So I’ll definitly be able to get my list posted by Friday. Well at least as long as this site will let me post something this big(26 pages currently). So that aside I’m looking good.
Also here’s a nasty 7 carder using 59 of our 60 manna
Opalesence
Doubling season
Thousand-year storm
Angels grace
Twinflame
Remand
Radiate
Play our enchantments. Play angels grace. Play flame and then remand, leaving twin flame copy on the stack to resolve as remand and flame come back to hand. Repeat this 8 more times(52 mana used, 19 spells seen by TYS) letting all TYS flame copies resolve before recasting the loop. Cast flame 1 more time getting 20 copies(54 mana used). Let all but original resolve. Then cast radiate(59 mana used) targeting original lone flame for 21 total radiates.
Castimg Grace stops us from dying to decking as well. We could add another card if we assume the remand draws don’t kill us.
Edit: my spell count was off by 2 in terms of spells seen by TYS. Fixed
Edit: if we alternate TF copies between DS and TYS it is even more nuts than just targeting DS.
so bit of a road block guys. salvation thinks my primer is a spam post(good news is that i have it finished). i had the cards formatted properly just in case but that didn't seem to fix it. pretty sure its related to the size. really don't want to split it up if i don't have to, but that might be the only way. i'm gonna see if i can't reach someone at salvation to see if i can't get it posted as one post somehow.
If that doesn't work, it wouldn't bother me at all for the writeup to be spread over multiple posts. You might also put spoiler tags around each section, so we can open and close them at our leisure.
these first 4 cards are pretty standard so far. later on in our loops we will be able to use enter the infinite in a more abuse-able manner, but that's a ways off. for now, we have our deck(-1 card) in our hand, with an omniscience in play. now we start to play out some of our engine pieces
so now we have made a few things happen. every permanent in play is a creature and an artifact. with master biomancer some other cool stuff happens. if a normally non creature permanent would enter play it enters as a creature, because it does master biomancer makes it enter with some counters. this means stuff like lands and 0 cmc things don't just die to state based checks. also everything that enters also has the creature type mutant thanks to biomancer. this will be important shortly. also at this point all mana costs of any variety can be paid for using any mana(unless specified by the ability itself) via lattice.
so this is why biomancer is played when he is. now everything entering as a creature(everything) will generate 1 mana for each creature we have in play. this will be one of our mana generating engines, but not our most powerful one. we need it to help jump start our other engines. mana generation is vitally important to this deck and this is a nice stepping stone to larger things.
OK so the first of our engines is starting to come online. the nice thing with mana echos and riku is that as long as riku(and his copies) doesn't exceed 1/2 of the total amount of permanents in play we will always to be able to pay for all of rikus triggers. its actually an even smaller amount of the toal but its a good rule of thumb. also we will want many copies of riku. he allows us to accelerator on 2 separate fronts and is quite efficient at both of them. we will be attempting to make a lot of things in play and a lot of copies of instants and sorceries for various reasons.
so yeah this card. lets face it, its just super powerful. when it enters we will get a riku trigger for it, and we will pay for that trigger. this will attempt to put 1 token into play. that token sees a season in play already and makes 2 instead. so we get 3 total. this isn't super fast to start but we have ways to catch up soon enough
so now every non creature spell we cast gets us a blink from our original exemplar, this in turn gives us another riku trigger(or wave of riku triggers if we have multiple copies of him). the token copies of exemplar can all target the same thing to tap. later once we give our creatures something to tap to do we can stack our triggers so that exemplars tapping ability will be the last thing to resolve. giving first strike is a no no as we will be attacking and we don't want our first strike damage to kill them before our main force can get their damage in.
so now we can make more copies of riku(or any other legendaries) without worrying about needing to sacrifice any of them. as will be true of several things moving forward making extra copies of this piece doesn't inherently do much for us. that being said it only requires 2 mana to make riku copies and each of these activations will create more than 2 mana in the process. we want more mana so we will still activate as many rikus as possible. this will help us maximize our mana production. in general this is a go wide strategy deck and making extra bodies has additional value later on.
OK so this is where things start to get very interesting. this card is very powerful and we are gonna abuse the hell out of it. because it is so powerful we do need to be very careful with our list going forward. i'm going to spend a lot of time talking about things we do with this card right now. ill be quite blunt in saying this card has been a source of many unintended infinite loops already, but its so versatile that i think its worth the risk. its important to talk about what it can and what it cannot do. while we have the ability to change our mirror into any permanent we have in play we do not get that permanents enter triggers. this is very very important as it cuts us off some infinites later. that being said i think we should now talk about how it coming into play the first time should be handled. i'm very confident in this part as it sets up some very cool interactions that also happen to be absurdly powerful. so we start mapping some of our stacks here. i will map them like this going forward
stack resolving order
last
x
y
z
first
so with the case of our mirror we will pick up our stack after our exemplar triggers have cleared and mirror has resolved. i think its important to note that we want it to stay as itself for now. this lets us copy the mirror with rikus trigger and we get some number of these tokens from doubling season buffs. of note here is that even after we change our mirrors into something else(say more copies of doubling season for instance) that because of the way mtg rules on actual layers work our newly changed into object will maintain its mutant creature type and keep it counters too. this is only true because we remain a creature. if it became a non creature at any point it would lose its mutant type, but lukily for us it stays a mutant and continues to help us make mana echoes mana. so at this point i will concede that i'm not entirely sure what the most profitable objects are for us. i assume its a mix of rikus and doubling seasons, but i'm not sure what the ratio should be. for the sake of argument lets just say its 50/50 on season and riku. we will take one token mirror and make it into another mana echoes to help pay for our mirror changes but the rest of our batch we will make rikus and seasons. its important here that our actual mirror card is still a mirror as we are about to start comboing with it. so we use 2 more mana and turn our actual mirror into a copy of exemplar.
so, what have we done? well just think about what happens on the next cast of a non creature spell. yes our actual exemplar will blink as it was before creating a few nice triggers. the real cool stuff happens when our exemplar that is actually a mirror blinks. it comes back as a mirror and procs riku as a mirror. this allows us blink/trigger mirror on every non creature spell for the rest of the game. there are only 6 or so creatures in this deck so 50+ spells will be blinking our ememplared mirror allowing us to have it reenter as mirror, generate more riku triggers making more of them and turning them into more rikus and more seasons. this is one of my favorite interactions in the deck and one i'm super proud to have discovered it. plus all of these interactions will happen with the non creature spell on the stack which means we have time to turn them into riku/season before they resolve and will get there added benefits from triggers they created just by being cast.
so just for tghe sake of thuroghness the stack will look like this after we blink the exemplared mirror
last
original non creature spell
actual exemplar blink
riku triggers for newly etb blinked mirror
first
after riku triggers are paid for we can then turn our mirrors into whatever we want with actual exemplars blink trigger still on the stack. then let triggers resolve as needed. mana echos is happening in there too but we can probably have it resolve near the end as i noted before about riku/echos costs and the longer we can wait the more beneficial it will become. so importantly in all of this we want our actual mirror to stay a mirror until we are ready to do something cool with it. if we turn it into something that isn't exemplar we won't be able to do any of this as all riku copies will be what the original copied and also we cant do this trick with a token copy. it exiles for the blink and ceases to exist and cant come back(seems bad for us).
there is another really cool interaction that we can do with mirror itself. for this case we can do this will any 2 mirrors that are still actual mirrors and only if this interaction doesn't involve attempted blinks. so what we can do is allow a mirror to become something and then still be allowed to return to being an actual mirror. the way this works is a bit complicated but its one of the ways i found at least 1 infinite i had to eliminate from the deck. so how this works is this. we activate it's ability to copy an chose another mirror. with that ability on the stack we activate again targeting something else(say riku). our stack looks like this
last
copy another mirror
copy riku
first
this means we will become riku with the ability to return to being a mirror still on the stack. so if we can do something while its riku we can reap the benefits without ,actually fully giving up a mirror. the reason u need 2 mirrors to do this is pretty simple. if we try to do this entirely with one mirror targeting itself, the abilities will indeed resolve in the order we need them to but it wont have the effect we need(want). so our mirror will indeed become something else, but when it resolves the copy original mirror it will become what it already is. because the copy ability actually reads "become what the targeted object is when this ability resolves" it will still be targeting itself which is now not a mirror, and attempt to become that again, which is not what we want. so it works fine with 2 mirrors but not with just 1. while this interaction is very cool it is limited a bit. unfortunately we cannot get strings of etb triggers by changing the mirrors in response to each etb. we can get our mirrors to be the best one for one etb but then all the etb triggers will resolve before we get the chance to change again. i haven't dug to far into this interaction as the limiting factor here is timing and generally it feels wasteful to be doing to much of this type of thing. generally we just wan to change all but our orginal mirror into what we want as soon as it enters and just let it be that. if you want to save 1 copy of a token mirror as a mirror tht is fine. this leaves options open for later discoveries to be abused.
so going forward from this point we will just assume we make actual mirror into a exemplar every time before we cast a non creature spell and then make the generated tokens into the most beneficial things and then let our non creature spell resolve. every, single, time .... this means will be very quickly growing our amounts of doubling season, riku and later anything else that we want additional copies of.
so wit hall of that noted, we move on. importantly i guess is that i put this combo as early in our sequencing as possible. lets us abuse it the most times as we progress through the deck.
so this will be our main life gaining engine. we will want a lot of life as it will later be translated directly into power/toughness(p/t) and also into mana. so a quick note here about normally non creatures entering as creatures. a lot of more modern creature cards that trigger on creature etbs will specify "another". none of our normally non creature trigger generators specify another so they will self trigger themselves upon entering. also of note here is it is generally most profitable to trigger riku before our life gain triggers happen. this isn't super relevant just yet, but as we start generating more and more types of etb triggers we can start to effect p/t before triggers resolve. again as before we will make all copies possible via riku triggers and then amplified through our doubling season collection.
our xenograph/conspiracy of choice. will will again max out riku triggers and get a bunch of these. we will name human, wolf, and golem. after that it honestly doesn't matter but if we need to we can name every creature type in mtg. it does make our mana echos slightly better as the few permanents we had in play before biomancer was and before everything was creatures will now help add onto our mana echoes triggers. now echoes fully triggers for literally everything in play.
so another one of our creatures shows its face. again we will make as many copies of this as we can. after 2 are in play we have the effect we need, but as before extra copies still generate us additional mana. this card does shuffle into out library and that could be a concern. fortunately for this build it does not enable any infinites that i am aware of. i will explain this in more detail later but for now just trust me that it doesn't. unfortunately we don't get any bonus from having multiple(past 2 anyway) of him, but even a single of his triggers will get modified by doubling season into absurdity. he doesn't see any action immediately but his ability will come in quite usefully in a few cards.
flip cards eh? yup, damn straight. so much like our vigor friend we won't see any action from this card right away. what will do though is make a bunch of copies of her(oh, yeah with the changes to the legend rule we can have multiple walkers with the same name via mirror gallery. cute huh?). we wont use them now but its a good idea to again max out on the copies. of important note here is that while she is her normal planeswalker self she is also a creature with types human, wolf, and golem. also of note mirror cannot copy her profitably. the nuances of walkers make using mirror quite bad here. it can for sure do it, but it will just die instantly to state based checks for being a walker with 0 locality. this limiting factor is actually super important to keeping me from going infinite later on.
cool our flash enabler of choice. we can actually play this much earlier if we choose to do so. in fact we probably should play this after we have our mirror/exemplar combo online. i'm not gonna lie im too lazy to fix this issue being this deep into the primer. i will probably have a small edit note at the end of all this. for now as before we get our mirror/exemplar trigger getting more doubling season and/or rikus and then make all our makable copies generating mana in the process.
OK time to get weird, and complicated. i'm not gonna lie things are about to explode numbers wise. up until this point we are dealing with some what reasonable numbers. even all the mirror/exemplar cuteness will pale in comparison to the numbers we are about to start putting into action. i've done my best to sequence my plays as best i thought possible after this but there may be better ways i haven't seen yet. so you can kinda guess whats about to happen here. we are gonna get our gateway flipped into a mana making machine. OK so here we go:
start by casting AG, let all mirror/exemplar(E/M) triggers happen and fully resolve. resolve AG, put riku copy triggers on the stack, and then before those start to resolve we cast moonmist(again here E/M triggers happen). much like our actual arlinn kord card our actual gateway card is a creature with type human, wolf and golem. so both arlinn kord and AG will be asked to transform from moonmist resolving. they both see they are humans and can transform, so they do. we will get back to AK in a second but now lets talk about sanctum of the sun. as i mentioned near the beginning of our journey we have master biomancer in this list for multiple reasons, one of which is right now. so gateway entered with counters and then becomes the land/creature still with those counters and creature types. this allows sanctum to live. mirror gallery allows us to make multiple copies of it without needing to sack them to legend rules. so now we start to resolve our riku triggers. because of how these types of triggers/abilities actually work when we start to pay for and resolve them we will get a copy of what the original object is now(which is our uber powerful land). again our friend biomancer is here to hook us up. he ensures that yes they enter as lands but because they also enter as creatures they get his buff before they do state based checks and they live. so we pay for and resolve all of our riku triggers here getting a ton of these lands. they currently have summoning sickness(actually our entire team does) but we are about to fix that, because AG wasn't the only thing to flip to moonmist.
as a quick note we don't need or want to copy moonmist with riku at all. one copy is all we need. extra copies gain us nothing as E/M is a cast only trigger and resolving extra copies gains us nothing in terms of mana. so just let it go on the stack and ignore any options to make copies.
so back to arlinn kord. now she has flipped and lived just like our land friend has. of note here is that while we do have token copies of her in play those tokens cannot transform so they stay in there current state. this is actually beneficial to us later on when we will use those copied AK tokens for their token generating ability. so back to our flipped actual AK card. so now we will activate her -6 ability, getting an emblem. now we have haste unconditionally, but that's not all the emblem gives us access to. now all of our bodies can shoot things in the face. we will be doing a lot of this, and we will be targeting our on things. combining haste, tap to do damage, our older friend vigor, and our even older powerhouse doubling seasons we start to create what i call damage chains. so i'm gonna do a very simple example to illustrate what will be happening with our chains.
so just for example just assume these are creatures that are somehow alive and we can use them as needed. also assume we have an AK emblem.
in play: doubling season(DS)(creature as well as a 5/5 body), vigor 1 6/6, vigor 2 6/6, 1/1 creature, and a 0/0 creature.
so how do we start our chain? well before we start it lets take a look at whats actually going to happen. so because we have doubling season our damage will not just get done/changed into counters, it will get amplified. it will also then get added to our targeted creature to then be again amplified to the next target. so what do we see? we want to start at the top of the food chain with this chain business. this way our highest initial power will be amplified through doubling season the most times. so in our current state we will have a chain that looks like this:
vigor_1->vigor_2->DS->1/1->0/0
so lets see what happens
vigor_1 does 6 damage to vigor_2 giving it 12 more counters. vigor 2 does 18 damage to DS adding 36 counters to it. DS does 41 damage to our 1/1 adding 82 counters. 1/1 does 83 damage to our 0/0 and gives 166 counters. now our 0/0 can do 166 damage to any of our targets adding an additional 332 counters.
neat. this means we take our largest creature and make it our smallest, and doing it in the descending power order means we will get maximized damage output which will in turn mean maximized counter generation. obviously this was a small simple example but this in general how we want these chains to progress. we took 18 power and turned it into around 650 with very small amplifiers. make these chains billions of creatures long with billions of doubling seasons and u can see things get very large very quickly. and it gets even more complicated than that. so whats very cool about this interaction is its amplifications with our other etb triggers, mainly our life gain triggers. you know what, before we get too far into this lets go deeper down the rabbit hole.
so, yeah this is happening. the reason i'm letting this get introduced is to show just how insane our etb trigger stacks are going to get. i'll be the first to acknowledge that alarm is a very, very, VERY, dangerous card to mess with. i had to be extremely careful when floating ideas for this deck once i had included alarm. but that high danger comes with crazy pay off if we can successfully incorporate it without going infinite. so a quick check of our current resources to see if we can already go infinite.
-can we make bodies without using cards from hand? yes, our unused AK can make them.
-OK, can our AK token generation be fueled by IA triggers? no, not so far. we can make our bodies huge but that cant reset our AK token making
-can our E/M combo do anything here? not really. to start it we need a cast trigger which IA triggers cannot facilitate.
-can mirror itself abuse alarm triggers? um maybe but not in way which creates more of those triggers
so, so far at least IA is safe. as we add more elements to our mix i will check back to see if we can indeed start a unbound loop. good so far though. once we start an initial burst of IA triggers from casting a non creature spell or then resolving a permanent those triggers will eventually need to be restarted and the only way to do that will be using a arlinn kord token generation or by using a card from hand. for certain riku copy triggers and E/M cuteness will generate a bunch of IA triggers but those to have limiting factors that don't allow us to spiral into infinity just yet. so back to looking at the insanity that is our etb trigger stacks.
so what exactly does this look like? well it depends on where we start and what we start with. lets say start from hand, with a non existing card that is a 0 casting artifact that has no abilities at all. we now cast it we immediately get our E/M combo up and running. this creates our first wave of etbs. this will actually be broken into 2 waves which we can control the order of and then also control the order/stack of resulting etbs:
last
real mirror blink
real exemplar blink
first
each of these will generate these etb triggers: mana echoes, angelic chorus, riku(s) copy trigger, intruder alarm triggers
each resolution of a single riku trigger will generate another wave of etbs of: echoes, chorus, alarm
so now how do we start to order this mess? well lets start at the smallest of our waves. this will be our waves created by resolving a riku copy trigger. so just as a ease of explaining things i'm going to short cut this a bit to a point when we have multiple alarms in play to create waves of untap triggers. this is how things will actually work once we finally get done resolving alarm, making all of ts riku copies, and have gotten to the point where we are ready to cast another spell from hand.
so back to our riku copy's being created. well we try to make 1 token and doubling season(s) says nope make an bunch, so we do. these all enter at the same time and create our first wave of etbs to start trying to resolve. so we have our stack of etbs generally look like this:
last
chorus(all)
alarm(all)
echos(all)
first
so why this order? well the echoes kinda doesn't matter when it happens so i just figured get it out of the way. it doesn't change when we start interacting with our board with abilities. we want our untap triggers before our life gain so that we can do damage chain nonsense before our life gain stuff starts to resolve. so what our stack actually looks like is this:
last
chorus(all)
damage chain
untap
damage chain
untap
....
