No Omniscience definitely makes the start trickier, but we should still be able to go off by turn 4.
I think if we borrow a trick from the earlier deck and cast Patient rebuilding on turn 3 to draw 3 we can have enough gas to get started.
the issue with interplanar beacon is that we pretty much already use all the colors. (too much Green from Marwyn, Blue for Disdainful Stroke and Quasiduplicate, White for Nova, BR for Rampage) I was hoping that we could use another special land like Karn's Bastion
I guess B or R is fine in the Rampage loop right? And no planeswalkers that can kill themselves after a few proliferation.
Best Red option is probably Chandra Fire Artisan She can kill herself but only a few times before that kills our opponent.
Best Black option is probably Davriel, Rogue Shadowmage as it is just one B pip.
Well, we can use Bolas's Citadel to cast Angrath's Rampage, so that we pay life rather than red or black mana. Then, we wouldn't have life to spare for casting our planeswalkers, so we would be forced to use Interplanar Beacon, which conveniently can't be used to cast AR.
But, unfortunately there's nothing stopping us from storing our mana in advance. So we can cast a planeswalker AR and respond with a creature AR. The creature AR can repeatedly sacrifice Interplanar Beacon, and collect us a lot of planeswalker mana. Then the planeswalker AR will allow us to sacrifice and cast a planeswalker multiple times. So this doesn't look like it can force us to resolve both ARs in succession.
It's possible that reshuffling and retrieving cards might be harder than it appears, and can somehow keep us from going infinite. But it looks hard to make work.
I too had hope for Karn's Bastion, but I haven't found a good thing to proliferate. If only The Eldest Reborn brought the planeswalker to our hand, or if Interplanar Beacon triggered on entering the battlefield...
It's possible we may need to expand our search outside of Nova and AR. Possibly with a pair of similar cost spells like I mentioned above, or possibly a spell and a triggered ability.
Yeah, Karn's bastion really doesn't have something we want to proliferate onto. The Mending of Dominaria is kinda close but still not really what we want. Arch of Orazca seems slightly safer without omniscience but still dangerous.
Hmm, Arch of Orazca might be useful for drawing planeswalkers to cast them, but then we have to deal with those damn lockets again. Is there any other way to get white mana? Maybe we have to wait for Core 2019 for some good mana artifacts.
While I'm still hoping for two stages, I went back for a bit and considered the deck with just the AR stage. It would be nice to improve it by allowing for Quasiduplicate.
What if we replaced the Flux Channelers with a spell that proliferates, like Courage in Crisis? It looks like Courage in Crisis can be cast when needed, so it should work. But, I think Quasiduplicate still goes infinite. After we resolve a couple of artifact ARs to destroy the Rakdos Lockets, we need to cast Finale of Devastation (or whatever we are using) to bring the lockets back. But, after we resolve the next couple of artifact ARs, we can get them back by casting Quasiduplicate on the Golgari Findbrokers, getting the lockets and also The Mending of Dominaria. We can then cast an artifact AR, cast Courage in Crisis to proliferate and reshuffle the graveyard into the library, and cast a creature AR. So we are in the same place as before.
So, it looks like the Cleansing Nova deck is still the best we have.
Yeah, I think the best we have working is still the decklist on the top of page 3, without the extra nova and impulse and adding warlord's fury and an extra mountain.
As for interesting triggered abilities Massacre Girl lasts the whole turn so we'd get increasing numbers of -1/-1 triggers, but it seems difficult to use those triggers in a responsible way, as they would just generate more triggers if they killed things.
Vivien's Invocation seems worse than Adventurous Impulse, being able to get creatures in hand to cast later is nice. What advantage do you see to the Invocation?
Adventurous Impulse is also convenient during the setup, as we have 1 green left after Emergency powers, and we can use that to cast Impulse off the top and get all of our relevant creatures into our hand and begin going off. This nets a drawn card instead of having to draw Invocation as one of our seven cards.
Oh that's right, we could just cast it then anyway.
