storms on Insurrection
X9 = life gain from Bargain
So for example, resolving one Bloodbond March decreases X3 by 1, and increases X2 by 2^X1, the that part works out, and similarly for the other levels.
Now, for my deck, say we have three green mana. That allows us to create a stack of twelve groups of triggers, so we have
X1 = group of Psychic Battle triggers
X2 = group of Grip of Chaos triggers
X3 = group of Rings of Brighthearth triggers
X4 = group of Bloodbond March triggers
X5 = group of Psychic Battle triggers
X6 = group of Grip of Chaos triggers
X7 = group of Rings of Brighthearth triggers
X8 = group of Bloodbond March triggers
X9 = group of Psychic Battle triggers
X10 = group of Grip of Chaos triggers
X11 = group of Rings of Brighthearth triggers
X12 = group of Bloodbond March triggers
and again, we have the ability to resolve one trigger from X(n+1) to create a whole bunch of triggers of Xn above it, as explained in my previous post. (If you have any particular questions about how this is done, I would be happy to answer.) So here we get 12 layers, and if we had 1000 mana we would get 4000, etc.
I have to say, I'm not really understanding your particular objection to Rings of Brighthearth. They work just like all the other triggered abilities that we are using as layers. You certainly do not want to resolve them all immediately, no can you; in order to reach a new layer, you need to bootstrap the previous layer for each resolution of a trigger. So in our case, when we resolve a Rings of Brighthearth trigger and get a whole bunch of Grip of Chaos triggers equal to the number of Grip of Chaoses. You do not want to resolve the next Rings of Brighthearth trigger, nor can you, since all the Grip of Chaos triggers are put on the stack on top. This is a good thing, since we can then resolve all those Grip of Chaos triggers to create a whole bunch more Grip of Chaoses, and so when all the Grip of Chaos triggers are done and we get to the next Rings of Brighthearth trigger, we get way more Grip of Chaos triggers this time around, as desired.
This is exactly how all the other layers work, like for example the Bloodbond March and Possibility Storm layers in your deck. When you cast Quicksilver Gargantuan, you get a whole bunch of Bloodbond March triggers. When the first Bloodbond March trigger resolves and puts a Quicksilver Gargantuan on the battlefield, you get a whole bunch of Dual Nature triggers. You cannot now resolve the next Bloodbond March trigger, nor do you want to, since we would only get the same number of Dual Nature triggers again, which is really weak. Instead, we resolve the Dual Nature triggers first, each time creating a bunch of Doubling Seasons, until we reach the last Dual Nature trigger, and create a whole bunch of new Dual Natures. Now the next Bloodbond March can resolve, and this time we have astronomically more Dual Natures on the battlefield, which is exactly what we want. So we absolutely want to leave triggers on the stack waiting until all the lower level interactions peter out.
You say "if you leave the Rings of Brighthearth triggers floating around, they don't multiply"; yes, and that is very important, since if they did multiply while we were taking care of lower level interactions, the combo would go infinite. It's very important that the only thing that can create more Rings of Brighthearth triggers is a higher level resource, to prevent infinities. The exact same thing is true of Grip of Chaos triggers, Psychic Battle triggers, Bloodbond March triggers, all of our layers; they stay constant while the lower level stuff gets done, and only get increased by something higher up.
So honestly, I'm not seeing a difference between what Rings of Brighthearth is doing and all the other layers are doing. And I don't see the relevance of needing to activate Pyromancer Ascension. Rings of Brighthearth doesn't need to be activated.
But, you're absolutely right that Abyssal Persecutor goes infinite. So, perhaps something that prevents damage - Amulet of Kroog should be fine.
Consider me still unconvinced at your sudden ability to multiply arrows. I understand that when you have X of each thing and go from one to the next, like Grip of Chaos to Psychic Battle, multiplying them along the way, you get X iteration of raising X to itself, which is pretty much adding one of those arrows by definition. Why is adding iterations of Ezuri on top of that multiplicative of the arrows, and not just adding one more layer? And if you leave the Rings of Brighthearth triggers floating around, they don't multiply, so when you eventually resolve back down to them, you get way less than the current X number of iterations, where the other pieces of the chain multiply better as you go. So it would be most efficient to resolve them first rather than leave them on the stack waiting. Much like you were questioning whether the Pyromancer Ascensions would be active in time for the next round, you're artificially holding a level back by stacking it like that.
Also, if you play Abyssal Persecutor, your opponent can't draw out and you go infinite.
Well, iterations of Ezuri aren't really "multiplicative of the arrows"; to put it more precisely, having X green mana allows us to create a stack of 4X groups of different triggers, and each of thiose groups contributes a layer. Let me go into greater detail.
Okay, so the basic idea behind getting these huge Knuth arrow numbers is that we have a bunch of different resources, call them X1, X2, ... up to Xn. Also, you have to ability to decrease X2 by 1 (or a fixed amount) to increase X1 by more; the ability to decrease X3 by 1 to increase X2 by X1 or thereabouts, the ability to decrease X4 by 1 to increase X3 by X1 or thereabouts, and so on up to Xn. This allows us to create a number with n Knuth arrows.
So for example, take your deck. We have
X1 = Doubling Seasons
X2 = Dual Natures
X3 = Bloodbond Marches on Quicksilver Gargantuan
X4 = Possibility Storms on Quicksilver Gargantuan
X5 = activations of Barrin / amount of mana
X6 = Tappings of Harabaz Druid
X7 = Pyromancer Ascensions on Insurrection
X8 = Possibility Storms on Insurrection
X9 = life gain from Bargain
So for example, resolving one Bloodbond March decreases X3 by 1, and increases X2 by 2^X1, the that part works out, and similarly for the other levels.
Now, for my deck, say we have three green mana. That allows us to create a stack of twelve groups of triggers, so we have
X1 = group of Psychic Battle triggers
X2 = group of Grip of Chaos triggers
X3 = group of Rings of Brighthearth triggers
X4 = group of Bloodbond March triggers
X5 = group of Psychic Battle triggers
X6 = group of Grip of Chaos triggers
X7 = group of Rings of Brighthearth triggers
X8 = group of Bloodbond March triggers
X9 = group of Psychic Battle triggers
X10 = group of Grip of Chaos triggers
X11 = group of Rings of Brighthearth triggers
X12 = group of Bloodbond March triggers
and again, we have the ability to resolve one trigger from X(n+1) to create a whole bunch of triggers of Xn above it, as explained in my previous post. (If you have any particular questions about how this is done, I would be happy to answer.) So here we get 12 layers, and if we had 1000 mana we would get 4000, etc.
I have to say, I'm not really understanding your particular objection to Rings of Brighthearth. They work just like all the other triggered abilities that we are using as layers. You certainly do not want to resolve them all immediately, no can you; in order to reach a new layer, you need to bootstrap the previous layer for each resolution of a trigger. So in our case, when we resolve a Rings of Brighthearth trigger and get a whole bunch of Grip of Chaos triggers equal to the number of Grip of Chaoses. You do not want to resolve the next Rings of Brighthearth trigger, nor can you, since all the Grip of Chaos triggers are put on the stack on top. This is a good thing, since we can then resolve all those Grip of Chaos triggers to create a whole bunch more Grip of Chaoses, and so when all the Grip of Chaos triggers are done and we get to the next Rings of Brighthearth trigger, we get way more Grip of Chaos triggers this time around, as desired.
To clarify, when I say resolve them all, I mean to say resolve the entire stack, resolve every trigger that results from a single activation of Ezuri before activating Ezuri again. I didn't quite comprehend the way Elvish Spirit Guide was actually working. I kept thinking "the only activated ability to trigger rings is Ezuri, and that's going to keep taking 1 mana, where is he expecting those triggers from?" I understand now. I still don't trust the method, but I was definitely being stupid.
So here's the next question. The power you're describing is entirely dependent on being done in one single shot, so you have to maintain the growth of every resource needed to keep going within the combo (except lower tier triggers, the intended limitting factor). By what mechanism are you generating hasty Millikin and Mirror of Fate in scale with the growth of the combo, and why can it not be applied to Zhur-Taa Druids?
Private Mod Note
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Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Zedruu: "This deck is not only able to go crazy - it also needs to do so."
Okay... I revamped my deck and now it is now significantly more powerful than before.
I believe you go infinite thanks to Intruder Alarm and Mimic Vat / Prototype Portal; You can tap Mimic Vat or Prototype Portal to put creatures into play, and Intruder Alarm will allow Mimic Vat / Prototype Portal to untap, and repeat the process. Life and Limb will take care of the mana costs, as would your Bioshift / Gyre Sage sequence.