....
untap
dmage chain
untap
damage chain(for new bodies only as they will be the only things untapped currently)
echoes(all)
first
another thing we can do is be tapping our uber lands for mana instead of including them in the damage chains. i would normally say that it would be correct to do but there is still another option we haven't talked about yet.
so i'm going to go back and start talking about how we actually construct our damage chain again because now we are doing it on an actual board with more resources at our disposal. is there an even better ordering process we can do to maximize our already ridiculous engine? well, actually, yes, i think there is. so i think the idea of going high->low in our chains is correct, but now we will modify it slightly to better interact with our more developed board state. so how? well because we have life gain triggers tied to only our incoming bodies we will shift them to the end of the chains to make sure we get max value from our incoming bodies. so our chains now look like this:
nice! ...... but i think we can do even better by remembering literally our very first creature; master biomancer(a quick note about biomancer going forward. at some point leading up to this we will ant to make at least 1 token of him. it wont be just 1 but for later things we want what i'm about to do directed at token rather than the original. FWIW having multiples of him is just gross anyway so its no loss to make a few on our way to getting to this point). so generally we will be making these waves of etb triggers because we have waves of body making triggers still to work through. well what happens when we super power those waves coming behind with the current wave? so i hope you know where this is going.
(all pre existing bodies except 1 biomancer token)->(new bodies)->(our very last tap)->(our biomancer token).
this makes the next wave coming in just start out ******* enormous before we even get to our damage chains. the chains will then make it even grosser which again end in biomancer(s) getting buffed further into oblivion for the next even more buffed wave.
so back to the question of tapping for mana or tapping for damage. i think we just do the damage here. i think the insane buffs we will get in life gain, and therefore mana, by running it through biomancer, will get us paid off by using our very last untap trigger, excluding the lands from our damage chains, and after our final chorus trigger has resolved, then and only then tap all the lands for mana.
so where are we? we finally got to the end of our first riku copy trigger resolution. great now repeat all of this over again for each of these triggers. remember this is all just from casting our 0 drop useless artifact. we haven't even gotten to it resolving yet. we will want to have our actual mirror blink happen before the exemplar. this way we can make a few more copies of import stuff like riku, doubling season, lands(?) or even more intruder alarms. so as cool as intruder alarm is(it definitely is) i think riku and doubling season actually scale better in my list.
then exemplar will blink and we create a whole new wave of stuff entering, chaining, buffing and gaining life. so we've now resolved all associated triggers from our artifact being cast, now it resolves. again we get a bunch of waves of etb triggers including our newly made rikus etc etc etc. grossness ensues(again). we finally reach the end of those triggers, and we are back to an empty stack, everything is huge and tapped, we have added a huge amount of power to the board, we have also gained a mammoth amount of life and we have an obscene amount of mana.
and now we move to our next spell. before we do just realize all the grossness that i just detailed will be amplifying on every spell and happening on every spell. it just doesn't stop doing it. i don't have time to expaling it each time it happens but know that it is in fact happening on every single spell being played. sometimes we get the full effect from cast triggers and natural etb triggers, and sometimes its just a creature that comes in gets us chains life and mana. regardless its is always building upon itself at every single step. the craziest part of all of it is we aren't done amplifying this end of things. its going to scale even harder in a few cards.
so we introduced a few concepts here: damage chains was the big one but we added untapping to make chaining a integral part of our board state amplification. now that we have a full grasp of what is actually happening lets continue to introduce new cards to the mix.
so i'm gonna be quite honest here, i don't know if this is an optimal choice. the reason i decide to include it my list is a few fold. 1) i can. it doesn't go infinite in my list as it is today. 2) it gives me a p/t engine that is really insane as it continues to scale past our damage chains and thus amplify them even further. 3) the interaction between this and angelic chorus is just glorious. if we have 5 chorus and a single avatar enters we then proceed to double our life total 5 times over. i just couldn't pass that growth up. in including it in my list we now have a direct correlation from life->p/t on board without having to invest any further resources to achieve this. obviously this just goes nuts when we start introducing it into our damage chains. it just super powers them to the nth degree, and continues to push our life as a viable resource to try to accrue in a meaningful way.
hmmm. i just had a thought about a possible infinite but i think i'm still good. i'm going to discuss it here as the next card will be our sac outlet. it will be:
OK before we get to far i want to talk about the infinite i think i avoid. we all see i can now get vigor and avatar back into our library. well that's fine we cant draw them .... or can we. while were doing our moonmist stuff we could have used an extra mirror to copy the gateway before it flips. this does let us draw cards indeed. however it comes at a fairly penal cost, exiling a card from hand. while i will be talking about interacting with the exile zone later, the cards doing it will not be able to create an unbound loop to keep regurgitating our self shufflers. incidentally we can actually get mirage mirror back into the deck by turning the actual card into a self shuffler and then sacrificing it to foundry. it'll hit the yard as a shuffler and trigger the self shuffle ability and go back in. again the loops i will create later cannot interact with cards exiled with gateway(outside of one interaction that is far less profitable to use up to get our avatar, vigor or even mirror back. its a finite interaction and this loop i am talking about is itself bound). there is also no time for us to cast the card we draw with gateway before we exile so we do always pay that cost if we do decide to make this option a thing. therefore, we are good.
foundry. yes similar to orrery we can and should cast this sooner in our list. we now have a limited sac outlet. this outlet gives us a small life boost but it also gives us token generation. uh oh ..... does this go infinite with alarm? it does not. we can only sac actual cards and not tokens so we don't sac one make many and explode infinitely. we sac one make a bunch of triggers and then resolve those triggers. at the end of that we are still down the resource that mattered to the token making which was a real card. alarm still cannot make this loop fully recursive. even if we get our self shufflers into the deck at this point they don't do us any good because we cannot access them profitably. so what does this bring to the table? well i've alluded to it a bit already but we will be getting our cards back, but in a limited(ish) capacity. i don't want o give to much away just yet but having the ability to put our actual card into our graveyard is important for things later on(like 20 card away later on). so we have our sacrifice outlet. it doesn't go infinite with alarm or our shufflers, and we can move on.
OK so this is a really interesting card. we can do a lot of things with are uber mage. the first thing we will do is cast it(triggers), resolve it(triggers), copy it as much as possible(more triggers) and then let all those triggers fully resolve until we have an empty stack. we will then use use one of them to get his emblem. the rest of the copies we will just set aside for use later.
25 .....
but jkibbs wait, can't we redraw our self shufflers now? yeah, we could actually but we are bound by the amount of times we can do it. even if i thought it was the best we could do with him, it isn't the right time to do it. i'm telling you its not the best we can do, and it still doesn't go infinite. we can get mirror back and draw it which creates more mirrors which we can indeed attempt to make into teferi's but as noted earlier they will die to being a walker with no loyalty before we can use them. still doesn't go infinite. it's cool for sure, but we can do far better with our mage later on. stay tuned. also his ability to untap things definitely doesn't go infinite. it makes some big creatures(chains) or a bunch of mana but nothing of real note. trust me, hold out for a better offer.
OK ..... now you should start to see why i said to wait for a better offer. we are about to make each of our teferi +1s(and his -1s) much, much better. that being said rowan just kinda amplifies everything, kinda literally. so the last few cards have been a bit boring in there interactions with the board(aside from explaining why i don't infinite or saying don't do this cool thing just yet). things are about to get nuts again in a major major way. time to start abusing the stack again .... strap in its gonna get a bit nuts. so we cast rowan(triggers, resolve them), resolve rowan(triggers, hold priority at this point). OK with all etb triggers on the stack, we are going to want to have all riku triggers stacked to resolve first before anything else. before we start to resolve those we emblem rowan. now we resolve our first riku copy trigger. we arrange our stack of etb triggers the same way we did before to set up our damage chains but before we start resolving those triggers/chains we in succession activate our new rowan tokens emblem making ability. oh cool, that was an ability, all current emblems notice and add another copy of the ability giving us even more emblems. uh ..... yup it works this way. and we will specifically be letting each activation of each rowan fully resole before popping the next one off. this way we get maximum emblem interaction in our emblem making endeavors(super gross). it works exactly like casting multiple bonus rounds from hand. it is exponential growth. sweet, this is gonna make our teferi's abilities super good. um, no. its gonna make ALL of our activated abilities super potent. like say, damage dealing in our damage chains? yup definitely. so we do all of this emblem creating stuff while our good old etb damage chains waves are waiting to come online. now when they start to resolve, all the damage dealing is amplified not only by doubling season but now also by rowan emblems. so this was one trigger of our riku copy ability resolving, creating our roan tokens and there etbs. now we move on to the next riku trigger and repeat this process again. and again, and again ....... until we have finally resolved all of our riku copies and resulting rowan emblems and also all the damage chains. this gains us life which super powers our avatars which just puke it back into the chains back onto biomancer and repeat until we are back to the original set of etb from our actual rowan entering the battlefield. we have done all the original riku triggers but we still have chains from our alarms. this sets off a final, fully powered, wave of damage chains that does large numbers things for awhile before we finally run out of untap triggers(well as we discussed earlier we will indeed leave our lands untapped for the last final chain) we will gain our absurd amount of life and then we will tap our lands for an egregious amount of mana. cool beans. whats next?
so we are about to cast our last 3 creatures. 2 of them are powerhouses and one is a required piece for some future stuff. i'm pretty sure you know what one of them is, so we will start there.
yup, golem being named as a creature type probably gave this away a long time ago. that's OK, it doesn't change the fact that he is without question one hell of an engine when combined with creature type adding effects. his inclusion has been from the very start of my damage quest. hes just too potent for me not to try to abuse. and while he is kinda nuts he still doesn't create any loops that inherently go into infinite territory. busted sure, deck ruiningly too good? nope. so i kinda just realized that's its actually correct to play golem first out of these 3. it works similarly to what we saw in our very first damage chain. we put more bodies into play first(him and his token buddies and then all the copies) creating a faster start to our damage chains from these 3 creatures we will be casting. so we cast him, resolve him, generate a bunch of copy triggers, a bunch of damage chain possibilities, gain a bunch of life, use avatars to puke that back onto biomancer, resolve another one of our copy triggers to to start it all over again. of course our rowan emblems will be putting in work here throughout the whole trigger/alarm stacks within the chaos. casting a creature at this point doesn't actually scale us all that hard. well it still scales our damage chains pretty effectively and we can turn that into more mana and amplifying our next play. in this case also creates a bunch of base PG golems to help the spreading of spells when we finally get to it.
um, say what? yup i hadn't heard of him either until i started this quest. i'll let you ponder what we might be doing with him for a bit but he is very important. as we have mentioned a few times before we will still make as many copies of this dude as we can. i actually don't know if we will fully be able to use his abilities but what use we do get our of him goes a long long way. regardless if we can use our copies of him his clones make nice trigger enablers for some more chaining nonsense for more counter generation.
so i guess this is where i start to explain why we went through all this trouble to not only make huge creatures, but also a but load of mana.
this is what we want our ludicrous mana generation engines for. we only need one of this guy but maxing out on copies of him still adds considerable value to our board through chain/mana generation. so do the usual max copy max chain process here and get what value we can from just his body entering. so next we will be moving into some spell casting.
well, not quite yet. we have a few things we need to extract some more value out of now that our stage is a bit more fully set. so, first up, it's time to use our arlinn kord creature generation abilities up. we waited until this point so that we would get max value out of each activation. remember rowan(s) turn 1 activation into a but load of them, making a bunch of waves of tokens coming in 1 activation copy at a time. this sets off our chains again each time for each copy of each ability resolving. each one of these bringing not one token but doubling seasons altered amount each time. so our stack looks like a bit of a mess. we have original abilities on the stack and a wave of rowan copied ones under that. for each of these we have an entire wave of chains going off. as we go back up the stack we run out of our copied abilities and then our original resolves and our stack is clear. we then activate another kord and the process repeats again. we do this until we have used all of our arlinn kords up. so now teferi to get our self shufflers? not quite, though we are very very close.
OK, now you have to go infinite here right? well, no actually. let's see how this plays out before we get to the non infinite end of things. so what actually does happen and how do we max out on our value here? so after a bit of consideration i actually think we don't use djinn's replicate ability here. its just way too clunky. what we most certainly do however is max the hell out of our x when we do cast this. yup we want 0 mana in our pool as this this spell is put onto the stack. so why not save some mana for riku copies? well you see rikus spell copying ability is a cast trigger so we don't need to pay for them until we get to that point. luckily for us we have a nice convenient combo that triggers on non creature spells being cast which can generate us some mana (along with other value as well) to pay for those riku triggers. so cast a maxed out WSZ and trigger our good old mirror combo from quite awhile back. this generates us enough mana to pay for all riku triggers and also allows us to make a few more of what ever things we want(importantly we still cannot make additional copies of usable planeswalkers) like seasons, riku, etc etc. we get some nice chaining before we resolve our riku copy triggers. now we do indeed pay for all our triggers and put X copies of WSZ on the stack where X is the amount of rikus we controlled as we put WSZ on the stack(importantly if we made new riku tokens with E/M combo we cannot use them to make new copies of WSZ as they were not around to see it originally be cast), all of these copies will be resolving before our original WSZ finally resolves. as the copies resolve we make some absolutely huge damage chains, compounding our already monstrous board state. this happens as each copy resolves and also as the original resolves, and then the original finally shuffles back into our library. now is when we use teferi's +1 ability's.
currently we have 2 cards in library(1 went back from our original casting of enter the infinite way back at the beginning). so we activate teferi looking at our top 2 and putting WSZ back into our hand. cool so now we cast it again and repeat the last few steps right? well actually we can do a bit better. see teferi didn't just put 1 activation on the stack, rowans emblems say we actually put a lot of them on the stack. and? well we also have flash so we can respond to all of those excess copied activation's so we don't let them just go to waste. so after we have WSZ back in hand but before the next copied teferi ability resolve we cast WSZ again and we do repeat our steps from before(max cast, do E/M combo to pay for riku copies, huge chains as each copy resolves) until again our original final resolves. now we let the next teferi copied ability resolve and again putting WSZ into our hand again. so you can see how this works now. we will continue this loop until our copied abilities dry up and then restart it by activating another one of our teferis we haven't used yet. this creates another slew of copies of the ability again and we proceed to work our way through them as we did the last time. isn't this a loop? yes, but its not infinite loop. we are restricted as to the length of this loop by how many teferi's we have and can activate. WSZ makes a lot of tokens but non of them can be copies of new teferi's so while we do make our table very wide and just nuts in terms of p/t we can't actually make an new teferi's just yet. yet? correct, yet. so if you really wanted to you could alternate between drawing cards with teferi and maybe using his untap to turbo power our mana generation. i'm pretty sure its just correct to just go ham on just looping WSZ as much as possible, but maybe a few untaps could have some value too. so NOW we attack? nope, not just yet, we still have work to do. actually crazy as this last part was we are about to start dwarfing these output values. so before we move on lets fully tap out. all but the lands into damage chains and then the lands tapping for even more mana(its worth noting that each successive casting/copying of WSZ throughout this looping will be significantly more powerful than the ones before it, and that will lead to generating more mana each time through, so we will have access to a far deeper mana reserves at the end of this looping verses what we had when we started. basically we turn mana into more mana and get some p/t amplification along the way as a bit of a bonus). so WSZ looping has been fully used. all of our walkers have been fully used. all of our damage chains have been completed. the stack is empty it is time to move on to the next part of the deck.
OK our 1 and only targeted spell. so we use a single target option here instead of a mass generator because of a few things. yes our replicated copies and or riku copies will be a bit lackluster(comparatively) but precourser golem more than makes up for it. also the fact that its lower cost means we can make more distinct waves with the same amount of mana. this doesn't seem that great at face value but that changes when each wave influences the power of the wave(s) coming behind it. while we can already do this to a degree just with damage chains we will see truly busted waves of amplification when we star making more token copies of doubling season.
so whole lots about to start happening. first and foremost we need to cast this spell, but djinn complicates this just a bit, but in a good way. so with WSZ we didn't want to replicate the spell because it was mana inefficient. this is not the case at all with CC. so first thing we do is figure out how much mana we actually have. once we do that we can then dump it all into making replicated copies of CC as we cast it. of note here is that this option is only available to us while we are actually paying true casting costs, once its on the stack we can no longer replicate it, and that's important as it would very quickly go infinite otherwise. so we finish casting CC and we place the original on the stack with all the replicated copies underneath it on the stack, looking like this:
last
org CC
rep CC
rep CC
.
.
