Hmm, the kicker effects in Standard are pretty boring for the most part. The only interesting one I found was Keldon Overseer, which could untap a creature a lot of times. But, that doesn't add a layer, since we can Replicate the other creature and activate all of them anyway.
For the current Sarkhan deck, we can replace a Stony Strength with another Leyline of Abundance, getting us another exilable card and bumping our final damage up to 10 -> 10 -> 20 -> 12.
The idea behind Rona was that she was limited, i.e. we have to use Blood for Bones to fetch her. So it wouldn't be like Future Sight. But, we need a different version to work.
Edit: Hey, here's an interesting idea: Use Metamorphic Alteration on World Shaper, to turn it into something other than a Merfolk. Then we use Slinn Voda to return it to our hand. Then we can cast a Wrath Nova, and destroy all the token copies of World Shaper, getting us all those land triggers. This seems very promising!
Edit: Meh, we can also use Metamorphic Alteration on Slinn Voda, and return it to our hand. So that seems to be a problem.
Ohh, I like that idea with metaporphic alteration, Getting slinn voda back to hand for free is probably too good though.
Grim captain's call is a raise dead that basically only gets worldshaper? That makes Worldshaper slightly cheaper than the other creatures, but IDK if that's worth much.
Another thought is using metamorphic alteration to make something a planewalker via Gideon, but that doesn't seem to work unless its the always 4/4 gideon, and that one can make our stuff indestructable.
Another idea: Use Teshar, Ancestor's Apostle as the creature we fetch using Blood for Bones. We would then need to cast a lot of historic spells while Teshar is in play. One possibility is to keep casting Squee, the Immortal, and then countering it with Essence Scatter. The problem is that we can't keep casting Essence Scatter, and if we wait to resolve an Essence Scatter copy that is on the stack, we have to resolve the historic trigger from Teshar first, and to make proper use of that, we have to Wrath Nova and kill Teshar. So we need to somehow cast a bunch of historic spells in a row, without having to resolve anything that is lower in the stack. I don't see how to do that yet.
Edit: Oh wait... we can actually just use Spark Double and Replicate a lot of nonlegendary copies of Teshar, then a single historic spell can fetch a lot of creatures.
The problem then becomes our old problem of fetching all our normal stage creatures without fetching Llanowar Scout or whatever Teshar fetches.
The Eldest Reborn needs to be proliferated to give them a creature. interesting. But we can't really do it more than the number of proliferates we have?
is there some way we can only have the dragon as a target? Seems easy enough with reshuffles.
there might be a problem of getting any other creatures back with proliferate? getting all of the non stage creatures for the same price?
Yeah, I was thinking of using Role Reversal to give The Eldest Reborn over to the opponent, but we can't proliferate The Eldest Reborn once it is under the opponent's control. So that doesn't work, I guess.
Going back to the Sarkhan deck, it looks like [c]Repeated Reverberation is really good for the start. So I'm looking at:
Ah, okay. But, we don't need to use Role Reversal on The Eldest Reborn to proliferate it on our side, which will allow us to fetch our land recycler. So that's still a problem.
Edit: So, calculations for the start:
Addendum Kykar - GG, 6 cards
Stony Strength - 5G,R, 5 cards, 3 storm
Samut, Tyrant Smasher - 1G,2R, 4 cards, 3 storm
Mox Amber - 1G,3R,1U, 3 cards, 3 storm
Gyre Engineer - 3G,3R,1U, 2 cards, 3 storm
Precognition Field - 4R, 1 card, 3 storm
L - Act of Treason - 4G,2R,1U, 1 card, 4 storm
L - Act of Treason - 6G,2R,2U, 1 card, 5 storm
Thousand-Year Storm - 2G,2R,1U, 0 cards, 5 storm
L - Act of Treason - 24G,7U,2R, 6 storm
L - Switcheroo - 20G,6U,3R, 7 storm
L - Disdainful Stroke - 19G,5U,4R, 8 storm
L - Nexus of Fate - 14G,3U,5R, 9 storm
L - Nexus of Fate - 9G,1U,6R, 10 storm
L - Act of Treason - 51G,12U,6R, 11 storm
L - Nexus of Fate x 5 - 26G,2U,11R, 16 storm
L - Replicate - 92G,18U,12R, 17 storm
L - Nexus of Fate x 8 - 52G,2U,20R, 25 storm
L - Replicate - 154G,27U,21R, 26 storm
Nexus of Fate x 13 - 89G,1U,34R, 39 storm
L - Repeated Reverberation 87G,1U,33R, 40 storm (40 copies)
L - Repeated Reverberation 85G,1U,32R, 41 storm (121 copies)
L - Repeated Reverberation 83G,1U,31R, 42 storm (284 copies)
L - Repeated Reverberation 81G,1U,30R, 43 storm (611 copies)
L - Gaea's Blessing - 79G,1U,31R, 44 storm
After Gaea's Blessing, we get a TYS trigger for 43 draws, then 611 Repeated Reverberation triggers for 2 draws and 6 reshuffles each.
After the TYS trigger of Gaea's Blessing:
L - Ionize - 78G,31R, 45 storm
L - Repudiate Ionize's TYS trigger - 76G,32R, 46 storm
L - Repudiate Ionize's TYS trigger - 74G,33R, 47 storm
L - Repeated Reverberation - 72G,32R, 48 storm (48 copies)
L - Repeated Reverberation - 70G,31R, 49 storm (145 copies)
L - Repeated Reverberation, don't resolve TYS trigger - 68G,30R, 50 storm (290 copies)
L - Repeated Reverberation, don't resolve TYS trigger - 66G,29R, 51 storm (580 copies)
L - Stony Strength, don't resolve TYS trigger - 4705G,1160U,30R, 52 storm
L - Nexus of Fate x 579 - 1810G,2U,609R, 631 storm
L - Disdainful Stroke - 1809G,1U,610R, 632 storm
Resolve TYS trigger for Stony Strength - 4337G,633U,610R, 632 storm
L - Nexus of Fate x 316 - 2757G,1U,926R, 948 storm
Resolve TYS trigger for Repeated Reverberation (948 copies)
Resolve TYS trigger for Repeated Reverberation (948 copies)
From now on, only worry about blue mana.
After the first Repeated Reverberation trigger for Gaea's Blessing:
L - Repeated Reverberation - 1U, 949 storm (4741 copies)
L - Repeated Reverberation - 1U, 950 storm (10432 copies)
L - Repeated Reverberation, no TYS - 1U, 951 storm (20864 copies)
L - Repeated Reverberation, no TYS - 1U, 952 storm (41728 copies)
L - Stony Strength, don't resolve TYS trigger - 83457U, 953 storm
L - Nexus of Fate x 41728 - 1U, 42681 storm
L - Disdainful Stroke - 0U, 42682 storm
Resolve TYS trigger for Stony Strength - 42682U, 42682 storm
L - Nexus of Fate x 21341 - 0U, 64023 storm
Resolve TYS trigger for Repeated Reverberation (64023 copies)
Resolve TYS trigger for Repeated Reverberation (64023 copies)
Each Repeated Reverberation trigger for Gaea's Blessing allows us to multiply the storm count by more than 66, so we wind up with more than 8.102 * 10^1112 after 610 Repeated Reverberation triggers. Then the last Repeated Reverberation trigger resolves, and we can shuffle back in all of our cards. We can then play the other Thousand-Year Storm, animate a Manifold Key with Karn, and go:
L - Stony Strength, don't resolve TYS triggers - 8.1E1112 storm
Resolve Repeated Reverberation triggers (3.24E1113 copies)
L - Nexus of Fate x 1.62E1113 - 2.43E1113 storm
Resolve TYS trigger for Stony Strength (2.43E1113 copies)
L - Nexus of Fate x 1.215E1113 - 3.645E1113 storm
Resolve TYS trigger for Stony Strength (3.645E1113 copies)
L - Nexus of Fate x 1.8225E1114 - 5.4675E1113 storm
L - Repeated Reverberation (1.0935E1114 copies)
L - Act of Treason, don't resolve TYS triggers (2.187E1114 copies)
L - Nexus of Fate x 1.0935E1114 - 1.64E1114 storm
Resolve TYS trigger for Act of Treason (1.64E1114 copies)
L - Nexus of Fate x 8.2E1113 - 2.46E1114 storm
Resolve TYS trigger for Act of Treason (2.46E1114 copies)
L - Nexus of Fate x 1.23E1114 - 3.69E1114 storm
L - Repeated Reverberation (7.38E1114 copies)
L - Act of Treason, don't resolve TYS triggers (1.476E1115 copies)
L - Nexus of Fate x 7.38E1114 - 1.107E1115 storm
Resolve TYS trigger for Act of Treason (1.107E1115 copies)
L - Nexus of Fate x 5.535E1114 - 1.6605E1115 storm
Resolve TYS trigger for Act of Treason (1.6605E1115 copies)
L - Nexus of Fate x 8.3025E1114 - 2.491E1115 storm
Then we get another two Act of Treasons and two Replicates, each one getting two Thousand-Year Storm triggers, taking us to more than 6 * 10^1116 storm count. At the end we will have created 8.2 * 10^1116 Gyre Engineers, and 2.05 * 10^1116 Manifold Keys, thanks to the Replicates. At this point we can animate our Manifold Key, and we can start casting our Rallying Roars:
L - Repeated Reverberation (1.2E1117 copies)
L - Rallying Roar
Resolve RR triggers (2.4E1117 copies) - 1.968E2234 blue mana
L - Nexus of Fate x 9.84E2233
Resolve TYS trigger (9.84E2233 copies) - 8.069E3350 blue mana
L - Nexus of Fate x 4.034E3350
Resolve TYS trigger (4.034E3350 copies) - 3.308E4467 blue mana
L - Nexus of Fate x 1.654E4467
L - Repeated Reverberation (1.654E4467 copies)
L - Rallying Roar
Resolve RR triggers (3.308E4467 copies) - 2.713E5584 blue mana
L - Nexus of Fate x 1.356E5584
Resolve TYS trigger (1.356E5584 copies) - 1.112E6701 blue mana
L - Nexus of Fate x 5.561E6701
Resolve TYS trigger (5.561E6701 copies) - 1.114E7818 white mana
We can now cast Vivien, Champion of the Wilds, allowing us to cast creatures at instant speed. We can then cast a sequence of 5.57E7817 Cleasning Novas, destroying creatures every time, and before each one we will create as many Citywatch Sphinxes as we can. With X Citywatch Sphinxes, we can reshuffle X times, and each time we can multiply our storm count by more than 100, so each Wrath will take X to more than X * 100^X. So after all the Cleansing Novas, we will wind up with a storm count of more than 100^^(5.57 * 10^7817).