Quote from tstorm823 »
To clarify, when I say resolve them all, I mean to say resolve the entire stack, resolve every trigger that results from a single activation of Ezuri before activating Ezuri again. I didn't quite comprehend the way Elvish Spirit Guide was actually working. I kept thinking "the only activated ability to trigger rings is Ezuri, and that's going to keep taking 1 mana, where is he expecting those triggers from?" I understand now. I still don't trust the method, but I was definitely being stupid.
Okay. Well, I don't know what to do about your lack of trust, other than to answer any questions you may have, so I'll do that as best I can.
Quote from tstorm823 »
So here's the next question. The power you're describing is entirely dependent on being done in one single shot, so you have to maintain the growth of every resource needed to keep going within the combo (except lower tier triggers, the intended limitting factor). By what mechanism are you generating hasty Millikin and Mirror of Fate in scale with the growth of the combo, and why can it not be applied to Zhur-Taa Druids?
Millikin can be exiled to Mimic Vat, which can create hasty tokens; for Mirror of Fate it looks like the best way is to bounce March of the Machines when we need to use it, allowing the original Mirror of Fate and its Dual Nature token copies to tap without worrying about summoning sickness. The reason we can do this is because of Reclamation Sage. Reclamation Sage, along with Cowardice, allows us to bounce any artifact; bouncing Mirror of Fate and replaying it (with March of the Machines in play) gets us new Dual Nature tokens to use. Bouncing Millikin allows us to cast it and counter it, and we can use the first Bloodbond March trigger to bring it to the battlefield, where we can sacrifice it to Cateran Overlord, then exile it to Mimic Vat. Then we do need to tap another Mirror of Fate and a Millikin to bring it back to the graveyard, but each playing of Millikin and Mirror of Fate gets us a gazillion uses, so we can certainly spare one of each to recycle Millikin.
Zhur-Taa Druid, on the other hand, can't be targeted by anything lower level; that's why it was specifically chosen to be not an Elf, and artifact, or an enchantment. The general idea is that higher level things can only target / recycle lower level things, so for example nothing above Ezuri, Renegade Leader can be an elf.
Okay... I revamped my deck and now it is now significantly more powerful than before.
I believe you go infinite thanks to Intruder Alarm and Mimic Vat / Prototype Portal; You can tap Mimic Vat or Prototype Portal to put creatures into play, and Intruder Alarm will allow Mimic Vat / Prototype Portal to untap, and repeat the process. Life and Limb will take care of the mana costs, as would your Bioshift / Gyre Sage sequence.
How does Alarm cause the Vats/Portals to untap? They are not creatures. The only way to untap them is when the Scorpions die. The only way (non-enchantment) creatures can die is by Descent... or Silence, now that I'm looking at it, but that is remedied by changing Silence to Faith Healer (which is what I was originally going to use, then I changed it at the last moment).
It's actually better to cast unkicked Rite of Replications than kicked ones when you use Spellweaver Helix. Even though kicked Rites are putatively more powerful, casting N unkicked Rites will result in between 2^^(N+3) and 2^^(N+4) Golems, and the same result will be true if you cast kicked Rites. So you can either cast 576 kicked Rites and get between 2^^579 and 2^^580 Golems, or cast 2016 unkicked Rites and get between 2^^2019 and 2^^2020 Golems.
Each tapping of an Isochron Scepter will allow you to cast X Rites, resulting in 2^^X Golems. I don't see why we should save the fourth Isochron Scepter for later, so I will assume it is activated along with the first three. Each Blinkmoth Infusion, Turnabout, and Wild Ricochet will allow another four tappings of an Isochron Scepter, and Toils of Night and Day will allow two more. Reality Spasm is problematic; casting it with Omniscience is useless, since X will be defined to be 0. So we need blue mana, and there currently is no source for that. So I count 56 additional tappings of Isochron Scepter from our untapping spells. When we use Cranial Archive to reshuffle and redraw everything, we do get a blue mana source, namely Black Lotus, which we can copy a couple of times to cast all four Reality Spasms. So we get 72 untappings on the following go-arounds. When we are down to say one Cranial Archive and two Phyrexian metamorphs, we need to use one of the Metamorphs to copy Cranial Archive, so we can make one copy of Black Lotus, allowing for three Reality Spasms. Then for the last three go-arounds we have just the one Black Lotus for one Reality Spasm. All told I count 1388 tappings of Isochron Scepter. Since we start with 2016 Rites, which is between 2^^^2 and 2^^^3, we wind up with a final damage of between 2^^^1390 and 2^^^1391.
I'm glad you had fun with this challenge!
Hmm, I would to post the contents of a spreadsheet, but it didn't work. Anyone know how?
1 Show and Tell
1 Omniscience
1 Enter the Infinite
1 Inner Flame
3 Cathars' Crusade
4 Unwilling Recruit
4 Phyrexian Metamorph
4 Monastery Mentor
1 Clever Impersonator
1 Vedalken Orrery
4 Doubling Season
4 Parallel Lives
1 Blank
4 Eye of the Storm
4 Mirrorweave
4 Retraction Helix
4 Rite of Replication
4 Battle Hymn
Basically, it works like this:
Black Lotus comboey thing at the start draws basically your entire deck, with the blank on top. We use Inner Flame for a lot of mana.
We make a bunch of Precursor Golems, Golem Tokens, and Monastery Mentors
We make a bunch of monks, as well as making everything giant.
We play Eye of the Storm, which causes shenanigans
Now we play Vedalken Orrery for flash
We follow this with Empty the Warrens, gaining 4 copies
We play Mirrorweave, letting the 4 copies happen and making everything into a Precursor Golem. Since we get a huge amount of copies, we just need to target a Precursor Golem first, so each copy is redundant. We stack our 4 Empty the Warrens after 3 Mirrorweaves for a lot of extra tokens, which are all Precursor Golems
We play Retraction Helix, stacking our copies alternating Empty the Warrens above Retraction Helix above Mirrorweave and repeating.
After the first Retraction Helix, we use each of our creatures to bounce one of the original Precursor Golems (same golem each time, so Cathars' Crusade is useful), flashing it in between bounce. Then, Mirrorweave makes a bunch of Golem copies. We use our new, untapped Golems from entry triggers in conjunction with the next Retraction Helix to do it again, and again, and again.
Now, we cast Rite of Replication, not paying kicker. Rite is exiled, and we get extra casts from Eye of the Storm. We get 4 sets of Rite, Helix, and Mirrorweave.
When we cast the Rite copies, we have the option to pay Kicker, which we do.
We stack our copies like:
Rite
Empty the Warrens
Helix
Mirrorweave
and so on.
Since each Rite targets only a single Golem, and all of our creatures are Precursor Golems, we go from x creatures to 6x^2 creatures, whatever x is. Then, we do the thing with Helix and Mirrorweave, followed by repeating this combo 3 more times.
Now, we cast Battle Hymn, again kicking all of our Rites. We stack like:
Empty the Warrens
Rite
Helix
Mirrorweave
Battle Hymn
We do the Rite+Helix+Mirrorweave thing, and get a ton of mana from our Battle Hymns.
Lastly, we cast Unwilling Recruit, stacking like so:
Empty the Warrens
Rite
Helix
Mirrorweave
Battle Hymn
Unwilling Recruit
We do the thing yet AGAIN, but this time, Unwilling Recruit does work. We are able to untap all of our creatures, meaning we get a lot more bounces with Helix, giving us a lot more creatures, as well as giving us insane pumps to everything (Battle Hymn for 20,000,000 is awesome)
We have only used one copy of each of the above spells. We now dobasically the same thing 3 more tiems, fitting in the full 5 in the sequence shown above between each set of copies.
Eventually, we have a ridiculously large number of ridiculously large Precursor Golems.
Now we cast Time Reversal, drawing Enter the Infinite and doing it again.
And again.
And again.
Finally, we are ready to swing. We cast our last Unwilling Recruit (which takes all of our mana) last of all of our spells, and swing for significantly more than lethal.
I have no idea how to calculate this, but it feels insanely large. After just the first Helix+Weave+Rite+Hymn+Unwilling Recruit, factoring in Eye of the Storm, I think we have about 600 million creatures (rough estimate, but accurate-ish), each getting a HUGE pump from the 4 giant copies of Unwilling Recruit.
Does anyone have any idea how to calculate this? I'm just not good enough with big numbers, and Eye of the Storm, though awesome, makes everything difficult.