.
rep CC
first
now we have some cast triggers to deal with. we have our E/M combo stuff, we have riku, and because we declared targets and cast CC targeting a single target, we will also have our golem triggers. all of these will resolve before our first replicated CC resolves. we will want the golem triggers to resolve as late as possible so we will stack our triggers and our CC stack as such:
last
org CC
rep copies(all)
golem triggers(all)
riku triggers(all)
E/M combo stuff
first
so we start resolving this stack. we do our E/M combo stuff and generate some extra mana to pay for all of our riku triggers coming up. we also turn all of the extra mirrors into doubling season(? maybe we want other stuff here). we do our damage chains here too again this time going full on damage mode as the mana will be trivial and rather useless right now. we can make more towards the end if we think we want it. as we saw before if we wait and cash in our lands at the very end it kinda dwarfs what we would get along the way so just wait it out and cash it in huge at the end. now we start resolving riku triggers. each of these triggers we will be able to pay for and will indeed use to make an additional copy of CC per riku we have. these will all be pointed at doubling seasons. again we get damage chains galore as these resolve. repeat until we are out of riku triggers. now we have moved to golems spread ability. this is where things really start to explode. just a quick reminder everything in play is a golem and so when we spread we spread to the entire team. what's really insane here is that these spread triggers don't all happen at once. each spread will happen only when it starts to resolve, meaning when we make our board state bigger between spread triggers, the next spread will hit everything, including the newly made things.
so before we start to resolve this we actually have a line of play here that is interesting. remember our odd goblin friend flectomsncer? well we can do somethings with him right now. so of course we can sac him and move one CC from targeting something rather useless(say a cat token) to something like doubling season. that is cool, but its far cooler because this is an activated ability our rowan emblems say we get a much larger bang for our buck. so for later uses we will need to have a few goblins at our disposable but we can sack a lot of them. make sure we use at least one of the copied flecto abilities to move the CC targeting our now gone friend onto something that won't fizzle. i'm not sure how the ratios work out here. i know we need at least 1 successful CC resolution to be on a single flecto but after that we can use as many as we want or need. keeping the body count high is important for chains so i'm sure there is an optimal ratio for sac'ing/re-targeting and just letting things happen naturally.
so when we make all of our spread copies they all tried to go on the stack at the same time. this means we pick the order they resolve. with waves like thius and doubling season theee is a pretty easy rule to follow: resolve DS generation first, and everything else after. the reason we want it this way is so that all the seasons will be made and in play to super power out our desired other permanent to maximum value. so when we spread and arrange our stack it should look like this:
last
replicated CC copies (all)
golem spread non doubling season CC(all)
golem spread CC targeting seasons(all)
first
so we start to resolve this mess. so our CC's start to resolve. we get wave after wave of doubling seasons trying to be made. each wave makes the damage chains nuttier and makes each CC resolving behind it nuttier still. this goes on for a lot of CC's making seasons. then we finish all those and now we get our non season CC's resolving. i'm sure there is an optimal order here. i think we want rowan coming in first and just as before popping for emblems as soon as possible amplifying our damage chains again in the process. so all of our utility permanents follow here an we use them as needed if its beneficial to do so. i'm for sure that we want as many rowans, golems, rikus, teferi's and at least one life abusers(land or chorus) that we can get. these are our non season engines and all work together to do gross things. again we will need at least 1 goblin left after this. now we move to resolve all of our replicated CC's all of which will be making DS. lastly our original CC finally resolves and goes safely to the yard. we are definitely going to flash it back, but first lets abuse our newly acquired walker resources. rowan has already been used up but teferi and arlinn have just added huge numbers to their ranks so lets use them now. much like when we transitioned from the end of our creature casting to starting to cast CC we paused and used our walkers to make tokens and loop WSZ, both in an effort to make more mana in preparation to make more CC copies. this time it will be casting from yard but luckily for us our cast triggers and casting modifiers(we will have to pay the 7 mana to start the flashback as omniscience only works from hand) don't care where its being cast from just that it is in fact being cast, which it will be. so we go through the steps of using all of our walkers up starting again with AK and then moving on to teferi looping WSZ. we make bodies, we make chains, we make mana, we gain life, etc etc. just as before we cant go infinite here with walkers/WSZ and we also cannot interact with the CC sitting in the yard to try to go infinite that way. now we repeat the CC process from the yard. we cast/replicate, we combo E/M, we copy with riku, we spread with golem, we chain like madmen etc etc. we make lots more of everything saving non seasons for last and making sure we kept a goblin around.
so now CC has fully resolved from yard and goes into the exile zone. we are going to be casting another non permanent spell soon so we will again turn to our newly acquired walkers and do the walker value dance once again making a bunch of tokens, chains, man life etc. so to summarize the last few "stages" have sequenced up as such:
last
walker(mana)
CC yard (stuff)
walker(mana)
CC hand(stuff)
walker (mana)
first
so we just resolved our most recent walker stage and we have an abundance of mana. now what? now we get to my favorite sequencing in the deck. its not he most powerful but its the craftiest for sure and i literally smile when i start thinking about it. so with that mana we cast/replicate:
OK you can obviously see we are going to get back CC here ..... but why replicate it into oblivion? once we grab CC from exile the other RR will all have invalid targets, and should fizzle. well while that is indeed correct, we have a certain goblin who is going to hook us up big time. its looping time my friends.
the loop
so we will cast RR and max cast/replicate it, and then max riku it as well before anything starts to resolve. then we will let the first copy resolve. we will indeed get CC back. the neat thing about spells/abilities on the stack though is that they don't just fizzle if the have an invalid target. they only fizzle when they try to resolve with an invalid target, and we can and will abuse the hell out of that timing window. so with our RR copies still on the stack we cast CC for free and replicate it as much as we can from mana we got from our E/M combo when we cast RR initially. it wont be a full CC explosion but it's still sizable, we basically just lose the replicated copies as golem's spreading is all still gonna happen as a trigger. just as before we will do a walker loop between resolving CC from hand and casting it from yard. we do the walker dance to power up our CC casting from yard. we now max cast CC from yard get value and put CC back into exile. now once this has happened and still before our first RR copy will fizzle we pop a flectomancer and redirected an about to fizzle RR copy to our newly in exile CC and get CC back to hand. so what this means is we get a full walker/cc/walker/cc/walker stages in between each copy of RR happening. because of golem's spread ability we will easily be able to make a goblin from the time one RR resolves until the next time it would resolve off the CC's we will be casting to keep the loop going. our limiting factor for how long the loop goes will be the number of copies we can make of RR when we first cast it.
ill go into a bit more detail here on why its finite. so one of the things i was very careful with when i designed this deck was to be deathly sure i couldn't abuse a spell once it was on the stack. we will see why later but it comes up here for now. yes i can redirect spells but i can't abuse that ability so much that it allows me to make more of those copies. i can make them benefit me the most, but even at its most beneficial its falls far short of replacing itself for free. all of the loops i use up to this point(and beyond) have a cost to start them and a timing window on how and when i can start them. in the RR/CC/goblin loop my limiting factor is how much mana i have at the time of casting RR. making more mnan afterwards does me no good. RR can't recur itself and CC can't recur RR either. we can use goblin to make sure we get full value from CC and from RR but he cannot make more copies of either directly. we can get CC value from him getting it back but that "costs" us a RR copy which neither CC or goblin can replace.
so bringing up a thought i had way back when we first brought in self shufflers. yes i can trade a CC from hand to exile to redraw one of my shufflers. this is a ludicrously bad trade for us. CC dwarfs our shufflers in value by untold amounts. we can then get CC back with RR but as i have just shown doing that has a real cost to it. we basically give up a CC for a shuffler any way we look at it and that is just awful all the way around. luckily for me i was crazy diligent in checking and rechecking my abilities/spells to make sure i couldn't abuse spells on the stack too hard. this for the most part means the only time i can really do abusive things is when i am casting the spell. once its on the stack i get my cast triggers and then the time for abuse is gone. for an example lets look at my E/M combo and making rikus from those triggers. yes i can do this, but because it was a cast trigger and the casting event has passed the new copies of riku won't have an opportunity to trigger thwarting any potential infinite casting trigger loops. another thing which limits the abuse i can do. RR can get exactly 1 card from my 60 back out from exile. CC is the only instant or sorcery i run that has flashback as part of its text. yes in a bit we will be casting spells that will make their way to exile but because they don't have flashback RR cannot bring them back. if it could i would certianly go infinite, but i cannot; so i do not.
so continuing on we need to finish working through our full RR loop. so between each RR copy resolving we get a CC hand/walker/CC yard/walker loop. i think i have explained how this works (and doesn't go infinite) well enough to just say it all resolves and we do so in the most profitable manner possible. we do all damage chains, we gain max life, we get max mana. we do it all for all of our triggers. so we finish that giant loop and .... well, we start it again.
so yeah this loop was strong enough for me to include the full play set of RR. we will just do more of what we have been doing up to this point with the RR/CC/goblin loop. importantly to note here though is what we do when all of our RR copies have been used and our last actual RR card has resolved and gone to the yard. we will do one more walker stage followed by casting and abusing CC from hand, but we will let CC stay in the yard this time. we will do our due diligence and do our walker dance one last time to prep for our next loop. one other minor thing is we NEED to save 1 teferi +1 activation here. use everything else but save 1 unused teferi.
time to loop everything. OK so let me explain why this doesn't go infinite before we get too far. to do this let's take a look at what happens when we cast it and let it resolve. sure we can now sac our real cards and put them back into the deck and use twister to get them back. now what though? none of the other 34 cards can get TT back from the yard. even if i exiled it to gateway, i couldn't get it back with RR anyway. for reason i just talked about i can't abuse it on the stack(aside from specifically at casting, which we will do). we can even use teferi to draw the deck(and abuse excess "draws" to loop WSZ again). hell this point we can actually cast and play the entire deck with those last "wasted" teferi draws on the stack. but all of this doesn't change the fact that once TT is on the stack and my cast triggers have past, we can't make more copies of it. so does anything change when we do make copies of it? well actually, no it doesn't. but wont the copies shuffle the original back in? no, they wont. the original will always sit at the top of the stack like this:
last
org twister
replicate copies
riku copies
first
using the cards i have means this is the only way this stack will ever look. the original will always be at the end of the line. this means its copies can never shuffle our original back into the deck. it will safely stay on the stack while everything else happens around it. also of note here our goblin friend cannot interact with it at all, as it doesn't target at all, so he can't abuse it at all, and certainly not in an infinite manner.
so what does this mean. well exactly what i said as i introduced the card. we loop everything. everything?
EVERYTHING(in my best norman stansfield / gary oldman voice)!!!!!!
so we basically take the looping structure we established in the RR/CC/goblin loop and extrapolate it out into the entire playing of the deck. in this case our loop will be literally the entire deck(up to this point) being played out between TT copies resolving. which looks like:
last
TT org
deck
TT copy
deck
TT copy
deck
.
.
.
.
TT copy
first
so how exactly do we loop everything? well at this point all of our relevant ins/sor are either in the yard or on the stack, so they are ready. we then sac all of our actual physical permanent cards to thopter foundry and let them go to yard or possibly shuffle in(vigor, avatar, and possibly mirror). there will be some triggers involved here as foundry does make a token(lol, a token, right ...) and gain us 1 life. so i'm sure there is an optimal sac'ing order here but i can't imagine it costs us a lot of value in the long run. so we do this and we can finally let a TT copy resolve.
cool we shuffle up and draw 7, now what? so it depends on how lucky you want to be. do we need to activate our last carry over teferi +1 ability? or did we draw ETI? in either case be aware that both of these options can start their own mini loops. teferi we just draw the deck off 1 activation and then loop WSZ until the single activation(thanks rowan) has run its course. with ETI we do something similar but do it closer to our TT loops. we cast it, copy it as much as possible, and then loop as many of our self shufflers as possible between each resolving copy. also in both cases we can put these looping structures on the stack and then just play the entirety of the deck underneath them and resolve them just before we start to move into another TT copy restart. its pretty wide open tbh. i actually think doing this(setting up this delayed extra draws aspect) approach with teferi might be our best bet for max value. i'm also sure that since we will start with resources in play this time around, that re-ordering our cards to get even more value is both doable, and correct. as our damage chains have shown the bigger we can start the faster we explode. this applies to abilities, trigger stacking, single spell looping, multi spell looping, deck looping, and even to twister looping. come again? twister looping? yeah, that's about to happen.
so we said loop everything right? well that was everything except our actual TT. what if there was a way to loop that too? it would be hard to stop going infinite, right? well, actually, it isn't really that difficult after all, if you start with what you can't do. let me explain. so as i have now demonstrated it is possible to loop the deck with TT without looping the TT itself. at some point all of our TT copies will have resolved and now the actual TT is looking to resolve and go to the yard. we let this happen. so lets think what would allow us to get twister back.
-OK, a regowth effect? nope goes infinite when twister shuffles it back in to be redrawn
-how about making copies with it on the stack? a bit too risky i think. if we can do it to TT we can probably do it other things and go infinite with those somehow.
-how about we use itself? we counter it off the stack and let its own copy shuffle itself in? maybe but if the countering ability isn't a spell that exiles itself then that will also go fully infinite. if it does exile itself then it's probably not something we can abuse anyway. also if it can hit twister it can probably hit other things and those might cause unwanted infinite elsewhere.
well WTF man this sounds kinda tough. well i'll walk you through how i came to using TT in the first place. i realized very early on that recursion was super risky in these types of projects. i knew a lot of recursion would just go fully infinite. so i started dropping it all. then i realized i could play 1 card. i settled on regrowth, and then started working on how to abuse it. i quickly realized with copy effects i could get back not just 1 thing, but my whole graveyard, and with a sac outlet that meant the whole deck. i was stoked. but i didn't stop there. can i do better? i wondered ... well what about TT effects? do those work or are they too good? well similarity to my first thoughts i started very safe. i tried exile twisters. they actually checked out! so i started looking and experimenting. i quickly found exile twister + regrowth worked. i could pick up the deck an additional time when i cast a exile twister. can i improve from here? well i already ha the ability to copy regrowth, so why not exile twisters too? sure enough this checked out too. so i think you can see where this is going.
yeah so this is how you loop your TT. you use exile twisters(ET) to do it so you don't go infinite. the same rules apply here about not being able to abuse these cards except when we are casting them. when we do that we can make a great many copies of our Exile Twisters(ET) just like TT but our when our ET finally does resolve it will exile itself, and go to a place we cant abuse it anymore. also just like TT we can loop everything underneath these spells safely, including TT in the cases of the ET. so these loops look like this:
last
ET org
full TT + copies loop
ET copy
full TT + copies loop
ET copy
.
.
.
full TT + copies loop
ET copy
fully used up g(0) of the deck, including TT + copy loops resolved and TT in yard
first
this is our end game. this is the ultimate thing my deck can do. so lets put this into perspective. my deck makes mana, increases its life, increases its p/t on board, and increases its amplification with each card it plays. we can then loop the entirety of itself with a TT multiple times, increasing in its potency each time. then on top of that, we can loop the TT itself an absurd amount of times via ET we can also copy into oblivion safely. what the real kicker here is though, is that with each loop, large or small, our deck just outputs more and more resources to fuel is growth and or its loopablity. we just push harder and harder, more and more, over and over, again and again. so our ultimate limiting factor is how much mana can we make. it will determine how many times, and how potently, we can make each loop and our finite but huge mana reserves will ultimately be tasked with casting and copying our exile twisters. these are our true speed limiters, this is the best we(i) can do.
final thoughts
yeah so this is an incomplete list. its only 55 cards. i'll be quite blunt, filling out the final 5 has just become a hassle. my brain itself is getting annoyed with how much effort i've put into this. it almost makes me mad to just try to weight pros and cons of potential cards for the final slots. i do think thousand-year storm probably does belong in here. i wasn't sure in my first few iterations but now with the WSZ and CC loops my spell cast count per TT loop is actually quite high so TYS probably belongs in here. i've had multiple full 60 lists with lots of perspective options but this list is the most compact and efficient i've made so far. i've tried lots of other stuff but i think these 55 is where to start. i have thoughts on other options and am happy to share if anyone brings them up, but in general i'm just kinda at my wits end with it. i think i've pushed it as far as i can. now i think it needs other sets of eyes/brains to be pushed any further, and so i'm here to see if you guys can indeed push it farther. my list operates quite differently than the staged lists you guys are working on. those staged list probably dwarf mine but i never really give up resources as i move through the deck. i just add to the mess with higher and higher levels of amplification. while many of my card choices are not new, i am abusing all of them in ways almost no one else has. i take super powerful concepts and let them go right up to just short of going infinite, but do manage to stop them from crossing the line. IA and TT are perfect examples. they go infinite in almost anyone else's list, but not in mine. i figured out how to harness them rather than just assuming they were too good. so i made too good just bad enough to be kinda good.... so how good is that?
I Apologize if you have addressed any of this already
Okay so the below doesn't work UNLLESS you use Mizzium Transreliquatwhich you should use anyways.... I thought it was what you were using.... trust me 3 mana per iteration is way better than 2 when you look at what you get.
Say you cast a non instant or sorcerery (which until WSZ, you are doing, aside from MM, which you do not copy). You would want to have ALL of your mizzium be rikkus, so that you can trigger the copy for each of them, then you will want all of them to transform to (ttt) doubling seasons(DS) before those token generating triggers resolve, so you will need the mana after each token resolution. This would result in x*2^x copies (with an *, see below) where x is the number of mizzium copies you have (assuming the original will always be blinked to generate more tokens (which would also cost more mana ttt DS)) so.... lets do math.....
3x ttt rikku, 2x for each rikku trigger, 2x for each rikku tirgger caused by mizzium blink, 3x+3 (the original should become DS for the time being) ALL of this per time Rikku triggers, but each token coming into play gets you mana, so it's not a problem.
then things get compicated...
Because for THE FIRST mizzium rikku copy resolution,you will get 2^x copies of mizzium which can then be turned into DS, resulting in cumulatively 2^x more DS each rikku trigger.... but, with a single ME you will get 2^t^t (where t= the number of tokens created) mana.... which is more mana than you need by far for that iteration and it also cumulatively gets bigger...
SO... a single ME is fine no matter how many rikkus you would end up with. As long as you have at least 10x mana to start with. Which after casting mirror itself, should be no problem (you will get 16 tokens, resulting in 16^2 mana)
SO this also breaks your 1/2 rule (in half hahaha, but seriously have as many copies of rikku as you want)
ALSO
In your WSZ explanation you say that would need 0 mana when it goes on the stack, causing original mirror to blink, assumsing you to gain x mana, where x is the number of tokens you control.... which would always be more then twice the number of mirrors you control because the final mirrors become more doubling seasons and raise the number of tokens created by the original spell by... let's just say a huge exponent of 2, causing you to generate that much more mana....
