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?
The only sources of haste in the deck are Mimic Vat and, if we don't get anything better, Paragon of Fierce Defiance. Paragon requires red mana to grant haste, and if we put Zhur-Taa Druid on a particular copy of Mimic Vat, it is thereafter tied to that copy--producing extra Mimic Vats won't do anything to boost the size of the existing Mimic Vat that something is imprinted on.
By the time we need to tap Druid, a few select resources are available in plentiful supply: Elves (Ezuri), artifacts (Reclamation Sage), colorless mana (Thran Dynamo), and enchantments (Allay). Almost all of the Reclamation Sage's activity is going to involve bouncing the Thran Dynamo repeatedly, since that's the next engine card down the line, but the other artifacts--Mirror of Fate, Mimic Vat, Millikin, and Rings of Brighthearth--are also legal targets, and we should top up on those only when we're about to run out (or, in the case of Rings, when a step is about to make use of it). Millikin and Mirror are both artifacts, so that's no big deal. But nothing up to that point is capable of bouncing Zhur-Taa Druid, or of getting it out of the graveyard after removing it from imprint.
With the peculiarity of Zhur-Taa Druid actually dealing damage on its trigger, we might have to cut Guilty Conscience, going back to a simple AEther Flash or something so it doesn't say "T: Grow itself". One layer per step that makes use of it isn't such a big deal now.
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).
Oh of course; I had our own deck on the brain, which had March of the Machines, but of course your deck doesn't.
Question: You say that you move all your creatures through Mimic Vat, but one of the creatures has to wind up in exile. Which one to you leave in exile?
A quick note: the Psychic Battle and Grip of Chaos don't add any layers to your deck. It does to ours because we use Cowardice, which can be triggered any time a target is selected. But without Cowardice, reselecting a target doesn't cause the resolution of the targeting spell, so no extra layers. It is still probably worth keeping at least one of those cards to reselect targets to those of your choosing, so that for example, you can cast Descent of the Dragons targeting a single Golem with Xenograft in play turning all creatures into Golems, without causing the board to be wiped of creatures.
The Bioshift combo looks interesting, but was there anything in particular that you wanted to accomplish with it? It looks to me that, it takes care of activating Pyromancer Ascensions, and gives enough mana to cast creatures via Garruk's Horde, but I was wondering if there was something more that you wanted to happen with all those +1/+1 counters and mana. If you were looking to get extra layers below Doubling Season, I don't think that you get any. To illustrate, let's say that you had A Doubling Seasons, B Intruder Alerts, C Pyromancer Asceonsions, D +1/+1 counters on a particular creature, and E creatures in total. Let's say we resolve a Dual Nature trigger coming from Copy Enchantment, causing 2^A Doubling Seasons to enter the battlefield. This causes B*2^A Intruder Alert triggers. For each two triggers, we can cast Bioshift and Radiate it, and get C Pyromancer Ascension copies off of both. Each Bioshift copy causes D*2^A counters to be added to another creature. Each Radiate copy does this E times, causing D*2^(AE) counters to be added to the final creature. Each casting of Radiate gets C Pyromancer Ascension copies, gettin up to D*2^(ACE). Finally, the B*2^A Intruder ALert triggers each do that, getting up to D * 2^(ABCE*2^A). There's a lot of multiplication going on, but multiplication doesn't add layers - essentially, adding 2^A Doubling Seasons causes the number of +1/+1 counters to increase by a factor of 2^2^A approximately. So the total power of all our creatures will be one exponent more than the number of creatures, which sounds like a lot but is actually insignificant compared to the numbers that we will generate.
Okay, so on to the rest of the combo. Assuming there is a solution to the exiled creature problem, I get: Each casting of Copy Enchantment takes X Dual Natures to 2^^X, as we have already shown. So each sacrifice of a Crystal Chimes does the same. Each tapping of Prototype Portal gets X Crystal Chimes, taking X to 2^^^X. the duestruction of X artifact creatures will allow Prototype Portal to untap X times, achieving X to 2^^^^X. When you cast Descent of the Dragons, you can choose to target a single Golem (with Xenograft making all creatures into Golems); this triggers X Precursor Golems, and each trigger allows you to destroy X artifact creatures, so you get X to 2^^^^^X. (You can also get this via Pyromancer Ascension; unfortunately, Pyromancer Ascenion and Precursor Golem don't combine to get more layers, they basically act independently) Each retrieval spell allows you to retrieve Descent of the Dragons X times, so we get 2^^^^^^X. You have 20 retrieval spells; prior the the first retrieval spell, you can cast 4 Descent of the Dragons, taking X to at least 2^^^^^^6 > 2^^^^^^^3. Each retrieval spell bumps the right number by one, so we get between 2^^^^^^^23 and 2^^^^^^^24 damage.
With the peculiarity of Zhur-Taa Druid actually dealing damage on its trigger, we might have to cut Guilty Conscience, going back to a simple AEther Flash or something so it doesn't say "T: Grow itself". One layer per step that makes use of it isn't such a big deal now.
Well, without Abyssal Persecutor, we can only let Zhur-Taa Druid deal 19 damage before we kill the opponent; somehow we have to prevent all the remaining damage. Unfortunately, Amulet of Kroog doesn't seem to work since it can target any creature. We want something like Noble Vestige, except that can't be refreshed often enough. If we do find an acceptable answer, Guilty Conscience should be fine.
Auras can certainly be refreshed, so any of Heart of Light, Defang, Muzzle, or Armament of Nyx will work in that role. Armament's dual function has the greatest potential, if there's any way we can invoke it without wasting a card, and I don't think there is. Noble Purpose is only good for 1 layer in combination with a Yawgmoth's Bargain at the top.
The only sources of haste in the deck are Mimic Vat and, if we don't get anything better, Paragon of Fierce Defiance. Paragon requires red mana to grant haste, and if we put Zhur-Taa Druid on a particular copy of Mimic Vat, it is thereafter tied to that copy--producing extra Mimic Vats won't do anything to boost the size of the existing Mimic Vat that something is imprinted on.
By the time we need to tap Druid, a few select resources are available in plentiful supply: Elves (Ezuri), artifacts (Reclamation Sage), colorless mana (Thran Dynamo), and enchantments (Allay). Almost all of the Reclamation Sage's activity is going to involve bouncing the Thran Dynamo repeatedly, since that's the next engine card down the line, but the other artifacts--Mirror of Fate, Mimic Vat, Millikin, and Rings of Brighthearth--are also legal targets, and we should top up on those only when we're about to run out (or, in the case of Rings, when a step is about to make use of it). Millikin and Mirror are both artifacts, so that's no big deal. But nothing up to that point is capable of bouncing Zhur-Taa Druid, or of getting it out of the graveyard after removing it from imprint.
With the peculiarity of Zhur-Taa Druid actually dealing damage on its trigger, we might have to cut Guilty Conscience, going back to a simple AEther Flash or something so it doesn't say "T: Grow itself". One layer per step that makes use of it isn't such a big deal now.
The deck is both capable of retrieving things from Mimic Vat (Mirror of Fate) so that it isn't tied to that vat forever, and capable of retrieving things from the graveyard (Bloodbond March) even without that if another nontoken creature dies and pushes the imprinted creature out of Mimic Vat.
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."
It's tied to that Vat in the sense that it won't be tied to any other Vat, not unless you get it back onto the battlefield somehow and kill it off again. Bloodbond March can do this, but the number of those triggers is set in stone at the time the spell is cast, and once they run out, you can only reset it if you can get the card back in your hand to re-cast.
The deck is played like this:
Draw your deck with Lotus into S&T into Omniscience into Enter the Infinite, putting a Clone Legion on top.
Cast 2x Precursor Golem.
Cast all of your enchantments.
Cast 4 Battle Hymn, making a lot of mana.
Cast 1 Wall of Omens, drawing your Clone Legion and using your Battle Hymn mana to bounce Precursor Golems, making a lot a creatures.
Cast 1 Mirrorweave, making all of your creatures into Precursor Golems and making more mana.
Cast 1 Retraction Helix, making all of your creatures into bounce factories. Bounce one of the original Precursor Golems. Then, recast it, and use your excess Battle Hymn mana to trigger Equilibrium, bouncing your other Precursor Golem. Your other Precursor Golem lets you Equilibrium to grab the first, and so on until you run out of mana. Then, continue using your other creatures which were affected by Helix to bounce one of the original Golems. Now, Mirrorweave resolves to make everything a Golem again, and your Battle Hymns resolve to make more mana.
Cast 1 Rally the Righteous. Eye of the Storm triggers, then all of your Golems trigger, making a lot of extra copies. Let the copies resolve. Between each copy, use each Golem still affected by a Retraction Helix to bounce one of the original Golems, making even more tokens. On the first bounce, use Equilibrium to get extra casts of your Golems. Then, let Eye of the Storm exile Rally. Now, and cast all of your extra spells. Let Retraction Helix resolve (bouncing Golems a lot, of course), followed by Mirrorweave, followed by Rally (lots more bounces), followed by your Battle Hymns. Cast the Mirrorweaves, Retraction Helices, followed by Rallies, using the same order as above, but with Battle Hymns always resolving last.