Also, sorry for my grammar here. I'm tired, and my keyboard is buggy, so typing is hard. It's also very possible that my list is all screwed up, because it took a long time to trim down to 60, and I might have done something stupid.
EDIT 1: I'm pretty sure Empty the Warrens is better than Cathars' crusade, because Eye of the Storm works with it. Crusade is still ridiculous, but a copy of Empty seems good.
That is indeed the case. And when that thing is Mind's Desire (in a real game, not really advantageous here) people tend to scoop before you can figure out the outcome.
The idea behind the Cathers' Crusade was what it does later when the Radiates start raining down. It only cubes the power when you cast it initially, but having them there adds more "for each" into the mix later. For example, a single Rite of Replication resolving on a Doubling Season makes 5 * 2^(original number of Doubling Seasons) which is certainly dwarfing the previous number of doubling seasons into oblivion, so we can say you get [(# of Cathars' Crusades) * 2 ^ (5 * 2 ^ (original number of doubling seasons))] triggers each putting on [(# of creatures)*2^(new total doubling seasons)]. It's way more impact than just the original casting of Cathars' Crusade, but I can see how it's way less impact than just the doubling seasons.
With regards to getting the Pyromancer Ascensions active before casting the spells from Eye of the Storm, I have a solution for that. One thing we've been ignoring is that we don't have 1 Eye of the Storm, we have 30 * 2^(2^^^5) copies of it. In almost any other case, copies of Eye of the Storm are useless because they all trigger off of each card cast, they all resolve the trigger, and only one of them get's to exile the spell, so that the end result is that no matter how many copies there are of Eye of the Storm, you cast every spell exiled by any Eye of the storm exactly once. But here it matters, because we care about the order, so if we put the 2 copies of whatever spell is in the graveyard for Ascension activating into one Eye and then put our mighty pile of spells into another while always resolving the first eye's trigger first, the last patch of ascensions will always be active for the bulk of what we care about.
Note: When I say "a million billion" below here, I know that's not even close to the amount, it's just a lighthearted way to say "a lot."
But speaking of what we care about, we're about to make this number bigger. I looked at your description of alternating Doubling season and Dual Nature and thought "well that's so efficient, lets do some more of that." Take out the crusade and goliath and dragon and mirrorweave and gratuitous violence and fungal sprouting, and try playing some bounce instead. And if we want to bouncing these things, we may as well Supplant Form them for maximum value, but even if that bounces something and makes a million billion copies of it, those copies die to dual nature immediately after, so we'll have to abuse Copy Enchantment like in the other deck. And since we want to be able to target Copy enchantment each time, we'll need Vedalken Orrery to get it out inbetween each ascension trigger resolving. So now, casting Supplant Form targetting Copy Enchantment triggers every ascension, and we resolve them individually, each time targetting Copy Enchantment, making dual nature's with the supplant form copies, then flash copy enchantment back in making doubling seasons with the dual nature copies. We could make ascensions with the last copy if we wanted, but even more doubling seasons is probably better considering this whole time, we have a million billion radiates targetting a million billion rite of replications waiting to happen.
Deep breath.
But now lets do something totally different with this.
I was thinking "we could probably put seething songs in the derpy Eye since we only actually need 5 mana each iteration. But then why play Seething Songs at all instead of more versatile mana production for those kickers? Why not switch Black Lotus to permanent artifact mana that can be untapped and play Turnabout instead so that the excess copies can untap creatures? Why not keep Black Lotus and just play 1 mana dork and do all creature untaps? Ok, so that gives us creature untaps. Why do we want that? I don't know, Splinter Twin? Sure, we can even put splinter twin on a copy enchantment to make more splinter twins on more copy enchantments. Does that go infinite.... yes. But we can pretend for now that we can find a good tap outlet. We need haste to use it though, and if we replace In the Web of War with a haste spell, we get another iteration of spells. What's the bombiest haste spell we can think of. Insurrection? Lol, take control of no creatures... wait a second... reads card.... "untap all creatures, they gain haste." So we don't even need Turnabout. That one spell gives all our creatures haste and untaps them, and if our mana dork is something like Harabaz Druid, suddenly we have access to outrageous amounts of mana of every color and creature untaps. The best use of those taps and mana that I've found is even more bouncing in the form of Tradewind Rider and Barrin, Master Wizard to do even more explosive rounds of bounce and cast, and neither should go infinite because Tradewind Riders are limited by the finite number of haste generations, and Barrin is limited by the amount of mana we have which is also limited by the number of haste generations. I've also had the realization that we may want to be able to copy creatures in that cycle of bouncing, and we definitely always want more power, so we can replace Copy Enchantment with Quicksilver Gargantuan as a strictly better option.
Phew.
Recap of used deck slots. Black Lotus, Show and Tell, Omniscience, Enter the Infinite, Opalescence, 4 Doubling Season, 4 Dual Nature, Pyromancer Ascension, Eye of the Storm, Vedalken Orrery, Tradewind Rider, Quicksilver Gargantuan, Barrin, Master Wizard, Harabaz Druid, 3 of something to activate Acensions, Knowledge Pool, Rite of Replication, Insurrection, Supplant Form, and 4 Radiate. That's 31 cards leaving almost half of the deck open, more than half since those 3 cards to activate Ascension can definitely be made highly impactful. And if the Knowledge Pool and Eye triggers are used optimally, I'm pretty sure all 4 Radiates can be cast for every cast trigger, including their own, while having every existing Ascension activated every time. If we try to maximize Radiates, we can have 38 casts of it once they're all in the eye, with 30 instants or sorceries left which will trigger the eye 60 times, leading to a total of 278 casts of radiate (all copied a million billion times) without counting any fork effects.
The list looks okay, but you won't be able to take advantage of having four Eye of the Storms like you want to. Each card you exile has to be exiled to one of the Eye of the Storms, and only that Eye of the Storm will copy the exiled card when you cast another instant or sorcery. So each exiled card will be copied once no matter how many Eye of the Storms you have.
Also, you can't use Time Reversal to do everything again, because Time Reversal doesn't get back the cards that you have exiled to Eye of the Storm. Perhaps you can cast the Time Reversals first, then cast Eye of the Storm to finish off.
Rite of Replication does more than you think; when you cast Rite, each Precursor Golem trigger copies the spell for each Golem, multiplying the number of Precursor Golems by 2 (unkicked) or 6 (kicked). This happens for each Precursor Golem, so X Precursor Golems becomes X*2^X or X*6^X Precursor Golems. (X*257^X or X*1281^X with the Doubling Seasons and Parallel Lives). Retraction Helix could potentially do something similar, except the new vanilla Golems that get created won't have haste, and won't get haste until Unwilling Recruit is cast, which is too infrequent. So you could use a card that continuously gives creatures haste so that Retraction Helix can exponentiate with the help of Mirrorweave.
As it is, Rite of Replication is doing all the heavy lifting here, so the goal is to cast it as many times as possible. The four Time Reversals get us 16 castings of Rite of Replication; for Eye of the Storm, it is best to cast the four Rites first, then cast the other 16 instant/sorceries you listed (You can squeeze more in the deck, but I won't worry about that yet), getting another 74 castings. So we get 90 castings of Rite of Replication. At the start, the Monastery Mentors (it's best to copy Monastery Mentor with our copy cards, since we're going to Mirrorweave them to Precursor Golems later anyway) wind up adding about 2500 creatures, then alternating Unwilling Recruits and Rectraction Helixes triple that number four times for about 200,000 creatures, which get Mirrorweaved into 200,000 Precursor Golems, or more than 2^^4 Precursor Golems. That gets bumped 90 times, so the final damage is between 2^^94 and 2^^95.
I don't think that quite works. It's true that the first Eye will activate the Pyromancer Ascensions when it resolves, allowing the first Radiate in the second Eye to take advantage of it. But if the second Eye has more than one Radiate or copy spell, we need to activate the new Ascensions in between each pair. So the castings have to go Radiate, activating spell, Radiate, activating spell, ... . I don't see how the extra Eye helps us do that.
