@J_kibbs: Okay, I guess I should explain how much a cheaper Teferi would gain us. In the current deck, we can get our TYS count to more than 3 -> 3 -> 1 -> 5 before we generate any red mana, but it looks like we don't reach 3 -> 3 -> 2 -> 5. We can then create a bunch of Grand Warlord Radhas and attack with everything, generating a lot more than 3 -> 3 -> 1 -> 5 red mana, by spending the red mana for Banefires, we can increase our count to more than 3 -> 3 -> 2 -> 5, but less than 3 -> 3 -> 3 -> 5. Similarly, each Mountain we tap with a lot of Nikyas in play can increase the third number in the estimation by one. So after 23 Mountains are tapped, our TYS count goes to between 3 -> 3 -> 25 -> 5 and 3 -> 3 -> 26 -> 5. This allows us to cast Quasiduplicate and create more than 3 -> 3 -> 25 -> 5 Nikyas, so our 24th Mountain generates more than 3 -> 3 -> 25 -> 5 red mana. We can then turn that red mana into Teferi activations on a one-for-one basis, so we get more than 3 -> 3 -> 25 -> 5 Teferi activations in the end. We can also use those Banefires to increase our TYS count to more than 3 -> 3 -> 26 -> 5, but that is insignificant; it's the Teferi activations that will do the heavy lifting. So in the end step, we can untap Mountains more than 3 -> 3 -> 25 -> 5 times, each time allowing us to tap the Mountain for red mana and increase the third number by one, so we wind up with a TYS count of more than 3 -> 3 -> (3 -> 3 -> 25 -> 5) -> 5 in the end, allowing us to generate that much green mana and Banefire for more than that much damage. (Remembering to save the last red mana for that Banefire, of course)
Now, if we can get many Teferi activations for a red mana, then we could use that final Mountain to increase our TYS count, until we could use the final red mana to generate more than 3 -> 3 -> 26 -> 5 Teferi activations. So the 25 would become a 26. Of course, if we had to spend a card slot to get a cheap Teferi activation, then we would have to give up a Mountain, so the 26 would go back down to 25. So for example, it looks like a second Teferi does not go infinite (we can use one Teferi to draw the other, and play it to put the original Teferi in the graveyard. But, we would still need to spend resources to move that Teferi from the graveyard to the library, so it doesn't look like we could do that forever.), and allows us to get many Teferi activations cheaply, so we would also get 3 -> 3 -> (3 -> 3 -> 25 -> 5) -> 5 with a second Teferi. It's hard to pick between the two, but I suspect that 24 Mountain version might do a touch more damage - we can fully run the combo all the way through the 23rd Mountain in that version, whereas in the 23 Mountain version, our number of Teferi activations would be based on the TYS count _prior_ to the very last Gaea's Blessing that we cast while spending the 23rd Mountain's mana. So that is smaller by an absolutely infitesimal amount, but it does look like the 24 Mountain version ekes out ahead.
Also, I agree with FortyTwo that we want to delay the tapping of each Mountain as long as possible, to generate the largest possible TYS count and create the most Nikyas. Grand Warlord Radha should go first; once you get that early lead, the difference will keep increasing as we continue the combo, so getting the advantage as early as possible is best.
Edit: Eh, my reasoning for going with 24 Mountains and one Teferi is not compelling. That minute difference will only matter if everything else is the same up to that point; if there is even a little bit of gain we can get earlier by having two Teferis, that should be enough to tip the scales in that direction.
An extra Teferi is just free early, as the first can draw the second.
Looking at it, I think a second legendary Teferi is infinite.
As we can use his draw to be a new draw trigger and can get a fresh one in play for free during the stage combo. (Making the teardown part of the combo infinite.)
Wait we can't cast Teferi without actually drawing him can we?
Hmm, I think we need to spend a draw to get Teferi back. This might be more promising than I thought.
This does mean that all of our Teferi draws are just redrawing the other Teferi. So they are not improving the storm count in the meantime.
So we roughly get an activation every time the stack is empty, rather than for each red mana. So this gives us actually a lot more Teferi activations as we go through the combo. At least until we run out of mountains.
I'm not sure if it makes up for being down a mountain.
How much more often is the stack empty?
Well, once we gain a bunch of life from the enrage. We get an empty stack for each 2 life we have, We can also get activations in the teardown part of the combo.
We get as many activations as we have storm count, roughly? The final teardown has size equal to the storm count so far.
Which is gonna be about the same as we can make red mana from the last mountain.
I'm just coming to the same conclusion as Deedlit, I think a second Teferi doesn't change the estimate? But because it's storm count is updated later than the mountain's it is slightly worse?
I'm only like 58% certain though.
Edit: Deedlit, mentioned killing with banefire, and after thinking it over it is slightly better to use the last copy of banefire (the final original) to kill as opposed to the enrage trigger because we can't get that to more than three. Most of the damage still comes from Angrath's Marauders doublings though so this won't change the estimate.
Edit2: Yeah, second Teferi is worse, we get storm @ 23 tapped mountains and 3 life extra teferi activations. As opposed to storm at 23 tapped mountains and 1 life teferi activations from an extra mountain. (before or after the last Gaea's blessing) We get an extra stage combo worth of storm with the mountain.
If a second Teferi can be even slightly more useful (the -3 can tuck the elephant? Is that actually useful?) then it is worth it. (If we were counting actual storm vs TYS storm...)
we only will have an empty stack and life when the last enrage trigger for a given batch of banfire has fully resolved. the good thing is that the way these systems update the last amount of life will dwarf all other amounts by many many stages worth of growth. so yeah it won't happen too to often but it will be many many teferi activation's. also just inherently each mountain is worth only 1 tap after the first 2 red sources. if we look at each actual mountain it only adds 1 taps worth of red mana(which will be our storm count at the time it happens) once. all the extra untaps with teferi don't care how many mountains we have. i think teferi #2 is better than a mountain for 3 reasons. 1 adding another mountain is addition and nothing else. it is at the 2nd highest level of our combo and will be powerful inherently but it's still just addition. 2 the number of taps we get from mountains is far more influenced by the amount of teferi triggers than it is the raw number of mountains, so i think teferi is higher up the proverbial food chain than number of mountain in terms of strength of card slot. 3 adding a 2nd teferi means we can create a layer like structure to our extended combo. basically the more steps we can create from goal to start more or less gives us more layers of growth. so in this chain more mountains gets us more red mana. adding the first teferi gets us basically more mountains. adding another teferi doesn't just get us more mountains, it gets us more teferi activation which is again more mountains. so mountain is layer 1, teferi 1 is layer 2 and teferi 2 is layer 3.