Before your last Rally the Righteous resolves, cast all of your copying spells targetting it. On our Eye of the Storm triggers, we target that same Rally, making a lot of extra Rallies, which in turn makes a lot of extra creatures.
Now, cast all of your Rite of Replications, letting them resolve just before the Battle Hymns. We kick each Rite, of course.
Now, we cast our Cackling Counterparts, letting them resolve just before our Rites.
Lastly, we cast our Clone Legions, letting them resolve above our Counterparts.
Finally, we swing for what is almost certainly lethal. Note that on this cast, we want to resolve our Battle Hymns early for maximal Equilibrium triggers.
I think this is the best Precursor Golem build I'll come up with, so I'm going to give up on those for a while and try to understand what's going on in the Ezuri builds, which look more powerful than this, although I'm not sure because computational math is hard.
When you're playing the Battle Hymns, you only have 6 creatures, and all four combined will give a measly total of 60 mana. Then Wall of Omens gives you an opportunity to bounce one of them, and from then on the two can bounce each other with Equilibrium, leaving 127 creatures when all the mana is gone.
Mirrorweave gets all four Hymns, going to 508 mana, and now you have 128 Precursors, with 125 copies of Mirrorweave and three Precursor triggers still on the stack.
Retraction Helix gets 256 Precursor triggers, half that trigger at the same time as Eye and half that trigger when it comes out. The first spell to resolve can allow one of the original Precursors to bounce itself, starting an Equilibrium loop that runs through all 508 mana and gets another 1018 tokens, while wasting the Helix copy that's pointed at the other original Precursor. Each other Retraction Helix copy only yields two additional creatures, until the Battle Hymns start resolving. Each of those triples the creature count, multiplying it by 81 after all four copies. This is actually rather underwhelming for this level.
If you are using Precursor Golem, single-targeted spells will do more for you than global spells, so you want to focus on the triggers wherever possible. Clone Legion is a spell with no targets, so it is vastly inferior for you compared to Cackling Counterpart, Twinflame, or Sundering Growth. Battle Hymn is another spell with no targets, so it is vastly inferior compared to Deconstruct, Liturgy of Blood, or Corpsehatch (the fact that things are being destroyed is a non-issue when you can work at instant speed and hold one Precursor up in your hand at all times--but if it makes you more comfortable, you can throw in Avacyn to keep the entire board intact). And while Mirrorweave does target, it's not doing anything especially meaningful after the first copy resolves. You're better off with another token-making spell, especially if you ever decide you want support from other creatures, such as animated Doubling Seasons.
From the looks of it, this deck is less powerful than your previous attempt with Barrin.
When you're playing the Battle Hymns, you only have 6 creatures, and all four combined will give a measly total of 60 mana. Then Wall of Omens gives you an opportunity to bounce one of them, and from then on the two can bounce each other with Equilibrium, leaving 127 creatures when all the mana is gone.
Mirrorweave gets all four Hymns, going to 508 mana, and now you have 128 Precursors, with 125 copies of Mirrorweave and three Precursor triggers still on the stack.
Retraction Helix gets 256 Precursor triggers, half that trigger at the same time as Eye and half that trigger when it comes out. The first spell to resolve can allow one of the original Precursors to bounce itself, starting an Equilibrium loop that runs through all 508 mana and gets another 1018 tokens, while wasting the Helix copy that's pointed at the other original Precursor. Each other Retraction Helix copy only yields two additional creatures, until the Battle Hymns start resolving. Each of those triples the creature count, multiplying it by 81 after all four copies. This is actually rather underwhelming for this level.
If you are using Precursor Golem, single-targeted spells will do more for you than global spells, so you want to focus on the triggers wherever possible. Clone Legion is a spell with no targets, so it is vastly inferior for you compared to Cackling Counterpart, Twinflame, or Sundering Growth. Battle Hymn is another spell with no targets, so it is vastly inferior compared to Deconstruct, Liturgy of Blood, or Corpsehatch (the fact that things are being destroyed is a non-issue when you can work at instant speed and hold one Precursor up in your hand at all times--but if it makes you more comfortable, you can throw in Avacyn to keep the entire board intact). And while Mirrorweave does target, it's not doing anything especially meaningful after the first copy resolves. You're better off with another token-making spell, especially if you ever decide you want support from other creatures, such as animated Doubling Seasons.
From the looks of it, this deck is less powerful than your previous attempt with Barrin.
The Barrin deck belonged to somebody else, and I think that that deck is superior to this one.
You are also generally right about single-target spells being better than global ones, and if I do ever revisit this deck, I will certainly make most of the changes you suggested.
However, Mirrorweave does a lot more than you think. The Mirrorweave turns every creature into a Precursor Golem, and although the extra copies are redundant, this means that each Rally the Righteous brings me from x creatures to approximately 3^(x^2) creatures, which is a significant (read: noticeable) jump even using Knuth up-arrow notation.
Once you get the token spells on board, Precursors are going for some fraction of your existing creature base: without any extra cards to amplify your token creation, this will be slightly less than 1/3. Then Mirrorweave simply multiplies your Precursor count by about 3, and a Rally the Righteous cast goes to 3^(3x^2) instead of 3^(x^2): barely a difference at high numbers. As far as Knuth expressions, the "3^" part is the sole dominating factor, and each repetition will take a 3^^Z expression and add one to the value of Z, no matter what the x^2 coefficient is at the top.
Sundering Growth with Precursor Golem, on the other hand, is already 3^^X in terms of creating more Precursors, which is far more effective than simply multiplying by 3 a single time.
I must be missing something with Sundering Growth. Let's assume we have X Precursor Golems (at least one of which is a token) and Y golem tokens. We cast 1 Sundering Growth, so we have X Sundering Growths targeting each creature (besides the original target, which is negligible). The first Sundering Growth on the first Golem resolves, destroying it and making another Precursor Golem, which makes 2 tokens. The rest of the Sundering Growths which targetted that Golem now fizzle. This happens for each of the original Golems, so we are only multiplying by 3, no matter how many Precursor Golems we have. Which part of this is wrong? (I guess if we have a Darksteel Forge or something, then we're multiplying by 4^X, but that's still not particularly big. It's certainly smaller than 3^X^2).
You do not have X Sundering Growths targeting each creature, you have X Precursor Golem triggers on top of the original spell, and all resolve one at a time. Let's say the tokens were kickstarted by a single kicked Rite, so there are 6 Precursors and 22 vanilla golems and we don't even bother with any other cards yet. That means 6 Precursor triggers, and the first one to resolve creates 27 copies of Sundering Growth, for a total of 28 copies of that spell on the stack right now, and each of the 28 existing Golems is targeted by one and only one of those spells. Then, the first 27 instances of the spell will resolve before we ever get to Precursor trigger #2.
With each populate instruction creating a token Precursor, we get 27 of those (and 54 V's) after the first round of spells, and each of those 81 new creatures will get a new copy of Sundering Growth for the next go-round. Likewise, rounds 3, 4, 5, and 6 don't determine the number of Golems and spell copies until resolution, which will be 243, 729, 2187, and 6561 respectively. Finally, the original target gets destroyed with one last populate, so the one Sundering Growth cast will cause enough sundering, and growth, to go from 6-22 to 6562-13124. This is much better than the 28-0 we'd have after a Mirrorweave.
BL -> S&T -> Omni -> ETI
Cathar's Crusade
Opalesence
Mycosynth Lattice
False Dawn (mostly just to get that last card)
Mass Hysteria
Doubling Seasons and all clones (except CC) as copies of Doubling Season
Inner Fire
Cast (don't FB) all CC
Cast (don't FB) all Parallel Evolution
Cast Rhys and use 2nd ability
Gyre Sage
Cast all Arcbound Ravagers
Cast all Kalonian Hydras
Cytoplast Rootkin
---Trigger adds counters to all creatures
Tap Gyre Sage for mana
CR steals as many counters as possible (all of which are multiplied on arrival)
Use 2 bioshift to put counters from 2 doubling seasons onto CR
Thromok the Insatiable
---Eat all the tokens, Gyre Sage, and Arcbound Ravagers (put ravager counters on CR)
Bioshift from Thromok onto CR
Praetor's Counsel -> Start over again from casting CC
Final step -> This time use FB on cards with it -> Everyone attacks
I'm pretty sure this one doesn't have any infinite loops in it
Gyre Sage, then Mercurial Pretender copying Gyre Sage, then Dack's Duplicate copying Mercurial Pretender. As long as there are at least three Doubling Seasons, Cathar's Crusade gives it a lot more than four +1/+1 counters, then it can tap to get that much white mana (since it has haste), and it only costs 4 to bounce and repeat, with Cathar's Crusade pumping everything else each time. Easy infinite there.