Very nice work! It's looking much better with access to more Repeated Reverberations, they really turbocharge the start. (and gyre engineer early makes the mana much easier to calculate)
I'm not sure if carrying two repeated reverberations through to the next iteration is optimal? It looks like it is, but I haven't compared the other options.
With access to 4 mana cards, we can use Leyline of Anticipation instead of Vivien to get replicate copies of Sphinxes for each copy of wrath. (can't do a full stage combo as we lose access to flash after a Purify).
Edit: I'm also not sure on the ratios for the other cards, act of treason is cheaper then replicate now, but they are still very similar. An extra TYS would be better than the second replicate, maybe even the also the fourth TYS? (6x2<5x3<4x4)
Edit2: heres some quick math on carrying over n RRs
after stony strength and nexus we have X storm
resolve all the TYS triggers to get 4X RR's ready
resolve a GB
RR - 8X
RR - 16X
RR - 32X
RR - 64X
Stony for 64X to increase storm by +32X
stony TYS for 32X increases storm by +16X
total is +48X
after stony strength and nexus we have X storm
resolve all the TYS triggers to get 3X RR's ready
resolve a GB
RR - 6X resolve tys +X
RR - 14X
RR - 28X
RR - 56X
Stony for 56X ...
gonna be less
after stony strength and nexus we have X storm
resolve all the TYS triggers to get 2X RR's ready
resolve a GB
RR - 4X resolve tys +X
RR - 10X resolve tys +X
RR - 22X
RR - 44X
Stony for 44X ...
gonna be less
Looks like we want to carry over the most RRs possible.
Yeah, when I did the computation I checked out just the first two Gaea's Blessing triggers, but those are skewed since the first set of Repeated Reverberations don't get a boost from previous Repeated Reverberations, so we need a couple of TYS triggers to get going. For the long term, carrying over four Repeated Reverberations is best, and looks like it will multiply by 97.5 each trigger.
Concerning Thousand-Year Storm versus Repudiate // Replicate / Act of Treason, the main benefit of the latter is to get lots of Repeated Reverberation triggers for Gaea's Blessing, before we can play any additional Thousand-Year Storms. I worked out that with 6 Replicates/Act of Treasons, we can get 611 Repeated Reverberation triggers for Gaea's Blessing, whereas for 5 Rep/AoTs we can get 401 RR triggers for Gaea's Blessing. So for the former, we get roughly 97.5^611 ~ 1.9 * 10^1215 TYS count after Gaea's Blessing, then with two Rallying Roars and two Thousand-Year Storms, we can multiply by itself 6 times, to get about 9.4^8506. (Left out some small calculational differences.) With the latter, we get roughly 97.5^401 ~ 3.9^797 after the Gaea's Blessing, and with two Rallying Roars and three Thousand-Year Storms, we could multiply by itself 8 times to get about 2.1 * 10^7178. So getting 6 Replicates/Act of Treasons is worth it for the RR triggers for Gaea's Blessing. Adding a seventh is probably not worth it, since we can't allow the TYS trigger for Gaea's Blessing to draw more than 48 cards. Unless of course we Repudiate the TYS trigger, but then we use up a Repudiate // Replicate.
Right 97.5 because the Stony Strength gets doubled to x128. increasing the storm to 65X and the TYS trigger gives 32.5X giving 97.5.
One subtle note about your line is that because you Ionize after the TYS trigger, gaea's blessing is in the yard until the very last Repeated Reverberation copy.
Another tricky bit is that all of the carried over repeated reverberations from the very last of the 611 can't be used on Rallying roar to make white mana. Because they would be eaten by the Karn activation on Manifold Key. Its not ideal but not disastrous, because we want to make a bunch more storm first, but is a possible pitfall.
Would the extra TYS possibly catch up in the Leyline of Anticipation Wrath ministage?
No, as it is effectively only doubling the number of times we can cast wrath, so it will get left in the dust.
Also, we can definitely draw more than 48 cards with the TYS trigger on Gaea's Blessing, each extra one we can cast Nexus of Fate from hand to not deck.
Edit:
Hmm carrying over fewer RRs seems to be optimal for the first reshuffle, because we want to get RR on RR as soon as possible to start multiplying. What we want to maximize is the number of RR triggers carried over, which it looks like is done by just letting the very first TYS on repeated Reverberation resolve.
L - Ionize - 78G,31R, 45 storm
L - Repudiate Ionize's TYS trigger - 76G,32R, 46 storm
L - Repudiate Ionize's TYS trigger - 74G,33R, 47 storm
L - Repeated Reverberation - 72G,32R, 48 storm (48 copies)
L - Repeated Reverberation, don't resolve TYS trigger - 70G,31R, 49 storm (96 copies)
L - Repeated Reverberation, don't resolve TYS trigger - 68G,30R, 50 storm (192 copies)
L - Repeated Reverberation, don't resolve TYS trigger - 66G,29R, 51 storm (384 copies)
L - Stony Strength, don't resolve TYS trigger - 768U, 52 storm
L - Nexus of Fate x 383 - 2U, 435 storm
L - Disdainful Stroke - 1U, 436 storm
Resolve TYS trigger for Stony Strength - 437U, 436 storm
L - Nexus of Fate x 218 - 1U, 654 storm
Resolve TYS trigger for Repeated Reverberation (654 copies)
Resolve TYS trigger for Repeated Reverberation (654 copies)
Resolve TYS trigger for Repeated Reverberation (654 copies)
Total RR triggers carried over =1962
Your 2x RR line had 1896 RR triggers waiting, but with 300 more storm. I think the extra 66 RR triggers will make up for that difference as they get doubled 4 times by the RRs for Stony strength and then halved for Nexus of fate giving 66*8=528 more storm putting it over 200 storm ahead of the 2x RR line.
Edit2: hmm Teshar doesn't have enough historic things to trigger off of anymore? Mishra's Self-Replicator is a historic card that Militia Bugler can fetch. It can replace Sphinx of the Guildpact? CMC 5 means we should swap the extra Replicate with a Quasiduplicate?
Also, we can't fetch Kykar without Pattern Matcher, might need 6 mana gideon?
Yeah, I noticed that we couldn't get Gaea's Blessing back in the library with the TYS copies, but since we can get it back with the RR copies, it should be no problem.
The carried over RR copies shouldn't be a problem either, since we cast our instants/untappers first, and there are plenty of opportunities to activate Karn then (probably after a sorcery, since we can't carry over TYS triggers of RR past those.)
Ooh, I didn't notice that we could use Nexus of Fate to avoid decking ourselves! I think that means that we should probably add another Repudiate // Replicate into the deck. Probably not an fourth Replicate though, since that would require us to scale back from two Rallying Roars to one, so we would take the 3rd power rather than the 5th with the Rallying Roars.
Good point about those extra RR copies being more important than the storm count.
I think we will have Teshar when we put our Mox Amber into play, so we shouldn't need Gideon.
Hmmm... I think we could get by without Mishra's Self-Replcator, by using Mox Amber, Manifold Key, and our two The Antiquities Wars as our historic cards? That means that we can replenish are creatures at most two times after Wrath Novas, before we need another Purify Nova. I don't think that is a problem, since for all layers of the stage except the top one, we will only be resolving one Wrath Nova at a time. In the case that the top layer is Wrath Nova layer, I believe we can cast Disdainful Stroke to counter all but two of the Wrath Novas. So it should be okay?
I guess the question is whether it is still better to go with Mishra's Self-Replicator and Quasiduplicates; having extra Replicates will pump up the beginning by a small amount, but being able to get a full layer for a top Wrath Nova layer will add a little later on. I believe that the extra Replicates are worth more, since, although the extra advantage in storm count is not significant, it is a whole lot more than one, so we will get stages with many more layers than the Mishra Self-Replicator version, which will more than make up for the fact that the top layer might be muted.
Right, Teshar is also a white legend. Gideon is definitely not needed.
hmm we need to save our sagas until immediately after a wrath? yeah that looks like it works. It might cost us a top layer worth of wrath, but that's pretty minor. It does mean that the early mini leyline(/vivien) stage isn't nearly as good because we cant recur everything without casting a historic spell to return Militia Bugler, and we don't get more historic spells just from wrath without the self-replicator.