another thing relating to the pay off is that while we are activating teferi relatively low in the chain, his pay off happens at the very top. we won't start getting any use from these activation's until we have already used up our base amount of our mountains. while it may seem that the timing of these actions is the only reason this occurs just remember i'm quite sure untapping 2 lands on the spot would just go infinite. so we can only use this because of it timing restrictions. it would be too good otherwise. fwiw i think teferi 2 is worth it but i'm not sure copies 3 and or 4 would be as they don't add layers like a 2nd one does.
basically adding teferi 2 costs us some combo amount pre end step(1 tapping of a mountain), but makes layers/stages worth of that same action once we get to the end step. so -x early to get x^x later on.
edit: if we prioritize making extra mana whenever possible banefire as the kill could be quite potent. so if we make another copy of gideon at some point we can make marwyn not die to the wrath's and then we can point all buffs and untaps at her(that we don't need for other reasons). also if we do this each time we play llanowar elf she will get a small buff. she will get very very large(possibly even scaling as fast as our red mana production). we will lose this mana as we transition into the end step but we won't lose her size which can again just go into mana making overdrive once in the end step portions of the combo. the final blow can be all excess mana generated funneled into a huge banefire at their face. then do the combo until the copies are used up and max out on our marauder's and hit them awfully hard.
basically adding teferi 2 costs us some combo amount pre end step(1 tapping of a mountain), but makes layers/stages worth of that same action once we get to the end step. so -x early to get x^x later on.
Tapping the last mountain happens after the teferi shenanigans would, so its more like +x^x early for -x later, which is why this is difficult, tapping a mountain in main 2 also gets us teferi activations. So the question is, are there more total times the stack is empty or the storm count before tapping the last mountain?
And I think the answer is storm count, though it is close.
As to your points:
1. an extra mountain is not addition but iteration. We get to do the whole combo all over again, but much much more potently as the last mountain makes much more red than the previous one.
2. True. this is about optimizing the number of teferi triggers when we go to the end step.
3. Kind of true, its not worth a layer because its an action we take inside another layer. We have this interesting interaction where mountains make increasingly more teferi triggers, until the end step where those triggers untap mountains.
Storm count before tapping the last mountain is 3 -> 3 -> 25 -> 5
Number of times the stack is empty is also 3 -> 3 -> 25 -> 5, but is slightly smaller because its mostly from the last casting of Gaea's Blessing, instead of after that.
so i don't understand the math quite well enough to write out what this looks like but we have an additional 2 times the stack is clear and not tied to banefire castings. 1st will be when we use our initial starting life to make stages and the 2nd will be after combat when we refresh that life total again. its not a ton but it is 16+20 life worth of empty stack(18 times).
we don't actually need to use any mountain taps up pre combat. we can get our dino to 19 power via buffs and we can make all copies of radha without needing to use any red mana. for the mountain v teferi debate we can save all of our tapping until have used all initial life up and converted it into storm, which helps the mountain's argument as this means we can delay using them until higher storm counts.
another thing is that each teferi untap is 2 sources and not just one. not sure that changes the math at all but 2 iterations should be stronger than 1 i would think, although the scale of that difference might get lost in the math.
edit: as far as the banefire finish i think its way better actually. mawmyr's power will be tied to our storm count. it will actually be even higher than that. we will be using quasi to make enough blue mana to keep our combo running but the extra copies can make more llan elves. this will mean she will be growing at 9x our storm count per reshuffle(7x on just buffs and 2x(1 for counter, 1 for them tapping) for the elves). also we will be getting 1x number of untaps too.
edit: this making of mana would really only up the stating number from 3 to our storm count, but that isn't even our final storm number. it's our storm when we cast the final banefire. so its x(2^y) as our final damage where x is our BF casting storm plus buff modifiers and untaps and Y is our final storm count. you guys are much better at putting numbers(or at least representations of functions) on the x and y but it should be roughly this on the final hit
At this scale the extra ~20 Teferi activations are insignificant. The bulk of them come from the 'teardown' part of the last stage before going to end step, which has size equal to the storm count for the last Gaea's Blessing we cast.
Yeah I don't use any mountains precombat, that's all in my 247 writeup. However this neither helps or hurts mountains vs Teferi, as they are essentially the same until the end of the 23rd mountain. (Teferi is cast and draws itself a bunch but far less than at the end, and it doesn't impact the combo at all).
And 2 is better than 1, but it doesn't change the math, we would need to be able to untap more mountains than we can fit in the deck all at once (Say by making token copies and if teferi triggers were "all lands" like Wilderness Reclamation) to change it. We can only copy lands by making them creatures, so Gift of Growth isn't safe and we'd have to delay a turn. (or find a line to go off turn 3 without Gift of Growth.)
Edit: Thinking about animating lands, swapping a locket for a boros one allows us to do the stage combo with either Nova or Angrath's Rampage. But only Angrath's rampage lets us sacrifice Sylvan Awakening lands, and only Nova lets us reshuffle. Is there maybe something there? (AR also costs 2 life to Ionize)
so i agree that the stack will be fully open only when we finish a batch of banefire resolutions, but that doesn't quite equate to the number of teferi activation's. that number is tied to how much life we have(divided by 2)when we get to that open stack. this will happen after each casting of a banefire, after the stack clears. we will be getting 3x life and can convert that into (3/2)x teferi activation's for each casting of banfire. this is true with 2 teferi if we can only get 1 activation per 2 life loop iteration. it might be 2 tho and i'm just missing something. again not sure this changes the math
edit: i'm pretty sure teferi is worse. we stop being able to update the amount of teferi activation's once we get into end step. the end step is where we will be doing our largest scaling so giving up a layer(iteration?) of mountains is probably far worse than being able to get more teferi activation's but only for part of our combo. yeah i think 1 teferi is correct.
No, we can get more Teferi activations than that with 2 Teferis. Its not just every time we would cast Blessing on an open stack.