Okay - each casting of Radiate still takes X activated Pyromancer Ascensions to 2^^^X Doubling Seasons. But your new combos are more powerful. Each bouncing of {c}Quicksilver Gargantuan[/c] triggers X Dual Natures, and each trigger takes X Doubling Seasons to 2^X Doubling Seasons, so we wind up with 2^^X Doubling Seasons as well as Dual Natures and any other creature we're using. So each copy of Supplant Form applies X to 2^^X; so does each activation of Tradewind Rider, so Insurrection untaps X Tradwind Riders and takes X Doubling Seasons to 2^^^X Doubling Seasons. Best of all, though, is the Barrin, Master Wizard combo. Each two mana applies X to 2^^X, so each tapping of Harabaz Druid gets lots of mana and takes X to 2^^^X, and each copy of Insurrection untaps lots of Harabaz Druids and takes X to 2^^^^X. So with X Pyromancer Ascensions, a casting of Insurrection will generate 2^^^^^X Doubling Seasons. So the goal now is to cast Insurrection, activating spell, Insurrection, activating spell, etc. as many times as possible, with Radiate becoming completely insignificant at this point. If say you can cast 278 Insurrections, that will get you a final damage of about 2^^^^^^281.
Now we're getting to some serious numbers!
Well, maybe I'll think of a decent way to fix that.
4 Clone Legion
4 Parallel Evolution
4 Time Spiral
4 Time Reversal
4 Praetor's Counsel
4 Ill-Gotten Gains
4 Restock
1 Show and Tell
1 Enter the Infinite
1 Past in Flames
1 Unwilling Recruit
1 Doubling Season
1 Dual Nature
1 Pyromancer Ascension
1 Xenograft
1 March of the Machines
1 Life and Limb
1 Leyline of Anticipation
1 Intruder Alarm
1 Primeval Bounty
1 Mana Reflection
1 Fires of Yavimaya
1 Dictate of the Twin Gods
1 Coat of Arms
1 Snake Basket
1 Mycosynth Lattice
1 Archangel of Thune
1 Craterhoof Behemoth
1 Wild Beastmaster
1 Avenger of Zendikar
1 Gyre Sage
1 Precursor Golem
1 Kalonian Hydra
You start with the standard Lotus --> Show --> Omni --> Infinite play (leaving Past). Then March and Lattice to make everything a creature. Play Nature and Season followed by Leyline/Bounty and Thune. Then play each other enchantment (for each Xenograft you choose Saproling/Golem/Plant and ignore the rest) artifact, and creature in response to the previous ending with Avenger (tapping every creature for mana because of Limb).
From here you do a series of Rites/Legions/Evolutions multiplying every permanent each time in an explosive manner due to the Ascensions/Seasons/Golems/Avengers, adding even more counters from landfall/Bounty/Thune/Season triggers (remember every creature is a plant and a land) and from those counters generating even more mana from every Alarm/Sage/Reflection (not to mention every other creature).
After each of those is used you play a Spiral which gets multiplied by an unimaginable amount of active Ascensions. Between the resolution of each copy you replay Infinite and every Rite/Legion/Evolution (thanks to Leyline) multiplying by every active Precursor (for Rite)/Ascension exploding everything you have to astronomical counts. Then you repeat this for every Spiral/Reversal/Counsel/Gains/Restock leaving the Lotus on as the only card in the deck the final time you cast Infinite. Now cast past in flames so you can cast each one more time (because you can).
Finally... Use all the mana in your pool (which is beyond ridiculous) to pop a Basket and resolve all subsequent Season/Bounty/landfall/Bounty/Thune/Season/Alarm/Sage/Reflection blah blah... use that mana to feed another Basket... then another... until every one is popped. Now use the entire pool of mana to cast a Recruit (because Lattice allows you, and why not) which hits everything for every Precursor since every creature is a golem and is copied for every active Ascension which you use to target a single Beastmaster. You then attack with everything, first resolving all Hydra triggers, then all Beastmaster triggers (starting with the mega-Recruited one). Then all damage is doubled for every gazillion-bagillion Dictates.
Ok, let's cast way more than 278 Insurrections and stick at least a couple more arrows in there! I now need to change my method of draw because in order to crank that number up, I need to get cards back into my hand (or library as I intend to), and as crazy as it sounds to me, if I leave in Enter the Infinite, I will in fact Enter the Infinite.
Cards we are definitely cutting:
Enter the Infinite
Tradewind Rider
Knowledge Pool
Supplant Form
Radiate
Rite of Replication
Before I start listing what I've come up with since, I'm going to explain more clearly how the multiple Eyes are helping. Pretend for a moment that we had Opalescence, 2 Eye of the Storms, and 1 Pyromancer Ascension. We have a Healing Salve in the graveyard, 2 Healing Salves in one Eye of the Storm, and 1 Cackling Counterpart in the other, and for the sake of arguement, no counters on Pyromancer Ascension. If we cast an instant or sorcery, both Eyes trigger. We put the one with Cackling Counterpart on bottom and the one with Healing Salves on top. The one on top resolves, exiling the spell we cast, and then casting out a copy of the spell we cast in, healing salve, and healing salve. Both Healing Salves are cast while having the same name as a card in the graveyard, so Pyromancer Ascension triggers the ability to add a counter twice. Then all three spells resolve leaving only the other Eye of the Storm trigger on the stack. When it resolves, it casts Cackling Counterpart, which triggers the copy ability of Pyromancer Ascension since it acquired its 2 counters. So two copies of the spell makes 2 more Ascensions. If we cast another spell and stack the triggers the same, those copies will have 2 counters as well before we get back around to Cackling Counterpart again. The spells cast out of a single Eye of the Storm all happen all at once without chance for Pyromancer Ascension triggers to go on the stack until after they're all cast, so there is no wizardry to get more triggers out of the same Eye. I apologize if that's what it sounded like I was getting at. It's all irrelevant now though, because the only spell we care to have copied a million billion times anymore is Insurrection.
Ok, so. Black Lotus. Show and Tell. Omniscience. Yawgmoth's Bargain. Draw 19 cards.
Opalescence, Dual Nature + Doubling Season x4. (Even correctly ordered, I assume the card slot efficiency is low here by playing 4 of each when we'll eventually bounce them out of hand anyway, but with half the deck blank, I'm not gonna lose any sleep on it.)
The 3-of instant or sorcery as of right now is going to be Parallel Evolution mostly so I don't care to think about making some of everything later, it will auto-make plenty of everything. So we cast one copy of Parallel Evolution that goes to the graveyard. And get down the other essentials: Barrin, Master Wizard, Harabaz Druid, Quicksilver Gargantuan, Pyromancer Ascension, Eye of the Storm, Vedalken Orrery. (Double checking myself: 26 cards drawn, 20 played, 6 available, looking good.)
Now we play the second copy of Parallel Evolution which goes into an Eye of the Storm and casts out, activating the Pyromancer Ascensions that existed before it resolved. Next we cast Insurrection which copies on the first cast, is eaten by an empty Eye, copies out of Eye of the Storm, and then the other Eye with Parallel Evolution resolves multiplying everything again. Mostly, we got our first big Barrin/Druid/Gargantuan bump. Then we cast the 3rd and final Parallel Evolution, putting it into the Eye with the other one and activating every Ascension not made by those two, and then resolving the Eye trigger with Insurrection doing the second big Insurrection bump. 3 cards left in hand, we cast Boon Reflection which is really a million billion of them. 2 cards left in hand, we cast Bargain, having the opponent draw 1 and gaining 7 x 2^million billion life ourselves. It doesn't matter which Eye eats Bargain, we're going to decline to cast it nearly every time we have the option anyway. With 1 card of wiggle room, we can now draw the rest of the library. And with an empty library, we can move onto my next big plan.
Play Possibility Storm. I chose Knowledge Pool over Possibility Storm earlier because it's easier to control when just going for 2 cast triggers, but Knowledge Pool gets in the way of the Barrin bounce/cast combo. With an empty library, 2 Possibility Storms will get you what you originally cast by failing to find on the first trigger and then finding the card the second time. Possibility Storm also has no intervening if clause, so if you have a million billion of them, they will attempt to cast a matching card from your library a million billion times. We now have a million billion Possibility Storms. Now we cast the saddest spell in the universe, because it's going to stay on the bottom of the stack waiting for a the end of the game. It doesn't matter what the spell is, so for comedy's sake, I'm going to call is Storm Crow. In response to Storm Crow, Hinder it. All the Possibility Storms Trigger, all the Eye of the Storms trigger, all the Pyromancer Ascensions trigger. Allow one Pyromancer Ascension Trigger to happen, copying Hinder and using it to target the original Hinder. The copy resolves, putting Hinder on the top or bottom of the library (doesn't matter which, same thing). The two relevant Eyes do their thing and raise the number of permanents to some rediculous exponent of their previous state.