We definitely want at least 2 rallying roars, because we can split up the Repeated Reverberations and their TYS triggers we can get 2 sets of RR triggers on the Rallying Roars. (though, if the ministage doesn't work...)
Yeah, we pretty much lose the ministage. We can still resolve two copies of a Wrath Nova. Maybe four?
Let's see... We put Citywatch Sphinx into play, put Kaya's Ghostform on it, then Replicate a lot of copies. (So we need to save a copy of Replicate for this). Cast Wrath Nova, and resolve a copy. This triggers a lot of reshuffles, taking X Citywatch Sphinxes to more than X * 100^X mana and storm count. Play Tragic Poet, and bring back Kaya's Ghostform, and cast it on the Citywatch Sphinx again, and Replicate copies again. Resolve another copy of Wrath Nova, getting more than X * 100^X reshuffles, taking our storm count to more than 100^100^X. We next cast Militia Bugler retrieving Tragic Poet, which can retrieve Kaya's Ghostform and put it on Citywatch Sphinx again. Another Wrath Nova takes us to 100^100^100^X. Oh, and we need to leave at least one surveil or reshuffling trigger on the stack. Next, we cast Teshar, Ancestor's Apostle, and cast The Antiquities War. We resolve the Teshar trigger. We bring back Militia Bugler, which brings back Tragic Poet, which brings back Kaya's Ghostform, which we place on Citywatch Sphinx again. A Replicate copy of Teshar gets rid of the original Teshar. We then Replicate a bunch of Citywatch Sphinxes. We resolve the reshulffing trigger, which puts Teshar back into the library, and we can cast Replicate again to create a bunch more Citywatch Sphinxes, and a Militia Bugler, which puts Teshar back into our hand. Resolving another Wrath Nova copy then takes us to 100^100^100^100^X. We then do this again, with the other The Antiquities War, then Dowsing Dagger, then Sphinx of the Guildpact. I think that's all the historic spells that we have left? That takes us to 100^100^100^100^100^100^100^X, or seven exponentiations.
Now that I think about it though, it is totally worth it to give up our cards that are helping the early start, to instead get cards that will help out the ministage. Will Mishra's Self-Replicator actually save the entire ministage though? Unfortunately, I don't see a way to bring Militia Bugler back to our hand. So it will get destroyed when we Wrath Nova, so we can't use it immediately to get Mishra's Self-Replicator back. We can fetch Militia Bugler with Teshar, but to do that we need a historic spell first.
We could get the ministage if we could get the original Militia Bugler off the battlefield, then Replicate a copy, but I don't see a way to do that. Perhaps a cheap sacrifice outlet, or a second Militia Bugler?
Edit: Oh, I see - we can just have the Mishra's Self-Replicator already in our hand. We can then Disdainful Stroke it, and after a reshuffle, we can Replicate a Militia Bugler to bring it back to our hand.
Yeah, I think the entire ministage is saved with Mishra's Self-Replicator, we save it for right after Teshar. Its funny how the self replicator's ability looks like the powerful part of the card in a combo like this, but nope, its powerful because its a 5 mana 2 power historic card.
We can counter the 5 mana artifact with Disdainful stroke, and kill teshar with the legend rule, to get them both shuffled in. then we can get them to hand with replicate on the bugler.
being short one early blue mana and one repudiate storm looks definitely worth it, because we get to something like X^^^X now that we can cast kaya's ghostform and replicate at instant speed with Leyline.
One wrinkle in the ministage is that we can't get kykar back, so we only have however much red we had in the beginning, limiting the number of repeated reverberations we can chain together. I think we want to spend that red early?
Hmm, I think that actually we are focusing on the wrong sort of cards for our extra cards. This is my fault for emphasizing the cards that help really early. But, it is better to put in cards that will have the greatest impact to the combo.
Now, the biggest impact would be something like that could get extra black mana, like Smothering Tithe and Unmoored Ego. But those go infinite, and I haven't found any other limited black mana resources. (Using Saheeli, Sublime Artificer to flip Azor's Gateway during combat is a net draw if we count by negative life total, since we would need a Gravitic Punch to deal damage in the end, and we wind up just losing two extra card slots.) Next up would be something like Spark Double to get more Sarkhan activations, but that goes infinite as well. Then we would look for something that could deal damage to Imperial Ceratops or otherwise gain life to the opponent. Whispering Snitch is very good for this, but unfortunately it is only 2 mana cost, conflicting with Dowsing Dagger. And replacing Dowsing Dagger would cost us a couple of exilable cards, so that's no good. After that would be things that gain life for us. There are Planeswalkers that do this, but those go infinite with Sarkhan. I have a feeling there is some card that can gain us life in a limited fashion (without losing life for the opponent), but I can't think of any. Then comes card draws. Again, there are Planeswalkers that can draw, but those go infinite with Sarkhan. And we can't add another card drawing instant/sorcery, since having two would allow each to draw the other. So I don't know anything up to here.
Next up would be fetching creatures. And here I think we have a lot - Blood for Bones, Bond of Revival, Connive // Concoct, etc. In partcular, we can have Aid the Fallen as our unexilable creature fetcher, and then have a lot of Planeswalkers that can fetch creatures, since Aid the Fallen can fetch Planeswalkers as well. So I'm thinking of something like:
So, we can activate our 11 creature fetching Planeswalkers (aided by Repeated Reverberation), then destroy the remaining ones with Sarkhan. Then we can fetch all of those Planeswalkers as well as Sarkhan and a lot of World Shapers with Aid the Fallen, then do it all again. So we wind up with 23 effects that fetch World Shaper many times, which will beat out having a stronger beginnning.
Obviously the start will be much weaker now, I'll have to work that out.
Hmm, this seems similar to the issue of extra replicates helping in the stage vs act of treason helping the start. it looked like any advantage carried over into the initial stage combo was better than an advantage gained within the layer extensions, as the layer would already be much bigger than just getting double (or 23x) value each time.
And anyway, if we just want extra instances of "fetch a creature" by far the best option for that is extra TYS, which helps many parts of the combo (notably card draw and Sarkhan activations). Another card that also helps a deeper layer is more Repeated Reverberation which also help increase the number of Sarkhan activations.
But in this case, it's not taking X to 23X, it's having 23 different creature fetching spells/activations, and each one greatly increases the storm count for the next one. So, even after the first batch of creature fetching, we will have increased the storm count past what we would have had with our previous deck with the stronger start, so that the second batch of creature fetching will take us past what we would have had with the single creature fetching of the previous deck.
I guess you are right about Thousand-Year Storm though, having multiple copies gets us more batches of spells, with increasing of storm count between each batch. So we should have four of those, I guess. Concerning Repeated Reverberation, I'm not seeing how we can use multiple copies to get that significant increase of storm count between copies. It's true that multiple copies can be used to increase the number of Sarkhan abilities we get with each activation, but this is the kind of thing that you were talking about above - having two Repeated Reverberations before a Sarkhan activation will increase the number of Sarkhan abilities from 2X to 6X, (or I guess somewhat more, if we have multiple Thousand-Year Storms) but if we used that Repeated Reverberation for something that helped out sooner, we would increase the storm count by a lot more by that point. So, I don't think it is worth it to have multiple Repeated Reverberations.
So, instead we can start with something like this:
So we get 9 creature fetching spells, each one getting Repeated Reverberation and four Thousand-Year Strom triggers, for basically 45 effects in total. And then Bankrupt in Blood will get five effects total, and Gaea's Blessing will get five effects per 2 life lost. That seems to be as high as we can get right now.
I'm not seeing how having 23 extra creature fetch instances is any better than drawing one creature fetcher 23x as many times? It looks like a multiplicative effect of the next layer.
Repeated reverberation isn't quite as good for sarkhan activations as it is for the card drawers. With the spells we can split the RR copies from the TYS copies, Much like we've been doing at the start. We can get RR on RR for say gaea's blessing and save the TYS triggers for the next time we are about to cast Gaea's blessing, and then RR on RR and still have TYS triggers for later. (we might even be able to 'hide' some of those on the bottom of the stack, and carry them all through to Sarkhan's activation?)
Getting 23 extra creature fetch instances is much better than drawing one creature fetcher 23x as many times, because those 23 extra creature fetches will increase the storm count by much more than a factor of 23. Let's say we start with a storm count of X. Each instance of multiple creature fetching will take X to around X -> X -> X -> 4, so after 23 such instances, we will have around X -> X -> 24 -> 5 storm count. So after a card draw instance, we will have a storm count of around X -> X -> (X -> X -> 24 -> 5) -> 5, compared to X -> X -> X -> 5 without the creature fetching instances.
We did do some shenanigans with multiple Repeated Reverberations, but the benefit was only impressive at a small scale, I think. Let's say we have 4 Repeated Reverberations, and carry over 16 TYS copies of Repeated Reverberations from previous casts. After we resolve the 16 TYS copies, we would have 16X RR copies resolved. Then each of the Repeated Reverberations that we cast would double the number so after 4 we would have 256X RR copies. Then we would get 512X copies of whatever spell we cast next, as opposed to 4X for one RR and one TYS. 512 was significant in the beginning when we were dealing with relatively small numbers, but won't be noticeable by the point that we have Conway chains. (Actually we can probably do better than 512X by resolving some of the TYS triggers rather than carrying them over... but still, we will get some small, writable multiple.)