Its every time we squeeze more storm out of the combo by doing unprofitable stages. Each one of those involves an empty stack and a reshuffle that we can redraw Teferi with.
We can do that for as much white as we have, and we make white equal to the storm count for the last Gaea's blessing (23 tapped mountains and 3 life).
However that number is much smaller than the storm after resolving all of those blessings and doing the stage combo with that many layers.
That storm is the amount of R the 24th mountain would tap for. and each Red gives a single teferi activation with 1 teferi.
So even though we can activate teferi more often if we have 2 of them, with an extra mountain, we get more total activations.
Edit: uggh the banefire kill means we technically need to optimize how much green we can make in the end step.
We can make a nonlegendary marwyn and then quasiduplicate it. We can even make some of the tokens indestructable. Because of wizardifying everything, each one triggers the others based on how many Nabans we have which we can also make a lot of with the same trick.
I am not at all sure about the optimal progression of those two, I think we want as many Nabans as possible first?
We can also make a legendary token and recast the original for each Garna trigger (also a wizard).
Well Garna can also use the same trick,
... OOPS, this is infinite.
Cast garna, in response to the trigger, quasiduplicate both Garna and Marwyn.
Return both to hand with Garna's trigger.
Cast both, marwyn token gets +1/+1.
Return both to hand with Garna's trigger.
Repeat.
Back to Samut, Tyrant smasher I guess. Costing us a draw early. Or Regisaur Alpha costing us some purifies to reset the Arcane Adaptation might be better.
Edit: Wait, after a Purify Nova, we won't have Arcane Adaptation on the battlefield, so I don't know how we can retrieve it with Tragic Poet. So maybe Regisaur Alpha doesn't work.
You should be fine. Your combo isn’t infinite. You can’t keep casting quasiduplicate as after casting it will go to yard.
Also it doesn’t make sense to make more than 1 marwyn. We get the most value untapping only 1 huge one. Even if they survive the wraths they don’t untap. The best way to use each untap is always on the largest(after we make the needed other mana to continue combining of course). We can short cut the arcane adaptation nonsense by just making a bunch of llan elves. This will give give a solid boost to marwyn and also makes 1 mana on their own allowing a sort of double dipping on efficiency. Maybe there is room for more trigger makers but remember we need a Gideon activation per unit we want to survive the wraths. We are restricted on when we can do this and tbh at best we are getting 1 Gideon to use per reshuffle. If we do spark double stuff with Gideon the spark double is stuck in play. We can’t legend rule it and we can’t kill it with damage. Maybe we could tuck it with teferi but again timing is super awkward and we give up a teferi activation to do it.
Edit: extra copies of marwyn would be better than elves(they all get made and trigger each other, then we tap them, then they die to a wrath). The proper use would be to make the original unkillable, then make 1 non legendary unkillable. We will actually not tap this one at all until the very end. It will store up counters as a progress retainer we can use at the end as one final tap.
Edit: ugh, no that’s not quite right either. So we make 1 non legendary unkillable and this will be the one we untap. We then make 1 also unkillable we don’t tap. Neither of these should be the actual marwyn card. That we want to kill so we can redraw and recast it. Getting an extra cast/enter trigger each reshuffle. Small but i think that’s the optimized play with just marwyn anyway.
Edit: ugh again lol. I think the combo is infinite. We at some point make an wrath proof copy of garna(and any other legendary creature we want to infinitely recur). Now we cast actual garna from hard. We let the actual card die to state based legend rule and then retrieve it with its own trigger. If this works timing wise we do need to replace garna. Hopefully this doesn’t mess up the mending stage you guys ended up settling on.
I think this means we need to spark double Teferi to get an extra draw, but if spark double is a teferi, we cant kill it without spending red, which we can't make efficiently without spark double, this leads to either a very inefficient attack step or a very sad mountain tap.
So can someone do a mini mock up of how the mending stage is built and works? I just want to make sure it works without garna. I can’t wrap my head around it working without garna but I could be missing something. Edit: I don’t need a full explanation just if garna is needed I guess.
If it doesn’t then we probably need to go back to the Sphinx build. While this is a loss, we do pick up the added storm count generation quasi+Sphinx gives us. We lose a mountain but we pick up a compounder inside the stage loops.
This also means our green mana generation will be almost sticky tied to gift of growth resolutions. I think that’s pretty minor as each quasi resolution will be an entire reshuffle once we have a wrath to set them off, and each of those let’s us recast gift of growth again.
Also yeah we may need to use up our first life/draw tower to just be used as primarily a set up to get the combo set up optimized before starting another life/draw tower and really “going off”.
Yeah losing Garna definitely makes the stage a bit more awkward.
We have to use The Mending as our regrowth effect as well as our reshuffler. But not bad enough that we need to lose a mountain.
Purifies are easy, they kill the Mending so we can get it back with poet, this is the same.
Wraths are trickier, we need to save the TMoD from the previous purify for the wrath. This is the same way we save the reshuffle for a wrath we just countered, except now we have to let one resolve before reshuffling, which is fine.
What is tricky is the setup. I'd like to be able to cast purify before the first Gaea's Blessing.
I'm now thinking that delaying the locket is probably the card to leave out for Samut. We are down 2 white but otherwise pretty much the same as in the 247 line. Now unfortunately, one of the draw triggers will need to be the locket to get us the initial white. but it just means that there are 59 alternating purifies instead of 60. which isn't great but much better than tapping a mountain early.
Ok so it looks like losing garna isn’t catastrophic which is good news.
As far as set up vs just going straight into the stage end of things, don’t we want to make some indestructible creatures first? This makes things awkward as Gideon is currently our only way to do this. We will get max 2 activations(1 original, 1 quasi copy) and I don’t think with our current list/set up we will be able to have access to using his ability until our first stage has already happened. This is awkward as we won’t be able to save marwyn or have a copy of poet to quasi easily.
@FortyTwo: I just noticed your edit concerning adding Angrath's Rampage. That would be killer if we could do so, so it might be worth investigating again. If Angrath's Ramage is the spell that can get rid of lands, then maybe it should be the "higher" stage (higher of course meaning lower on the stack, as usual). We can eliminate artifacts with Cleansing Nova, so perhaps sacrificing planeswalkers could be the other thing that AR does. I think we had an idea of using Interplanar Beacon, so that recycling planeswalkers could give us life. I think the issue we had was how to recycle the planeswalker though. Anyway, I think it's worth thinking about, let's throw out any ideas that anyone comes up with!