SO nevermind lol.
But how many tokens would a single casting of a non instant/sorcery generate...? Well....let's find out... in a future post.
*technically this would be it be x*2^(x+z) where z is the number of original doubling seasons an tokens you have.. at this point it's 3, but future iterations could change that. So I have excluded all non mirror doubling seasons from the equation.
TLDR: Use Mizzium Transreliquat instead of mirror.
Rikku can has all of the copies. And it makes your mana grow more exponentially.
Edit:minor spelling fixes.
Also to save from double post:
More card ideas: Doublecast(replicated to high heaven of course) into Bonus Round with these 2 cards also shuffling in when you spiral, they will grow 2^x and then also your replicates.
Also Thousand-year Storm will get some copies of instants and sorceries but not that many... but wait if you make copies of thousand year storm you will get more copies...
Interesting deck! I see you put a lot of time into it. I don't see any infinities offhand, so I will analyze what numbers it reaches.
At the bottom, we have to damage chain, so let's start with that. If A is the number of creatures that get created (buttressed by Doubling Season), B is the number of Intruder Alarms (so we get AB untaps) and C is the number of Rowan emblems on the battlefield (so we get C copies of each tap ability), then we can tap those creatures A(AB + A) times, for A(AB+A)(C+1) copies of the ability, so the damage chain yields roughly 2^[A(AB+A)(C+1)] counters. Then, if we have D copies of Angelic Chorus, our life increases by roughly D*2^[A(AB+A)(C+1)]. Note that we cannot increase our number of Rowan Kenriths at this level. We can incrase our number of Intruder Alarms and Angelic Choruses a little higher up, but it turns out that this is never a good idea; we get much more benenfit by copying Doubling Season, since each one has an exponential effect, and that effect applies to pretty much everything. So our life increases by roughly 2^(cX^2) where c is a constant, or exponential growth. This puts us at layer 1.
Next we have the other effect of adding more creatures. Most of the time when we add a token creature, we will want all the tokens to copy Doubling Season. If we have X Doubling Seasons in play, the effect of a token creation is to actually create 2^X more tokens, which will usually be or turn into Doubling Seasons, so each such ability takes X to 2^X. So this is layer 1 again.
Going through the rest of the combo:
Layer 1: With X Doubling Seasons in play, an ability to create a token can create 2^X Doubling Seasons.
Layer 2: With X Riku of Two Reflections in play, putting a nontoken creature into play will trigger token creation X+1 times, each time taking X to 2^X. The last creation can create more Rikus, so we wind up taking X Rikus to 2^^(X+1) Rikus. Casting any noncreature spell will trigger the flickering of Ojutai Exemplars, and therefore this layer. Casting White Sun's Zenith will achieve this layer in another way, since if we copy it the spell X times we will take X to 2^^(X+1) as well.
Layer 3: Resolving a copy of Cackling Counterpart will create us to create 2^X Teferi, Temporal Archmages, where X is the number of Doubling Seasons on the battlefield. If we have Y Rowan Kenriths on the battlefield, then we can create 2^X(Y+1) Teferi abilities, each of which can draw and recast White Sun's Zenith, so we can take X to 2^^^(2^X(Y+1)). We could also copy Rowan Kenrith and use his ability to increase Y, but unfortunately, the number of emblems doesn't increase anywhere near as fast as everything else, since unfortunately emblem creation isn't affected by Doubling Season. So the best we can do is to use the first 2^X-1 copies to copy Rowan Kenrith, and the last copy to copy Teferi Temporal Archmage. We can use the activate the 2^X-1 Rowan Kenriths' ultimate abilities, and each one doubles the number of emblems. So we wind up with Y*2^(2^X - 1) emblems, so we get 1+Y*2^(2^X-1) copies of Teferi's ability and we take X to 2^^^[Y*2^(2^X-1)].
Layer 4: Each time we resolve a Precursor Golem trigger for Cackling Counterpart with X creatures in play, we get X-1 copies of Cackling Counterpart, and we can use Goblin Flectomancer to retarget the target to Mirage Mirror. So this takes X to 2^^^^(X-1).
Layer 5: Each time we cast Cackling Counterpart, we get X Precursor Golem triggers, where X is the number of Precursor Golems in play. So this takes X to 2^^^^^X.
Layer 6: Each time we cast Runic Repetition, we can copy it X times to retrieve Cackling Counterpart X+1 times, taking X to 2^^^^^^(X+1).
Layer 7: Each time we cast Timetwister we can copy it X times to redraw Runic Repetition X+1 times, taking X to 2^^^^^^^(X+1).
Layer 8: Each time we cast one the exile-for-retrieval spells, we can copy it X times to retrieve Timetwister X+1 times, taking X to 2^^^^^^^^(X+1).
There are various other effects and increases being done, but they are insignficant compared to this main sequence. Since we have 20 exile-for-retrieval spells, the final damage is between 2^^^^^^^^^22 and 2^^^^^^^^^23.
It would definitely help to add Thousand-Year Storm, since we get the Precursor Golem of effect of creating a bunch of spells, and each trigger copying the original spell a bunch of times. So that would change things to:
Layer 6: Each TYS trigger for Runic Repetition creates X copies of Runic Repetition.
Layer 7: Each time we cast Runic Repetition, we get X TYS triggers.
Layer 8: Each TYS trigger for Timetwister creates X copies of Timetweister.
Layer 9: Each time we cast Timetwister, we create X TYS triggers.
Layer 10: Each TYS trigger for Praetor's Counsel creates X copies of Praetor's Counsel.
Layer 11: Each time we cast Praetor's Counsel, we create X TYS Triggers.
So that ups the damage to between 2^^^^^^^^^^^^22 and 2^^^^^^^^^^^^23. (12 arrows)
As for improving the deck, it would be nice to extend the chain of retrieval cards. Here's a way to improve the chain by one: Replace Timetwister with Sage's Knowledge and Reiterate. Sage's Knowledge can fetch Runic Repetition. Reiterate can copy an exile-for-retrieval spell and fetch Sage's Knowledge. Then the exile-for-retrieval spells can fetch Reiterate. This adds two arrows, getting us to 2^^^^^^^^^^^^^^22 (14 arrows).
I am sorry to say we cannot use reitterate.... it can cause us to go infinite with a single casting of CC... which is why I suggested double cast instead (besides buyback is 3, replicate is 2)
Sage's knowledge is a step back from timetwister with things like thousand year storm and bonus round as all of those copies go on the stack as you cast it. Timetwister is the better choice because it gets you all of the cards you need back each time it resolves, not just one.
Also I think biomancer should be moved to the end of doubling season. You will get so much more of an increase at this point.
You would get 30 counters total playing it where it stands up to doubling season... and not going to do the math but casting after doubling season, with 11 doubling seasons... well the first wave would get none. The second wave would get 2^11, the third wave would get 2^11^2^11,etc until 11 waves... Plus the original. And that's assuming the ETBs don't see each other (which I forget if they do)
Since you have no land or cmc 0 at this point, since mana cost is a copiable trait (202.3a), you don't need it so early.
Edit: never mind my initial edit edit comments, added stuff on sage's
Whoops, I forgot what Reiterate was for a second. So yeah, go with Fork or one of its many variants. But we can't mix Fork or Doublecast with Timetwister and Praetor's Counsel, since Timetwister can allow us to redraw Doublecast, and Doublecast can fetch Timetwister by copying Praetor's Counsel. So we need to switch Timetwister for something that cannot fetch Fork, like Sage's Knowledge.
Edit: No, I guess Doublecast will not go infinite with Timetwister. But given the way it works, it doesn't add to the sequence. So we still would rather have Sage's Knowledge + Fork than Timetwister.
Also it's worth pointing out that time twister does not only get us back runic repetitions, it literally rest our entire non token board (since we copied everything, we have zounds token copies of every permanent) thopter engine sacs every non token permanent, which gets shuffled in and we start again. So every iteration of time twister is another iteration of the entire game, except with all of those token copies out, which means every single permanent card gets played again, copied via rikku, and then umpteened by the doubling seasons. All the while generating more mana than we know what to do with except replicate our spells
Edit: ood point on doublecast, it won't be able to be included in the deck with timetwister, but I think timetwister is still the best option for the above reasons? Idk would require so much number crunching.
Edit edit: I take that back, doublecast only copies the next spell you cast, so you cant go infinite with it. Yes you can get back timetwister with an ETT, but that's the point of the ETTs. They allow you to get timetwister back and then start over again, but they are limited by the number of ETT iterations. I am 99% sure you cannot go infinite with doublecast, it's not fork
Nah, Sage's Knowledge + Fork is better than Timetwister. Timetwister does allow you to reuse the whole deck, but all the non-Runic Repetition cards put together have less of an effect than a single Runic Repetition. So a single copy of Timetwister has less of an effect than 5 copies of Sage's Knowledge, since those could fetch Runic Repetition 5 times. This still means that 1 casting of Timetwister is more effective than 1 casting of Sage's Knowledge. But that 1 casting will increase our number of Thousand-Year Storms a gajillion times, so a second casting of Sage's Knowledge will get way more than 5 times as many copies as the original Timetwister had. More generally X+1 castings of Sage's Knowledge will beat X castings of Timetwister. So in the Timetwister deck, one copy of Praetor's Counsel can allow for one more casting of Timetwister, but in the Sage's Knowledge deck, one copy of Praetor's Counsel will allow for one more casting of Fork, gets a gajllion copies, and all of those copies can copy Praetor's Counsel and fetch Sage's Knowledge. So we get a gajlllion castings of Sage's Knowledge rather than one casting of Timetwister.
Fork (or other variations) cannot be used with with any TT variant (including praetors) because of the whole infinite combo thing.
I cast praetors. I cast fork. It resolves. It copies praetors. Fork goes back to my hand.... etc etc
Edit: you may not have seen my second edit above also
Oh right, the Fork trick only works with cards that *target* cards in the graveyard, and we can't have Goblin Flectomancer. So scratch that idea.
I saw your second edit, see my previous edit to post #1841. Doublecast doesn't go infinite, but it doesn't help a lot. If we cast Doublcast, we can get X copies via Djinn Illuminatus and Riku of two Reflections. Then we cast some other spell, and get X copies via Djinn and Riku, and another X copies via Doublecast. So it's just X versus 2X, which hardly makes a difference. It's the same with Thousand-Year Storm, except the difference is even less, since we get more copies for the second spell than we get with Doublecast.
But you cant use fork. So use doublecast. Also its doublecast plus Bonus Round. You cast double cast and replicate it, then cast Bonus Round, bam all your instant and soreceries are copied. So your adding x iterations to every spell you cast each time you cast the 2, which because you get to copy timetwister x times, you get x^x (actually its more than that because every casting of doupblecast gets copied again for each previously cast double round, which is also copied that many times again) more copies on the next timetwister cast.
Timetwister is the way to go.
Edit: Let me put it another way. The number of double cast replicates that can be had towards the end of a playthrough (the number of permanents you control raised to the power of the number of permanents you just out into play, which with CC is all of them). That number divided by 2 is the number of times you will be able you copy your Bonus round. Which will then copy every other instant and sorcery you cast. So that's how many TT is worth one playthrough.
Now if you are arguing that 4 TYS might be a better fit? Then I argue 4 Bonus Round with a single doublecast would be at least comparable if not better. Throw in more double casts and then...
I say throw them all in and take out a number of ETTs to get you top 60 because the copies will be worth more than any single card
Also if your argument is that rikku can just copy the spell, well that's limited by how many rikkus you have (way less than your mana, which by the way increases even more when you get more ME through CC) and if you think a 2/3 ratio from djinn is insignificant when talking about the number of copies you can cast that get you future copies, especially when the number of permanents is going to be in the.... rediculos (seriously I know nothing about this arrow notation) then you ^x that number and that's how much mana you have..... well if you think a 2/3 ratio is insignificant at that level, then I have 0 words.
I don't think you get x^x. Doublecast and Bonus Round activate only when a spell is cast, as does Replicate. So say you cast Doublecast. You get X copies. You then cast Bonus Round. You get about X copies from Djinn Illuminatus and you also get X copies from Doublecast, for 2X total. Then you cast Timetwister, which gets X copies from Djinn Illuminatus, and 2X from Bonus Round, for 3X total. So it's not a big deal really. Even if it were X^X, that's not noticeable when you are dealing with numbers this large (of the many Knuth arrow variety).
It's true that adding Doublecast and Bonus Round will increase the final damage, no matter how small. But it would be better to use those card slots for adding more exile-for-retrieval cards, since those currently take X to 2^^^^^^^^^^^X, a much bigger improvement. Still, rather than just fill out the deck with exile-for-retrieval cards, it would be more interesting to look for cards that can extend the sequence, and therefore the number of Knuth arrows. Right now the deck ends the sequence with
Can we extend this to a sequence of five or more? That would be the really big improvement.
Edit: It's true that in a normal sense, if X is very large than (2/3)X is "much smaller" than X. And it's true that, as we continue the combo, the difference between our number starting from X versus (2/3)X will get bigger and bigger. But the point is, there are much stronger things that we can do instead of going from (2/3)X to X. For example, if we replace the cards that go from (2/3)X to X with cards that can go form (2/3)X to 2^{(2/3)X}, that will get us a much bigger number. And this time, when we continue the combo, the difference will again get bigger and bigger, but this time in favor of 2^{(2/3)X}.
In regards to this deck... it's a bit hard to explain if you don't understand Knuth arrows, but I will give it a try. So we know that casting Praetor's Counsel generates and incredibly powerful combo, taking X to some f(X) where f(X) is an incredibly fast-growing function. For instance f is much stronger than exponentiation, or repeated exponentiation, or anything even close to that. So let's say you have Praetor's Counsel along with Doublecast and Bonus Round. The latter two will get us 3X copies of Praetor's counsel, so we can generate f(3X). This is, in a normal sense, much bigger than f(X), so in a sense Doublecast and Bonus Round are doing a wonderful job. But if we replace Doublecast and Bonus Round with another copy of Praetor's Counsel, now we can cast the first Praetor's Counsel to get f(X), and another Praetor's Counsel to get f(f(X)). f(f(X)) is MUCH bigger than f(3X), since f(X) is much bigger than 3X. Even if 3X were X^X this would remain true. So just adding more exile-for-retrieval cards would be better.
I argue that 1000 quinticilion copies of a spell (and that's a vast underestimate of the FIRST TT, not even ETT) is worth way more than one copy of that spell. What you aren't realizing is that 16 copies of ETT gets TT back 16 times none of them are copied. Take 2 out and you have 14 ETT, with double cast and bonus round. I cast the combo for 2 bonus rounds. Now I cast TT. I get 3 TTs and so in the 1st one I get that count to 6 bonus rounds, the second TT it goes to 14 and then in the third I get 30. So then I cast my FIRST ETT and get 30 copies, which is more than you even started with. and in each of those I get to cast the combo again.
That's life without replicate, which makes those numbers even higher.
(and I didn't even go into how your life total in mana times the number of lands you have is also added into the mix)
So no, let's not find more ETTs, lets find ways to copy them.
Also you ETTs cost a bit more than 3, and doublecast only costs 2, again without doublecast and bonus round it's a 2:3 ratio, adding it increases the number of ALL Instant and sorcery spells by 50% (well really more, that's just based on TT and CC)
Let's put an analogy to this, if someone offered you 1 billion dollars, but you had to use my 2 cards, or $666,666,666.666. Which one would you take? Especially since the 1 billion dollars gets the same interest rate as the lesser amount (except the billion dollars ALSO gets more days in a year).you are telling me that a 50% increase, plus interest would be worth less than 666,666,666.666, or a "not really a big deal?"
By ETT's, do you mean cards like Praetor's Counsel? Wait, what do you mean that "ETT gets TT back 16 times and none of them are copied"? When you cast Praetor's Counsel, you will get many copies via Riku, Djinn Illuminatus, or Thousand-Year Storm, and each copy will fetch Timetwister from the graveyard.
30 copies of Praetor's Counsel is not that much. By the time you get around to casting Praetor's Counsel, you can get a gajillion copies of Thousand-Year Storm via all the token copies of Mirage Mirror we are creating througout the whole combo. And each of the Thousand-Year Storms triggers to create a gajillion copies of Praetor's Counsel. So that certainly seems a lot better. Of course, we can increase that a bit by adding Doublecast and Bonus Round, but it would be much better to add another Praetor's Counsel, since after the first Praetor's Counsel we can increase the number of Thousand-Year Storms and the instant/sorcery count tremendously, and then the second Praetor's Counsel will key off of those much bigger numbers. The numbers increase MUCH more than exponentially, and much more than you get from Doublecast and Bonus Round.
I don't understand your analogy. It's not like we can just add two cards for free. There is a 60 card limit, so we have to be sure there those two cards do the best job at increasing the final number. If you remove the 60 card limit, then sure, you can add everything and the kitchen sink, as long as things don't go infinite.
I can’t do too much talking right now but I can answer a few things.
Biomancer has to be where he is in the first sequence through the deck. The enchantments and artifacts that aren’t normally creatures literally have no creature type so they don’t activate mana echoes. We could move exemplar before doubling season which would start helping but it still might not be enough to actually get you up and running. Giving the mutant type is what kick starts our mana generation in the first place.
Deedlit - a small maybe inconsequential note on the initial layer or chains: if we point the outcome of that chain at biomancer the next wave will start at that level x doubling seasons. Also the life gain also effects the chains because Serra avatar is growing with each life gain trigger and that is growing the chains etc. I’m not sure it’s super substantial but it’s actaully growing faster than u think.
Pretty much anything that can generate a copy of a spell that isn’t tied to a trigger is too good and will go infinite. It’s just too easy to make a copy of twister with some TT still on the stack let’s us use that copied TT to get back what we copied it with and this goes infinite.