But shouldn't it be the same asymptotically? c extra creature fetches each card draw vs c times as many card draws? We need to cast our card drawer just as often, and we get the same total number of creature fetches.
If we had an extra replicate we can make more dinos to make them gain life twice as many times for every sarkhan activation. Which turn into far more than 23x as many gaea's blessings.
It seems like you are improving the middle of the combo as opposed to the start or the later layers? For example, one extra free black mana would be worth way more than all of this creature fetching, and all that that lets us do is get 1 more sarkhan activation. So why isn't one extra sarkhan trigger worth more than the creature fetching as well? (and its even X extra sarkhan triggers...)
Though it looks like any tricks with Repeated Reverberation are not particularly amplified by additional RRs. Though with just one we can do a pretty good amount, I think we can get ~X TYS triggers to go off right before we activate Sarkhan, by just casting RR when the stack gets down that low, then doing whatever we would normally do (gaea's blessing or w/e) this makes Sarkhan give X^2 activations in that layer instead of X. In fact we can do this for all the layers that rely on spells (that have access to red mana).
Okay, let's look at the whole combo as an example. We have 19 tappings of Sanctum of the Sun, and these are the most powerful things that happen in the combo. Now, any smaller event that happens after the first tapping of Sanctum of the Sun is not significant. The most significant event that could happen would be an extra activation of Sarkhan between the first and second tappings of Sanctum of the Sun. But already we have the first Sanctum of the Sun getting us to X -> X -> X -> 11, and then the Sarkhan activation would take that to X -> X -> (X -> X -> X -> 11) -> 10, which is equal to X -> X -> X+1 -> 11, i.e. not a significant difference, and equal to tapping the first Sanctum of the Sun with one higher life. So timing matters very much.
So, after the fact that we have 19 tappings of Sanctum of the Sun, the next most important piece of information is, how much life we have when we tap that first Sanctum of the Sun. And for that number, the most significant event that occurs is an activation of Sarkhan, of which we currently get only one. So we get some number X -> X -> X -> 10, where X is how many copies of Sarkhan we can get when we activate it. So, if we say use extra RR copies to change X to 512X, then we get 512X -> 512X -> 512X -> 10. Now that is bigger, but not significantly bigger; for example, if we were able to just get one more stage in before we activated Sarkhan, that would take us to Y -> Y -> Y -> 10, where Y = X -> X -> X. On the other hand, getting an extra black mana would allow us to activate Sarkhan twice, which would take us to about X -> X -> (X -> X -> X -> 10) -> 10, which is more than we could get with just one Sarkhan activation and smaller events than a Sarkhan activation. So, hopefully that answers your question about why one extra black mana is worth way more than creature fetching, but creature fetching is worth a lot more than getting extra RR triggers on the Sarkhan activation.
If we continue this, we have that the life we can gain prior to the first Sanctum of the Sun is roughly X -> X -> X -> 10, where X is the how many copies of Sarkhan's ability we can get when we activate it. For that X, the main events are dealing damage to the opponent via Vicious Rumors and gaining life, which we can do 19 times. So we get 19 iterations of X to X -> X -> X -> 7, or roughly equivalently, X -> X -> 20 -> 8, where X is the how many Angels of Vitality we can get prior to the first resolution of Vicious Rumors. This X in turn is mainly created by our Gaea's Blessings, countered by Ionize, of which we can cast seven (Not counting the first Gaea's Blessing, which doesn't do that much.). I guess with 4 Thousand-Year Storms, we get 5 instances of mass card drawing per Gaea's Blessing cast, so this will give us X -> X -> 36 -> 7. And then the X here is how much storm count we can create prior to casting Gaea's Blessing. Before this Gaea's Blessing, we can cast one Bankrupt in Blood, which gets 5 mass draws again, so we get X -> X -> 6 -> 6. And then this X is determined by how big our storm count is prior to casting Bankrupt in Blood. The biggest effect on this number is the number of creature fetches we get. With 9 card fetching cards, we can get 45 instances of creature fetching, which gives us about X -> X -> 46 -> 5. If we had one less creature fetching card, we would get X -> X -> 41 -> 5; so whatever we replaced that creature fetching card would have to at least take X to X -> X -> 6 -> 5 to be as good or better. An extra Repeated Reverberation or Repudiate // Replicate won't be able to do that.
X^2 compared to X is again small potatoes; in general, resolving that TYS trigger for Repeated Reverberation on an earlier spell will eventually lead to a far greater benefit that taking X to X^2. Certainly, any TYS trigger that we can resolve before we execute a stage will compound by the Ackermann function when we execute a stage, so that will be much better than holding the TYS trigger. So any holding back of TYS triggers would have to happen after the last stage before a Sarkhan activation.
Hmm, so I think the timing is the tricky bit that I'm missing. because my intuition still is that creature fetching can't be the best spot to spend our extra cards. I know intuition is, to put it lightly, absolutely awful, at this scale.
Basically we enter the stage at the landfall trigger section, as soon as we put Emergence zone into play, we can sac it in response to the landfall triggers and be off to ackermann induced numbers. (X->X->X->3? for the landfall triggers).
If we optimize for the initial storm, we start all of that at something around X^^^X where X=10^(10^20) storm.
That gives us a ton more initial worldshapers when we run out of landfalls, only after all of those death triggers have been exhausted do the extra fetchers come into play. And I can see them overtaking, because additional iteration at this level does matter the first might only get say 50->50->50->3 copies, but the second copy is charged up by that. Ok, you've sold me on the intital storm being less important.
But, I guess I still don't quite see why extra Sarkhan pings aren't also worth it? If there was a Smothering Tithe that pyroclasmed instead of giving us a treasure, wouldn't we play that? And Repeated Reverberation gives us way more than the ~200 extra pings that that card would give us. Is the timing really so bad as to make it not worth it?
Another minor point is that Bankrupt in blood can't draw all of these Blood for bones and Concoct s each time through, so this is just a one time optimization.
Fair point about RR's TYS triggers, so we want to be constantly spending our Kykar mana whenever we can. (though we get a lot less of it without Nexus of Fate.)
Well the thing is, everything positive that we do before a Sarkhan activation will lead to more copies when we do the Sarkhan activation. So an extra Repeated Reverberation, an extra creature fetching, and an extra Pyroclasm will all lead to more copies of the Sarkhan ability. The difference is in the degree. If we start out at X, and do nothing but activate Sarkhan with a single Repeated Reverberation, then we get X -> X -> 2X -> 10. If we cast an extra Repeated Reverberation before the Sarkhan activation, we get X -> X -> 6X -> 10. If we cast Blood for Bones before the Sarkhan activation, we will get X -> X -> (X -> X -> X -> 4) -> 10. If we cast a Pyroclasm with storm count X before the Sarkhan activation, we would get X -> X -> (X -> X -> X -> 10) -> 10. Or actually with four Thousand-Year Storms and a Repeated Reverberation, we would get five batches of Pyroclasms, so we would get around X -> X -> 7 -> 11. As you can see, those numbers are in increasing order, since Repeated Reverberation is better than nothing, creature fetching does more than a Repeated Reverberation, and Pyroclasm does more than creature fetching.
You're right that Bankrupt in Blood can't draw all the different creature fetchers, but it is before the first Bankrupt in Blood that is the most important.
Edit: Oh, and you're right that the "middle" isn't really where we want to spend our extra cards; what we really want is the "top", i.e. Spark Double for more Sarkhan activations, or if not that, Whispering Snitch for more opponent life, etc. But I haven't found anything that will significantly effect the top layers.
Edit: Hmm, I think maybe I was completely wrong about Dowsing Dagger, Azor's Gateway, and Saheeli, Sublime Artificer. It's true that if we turn Azor's Gateway into a Dowsing Dagger, and transform them by dealing combat damage, they will transform one after another, and we won't be able to run the combo with the Lost Vale mana in between because Sarkhan can only be activated at sorcery speed. But, I don't see any reason why we need to tap Sanctum of the Sun right away. So we can hold on to the Sanctum of the Sun, and tap the Lost Vale for three black mana, getting three more activations of Sarkhan before we eventually tap Sanctum of the Sun. So that is obviously better, even if we do need a Gravitic Punch to send the opponent to a low negative life total.
Also, since we are going to the combat phase anyway, we can take the opportunity to attack with a whole bunch of Herald of Faiths which will give us a lot of life gain triggers, which we can augment using Angel of Vitality.
For the current Sarkhan deck, we can replace a Stony Strength with another Leyline of Abundance, getting us another exilable card and bumping our final damage up to 10 -> 10 -> 20 -> 12.
The idea behind Rona was that she was limited, i.e. we have to use Blood for Bones to fetch her. So it wouldn't be like Future Sight. But, we need a different version to work.
Edit: Hey, here's an interesting idea: Use Metamorphic Alteration on World Shaper, to turn it into something other than a Merfolk. Then we use Slinn Voda to return it to our hand. Then we can cast a Wrath Nova, and destroy all the token copies of World Shaper, getting us all those land triggers. This seems very promising!
Edit: Meh, we can also use Metamorphic Alteration on Slinn Voda, and return it to our hand. So that seems to be a problem.
Grim captain's call is a raise dead that basically only gets worldshaper? That makes Worldshaper slightly cheaper than the other creatures, but IDK if that's worth much.