And then the Possibility Storm triggers start resolving. The first one to resolve looks for an instant and finds Hinder and casts it which retriggers ever Eye and Ascension all over again (because neither of those things care if the spell was cast from hand). This process of casting Hinder and triggering things will repeat once for every single copy of Possibility Storm that existed when Hinder was cast from hand. Eventually it runs out, and on the last copy of the trigger, Hinder gets put onto the bottom of the library and stays there. After one more round of Insurrections, Stor Crow can finally see the light of day as it tries to resolve, so we pay 1 life to draw Hinder and reignite the process with a million billion times as many Possibility Storms. We repeat the whole process a million billion times until we get down to 1 life, and on that cycle of casts, we'll choose to cast 1 copy of Bargain, putting our life back up to astronomical, so we can do the whole thing over again until we've cast Bargain 53 times and the opponent has no cards left to draw.
And that is the deck so far, 33 unused decks slots remaining.
Ah, okay - that works so long as we have just one Cackling Counterpart. My issue was that we would want to exile a whole bunch of Insurrections to Eye of the Storm, so we would need a whole bunch of activating spells exiled as well. But in your new deck it looks like you need just one, so all is good.
Okay, so the Eye of the Storms want to exile the Hinder, but they can't since the spell is countered and changes zones. I think that's right.
Okay, so each casting of Insurrection from Eye of the Storm takes X to 2^^^^^X, each casting of Hinder from our hand causes it to be cast X times from X Possibility Storms, so it takes X to 2^^^^^^X. Each casting of Bargain adds X life and allows us to draw Hinder X times, taking X to 2^^^^^^^X. Finally, we cast Bargain 53 times - the first Bargain is done before we really have a lot of Boon Reflections, but after some inspection, the first Bargain will take us to more than 2^^^^^^^^3, and then each of the remaining 52 Bargains will bump that by 1, so we wind up with between 2^^^^^^^^55 and 2^^^^^^^^56 damage. I guess you could bump that to between 2^^^^^^^^56 and 2^^^^^^^^57 by dropping a Dual Nature and a Doubling Season, so that the first Bargain could be cast after Hinder is first cast.
I'm a little worried there might be an infinite in there somewhere, but I don't see one. SadisticMystic and plopfill are much better at finding these infinites than I am.
Oh, and you don't actually need three Parallel Evolutions; when you trigger Pyromancer Ascension's first ability you add a gazillion quest counters thanks to the Doubling Seasons. So two is enough.
It should be safe, each level of nonsense has an independent fundamental restriction. I'm limited on my number of every permanent by the amount of Quicksilver Gargantuan casts I can do. I'm limited on Quicksilver Gargantuan cats by the mana I can make. I'm limited on the mana I can make by the Harabaz Druids I can tap. I'm limited on the Harabaz Druids I can tap by the amount of Insurrections I can resolve. I'm limited on the amount of Insurrections I can resolve by the amount I can cast. In Eye of the Storm, I'm limited on the amount of Insurrections I can cast by the amount of instant or sorcery cards I can cast. The only way I can cast an Instant or Sorcery card is casting it from hand or casting it from Possibility Storm. And Possibility Storm only triggers off of cards cast from hand, so my instant and sorcery cards cast is limited by the number of instant and sorceries I can cast from my hand. I'm limited on the number of instants and sorceries I can get in hand by the number of cards I can draw. I'm limited on the number of card I can draw by the amount of life I can spend. And I'm limited on the amount of life I can spend by the amount of cards my opponent can draw.
Nice catch!
We will use the same setup as in the above link - so we will have
Opalescence
March of the Machines
Doubling Season
Dual Nature
Omniscience
Leyline of Anticipation
Bloodbond March
Grip of Chaos
Psychic Battle
Cephalid Shrine
Mimic Vat
Clash of Realities
Guilty Conscience
Rite of Passage
Sinking Feeling
Copy Enchantment
Allay
Avacyn, Angel of Hope
Thran Dynamo
Mirror of Fate
Millikin
Cowardice
Omniscience
Our new cards will be Reclamation Sage, Elvish Spirit Guide, and Ezuri, Renegade Leader.
As in the current champion deck, each time we play Copy Enchantment with X Dual Natures in play, we get X Dual Nature triggers, each of which takes X Doubling Seasons to 2^X Doubling Seasons, so we wind up with 2^^X Doubling Seasons and 2^^X Dual Natures. (approximately) Each time we cast Allay, it triggers X Grip of Chaoses, and each Grip of Chaos triggers X Psychic Battles. Each time Psychic Battle resolves, we redirect the target to the nontoken Copy Enchantment, and Cowardice triggers, bouncing it back to hand. So each Psychic Battle trigger takes X to 2^^X, each Grip of Chaos takes X to 2^^^X, and each casting of Allay takes X to 2^^^^X.
Next in the sequence is Thran Dynamo. Much like Mana Crypt in the above link, Thran Dynamo is worth five recursive layers, so each casting of Thran Dynamo takes X to 2 -> X -> 9. Then comes Reclamation Sage - this is an ETB effect that targets, so it is worth nine recursive layers, so each casting takes X Doubling Seasons to 2 -> X -> 18 Doubling Seasons.
Now the new combo starts. We have Ezuri, Renegade Leader on the battlefield, and Elvish Spirit Guide in our hand. Let's say we have one green mana in our mana pool. We cast Elvish Spirit Guide, triggering X Bloodbond Marches and also Cephalid Shrine. We allow Cephalid Shrine to counter Elvish Spirit Guide, and we let the first Bloodbond March trigger resolve, and bring Elvish Spirit Guide from the graveyard to the battlefield. Now we spend our one green mana and activate Ezuri, Renegade leader, triggering X Rings of Brighthearths. Each time we resolve a Rings of Brighthearth trigger, we trigger X Grip of Chaoses, and each time we resolve a Grip of Chaos, we trigger X Psychic Battles. So the stack looks like:
Psychic Battle trigger
...
Psychic Battle trigger
Grip of Chaos trigger
...
Grip of Choas trigger
Rings of Brighthearth trigger
...
Rings of Brighthearth trigger
Bloodbond March trigger
...
Bloodbond March trigger
each time we resolve a Psychic Battle trigger, we reselect the target to be Reclamation Sage, and Cowardice will bounce it back to hand, allowing us to apply another X to 2 -> X -> 18. Each Grip of Chaos trigger will create X Psychic Battle triggers, and will take X to 2 -> X -> 19, and each Rings of Brighthearth trigger will trigger X Grip of Chaos triggers, taking X to 2 -> X -> 20.
When all the Rings of Brightheart triggers, are gone, we use the last Psychic Battle trigger prior to the Bloodbond March triggers resolving to bounce Elvish Spirit Guide to hand rather than Reclamation Sage. Now, we exile Elvish Spirit Guide to give us a green mana. We use Mirror of Fate to shuffle Elvish Spirit Guide into our library (with all our castings of Reclamation Sage, we can insure that we have a spare Mirror of Fate to use), and use Millikin to mill Elvish Spirit Guide from our library into our graveyard. We resolve the next Bloodbond March trigger, bringing Elvish Spirit Guide back to the battlefield. We now have a green mana, so we can activate Ezuri, Renegade Leader again, getting us our stack of Rings of Brightheart triggers, Grip of Choas triggers, and Psychic Battle triggers again, and we do the whole process over again. We repeat this process for each Bloodbond March; each Bloodbond March trigger takes X to 2 -> X -> 21, and the whole process takes X Bloodbond Marches to 2 -> X -> 22.
Now, let's see what happens when we have two green mana. As before, we cast and counter Elvish Spirit Guide, and use the first Bloodbond March trigger to bring the Guide to the battlefield. We spend one of the two green mana to activate Ezuri, Renegade Leader, getting Rings of Brighthearth triggers, Grip of Choas triggers, and Psychic Battle triggers. We use our first Psychic Battle trigger to bounce Elvish Spirit Guide. We now cast and counter Elvish Spirit Guide, use the first Bloodbond March to bring it to the battlefield again. Now we use the second of our green mana to activate Ezuri, Renegade Leader for the second time, getting us a cascade of triggers again. Now our stack looks like
Psychic Battle trigger
...
Psychic Battle trigger
Grip of Chaos trigger
...
Grip of Choas trigger
Rings of Brighthearth trigger
...
Rings of Brighthearth trigger
Bloodbond March trigger
...
Bloodbond March trigger
Psychic Battle trigger
...
Psychic Battle trigger
Grip of Chaos trigger
...