Edit:
One more possibility for extension is artifacts that sacrifice for their effect, we can't copy them or benefit from killing them with nova. We can only get them back with the elephant, which costs white. (we can also get the lockets back at the same time thanks to copies of Naban). Unfortunately, I don't see anything too useful. A few ways to gain life, a few ways to draw cards, make mana, damage a creature, damage any target... Mostly seems infinite at that level.
Another, probably more fruitful, possibility is using Karn, the Great Creator to make the locket a creature, and make many copies of it with Quasiduplicate. But either Nova would kill all of them, so we can only make more by clearing the stack. This lets us rebuild the nova stage without using our life as a resource, replacing Huatli, the Sun's Heart. Freeing life up to be used on a different combo. Karn also can't animate Mox Amber so we might be able to use that for lots of red/black mana. (It can't tap for white without Huatli, so its safe in the nova stage now).
Edit 2: Mox Amber can let us sac the lockets for cards so that's probably no good.
Hmm, the trouble with sacrificing artifacts seems to be that any layer or layers we create with them have to be below the Cleansing Nova stage, which is a really minimal improvement. All the power comes from adding layers *above* the highest stage.
Karn, the Great Creator is interesting, although each usage creates one stage, so it takes X to 3 -> 3 -> X rather than 3 -> 3 -> X -> 3 with Huatli, the Sun's Heart. So we have to figure out how to add at least two more layers on top in addition to the mana layer that we already had on top of Huatli. And the trouble is, it's harder to add layers on top of things that we can only use at sorcery speed. For example, we couldn't use the Thousand-Year Storm copies from instants and sorceries higher up the chain because we need to have them waiting on the stack when we activate Karn. We can certainly think about it, but it seems hard to beat the current deck with it.
Edit: Ooh, instead of using Huatli, the Sun's Heart to gain life, and destroy it with Banefire, we can just have Firesong and Sunspeaker give Banefire lifelink, and cast it to deal damage to our own creatures. So that brings back our mass untappers, and we should be able to get to 3 -> 3 -> X -> 6.
Edit: So, at first I was considering using Jace, Ingenious Mind-Mage and other planeswalker untappers, but then I realized that Banefire could target them to be recycled. I looked for an alternative to Banefire that could target creatures but not planeswalkers, but no such luck. So we really only have Wilderness Reclamation and Tenth District Veteran as our mass untappers. It's too bad, we could have done a lot with recycling Jace and Spark Double copies with loyalty shenanigans.
Nice, I always forget about the cards that don't appear in boosters. Shame that lifelink doesn't stack with. With FS+SS giving Banefire lifelink, we can gain life at instant speed, that seems much easier to build on.
Though, if we are making a manland, that list has to be the turn 4 version without Gift of Growth. I was happier delaying a turn for a 5 chain, but that didn't work out.
Edit: I had in a interesting possible extension based on nonlegendary Lazav, the multifarious tokens being able to become legendary again, but unfortunately Lazav himself surveils on etb and thus goes infinite with Quasiduplicate.
Hmm, Lazav is an interesting card. What was the possible extension using Lazav that you had in mind?
I found another layer improvement: Angrath's Marauders. Each Banefire hits for a fixed X amount of damage. But if we put Y Angrath's Marauders onto the battlefield using Quasiduplicate, then a Banefire copy will deliver X * 2^Y damage to an unsuspecting creature, and we can increase Y between every copy of Banefire. So that adds another layer, taking us to 3 -> 3 -> 7 -> 7.
But, you made a good point about having to delay until turn 4. If we add Angrath's Marauders to the deck without Sylvan Awakening, that should take us to 3 -> 3 -> 26 -> 6. So we can either do 3 -> 3 -> 26 -> 6 damage on turn 3, or 3 -> 3 -> 7 -> 7 damage on turn 4.