Another thought is using metamorphic alteration to make something a planewalker via Gideon, but that doesn't seem to work unless its the always 4/4 gideon, and that one can make our stuff indestructable.
Edit: Oh wait... we can actually just use Spark Double and Replicate a lot of nonlegendary copies of Teshar, then a single historic spell can fetch a lot of creatures.
The problem then becomes our old problem of fetching all our normal stage creatures without fetching Llanowar Scout or whatever Teshar fetches.
Hey, here's something: What if we went back to the Demanding Dragon deck, but used The Eldest Reborn rather than Unholy Indenture?
is there some way we can only have the dragon as a target? Seems easy enough with reshuffles.
there might be a problem of getting any other creatures back with proliferate? getting all of the non stage creatures for the same price?
Going back to the Sarkhan deck, it looks like [c]Repeated Reverberation is really good for the start. So I'm looking at:
1 Leyline of Abundance
2 Leyline of Abundance
3 Leyline of Abundance
4 Breeding Pool
5 Llanowar Elves
6 Plains
7 Stony Strength
8 Emergency Powers
9 Kykar, Wind's Fury
10 Samut, Tyrant Smasher
11 Mox Amber
12 Gyre Engineer
13 Precognition Field
14 Thousand-Year Storm
15 Omniscience
16 Emergence Zone
Stage Combo:
17 Manifold Key
18 The Antiquities War
19 The Antiquities War
20 Cleansing Nova
21 Cleansing Nova
22 Disdainful Stroke
23 Teshar, Ancestor's Apostle
24 Militia Bugler
25 Tragic Poet
26 Gaea's Blessing
27 Citywatch Sphinx
28 Kaya's Ghostform
29 Repudiate // Replicate
Proliferation:
30 Evolution Sage
Recycling Lands:
31 World Shaper
32 Lotus Field
Drawing:
33 Blood for Bones
34 Bankrupt in Blood
35 Ionize
Life Gain:
36 Sarkhan, Dragonsoul
37 Repeated Reverberation
39 Dreadmalkin
39 Imperial Ceratops
40 Angel of Vitality
41 Vicious Rumors
42 Dowsing Dagger
43 Switcheroo
44 Azor's Gateway
Recycling Artifacts:
45 Karn, the Great Creator
46 Sphinx of the Guildpact
Putting Emergence Zone into play:
47 Wayward Swordtooth
Disposable Cards:
48 Nexus of Fate
49 Vivien, Champion of the Wilds
50 Repudiate // Replicate
51 Act of Treason
52 Act of Treason
53 Act of Treason
54 Act of Treason
55 Repeated Reverberation
56 Repeated Reverberation
57 Repeated Reverberation
58 Rallying Roar
59 Rallying Roar
60 Thousand-Year Storm
Edit: So, calculations for the start:
Addendum Kykar - GG, 6 cards
Stony Strength - 5G,R, 5 cards, 3 storm
Samut, Tyrant Smasher - 1G,2R, 4 cards, 3 storm
Mox Amber - 1G,3R,1U, 3 cards, 3 storm
Gyre Engineer - 3G,3R,1U, 2 cards, 3 storm
Precognition Field - 4R, 1 card, 3 storm
L - Act of Treason - 4G,2R,1U, 1 card, 4 storm
L - Act of Treason - 6G,2R,2U, 1 card, 5 storm
Thousand-Year Storm - 2G,2R,1U, 0 cards, 5 storm
L - Act of Treason - 24G,7U,2R, 6 storm
L - Switcheroo - 20G,6U,3R, 7 storm
L - Disdainful Stroke - 19G,5U,4R, 8 storm
L - Nexus of Fate - 14G,3U,5R, 9 storm
L - Nexus of Fate - 9G,1U,6R, 10 storm
L - Act of Treason - 51G,12U,6R, 11 storm
L - Nexus of Fate x 5 - 26G,2U,11R, 16 storm
L - Replicate - 92G,18U,12R, 17 storm
L - Nexus of Fate x 8 - 52G,2U,20R, 25 storm
L - Replicate - 154G,27U,21R, 26 storm
Nexus of Fate x 13 - 89G,1U,34R, 39 storm
L - Repeated Reverberation 87G,1U,33R, 40 storm (40 copies)
L - Repeated Reverberation 85G,1U,32R, 41 storm (121 copies)
L - Repeated Reverberation 83G,1U,31R, 42 storm (284 copies)
L - Repeated Reverberation 81G,1U,30R, 43 storm (611 copies)
L - Gaea's Blessing - 79G,1U,31R, 44 storm
After Gaea's Blessing, we get a TYS trigger for 43 draws, then 611 Repeated Reverberation triggers for 2 draws and 6 reshuffles each.
After the TYS trigger of Gaea's Blessing:
L - Ionize - 78G,31R, 45 storm
L - Repudiate Ionize's TYS trigger - 76G,32R, 46 storm
L - Repudiate Ionize's TYS trigger - 74G,33R, 47 storm
L - Repeated Reverberation - 72G,32R, 48 storm (48 copies)
L - Repeated Reverberation - 70G,31R, 49 storm (145 copies)
L - Repeated Reverberation, don't resolve TYS trigger - 68G,30R, 50 storm (290 copies)
L - Repeated Reverberation, don't resolve TYS trigger - 66G,29R, 51 storm (580 copies)
L - Stony Strength, don't resolve TYS trigger - 4705G,1160U,30R, 52 storm
L - Nexus of Fate x 579 - 1810G,2U,609R, 631 storm
L - Disdainful Stroke - 1809G,1U,610R, 632 storm
Resolve TYS trigger for Stony Strength - 4337G,633U,610R, 632 storm
L - Nexus of Fate x 316 - 2757G,1U,926R, 948 storm
Resolve TYS trigger for Repeated Reverberation (948 copies)
Resolve TYS trigger for Repeated Reverberation (948 copies)
From now on, only worry about blue mana.
After the first Repeated Reverberation trigger for Gaea's Blessing:
L - Repeated Reverberation - 1U, 949 storm (4741 copies)
L - Repeated Reverberation - 1U, 950 storm (10432 copies)
L - Repeated Reverberation, no TYS - 1U, 951 storm (20864 copies)
L - Repeated Reverberation, no TYS - 1U, 952 storm (41728 copies)
L - Stony Strength, don't resolve TYS trigger - 83457U, 953 storm
L - Nexus of Fate x 41728 - 1U, 42681 storm
L - Disdainful Stroke - 0U, 42682 storm
Resolve TYS trigger for Stony Strength - 42682U, 42682 storm
L - Nexus of Fate x 21341 - 0U, 64023 storm
Resolve TYS trigger for Repeated Reverberation (64023 copies)
Resolve TYS trigger for Repeated Reverberation (64023 copies)
Each Repeated Reverberation trigger for Gaea's Blessing allows us to multiply the storm count by more than 66, so we wind up with more than 8.102 * 10^1112 after 610 Repeated Reverberation triggers. Then the last Repeated Reverberation trigger resolves, and we can shuffle back in all of our cards. We can then play the other Thousand-Year Storm, animate a Manifold Key with Karn, and go:
L - Stony Strength, don't resolve TYS triggers - 8.1E1112 storm
Resolve Repeated Reverberation triggers (3.24E1113 copies)
L - Nexus of Fate x 1.62E1113 - 2.43E1113 storm
Resolve TYS trigger for Stony Strength (2.43E1113 copies)
L - Nexus of Fate x 1.215E1113 - 3.645E1113 storm
Resolve TYS trigger for Stony Strength (3.645E1113 copies)
L - Nexus of Fate x 1.8225E1114 - 5.4675E1113 storm
L - Repeated Reverberation (1.0935E1114 copies)
L - Act of Treason, don't resolve TYS triggers (2.187E1114 copies)
L - Nexus of Fate x 1.0935E1114 - 1.64E1114 storm
Resolve TYS trigger for Act of Treason (1.64E1114 copies)
L - Nexus of Fate x 8.2E1113 - 2.46E1114 storm
Resolve TYS trigger for Act of Treason (2.46E1114 copies)
L - Nexus of Fate x 1.23E1114 - 3.69E1114 storm
L - Repeated Reverberation (7.38E1114 copies)
L - Act of Treason, don't resolve TYS triggers (1.476E1115 copies)
L - Nexus of Fate x 7.38E1114 - 1.107E1115 storm
Resolve TYS trigger for Act of Treason (1.107E1115 copies)
L - Nexus of Fate x 5.535E1114 - 1.6605E1115 storm
Resolve TYS trigger for Act of Treason (1.6605E1115 copies)
L - Nexus of Fate x 8.3025E1114 - 2.491E1115 storm
Then we get another two Act of Treasons and two Replicates, each one getting two Thousand-Year Storm triggers, taking us to more than 6 * 10^1116 storm count. At the end we will have created 8.2 * 10^1116 Gyre Engineers, and 2.05 * 10^1116 Manifold Keys, thanks to the Replicates. At this point we can animate our Manifold Key, and we can start casting our Rallying Roars:
L - Repeated Reverberation (1.2E1117 copies)
L - Rallying Roar
Resolve RR triggers (2.4E1117 copies) - 1.968E2234 blue mana
L - Nexus of Fate x 9.84E2233
Resolve TYS trigger (9.84E2233 copies) - 8.069E3350 blue mana
L - Nexus of Fate x 4.034E3350
Resolve TYS trigger (4.034E3350 copies) - 3.308E4467 blue mana
L - Nexus of Fate x 1.654E4467
L - Repeated Reverberation (1.654E4467 copies)
L - Rallying Roar
Resolve RR triggers (3.308E4467 copies) - 2.713E5584 blue mana
L - Nexus of Fate x 1.356E5584
Resolve TYS trigger (1.356E5584 copies) - 1.112E6701 blue mana
L - Nexus of Fate x 5.561E6701
Resolve TYS trigger (5.561E6701 copies) - 1.114E7818 white mana
We can now cast Vivien, Champion of the Wilds, allowing us to cast creatures at instant speed. We can then cast a sequence of 5.57E7817 Cleasning Novas, destroying creatures every time, and before each one we will create as many Citywatch Sphinxes as we can. With X Citywatch Sphinxes, we can reshuffle X times, and each time we can multiply our storm count by more than 100, so each Wrath will take X to more than X * 100^X. So after all the Cleansing Novas, we will wind up with a storm count of more than 100^^(5.57 * 10^7817).