Grip of Choas trigger
Rings of Brighthearth trigger
...
Rings of Brighthearth trigger
Bloodbond March trigger
...
Bloodbond March trigger
We use each Psychic Battle trigger to bounce Reclamation Sage, until we have used all of the Rings of Brighthearth, Grip of Chaos and Psychic Battle triggers at the top level, and our down to our last Psychic Battle trigger. This time, we use the Psychic Battle to bounce Elvish Spirit Guide. Then we exile Elvish Spirit Guide to get a green mana back, use Mirror of Fate to shuffle the Guide, into our library, use Millikin to bring it to the graveyard, and the next Bloodbond March trigger to bring it back to the battlefield. With our new green mana, we activate Ezuri, Renegade Leader again, and the combo continues as before.
So far, this is the same as the combo with one mana. When we get down to our last Bloodbond March trigger, we use it to bring Elvish Spirit Guide back to the battlefield, but rather than use our one green mana to activate Ezuri, Renegade Leader, we use the following Psychic Battle trigger to bring Elvish Spirit Guide back to our hand. Now we cast and counter Elvish Spirit Guide, creating a whole new stack of Bloodbond March triggers, and we have saved our one green mana, so we can do the whole top level combo again at the cost of one Psychic Battle trigger at the lower level.
So, the top four stacks of triggers works as before, getting us X to 2 -> X -> 22. Each Psychic Battle trigger on the lower level gets us X to 2 -> X -> 22, each Grip of Chaos trigger gets us X to 2 -> X -> 23, each Rings of Brighthearth trigger gets us X to 2 -> X -> 24, each Bloodbond March trigger gets us X to 2 -> X -> 25, and the whole combo with two green mana gets us to 2 -> X -> 26.
So, we see that each additional green mana that we start the combo with gets us four more stacks of triggers in the combo, each one adding a recursive layer. So starting with X green mana, we get 4X + 18 layers in the end. If we start with 100 green mana (easy to generate), we'll get 418 layers, beating the current megacombo. If we have a green mana source that we can iterate at least 64 times (say with Mana Reflection), we'll beat Graham's Number!
The crucial question of course is whether there is a way to make this go infinite. I don't think so, because to create a stack of triggers, we have to use up a trigger in the next stack below it, so we have the same one-way traffic priciple that keeps the current decks from going infinite. Note that we always save the bouncing of Elvish Spirit Guide until the very last Psychic Battle trigger before the following stack of Bloodbond March triggers; one might wonder if there is profit to be had by bouncing Elvish Spirit Guide before then. I believe the answer is no, because we can't exile Elvish Spirit Guide until we have a Bloodbond March trigger waiting on the stack to bring it back. We could cast the Guide again, but doing that and bouncing it back to hand costs us a green mana, so doing this prematurely will only hurt the combo. We could bounce the Guide prematurely and then exile it, and then wait until the next Bloodbond March trigger comes up, but this has the same effect as just waiting to bounce the Guide until the Bloodbond March trigger is ready. So I don't see any infinite.
So, is this it? Is this the coveted Ackermann combo that has eluded us until now? Or is the some crucial snafu that I am missing?
I apologize if this is heartbreaking to an alarming degree, but the creature you're trying to use is in fact Elvish SPIRIT Guide.
Omniscience, Cowardice, Clash of Realities, Elvish Spirit Guide, and any non-spirit creature (like Reclamation Sage) turns into infinite creature casts and ETBs.
Thanks for the heads up!
The obvious question, then, is if we can do something similar with Simian Spirit Guide at a later point. ESG + SSG + land is enough to cast Chaos Warp from the opening hand, so we wouldn't need to downgrade to Mana Crypt just for a usable bootstrap. SSG is a lot harder to single out, though, and the red mana activated abilities are far less friendly. The only one that looks promising (while leaving room for at least a red mana producer above it) is Paragon of Fierce Defiance, which probably fails both for granting haste and for giving +1/+1 in greater and greater numbers with its ability to bounce other copies of itself.
Even if it does pan out, these numbers still won't approach Graham, not without about 63 separate analogs of the ESG step. An ESG-based deck should be able to get somewhere around 2 -> X -> (2 -> Y -> 300), which will comfortably beat G_2, and if SSG can work somehow then it'll be over G_3, but still a long way off.
If we go on to use Frontier Siege, I think the most efficient way to set it up involves a Scrambleverse that gives them a few copies of Rite of Passage and nothing else. With Primal Vigor, a single Rite of Passage donation would be enough, but Frontier Guide requires Elspeth which requires Doubling Season, since Primal Vigor doesn't double loyalty counters. Or if we're going to use Avacyn, donating a token of that (in response to a Dual Nature trigger to get back another token) works just as well--the idea is to set it up so that nothing on either side will ever die as a result of the fights. Obviously with Scrambleverse potentially doubling as an "untap all" spell, we can't run Mnemonic Wall or anything like that with the potential to return it, but since a Frontier Siege-based setup will probably top out at Chaos Warp and Yawgmoth's Bargain anyway, Scrambleverse plays right into that direction.
Ok, so in case you haven't noticed, I'm not an expert on the mathematics here, but I think your suggested procedure doesn't scale the way you want it to because the Rings of Brighthearth triggers are a set amount from when you activate Ezuri, so to scale it to another layer, you need that many activations of Ezuri (I think).
If it does work, you're welcome to slot it into what I have so far, since Cowardice should be safely non-infinite when my only targetted ability so far is Barrin and I'm already making upward arrows worth of green mana, and if each 1 mana adds 4 arrows, we've broken the viability of that number system without embedding it into istelf.
--------------------- Ideas for my list ---------------------
With the new goal of playing with Possibility Storm triggers as much at possible, I did a quick search of things that trigger off of casts, and realized that I can also do nonsense with Bloodbond March myself. Every time I bounce and cast Quicksilver Gargantuan, it's triggers the Possibility Storms, one of which recasts the Gargantuan, each cast can trigger a Bloodbond March. Where you bounce, cast, counter, recur, I can't do that efficiently because bouncing is my non-free mechanism and if I find a way to make the mana keep up, it would go infinite. So instead, I'll resolve the March triggers with the creature still on the stack each time by using a second Gargantuan and a sac outlet (I'm picking Vish Kal, Blood Arbiter).
So plus Bloodbond March, Vish Kal, and a duplicate Gargantuan, now instead of having 1 Gargantuan enter for each Barrin bounce, we have 1 for every Bloodbond March followed by another for every March that exists after the Gargantuan copies finish entering allowing Possibility Storm to cast the Gargantuan a second time. Now if only we could get the Gargantuan back in the deck like Hinder to use ALL of the Possibility Storm triggers. Good news! With its cloning ability and the newly acquired sac outlet, we are one Mirage common away from doing just that. If Quicksilver Gargantuan copies Gravebane Zombie when it enters the battlefield, we can sacrifice it to Vish Kal to put it back on top before each Possibility Storm trigger resolves. So our Doubling Seasons explode for every Doubling Season for every Dual Nature for every Bloodbond March for every Possibility Storm for 1/2 every Harabaz Druid for every Harabaz Druid for Insurrections for every Pyromancer Ascension for every Possibility Storm for every Boon Reflection for every Bargain cast which, as of right now, is 53 times. And then at the end, the attack power on the swing gets increased whatever amount more because instead of stopping the cycle after the last Insurrection because anything else made wouldn't have haste, we can continute making creatures until we absolutely exhaust the mana supply and simultaneously raising the power to some rediculous exponent by sacrificing every other creature to Vish Kal.
So that's adding 4 cards: Bloodbond March, Vish Kal, Blood Arbiter, Quicksilver Gargantuan, and Gravebane Zombie.
I'm thinking the most efficient method would be to only play 1 Doubling Season and 1 Dual Nature, so cut 6 cards there, and one enabling card (still Parallel Evolution), at least as a place holder), so 7 cards out of the previous assembly.
That should put the deck at 24 slots used, 36 left open, and access to the full procedure from Hinder down for 3 full cycles before the first casting of bargain (8 if we play Possibility Storm before any of the creatures and use the duplicate Possibility Storms to pull every creature out of the deck). So that's a lot of efficiency gained while simultaneously pumping the output up a couple levels.
Things we have access to for those other 36 cards: mega mana, mega creature ETB's, mega creature casts, mega instant and sorcery casts, mega death triggers, and mega +1/+1 counters on Vish Kal.
That's great to hear! I do think that you're greatly underestimating the size of the numbers that we'll get though.