I wanted to make a layer out of the Citywatch Sphinx reshuffle triggers and another card. As we already generate a batch of sphinx triggers every wrath and its easy for the reshuffles to allow us to use something new. Lots of things can kill the Sphinxes, however whatever we use can't let us cast additional elephants. I initially thought something like hurricane or plummet, but being green means it goes infinite. collision // colossus comes close... Then I found the interaction with Lazav Spark Double Quasiduplicate token copying a dead sphinx to legend rule itself and trigger another reshuffle and remove the real sphinx from the yard, but its not completely working, and is infinite with Lazav's surveil. Today I found Gravewalker and Take Vengeance but that both can't make many tapped sphinxes at a time, and requires white (maybe Assassinate gets reprinted in core 2020?).
Obviously Citywatch Sphinx could be another beneficial death trigger so Ritual of Soot can single out small guys...
Also, we don't need the other planeswalkers anymore, so Finale of Devastation can come back in, allowing us to make the original spark double a blank 10/10 to quasiduplicate.
Edit: While almost really good, Gideon can make something indestructible, and that can take damage instead of doing nothing to Gideon when we Nova.
Edit2: Teysa Karlov instead fixes it, either we shoot our own face and go even with lifelink, or we shoot our opponent and they only have 20 life.
I don't see how the Dreadhorde Butcher plus Gideon Blackblade, even without the infinite, gets us an extension; we can get life for both the Dreadhorde Butcher and the Banefire that destroys it, but both are at the same level, so there's minimal improvement. But, Teysa Karlov does get us an improvement, since having many of them allows Dreadhorde Butcher to trigger many times when it dies, and we can increase the damage/lifegain each time by increasing the number of Angrath's Marauders. We add two more cards with Dreadhorde Butcher and Teysa Karolve, but we can remove Firesong and Sunspeaker, so we add one more card overall. So the turn 3 version goes up to 3 -> 3 -> 25 -> 7, and then turn 4 version goes up to 3 -> 3 -> 7 -> 8. Very nice! Unless there's another layer that I'm missing?
With Dreadhorde Butcher, we could use Finale of Eternity instead of Banefire, if we switch over to Boros Lockets. But I'm not seeing an advantage in doing so. Finale of Eternity can't target planeswalkers, but Dreadhorde Butcher can so we can't use planeswalkers anyway.
I was confusing Dreadhorde Butcher's effect with something like Boros Reckoner. Thinking we could make a chain of them and have each one kill the next in the chain getting the damage increased by Angrath's marauders each step. I suppose they do all get giant from Finale of devastation now, but that's not actually a big improvement. (The thought with gideon was that it wouldn't go infinite because we can only grant lifelink at sorcery speed. So the chain cant grow once we start using it).
But this unfortunately does go infinite with Teysa Karlov as we can have one butcher kill another and a citywatch sphynx to reshuffle quasiduplicate to make more of both creatures.
We can use Truefire Captain instead, but it can't target creatures, so we'd need Gideon's Sacrifice to shoot the damage back to a Captain. That goes infinite with Teysa Karlov as we can wrath and make a new lifelink captain with the previous one still on the stack. And Gideon making it indestructible is infinite too. Doesn't look like any other walker works either. The only other way I see to force sorcery speed lifelink is with a land drop, Wayward Swordtooth and Evolution Sage let us replay emergence zone to proliferate onto Triumph of Gerrard. However, this also lets us proliferate The Mending to trigger more reshuffles, which is another infinite. Maybe The Mending of dominaria can be replaced?
I'm not seeing any benefit to the Finale over Banefire, but its good to keep in mind that we do have other options.
Hmm, I think The Mending of Dominaria seems pretty important to our stage not going infinite. It's useful because we only need one Cleansing Nova, since when we need to cast a Purity Nova followed by a Wrath Nova, we can bring back The Mending of Dominaria after the Purity Nova to reshuffle the library. But, if we do so with Excavation Elephant on the battlefield, we lose an opportunity to bring it back to our hand, and use it to bring back one round of Lockets. So that makes us need to resolve a Wrath Nova after resolving two Purity Novas in a row, I think. That's actually pretty crucial. I think to replace it, we need to find something else that can both reshuffle and bring back a creature, which might be hard. (unless we find some other method for making us resolve a wrath nova after two purity novas)
But, does The Mending of Dominaria really go infinite with Wayward Swordtooth and Evolution Sage? To play a land, we first need to put it in our hand, so as long as we don't have a way to get Emergence Zone in our hand other than drawing it, reshuffling isn't going to go infinite, I don't think. So that should make Dreadhorde Butcher or Truefire Captain work. I guess Dreadhorde Butcher is a little more efficient, since we won't need Gideon's Sacrifice.