Gyre Sage, then Mercurial Pretender copying Gyre Sage, then Dack's Duplicate copying Mercurial Pretender. Cathar's Crusade gives it a lot more than four +1/+1 counters, then it can tap to get that much white mana (since it has haste), and it only costs 4 to bounce and repeat. Easy infinite there.
Oh, right. If we nix Mercurial Pretender there shouldn't be any loops.
I'm seeing that as 2^^52 counters, which you can get just as well if you play Dack's Duplicate as a Doubling Season early on and completely forget about anything that uses mana (except you do want to play one Battle Hymn to cover the 56 mana in flashback costs, or at least the 44 mana that Black Lotus won't cover).
The most powerful mechanism you have there is making token copies of a Doubling Season, and anything weaker than that might as well go unnoticed. Thromok, for example...well, first off there's no reason to run it as a 4-of since it's legendary. But you definitely don't want to sacrifice any tokens for devour, because that deck that no room to create tokens of anything other than Doubling Season if it wants to stick to an optimal path. Suppose you have three Doubling Season cards, eight Doubling Season tokens, and four other creatures (say, Gyre Sage, Cytoplast Root-Kin, and animated Cathars' Crusade and Training Grounds). If you devour...
-just the four other creatures, you get 32,768 counters
-the four other creatures and the three nontoken DS, you get 12,544 counters
-the four other creatures and the eight token DS copies, you get 1,152 counters
-everything, you get 225 counters and have lost all the progress you've made up to this point
Clearly, it is better if Thromok never devours a Doubling Season of any kind, since they're better off sticking around to double the counter total rather than simply being used to add 1 to the X value. But even the most ideal Thromok with its 32,768 counters pales in comparison to what's already happened: when you played the spell to make those eight DS tokens in the first place, the resulting Cathars' Crusade triggers resulted in a total of 245,760 counters, and the creatures you devoured already had 65,536 counters between them.
Multiplying, and even squaring, are less efficient operations than mapping x -> 2^x like you get from Doubling Season tokens. Rather than constructing several growth functions of various sizes that go up in parallel, the goal should be to figure out the single most effective thing you're doing, and look for ways to do that thing as many times as possible. For example, by cutting the Cytoplast Root-Kin, Training Grounds, Gyre Sage, all four Thromoks, and three of the Battle Hymns, and adding just a single Runic Repetition, you can jump from 2^^52 to 2^^62. Four Repetitions will go to 2^^92. And if you look for more ways to reuse those spells...
Ok, this one took a while to figure out, is pretty darn inelegant, and is pretty darn likely to end up making an infinite loop somewhere that I didn't notice, but I kept going off of Possibility Storms and Bloodbond Marches until I could do my best impersonation of Ezuri/Guide. This involves cutting and replacing a lot of the previous pieces. Barrin, Master Wizard is out, along with both Quicksilver Gargantuan copies and are instead turned into Isochron Scepter with Kiora's Dismissal, Karn, Silver Golem, and Voltaic Construct with a single copy of Copy Enchantment. It's a downgrade, but it's still funneling the large swaths of mana into Doubling Seasons, and it is critically important that there be no way to bounce any cards that are creature or artifact spells from the battlefield to hand. We also need to cut Boon Reflection because we're going to gain life 1 at a time, and probably replace Bargain because gaining just 7 life doesn't really cut it. We no longer need that Gravebane Zombie, we replace it with Enigma Sphinx. And we can cut the placeholder slot for the card Hinder was targetting, that will sort itself out. Then on top of the old stuff, we need a Telekinetic Bonds, a Rings of Brighthearth, a Cinder Pyromancer, and a Cho-Arrim Alchemist. And as of right now, I'll say 1 copy of Dawnglow Infusion to gain a bunch of life. So that's 5 more than before, up to 28 cards. And I realized after writing this that we're no longer able to make more Harabaz Druids from bounce triggers, so we're going to have to toss in a copy of Conspiracy naming Allies or each Insurrection's worth of Druids is going to tap for a static amount, and that's no fun at all. So that's 29 cards.
Unfortunately 29 is too many to draw all of them and use full power before the Dawnglow Infusion, but that the very least, we can get one round of Insurrection cast out of Eye of the Storm with active Pyromancer Ascensions to turn into a bunch of Harabaz Druid mana to mostly pump into Copy enchantment bounces to make more Dual Nature's and Doubling Seasons that are all Allies, until the very last Druid activation, where we use the mana to cast Dawnglow Infusion and gain [(mana spent - 1) x 2 x (active pyromancer ascensions)] life. Doing so with an X cast spell is important, because now it can't be reused out of Eye of the Storm, X will be zero.
Cast Enigma Sphinx. Simultaneous triggers for each Bloodbond March, each Possibility Storm, and Cascade, so we can stack them as lovingly as we feel like. (We're actually not really going to take advantage of these March triggers, but they do exist). We'll put cascade on top with all the triggers from permanents beneath, particularly Possibility Storm. Cascade resolves, casting the only card in the library, which is Hinder. Hinder is copied by Pyromancer Ascension a lot of times. We use one copy to put Enigma Sphinx back in the library, and another to put Hinder back in the library. (This casting of Hinder incidentally triggers Eye of the Storm, which is what feeds the growth each cycle.) Then the first Possibility Storm trigger resolves, it finds Enigma Sphinx stacked neatly on top of the library, and we cast the Sphinx, which once again triggers Bloodbond March and cascade. These are the Bloodbond March triggers that we're going to use. Resolve cascade first though, triggering Eyes and putting Enigma Sphinx under the library and then Hinder underneath that.
So now we have a big pile of March triggers and Enigma Sphinx on top of the library. The Sphinx doesn't stay in the graveyard when it dies, so the way we use those triggers is through discard. The way we discard is through Cho-Arrim Alchemist preventing our one source of damage to ourselves, Cinder Pyromancer. Cinder Pyromancer can only do 1 damage at a time, no matter how we goof with it, and for each card we discard, Cho-Arrim Alchemist can only prevent one instance of damage, so it only gains 1 life. Which means with those to creatures, we've effectively made the ability "3: discard a card, gain 1 life" except it can't effectively be copied by Rings of Brighthearth. So we could, if there wasn't a Hinder in the way and we had arbitrary mana, do repeated cycles of "pay 1 life: draw a Sphinx," "discard Sphinx: gain 1 life," "return Sphinx to play with Bloodbond March" "sacrifice Sphinx, put it back into the library." Not only can't we do that, it doesn't accomplish much except for triggers of Telekinetic Bonds (which under further consideration is likely not worth the deck slot), which is a dead end. If we spend 2 with Rings of Brighthearth (which we only ever have 1 copy of since we aren't copying artifacts), we can draw twice per life, but if we want to gain that life back, we have to discard the Sphinx to gain the life back, and it still only comes back once we let a Bloodbond March go, so we just have a cast of Hinder from hand and a trigger of Telekintic Bonds for each trigger of Bloodbond March, which is just 2 parallel dead ends.
The third option, and the one we'll be using, is to pay 1 life to activate Yawgmoth's Bargain, pay 2 to copy it, resolve the copy to draw the Sphinx, and then cast it. With this, we reignite the entire pile of Possibility Storms and subsequent Bloodbond Marches at the cost of 1 life paid. We can stack these layers as high as we have life to pay. At the very top, we run down to one life and can't activate Yawgmoth's Bargain again, so the Bloodbond March triggers fizzle out uselessly. So it's just Possibility Storm into cascade into Hinder resetting the deck repeatedly. After that, we get back down to the second instance of draw from copying Yawgmoth's Bargain. We draw the Sphinx. Next is a Bloodbond March trigger, in response we discard the Sphinx to gain back the life we spent on card draw. It returns to play, we sacrifice it, it goes on the bottom of the library. Unfortunately, we can't just use the life to double draw and climb back up the tower because Hinder is on top of the library. However, we can double draw to get both cards into hand, discard the Sphinx to regain that life, use a second Bloodbond March trigger to get it back into play, thus into the deck, then do the double draw stack same as before but with 2 less Bloodbond March triggers, and we cast Hinder from hand targeting the Sphinx to get Hinder back into the library. And once we resolve the entire pile of stuff, we should be back to the original life total, just with the Sphinx in the library, so 1 life allows the entire process to start again except the tower of stacked triggers is one iteration shorter.