Let's say we add Nantuko Elder. We get a hasty token version, and say we put Sinking Feeling on it and activate it with 100 Rings of Brighthearths on the battlefield. This will allow us to tap Nantuko Elder 102 times. Let's also say we have 10 Mana Reflections on the battlefield. We tap Nantuko Elder the first time, and this gives us 1024 green mana. By the aforementioned combo, this will allow us to generate more than 10 -> 10 -> 4096 Doubling Seasons, and also Mana Reflections. (more than G_1) Once that combo is done, we untap and tap Nantuko the second time, and this time we get more than 10 -> 10 -> 4096 mana. So, since with X green mana we can generated more than 10 -> 10 -> 4X Doubling Seasons, this gives us more than 10 -> 10 -> (10 -> 10 -> 4096) Doubling Seasons and Mana Reflections, which is more than G_2. We get that much mana on the third tapping of Nantuko Elder, so we get more than 10 -> 10 -> (10 -> 10 -> (10 -> 10 -> 4096)), or more than G_3. After the 64th tapping, we have nested this expression 64 times, and we've beaten Graham's number!
So, the first layer above the "big" Ackermann layer (Ackermann stage, maybe?) will iterate the function X to 10 -> 10 -> X many times, which gives us 10 -> 10 -> X -> 2; the second layer will iterate X to 10 -> 10 -> X -> 2 many times, which takes us to 10 -> 10 -> X -> 3, and so on. Getting a second "Ackermann stage" via Simian Spirit Guide will put X into the fourth number in the chain, so we get something like 10 -> 10 -> 10 -> X. Then, adding layers on top of that will bump up the fifth number, so we should potentially get something like 10 -> 10 -> 10 -> X -> 300+.
If by "set amount", you mean that there are the same number of Rings of Brightherath triggers each time we activate Ezuri, that's not true - activating Ezuri allows us to bounce Reclamation Sage, and Reclamation Sage allows us to bounce Rings of Brighthearth and get many more of them.
Ah, nice. So Quicksilver Gargantuan copying Doubling Season and Dual Nature gets you two layers, Bloodbond March is worth a layer, Possibility Storm on Quicksilver Gargantuan is worth a layer, mana for the Harabaz Druid is worth a layer, all the Harabaz Druids that get hasted is worth a layer, all the Pyromancer Ascensions on Insurrection is worth a layer, all the Possibility Storms on Insurrection is worth a layer, and all the life you get with Bargain is worth a layer. So that's nine layers, and 53 activations take you to more than 2^^^^^^^^^^55 damage.
EDIT: Okay, on to constructing an actual deck. Yeah, the only possibilities I see for red mana are Paragon of Fierce Defiance and Break Through the Line. But not only does Break Through the Lines probably cut out more potential cards, it kills the Sinking Feeling part of the combo, which will really cut down on the number of layers. So I think Paragon of Heart Defense is the winner. I don't see that haste is a problem; we don't want something like Empress Galina to get haste because it could target itself, but anything red will get targeted by Break Through the Lines anyway so it doesn't matter. Similarly, we add +1/+1 to red creatures, but those are cut out anyway by the Paragon targetting them, so no difference.
Okay, so the next question is how to transition from Elvish Spirit Guide to Simian Spirit Guide. Well, we just need a red creature that generates green mana, but not red mana and is not an Elf. Which - is scarcer than I thought. The only possibility I see is Zhur-Taa Druid, which does damage to the opponent. So I guess we add Abyssal Persecutor as well.
So, here goes:
1 Elvish Spirit Guide
1 Ezuri, Renegade Leader
1 Zhur-Taa Druid
1 Simian Spirit Guide
1 Paragon of Fierce Defiance
1 Snow-Covered Mountain
1 Scrying Sheets
1 Show and Tell
1 Archaeomancer
1 Ghosthelm Courier
1 Tropical Island
1 Everbark Shaman
1 Black Poplar Shaman
1 Swamp
1 Fertilid
1 Horde of Notions
1 Primal Beyond
1 Tidal Warrior
1 Seahunter
1 Cateran Enforcer
1 Cateran Slaver
1 Cateran Overlord
1 Mercenary Informer
1 Dream Thrush
1 Driver of the Dead
1 Baron Sengir
1 Willow Satyr
1 King Crab
1 Snow Hound
1 Garza's Assassin
1 Divinity of Pride
1 Western Paladin
1 Shadowborn Demon
1 Minion of Leshrac
1 Devout Lightcaster
1 Mimic Vat
1 Mirror of Fate
1 Dual Nature
1 Frontier Siege
1 Guilty Conscience
1 Rite of Passage
1 Rings of Brighthearth
1 Grip of Chaos
1 Psychic Battle
1 Cowardice
1 Leyline of Anticipation
1 Omniscience
1 March of the Machines
1 Nature's Revolt
1 Opalescence
1 Elspeth, Sun's Champion
1 Akroan Horse
1 Elvish Pioneer
1 Mana Reflection
1 Mana Crypt
1 Millikin
1 Abyssal Persecutor
1 Words of Wisdom
I count Devout Lightcaster at level 312; I didn't bother counting how many times Words of Wisdom can draw Devout Lightcaster, since I doubt this will be the last iteration of the deck, but it's probably about 30, so the damage will be about 10 -> 10 -> 10 -> ~30 -> 313.
Consider me still unconvinced at your sudden ability to multiply arrows. I understand that when you have X of each thing and go from one to the next, like Grip of Chaos to Psychic Battle, multiplying them along the way, you get X iteration of raising X to itself, which is pretty much adding one of those arrows by definition. Why is adding iterations of Ezuri on top of that multiplicative of the arrows, and not just adding one more layer? And if you leave the Rings of Brighthearth triggers floating around, they don't multiply, so when you eventually resolve back down to them, you get way less than the current X number of iterations, where the other pieces of the chain multiply better as you go. So it would be most efficient to resolve them first rather than leave them on the stack waiting. Much like you were questioning whether the Pyromancer Ascensions would be active in time for the next round, you're artificially holding a level back by stacking it like that.
Also, if you play Abyssal Persecutor, your opponent can't draw out and you go infinite.
1 Enter the Infinite
4 Restock
4 Pull from the Deep
4 Treasured Find
4 Volcanic Vision
4 Woodland Guidance
4 Descent of the Dragons
4 Rite of Replication
2 Bioshift
2 Radiate
1 Omniscience
1 Doubling Season
1 Dual Nature
1 Pyromancer Ascension
1 Xenograft
1 Life and Limb
1 Leyline of Anticipation
1 Mana Reflection
1 Copy Enchantment
1 Intruder Alarm
1 Death's Presence
1 Fervor
1 Psychic Battle
1 Grip of Chaos
1 Crystal Chimes
1 Prototype Portal
1 Mimic Vat
1 Avenger of Zendikar
1 Garruk's Horde
1 Barishi
1 Faith Healer
1 Gyre Sage
1 Precursor Golem
1 Elite Arcanist
1 Dross Scorpion
The deck is based around how many Descents can be cast.
I start as before (adding the Copy Enchantment trick I missed), but this time I also have two Arcanists (one with a Bioshift and the other with Radiate). I also have a Portal with Chimes imprinted. I cast the Bioshift/Radiate in hand to get them in my graveyard and with the Arcanists I can take advantage of (i.e. abuse) the Alarm triggers, each time Shifting with Ascendency copies and Radiating with Ascendency copies each meandering through a series of Grips and Battles culminating with my +1/+1 counters moving from creatures A->B->C->... sweeping up all counters and eventually bouncing back and forth each time taking advantage of the Seasons until all counters end on a Sage.
After all permanents are on board I cast Descent (copying for each Ascendency and through the Battle/Grips). I choose to destroy every Scorpion, Barishi, Precursor (and friends) and Avenger. I stack all Barishi shuffle triggers on the bottom, then the Scorpion triggers on every Scorpion and Precursor dying for every Scorpion that was in play again weaving through the Battle/Grips targeting the Portal sans one. I then have my creatures each move through the Vat (saving my Barishi from permanent exile) tapping once to produce Avengers, untapping with the final Scorpion target and tapping to produce Precursors. Then all the Presence triggers resolve yadda yadda. After that I use Healer to sac the Opal so my enchantments are no longer creatures and will not incur the Nature exile. I then use Healer on all remaining non-token enchantments sans Nature.