Good point about The Mending, that card has been way more convenient than I thought it would be.
Triumph of Gerrard is awkward because it can only target our biggest creature. That's still manageable though.
The issue with Dreadhorde Butcher is that it doesn't carry over the overkill damage the way Truefire Captain does. Also with Gideon's sacrifice we can go off in between each of the proliferate triggers. Whereas with the Butcher its target will fizzle from a wrath. I think that's worth the extra card.
edit: We can also generate non-lifelinking Captains in between to get more doublings before hitting the lifelinker.
Hmm, I think The Mending of Dominaria goes infinite with proliferate after all. We can't easily bring Emergence Zone to our hand, but the third step of TMoD brings our lands back from the graveyard, so we can just sacrifice Emergence Zone and then bring it back using TMoD's third step. I don't know how to fix it. Karn's Bastion doesn't look like it goes infinite, since it remains on the battlefield, but for the same reason it doesn't look like it's enough.
Yes, but bringing back Emergence Zone doesn't cause us to proliferate during TMoD's resolution, it just puts proliferate triggers on the stack. Then TMoD finishes resolving, and goes to the graveyard. We can then respond with a Tragic Poet to bring TMoD back to the battlefield, we can sacrifice the Emergence Zone to put it back into the graveyard, and then we can resolve the proliferate triggers to bring TMoD back to step 3. So that does look like a loop, during which we get reshuffles so that we can keep casting Giant Growth on something for instance.
Hmm, that is a problem. The relevant rule is: "714.4. If the number of lore counters on a Saga permanent is greater than or equal to its final chapter number, and it isn’t the source of a chapter ability that has triggered but not yet left the stack, that Saga’s controller sacrifices it. This state-based action doesn’t use the stack." Sagas sacrifice not using the stack was what I got tripped up on.
Replacing it with something like Gravedigger works though right? We already have perfect access to creatures in the yard, we just can't kick them, and in order for our elephant to have targets we still need to resolve a purity nova.
Though we still need an artifact/enchantment way to mill, so good old Millstone should work?
Sucks to have to replace it with two cards, but I don't think it can be avoided and keep the lifelink extension.
Also 100 posts, Woo! Maybe someone else can contribute instead of just us?
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I think if we borrow a trick from the earlier deck and cast Patient rebuilding on turn 3 to draw 3 we can have enough gas to get started.
the issue with interplanar beacon is that we pretty much already use all the colors. (too much Green from Marwyn, Blue for Disdainful Stroke and Quasiduplicate, White for Nova, BR for Rampage) I was hoping that we could use another special land like Karn's Bastion
I guess B or R is fine in the Rampage loop right? And no planeswalkers that can kill themselves after a few proliferation.
Best Red option is probably Chandra Fire Artisan She can kill herself but only a few times before that kills our opponent.
Best Black option is probably Davriel, Rogue Shadowmage as it is just one B pip.
But, unfortunately there's nothing stopping us from storing our mana in advance. So we can cast a planeswalker AR and respond with a creature AR. The creature AR can repeatedly sacrifice Interplanar Beacon, and collect us a lot of planeswalker mana. Then the planeswalker AR will allow us to sacrifice and cast a planeswalker multiple times. So this doesn't look like it can force us to resolve both ARs in succession.
It's possible that reshuffling and retrieving cards might be harder than it appears, and can somehow keep us from going infinite. But it looks hard to make work.
I too had hope for Karn's Bastion, but I haven't found a good thing to proliferate. If only The Eldest Reborn brought the planeswalker to our hand, or if Interplanar Beacon triggered on entering the battlefield...
It's possible we may need to expand our search outside of Nova and AR. Possibly with a pair of similar cost spells like I mentioned above, or possibly a spell and a triggered ability.