So the spout in here is that each cast of Sphinx cascades into Hinder, which triggers Eye of the Storm, which cast Pyromancer Ascension quantities of Insurrection, which untaps Harabaz Druids, which each generate total number of creatures mana, which with constuct/rings/activated isochron scepter converts to 2 activations of iso-scepter for each 6 mana spent, each activation of which makes 1 kiora's dismissal for each pyromancer's ascension (making it overwhelmingly favorable to ignore using Eye of the Storm to activate the Ascensions and instead leave a Kiora's Dismissal in the graveyard, though I'd still like 1 copy of Parallel Evolution or a populate effect as a way to get more druids), each of which is going to bounce copy enchantment making Dual Nature's and Doubling Seasons (and at some point more Ascensions, Marches, and Possibility Storms). Sphinx to cascade to hinder to eye trigger is all 1 to 1 conversions, so by my best guess here, that's 8 layers on top of alternating layers of Bloodbond March and Possibiity Storm equal to the amount of life started out with, whatever value of X that is. So unless I'm dumb and evaluating things wrong, or dumb and there's an infinite, or dumb and I described something that can't be done in the first place, that should be 2X+8 layers deep, and then we can play another X cost life gain effect (I'm feeling partial to the idea of Avacyn, Angel of Hope + Brightflame) for whatever rediculous amount of mana we can tap a Druid for and start the whole thing over again.
So, if I'm right about everything (which I've proven in this thread is a big if), that should annihilate the original mega-combo posted and put me solidly in second place with half the deck left blank.
PS. Proofreading this, I realized I wanted an indestructible granting effect and a populate effect, so those can be condensed down to a single copy of Rootborn Defenses under Eye of the Storm.
If you activate Cho-Arrim Alchemist with a Rings of Brighthearth copy, you do in fact get to set up two distinct replacement effects, and the next time damage is dealt, you choose which one applies. Either way, it gets replaced into something that isn't damage, which means the other effect does not get used up and continues to listen for another instance of damage that it can replace. So by going Pyromancer, copy, respond with Alchemist, copy, you actually do get to gain 2 life per single discard, and that is what proves fatal.
If you activate Cho-Arrim Alchemist with a Rings of Brighthearth copy, you do in fact get to set up two distinct replacement effects, and the next time damage is dealt, you choose which one applies. Either way, it gets replaced into something that isn't damage, which means the other effect does not get used up and continues to listen for another instance of damage that it can replace. So by going Pyromancer, copy, respond with Alchemist, copy, you actually do get to gain 2 life per single discard, and that is what proves fatal.
Unfortunately, I do not have the time to research the rules on this thoroughly right now, but I don't think this is the case. The second copy of Pyromancer is not "the next time" the pyromancer would deal damage from when the Alchemist is activated. Each is a replacement effect, I'm pretty sure they both attempt to happen and then one has nothing to replace, I don't think you get to pick on and the other sits around waiting.
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Zedruu: "This deck is not only able to go crazy - it also needs to do so."
It is the case, but even if it wasn't, you could work around those semantics by virtue of the fact that you have multiple copies of Cinder Pyromancer and they all cost only a tap. So activate Alchemist, copy the ability, let the copy resolve, tap a Pyromancer without using Rings, let the original ability resolve, and tap another Pyromancer without using Rings. Still 2 life.
Hey everyone. Above is the deck idea I was thinking of to do as much possible damage. I have no intention of actually calculating the total amount of damage, as my feeble mind cannot fathom it. The sequence goes like this:
Play the usual black lotus into show and tell into omniscience into enter the infinite, putting a time twister on the top of the library. Play four precursor golems, then Gaea’s cradle, Meloku, fastbond, kiki jiki, Pemmin’s Aura targeting Kiki jiki, and Sylvan Safekeeper.
At this point you should have (15) creatures. Tap Gaea’s cradle for (15) green and play fast bond. You have (14) green left. Using five green pay the kicker for rite of replication (3) left in hand. Make a bunch of tokens. Use a green to bounce back Cradle with Meloku. Pay 1 life to replay it again (13) mana left in pool.
Play the following: x3 Doubling cubes, Darksteel Forge, Mycosynth Lattice, Gratuitous Violence, Opalescence. Tap Gaea’s Cradle for a boat load of Blue Mana (thanks to Lattice). Use up all but one mana to make copies of Gratuitous Violence with Kiki/Pemmin’s Aura. Play Elspeth use her +2 to gain a boat load of life.
*Next, bounce back Cradle replay it tap for a lot of mana. Use one mana to bounce Cradle. Pay one life to replay it tap it for a lot of blue. Make another token each time. Repeat until you are at one life. Play the Chain veil activate for elsepth’s plus 2. Gain a bunch of life.
Repeat above paragraph.
Play four voltaic keys. Repeat above paragraph four times except at the last iteration stay at 2 life.
Play Boros Reckoner. *Make as many copies as you can with kiki. Play Crucible of worlds. Sacrifice a Cradle to Sylvan keeper give one of your 1/1 tokens shroud. Go to one play Cradle again.
Play Harmony to Nature tap all of your creatures gain 4 times the total. Repeat * Copying Violence.
Having about 100 or so mana play the remaining Rites of Replications in hand on Precursor Golem’s. Then finally use Blasphemous Act to do a lot of damage.
Once you have used all of your untaps and gain life abilities recycle them again with Counsel.
Once this is done play Vedalken Orrery then play gitaxian probe. Drawing time twister. Play enter the infinite and respond with time twister to do it again!
I almost forgot; when you have the most mana you can get use the three doubling cubes for more mana.
Sorry for the long post. If there are any ways of making this idea better I would like to hear about it.
TL;TR: The idea is to use Precursor Golem/ Rite of Replication to make a bunch of tokens. Use Kiki//Aura//Opalescence//Gratuitous Violence//Gaea’s Cradle//Fast Bond// Meloku//Gain life cards//Boros Reckoner//Blasphemous Act//Time Twister//Predator’s Counsel to do as much damage as possible.
Hmm . . . I'm not sure exactly how the Ezuri combo works, so it seems pretty likely that this doesn't work, but can Wild Cantor replace Zhur-Taa Druid, which seems to be causing a lot of problems? It seems like recurring things from the graveyard isn't particularly difficult with this setup because of Bloodbond March, so I think something like this might fix the problem.
If this doesn't work (which I expect, but I'm not certain of), could someone explain why? I'm still trying to wrap my head around exactly how the cards interact, so I'm sorry if this is just a waste of time.
Cantor and BTE both fail because producing red mana in addition to green allows an infinite loop. Valleymaker might work, but I don't remember if we have an adequate supply of Forests to work with.
Hey everyone. Above is the deck idea I was thinking of to do as much possible damage. I have no intention of actually calculating the total amount of damage, as my feeble mind cannot fathom it. The sequence goes like this:
Play the usual black lotus into show and tell into omniscience into enter the infinite, putting a time twister on the top of the library. Play four precursor golems, then Gaea’s cradle, Meloku, fastbond, kiki jiki, Pemmin’s Aura targeting Kiki jiki, and Sylvan Safekeeper.
At this point you should have (15) creatures. Tap Gaea’s cradle for (15) green and play fast bond. You have (14) green left. Using five green pay the kicker for rite of replication (3) left in hand. Make a bunch of tokens. Use a green to bounce back Cradle with Meloku. Pay 1 life to replay it again (13) mana left in pool.
Play the following: x3 Doubling cubes, Darksteel Forge, Mycosynth Lattice, Gratuitous Violence, Opalescence. Tap Gaea’s Cradle for a boat load of Blue Mana (thanks to Lattice). Use up all but one mana to make copies of Gratuitous Violence with Kiki/Pemmin’s Aura. Play Elspeth use her +2 to gain a boat load of life.
*Next, bounce back Cradle replay it tap for a lot of mana. Use one mana to bounce Cradle. Pay one life to replay it tap it for a lot of blue. Make another token each time. Repeat until you are at one life. Play the Chain veil activate for elsepth’s plus 2. Gain a bunch of life.
Repeat above paragraph.
Play four voltaic keys. Repeat above paragraph four times except at the last iteration stay at 2 life.
Play Boros Reckoner. *Make as many copies as you can with kiki. Play Crucible of worlds. Sacrifice a Cradle to Sylvan keeper give one of your 1/1 tokens shroud. Go to one play Cradle again.
Play Harmony to Nature tap all of your creatures gain 4 times the total. Repeat * Copying Violence.
Having about 100 or so mana play the remaining Rites of Replications in hand on Precursor Golem’s. Then finally use Blasphemous Act to do a lot of damage.
Once you have used all of your untaps and gain life abilities recycle them again with Counsel.
Once this is done play Vedalken Orrery then play gitaxian probe. Drawing time twister. Play enter the infinite and respond with time twister to do it again!
I almost forgot; when you have the most mana you can get use the three doubling cubes for more mana.
Sorry for the long post. If there are any ways of making this idea better I would like to hear about it.
TL;TR: The idea is to use Precursor Golem/ Rite of Replication to make a bunch of tokens. Use Kiki//Aura//Opalescence//Gratuitous Violence//Gaea’s Cradle//Fast Bond// Meloku//Gain life cards//Boros Reckoner//Blasphemous Act//Time Twister//Predator’s Counsel to do as much damage as possible.