Yeah,it would be great but I just can't seem to find a way to make it work. AR has to be higher than nova as it cant be ionized and the only other viable counterspells for it (Siren Stormtamer) also counters Gaea's blessing.
Ideally the AR stage outputs a bunch of white mana to feed into the nova stage cleanly. So something like plains is the obvious first idea. But that goes infinite with both Quasiduplicate and Gift of Growth. And we need at least one of those to make enough mana for the combo.
A guildgate makes Quasiduplicate safe, but has other problems, namely that we need to untap it each time we want to use it, and there's not really a good way to do that.
Gift of Growth is almost assuredly not safe with any lands that tap for value.
The only way to make quasiduplicate safe is if the land ETBs tapped or can't be quasiduplicated for some other reason.
I had been thinking about the Ixalan flip lands, but if we copy those we still get the flipped land, so boo to that. (Side note: Primal amulets are slightly better than mountains in the current deck)
So, it doesn't look like we can output mana without opening up infinites.
Which leaves us with outputting life:
The issue here is that this stage is also limited by life via ionize if it could be limited by some other resource, (red mana?) .
hmm, so don't know if this helps(also it might go infinite, not sure yet) but i found a cool series of cards that might be really interesting.
so i've always had squee, the immortal and azor's gateway in the back of my head as something to maybe jam in here but it never really made sense. after realizing a few things about the current deck and a bit of digging i found another card to pair with them that might be really interesting; hijack.
so how this would work is we target gateway with hijack many times. this gives us the ability to tap, draw a card then discard(edit: exile) squee. we then pay RR (the 1 is irrelevant, we will have plenty of green to do this) and cast squee into play. now we need squee in our hand to repeat. that's ok we can do some nova/mending stuff here to get squee back into the deck w/ impluse in the deck as well. we cast impulse getting squee and the rest of our creatures into hand. now we let another hijack resolve and repeat. as long as nothing in this process makes red mana we can't keep doing it infinitely. we may have an issue being able to make lots of extra white, but i can't think of a direct problem just yet.
i also realized that we are actually pretty close to easily removing 5 cards from our deck to meet the gateway flip clause without really giving up much value. hijack can't target the land after it flips so that isn't a problem. still our only way to untap lands is teferi and we can use him as one of our perma exile's to gateway as we transition into the end step where teferi is no longer useful. this means we can let all 3 walkers go to exile, then emergence zone, and then 1 more card of our choice and gateway flips for us to use with teferi triggers. i know we need to have a walker just to hit with enrage triggers(that can take damage) but i think we can make that work with spark double as long as we prep properly for it.
this would allow us to convert red->white mana(also green blue or black) and also red mana into draws with out needing to use life. maybe this causes issues, but i thought i could at least bring it to the light here and see if it can do something.
edit: shoot, pretty sure mending/nova stuff will need to kill the gateway .... nuts. still it's something to look at, maybe?
Hmm, Hijack is interesting, I think if we use Gaea's Blessing to draw hijack instead of Nova we can make a bunch of white cheaply, but then we can sac the lockets to redraw hijack and we have the Warlord's Fury issue all over again. (We really need a mono white mana rock that can't draw cards... )
I'm not sure Squee is how we want to be spending red though, RR is a lot more expensive than our current card draw cost (2 life / storm count).
Moving life later is maybe a possibility, but its harder to turn life into red mana than red mana into life. (red into card draw isn't bad.)
As for flipping the gateway, We can do this (I was thinking Voltaic Servant), but two mountains ended up being better. Even if we can flip it for free, the way things are set up right now, we'd still be tapping it while we are at one life because the storm count will be much higher for every 2 life we pay.
Edit: also as for killing the gateway, that's not an issue, as we can get any artifact with one of the many excess Elephant triggers from Naban.
hmmm, the lands idea i find pretty interesting. only thing i've found that's even close is primal amulet and then the bedazzle half of bedazzle//bedeck. bedazzle is good because it can't hit basics(which would go very infinite with grow from ashes). i still think this might go infinite but it's not obvious, so maybe it doesn't. we need red or black mana or using up a draw to make this work at all. bedazzle also let's us kill off walkers to replay as the damage to target walker clause should try to resolve even if the land is invalid (from being destroyed). might be something.
edit: pretty sure it's infinite. we can make a lot of red mana, blow it up. then make a lot of black mana, blow it up. then make a lot of white mana. use up all the white making storm, then use up some red and black to make a lot more white, then as we get low on red or black just go back and repeat ... using lands is really hard to not go infinite *sigh*
edit: would 4 primal amulets be better than 4 mountains? we should be able to get them(1 at a time) with elephants with blessing shuffle on the stack from mending, so we wouldn't have to use up draws to get them into our hand .... also with taps/untaps they are strictly better than mountain's ...
The Bedeck half can also kill creatures which is very dangerous to introduce. Fortunately its color requirements are enough to be fine.
Only killing nonbasics is interesting, we can get a lot of land drops with Wayward Swordtooth, But it seems like any current way to recycle lands like that is likely infinite in the way you outlined.
And yes I do think for the current deck 4 amulets should come in over 4 mountains, they are just slightly better.
Another thought is using hijack with Treasure Map.
Treasure Cove looks safe to both Quasiduplicate and Gift of Growth.
However, treasure map only makes 3 treasures per transformation, but the land copies can use them to draw cards instead.