Arch of Orazca seems slightly safer without omniscience but still dangerous.
For some reason I thought that core 19 was rotating out then, but its not.
What if we replaced the Flux Channelers with a spell that proliferates, like Courage in Crisis? It looks like Courage in Crisis can be cast when needed, so it should work. But, I think Quasiduplicate still goes infinite. After we resolve a couple of artifact ARs to destroy the Rakdos Lockets, we need to cast Finale of Devastation (or whatever we are using) to bring the lockets back. But, after we resolve the next couple of artifact ARs, we can get them back by casting Quasiduplicate on the Golgari Findbrokers, getting the lockets and also The Mending of Dominaria. We can then cast an artifact AR, cast Courage in Crisis to proliferate and reshuffle the graveyard into the library, and cast a creature AR. So we are in the same place as before.
So, it looks like the Cleansing Nova deck is still the best we have.
As for interesting triggered abilities Massacre Girl lasts the whole turn so we'd get increasing numbers of -1/-1 triggers, but it seems difficult to use those triggers in a responsible way, as they would just generate more triggers if they killed things.
2 Llanowar Elves
3 Island
4 Marwyn, the Nurturer
5 Island
6 Giant Growth
7 Gift of Growth
8 Omniscience
9 Emergency Powers
10 Thousand-Year Storm
11 Precognitive Field
12 Citywatch Sphinx
13 Gaea's Blessing
15 Emergence Zone
16 Orzhov Locket
17 Orzhov Locket
18 Orzhov Locket
19 Cleansing Nova
20 Disdainful Stroke
21 Excavation Elephant
22 The Mending Of Dominaria
23 Naban, Dean of Iteration
24 Arcane Adaptation
25 Spark Double
27 Tragic Poet
28 Garna, the Bloodflame
29 Warlord's Fury
30 Ionize
31 Huatli, Warrior Poet
32 Grow from the Ashes
33 Banefire
34 Nikya of the Old Ways
35 Quasiduplicate
36 Grand Warlord Radha
24 Mountain
I replaced Adventurous Impulse with Vivien's Invocation, it seems a little better.
Adventurous Impulse is also convenient during the setup, as we have 1 green left after Emergency powers, and we can use that to cast Impulse off the top and get all of our relevant creatures into our hand and begin going off. This nets a drawn card instead of having to draw Invocation as one of our seven cards.
Spark Double copies Huatli, Warrior Poet and -4s to kill Citywatch Sphynx and itself and reshuffle from Gaea's Blessing.
We can get them back with Adventurous Impulse and be back where we started but with a fresh library.
Edit:
I think we can replace Banefire with Electrodominance to cast many copies of Warlord's Fury.
Edit:
One more possibility for extension is artifacts that sacrifice for their effect, we can't copy them or benefit from killing them with nova. We can only get them back with the elephant, which costs white. (we can also get the lockets back at the same time thanks to copies of Naban). Unfortunately, I don't see anything too useful. A few ways to gain life, a few ways to draw cards, make mana, damage a creature, damage any target... Mostly seems infinite at that level.
Another, probably more fruitful, possibility is using Karn, the Great Creator to make the locket a creature, and make many copies of it with Quasiduplicate. But either Nova would kill all of them, so we can only make more by clearing the stack. This lets us rebuild the nova stage without using our life as a resource, replacing Huatli, the Sun's Heart. Freeing life up to be used on a different combo. Karn also can't animate Mox Amber so we might be able to use that for lots of red/black mana. (It can't tap for white without Huatli, so its safe in the nova stage now).
Edit 2: Mox Amber can let us sac the lockets for cards so that's probably no good.
Karn, the Great Creator is interesting, although each usage creates one stage, so it takes X to 3 -> 3 -> X rather than 3 -> 3 -> X -> 3 with Huatli, the Sun's Heart. So we have to figure out how to add at least two more layers on top in addition to the mana layer that we already had on top of Huatli. And the trouble is, it's harder to add layers on top of things that we can only use at sorcery speed. For example, we couldn't use the Thousand-Year Storm copies from instants and sorceries higher up the chain because we need to have them waiting on the stack when we activate Karn. We can certainly think about it, but it seems hard to beat the current deck with it.