From there I tap the Portal to produce a large number of Chimes. I pop a chime to return all enchantments in my graveyard to hand and recast them. Opal first, then Season, Copy, etc... each time creating a bajillion tokens, counters and subsequent untap triggers on my Arcanists for my Shifting fun. I then destroy the Opal then the others again and pop the next Chime. After each Chime token has popped, the first untap will resolve allowing me to tap the Portal for even more token Chimes. The process repeats until all untaps have resolved and the final chime has popped. At that point I use Healer to sac the Copy Enchantment (since nothing shares its name I don't have to worry about losing any tokens) and it goes into the Vat, releasing my Precursor.
That is when the first Barishi shuffle trigger resolves, returning all my creatures in my graveyard to my library. I use my Horde's ability to cast each one from the top of my library. I then repeat the previous step for each shuffle trigger until they have all resolved. Once all shuffles have resolved, the next Descent will wipe my board as before and all previous steps are repeated until I have spent every Descent.
After all descents have been used, I begin using my terminal Restocks, Pulls, Finds, Visions and Guidances. I chose those because they target and allow better abuse with the Grip/Battles over the non-targeting Spirals/Reversals I was using previously. I also threw in Rites because I had the space, but I no longer have the Spiral/Reversal shuffle triggers to reuse them.
EDIT: Replaced Aura of Silence with Faith Healer to prevent going infinite.
Well, iterations of Ezuri aren't really "multiplicative of the arrows"; to put it more precisely, having X green mana allows us to create a stack of 4X groups of different triggers, and each of thiose groups contributes a layer. Let me go into greater detail.
Okay, so the basic idea behind getting these huge Knuth arrow numbers is that we have a bunch of different resources, call them X1, X2, ... up to Xn. Also, you have to ability to decrease X2 by 1 (or a fixed amount) to increase X1 by more; the ability to decrease X3 by 1 to increase X2 by X1 or thereabouts, the ability to decrease X4 by 1 to increase X3 by X1 or thereabouts, and so on up to Xn. This allows us to create a number with n Knuth arrows.
So for example, take your deck. We have
X1 = Doubling Seasons
X2 = Dual Natures
X3 = Bloodbond Marches on Quicksilver Gargantuan
X4 = Possibility Storms on Quicksilver Gargantuan
X5 = activations of Barrin / amount of mana
X6 = Tappings of Harabaz Druid
X7 = Pyromancer Ascensions on Insurrection
X8 = Possibility Storms on Insurrection
X9 = life gain from Bargain
So for example, resolving one Bloodbond March decreases X3 by 1, and increases X2 by 2^X1, the that part works out, and similarly for the other levels.
Now, for my deck, say we have three green mana. That allows us to create a stack of twelve groups of triggers, so we have
X1 = group of Psychic Battle triggers
X2 = group of Grip of Chaos triggers
X3 = group of Rings of Brighthearth triggers
X4 = group of Bloodbond March triggers
X5 = group of Psychic Battle triggers
X6 = group of Grip of Chaos triggers
X7 = group of Rings of Brighthearth triggers
X8 = group of Bloodbond March triggers
X9 = group of Psychic Battle triggers
X10 = group of Grip of Chaos triggers
X11 = group of Rings of Brighthearth triggers
X12 = group of Bloodbond March triggers
and again, we have the ability to resolve one trigger from X(n+1) to create a whole bunch of triggers of Xn above it, as explained in my previous post. (If you have any particular questions about how this is done, I would be happy to answer.) So here we get 12 layers, and if we had 1000 mana we would get 4000, etc.
I have to say, I'm not really understanding your particular objection to Rings of Brighthearth. They work just like all the other triggered abilities that we are using as layers. You certainly do not want to resolve them all immediately, no can you; in order to reach a new layer, you need to bootstrap the previous layer for each resolution of a trigger. So in our case, when we resolve a Rings of Brighthearth trigger and get a whole bunch of Grip of Chaos triggers equal to the number of Grip of Chaoses. You do not want to resolve the next Rings of Brighthearth trigger, nor can you, since all the Grip of Chaos triggers are put on the stack on top. This is a good thing, since we can then resolve all those Grip of Chaos triggers to create a whole bunch more Grip of Chaoses, and so when all the Grip of Chaos triggers are done and we get to the next Rings of Brighthearth trigger, we get way more Grip of Chaos triggers this time around, as desired.
This is exactly how all the other layers work, like for example the Bloodbond March and Possibility Storm layers in your deck. When you cast Quicksilver Gargantuan, you get a whole bunch of Bloodbond March triggers. When the first Bloodbond March trigger resolves and puts a Quicksilver Gargantuan on the battlefield, you get a whole bunch of Dual Nature triggers. You cannot now resolve the next Bloodbond March trigger, nor do you want to, since we would only get the same number of Dual Nature triggers again, which is really weak. Instead, we resolve the Dual Nature triggers first, each time creating a bunch of Doubling Seasons, until we reach the last Dual Nature trigger, and create a whole bunch of new Dual Natures. Now the next Bloodbond March can resolve, and this time we have astronomically more Dual Natures on the battlefield, which is exactly what we want. So we absolutely want to leave triggers on the stack waiting until all the lower level interactions peter out.
You say "if you leave the Rings of Brighthearth triggers floating around, they don't multiply"; yes, and that is very important, since if they did multiply while we were taking care of lower level interactions, the combo would go infinite. It's very important that the only thing that can create more Rings of Brighthearth triggers is a higher level resource, to prevent infinities. The exact same thing is true of Grip of Chaos triggers, Psychic Battle triggers, Bloodbond March triggers, all of our layers; they stay constant while the lower level stuff gets done, and only get increased by something higher up.
So honestly, I'm not seeing a difference between what Rings of Brighthearth is doing and all the other layers are doing. And I don't see the relevance of needing to activate Pyromancer Ascension. Rings of Brighthearth doesn't need to be activated.
But, you're absolutely right that Abyssal Persecutor goes infinite. So, perhaps something that prevents damage - Amulet of Kroog should be fine.
To clarify, when I say resolve them all, I mean to say resolve the entire stack, resolve every trigger that results from a single activation of Ezuri before activating Ezuri again. I didn't quite comprehend the way Elvish Spirit Guide was actually working. I kept thinking "the only activated ability to trigger rings is Ezuri, and that's going to keep taking 1 mana, where is he expecting those triggers from?" I understand now. I still don't trust the method, but I was definitely being stupid.
So here's the next question. The power you're describing is entirely dependent on being done in one single shot, so you have to maintain the growth of every resource needed to keep going within the combo (except lower tier triggers, the intended limitting factor). By what mechanism are you generating hasty Millikin and Mirror of Fate in scale with the growth of the combo, and why can it not be applied to Zhur-Taa Druids?
I believe you go infinite thanks to Intruder Alarm and Mimic Vat / Prototype Portal; You can tap Mimic Vat or Prototype Portal to put creatures into play, and Intruder Alarm will allow Mimic Vat / Prototype Portal to untap, and repeat the process. Life and Limb will take care of the mana costs, as would your Bioshift / Gyre Sage sequence.
Okay. Well, I don't know what to do about your lack of trust, other than to answer any questions you may have, so I'll do that as best I can.
Millikin can be exiled to Mimic Vat, which can create hasty tokens; for Mirror of Fate it looks like the best way is to bounce March of the Machines when we need to use it, allowing the original Mirror of Fate and its Dual Nature token copies to tap without worrying about summoning sickness. The reason we can do this is because of Reclamation Sage. Reclamation Sage, along with Cowardice, allows us to bounce any artifact; bouncing Mirror of Fate and replaying it (with March of the Machines in play) gets us new Dual Nature tokens to use. Bouncing Millikin allows us to cast it and counter it, and we can use the first Bloodbond March trigger to bring it to the battlefield, where we can sacrifice it to Cateran Overlord, then exile it to Mimic Vat. Then we do need to tap another Mirror of Fate and a Millikin to bring it back to the graveyard, but each playing of Millikin and Mirror of Fate gets us a gazillion uses, so we can certainly spare one of each to recycle Millikin.
Zhur-Taa Druid, on the other hand, can't be targeted by anything lower level; that's why it was specifically chosen to be not an Elf, and artifact, or an enchantment. The general idea is that higher level things can only target / recycle lower level things, so for example nothing above Ezuri, Renegade Leader can be an elf.
How does Alarm cause the Vats/Portals to untap? They are not creatures. The only way to untap them is when the Scorpions die. The only way (non-enchantment) creatures can die is by Descent... or Silence, now that I'm looking at it, but that is remedied by changing Silence to Faith Healer (which is what I was originally going to use, then I changed it at the last moment).