So we can flip treasure map, make it a creature with Sylvan awakening, make an untapped copy with Quasiduplicate, sacrifice the real one to Angrath's Rampage, then return it with Elephant, the sac the elephant to the next Rampage, Netting a treasure per 2 Angrath's Rampage = creature (we need use one to redraw the Hijack, and one to kick the elephant)... We can reshuffle with Millstone, requiring either the Nova stage or an artifact Rampage.
hmm, this seems like a complicated way to spin our wheels...
until we can find a better way to limit our color production i think hijack is too good.
another interesting interaction with primal amulet is that depending on how we can layer our casting of spells we might be able to use amulet as a cost reducer until we need to flip them. so the charge counters that flip amulet are put on with triggers, which means we can respond to them. this means we can have some amulets in play cast a spell, then respond to the charge counter trigger(similar to blessing and TYS we already do) by casting another spell and responding again, and then again, and so on. we can do this a have our final spell(s) cast resolve in a manner that kills the amulets without flipping them, even if we have cast more than 4 triggering spells that would normally flip them. then we can get them back with excess elephant triggers, cast them and go again. this isn't a huge deal, and it may mess up our spell stacks too much, but it is a way to optimize mana use/conservation. this wasn't a big deal when we killed with the enrage trigger but with banefire if we can conserve mana we should.
i'm looking into land stuff but it's really tough to not go infinite. spreading rot is a possibility but we'd have to eliminate grow from ashes to not go infinite and i don't know if we'd have a good way to get our lands into play at that point.
hmmm, what happens if we just switch all the lands to shock lands? this bottle necks us on land/life as even the ability to play infinite lands it would require infinite life to get mana from them. it also slows our start as we'd be at 14 life pretty quickly near the start of t3. we'd have to really limit what colors our lands could tap for ... pretty sure this would require pulling the amulets out ... and then grow from ashes is not needed ..... but we might be able use this to move our restrictions/bottlenecks around to make interesting things happen.
Hmm, Spreading Rot won't go infinite so long as we put life above (i.e. more scarce than) mana, which I think would be the point of having Spreading Rot in the first place. Same with shocklands. So the question is, can we get more layers by putting mana before life?
So, we have to figure out how we transition from tapping lands to generating stages. The obvious way is to have lands that tap for white mana. So, with a lot of Nikyas in play, we can tap a land to generate a lot of white mana, then use that white mana to execute a stage. Then we can recycle the land at the cost of 2 life. So each 2 life gets us one stage. The problem is, that is the same as what we got with Ionize, and with Ionize we didn't have to give up lands for further up the chain. So this is strictly worse.
There may be something we can make of switching up life and lands, but we have to get more out of lands than tapping for white mana.
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@J_kibbs: Okay, I guess I should explain how much a cheaper Teferi would gain us. In the current deck, we can get our TYS count to more than 3 -> 3 -> 1 -> 5 before we generate any red mana, but it looks like we don't reach 3 -> 3 -> 2 -> 5. We can then create a bunch of Grand Warlord Radhas and attack with everything, generating a lot more than 3 -> 3 -> 1 -> 5 red mana, by spending the red mana for Banefires, we can increase our count to more than 3 -> 3 -> 2 -> 5, but less than 3 -> 3 -> 3 -> 5. Similarly, each Mountain we tap with a lot of Nikyas in play can increase the third number in the estimation by one. So after 23 Mountains are tapped, our TYS count goes to between 3 -> 3 -> 25 -> 5 and 3 -> 3 -> 26 -> 5. This allows us to cast Quasiduplicate and create more than 3 -> 3 -> 25 -> 5 Nikyas, so our 24th Mountain generates more than 3 -> 3 -> 25 -> 5 red mana. We can then turn that red mana into Teferi activations on a one-for-one basis, so we get more than 3 -> 3 -> 25 -> 5 Teferi activations in the end. We can also use those Banefires to increase our TYS count to more than 3 -> 3 -> 26 -> 5, but that is insignificant; it's the Teferi activations that will do the heavy lifting. So in the end step, we can untap Mountains more than 3 -> 3 -> 25 -> 5 times, each time allowing us to tap the Mountain for red mana and increase the third number by one, so we wind up with a TYS count of more than 3 -> 3 -> (3 -> 3 -> 25 -> 5) -> 5 in the end, allowing us to generate that much green mana and Banefire for more than that much damage. (Remembering to save the last red mana for that Banefire, of course)
Now, if we can get many Teferi activations for a red mana, then we could use that final Mountain to increase our TYS count, until we could use the final red mana to generate more than 3 -> 3 -> 26 -> 5 Teferi activations. So the 25 would become a 26. Of course, if we had to spend a card slot to get a cheap Teferi activation, then we would have to give up a Mountain, so the 26 would go back down to 25. So for example, it looks like a second Teferi does not go infinite (we can use one Teferi to draw the other, and play it to put the original Teferi in the graveyard. But, we would still need to spend resources to move that Teferi from the graveyard to the library, so it doesn't look like we could do that forever.), and allows us to get many Teferi activations cheaply, so we would also get 3 -> 3 -> (3 -> 3 -> 25 -> 5) -> 5 with a second Teferi. It's hard to pick between the two, but I suspect that 24 Mountain version might do a touch more damage - we can fully run the combo all the way through the 23rd Mountain in that version, whereas in the 23 Mountain version, our number of Teferi activations would be based on the TYS count _prior_ to the very last Gaea's Blessing that we cast while spending the 23rd Mountain's mana. So that is smaller by an absolutely infitesimal amount, but it does look like the 24 Mountain version ekes out ahead.
Also, I agree with FortyTwo that we want to delay the tapping of each Mountain as long as possible, to generate the largest possible TYS count and create the most Nikyas. Grand Warlord Radha should go first; once you get that early lead, the difference will keep increasing as we continue the combo, so getting the advantage as early as possible is best.
Edit: Eh, my reasoning for going with 24 Mountains and one Teferi is not compelling. That minute difference will only matter if everything else is the same up to that point; if there is even a little bit of gain we can get earlier by having two Teferis, that should be enough to tip the scales in that direction.
Looking at it, I think a second legendary Teferi is infinite.
As we can use his draw to be a new draw trigger and can get a fresh one in play for free during the stage combo. (Making the teardown part of the combo infinite.)
Wait we can't cast Teferi without actually drawing him can we?
Hmm, I think we need to spend a draw to get Teferi back. This might be more promising than I thought.
This does mean that all of our Teferi draws are just redrawing the other Teferi. So they are not improving the storm count in the meantime.
So we roughly get an activation every time the stack is empty, rather than for each red mana. So this gives us actually a lot more Teferi activations as we go through the combo. At least until we run out of mountains.
I'm not sure if it makes up for being down a mountain.
How much more often is the stack empty?
Well, once we gain a bunch of life from the enrage. We get an empty stack for each 2 life we have, We can also get activations in the teardown part of the combo.
We get as many activations as we have storm count, roughly? The final teardown has size equal to the storm count so far.
Which is gonna be about the same as we can make red mana from the last mountain.