I'm not sure if carrying two repeated reverberations through to the next iteration is optimal? It looks like it is, but I haven't compared the other options.
With access to 4 mana cards, we can use Leyline of Anticipation instead of Vivien to get replicate copies of Sphinxes for each copy of wrath. (can't do a full stage combo as we lose access to flash after a Purify).
Edit: I'm also not sure on the ratios for the other cards, act of treason is cheaper then replicate now, but they are still very similar. An extra TYS would be better than the second replicate, maybe even the also the fourth TYS? (6x2<5x3<4x4)
Edit2: heres some quick math on carrying over n RRs
after stony strength and nexus we have X storm
resolve all the TYS triggers to get 4X RR's ready
resolve a GB
RR - 8X
RR - 16X
RR - 32X
RR - 64X
Stony for 64X to increase storm by +32X
stony TYS for 32X increases storm by +16X
total is +48X
after stony strength and nexus we have X storm
resolve all the TYS triggers to get 3X RR's ready
resolve a GB
RR - 6X resolve tys +X
RR - 14X
RR - 28X
RR - 56X
Stony for 56X ...
gonna be less
after stony strength and nexus we have X storm
resolve all the TYS triggers to get 2X RR's ready
resolve a GB
RR - 4X resolve tys +X
RR - 10X resolve tys +X
RR - 22X
RR - 44X
Stony for 44X ...
gonna be less
Looks like we want to carry over the most RRs possible.
Concerning Thousand-Year Storm versus Repudiate // Replicate / Act of Treason, the main benefit of the latter is to get lots of Repeated Reverberation triggers for Gaea's Blessing, before we can play any additional Thousand-Year Storms. I worked out that with 6 Replicates/Act of Treasons, we can get 611 Repeated Reverberation triggers for Gaea's Blessing, whereas for 5 Rep/AoTs we can get 401 RR triggers for Gaea's Blessing. So for the former, we get roughly 97.5^611 ~ 1.9 * 10^1215 TYS count after Gaea's Blessing, then with two Rallying Roars and two Thousand-Year Storms, we can multiply by itself 6 times, to get about 9.4^8506. (Left out some small calculational differences.) With the latter, we get roughly 97.5^401 ~ 3.9^797 after the Gaea's Blessing, and with two Rallying Roars and three Thousand-Year Storms, we could multiply by itself 8 times to get about 2.1 * 10^7178. So getting 6 Replicates/Act of Treasons is worth it for the RR triggers for Gaea's Blessing. Adding a seventh is probably not worth it, since we can't allow the TYS trigger for Gaea's Blessing to draw more than 48 cards. Unless of course we Repudiate the TYS trigger, but then we use up a Repudiate // Replicate.
One subtle note about your line is that because you Ionize after the TYS trigger, gaea's blessing is in the yard until the very last Repeated Reverberation copy.
Another tricky bit is that all of the carried over repeated reverberations from the very last of the 611 can't be used on Rallying roar to make white mana. Because they would be eaten by the Karn activation on Manifold Key. Its not ideal but not disastrous, because we want to make a bunch more storm first, but is a possible pitfall.
Would the extra TYS possibly catch up in the Leyline of Anticipation Wrath ministage?
No, as it is effectively only doubling the number of times we can cast wrath, so it will get left in the dust.
Also, we can definitely draw more than 48 cards with the TYS trigger on Gaea's Blessing, each extra one we can cast Nexus of Fate from hand to not deck.
Edit:
Hmm carrying over fewer RRs seems to be optimal for the first reshuffle, because we want to get RR on RR as soon as possible to start multiplying. What we want to maximize is the number of RR triggers carried over, which it looks like is done by just letting the very first TYS on repeated Reverberation resolve.
L - Ionize - 78G,31R, 45 storm
L - Repudiate Ionize's TYS trigger - 76G,32R, 46 storm
L - Repudiate Ionize's TYS trigger - 74G,33R, 47 storm
L - Repeated Reverberation - 72G,32R, 48 storm (48 copies)
L - Repeated Reverberation, don't resolve TYS trigger - 70G,31R, 49 storm (96 copies)
L - Repeated Reverberation, don't resolve TYS trigger - 68G,30R, 50 storm (192 copies)
L - Repeated Reverberation, don't resolve TYS trigger - 66G,29R, 51 storm (384 copies)
L - Stony Strength, don't resolve TYS trigger - 768U, 52 storm
L - Nexus of Fate x 383 - 2U, 435 storm
L - Disdainful Stroke - 1U, 436 storm
Resolve TYS trigger for Stony Strength - 437U, 436 storm
L - Nexus of Fate x 218 - 1U, 654 storm
Resolve TYS trigger for Repeated Reverberation (654 copies)
Resolve TYS trigger for Repeated Reverberation (654 copies)
Resolve TYS trigger for Repeated Reverberation (654 copies)
Total RR triggers carried over =1962
Your 2x RR line had 1896 RR triggers waiting, but with 300 more storm. I think the extra 66 RR triggers will make up for that difference as they get doubled 4 times by the RRs for Stony strength and then halved for Nexus of fate giving 66*8=528 more storm putting it over 200 storm ahead of the 2x RR line.
Edit2: hmm Teshar doesn't have enough historic things to trigger off of anymore? Mishra's Self-Replicator is a historic card that Militia Bugler can fetch. It can replace Sphinx of the Guildpact? CMC 5 means we should swap the extra Replicate with a Quasiduplicate?
Also, we can't fetch Kykar without Pattern Matcher, might need 6 mana gideon?
Yeah, I noticed that we couldn't get Gaea's Blessing back in the library with the TYS copies, but since we can get it back with the RR copies, it should be no problem.
The carried over RR copies shouldn't be a problem either, since we cast our instants/untappers first, and there are plenty of opportunities to activate Karn then (probably after a sorcery, since we can't carry over TYS triggers of RR past those.)
Ooh, I didn't notice that we could use Nexus of Fate to avoid decking ourselves! I think that means that we should probably add another Repudiate // Replicate into the deck. Probably not an fourth Replicate though, since that would require us to scale back from two Rallying Roars to one, so we would take the 3rd power rather than the 5th with the Rallying Roars.
Good point about those extra RR copies being more important than the storm count.
I think we will have Teshar when we put our Mox Amber into play, so we shouldn't need Gideon.
Hmmm... I think we could get by without Mishra's Self-Replcator, by using Mox Amber, Manifold Key, and our two The Antiquities Wars as our historic cards? That means that we can replenish are creatures at most two times after Wrath Novas, before we need another Purify Nova. I don't think that is a problem, since for all layers of the stage except the top one, we will only be resolving one Wrath Nova at a time. In the case that the top layer is Wrath Nova layer, I believe we can cast Disdainful Stroke to counter all but two of the Wrath Novas. So it should be okay?
I guess the question is whether it is still better to go with Mishra's Self-Replicator and Quasiduplicates; having extra Replicates will pump up the beginning by a small amount, but being able to get a full layer for a top Wrath Nova layer will add a little later on. I believe that the extra Replicates are worth more, since, although the extra advantage in storm count is not significant, it is a whole lot more than one, so we will get stages with many more layers than the Mishra Self-Replicator version, which will more than make up for the fact that the top layer might be muted.
hmm we need to save our sagas until immediately after a wrath? yeah that looks like it works. It might cost us a top layer worth of wrath, but that's pretty minor. It does mean that the early mini leyline(/vivien) stage isn't nearly as good because we cant recur everything without casting a historic spell to return Militia Bugler, and we don't get more historic spells just from wrath without the self-replicator.
We definitely want at least 2 rallying roars, because we can split up the Repeated Reverberations and their TYS triggers we can get 2 sets of RR triggers on the Rallying Roars. (though, if the ministage doesn't work...)