Edit: Ooh, instead of using Huatli, the Sun's Heart to gain life, and destroy it with Banefire, we can just have Firesong and Sunspeaker give Banefire lifelink, and cast it to deal damage to our own creatures. So that brings back our mass untappers, and we should be able to get to 3 -> 3 -> X -> 6.
Edit: So, at first I was considering using Jace, Ingenious Mind-Mage and other planeswalker untappers, but then I realized that Banefire could target them to be recycled. I looked for an alternative to Banefire that could target creatures but not planeswalkers, but no such luck. So we really only have Wilderness Reclamation and Tenth District Veteran as our mass untappers. It's too bad, we could have done a lot with recycling Jace and Spark Double copies with loyalty shenanigans.
So it looks like we have:
2 Llanowar Elves
3 Island
4 Marwyn, the Nurturer
5 Island
6 Giant Growth
7 Gift of Growth
8 Omniscience
9 Emergency Powers
10 Thousand-Year Storm
11 Precognitive Field
12 Citywatch Sphinx
13 Gaea's Blessing
14 Gyre Engineer
15 Emergence Zone
16 Orzhov Locket
17 Orzhov Locket
18 Orzhov Locket
19 Cleansing Nova
20 Disdainful Stroke
21 Excavation Elephant
22 The Mending Of Dominaria
24 Arcane Adaptation
25 Spark Double
26 Adventurous Impulse
27 Tragic Poet
28 Garna, the Bloodflame
29 Warlord's Fury
30 Ionize
31 Banefire
32 Firesong and Sunspeaker
33 Quasiduplicate
34 Nikya of the Old Ways
35 Boros Guildgate
36 Sylvan Awakening
37 Llanowar Scout
38 Wilderness Reclamation
39 Wilderness Reclamation
40 Wilderness Reclamation
41 Wilderness Reclamation
43 Grand Warlord Radha
44 Smothering Tithe
45 Smothering Tithe
46 Smothering Tithe
47 Smothering Tithe
48 Unmoored Ego
49 Huatli, the Sun's Heart
50 Ajani, Wise Counselor
51 Spark Double
52 Spark Double
53 Spark Double
54 Oath of Teferi
55 Revival // Revenge
which should get us around 3 -> 3 -> 7 -> 6.
Though, if we are making a manland, that list has to be the turn 4 version without Gift of Growth. I was happier delaying a turn for a 5 chain, but that didn't work out.
Edit: I had in a interesting possible extension based on nonlegendary Lazav, the multifarious tokens being able to become legendary again, but unfortunately Lazav himself surveils on etb and thus goes infinite with Quasiduplicate.
I found another layer improvement: Angrath's Marauders. Each Banefire hits for a fixed X amount of damage. But if we put Y Angrath's Marauders onto the battlefield using Quasiduplicate, then a Banefire copy will deliver X * 2^Y damage to an unsuspecting creature, and we can increase Y between every copy of Banefire. So that adds another layer, taking us to 3 -> 3 -> 7 -> 7.
But, you made a good point about having to delay until turn 4. If we add Angrath's Marauders to the deck without Sylvan Awakening, that should take us to 3 -> 3 -> 26 -> 6. So we can either do 3 -> 3 -> 26 -> 6 damage on turn 3, or 3 -> 3 -> 7 -> 7 damage on turn 4.
Obviously Citywatch Sphinx could be another beneficial death trigger so Ritual of Soot can single out small guys...
In the deck thats actually working:
Angrath's Marauders, I think allows for another extension: Dreadhorde Butcher with Gideon Blackblade.
Also, we don't need the other planeswalkers anymore, so Finale of Devastation can come back in, allowing us to make the original spark double a blank 10/10 to quasiduplicate.
Edit: While almost really good, Gideon can make something indestructible, and that can take damage instead of doing nothing to Gideon when we Nova.