I’ll be around later but those are my first thoughts. Glad ou guys got a kick out of it.
I understand now.
You are saying that adding double cast and bonus round PLUS TYS would be a bad idea because adding it to that would at best be a 100% increase.
I however am not fully convinced that TYS is the better option over DC + BR
Every instant and sorcery you cast gives you a counter on each of TYS. Now you can have an arbitrarily large number of them and I would care because it's (13+z)x where z is the number of times you cast WSZ, but the amount of mana you gain from a casting of CC is (y^y/2)X where y is the total number of permanents you own, and x is the same arbitrarily large number as TYS (in MEs, give or take a few 0s.
And that's just from ME which is actually a small amount of mana compared to what you could generate because of Sanctum of the Sun. Because your life total will be increased far more than anything else (each of your permanents is a creature which pushes into your WSZ tokens, which have life link,then end by alternating between the cats (life link) and Serra avatar (life total in damage and therefore counters), ending with a cat all before before smacking Into master biomancer to increase the next damage wave, all copied Rowan^Rowan times.) And when it's time you use an amount (might only be 1 because of the ludicrous compounding exponential life gain)of your Sanctums to generate your life total in mana (copied Rowan ^Rowan times). That number divided by 2 is the number of extra times you get to copy TT.
Don't go saying that you'll get extra casts of CC with TYS because those extra casts are inconsiquential compared to the number generated by PG.
TLDR: Life total gains will grow so much more than anything else this game, Diublecast + bonus round instead of TYS.
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Also here’s a nasty 7 carder using 59 of our 60 manna
Opalesence
Doubling season
Thousand-year storm
Angels grace
Twinflame
Remand
Radiate
Play our enchantments. Play angels grace. Play flame and then remand, leaving twin flame copy on the stack to resolve as remand and flame come back to hand. Repeat this 8 more times(52 mana used, 19 spells seen by TYS) letting all TYS flame copies resolve before recasting the loop. Cast flame 1 more time getting 20 copies(54 mana used). Let all but original resolve. Then cast radiate(59 mana used) targeting original lone flame for 21 total radiates.
Castimg Grace stops us from dying to decking as well. We could add another card if we assume the remand draws don’t kill us.
Edit: my spell count was off by 2 in terms of spells seen by TYS. Fixed
Edit: if we alternate TF copies between DS and TYS it is even more nuts than just targeting DS.
1 black lotus
2 show and tell
3 omnisience
4 enter the infinite(ETI)
these first 4 cards are pretty standard so far. later on in our loops we will be able to use enter the infinite in a more abuse-able manner, but that's a ways off. for now, we have our deck(-1 card) in our hand, with an omniscience in play. now we start to play out some of our engine pieces
5 master biomancer
6 march of the machines
7 mycosynth lattice
so now we have made a few things happen. every permanent in play is a creature and an artifact. with master biomancer some other cool stuff happens. if a normally non creature permanent would enter play it enters as a creature, because it does master biomancer makes it enter with some counters. this means stuff like lands and 0 cmc things don't just die to state based checks. also everything that enters also has the creature type mutant thanks to biomancer. this will be important shortly. also at this point all mana costs of any variety can be paid for using any mana(unless specified by the ability itself) via lattice.
8 mana echoes
so this is why biomancer is played when he is. now everything entering as a creature(everything) will generate 1 mana for each creature we have in play. this will be one of our mana generating engines, but not our most powerful one. we need it to help jump start our other engines. mana generation is vitally important to this deck and this is a nice stepping stone to larger things.
9 riku of two refections
OK so the first of our engines is starting to come online. the nice thing with mana echos and riku is that as long as riku(and his copies) doesn't exceed 1/2 of the total amount of permanents in play we will always to be able to pay for all of rikus triggers. its actually an even smaller amount of the toal but its a good rule of thumb. also we will want many copies of riku. he allows us to accelerator on 2 separate fronts and is quite efficient at both of them. we will be attempting to make a lot of things in play and a lot of copies of instants and sorceries for various reasons.
10 doubling season
so yeah this card. lets face it, its just super powerful. when it enters we will get a riku trigger for it, and we will pay for that trigger. this will attempt to put 1 token into play. that token sees a season in play already and makes 2 instead. so we get 3 total. this isn't super fast to start but we have ways to catch up soon enough
11 ojatui exemplars
so now every non creature spell we cast gets us a blink from our original exemplar, this in turn gives us another riku trigger(or wave of riku triggers if we have multiple copies of him). the token copies of exemplar can all target the same thing to tap. later once we give our creatures something to tap to do we can stack our triggers so that exemplars tapping ability will be the last thing to resolve. giving first strike is a no no as we will be attacking and we don't want our first strike damage to kill them before our main force can get their damage in.
12 mirror gallery
so now we can make more copies of riku(or any other legendaries) without worrying about needing to sacrifice any of them. as will be true of several things moving forward making extra copies of this piece doesn't inherently do much for us. that being said it only requires 2 mana to make riku copies and each of these activations will create more than 2 mana in the process. we want more mana so we will still activate as many rikus as possible. this will help us maximize our mana production. in general this is a go wide strategy deck and making extra bodies has additional value later on.
13 mirage mirror
OK so this is where things start to get very interesting. this card is very powerful and we are gonna abuse the hell out of it. because it is so powerful we do need to be very careful with our list going forward. i'm going to spend a lot of time talking about things we do with this card right now. ill be quite blunt in saying this card has been a source of many unintended infinite loops already, but its so versatile that i think its worth the risk. its important to talk about what it can and what it cannot do. while we have the ability to change our mirror into any permanent we have in play we do not get that permanents enter triggers. this is very very important as it cuts us off some infinites later. that being said i think we should now talk about how it coming into play the first time should be handled. i'm very confident in this part as it sets up some very cool interactions that also happen to be absurdly powerful. so we start mapping some of our stacks here. i will map them like this going forward
stack resolving order
last
x
y
z
first
so with the case of our mirror we will pick up our stack after our exemplar triggers have cleared and mirror has resolved. i think its important to note that we want it to stay as itself for now. this lets us copy the mirror with rikus trigger and we get some number of these tokens from doubling season buffs. of note here is that even after we change our mirrors into something else(say more copies of doubling season for instance) that because of the way mtg rules on actual layers work our newly changed into object will maintain its mutant creature type and keep it counters too. this is only true because we remain a creature. if it became a non creature at any point it would lose its mutant type, but lukily for us it stays a mutant and continues to help us make mana echoes mana. so at this point i will concede that i'm not entirely sure what the most profitable objects are for us. i assume its a mix of rikus and doubling seasons, but i'm not sure what the ratio should be. for the sake of argument lets just say its 50/50 on season and riku. we will take one token mirror and make it into another mana echoes to help pay for our mirror changes but the rest of our batch we will make rikus and seasons. its important here that our actual mirror card is still a mirror as we are about to start comboing with it. so we use 2 more mana and turn our actual mirror into a copy of exemplar.
so, what have we done? well just think about what happens on the next cast of a non creature spell. yes our actual exemplar will blink as it was before creating a few nice triggers. the real cool stuff happens when our exemplar that is actually a mirror blinks. it comes back as a mirror and procs riku as a mirror. this allows us blink/trigger mirror on every non creature spell for the rest of the game. there are only 6 or so creatures in this deck so 50+ spells will be blinking our ememplared mirror allowing us to have it reenter as mirror, generate more riku triggers making more of them and turning them into more rikus and more seasons. this is one of my favorite interactions in the deck and one i'm super proud to have discovered it. plus all of these interactions will happen with the non creature spell on the stack which means we have time to turn them into riku/season before they resolve and will get there added benefits from triggers they created just by being cast.
so just for tghe sake of thuroghness the stack will look like this after we blink the exemplared mirror
last
original non creature spell
actual exemplar blink
riku triggers for newly etb blinked mirror
first
after riku triggers are paid for we can then turn our mirrors into whatever we want with actual exemplars blink trigger still on the stack. then let triggers resolve as needed. mana echos is happening in there too but we can probably have it resolve near the end as i noted before about riku/echos costs and the longer we can wait the more beneficial it will become. so importantly in all of this we want our actual mirror to stay a mirror until we are ready to do something cool with it. if we turn it into something that isn't exemplar we won't be able to do any of this as all riku copies will be what the original copied and also we cant do this trick with a token copy. it exiles for the blink and ceases to exist and cant come back(seems bad for us).
there is another really cool interaction that we can do with mirror itself. for this case we can do this will any 2 mirrors that are still actual mirrors and only if this interaction doesn't involve attempted blinks. so what we can do is allow a mirror to become something and then still be allowed to return to being an actual mirror. the way this works is a bit complicated but its one of the ways i found at least 1 infinite i had to eliminate from the deck. so how this works is this. we activate it's ability to copy an chose another mirror. with that ability on the stack we activate again targeting something else(say riku). our stack looks like this
last
copy another mirror
copy riku
first
this means we will become riku with the ability to return to being a mirror still on the stack. so if we can do something while its riku we can reap the benefits without ,actually fully giving up a mirror. the reason u need 2 mirrors to do this is pretty simple. if we try to do this entirely with one mirror targeting itself, the abilities will indeed resolve in the order we need them to but it wont have the effect we need(want). so our mirror will indeed become something else, but when it resolves the copy original mirror it will become what it already is. because the copy ability actually reads "become what the targeted object is when this ability resolves" it will still be targeting itself which is now not a mirror, and attempt to become that again, which is not what we want. so it works fine with 2 mirrors but not with just 1. while this interaction is very cool it is limited a bit. unfortunately we cannot get strings of etb triggers by changing the mirrors in response to each etb. we can get our mirrors to be the best one for one etb but then all the etb triggers will resolve before we get the chance to change again. i haven't dug to far into this interaction as the limiting factor here is timing and generally it feels wasteful to be doing to much of this type of thing. generally we just wan to change all but our orginal mirror into what we want as soon as it enters and just let it be that. if you want to save 1 copy of a token mirror as a mirror tht is fine. this leaves options open for later discoveries to be abused.
so going forward from this point we will just assume we make actual mirror into a exemplar every time before we cast a non creature spell and then make the generated tokens into the most beneficial things and then let our non creature spell resolve. every, single, time .... this means will be very quickly growing our amounts of doubling season, riku and later anything else that we want additional copies of.
so wit hall of that noted, we move on. importantly i guess is that i put this combo as early in our sequencing as possible. lets us abuse it the most times as we progress through the deck.
so this will be our main life gaining engine. we will want a lot of life as it will later be translated directly into power/toughness(p/t) and also into mana. so a quick note here about normally non creatures entering as creatures. a lot of more modern creature cards that trigger on creature etbs will specify "another". none of our normally non creature trigger generators specify another so they will self trigger themselves upon entering. also of note here is it is generally most profitable to trigger riku before our life gain triggers happen. this isn't super relevant just yet, but as we start generating more and more types of etb triggers we can start to effect p/t before triggers resolve. again as before we will make all copies possible via riku triggers and then amplified through our doubling season collection.
15 arcane adaptation
our xenograph/conspiracy of choice. will will again max out riku triggers and get a bunch of these. we will name human, wolf, and golem. after that it honestly doesn't matter but if we need to we can name every creature type in mtg. it does make our mana echos slightly better as the few permanents we had in play before biomancer was and before everything was creatures will now help add onto our mana echoes triggers. now echoes fully triggers for literally everything in play.
16 vigor
so another one of our creatures shows its face. again we will make as many copies of this as we can. after 2 are in play we have the effect we need, but as before extra copies still generate us additional mana. this card does shuffle into out library and that could be a concern. fortunately for this build it does not enable any infinites that i am aware of. i will explain this in more detail later but for now just trust me that it doesn't. unfortunately we don't get any bonus from having multiple(past 2 anyway) of him, but even a single of his triggers will get modified by doubling season into absurdity. he doesn't see any action immediately but his ability will come in quite usefully in a few cards.
17 arlinn kord
flip cards eh? yup, damn straight. so much like our vigor friend we won't see any action from this card right away. what will do though is make a bunch of copies of her(oh, yeah with the changes to the legend rule we can have multiple walkers with the same name via mirror gallery. cute huh?). we wont use them now but its a good idea to again max out on the copies. of important note here is that while she is her normal planeswalker self she is also a creature with types human, wolf, and golem. also of note mirror cannot copy her profitably. the nuances of walkers make using mirror quite bad here. it can for sure do it, but it will just die instantly to state based checks for being a walker with 0 locality. this limiting factor is actually super important to keeping me from going infinite later on.
18 vedelkin orrery
cool our flash enabler of choice. we can actually play this much earlier if we choose to do so. in fact we probably should play this after we have our mirror/exemplar combo online. i'm not gonna lie im too lazy to fix this issue being this deep into the primer. i will probably have a small edit note at the end of all this. for now as before we get our mirror/exemplar trigger getting more doubling season and/or rikus and then make all our makable copies generating mana in the process.
19/20 azor's gateway and moonmist
OK time to get weird, and complicated. i'm not gonna lie things are about to explode numbers wise. up until this point we are dealing with some what reasonable numbers. even all the mirror/exemplar cuteness will pale in comparison to the numbers we are about to start putting into action. i've done my best to sequence my plays as best i thought possible after this but there may be better ways i haven't seen yet. so you can kinda guess whats about to happen here. we are gonna get our gateway flipped into a mana making machine. OK so here we go:
start by casting AG, let all mirror/exemplar(E/M) triggers happen and fully resolve. resolve AG, put riku copy triggers on the stack, and then before those start to resolve we cast moonmist(again here E/M triggers happen). much like our actual arlinn kord card our actual gateway card is a creature with type human, wolf and golem. so both arlinn kord and AG will be asked to transform from moonmist resolving. they both see they are humans and can transform, so they do. we will get back to AK in a second but now lets talk about sanctum of the sun. as i mentioned near the beginning of our journey we have master biomancer in this list for multiple reasons, one of which is right now. so gateway entered with counters and then becomes the land/creature still with those counters and creature types. this allows sanctum to live. mirror gallery allows us to make multiple copies of it without needing to sack them to legend rules. so now we start to resolve our riku triggers. because of how these types of triggers/abilities actually work when we start to pay for and resolve them we will get a copy of what the original object is now(which is our uber powerful land). again our friend biomancer is here to hook us up. he ensures that yes they enter as lands but because they also enter as creatures they get his buff before they do state based checks and they live. so we pay for and resolve all of our riku triggers here getting a ton of these lands. they currently have summoning sickness(actually our entire team does) but we are about to fix that, because AG wasn't the only thing to flip to moonmist.
as a quick note we don't need or want to copy moonmist with riku at all. one copy is all we need. extra copies gain us nothing as E/M is a cast only trigger and resolving extra copies gains us nothing in terms of mana. so just let it go on the stack and ignore any options to make copies.
so back to arlinn kord. now she has flipped and lived just like our land friend has. of note here is that while we do have token copies of her in play those tokens cannot transform so they stay in there current state. this is actually beneficial to us later on when we will use those copied AK tokens for their token generating ability. so back to our flipped actual AK card. so now we will activate her -6 ability, getting an emblem. now we have haste unconditionally, but that's not all the emblem gives us access to. now all of our bodies can shoot things in the face. we will be doing a lot of this, and we will be targeting our on things. combining haste, tap to do damage, our older friend vigor, and our even older powerhouse doubling seasons we start to create what i call damage chains. so i'm gonna do a very simple example to illustrate what will be happening with our chains.
so just for example just assume these are creatures that are somehow alive and we can use them as needed. also assume we have an AK emblem.
in play: doubling season(DS)(creature as well as a 5/5 body), vigor 1 6/6, vigor 2 6/6, 1/1 creature, and a 0/0 creature.
so how do we start our chain? well before we start it lets take a look at whats actually going to happen. so because we have doubling season our damage will not just get done/changed into counters, it will get amplified. it will also then get added to our targeted creature to then be again amplified to the next target. so what do we see? we want to start at the top of the food chain with this chain business. this way our highest initial power will be amplified through doubling season the most times. so in our current state we will have a chain that looks like this:
vigor_1->vigor_2->DS->1/1->0/0
so lets see what happens
vigor_1 does 6 damage to vigor_2 giving it 12 more counters. vigor 2 does 18 damage to DS adding 36 counters to it. DS does 41 damage to our 1/1 adding 82 counters. 1/1 does 83 damage to our 0/0 and gives 166 counters. now our 0/0 can do 166 damage to any of our targets adding an additional 332 counters.
neat. this means we take our largest creature and make it our smallest, and doing it in the descending power order means we will get maximized damage output which will in turn mean maximized counter generation. obviously this was a small simple example but this in general how we want these chains to progress. we took 18 power and turned it into around 650 with very small amplifiers. make these chains billions of creatures long with billions of doubling seasons and u can see things get very large very quickly. and it gets even more complicated than that. so whats very cool about this interaction is its amplifications with our other etb triggers, mainly our life gain triggers. you know what, before we get too far into this lets go deeper down the rabbit hole.
so, yeah this is happening. the reason i'm letting this get introduced is to show just how insane our etb trigger stacks are going to get. i'll be the first to acknowledge that alarm is a very, very, VERY, dangerous card to mess with. i had to be extremely careful when floating ideas for this deck once i had included alarm. but that high danger comes with crazy pay off if we can successfully incorporate it without going infinite. so a quick check of our current resources to see if we can already go infinite.
-can we make bodies without using cards from hand? yes, our unused AK can make them.
-OK, can our AK token generation be fueled by IA triggers? no, not so far. we can make our bodies huge but that cant reset our AK token making
-can our E/M combo do anything here? not really. to start it we need a cast trigger which IA triggers cannot facilitate.