If you try to follow that path exactly for as long as you can, you end up dealing 0 damage to the opponent, because Fastbond kills you on the third instance of replaying Gaea's Cradle. Remember, Opalescence animates Fastbond into a creature, so the damage it deals is getting doubled by all those Gratuitous Violences.
You could try something better instead.
First off, play all the permanents except the Elspeths, Gratuitous Violence, and Darksteel Forge. For creatures, you have Boros Reckoner, Kiki-Jiki, animated Omniscience, animated Fastbond, 4 Precursors, 8 Golem tokens, Meloku, and Sylvan Safekeeper--a total of 18 creatures. Tap Kiki-Jiki to copy Precursor, making it 21. Kiki-Jiki gets the Pemmin's Aura, of course.
Play Gaea's Cradle and tap for 21. Each mana can untap Kiki-Jiki, who copies Precursor Golem again to get 3 more creatures, but you should only do that 20 times. There are now 81 creatures, and use the last mana to bounce Gaea's Cradle with Meloku to make it 82.
Replay Gaea's Cradle, and Fastbond deals 1 damage (but thankfully only 1, without Gratuitous Violence) to drop to 19. Cradle now taps for 82 mana, which is 81 more copies of Precursor Golem, 162 Golem tokens, and a Meloku token to bounce Cradle again. 326 creatures in all.
From here, each life can replay Gaea's Cradle and roughly quadruple the creature count. 326 is over 4^4, and after repeating 18 more times, you can have 4^22 creatures, which is over 17 quadrillion.
Harmony of Nature goes here, tapping everything except Kiki-Jiki and gaining 4^23 life, where each life point quadruples the creature count again. That's 4^(4^23), and three more copies all do the same, ending at 4^4^4^4^4^23, or more than 4^^6.
Elspeth #1 can use +2 to accomplish roughly the same thing as a Harmony of Nature, for 4^^7. This time it's better to avoid going all the way down to 1 mana, so that there's mana left for Chain Veil and activate Elspeth +2 again. That's 4^^8, four Voltaic Keys on Chain Veil all go to 4^^12, and Blinkmoth Infusion and Turnabout each untap all the artifacts and result in 4^^52. Vitalize only untaps creatures, which is a vanishingly small effect here--essentially it's just one Kiki-Jiki untap. Getting to untap Doubling Cube is more effective, since each mana is another untap, but together they only multiply the mana by 8 which still goes unnoticed.
Now play Elspeth #2 and lose Elspeth #1. Because the Chain Veil affects rules, not characteristics, #2 is able to activate the same 46 loyalty abilities even though she wasn't around to witness any of the Chain Veil activations. Using +2 46 times goes to 4^^98, then #3 contributes another 46 abilities and goes to 4^^144. #4 should only use the +2 ability 45 times, putting you at 4^^189.
Rather than running all the way though the mana, hold onto enough to insert the four kicked Rites here. That's 6^^193, even though the tokens you get from this don't have haste.
At this point, use one Kiki-Jiki tap to make a token copy of Omniscience rather than Precursor Golem, and since the final Elspeth has 94 loyalty counters, she can easily use the -5 ability. You want the nontoken permanents to be destroyed, which is why you don't play Darksteel Forge...ever.
Timetwister and Enter the Infinite go here to redraw everything, including the permanents that were just destroyed. Show and Tell actually allows Gaea's Cradle to come down once for free, which is invisible by now. Get the board all set up again, tap Kiki once, and replay each Harmony of Nature for 4^^197. Elspeth #4 is still around, and after using the Chain Fail and all the artifact untaps, she can activate an additional 45 loyalty abilities for 2^^242.
Replay Elspeth #1 as Elspeth #5, and she can use 91 loyalty abilities. Ditto for #6 and #7, but just as before, #7 should stop short and use the destruction ability as the last one. That's 4^^514, and kicked Rites take it to 6^^518.
Praetor's Counsel is the only way to continue from here, so it brings the graveyard back. Harmony of Nature 4^^522, Chain Veil 4^^567, Elspeths #8-10 4^^974, kicked Rites 6^^978, and Timetwister/ETI can recycle everything one last time.
Last call: Harmony of Nature 4^^982, Chain Veil 4^^1027, Elspeths #11-13 4^^1570 (there's no more recursion available, so no sense using the -5 at all this time), kicked Rites 6^^1574.
And finally, after the last Gaea's Cradle replay and Fastbond taking you to 1 life, it's finally safe to play Gratuitous Violence, and for the last venture into the world of mana, Kiki-Jiki should make copies of that instead of Precursor Golem (because the vanilla Golems that Precursor makes won't have haste, and there's nothing further that can care about the extra 2 in the body count). Just attack with all of them, and the damage is doubled for each one. 2^(6^^1574) actually exceeds 2^^1577, and there's your final damage figure.
Cantor and BTE both fail because producing red mana in addition to green allows an infinite loop. Valleymaker might work, but I don't remember if we have an adequate supply of Forests to work with.
If there were any Forests that existed below that point, they could simply be tapped for green mana, and they--rather than Volleymaker--would be the most abundant supply of green mana, which can't be allowed to happen. I suppose Proteus Machine + Life and Limb would be safe, since you can't put it face down from a Mimic Vat and there's no other way to give it haste, but then you're adding two cards to make Volleymaker work, while Zhur-Taa Druid can be sanitized with the addition of just one card--Muzzle. The extra slot is better off contributing additional layers over the top.
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The only sources of haste in the deck are Mimic Vat and, if we don't get anything better, Paragon of Fierce Defiance. Paragon requires red mana to grant haste, and if we put Zhur-Taa Druid on a particular copy of Mimic Vat, it is thereafter tied to that copy--producing extra Mimic Vats won't do anything to boost the size of the existing Mimic Vat that something is imprinted on.
By the time we need to tap Druid, a few select resources are available in plentiful supply: Elves (Ezuri), artifacts (Reclamation Sage), colorless mana (Thran Dynamo), and enchantments (Allay). Almost all of the Reclamation Sage's activity is going to involve bouncing the Thran Dynamo repeatedly, since that's the next engine card down the line, but the other artifacts--Mirror of Fate, Mimic Vat, Millikin, and Rings of Brighthearth--are also legal targets, and we should top up on those only when we're about to run out (or, in the case of Rings, when a step is about to make use of it). Millikin and Mirror are both artifacts, so that's no big deal. But nothing up to that point is capable of bouncing Zhur-Taa Druid, or of getting it out of the graveyard after removing it from imprint.
With the peculiarity of Zhur-Taa Druid actually dealing damage on its trigger, we might have to cut Guilty Conscience, going back to a simple AEther Flash or something so it doesn't say "T: Grow itself". One layer per step that makes use of it isn't such a big deal now.
Oh of course; I had our own deck on the brain, which had March of the Machines, but of course your deck doesn't.
Question: You say that you move all your creatures through Mimic Vat, but one of the creatures has to wind up in exile. Which one to you leave in exile?
A quick note: the Psychic Battle and Grip of Chaos don't add any layers to your deck. It does to ours because we use Cowardice, which can be triggered any time a target is selected. But without Cowardice, reselecting a target doesn't cause the resolution of the targeting spell, so no extra layers. It is still probably worth keeping at least one of those cards to reselect targets to those of your choosing, so that for example, you can cast Descent of the Dragons targeting a single Golem with Xenograft in play turning all creatures into Golems, without causing the board to be wiped of creatures.
The Bioshift combo looks interesting, but was there anything in particular that you wanted to accomplish with it? It looks to me that, it takes care of activating Pyromancer Ascensions, and gives enough mana to cast creatures via Garruk's Horde, but I was wondering if there was something more that you wanted to happen with all those +1/+1 counters and mana. If you were looking to get extra layers below Doubling Season, I don't think that you get any. To illustrate, let's say that you had A Doubling Seasons, B Intruder Alerts, C Pyromancer Asceonsions, D +1/+1 counters on a particular creature, and E creatures in total. Let's say we resolve a Dual Nature trigger coming from Copy Enchantment, causing 2^A Doubling Seasons to enter the battlefield. This causes B*2^A Intruder Alert triggers. For each two triggers, we can cast Bioshift and Radiate it, and get C Pyromancer Ascension copies off of both. Each Bioshift copy causes D*2^A counters to be added to another creature. Each Radiate copy does this E times, causing D*2^(AE) counters to be added to the final creature. Each casting of Radiate gets C Pyromancer Ascension copies, gettin up to D*2^(ACE). Finally, the B*2^A Intruder ALert triggers each do that, getting up to D * 2^(ABCE*2^A). There's a lot of multiplication going on, but multiplication doesn't add layers - essentially, adding 2^A Doubling Seasons causes the number of +1/+1 counters to increase by a factor of 2^2^A approximately. So the total power of all our creatures will be one exponent more than the number of creatures, which sounds like a lot but is actually insignificant compared to the numbers that we will generate.