I'm just coming to the same conclusion as Deedlit, I think a second Teferi doesn't change the estimate? But because it's storm count is updated later than the mountain's it is slightly worse?
I'm only like 58% certain though.
Edit: Deedlit, mentioned killing with banefire, and after thinking it over it is slightly better to use the last copy of banefire (the final original) to kill as opposed to the enrage trigger because we can't get that to more than three. Most of the damage still comes from Angrath's Marauders doublings though so this won't change the estimate.
Edit2: Yeah, second Teferi is worse, we get storm @ 23 tapped mountains and 3 life extra teferi activations. As opposed to storm at 23 tapped mountains and 1 life teferi activations from an extra mountain. (before or after the last Gaea's blessing) We get an extra stage combo worth of storm with the mountain.
If a second Teferi can be even slightly more useful (the -3 can tuck the elephant? Is that actually useful?) then it is worth it. (If we were counting actual storm vs TYS storm...)
another thing relating to the pay off is that while we are activating teferi relatively low in the chain, his pay off happens at the very top. we won't start getting any use from these activation's until we have already used up our base amount of our mountains. while it may seem that the timing of these actions is the only reason this occurs just remember i'm quite sure untapping 2 lands on the spot would just go infinite. so we can only use this because of it timing restrictions. it would be too good otherwise. fwiw i think teferi 2 is worth it but i'm not sure copies 3 and or 4 would be as they don't add layers like a 2nd one does.
basically adding teferi 2 costs us some combo amount pre end step(1 tapping of a mountain), but makes layers/stages worth of that same action once we get to the end step. so -x early to get x^x later on.
edit: if we prioritize making extra mana whenever possible banefire as the kill could be quite potent. so if we make another copy of gideon at some point we can make marwyn not die to the wrath's and then we can point all buffs and untaps at her(that we don't need for other reasons). also if we do this each time we play llanowar elf she will get a small buff. she will get very very large(possibly even scaling as fast as our red mana production). we will lose this mana as we transition into the end step but we won't lose her size which can again just go into mana making overdrive once in the end step portions of the combo. the final blow can be all excess mana generated funneled into a huge banefire at their face. then do the combo until the copies are used up and max out on our marauder's and hit them awfully hard.
Tapping the last mountain happens after the teferi shenanigans would, so its more like +x^x early for -x later, which is why this is difficult, tapping a mountain in main 2 also gets us teferi activations. So the question is, are there more total times the stack is empty or the storm count before tapping the last mountain?
And I think the answer is storm count, though it is close.
As to your points:
1. an extra mountain is not addition but iteration. We get to do the whole combo all over again, but much much more potently as the last mountain makes much more red than the previous one.
2. True. this is about optimizing the number of teferi triggers when we go to the end step.
3. Kind of true, its not worth a layer because its an action we take inside another layer. We have this interesting interaction where mountains make increasingly more teferi triggers, until the end step where those triggers untap mountains.
Storm count before tapping the last mountain is 3 -> 3 -> 25 -> 5
Number of times the stack is empty is also 3 -> 3 -> 25 -> 5, but is slightly smaller because its mostly from the last casting of Gaea's Blessing, instead of after that.
we don't actually need to use any mountain taps up pre combat. we can get our dino to 19 power via buffs and we can make all copies of radha without needing to use any red mana. for the mountain v teferi debate we can save all of our tapping until have used all initial life up and converted it into storm, which helps the mountain's argument as this means we can delay using them until higher storm counts.
another thing is that each teferi untap is 2 sources and not just one. not sure that changes the math at all but 2 iterations should be stronger than 1 i would think, although the scale of that difference might get lost in the math.
edit: as far as the banefire finish i think its way better actually. mawmyr's power will be tied to our storm count. it will actually be even higher than that. we will be using quasi to make enough blue mana to keep our combo running but the extra copies can make more llan elves. this will mean she will be growing at 9x our storm count per reshuffle(7x on just buffs and 2x(1 for counter, 1 for them tapping) for the elves). also we will be getting 1x number of untaps too.
edit: this making of mana would really only up the stating number from 3 to our storm count, but that isn't even our final storm number. it's our storm when we cast the final banefire. so its x(2^y) as our final damage where x is our BF casting storm plus buff modifiers and untaps and Y is our final storm count. you guys are much better at putting numbers(or at least representations of functions) on the x and y but it should be roughly this on the final hit
Yeah I don't use any mountains precombat, that's all in my 247 writeup. However this neither helps or hurts mountains vs Teferi, as they are essentially the same until the end of the 23rd mountain. (Teferi is cast and draws itself a bunch but far less than at the end, and it doesn't impact the combo at all).
And 2 is better than 1, but it doesn't change the math, we would need to be able to untap more mountains than we can fit in the deck all at once (Say by making token copies and if teferi triggers were "all lands" like Wilderness Reclamation) to change it. We can only copy lands by making them creatures, so Gift of Growth isn't safe and we'd have to delay a turn. (or find a line to go off turn 3 without Gift of Growth.)
Edit: Thinking about animating lands, swapping a locket for a boros one allows us to do the stage combo with either Nova or Angrath's Rampage. But only Angrath's rampage lets us sacrifice Sylvan Awakening lands, and only Nova lets us reshuffle. Is there maybe something there? (AR also costs 2 life to Ionize)
edit: i'm pretty sure teferi is worse. we stop being able to update the amount of teferi activation's once we get into end step. the end step is where we will be doing our largest scaling so giving up a layer(iteration?) of mountains is probably far worse than being able to get more teferi activation's but only for part of our combo. yeah i think 1 teferi is correct.
Its every time we squeeze more storm out of the combo by doing unprofitable stages. Each one of those involves an empty stack and a reshuffle that we can redraw Teferi with.
We can do that for as much white as we have, and we make white equal to the storm count for the last Gaea's blessing (23 tapped mountains and 3 life).
However that number is much smaller than the storm after resolving all of those blessings and doing the stage combo with that many layers.
That storm is the amount of R the 24th mountain would tap for. and each Red gives a single teferi activation with 1 teferi.
So even though we can activate teferi more often if we have 2 of them, with an extra mountain, we get more total activations.
Edit: uggh the banefire kill means we technically need to optimize how much green we can make in the end step.