-can mirror itself abuse alarm triggers? um maybe but not in way which creates more of those triggers
so, so far at least IA is safe. as we add more elements to our mix i will check back to see if we can indeed start a unbound loop. good so far though. once we start an initial burst of IA triggers from casting a non creature spell or then resolving a permanent those triggers will eventually need to be restarted and the only way to do that will be using a arlinn kord token generation or by using a card from hand. for certain riku copy triggers and E/M cuteness will generate a bunch of IA triggers but those to have limiting factors that don't allow us to spiral into infinity just yet. so back to looking at the insanity that is our etb trigger stacks.
so what exactly does this look like? well it depends on where we start and what we start with. lets say start from hand, with a non existing card that is a 0 casting artifact that has no abilities at all. we now cast it we immediately get our E/M combo up and running. this creates our first wave of etbs. this will actually be broken into 2 waves which we can control the order of and then also control the order/stack of resulting etbs:
last
real mirror blink
real exemplar blink
first
each of these will generate these etb triggers: mana echoes, angelic chorus, riku(s) copy trigger, intruder alarm triggers
each resolution of a single riku trigger will generate another wave of etbs of: echoes, chorus, alarm
so now how do we start to order this mess? well lets start at the smallest of our waves. this will be our waves created by resolving a riku copy trigger. so just as a ease of explaining things i'm going to short cut this a bit to a point when we have multiple alarms in play to create waves of untap triggers. this is how things will actually work once we finally get done resolving alarm, making all of ts riku copies, and have gotten to the point where we are ready to cast another spell from hand.
so back to our riku copy's being created. well we try to make 1 token and doubling season(s) says nope make an bunch, so we do. these all enter at the same time and create our first wave of etbs to start trying to resolve. so we have our stack of etbs generally look like this:
last
chorus(all)
alarm(all)
echos(all)
first
so why this order? well the echoes kinda doesn't matter when it happens so i just figured get it out of the way. it doesn't change when we start interacting with our board with abilities. we want our untap triggers before our life gain so that we can do damage chain nonsense before our life gain stuff starts to resolve. so what our stack actually looks like is this:
last
chorus(all)
damage chain
untap
damage chain
untap
....
....
untap
dmage chain
untap
damage chain(for new bodies only as they will be the only things untapped currently)
echoes(all)
first
another thing we can do is be tapping our uber lands for mana instead of including them in the damage chains. i would normally say that it would be correct to do but there is still another option we haven't talked about yet.
so i'm going to go back and start talking about how we actually construct our damage chain again because now we are doing it on an actual board with more resources at our disposal. is there an even better ordering process we can do to maximize our already ridiculous engine? well, actually, yes, i think there is. so i think the idea of going high->low in our chains is correct, but now we will modify it slightly to better interact with our more developed board state. so how? well because we have life gain triggers tied to only our incoming bodies we will shift them to the end of the chains to make sure we get max value from our incoming bodies. so our chains now look like this:
(pre existing bodies high->low)->(new bodies high->low)
nice! ...... but i think we can do even better by remembering literally our very first creature; master biomancer(a quick note about biomancer going forward. at some point leading up to this we will ant to make at least 1 token of him. it wont be just 1 but for later things we want what i'm about to do directed at token rather than the original. FWIW having multiples of him is just gross anyway so its no loss to make a few on our way to getting to this point). so generally we will be making these waves of etb triggers because we have waves of body making triggers still to work through. well what happens when we super power those waves coming behind with the current wave? so i hope you know where this is going.
(all pre existing bodies except 1 biomancer token)->(new bodies)->(our very last tap)->(our biomancer token).
this makes the next wave coming in just start out ******* enormous before we even get to our damage chains. the chains will then make it even grosser which again end in biomancer(s) getting buffed further into oblivion for the next even more buffed wave.
so back to the question of tapping for mana or tapping for damage. i think we just do the damage here. i think the insane buffs we will get in life gain, and therefore mana, by running it through biomancer, will get us paid off by using our very last untap trigger, excluding the lands from our damage chains, and after our final chorus trigger has resolved, then and only then tap all the lands for mana.
so where are we? we finally got to the end of our first riku copy trigger resolution. great now repeat all of this over again for each of these triggers. remember this is all just from casting our 0 drop useless artifact. we haven't even gotten to it resolving yet. we will want to have our actual mirror blink happen before the exemplar. this way we can make a few more copies of import stuff like riku, doubling season, lands(?) or even more intruder alarms. so as cool as intruder alarm is(it definitely is) i think riku and doubling season actually scale better in my list.
then exemplar will blink and we create a whole new wave of stuff entering, chaining, buffing and gaining life. so we've now resolved all associated triggers from our artifact being cast, now it resolves. again we get a bunch of waves of etb triggers including our newly made rikus etc etc etc. grossness ensues(again). we finally reach the end of those triggers, and we are back to an empty stack, everything is huge and tapped, we have added a huge amount of power to the board, we have also gained a mammoth amount of life and we have an obscene amount of mana.
and now we move to our next spell. before we do just realize all the grossness that i just detailed will be amplifying on every spell and happening on every spell. it just doesn't stop doing it. i don't have time to expaling it each time it happens but know that it is in fact happening on every single spell being played. sometimes we get the full effect from cast triggers and natural etb triggers, and sometimes its just a creature that comes in gets us chains life and mana. regardless its is always building upon itself at every single step. the craziest part of all of it is we aren't done amplifying this end of things. its going to scale even harder in a few cards.
so we introduced a few concepts here: damage chains was the big one but we added untapping to make chaining a integral part of our board state amplification. now that we have a full grasp of what is actually happening lets continue to introduce new cards to the mix.
22 serra avatar
so i'm gonna be quite honest here, i don't know if this is an optimal choice. the reason i decide to include it my list is a few fold. 1) i can. it doesn't go infinite in my list as it is today. 2) it gives me a p/t engine that is really insane as it continues to scale past our damage chains and thus amplify them even further. 3) the interaction between this and angelic chorus is just glorious. if we have 5 chorus and a single avatar enters we then proceed to double our life total 5 times over. i just couldn't pass that growth up. in including it in my list we now have a direct correlation from life->p/t on board without having to invest any further resources to achieve this. obviously this just goes nuts when we start introducing it into our damage chains. it just super powers them to the nth degree, and continues to push our life as a viable resource to try to accrue in a meaningful way.
hmmm. i just had a thought about a possible infinite but i think i'm still good. i'm going to discuss it here as the next card will be our sac outlet. it will be:
23 thopter foundry
OK before we get to far i want to talk about the infinite i think i avoid. we all see i can now get vigor and avatar back into our library. well that's fine we cant draw them .... or can we. while were doing our moonmist stuff we could have used an extra mirror to copy the gateway before it flips. this does let us draw cards indeed. however it comes at a fairly penal cost, exiling a card from hand. while i will be talking about interacting with the exile zone later, the cards doing it will not be able to create an unbound loop to keep regurgitating our self shufflers. incidentally we can actually get mirage mirror back into the deck by turning the actual card into a self shuffler and then sacrificing it to foundry. it'll hit the yard as a shuffler and trigger the self shuffle ability and go back in. again the loops i will create later cannot interact with cards exiled with gateway(outside of one interaction that is far less profitable to use up to get our avatar, vigor or even mirror back. its a finite interaction and this loop i am talking about is itself bound). there is also no time for us to cast the card we draw with gateway before we exile so we do always pay that cost if we do decide to make this option a thing. therefore, we are good.
foundry. yes similar to orrery we can and should cast this sooner in our list. we now have a limited sac outlet. this outlet gives us a small life boost but it also gives us token generation. uh oh ..... does this go infinite with alarm? it does not. we can only sac actual cards and not tokens so we don't sac one make many and explode infinitely. we sac one make a bunch of triggers and then resolve those triggers. at the end of that we are still down the resource that mattered to the token making which was a real card. alarm still cannot make this loop fully recursive. even if we get our self shufflers into the deck at this point they don't do us any good because we cannot access them profitably. so what does this bring to the table? well i've alluded to it a bit already but we will be getting our cards back, but in a limited(ish) capacity. i don't want o give to much away just yet but having the ability to put our actual card into our graveyard is important for things later on(like 20 card away later on). so we have our sacrifice outlet. it doesn't go infinite with alarm or our shufflers, and we can move on.
OK so this is a really interesting card. we can do a lot of things with are uber mage. the first thing we will do is cast it(triggers), resolve it(triggers), copy it as much as possible(more triggers) and then let all those triggers fully resolve until we have an empty stack. we will then use use one of them to get his emblem. the rest of the copies we will just set aside for use later.
25 .....
but jkibbs wait, can't we redraw our self shufflers now? yeah, we could actually but we are bound by the amount of times we can do it. even if i thought it was the best we could do with him, it isn't the right time to do it. i'm telling you its not the best we can do, and it still doesn't go infinite. we can get mirror back and draw it which creates more mirrors which we can indeed attempt to make into teferi's but as noted earlier they will die to being a walker with no loyalty before we can use them. still doesn't go infinite. it's cool for sure, but we can do far better with our mage later on. stay tuned. also his ability to untap things definitely doesn't go infinite. it makes some big creatures(chains) or a bunch of mana but nothing of real note. trust me, hold out for a better offer.
25 rowan kenrith
OK ..... now you should start to see why i said to wait for a better offer. we are about to make each of our teferi +1s(and his -1s) much, much better. that being said rowan just kinda amplifies everything, kinda literally. so the last few cards have been a bit boring in there interactions with the board(aside from explaining why i don't infinite or saying don't do this cool thing just yet). things are about to get nuts again in a major major way. time to start abusing the stack again .... strap in its gonna get a bit nuts. so we cast rowan(triggers, resolve them), resolve rowan(triggers, hold priority at this point). OK with all etb triggers on the stack, we are going to want to have all riku triggers stacked to resolve first before anything else. before we start to resolve those we emblem rowan. now we resolve our first riku copy trigger. we arrange our stack of etb triggers the same way we did before to set up our damage chains but before we start resolving those triggers/chains we in succession activate our new rowan tokens emblem making ability. oh cool, that was an ability, all current emblems notice and add another copy of the ability giving us even more emblems. uh ..... yup it works this way. and we will specifically be letting each activation of each rowan fully resole before popping the next one off. this way we get maximum emblem interaction in our emblem making endeavors(super gross). it works exactly like casting multiple bonus rounds from hand. it is exponential growth. sweet, this is gonna make our teferi's abilities super good. um, no. its gonna make ALL of our activated abilities super potent. like say, damage dealing in our damage chains? yup definitely. so we do all of this emblem creating stuff while our good old etb damage chains waves are waiting to come online. now when they start to resolve, all the damage dealing is amplified not only by doubling season but now also by rowan emblems. so this was one trigger of our riku copy ability resolving, creating our roan tokens and there etbs. now we move on to the next riku trigger and repeat this process again. and again, and again ....... until we have finally resolved all of our riku copies and resulting rowan emblems and also all the damage chains. this gains us life which super powers our avatars which just puke it back into the chains back onto biomancer and repeat until we are back to the original set of etb from our actual rowan entering the battlefield. we have done all the original riku triggers but we still have chains from our alarms. this sets off a final, fully powered, wave of damage chains that does large numbers things for awhile before we finally run out of untap triggers(well as we discussed earlier we will indeed leave our lands untapped for the last final chain) we will gain our absurd amount of life and then we will tap our lands for an egregious amount of mana. cool beans. whats next?
so we are about to cast our last 3 creatures. 2 of them are powerhouses and one is a required piece for some future stuff. i'm pretty sure you know what one of them is, so we will start there.
26 precursor golem(PG)
yup, golem being named as a creature type probably gave this away a long time ago. that's OK, it doesn't change the fact that he is without question one hell of an engine when combined with creature type adding effects. his inclusion has been from the very start of my damage quest. hes just too potent for me not to try to abuse. and while he is kinda nuts he still doesn't create any loops that inherently go into infinite territory. busted sure, deck ruiningly too good? nope. so i kinda just realized that's its actually correct to play golem first out of these 3. it works similarly to what we saw in our very first damage chain. we put more bodies into play first(him and his token buddies and then all the copies) creating a faster start to our damage chains from these 3 creatures we will be casting. so we cast him, resolve him, generate a bunch of copy triggers, a bunch of damage chain possibilities, gain a bunch of life, use avatars to puke that back onto biomancer, resolve another one of our copy triggers to to start it all over again. of course our rowan emblems will be putting in work here throughout the whole trigger/alarm stacks within the chaos. casting a creature at this point doesn't actually scale us all that hard. well it still scales our damage chains pretty effectively and we can turn that into more mana and amplifying our next play. in this case also creates a bunch of base PG golems to help the spreading of spells when we finally get to it.
27 goblin flectomancer
um, say what? yup i hadn't heard of him either until i started this quest. i'll let you ponder what we might be doing with him for a bit but he is very important. as we have mentioned a few times before we will still make as many copies of this dude as we can. i actually don't know if we will fully be able to use his abilities but what use we do get our of him goes a long long way. regardless if we can use our copies of him his clones make nice trigger enablers for some more chaining nonsense for more counter generation.
so i guess this is where i start to explain why we went through all this trouble to not only make huge creatures, but also a but load of mana.
28 djinn illuminatus
this is what we want our ludicrous mana generation engines for. we only need one of this guy but maxing out on copies of him still adds considerable value to our board through chain/mana generation. so do the usual max copy max chain process here and get what value we can from just his body entering. so next we will be moving into some spell casting.
well, not quite yet. we have a few things we need to extract some more value out of now that our stage is a bit more fully set. so, first up, it's time to use our arlinn kord creature generation abilities up. we waited until this point so that we would get max value out of each activation. remember rowan(s) turn 1 activation into a but load of them, making a bunch of waves of tokens coming in 1 activation copy at a time. this sets off our chains again each time for each copy of each ability resolving. each one of these bringing not one token but doubling seasons altered amount each time. so our stack looks like a bit of a mess. we have original abilities on the stack and a wave of rowan copied ones under that. for each of these we have an entire wave of chains going off. as we go back up the stack we run out of our copied abilities and then our original resolves and our stack is clear. we then activate another kord and the process repeats again. we do this until we have used all of our arlinn kords up. so now teferi to get our self shufflers? not quite, though we are very very close.
OK, now you have to go infinite here right? well, no actually. let's see how this plays out before we get to the non infinite end of things. so what actually does happen and how do we max out on our value here? so after a bit of consideration i actually think we don't use djinn's replicate ability here. its just way too clunky. what we most certainly do however is max the hell out of our x when we do cast this. yup we want 0 mana in our pool as this this spell is put onto the stack. so why not save some mana for riku copies? well you see rikus spell copying ability is a cast trigger so we don't need to pay for them until we get to that point. luckily for us we have a nice convenient combo that triggers on non creature spells being cast which can generate us some mana (along with other value as well) to pay for those riku triggers. so cast a maxed out WSZ and trigger our good old mirror combo from quite awhile back. this generates us enough mana to pay for all riku triggers and also allows us to make a few more of what ever things we want(importantly we still cannot make additional copies of usable planeswalkers) like seasons, riku, etc etc. we get some nice chaining before we resolve our riku copy triggers. now we do indeed pay for all our triggers and put X copies of WSZ on the stack where X is the amount of rikus we controlled as we put WSZ on the stack(importantly if we made new riku tokens with E/M combo we cannot use them to make new copies of WSZ as they were not around to see it originally be cast), all of these copies will be resolving before our original WSZ finally resolves. as the copies resolve we make some absolutely huge damage chains, compounding our already monstrous board state. this happens as each copy resolves and also as the original resolves, and then the original finally shuffles back into our library. now is when we use teferi's +1 ability's.
currently we have 2 cards in library(1 went back from our original casting of enter the infinite way back at the beginning). so we activate teferi looking at our top 2 and putting WSZ back into our hand. cool so now we cast it again and repeat the last few steps right? well actually we can do a bit better. see teferi didn't just put 1 activation on the stack, rowans emblems say we actually put a lot of them on the stack. and? well we also have flash so we can respond to all of those excess copied activation's so we don't let them just go to waste. so after we have WSZ back in hand but before the next copied teferi ability resolve we cast WSZ again and we do repeat our steps from before(max cast, do E/M combo to pay for riku copies, huge chains as each copy resolves) until again our original final resolves. now we let the next teferi copied ability resolve and again putting WSZ into our hand again. so you can see how this works now. we will continue this loop until our copied abilities dry up and then restart it by activating another one of our teferis we haven't used yet. this creates another slew of copies of the ability again and we proceed to work our way through them as we did the last time. isn't this a loop? yes, but its not infinite loop. we are restricted as to the length of this loop by how many teferi's we have and can activate. WSZ makes a lot of tokens but non of them can be copies of new teferi's so while we do make our table very wide and just nuts in terms of p/t we can't actually make an new teferi's just yet. yet? correct, yet. so if you really wanted to you could alternate between drawing cards with teferi and maybe using his untap to turbo power our mana generation. i'm pretty sure its just correct to just go ham on just looping WSZ as much as possible, but maybe a few untaps could have some value too. so NOW we attack? nope, not just yet, we still have work to do. actually crazy as this last part was we are about to start dwarfing these output values. so before we move on lets fully tap out. all but the lands into damage chains and then the lands tapping for even more mana(its worth noting that each successive casting/copying of WSZ throughout this looping will be significantly more powerful than the ones before it, and that will lead to generating more mana each time through, so we will have access to a far deeper mana reserves at the end of this looping verses what we had when we started. basically we turn mana into more mana and get some p/t amplification along the way as a bit of a bonus). so WSZ looping has been fully used. all of our walkers have been fully used. all of our damage chains have been completed. the stack is empty it is time to move on to the next part of the deck.