Okay, so on to the rest of the combo. Assuming there is a solution to the exiled creature problem, I get: Each casting of Copy Enchantment takes X Dual Natures to 2^^X, as we have already shown. So each sacrifice of a Crystal Chimes does the same. Each tapping of Prototype Portal gets X Crystal Chimes, taking X to 2^^^X. the duestruction of X artifact creatures will allow Prototype Portal to untap X times, achieving X to 2^^^^X. When you cast Descent of the Dragons, you can choose to target a single Golem (with Xenograft making all creatures into Golems); this triggers X Precursor Golems, and each trigger allows you to destroy X artifact creatures, so you get X to 2^^^^^X. (You can also get this via Pyromancer Ascension; unfortunately, Pyromancer Ascenion and Precursor Golem don't combine to get more layers, they basically act independently) Each retrieval spell allows you to retrieve Descent of the Dragons X times, so we get 2^^^^^^X. You have 20 retrieval spells; prior the the first retrieval spell, you can cast 4 Descent of the Dragons, taking X to at least 2^^^^^^6 > 2^^^^^^^3. Each retrieval spell bumps the right number by one, so we get between 2^^^^^^^23 and 2^^^^^^^24 damage.
Well, without Abyssal Persecutor, we can only let Zhur-Taa Druid deal 19 damage before we kill the opponent; somehow we have to prevent all the remaining damage. Unfortunately, Amulet of Kroog doesn't seem to work since it can target any creature. We want something like Noble Vestige, except that can't be refreshed often enough. If we do find an acceptable answer, Guilty Conscience should be fine.
The deck is both capable of retrieving things from Mimic Vat (Mirror of Fate) so that it isn't tied to that vat forever, and capable of retrieving things from the graveyard (Bloodbond March) even without that if another nontoken creature dies and pushes the imprinted creature out of Mimic Vat.
So this is the same concept as my previous deck, but with some pretty amazing changes:
1 Show and Tell
1 Omniscience
1 Enter the Infinite
2 Precursor Golem
1 Equilibrium
1 Celestial Dawn
1 In the Web of War
1 Eye of the Storm
1 Leyline of Anticipation
1 Wall of Omens
4 Mirrorweave
4 Retraction Helix
4 Rally the Righteous
4 Rite of Replication
4 Reverberate
4 Twincast
4 Increasing Vengeance
4 Fork
4 Reiterate
4 Clone Legion
The deck is played like this:
Draw your deck with Lotus into S&T into Omniscience into Enter the Infinite, putting a Clone Legion on top.
Cast 2x Precursor Golem.
Cast all of your enchantments.
Cast 4 Battle Hymn, making a lot of mana.
Cast 1 Wall of Omens, drawing your Clone Legion and using your Battle Hymn mana to bounce Precursor Golems, making a lot a creatures.
Cast 1 Mirrorweave, making all of your creatures into Precursor Golems and making more mana.
Cast 1 Retraction Helix, making all of your creatures into bounce factories. Bounce one of the original Precursor Golems. Then, recast it, and use your excess Battle Hymn mana to trigger Equilibrium, bouncing your other Precursor Golem. Your other Precursor Golem lets you Equilibrium to grab the first, and so on until you run out of mana. Then, continue using your other creatures which were affected by Helix to bounce one of the original Golems. Now, Mirrorweave resolves to make everything a Golem again, and your Battle Hymns resolve to make more mana.
Cast 1 Rally the Righteous. Eye of the Storm triggers, then all of your Golems trigger, making a lot of extra copies. Let the copies resolve. Between each copy, use each Golem still affected by a Retraction Helix to bounce one of the original Golems, making even more tokens. On the first bounce, use Equilibrium to get extra casts of your Golems. Then, let Eye of the Storm exile Rally. Now, and cast all of your extra spells. Let Retraction Helix resolve (bouncing Golems a lot, of course), followed by Mirrorweave, followed by Rally (lots more bounces), followed by your Battle Hymns. Cast the Mirrorweaves, Retraction Helices, followed by Rallies, using the same order as above, but with Battle Hymns always resolving last.
Before your last Rally the Righteous resolves, cast all of your copying spells targetting it. On our Eye of the Storm triggers, we target that same Rally, making a lot of extra Rallies, which in turn makes a lot of extra creatures.
Now, cast all of your Rite of Replications, letting them resolve just before the Battle Hymns. We kick each Rite, of course.
Now, we cast our Cackling Counterparts, letting them resolve just before our Rites.
Lastly, we cast our Clone Legions, letting them resolve above our Counterparts.
Finally, we swing for what is almost certainly lethal. Note that on this cast, we want to resolve our Battle Hymns early for maximal Equilibrium triggers.
Mirrorweave gets all four Hymns, going to 508 mana, and now you have 128 Precursors, with 125 copies of Mirrorweave and three Precursor triggers still on the stack.
Retraction Helix gets 256 Precursor triggers, half that trigger at the same time as Eye and half that trigger when it comes out. The first spell to resolve can allow one of the original Precursors to bounce itself, starting an Equilibrium loop that runs through all 508 mana and gets another 1018 tokens, while wasting the Helix copy that's pointed at the other original Precursor. Each other Retraction Helix copy only yields two additional creatures, until the Battle Hymns start resolving. Each of those triples the creature count, multiplying it by 81 after all four copies. This is actually rather underwhelming for this level.
If you are using Precursor Golem, single-targeted spells will do more for you than global spells, so you want to focus on the triggers wherever possible. Clone Legion is a spell with no targets, so it is vastly inferior for you compared to Cackling Counterpart, Twinflame, or Sundering Growth. Battle Hymn is another spell with no targets, so it is vastly inferior compared to Deconstruct, Liturgy of Blood, or Corpsehatch (the fact that things are being destroyed is a non-issue when you can work at instant speed and hold one Precursor up in your hand at all times--but if it makes you more comfortable, you can throw in Avacyn to keep the entire board intact). And while Mirrorweave does target, it's not doing anything especially meaningful after the first copy resolves. You're better off with another token-making spell, especially if you ever decide you want support from other creatures, such as animated Doubling Seasons.
From the looks of it, this deck is less powerful than your previous attempt with Barrin.
The Barrin deck belonged to somebody else, and I think that that deck is superior to this one.
You are also generally right about single-target spells being better than global ones, and if I do ever revisit this deck, I will certainly make most of the changes you suggested.
However, Mirrorweave does a lot more than you think. The Mirrorweave turns every creature into a Precursor Golem, and although the extra copies are redundant, this means that each Rally the Righteous brings me from x creatures to approximately 3^(x^2) creatures, which is a significant (read: noticeable) jump even using Knuth up-arrow notation.
Sundering Growth with Precursor Golem, on the other hand, is already 3^^X in terms of creating more Precursors, which is far more effective than simply multiplying by 3 a single time.
With each populate instruction creating a token Precursor, we get 27 of those (and 54 V's) after the first round of spells, and each of those 81 new creatures will get a new copy of Sundering Growth for the next go-round. Likewise, rounds 3, 4, 5, and 6 don't determine the number of Golems and spell copies until resolution, which will be 243, 729, 2187, and 6561 respectively. Finally, the original target gets destroyed with one last populate, so the one Sundering Growth cast will cause enough sundering, and growth, to go from 6-22 to 6562-13124. This is much better than the 28-0 we'd have after a Mirrorweave.
1 Enter the Infinite
1 Omniscience
1 Show and Tell
1 Opalescence
1 Cathars' Crusade
1 Mycosynth Lattice
1 Mass Hysteria
1 False Dawn
4 Clever Impersonator
4 Clone
4 Copy Enchantment
4 Phyrexian Metamorph
4 Dack's Duplicate
4 Cackling Counterpart
4 Parallel Evolution
1 Rhys the Redeemed
1 Gyre Sage
1 Thromok the Insatiable
3 Bioshift
3 Kalonian Hydra
4 Arcbound Ravager
1 Inner Fire
4 Praetor's Counsel
BL -> S&T -> Omni -> ETI
Cathar's Crusade
Opalesence
Mycosynth Lattice
False Dawn (mostly just to get that last card)
Mass Hysteria
Doubling Seasons and all clones (except CC) as copies of Doubling Season
Inner Fire
Cast (don't FB) all CC
Cast (don't FB) all Parallel Evolution
Cast Rhys and use 2nd ability
Gyre Sage
Cast all Arcbound Ravagers
Cast all Kalonian Hydras
Cytoplast Rootkin
---Trigger adds counters to all creatures
Tap Gyre Sage for mana
CR steals as many counters as possible (all of which are multiplied on arrival)
Use 2 bioshift to put counters from 2 doubling seasons onto CR
Thromok the Insatiable
---Eat all the tokens, Gyre Sage, and Arcbound Ravagers (put ravager counters on CR)
Bioshift from Thromok onto CR
Praetor's Counsel -> Start over again from casting CC
Final step -> This time use FB on cards with it -> Everyone attacks
I'm pretty sure this one doesn't have any infinite loops in it
Oh, right. If we nix Mercurial Pretender there shouldn't be any loops.