Let's see... We put Citywatch Sphinx into play, put Kaya's Ghostform on it, then Replicate a lot of copies. (So we need to save a copy of Replicate for this). Cast Wrath Nova, and resolve a copy. This triggers a lot of reshuffles, taking X Citywatch Sphinxes to more than X * 100^X mana and storm count. Play Tragic Poet, and bring back Kaya's Ghostform, and cast it on the Citywatch Sphinx again, and Replicate copies again. Resolve another copy of Wrath Nova, getting more than X * 100^X reshuffles, taking our storm count to more than 100^100^X. We next cast Militia Bugler retrieving Tragic Poet, which can retrieve Kaya's Ghostform and put it on Citywatch Sphinx again. Another Wrath Nova takes us to 100^100^100^X. Oh, and we need to leave at least one surveil or reshuffling trigger on the stack. Next, we cast Teshar, Ancestor's Apostle, and cast The Antiquities War. We resolve the Teshar trigger. We bring back Militia Bugler, which brings back Tragic Poet, which brings back Kaya's Ghostform, which we place on Citywatch Sphinx again. A Replicate copy of Teshar gets rid of the original Teshar. We then Replicate a bunch of Citywatch Sphinxes. We resolve the reshulffing trigger, which puts Teshar back into the library, and we can cast Replicate again to create a bunch more Citywatch Sphinxes, and a Militia Bugler, which puts Teshar back into our hand. Resolving another Wrath Nova copy then takes us to 100^100^100^100^X. We then do this again, with the other The Antiquities War, then Dowsing Dagger, then Sphinx of the Guildpact. I think that's all the historic spells that we have left? That takes us to 100^100^100^100^100^100^100^X, or seven exponentiations.
Now that I think about it though, it is totally worth it to give up our cards that are helping the early start, to instead get cards that will help out the ministage. Will Mishra's Self-Replicator actually save the entire ministage though? Unfortunately, I don't see a way to bring Militia Bugler back to our hand. So it will get destroyed when we Wrath Nova, so we can't use it immediately to get Mishra's Self-Replicator back. We can fetch Militia Bugler with Teshar, but to do that we need a historic spell first.
We could get the ministage if we could get the original Militia Bugler off the battlefield, then Replicate a copy, but I don't see a way to do that. Perhaps a cheap sacrifice outlet, or a second Militia Bugler?
Edit: Oh, I see - we can just have the Mishra's Self-Replicator already in our hand. We can then Disdainful Stroke it, and after a reshuffle, we can Replicate a Militia Bugler to bring it back to our hand.
We can counter the 5 mana artifact with Disdainful stroke, and kill teshar with the legend rule, to get them both shuffled in. then we can get them to hand with replicate on the bugler.
being short one early blue mana and one repudiate storm looks definitely worth it, because we get to something like X^^^X now that we can cast kaya's ghostform and replicate at instant speed with Leyline.
One wrinkle in the ministage is that we can't get kykar back, so we only have however much red we had in the beginning, limiting the number of repeated reverberations we can chain together. I think we want to spend that red early?
Now, the biggest impact would be something like that could get extra black mana, like Smothering Tithe and Unmoored Ego. But those go infinite, and I haven't found any other limited black mana resources. (Using Saheeli, Sublime Artificer to flip Azor's Gateway during combat is a net draw if we count by negative life total, since we would need a Gravitic Punch to deal damage in the end, and we wind up just losing two extra card slots.) Next up would be something like Spark Double to get more Sarkhan activations, but that goes infinite as well. Then we would look for something that could deal damage to Imperial Ceratops or otherwise gain life to the opponent. Whispering Snitch is very good for this, but unfortunately it is only 2 mana cost, conflicting with Dowsing Dagger. And replacing Dowsing Dagger would cost us a couple of exilable cards, so that's no good. After that would be things that gain life for us. There are Planeswalkers that do this, but those go infinite with Sarkhan. I have a feeling there is some card that can gain us life in a limited fashion (without losing life for the opponent), but I can't think of any. Then comes card draws. Again, there are Planeswalkers that can draw, but those go infinite with Sarkhan. And we can't add another card drawing instant/sorcery, since having two would allow each to draw the other. So I don't know anything up to here.
Next up would be fetching creatures. And here I think we have a lot - Blood for Bones, Bond of Revival, Connive // Concoct, etc. In partcular, we can have Aid the Fallen as our unexilable creature fetcher, and then have a lot of Planeswalkers that can fetch creatures, since Aid the Fallen can fetch Planeswalkers as well. So I'm thinking of something like:
1 Leyline of Abundance
2 Leyline of Abundance
3 Leyline of Abundance
4 Breeding Pool
5 Llanowar Elves
6 Plains
7 Stony Strength
8 Emergency Powers
9 Kykar, Wind's Fury
10 Samut, Tyrant Smasher
11 Mox Amber
12 Gyre Engineer
13 Precognition Field
14 Thousand-Year Storm
15 Omniscience
16 Emergence Zone
Stage Combo:
17 Manifold Key
18 The Antiquities War
19 The Antiquities War
20 Cleansing Nova
21 Cleansing Nova
22 Disdainful Stroke
23 Teshar, Ancestor's Apostle
24 Militia Bugler
25 Tragic Poet
26 Gaea's Blessing
27 Citywatch Sphinx
28 Kaya's Ghostform
29 Repudiate // Replicate
Proliferation:
30 Evolution Sage
Recycling Lands:
31 World Shaper
32 Lotus Field
Drawing:
33 Aid the Fallen
34 Bankrupt in Blood
35 Ionize
Life Gain:
36 Sarkhan, Dragonsoul
37 Repeated Reverberation
39 Dreadmalkin
39 Imperial Ceratops
40 Angel of Vitality
41 Vicious Rumors
42 Dowsing Dagger
43 Switcheroo
44 Azor's Gateway
Recycling Artifacts:
45 Karn, the Great Creator
46 Mishra's Self-Replicator
Putting Emergence Zone into play:
47 Wayward Swordtooth
Disposable Cards:
48 Act of Treason
49 Act of Treason
50 Vivien, Champion of the Wilds
51 Vivien, Champion of the Wilds
52 Vivien, Champion of the Wilds
53 Vivien, Nature's Avenger
54 Vivien, Nature's Avenger
55 Vivien, Nature's Avenger
56 Vivien, Nature's Avenger
57 Domri, Chaos Bringer
58 Domri, Chaos Bringer
59 Domri, Chaos Bringer
60 Domri, Chaos Bringer
So, we can activate our 11 creature fetching Planeswalkers (aided by Repeated Reverberation), then destroy the remaining ones with Sarkhan. Then we can fetch all of those Planeswalkers as well as Sarkhan and a lot of World Shapers with Aid the Fallen, then do it all again. So we wind up with 23 effects that fetch World Shaper many times, which will beat out having a stronger beginnning.
Obviously the start will be much weaker now, I'll have to work that out.
And anyway, if we just want extra instances of "fetch a creature" by far the best option for that is extra TYS, which helps many parts of the combo (notably card draw and Sarkhan activations). Another card that also helps a deeper layer is more Repeated Reverberation which also help increase the number of Sarkhan activations.
I guess you are right about Thousand-Year Storm though, having multiple copies gets us more batches of spells, with increasing of storm count between each batch. So we should have four of those, I guess. Concerning Repeated Reverberation, I'm not seeing how we can use multiple copies to get that significant increase of storm count between copies. It's true that multiple copies can be used to increase the number of Sarkhan abilities we get with each activation, but this is the kind of thing that you were talking about above - having two Repeated Reverberations before a Sarkhan activation will increase the number of Sarkhan abilities from 2X to 6X, (or I guess somewhat more, if we have multiple Thousand-Year Storms) but if we used that Repeated Reverberation for something that helped out sooner, we would increase the storm count by a lot more by that point. So, I don't think it is worth it to have multiple Repeated Reverberations.
So, instead we can start with something like this:
1 Leyline of Abundance
2 Leyline of Abundance
3 Leyline of Abundance
4 Breeding Pool
5 Llanowar Elves
6 Plains
7 Stony Strength
8 Emergency Powers
9 Kykar, Wind's Fury
10 Samut, Tyrant Smasher
11 Mox Amber
12 Gyre Engineer
13 Precognition Field
14 Thousand-Year Storm
15 Omniscience
16 Emergence Zone
Stage Combo:
17 Manifold Key
18 The Antiquities War
19 The Antiquities War
20 Cleansing Nova
21 Cleansing Nova
22 Disdainful Stroke
23 Teshar, Ancestor's Apostle
24 Militia Bugler
25 Tragic Poet
26 Gaea's Blessing
27 Citywatch Sphinx
28 Kaya's Ghostform
29 Repudiate // Replicate
Proliferation:
30 Evolution Sage
Recycling Lands:
31 World Shaper
32 Lotus Field
Drawing:
33 Blood for Bones
34 Bankrupt in Blood
35 Ionize
Life Gain:
36 Sarkhan, Dragonsoul
37 Repeated Reverberation
39 Dreadmalkin
39 Imperial Ceratops
40 Angel of Vitality
41 Vicious Rumors
42 Dowsing Dagger
43 Switcheroo
44 Azor's Gateway
Recycling Artifacts:
45 Karn, the Great Creator
46 Mishra's Self-Replicator
Putting Emergence Zone into play:
47 Wayward Swordtooth
Disposable Cards:
48 Act of Treason
49 Act of Treason
50 Blood for Bones
51 Blood for Bones
52 Blood for Bones
53 Connive // Concoct
54 Connive // Concoct
55 Connive // Concoct
56 Connive // Concoct
57 Soul Savage
58 Thousand-Year Storm
59 Thousand-Year Storm
60 Thousand-Year Storm
So we get 9 creature fetching spells, each one getting Repeated Reverberation and four Thousand-Year Strom triggers, for basically 45 effects in total. And then Bankrupt in Blood will get five effects total, and Gaea's Blessing will get five effects per 2 life lost. That seems to be as high as we can get right now.