30 cackling counterpart(CC)
OK our 1 and only targeted spell. so we use a single target option here instead of a mass generator because of a few things. yes our replicated copies and or riku copies will be a bit lackluster(comparatively) but precourser golem more than makes up for it. also the fact that its lower cost means we can make more distinct waves with the same amount of mana. this doesn't seem that great at face value but that changes when each wave influences the power of the wave(s) coming behind it. while we can already do this to a degree just with damage chains we will see truly busted waves of amplification when we star making more token copies of doubling season.
so whole lots about to start happening. first and foremost we need to cast this spell, but djinn complicates this just a bit, but in a good way. so with WSZ we didn't want to replicate the spell because it was mana inefficient. this is not the case at all with CC. so first thing we do is figure out how much mana we actually have. once we do that we can then dump it all into making replicated copies of CC as we cast it. of note here is that this option is only available to us while we are actually paying true casting costs, once its on the stack we can no longer replicate it, and that's important as it would very quickly go infinite otherwise. so we finish casting CC and we place the original on the stack with all the replicated copies underneath it on the stack, looking like this:
last
org CC
rep CC
rep CC
.
.
.
rep CC
first
now we have some cast triggers to deal with. we have our E/M combo stuff, we have riku, and because we declared targets and cast CC targeting a single target, we will also have our golem triggers. all of these will resolve before our first replicated CC resolves. we will want the golem triggers to resolve as late as possible so we will stack our triggers and our CC stack as such:
last
org CC
rep copies(all)
golem triggers(all)
riku triggers(all)
E/M combo stuff
first
so we start resolving this stack. we do our E/M combo stuff and generate some extra mana to pay for all of our riku triggers coming up. we also turn all of the extra mirrors into doubling season(? maybe we want other stuff here). we do our damage chains here too again this time going full on damage mode as the mana will be trivial and rather useless right now. we can make more towards the end if we think we want it. as we saw before if we wait and cash in our lands at the very end it kinda dwarfs what we would get along the way so just wait it out and cash it in huge at the end. now we start resolving riku triggers. each of these triggers we will be able to pay for and will indeed use to make an additional copy of CC per riku we have. these will all be pointed at doubling seasons. again we get damage chains galore as these resolve. repeat until we are out of riku triggers. now we have moved to golems spread ability. this is where things really start to explode. just a quick reminder everything in play is a golem and so when we spread we spread to the entire team. what's really insane here is that these spread triggers don't all happen at once. each spread will happen only when it starts to resolve, meaning when we make our board state bigger between spread triggers, the next spread will hit everything, including the newly made things.
so before we start to resolve this we actually have a line of play here that is interesting. remember our odd goblin friend flectomsncer? well we can do somethings with him right now. so of course we can sac him and move one CC from targeting something rather useless(say a cat token) to something like doubling season. that is cool, but its far cooler because this is an activated ability our rowan emblems say we get a much larger bang for our buck. so for later uses we will need to have a few goblins at our disposable but we can sack a lot of them. make sure we use at least one of the copied flecto abilities to move the CC targeting our now gone friend onto something that won't fizzle. i'm not sure how the ratios work out here. i know we need at least 1 successful CC resolution to be on a single flecto but after that we can use as many as we want or need. keeping the body count high is important for chains so i'm sure there is an optimal ratio for sac'ing/re-targeting and just letting things happen naturally.
so when we make all of our spread copies they all tried to go on the stack at the same time. this means we pick the order they resolve. with waves like thius and doubling season theee is a pretty easy rule to follow: resolve DS generation first, and everything else after. the reason we want it this way is so that all the seasons will be made and in play to super power out our desired other permanent to maximum value. so when we spread and arrange our stack it should look like this:
last
replicated CC copies (all)
golem spread non doubling season CC(all)
golem spread CC targeting seasons(all)
first
so we start to resolve this mess. so our CC's start to resolve. we get wave after wave of doubling seasons trying to be made. each wave makes the damage chains nuttier and makes each CC resolving behind it nuttier still. this goes on for a lot of CC's making seasons. then we finish all those and now we get our non season CC's resolving. i'm sure there is an optimal order here. i think we want rowan coming in first and just as before popping for emblems as soon as possible amplifying our damage chains again in the process. so all of our utility permanents follow here an we use them as needed if its beneficial to do so. i'm for sure that we want as many rowans, golems, rikus, teferi's and at least one life abusers(land or chorus) that we can get. these are our non season engines and all work together to do gross things. again we will need at least 1 goblin left after this. now we move to resolve all of our replicated CC's all of which will be making DS. lastly our original CC finally resolves and goes safely to the yard. we are definitely going to flash it back, but first lets abuse our newly acquired walker resources. rowan has already been used up but teferi and arlinn have just added huge numbers to their ranks so lets use them now. much like when we transitioned from the end of our creature casting to starting to cast CC we paused and used our walkers to make tokens and loop WSZ, both in an effort to make more mana in preparation to make more CC copies. this time it will be casting from yard but luckily for us our cast triggers and casting modifiers(we will have to pay the 7 mana to start the flashback as omniscience only works from hand) don't care where its being cast from just that it is in fact being cast, which it will be. so we go through the steps of using all of our walkers up starting again with AK and then moving on to teferi looping WSZ. we make bodies, we make chains, we make mana, we gain life, etc etc. just as before we cant go infinite here with walkers/WSZ and we also cannot interact with the CC sitting in the yard to try to go infinite that way. now we repeat the CC process from the yard. we cast/replicate, we combo E/M, we copy with riku, we spread with golem, we chain like madmen etc etc. we make lots more of everything saving non seasons for last and making sure we kept a goblin around.
so now CC has fully resolved from yard and goes into the exile zone. we are going to be casting another non permanent spell soon so we will again turn to our newly acquired walkers and do the walker value dance once again making a bunch of tokens, chains, man life etc. so to summarize the last few "stages" have sequenced up as such:
last
walker(mana)
CC yard (stuff)
walker(mana)
CC hand(stuff)
walker (mana)
first
so we just resolved our most recent walker stage and we have an abundance of mana. now what? now we get to my favorite sequencing in the deck. its not he most powerful but its the craftiest for sure and i literally smile when i start thinking about it. so with that mana we cast/replicate:
OK you can obviously see we are going to get back CC here ..... but why replicate it into oblivion? once we grab CC from exile the other RR will all have invalid targets, and should fizzle. well while that is indeed correct, we have a certain goblin who is going to hook us up big time. its looping time my friends.
the loop
so we will cast RR and max cast/replicate it, and then max riku it as well before anything starts to resolve. then we will let the first copy resolve. we will indeed get CC back. the neat thing about spells/abilities on the stack though is that they don't just fizzle if the have an invalid target. they only fizzle when they try to resolve with an invalid target, and we can and will abuse the hell out of that timing window. so with our RR copies still on the stack we cast CC for free and replicate it as much as we can from mana we got from our E/M combo when we cast RR initially. it wont be a full CC explosion but it's still sizable, we basically just lose the replicated copies as golem's spreading is all still gonna happen as a trigger. just as before we will do a walker loop between resolving CC from hand and casting it from yard. we do the walker dance to power up our CC casting from yard. we now max cast CC from yard get value and put CC back into exile. now once this has happened and still before our first RR copy will fizzle we pop a flectomancer and redirected an about to fizzle RR copy to our newly in exile CC and get CC back to hand. so what this means is we get a full walker/cc/walker/cc/walker stages in between each copy of RR happening. because of golem's spread ability we will easily be able to make a goblin from the time one RR resolves until the next time it would resolve off the CC's we will be casting to keep the loop going. our limiting factor for how long the loop goes will be the number of copies we can make of RR when we first cast it.
ill go into a bit more detail here on why its finite. so one of the things i was very careful with when i designed this deck was to be deathly sure i couldn't abuse a spell once it was on the stack. we will see why later but it comes up here for now. yes i can redirect spells but i can't abuse that ability so much that it allows me to make more of those copies. i can make them benefit me the most, but even at its most beneficial its falls far short of replacing itself for free. all of the loops i use up to this point(and beyond) have a cost to start them and a timing window on how and when i can start them. in the RR/CC/goblin loop my limiting factor is how much mana i have at the time of casting RR. making more mnan afterwards does me no good. RR can't recur itself and CC can't recur RR either. we can use goblin to make sure we get full value from CC and from RR but he cannot make more copies of either directly. we can get CC value from him getting it back but that "costs" us a RR copy which neither CC or goblin can replace.
so bringing up a thought i had way back when we first brought in self shufflers. yes i can trade a CC from hand to exile to redraw one of my shufflers. this is a ludicrously bad trade for us. CC dwarfs our shufflers in value by untold amounts. we can then get CC back with RR but as i have just shown doing that has a real cost to it. we basically give up a CC for a shuffler any way we look at it and that is just awful all the way around. luckily for me i was crazy diligent in checking and rechecking my abilities/spells to make sure i couldn't abuse spells on the stack too hard. this for the most part means the only time i can really do abusive things is when i am casting the spell. once its on the stack i get my cast triggers and then the time for abuse is gone. for an example lets look at my E/M combo and making rikus from those triggers. yes i can do this, but because it was a cast trigger and the casting event has passed the new copies of riku won't have an opportunity to trigger thwarting any potential infinite casting trigger loops. another thing which limits the abuse i can do. RR can get exactly 1 card from my 60 back out from exile. CC is the only instant or sorcery i run that has flashback as part of its text. yes in a bit we will be casting spells that will make their way to exile but because they don't have flashback RR cannot bring them back. if it could i would certianly go infinite, but i cannot; so i do not.
so continuing on we need to finish working through our full RR loop. so between each RR copy resolving we get a CC hand/walker/CC yard/walker loop. i think i have explained how this works (and doesn't go infinite) well enough to just say it all resolves and we do so in the most profitable manner possible. we do all damage chains, we gain max life, we get max mana. we do it all for all of our triggers. so we finish that giant loop and .... well, we start it again.
32, 33, 34 runic repetition
so yeah this loop was strong enough for me to include the full play set of RR. we will just do more of what we have been doing up to this point with the RR/CC/goblin loop. importantly to note here though is what we do when all of our RR copies have been used and our last actual RR card has resolved and gone to the yard. we will do one more walker stage followed by casting and abusing CC from hand, but we will let CC stay in the yard this time. we will do our due diligence and do our walker dance one last time to prep for our next loop. one other minor thing is we NEED to save 1 teferi +1 activation here. use everything else but save 1 unused teferi.
35 timetwister(TT)
time to loop everything. OK so let me explain why this doesn't go infinite before we get too far. to do this let's take a look at what happens when we cast it and let it resolve. sure we can now sac our real cards and put them back into the deck and use twister to get them back. now what though? none of the other 34 cards can get TT back from the yard. even if i exiled it to gateway, i couldn't get it back with RR anyway. for reason i just talked about i can't abuse it on the stack(aside from specifically at casting, which we will do). we can even use teferi to draw the deck(and abuse excess "draws" to loop WSZ again). hell this point we can actually cast and play the entire deck with those last "wasted" teferi draws on the stack. but all of this doesn't change the fact that once TT is on the stack and my cast triggers have past, we can't make more copies of it. so does anything change when we do make copies of it? well actually, no it doesn't. but wont the copies shuffle the original back in? no, they wont. the original will always sit at the top of the stack like this:
last
org twister
replicate copies
riku copies
first
using the cards i have means this is the only way this stack will ever look. the original will always be at the end of the line. this means its copies can never shuffle our original back into the deck. it will safely stay on the stack while everything else happens around it. also of note here our goblin friend cannot interact with it at all, as it doesn't target at all, so he can't abuse it at all, and certainly not in an infinite manner.
so what does this mean. well exactly what i said as i introduced the card. we loop everything. everything?
EVERYTHING(in my best norman stansfield / gary oldman voice)!!!!!!
so we basically take the looping structure we established in the RR/CC/goblin loop and extrapolate it out into the entire playing of the deck. in this case our loop will be literally the entire deck(up to this point) being played out between TT copies resolving. which looks like:
last
TT org
deck
TT copy
deck
TT copy
deck
.
.
.
.
TT copy
first
so how exactly do we loop everything? well at this point all of our relevant ins/sor are either in the yard or on the stack, so they are ready. we then sac all of our actual physical permanent cards to thopter foundry and let them go to yard or possibly shuffle in(vigor, avatar, and possibly mirror). there will be some triggers involved here as foundry does make a token(lol, a token, right ...) and gain us 1 life. so i'm sure there is an optimal sac'ing order here but i can't imagine it costs us a lot of value in the long run. so we do this and we can finally let a TT copy resolve.
cool we shuffle up and draw 7, now what? so it depends on how lucky you want to be. do we need to activate our last carry over teferi +1 ability? or did we draw ETI? in either case be aware that both of these options can start their own mini loops. teferi we just draw the deck off 1 activation and then loop WSZ until the single activation(thanks rowan) has run its course. with ETI we do something similar but do it closer to our TT loops. we cast it, copy it as much as possible, and then loop as many of our self shufflers as possible between each resolving copy. also in both cases we can put these looping structures on the stack and then just play the entirety of the deck underneath them and resolve them just before we start to move into another TT copy restart. its pretty wide open tbh. i actually think doing this(setting up this delayed extra draws aspect) approach with teferi might be our best bet for max value. i'm also sure that since we will start with resources in play this time around, that re-ordering our cards to get even more value is both doable, and correct. as our damage chains have shown the bigger we can start the faster we explode. this applies to abilities, trigger stacking, single spell looping, multi spell looping, deck looping, and even to twister looping. come again? twister looping? yeah, that's about to happen.
so we said loop everything right? well that was everything except our actual TT. what if there was a way to loop that too? it would be hard to stop going infinite, right? well, actually, it isn't really that difficult after all, if you start with what you can't do. let me explain. so as i have now demonstrated it is possible to loop the deck with TT without looping the TT itself. at some point all of our TT copies will have resolved and now the actual TT is looking to resolve and go to the yard. we let this happen. so lets think what would allow us to get twister back.
-OK, a regowth effect? nope goes infinite when twister shuffles it back in to be redrawn
-how about making copies with it on the stack? a bit too risky i think. if we can do it to TT we can probably do it other things and go infinite with those somehow.
-how about we use itself? we counter it off the stack and let its own copy shuffle itself in? maybe but if the countering ability isn't a spell that exiles itself then that will also go fully infinite. if it does exile itself then it's probably not something we can abuse anyway. also if it can hit twister it can probably hit other things and those might cause unwanted infinite elsewhere.
well WTF man this sounds kinda tough. well i'll walk you through how i came to using TT in the first place. i realized very early on that recursion was super risky in these types of projects. i knew a lot of recursion would just go fully infinite. so i started dropping it all. then i realized i could play 1 card. i settled on regrowth, and then started working on how to abuse it. i quickly realized with copy effects i could get back not just 1 thing, but my whole graveyard, and with a sac outlet that meant the whole deck. i was stoked. but i didn't stop there. can i do better? i wondered ... well what about TT effects? do those work or are they too good? well similarity to my first thoughts i started very safe. i tried exile twisters. they actually checked out! so i started looking and experimenting. i quickly found exile twister + regrowth worked. i could pick up the deck an additional time when i cast a exile twister. can i improve from here? well i already ha the ability to copy regrowth, so why not exile twisters too? sure enough this checked out too. so i think you can see where this is going.
36->55 exile twister effects (game plan, preators counsil, emergency powers, time spiral, time reversal)
yeah so this is how you loop your TT. you use exile twisters(ET) to do it so you don't go infinite. the same rules apply here about not being able to abuse these cards except when we are casting them. when we do that we can make a great many copies of our Exile Twisters(ET) just like TT but our when our ET finally does resolve it will exile itself, and go to a place we cant abuse it anymore. also just like TT we can loop everything underneath these spells safely, including TT in the cases of the ET. so these loops look like this:
last
ET org
full TT + copies loop
ET copy
full TT + copies loop
ET copy
.
.
.
full TT + copies loop
ET copy
fully used up g(0) of the deck, including TT + copy loops resolved and TT in yard
first
this is our end game. this is the ultimate thing my deck can do. so lets put this into perspective. my deck makes mana, increases its life, increases its p/t on board, and increases its amplification with each card it plays. we can then loop the entirety of itself with a TT multiple times, increasing in its potency each time. then on top of that, we can loop the TT itself an absurd amount of times via ET we can also copy into oblivion safely. what the real kicker here is though, is that with each loop, large or small, our deck just outputs more and more resources to fuel is growth and or its loopablity. we just push harder and harder, more and more, over and over, again and again. so our ultimate limiting factor is how much mana can we make. it will determine how many times, and how potently, we can make each loop and our finite but huge mana reserves will ultimately be tasked with casting and copying our exile twisters. these are our true speed limiters, this is the best we(i) can do.
final thoughts
yeah so this is an incomplete list. its only 55 cards. i'll be quite blunt, filling out the final 5 has just become a hassle. my brain itself is getting annoyed with how much effort i've put into this. it almost makes me mad to just try to weight pros and cons of potential cards for the final slots. i do think thousand-year storm probably does belong in here. i wasn't sure in my first few iterations but now with the WSZ and CC loops my spell cast count per TT loop is actually quite high so TYS probably belongs in here. i've had multiple full 60 lists with lots of perspective options but this list is the most compact and efficient i've made so far. i've tried lots of other stuff but i think these 55 is where to start. i have thoughts on other options and am happy to share if anyone brings them up, but in general i'm just kinda at my wits end with it. i think i've pushed it as far as i can. now i think it needs other sets of eyes/brains to be pushed any further, and so i'm here to see if you guys can indeed push it farther. my list operates quite differently than the staged lists you guys are working on. those staged list probably dwarf mine but i never really give up resources as i move through the deck. i just add to the mess with higher and higher levels of amplification. while many of my card choices are not new, i am abusing all of them in ways almost no one else has. i take super powerful concepts and let them go right up to just short of going infinite, but do manage to stop them from crossing the line. IA and TT are perfect examples. they go infinite in almost anyone else's list, but not in mine. i figured out how to harness them rather than just assuming they were too good. so i made too good just bad enough to be kinda good.... so how good is that?