The most powerful mechanism you have there is making token copies of a Doubling Season, and anything weaker than that might as well go unnoticed. Thromok, for example...well, first off there's no reason to run it as a 4-of since it's legendary. But you definitely don't want to sacrifice any tokens for devour, because that deck that no room to create tokens of anything other than Doubling Season if it wants to stick to an optimal path. Suppose you have three Doubling Season cards, eight Doubling Season tokens, and four other creatures (say, Gyre Sage, Cytoplast Root-Kin, and animated Cathars' Crusade and Training Grounds). If you devour...
-just the four other creatures, you get 32,768 counters
-the four other creatures and the three nontoken DS, you get 12,544 counters
-the four other creatures and the eight token DS copies, you get 1,152 counters
-everything, you get 225 counters and have lost all the progress you've made up to this point
Clearly, it is better if Thromok never devours a Doubling Season of any kind, since they're better off sticking around to double the counter total rather than simply being used to add 1 to the X value. But even the most ideal Thromok with its 32,768 counters pales in comparison to what's already happened: when you played the spell to make those eight DS tokens in the first place, the resulting Cathars' Crusade triggers resulted in a total of 245,760 counters, and the creatures you devoured already had 65,536 counters between them.
Multiplying, and even squaring, are less efficient operations than mapping x -> 2^x like you get from Doubling Season tokens. Rather than constructing several growth functions of various sizes that go up in parallel, the goal should be to figure out the single most effective thing you're doing, and look for ways to do that thing as many times as possible. For example, by cutting the Cytoplast Root-Kin, Training Grounds, Gyre Sage, all four Thromoks, and three of the Battle Hymns, and adding just a single Runic Repetition, you can jump from 2^^52 to 2^^62. Four Repetitions will go to 2^^92. And if you look for more ways to reuse those spells...
Unfortunately 29 is too many to draw all of them and use full power before the Dawnglow Infusion, but that the very least, we can get one round of Insurrection cast out of Eye of the Storm with active Pyromancer Ascensions to turn into a bunch of Harabaz Druid mana to mostly pump into Copy enchantment bounces to make more Dual Nature's and Doubling Seasons that are all Allies, until the very last Druid activation, where we use the mana to cast Dawnglow Infusion and gain [(mana spent - 1) x 2 x (active pyromancer ascensions)] life. Doing so with an X cast spell is important, because now it can't be reused out of Eye of the Storm, X will be zero.
So then we draw the rest of the library and prepare for phenomenal cosmic power. We get in the Possibility Storm, Cinder Pyromancer, Cho-Arrim Alchemist, Vish Kal, Blood Arbiter, and Bloodbond March that we probably didn't play before this. We can cast one Hinder to loop it through Possibility Storm like before, or we can leave it as the last card in the library and save the one life.
Cast Enigma Sphinx. Simultaneous triggers for each Bloodbond March, each Possibility Storm, and Cascade, so we can stack them as lovingly as we feel like. (We're actually not really going to take advantage of these March triggers, but they do exist). We'll put cascade on top with all the triggers from permanents beneath, particularly Possibility Storm. Cascade resolves, casting the only card in the library, which is Hinder. Hinder is copied by Pyromancer Ascension a lot of times. We use one copy to put Enigma Sphinx back in the library, and another to put Hinder back in the library. (This casting of Hinder incidentally triggers Eye of the Storm, which is what feeds the growth each cycle.) Then the first Possibility Storm trigger resolves, it finds Enigma Sphinx stacked neatly on top of the library, and we cast the Sphinx, which once again triggers Bloodbond March and cascade. These are the Bloodbond March triggers that we're going to use. Resolve cascade first though, triggering Eyes and putting Enigma Sphinx under the library and then Hinder underneath that.
So now we have a big pile of March triggers and Enigma Sphinx on top of the library. The Sphinx doesn't stay in the graveyard when it dies, so the way we use those triggers is through discard. The way we discard is through Cho-Arrim Alchemist preventing our one source of damage to ourselves, Cinder Pyromancer. Cinder Pyromancer can only do 1 damage at a time, no matter how we goof with it, and for each card we discard, Cho-Arrim Alchemist can only prevent one instance of damage, so it only gains 1 life. Which means with those to creatures, we've effectively made the ability "3: discard a card, gain 1 life" except it can't effectively be copied by Rings of Brighthearth. So we could, if there wasn't a Hinder in the way and we had arbitrary mana, do repeated cycles of "pay 1 life: draw a Sphinx," "discard Sphinx: gain 1 life," "return Sphinx to play with Bloodbond March" "sacrifice Sphinx, put it back into the library." Not only can't we do that, it doesn't accomplish much except for triggers of Telekinetic Bonds (which under further consideration is likely not worth the deck slot), which is a dead end. If we spend 2 with Rings of Brighthearth (which we only ever have 1 copy of since we aren't copying artifacts), we can draw twice per life, but if we want to gain that life back, we have to discard the Sphinx to gain the life back, and it still only comes back once we let a Bloodbond March go, so we just have a cast of Hinder from hand and a trigger of Telekintic Bonds for each trigger of Bloodbond March, which is just 2 parallel dead ends.
The third option, and the one we'll be using, is to pay 1 life to activate Yawgmoth's Bargain, pay 2 to copy it, resolve the copy to draw the Sphinx, and then cast it. With this, we reignite the entire pile of Possibility Storms and subsequent Bloodbond Marches at the cost of 1 life paid. We can stack these layers as high as we have life to pay. At the very top, we run down to one life and can't activate Yawgmoth's Bargain again, so the Bloodbond March triggers fizzle out uselessly. So it's just Possibility Storm into cascade into Hinder resetting the deck repeatedly. After that, we get back down to the second instance of draw from copying Yawgmoth's Bargain. We draw the Sphinx. Next is a Bloodbond March trigger, in response we discard the Sphinx to gain back the life we spent on card draw. It returns to play, we sacrifice it, it goes on the bottom of the library. Unfortunately, we can't just use the life to double draw and climb back up the tower because Hinder is on top of the library. However, we can double draw to get both cards into hand, discard the Sphinx to regain that life, use a second Bloodbond March trigger to get it back into play, thus into the deck, then do the double draw stack same as before but with 2 less Bloodbond March triggers, and we cast Hinder from hand targeting the Sphinx to get Hinder back into the library. And once we resolve the entire pile of stuff, we should be back to the original life total, just with the Sphinx in the library, so 1 life allows the entire process to start again except the tower of stacked triggers is one iteration shorter.
So the spout in here is that each cast of Sphinx cascades into Hinder, which triggers Eye of the Storm, which cast Pyromancer Ascension quantities of Insurrection, which untaps Harabaz Druids, which each generate total number of creatures mana, which with constuct/rings/activated isochron scepter converts to 2 activations of iso-scepter for each 6 mana spent, each activation of which makes 1 kiora's dismissal for each pyromancer's ascension (making it overwhelmingly favorable to ignore using Eye of the Storm to activate the Ascensions and instead leave a Kiora's Dismissal in the graveyard, though I'd still like 1 copy of Parallel Evolution or a populate effect as a way to get more druids), each of which is going to bounce copy enchantment making Dual Nature's and Doubling Seasons (and at some point more Ascensions, Marches, and Possibility Storms). Sphinx to cascade to hinder to eye trigger is all 1 to 1 conversions, so by my best guess here, that's 8 layers on top of alternating layers of Bloodbond March and Possibiity Storm equal to the amount of life started out with, whatever value of X that is. So unless I'm dumb and evaluating things wrong, or dumb and there's an infinite, or dumb and I described something that can't be done in the first place, that should be 2X+8 layers deep, and then we can play another X cost life gain effect (I'm feeling partial to the idea of Avacyn, Angel of Hope + Brightflame) for whatever rediculous amount of mana we can tap a Druid for and start the whole thing over again.
So, if I'm right about everything (which I've proven in this thread is a big if), that should annihilate the original mega-combo posted and put me solidly in second place with half the deck left blank.
PS. Proofreading this, I realized I wanted an indestructible granting effect and a populate effect, so those can be condensed down to a single copy of Rootborn Defenses under Eye of the Storm.
Unfortunately, I do not have the time to research the rules on this thoroughly right now, but I don't think this is the case. The second copy of Pyromancer is not "the next time" the pyromancer would deal damage from when the Alchemist is activated. Each is a replacement effect, I'm pretty sure they both attempt to happen and then one has nothing to replace, I don't think you get to pick on and the other sits around waiting.