Edit2: Teysa Karlov instead fixes it, either we shoot our own face and go even with lifelink, or we shoot our opponent and they only have 20 life.
I don't see how the Dreadhorde Butcher plus Gideon Blackblade, even without the infinite, gets us an extension; we can get life for both the Dreadhorde Butcher and the Banefire that destroys it, but both are at the same level, so there's minimal improvement. But, Teysa Karlov does get us an improvement, since having many of them allows Dreadhorde Butcher to trigger many times when it dies, and we can increase the damage/lifegain each time by increasing the number of Angrath's Marauders. We add two more cards with Dreadhorde Butcher and Teysa Karolve, but we can remove Firesong and Sunspeaker, so we add one more card overall. So the turn 3 version goes up to 3 -> 3 -> 25 -> 7, and then turn 4 version goes up to 3 -> 3 -> 7 -> 8. Very nice! Unless there's another layer that I'm missing?
With Dreadhorde Butcher, we could use Finale of Eternity instead of Banefire, if we switch over to Boros Lockets. But I'm not seeing an advantage in doing so. Finale of Eternity can't target planeswalkers, but Dreadhorde Butcher can so we can't use planeswalkers anyway.
But this unfortunately does go infinite with Teysa Karlov as we can have one butcher kill another and a citywatch sphynx to reshuffle quasiduplicate to make more of both creatures.
We can use Truefire Captain instead, but it can't target creatures, so we'd need Gideon's Sacrifice to shoot the damage back to a Captain. That goes infinite with Teysa Karlov as we can wrath and make a new lifelink captain with the previous one still on the stack. And Gideon making it indestructible is infinite too. Doesn't look like any other walker works either. The only other way I see to force sorcery speed lifelink is with a land drop, Wayward Swordtooth and Evolution Sage let us replay emergence zone to proliferate onto Triumph of Gerrard. However, this also lets us proliferate The Mending to trigger more reshuffles, which is another infinite. Maybe The Mending of dominaria can be replaced?
I'm not seeing any benefit to the Finale over Banefire, but its good to keep in mind that we do have other options.
Hmm, I think The Mending of Dominaria seems pretty important to our stage not going infinite. It's useful because we only need one Cleansing Nova, since when we need to cast a Purity Nova followed by a Wrath Nova, we can bring back The Mending of Dominaria after the Purity Nova to reshuffle the library. But, if we do so with Excavation Elephant on the battlefield, we lose an opportunity to bring it back to our hand, and use it to bring back one round of Lockets. So that makes us need to resolve a Wrath Nova after resolving two Purity Novas in a row, I think. That's actually pretty crucial. I think to replace it, we need to find something else that can both reshuffle and bring back a creature, which might be hard. (unless we find some other method for making us resolve a wrath nova after two purity novas)
But, does The Mending of Dominaria really go infinite with Wayward Swordtooth and Evolution Sage? To play a land, we first need to put it in our hand, so as long as we don't have a way to get Emergence Zone in our hand other than drawing it, reshuffling isn't going to go infinite, I don't think. So that should make Dreadhorde Butcher or Truefire Captain work. I guess Dreadhorde Butcher is a little more efficient, since we won't need Gideon's Sacrifice.
Triumph of Gerrard is awkward because it can only target our biggest creature. That's still manageable though.
The issue with Dreadhorde Butcher is that it doesn't carry over the overkill damage the way Truefire Captain does. Also with Gideon's sacrifice we can go off in between each of the proliferate triggers. Whereas with the Butcher its target will fizzle from a wrath. I think that's worth the extra card.
edit: We can also generate non-lifelinking Captains in between to get more doublings before hitting the lifelinker.
Replacing it with something like Gravedigger works though right? We already have perfect access to creatures in the yard, we just can't kick them, and in order for our elephant to have targets we still need to resolve a purity nova.
Though we still need an artifact/enchantment way to mill, so good old Millstone should work?
Sucks to have to replace it with two cards, but I don't think it can be avoided and keep the lifelink extension.
Also 100 posts, Woo! Maybe someone else can contribute instead of just us?