1 Goblin Flectomancer
1 Master Biomancer
1 Ojutai Exemplars
1 Riku of Two Reflections
1 Vigor
1 Djinn Illuminatus
1 Serra Avatar
1 Arcane Adaptation
1 Intruder Alarm
1 Mana Echoes
1 March of the Machines
1 Angelic Chorus
1 Doubling Season
1 Omniscience
1 Black Lotus
1 Azor's Gateway
1 Thopter Foundry
1 Mirage Mirror
1 Vedalken Orrery
1 Mirror Gallery
1 Precursor Golem
1 Mycosynth Lattice
1 Moonmist
1 Cackling Counterpart
1 White Sun's Zenith
4 Emergency Powers
4 Runic Repetition
1 Show and Tell
1 Timetwister
4 Time Reversal
4 Game Plan
4 Time Spiral
4 Praetor's Counsel
1 Enter the Infinite
1 Arlinn Kord
1 Rowan Kenrith
1 Teferi, Temporal Archmage
I Apologize if you have addressed any of this already
Okay so the below doesn't work UNLLESS you use Mizzium Transreliquatwhich you should use anyways.... I thought it was what you were using.... trust me 3 mana per iteration is way better than 2 when you look at what you get.
Say you cast a non instant or sorcerery (which until WSZ, you are doing, aside from MM, which you do not copy). You would want to have ALL of your mizzium be rikkus, so that you can trigger the copy for each of them, then you will want all of them to transform to (ttt) doubling seasons(DS) before those token generating triggers resolve, so you will need the mana after each token resolution. This would result in x*2^x copies (with an *, see below) where x is the number of mizzium copies you have (assuming the original will always be blinked to generate more tokens (which would also cost more mana ttt DS)) so.... lets do math.....
3x ttt rikku, 2x for each rikku trigger, 2x for each rikku tirgger caused by mizzium blink, 3x+3 (the original should become DS for the time being) ALL of this per time Rikku triggers, but each token coming into play gets you mana, so it's not a problem.
then things get compicated...
Because for THE FIRST mizzium rikku copy resolution,you will get 2^x copies of mizzium which can then be turned into DS, resulting in cumulatively 2^x more DS each rikku trigger.... but, with a single ME you will get 2^t^t (where t= the number of tokens created) mana.... which is more mana than you need by far for that iteration and it also cumulatively gets bigger...
SO... a single ME is fine no matter how many rikkus you would end up with. As long as you have at least 10x mana to start with. Which after casting mirror itself, should be no problem (you will get 16 tokens, resulting in 16^2 mana)
SO this also breaks your 1/2 rule (in half hahaha, but seriously have as many copies of rikku as you want)
ALSO
In your WSZ explanation you say that would need 0 mana when it goes on the stack, causing original mirror to blink, assumsing you to gain x mana, where x is the number of tokens you control.... which would always be more then twice the number of mirrors you control because the final mirrors become more doubling seasons and raise the number of tokens created by the original spell by... let's just say a huge exponent of 2, causing you to generate that much more mana....
SO nevermind lol.
But how many tokens would a single casting of a non instant/sorcery generate...? Well....let's find out... in a future post.
*technically this would be it be x*2^(x+z) where z is the number of original doubling seasons an tokens you have.. at this point it's 3, but future iterations could change that. So I have excluded all non mirror doubling seasons from the equation.
TLDR: Use Mizzium Transreliquat instead of mirror.
Rikku can has all of the copies. And it makes your mana grow more exponentially.
Edit:minor spelling fixes.
Also to save from double post:
More card ideas:
Doublecast(replicated to high heaven of course) into Bonus Round with these 2 cards also shuffling in when you spiral, they will grow 2^x and then also your replicates.
Also Thousand-year Storm will get some copies of instants and sorceries but not that many... but wait if you make copies of thousand year storm you will get more copies...
At the bottom, we have to damage chain, so let's start with that. If A is the number of creatures that get created (buttressed by Doubling Season), B is the number of Intruder Alarms (so we get AB untaps) and C is the number of Rowan emblems on the battlefield (so we get C copies of each tap ability), then we can tap those creatures A(AB + A) times, for A(AB+A)(C+1) copies of the ability, so the damage chain yields roughly 2^[A(AB+A)(C+1)] counters. Then, if we have D copies of Angelic Chorus, our life increases by roughly D*2^[A(AB+A)(C+1)]. Note that we cannot increase our number of Rowan Kenriths at this level. We can incrase our number of Intruder Alarms and Angelic Choruses a little higher up, but it turns out that this is never a good idea; we get much more benenfit by copying Doubling Season, since each one has an exponential effect, and that effect applies to pretty much everything. So our life increases by roughly 2^(cX^2) where c is a constant, or exponential growth. This puts us at layer 1.
Next we have the other effect of adding more creatures. Most of the time when we add a token creature, we will want all the tokens to copy Doubling Season. If we have X Doubling Seasons in play, the effect of a token creation is to actually create 2^X more tokens, which will usually be or turn into Doubling Seasons, so each such ability takes X to 2^X. So this is layer 1 again.
Going through the rest of the combo:
Layer 1: With X Doubling Seasons in play, an ability to create a token can create 2^X Doubling Seasons.
Layer 2: With X Riku of Two Reflections in play, putting a nontoken creature into play will trigger token creation X+1 times, each time taking X to 2^X. The last creation can create more Rikus, so we wind up taking X Rikus to 2^^(X+1) Rikus. Casting any noncreature spell will trigger the flickering of Ojutai Exemplars, and therefore this layer. Casting White Sun's Zenith will achieve this layer in another way, since if we copy it the spell X times we will take X to 2^^(X+1) as well.
Layer 3: Resolving a copy of Cackling Counterpart will create us to create 2^X Teferi, Temporal Archmages, where X is the number of Doubling Seasons on the battlefield. If we have Y Rowan Kenriths on the battlefield, then we can create 2^X(Y+1) Teferi abilities, each of which can draw and recast White Sun's Zenith, so we can take X to 2^^^(2^X(Y+1)). We could also copy Rowan Kenrith and use his ability to increase Y, but unfortunately, the number of emblems doesn't increase anywhere near as fast as everything else, since unfortunately emblem creation isn't affected by Doubling Season. So the best we can do is to use the first 2^X-1 copies to copy Rowan Kenrith, and the last copy to copy Teferi Temporal Archmage. We can use the activate the 2^X-1 Rowan Kenriths' ultimate abilities, and each one doubles the number of emblems. So we wind up with Y*2^(2^X - 1) emblems, so we get 1+Y*2^(2^X-1) copies of Teferi's ability and we take X to 2^^^[Y*2^(2^X-1)].
Layer 4: Each time we resolve a Precursor Golem trigger for Cackling Counterpart with X creatures in play, we get X-1 copies of Cackling Counterpart, and we can use Goblin Flectomancer to retarget the target to Mirage Mirror. So this takes X to 2^^^^(X-1).
Layer 5: Each time we cast Cackling Counterpart, we get X Precursor Golem triggers, where X is the number of Precursor Golems in play. So this takes X to 2^^^^^X.
Layer 6: Each time we cast Runic Repetition, we can copy it X times to retrieve Cackling Counterpart X+1 times, taking X to 2^^^^^^(X+1).
Layer 7: Each time we cast Timetwister we can copy it X times to redraw Runic Repetition X+1 times, taking X to 2^^^^^^^(X+1).
Layer 8: Each time we cast one the exile-for-retrieval spells, we can copy it X times to retrieve Timetwister X+1 times, taking X to 2^^^^^^^^(X+1).
There are various other effects and increases being done, but they are insignficant compared to this main sequence. Since we have 20 exile-for-retrieval spells, the final damage is between 2^^^^^^^^^22 and 2^^^^^^^^^23.
It would definitely help to add Thousand-Year Storm, since we get the Precursor Golem of effect of creating a bunch of spells, and each trigger copying the original spell a bunch of times. So that would change things to:
Layer 6: Each TYS trigger for Runic Repetition creates X copies of Runic Repetition.
Layer 7: Each time we cast Runic Repetition, we get X TYS triggers.
Layer 8: Each TYS trigger for Timetwister creates X copies of Timetweister.
Layer 9: Each time we cast Timetwister, we create X TYS triggers.
Layer 10: Each TYS trigger for Praetor's Counsel creates X copies of Praetor's Counsel.
Layer 11: Each time we cast Praetor's Counsel, we create X TYS Triggers.
So that ups the damage to between 2^^^^^^^^^^^^22 and 2^^^^^^^^^^^^23. (12 arrows)
As for improving the deck, it would be nice to extend the chain of retrieval cards. Here's a way to improve the chain by one: Replace Timetwister with Sage's Knowledge and Reiterate. Sage's Knowledge can fetch Runic Repetition. Reiterate can copy an exile-for-retrieval spell and fetch Sage's Knowledge. Then the exile-for-retrieval spells can fetch Reiterate. This adds two arrows, getting us to 2^^^^^^^^^^^^^^22 (14 arrows).Sage's knowledge is a step back from timetwister with things like thousand year storm and bonus round as all of those copies go on the stack as you cast it. Timetwister is the better choice because it gets you all of the cards you need back each time it resolves, not just one.
Also I think biomancer should be moved to the end of doubling season. You will get so much more of an increase at this point.
You would get 30 counters total playing it where it stands up to doubling season... and not going to do the math but casting after doubling season, with 11 doubling seasons... well the first wave would get none. The second wave would get 2^11, the third wave would get 2^11^2^11,etc until 11 waves... Plus the original. And that's assuming the ETBs don't see each other (which I forget if they do)
Since you have no land or cmc 0 at this point, since mana cost is a copiable trait (202.3a), you don't need it so early.
Edit: never mind my initial edit edit comments, added stuff on sage's
Edit: No, I guess Doublecast will not go infinite with Timetwister. But given the way it works, it doesn't add to the sequence. So we still would rather have Sage's Knowledge + Fork than Timetwister.
Edit:
ood point on doublecast, it won't be able to be included in the deck with timetwister, but I think timetwister is still the best option for the above reasons? Idk would require so much number crunching.Edit edit: I take that back, doublecast only copies the next spell you cast, so you cant go infinite with it. Yes you can get back timetwister with an ETT, but that's the point of the ETTs. They allow you to get timetwister back and then start over again, but they are limited by the number of ETT iterations. I am 99% sure you cannot go infinite with doublecast, it's not fork
I cast praetors. I cast fork. It resolves. It copies praetors. Fork goes back to my hand.... etc etc
Edit: you may not have seen my second edit above also
I saw your second edit, see my previous edit to post #1841. Doublecast doesn't go infinite, but it doesn't help a lot. If we cast Doublcast, we can get X copies via Djinn Illuminatus and Riku of two Reflections. Then we cast some other spell, and get X copies via Djinn and Riku, and another X copies via Doublecast. So it's just X versus 2X, which hardly makes a difference. It's the same with Thousand-Year Storm, except the difference is even less, since we get more copies for the second spell than we get with Doublecast.
Timetwister is the way to go.
Edit: Let me put it another way. The number of double cast replicates that can be had towards the end of a playthrough (the number of permanents you control raised to the power of the number of permanents you just out into play, which with CC is all of them). That number divided by 2 is the number of times you will be able you copy your Bonus round. Which will then copy every other instant and sorcery you cast. So that's how many TT is worth one playthrough.
Now if you are arguing that 4 TYS might be a better fit? Then I argue 4 Bonus Round with a single doublecast would be at least comparable if not better. Throw in more double casts and then...
I say throw them all in and take out a number of ETTs to get you top 60 because the copies will be worth more than any single card
Also if your argument is that rikku can just copy the spell, well that's limited by how many rikkus you have (way less than your mana, which by the way increases even more when you get more ME through CC) and if you think a 2/3 ratio from djinn is insignificant when talking about the number of copies you can cast that get you future copies, especially when the number of permanents is going to be in the.... rediculos (seriously I know nothing about this arrow notation) then you ^x that number and that's how much mana you have..... well if you think a 2/3 ratio is insignificant at that level, then I have 0 words.
It's true that adding Doublecast and Bonus Round will increase the final damage, no matter how small. But it would be better to use those card slots for adding more exile-for-retrieval cards, since those currently take X to 2^^^^^^^^^^^X, a much bigger improvement. Still, rather than just fill out the deck with exile-for-retrieval cards, it would be more interesting to look for cards that can extend the sequence, and therefore the number of Knuth arrows. Right now the deck ends the sequence with
Cackling Counterpart <- Runic Repetition <- Timetwister <- exile-for-retrieval cards
Can we extend this to a sequence of five or more? That would be the really big improvement.
Edit: It's true that in a normal sense, if X is very large than (2/3)X is "much smaller" than X. And it's true that, as we continue the combo, the difference between our number starting from X versus (2/3)X will get bigger and bigger. But the point is, there are much stronger things that we can do instead of going from (2/3)X to X. For example, if we replace the cards that go from (2/3)X to X with cards that can go form (2/3)X to 2^{(2/3)X}, that will get us a much bigger number. And this time, when we continue the combo, the difference will again get bigger and bigger, but this time in favor of 2^{(2/3)X}.
In regards to this deck... it's a bit hard to explain if you don't understand Knuth arrows, but I will give it a try. So we know that casting Praetor's Counsel generates and incredibly powerful combo, taking X to some f(X) where f(X) is an incredibly fast-growing function. For instance f is much stronger than exponentiation, or repeated exponentiation, or anything even close to that. So let's say you have Praetor's Counsel along with Doublecast and Bonus Round. The latter two will get us 3X copies of Praetor's counsel, so we can generate f(3X). This is, in a normal sense, much bigger than f(X), so in a sense Doublecast and Bonus Round are doing a wonderful job. But if we replace Doublecast and Bonus Round with another copy of Praetor's Counsel, now we can cast the first Praetor's Counsel to get f(X), and another Praetor's Counsel to get f(f(X)). f(f(X)) is MUCH bigger than f(3X), since f(X) is much bigger than 3X. Even if 3X were X^X this would remain true. So just adding more exile-for-retrieval cards would be better.
That's life without replicate, which makes those numbers even higher.
(and I didn't even go into how your life total in mana times the number of lands you have is also added into the mix)
So no, let's not find more ETTs, lets find ways to copy them.
Also you ETTs cost a bit more than 3, and doublecast only costs 2, again without doublecast and bonus round it's a 2:3 ratio, adding it increases the number of ALL Instant and sorcery spells by 50% (well really more, that's just based on TT and CC)
Let's put an analogy to this, if someone offered you 1 billion dollars, but you had to use my 2 cards, or $666,666,666.666. Which one would you take? Especially since the 1 billion dollars gets the same interest rate as the lesser amount (except the billion dollars ALSO gets more days in a year).you are telling me that a 50% increase, plus interest would be worth less than 666,666,666.666, or a "not really a big deal?"
30 copies of Praetor's Counsel is not that much. By the time you get around to casting Praetor's Counsel, you can get a gajillion copies of Thousand-Year Storm via all the token copies of Mirage Mirror we are creating througout the whole combo. And each of the Thousand-Year Storms triggers to create a gajillion copies of Praetor's Counsel. So that certainly seems a lot better. Of course, we can increase that a bit by adding Doublecast and Bonus Round, but it would be much better to add another Praetor's Counsel, since after the first Praetor's Counsel we can increase the number of Thousand-Year Storms and the instant/sorcery count tremendously, and then the second Praetor's Counsel will key off of those much bigger numbers. The numbers increase MUCH more than exponentially, and much more than you get from Doublecast and Bonus Round.
I don't understand your analogy. It's not like we can just add two cards for free. There is a 60 card limit, so we have to be sure there those two cards do the best job at increasing the final number. If you remove the 60 card limit, then sure, you can add everything and the kitchen sink, as long as things don't go infinite.
Biomancer has to be where he is in the first sequence through the deck. The enchantments and artifacts that aren’t normally creatures literally have no creature type so they don’t activate mana echoes. We could move exemplar before doubling season which would start helping but it still might not be enough to actually get you up and running. Giving the mutant type is what kick starts our mana generation in the first place.
Deedlit - a small maybe inconsequential note on the initial layer or chains: if we point the outcome of that chain at biomancer the next wave will start at that level x doubling seasons. Also the life gain also effects the chains because Serra avatar is growing with each life gain trigger and that is growing the chains etc. I’m not sure it’s super substantial but it’s actaully growing faster than u think.
Pretty much anything that can generate a copy of a spell that isn’t tied to a trigger is too good and will go infinite. It’s just too easy to make a copy of twister with some TT still on the stack let’s us use that copied TT to get back what we copied it with and this goes infinite.
I’ll be around later but those are my first thoughts. Glad ou guys got a kick out of it.
You are saying that adding double cast and bonus round PLUS TYS would be a bad idea because adding it to that would at best be a 100% increase.
I however am not fully convinced that TYS is the better option over DC + BR
Every instant and sorcery you cast gives you a counter on each of TYS. Now you can have an arbitrarily large number of them and I would care because it's (13+z)x where z is the number of times you cast WSZ, but the amount of mana you gain from a casting of CC is (y^y/2)X where y is the total number of permanents you own, and x is the same arbitrarily large number as TYS (in MEs, give or take a few 0s.
And that's just from ME which is actually a small amount of mana compared to what you could generate because of Sanctum of the Sun. Because your life total will be increased far more than anything else (each of your permanents is a creature which pushes into your WSZ tokens, which have life link,then end by alternating between the cats (life link) and Serra avatar (life total in damage and therefore counters), ending with a cat all before before smacking Into master biomancer to increase the next damage wave, all copied Rowan^Rowan times.) And when it's time you use an amount (might only be 1 because of the ludicrous compounding exponential life gain)of your Sanctums to generate your life total in mana (copied Rowan ^Rowan times). That number divided by 2 is the number of extra times you get to copy TT.
Don't go saying that you'll get extra casts of CC with TYS because those extra casts are inconsiquential compared to the number generated by PG.
TLDR: Life total gains will grow so much more than anything else this game, Diublecast + bonus round instead of TYS.