Repeated reverberation isn't quite as good for sarkhan activations as it is for the card drawers. With the spells we can split the RR copies from the TYS copies, Much like we've been doing at the start. We can get RR on RR for say gaea's blessing and save the TYS triggers for the next time we are about to cast Gaea's blessing, and then RR on RR and still have TYS triggers for later. (we might even be able to 'hide' some of those on the bottom of the stack, and carry them all through to Sarkhan's activation?)
We did do some shenanigans with multiple Repeated Reverberations, but the benefit was only impressive at a small scale, I think. Let's say we have 4 Repeated Reverberations, and carry over 16 TYS copies of Repeated Reverberations from previous casts. After we resolve the 16 TYS copies, we would have 16X RR copies resolved. Then each of the Repeated Reverberations that we cast would double the number so after 4 we would have 256X RR copies. Then we would get 512X copies of whatever spell we cast next, as opposed to 4X for one RR and one TYS. 512 was significant in the beginning when we were dealing with relatively small numbers, but won't be noticeable by the point that we have Conway chains. (Actually we can probably do better than 512X by resolving some of the TYS triggers rather than carrying them over... but still, we will get some small, writable multiple.)
If we had an extra replicate we can make more dinos to make them gain life twice as many times for every sarkhan activation. Which turn into far more than 23x as many gaea's blessings.
It seems like you are improving the middle of the combo as opposed to the start or the later layers? For example, one extra free black mana would be worth way more than all of this creature fetching, and all that that lets us do is get 1 more sarkhan activation. So why isn't one extra sarkhan trigger worth more than the creature fetching as well? (and its even X extra sarkhan triggers...)
Though it looks like any tricks with Repeated Reverberation are not particularly amplified by additional RRs. Though with just one we can do a pretty good amount, I think we can get ~X TYS triggers to go off right before we activate Sarkhan, by just casting RR when the stack gets down that low, then doing whatever we would normally do (gaea's blessing or w/e) this makes Sarkhan give X^2 activations in that layer instead of X. In fact we can do this for all the layers that rely on spells (that have access to red mana).
So, after the fact that we have 19 tappings of Sanctum of the Sun, the next most important piece of information is, how much life we have when we tap that first Sanctum of the Sun. And for that number, the most significant event that occurs is an activation of Sarkhan, of which we currently get only one. So we get some number X -> X -> X -> 10, where X is how many copies of Sarkhan we can get when we activate it. So, if we say use extra RR copies to change X to 512X, then we get 512X -> 512X -> 512X -> 10. Now that is bigger, but not significantly bigger; for example, if we were able to just get one more stage in before we activated Sarkhan, that would take us to Y -> Y -> Y -> 10, where Y = X -> X -> X. On the other hand, getting an extra black mana would allow us to activate Sarkhan twice, which would take us to about X -> X -> (X -> X -> X -> 10) -> 10, which is more than we could get with just one Sarkhan activation and smaller events than a Sarkhan activation. So, hopefully that answers your question about why one extra black mana is worth way more than creature fetching, but creature fetching is worth a lot more than getting extra RR triggers on the Sarkhan activation.
If we continue this, we have that the life we can gain prior to the first Sanctum of the Sun is roughly X -> X -> X -> 10, where X is the how many copies of Sarkhan's ability we can get when we activate it. For that X, the main events are dealing damage to the opponent via Vicious Rumors and gaining life, which we can do 19 times. So we get 19 iterations of X to X -> X -> X -> 7, or roughly equivalently, X -> X -> 20 -> 8, where X is the how many Angels of Vitality we can get prior to the first resolution of Vicious Rumors. This X in turn is mainly created by our Gaea's Blessings, countered by Ionize, of which we can cast seven (Not counting the first Gaea's Blessing, which doesn't do that much.). I guess with 4 Thousand-Year Storms, we get 5 instances of mass card drawing per Gaea's Blessing cast, so this will give us X -> X -> 36 -> 7. And then the X here is how much storm count we can create prior to casting Gaea's Blessing. Before this Gaea's Blessing, we can cast one Bankrupt in Blood, which gets 5 mass draws again, so we get X -> X -> 6 -> 6. And then this X is determined by how big our storm count is prior to casting Bankrupt in Blood. The biggest effect on this number is the number of creature fetches we get. With 9 card fetching cards, we can get 45 instances of creature fetching, which gives us about X -> X -> 46 -> 5. If we had one less creature fetching card, we would get X -> X -> 41 -> 5; so whatever we replaced that creature fetching card would have to at least take X to X -> X -> 6 -> 5 to be as good or better. An extra Repeated Reverberation or Repudiate // Replicate won't be able to do that.
X^2 compared to X is again small potatoes; in general, resolving that TYS trigger for Repeated Reverberation on an earlier spell will eventually lead to a far greater benefit that taking X to X^2. Certainly, any TYS trigger that we can resolve before we execute a stage will compound by the Ackermann function when we execute a stage, so that will be much better than holding the TYS trigger. So any holding back of TYS triggers would have to happen after the last stage before a Sarkhan activation.
Basically we enter the stage at the landfall trigger section, as soon as we put Emergence zone into play, we can sac it in response to the landfall triggers and be off to ackermann induced numbers. (X->X->X->3? for the landfall triggers).
If we optimize for the initial storm, we start all of that at something around X^^^X where X=10^(10^20) storm.
That gives us a ton more initial worldshapers when we run out of landfalls, only after all of those death triggers have been exhausted do the extra fetchers come into play. And I can see them overtaking, because additional iteration at this level does matter the first might only get say 50->50->50->3 copies, but the second copy is charged up by that. Ok, you've sold me on the intital storm being less important.
But, I guess I still don't quite see why extra Sarkhan pings aren't also worth it? If there was a Smothering Tithe that pyroclasmed instead of giving us a treasure, wouldn't we play that? And Repeated Reverberation gives us way more than the ~200 extra pings that that card would give us. Is the timing really so bad as to make it not worth it?
Another minor point is that Bankrupt in blood can't draw all of these Blood for bones and Concoct s each time through, so this is just a one time optimization.
Fair point about RR's TYS triggers, so we want to be constantly spending our Kykar mana whenever we can. (though we get a lot less of it without Nexus of Fate.)
You're right that Bankrupt in Blood can't draw all the different creature fetchers, but it is before the first Bankrupt in Blood that is the most important.
Edit: Oh, and you're right that the "middle" isn't really where we want to spend our extra cards; what we really want is the "top", i.e. Spark Double for more Sarkhan activations, or if not that, Whispering Snitch for more opponent life, etc. But I haven't found anything that will significantly effect the top layers.
Edit: Hmm, I think maybe I was completely wrong about Dowsing Dagger, Azor's Gateway, and Saheeli, Sublime Artificer. It's true that if we turn Azor's Gateway into a Dowsing Dagger, and transform them by dealing combat damage, they will transform one after another, and we won't be able to run the combo with the Lost Vale mana in between because Sarkhan can only be activated at sorcery speed. But, I don't see any reason why we need to tap Sanctum of the Sun right away. So we can hold on to the Sanctum of the Sun, and tap the Lost Vale for three black mana, getting three more activations of Sarkhan before we eventually tap Sanctum of the Sun. So that is obviously better, even if we do need a Gravitic Punch to send the opponent to a low negative life total.
Also, since we are going to the combat phase anyway, we can take the opportunity to attack with a whole bunch of Herald of Faiths which will give us a lot of life gain triggers, which we can augment using Angel of Vitality.
So:
1 Leyline of Abundance
2 Leyline of Abundance
3 Leyline of Abundance
4 Breeding Pool
5 Llanowar Elves
6 Plains
7 Stony Strength
8 Emergency Powers
9 Kykar, Wind's Fury
10 Samut, Tyrant Smasher
11 Mox Amber
12 Gyre Engineer
13 Precognition Field
14 Thousand-Year Storm
15 Omniscience
16 Emergence Zone
Stage Combo:
17 Manifold Key
18 The Antiquities War
19 The Antiquities War
20 Cleansing Nova
21 Cleansing Nova
22 Disdainful Stroke
23 Teshar, Ancestor's Apostle
24 Militia Bugler
25 Tragic Poet
26 Gaea's Blessing
27 Citywatch Sphinx
28 Kaya's Ghostform
29 Repudiate // Replicate
Proliferation:
30 Evolution Sage
Recycling Lands:
31 World Shaper
32 Lotus Field
Drawing:
33 Blood for Bones
34 Bankrupt in Blood
35 Ionize
Life Gain:
36 Sarkhan, Dragonsoul
37 Repeated Reverberation
39 Dreadmalkin
39 Imperial Ceratops
40 Angel of Vitality
41 Vicious Rumors
42 Dowsing Dagger
43 Switcheroo
44 Azor's Gateway
Recycling Artifacts:
45 Karn, the Great Creator
46 Mishra's Self-Replicator
Putting Emergence Zone into play:
47 Wayward Swordtooth
The Final Hit:
48 Gravitic Punch
Disposable Cards:
48 Act of Treason
49 Act of Treason
50 Saheeli, Sublime Artificer
51 Herald of Faith
52 Blood for Bones
53 Blood for Bones
54 Blood for Bones
55 Connive // Concoct
56 Connive // Concoct
57 Connive // Concoct
58 Thousand-Year Storm
59 Thousand-Year Storm
60 Thousand-Year Storm