1 Gaea's Cradle
1 Enter the Infinite
3 Doubling Cube
4 Voltaic Key
1 Boros Reckoner
1 Darksteel Forge
1 Pemmin's Aura
1 Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker
1 Omniscience
1 Mycosynth Lattice
1 Fastbond
1 Show and Tell
4 Precursor Golem
4 Elspeth Tirel
1 The Chain Veil
1 Crucible of Worlds
1 Meloku the Clouded Mirror
1 Sylvan Safekeeper
4 Rite of Replication
1 Timetwister
1 Vedalken Orrery
4 Blinkmoth Infusion
4 Turnabout
4 Harmony of Nature
4 Vitalize
1 Gitaxian Probe
4 Blasphemous Act
1 Opalescence
1 Gratuitous Violence
1 Praetor's Counsel
Hey everyone. Above is the deck idea I was thinking of to do as much possible damage. I have no intention of actually calculating the total amount of damage, as my feeble mind cannot fathom it. The sequence goes like this:
Play the usual black lotus into show and tell into omniscience into enter the infinite, putting a time twister on the top of the library. Play four precursor golems, then Gaea’s cradle, Meloku, fastbond, kiki jiki, Pemmin’s Aura targeting Kiki jiki, and Sylvan Safekeeper.
At this point you should have (15) creatures. Tap Gaea’s cradle for (15) green and play fast bond. You have (14) green left. Using five green pay the kicker for rite of replication (3) left in hand. Make a bunch of tokens. Use a green to bounce back Cradle with Meloku. Pay 1 life to replay it again (13) mana left in pool.
Play the following: x3 Doubling cubes, Darksteel Forge, Mycosynth Lattice, Gratuitous Violence, Opalescence. Tap Gaea’s Cradle for a boat load of Blue Mana (thanks to Lattice). Use up all but one mana to make copies of Gratuitous Violence with Kiki/Pemmin’s Aura. Play Elspeth use her +2 to gain a boat load of life.
*Next, bounce back Cradle replay it tap for a lot of mana. Use one mana to bounce Cradle. Pay one life to replay it tap it for a lot of blue. Make another token each time. Repeat until you are at one life. Play the Chain veil activate for elsepth’s plus 2. Gain a bunch of life.
Repeat above paragraph.
Play four voltaic keys. Repeat above paragraph four times except at the last iteration stay at 2 life.
Play Boros Reckoner. *Make as many copies as you can with kiki. Play Crucible of worlds. Sacrifice a Cradle to Sylvan keeper give one of your 1/1 tokens shroud. Go to one play Cradle again.
Play Harmony to Nature tap all of your creatures gain 4 times the total. Repeat * Copying Violence.
Having about 100 or so mana play the remaining Rites of Replications in hand on Precursor Golem’s. Then finally use Blasphemous Act to do a lot of damage.
Once you have used all of your untaps and gain life abilities recycle them again with Counsel.
Once this is done play Vedalken Orrery then play gitaxian probe. Drawing time twister. Play enter the infinite and respond with time twister to do it again!
I almost forgot; when you have the most mana you can get use the three doubling cubes for more mana.
Sorry for the long post. If there are any ways of making this idea better I would like to hear about it.
TL;TR: The idea is to use Precursor Golem/ Rite of Replication to make a bunch of tokens. Use Kiki//Aura//Opalescence//Gratuitous Violence//Gaea’s Cradle//Fast Bond// Meloku//Gain life cards//Boros Reckoner//Blasphemous Act//Time Twister//Predator’s Counsel to do as much damage as possible.
If this doesn't work (which I expect, but I'm not certain of), could someone explain why? I'm still trying to wrap my head around exactly how the cards interact, so I'm sorry if this is just a waste of time.
EDIT: Valleymaker and Burning-Tree Emissary also exist.
If you try to follow that path exactly for as long as you can, you end up dealing 0 damage to the opponent, because Fastbond kills you on the third instance of replaying Gaea's Cradle. Remember, Opalescence animates Fastbond into a creature, so the damage it deals is getting doubled by all those Gratuitous Violences.
You could try something better instead.
First off, play all the permanents except the Elspeths, Gratuitous Violence, and Darksteel Forge. For creatures, you have Boros Reckoner, Kiki-Jiki, animated Omniscience, animated Fastbond, 4 Precursors, 8 Golem tokens, Meloku, and Sylvan Safekeeper--a total of 18 creatures. Tap Kiki-Jiki to copy Precursor, making it 21. Kiki-Jiki gets the Pemmin's Aura, of course.
Play Gaea's Cradle and tap for 21. Each mana can untap Kiki-Jiki, who copies Precursor Golem again to get 3 more creatures, but you should only do that 20 times. There are now 81 creatures, and use the last mana to bounce Gaea's Cradle with Meloku to make it 82.
Replay Gaea's Cradle, and Fastbond deals 1 damage (but thankfully only 1, without Gratuitous Violence) to drop to 19. Cradle now taps for 82 mana, which is 81 more copies of Precursor Golem, 162 Golem tokens, and a Meloku token to bounce Cradle again. 326 creatures in all.
From here, each life can replay Gaea's Cradle and roughly quadruple the creature count. 326 is over 4^4, and after repeating 18 more times, you can have 4^22 creatures, which is over 17 quadrillion.
Harmony of Nature goes here, tapping everything except Kiki-Jiki and gaining 4^23 life, where each life point quadruples the creature count again. That's 4^(4^23), and three more copies all do the same, ending at 4^4^4^4^4^23, or more than 4^^6.
Elspeth #1 can use +2 to accomplish roughly the same thing as a Harmony of Nature, for 4^^7. This time it's better to avoid going all the way down to 1 mana, so that there's mana left for Chain Veil and activate Elspeth +2 again. That's 4^^8, four Voltaic Keys on Chain Veil all go to 4^^12, and Blinkmoth Infusion and Turnabout each untap all the artifacts and result in 4^^52. Vitalize only untaps creatures, which is a vanishingly small effect here--essentially it's just one Kiki-Jiki untap. Getting to untap Doubling Cube is more effective, since each mana is another untap, but together they only multiply the mana by 8 which still goes unnoticed.
Now play Elspeth #2 and lose Elspeth #1. Because the Chain Veil affects rules, not characteristics, #2 is able to activate the same 46 loyalty abilities even though she wasn't around to witness any of the Chain Veil activations. Using +2 46 times goes to 4^^98, then #3 contributes another 46 abilities and goes to 4^^144. #4 should only use the +2 ability 45 times, putting you at 4^^189.
Rather than running all the way though the mana, hold onto enough to insert the four kicked Rites here. That's 6^^193, even though the tokens you get from this don't have haste.
At this point, use one Kiki-Jiki tap to make a token copy of Omniscience rather than Precursor Golem, and since the final Elspeth has 94 loyalty counters, she can easily use the -5 ability. You want the nontoken permanents to be destroyed, which is why you don't play Darksteel Forge...ever.
Timetwister and Enter the Infinite go here to redraw everything, including the permanents that were just destroyed. Show and Tell actually allows Gaea's Cradle to come down once for free, which is invisible by now. Get the board all set up again, tap Kiki once, and replay each Harmony of Nature for 4^^197. Elspeth #4 is still around, and after using the Chain Fail and all the artifact untaps, she can activate an additional 45 loyalty abilities for 2^^242.
Replay Elspeth #1 as Elspeth #5, and she can use 91 loyalty abilities. Ditto for #6 and #7, but just as before, #7 should stop short and use the destruction ability as the last one. That's 4^^514, and kicked Rites take it to 6^^518.
Praetor's Counsel is the only way to continue from here, so it brings the graveyard back. Harmony of Nature 4^^522, Chain Veil 4^^567, Elspeths #8-10 4^^974, kicked Rites 6^^978, and Timetwister/ETI can recycle everything one last time.
Last call: Harmony of Nature 4^^982, Chain Veil 4^^1027, Elspeths #11-13 4^^1570 (there's no more recursion available, so no sense using the -5 at all this time), kicked Rites 6^^1574.
And finally, after the last Gaea's Cradle replay and Fastbond taking you to 1 life, it's finally safe to play Gratuitous Violence, and for the last venture into the world of mana, Kiki-Jiki should make copies of that instead of Precursor Golem (because the vanilla Golems that Precursor makes won't have haste, and there's nothing further that can care about the extra 2 in the body count). Just attack with all of them, and the damage is doubled for each one. 2^(6^^1574) actually exceeds 2^^1577, and there's your final damage figure.
If there were any Forests that existed below that point, they could simply be tapped for green mana, and they--rather than Volleymaker--would be the most abundant supply of green mana, which can't be allowed to happen. I suppose Proteus Machine + Life and Limb would be safe, since you can't put it face down from a Mimic Vat and there's no other way to give it haste, but then you're adding two cards to make Volleymaker work, while Zhur-Taa Druid can be sanitized with the addition of just one card--Muzzle. The extra slot is better off contributing additional layers over the top.