We can make a nonlegendary marwyn and then quasiduplicate it. We can even make some of the tokens indestructable. Because of wizardifying everything, each one triggers the others based on how many Nabans we have which we can also make a lot of with the same trick.
I am not at all sure about the optimal progression of those two, I think we want as many Nabans as possible first?
We can also make a legendary token and recast the original for each Garna trigger (also a wizard).
Well Garna can also use the same trick,
... OOPS, this is infinite.
Cast garna, in response to the trigger, quasiduplicate both Garna and Marwyn.
Return both to hand with Garna's trigger.
Cast both, marwyn token gets +1/+1.
Return both to hand with Garna's trigger.
Repeat.
Back to Samut, Tyrant smasher I guess. Costing us a draw early. Or Regisaur Alpha costing us some purifies to reset the Arcane Adaptation might be better.
Regisaur Alpha might be better, but we have to check how we go about changing around the Arcane Adaptations. We need to switch to Wizard each time we cast Excavation Elephant, then switch to Dinosaur so that we can tap our Tragic Poets, Marwyn, and Gyre Engineers.
Edit: Wait, after a Purify Nova, we won't have Arcane Adaptation on the battlefield, so I don't know how we can retrieve it with Tragic Poet. So maybe Regisaur Alpha doesn't work.
Also it doesn’t make sense to make more than 1 marwyn. We get the most value untapping only 1 huge one. Even if they survive the wraths they don’t untap. The best way to use each untap is always on the largest(after we make the needed other mana to continue combining of course). We can short cut the arcane adaptation nonsense by just making a bunch of llan elves. This will give give a solid boost to marwyn and also makes 1 mana on their own allowing a sort of double dipping on efficiency. Maybe there is room for more trigger makers but remember we need a Gideon activation per unit we want to survive the wraths. We are restricted on when we can do this and tbh at best we are getting 1 Gideon to use per reshuffle. If we do spark double stuff with Gideon the spark double is stuck in play. We can’t legend rule it and we can’t kill it with damage. Maybe we could tuck it with teferi but again timing is super awkward and we give up a teferi activation to do it.
Edit: extra copies of marwyn would be better than elves(they all get made and trigger each other, then we tap them, then they die to a wrath). The proper use would be to make the original unkillable, then make 1 non legendary unkillable. We will actually not tap this one at all until the very end. It will store up counters as a progress retainer we can use at the end as one final tap.
Edit: ugh, no that’s not quite right either. So we make 1 non legendary unkillable and this will be the one we untap. We then make 1 also unkillable we don’t tap. Neither of these should be the actual marwyn card. That we want to kill so we can redraw and recast it. Getting an extra cast/enter trigger each reshuffle. Small but i think that’s the optimized play with just marwyn anyway.
Edit: ugh again lol. I think the combo is infinite. We at some point make an wrath proof copy of garna(and any other legendary creature we want to infinitely recur). Now we cast actual garna from hard. We let the actual card die to state based legend rule and then retrieve it with its own trigger. If this works timing wise we do need to replace garna. Hopefully this doesn’t mess up the mending stage you guys ended up settling on.
We draw:
Emergence Zone, Thousand-Year Storm, Precognition Field These are 100% needed to combo
The Mending of Dominaria, less sure on this one, but I think its needed.
Cleansing Nova, Maybe not needed?
Ionize, Needed
Teferi, hero of Dominaria (into locket). Need to draw a locket to get started, and Teferi is free here.
I think this means we need to spark double Teferi to get an extra draw, but if spark double is a teferi, we cant kill it without spending red, which we can't make efficiently without spark double, this leads to either a very inefficient attack step or a very sad mountain tap.
I think we dont need nova, but our first gaea's blessing will be less efficient.
(With a storm more like 10 than 60+)
Edit: I think its more optimal to delay drawing the Mending?
If it doesn’t then we probably need to go back to the Sphinx build. While this is a loss, we do pick up the added storm count generation quasi+Sphinx gives us. We lose a mountain but we pick up a compounder inside the stage loops.
This also means our green mana generation will be almost sticky tied to gift of growth resolutions. I think that’s pretty minor as each quasi resolution will be an entire reshuffle once we have a wrath to set them off, and each of those let’s us recast gift of growth again.
Also yeah we may need to use up our first life/draw tower to just be used as primarily a set up to get the combo set up optimized before starting another life/draw tower and really “going off”.
We have to use The Mending as our regrowth effect as well as our reshuffler. But not bad enough that we need to lose a mountain.
Purifies are easy, they kill the Mending so we can get it back with poet, this is the same.
Wraths are trickier, we need to save the TMoD from the previous purify for the wrath. This is the same way we save the reshuffle for a wrath we just countered, except now we have to let one resolve before reshuffling, which is fine.
What is tricky is the setup. I'd like to be able to cast purify before the first Gaea's Blessing.
I'm now thinking that delaying the locket is probably the card to leave out for Samut. We are down 2 white but otherwise pretty much the same as in the 247 line. Now unfortunately, one of the draw triggers will need to be the locket to get us the initial white. but it just means that there are 59 alternating purifies instead of 60. which isn't great but much better than tapping a mountain early.
As far as set up vs just going straight into the stage end of things, don’t we want to make some indestructible creatures first? This makes things awkward as Gideon is currently our only way to do this. We will get max 2 activations(1 original, 1 quasi copy) and I don’t think with our current list/set up we will be able to have access to using his ability until our first stage has already happened. This is awkward as we won’t be able to save marwyn or have a copy of poet to quasi easily.
Resolving Purify then wrath is fine, but wrath then purify is where I'm having trouble. (TMoD is in play at the start)
Can we have the real poet in hand after the wrath? Well only if its in hand before the wrath.
Can we get poet in hand from the purify to wrath transition? Yes actually.
We can sacrifice the real one to get back say Arcane Adaptation in response to the reshuffle trigger from TMoD after the wrath.
So no need to use an early draw on gideon, we can wait until right before combat.
Ideally the AR stage outputs a bunch of white mana to feed into the nova stage cleanly. So something like plains is the obvious first idea. But that goes infinite with both Quasiduplicate and Gift of Growth. And we need at least one of those to make enough mana for the combo.
A guildgate makes Quasiduplicate safe, but has other problems, namely that we need to untap it each time we want to use it, and there's not really a good way to do that.
Gift of Growth is almost assuredly not safe with any lands that tap for value.
The only way to make quasiduplicate safe is if the land ETBs tapped or can't be quasiduplicated for some other reason.
I had been thinking about the Ixalan flip lands, but if we copy those we still get the flipped land, so boo to that. (Side note: Primal amulets are slightly better than mountains in the current deck)
So, it doesn't look like we can output mana without opening up infinites.
Which leaves us with outputting life:
The issue here is that this stage is also limited by life via ionize if it could be limited by some other resource, (red mana?) .
Interplanar beacon is clearly the best candidate here, though there is also Plaza of harmony
I haven't seen anything else for lands that look good for this (other than maybe the proliferate land Karn's Bastion)
so i've always had squee, the immortal and azor's gateway in the back of my head as something to maybe jam in here but it never really made sense. after realizing a few things about the current deck and a bit of digging i found another card to pair with them that might be really interesting; hijack.
so how this would work is we target gateway with hijack many times. this gives us the ability to tap, draw a card then discard(edit: exile) squee. we then pay RR (the 1 is irrelevant, we will have plenty of green to do this) and cast squee into play. now we need squee in our hand to repeat. that's ok we can do some nova/mending stuff here to get squee back into the deck w/ impluse in the deck as well. we cast impulse getting squee and the rest of our creatures into hand. now we let another hijack resolve and repeat. as long as nothing in this process makes red mana we can't keep doing it infinitely. we may have an issue being able to make lots of extra white, but i can't think of a direct problem just yet.
i also realized that we are actually pretty close to easily removing 5 cards from our deck to meet the gateway flip clause without really giving up much value. hijack can't target the land after it flips so that isn't a problem. still our only way to untap lands is teferi and we can use him as one of our perma exile's to gateway as we transition into the end step where teferi is no longer useful. this means we can let all 3 walkers go to exile, then emergence zone, and then 1 more card of our choice and gateway flips for us to use with teferi triggers. i know we need to have a walker just to hit with enrage triggers(that can take damage) but i think we can make that work with spark double as long as we prep properly for it.
this would allow us to convert red->white mana(also green blue or black) and also red mana into draws with out needing to use life. maybe this causes issues, but i thought i could at least bring it to the light here and see if it can do something.
edit: shoot, pretty sure mending/nova stuff will need to kill the gateway .... nuts. still it's something to look at, maybe?
I'm not sure Squee is how we want to be spending red though, RR is a lot more expensive than our current card draw cost (2 life / storm count).
Moving life later is maybe a possibility, but its harder to turn life into red mana than red mana into life. (red into card draw isn't bad.)
As for flipping the gateway, We can do this (I was thinking Voltaic Servant), but two mountains ended up being better. Even if we can flip it for free, the way things are set up right now, we'd still be tapping it while we are at one life because the storm count will be much higher for every 2 life we pay.
Edit: also as for killing the gateway, that's not an issue, as we can get any artifact with one of the many excess Elephant triggers from Naban.
edit: pretty sure it's infinite. we can make a lot of red mana, blow it up. then make a lot of black mana, blow it up. then make a lot of white mana. use up all the white making storm, then use up some red and black to make a lot more white, then as we get low on red or black just go back and repeat ... using lands is really hard to not go infinite *sigh*
edit: would 4 primal amulets be better than 4 mountains? we should be able to get them(1 at a time) with elephants with blessing shuffle on the stack from mending, so we wouldn't have to use up draws to get them into our hand .... also with taps/untaps they are strictly better than mountain's ...
Only killing nonbasics is interesting, we can get a lot of land drops with Wayward Swordtooth, But it seems like any current way to recycle lands like that is likely infinite in the way you outlined.
And yes I do think for the current deck 4 amulets should come in over 4 mountains, they are just slightly better.
Another thought is using hijack with Treasure Map.
Treasure Cove looks safe to both Quasiduplicate and Gift of Growth.
However, treasure map only makes 3 treasures per transformation, but the land copies can use them to draw cards instead.
So we can flip treasure map, make it a creature with Sylvan awakening, make an untapped copy with Quasiduplicate, sacrifice the real one to Angrath's Rampage, then return it with Elephant, the sac the elephant to the next Rampage, Netting a treasure per 2 Angrath's Rampage = creature (we need use one to redraw the Hijack, and one to kick the elephant)... We can reshuffle with Millstone, requiring either the Nova stage or an artifact Rampage.
hmm, this seems like a complicated way to spin our wheels...
another interesting interaction with primal amulet is that depending on how we can layer our casting of spells we might be able to use amulet as a cost reducer until we need to flip them. so the charge counters that flip amulet are put on with triggers, which means we can respond to them. this means we can have some amulets in play cast a spell, then respond to the charge counter trigger(similar to blessing and TYS we already do) by casting another spell and responding again, and then again, and so on. we can do this a have our final spell(s) cast resolve in a manner that kills the amulets without flipping them, even if we have cast more than 4 triggering spells that would normally flip them. then we can get them back with excess elephant triggers, cast them and go again. this isn't a huge deal, and it may mess up our spell stacks too much, but it is a way to optimize mana use/conservation. this wasn't a big deal when we killed with the enrage trigger but with banefire if we can conserve mana we should.
i'm looking into land stuff but it's really tough to not go infinite. spreading rot is a possibility but we'd have to eliminate grow from ashes to not go infinite and i don't know if we'd have a good way to get our lands into play at that point.
hmmm, what happens if we just switch all the lands to shock lands? this bottle necks us on land/life as even the ability to play infinite lands it would require infinite life to get mana from them. it also slows our start as we'd be at 14 life pretty quickly near the start of t3. we'd have to really limit what colors our lands could tap for ... pretty sure this would require pulling the amulets out ... and then grow from ashes is not needed ..... but we might be able use this to move our restrictions/bottlenecks around to make interesting things happen.
So, we have to figure out how we transition from tapping lands to generating stages. The obvious way is to have lands that tap for white mana. So, with a lot of Nikyas in play, we can tap a land to generate a lot of white mana, then use that white mana to execute a stage. Then we can recycle the land at the cost of 2 life. So each 2 life gets us one stage. The problem is, that is the same as what we got with Ionize, and with Ionize we didn't have to give up lands for further up the chain. So this is strictly worse.
There may be something we can make of switching up life and lands, but we have to get more out of lands than tapping for white mana.