Yeah I don't know if we can get it exactly perfect, having to save our first surveil is awkward. (And torch courier is so much worse than garna or even samut.)
Probably the best way to make our opponent make a bunch of guys is swapping a Thorn Lieutenant over and then giant growthing it a bunch.
Oh, I think that should work. So we don't need a Purify Nova at all - we just play Dowsing Dagger, giving our opponent two Plant creatures, and then using Switcheroo to switch one of them with Thorn Lieutenant. Then we can easily target it 55 times to create 55 more creatures on the opponent's side, and then Switcheroo over all the required creatures. So getting to 221 life is actually pretty easy now.
Hmm, I think its still a bit tricky as we need to make a token of the Snitch, give that copy indestructible (pump the original and sac Lena), then Wrath and surveil. (the rest of the life can be slurped up with Grasping Thrulls)
Then we can return the artifacts with Elephant, meaning one locket has to be in play to give us the initial W. (if we have Deadeye Quartermaster we can fetch the dagger for free here and save a white for after the first purify)
Then we exchange everything over, which we can actually really easily to do because Sphinx+Teysa is SO many reshuffles. (and Grasping Thrull them to 1 in the meantime)
Then one of the final wraths kills their sphinx and drains us to 1. And we can easily drain them back to go up to 221.
Yeah this seems like there's a good amount of leeway to get other things set up. Fortunately we don't need to maximize green mana early as we lose it when we go to combat. (we do want to maximize the number of Proliferators though so its still nontrivial.)
Edit: Hmm, it's probably profitable to Profane Procession precombat to proliferate prodigiously.
We could avoid having to make Whispering Snitch indestructible by waiting to cast it until after the Wrath Nova resolves.
Welp, we've spent a lot of time polishing this latest deck, but now I want to make a major overhaul.
So, what I want to do is to go back to Mox Amber and Golgari Findbroker. Last time we tried this, we discovered that it didn't work with Quasiduplicate, and I wasn't willing to give up Quasiduplicate back then. But I'm willing now.
What we gain: We can cast Gaea's Blessing, and get a lot of copies; each copy of Gaea's Blessing can draw Honor the God-Phaoroh, which we can cast to get a lot of copies: Each copy can draw Bedeck // Bedazzle, and we can cast Bedazzle to get a lot of copies; and each copy can destroy a nonbasic land, which we can refetch and tap to gain a white mana for our stage.
We do need some Tragic Poets. I think we can get away with just two, if we have both The Mending of Dominaria and Citywatch Sphinx. If this turns out to not be enough, we can add more Tragic Poets. We can also remove Citywatch Sphinx if it turns out not to reduce the number of Tragic Poets we need.
The first thing I noticed was that Squee is a red legend, and we cant let the mox tap for red so that cuts down on how many Azor's Gateway flips we can do.
Honor The God-Pharaoh seems risky with the start as it is a draw 2, but I don't immediately see a problem there. Seems like an improvement over Warlord's Fury.
The start with Finale instead of AI is awkward (I'm assuming samut for haste)
Without Quasiduplicate, we really don't gain much life. (which also means that Sanctum of the Sun isn't tapping for much red)
So I don't think you found a way for us to are reach ->7 yet.
Hmm I know u guys want to do it before the first ionize but I don’t think we need to. Thrull doesn’t care about the timing and snitch only cares about our(or our opponents) first surveil. Since we are using Sphinx more as a support card rather than the true engine of the stage we can very easily not use it until we can make the full life exchanges with snitch/thrull. It will require us missing a few(maybe 1 or 2) wrath resolutions that we could have used Sphinx’s for but that should be pretty minor in the long run. Unless missing 1-2 early wrath resolutions without sphinxes is worth more than the life we would gain in doing it this way, but I don’t think it will be as the life we gain builds entire stages not just a few surveil triggers.
Edit: sorry had just read through end of page 14. Didn’t realize 15 had even happened yet.
@FortyTwo: Oh right, we can't make a gajillion copies of Angrath's Marauders. Oh well. We could use The Flame of Keld, and find a way to keep proliferating it, but I don't think it's worth it; it would also increase the cost of our Ionizes, so we wouldn't gain more Ionizes that way. But, we can still gain a lot of life with a single Banefire, since we can gain 3 life per copy. So we still generate a lot of red mana with Sanctum of the Sun. I think we lose just one layer, dropping us to 3 -> 3 -> (3 -> 3 -> X -> 6) -> 6, which is better than our previous deck.
@J_kibbs: I found difficulty not using Citywatch Sphinx or Ionize in the beginning, it is a bit hard to get off the ground that way. Anyway, with Thorn Lieutenant we can easily get to the maximum 221 life, and Deadeye Quartermaster makes it easier still, so no worries.
Edit: So, I made some changes. First thing, we don't really need Bedeck // Bedazzle without having a lot of Nikyas to pump up our lands, Hijack will do just as well. We still need a card to destroy our Sanctum of the Suns, so we add Demolish.
I think we do need three Tragic Poets after all. I was thinking that we could just not fetch Omniscience most of the time, since we cast our spells from the library and fetch our creatures with Finale of Devastation. But, we need to cast Thousand-Year Storm, so we need Omniscience for that. I'm thinking with 3 Tragic Poets though we can do without Citywatch Sphinx.
I'm not sure what to do with the remaining card slot. We could add Citywatch Sphinx. But actually, we could add 4 Citywatch Sphinxes and exile them to Profane Procession.
Because the snitch/thrull drain is 'only' net multiplying our life by 4, it's most profitable to do ASAP so we gain more life from the enrage triggers.
We want to do it before the first Ionize because thats 2 life that could've been 8.
Edit: @deedlit: Aren't you gaining roughly the same amount of life as teferi untaps? I don't think that deck is an improvent to the Elephant version.
No, Teferi can be destroyed with every 2 Enrage triggers, but we can only activate it once per casting of Banefire, since it activates at sorcery speed. But we can gain life with each copy of Banefire.
Hmm with the list from 355 can’t u just use a draw to get hijack in hand then target mox amber with it? This nets your lots of red(squee) and lots of white(teferi) along with green and blue. Unless I’m missing something major I’m pretty sure this is an issue.
Even taking squee out though u still are able to net white mana which I believe let’s u continue the stage build infinitely.
Hmm actually it doesn’t. U aren’t using lockets so u have no way to convert white mana into draws. Getting lockets out of the deck feels like an upgrade. We do lose access to squee to do it but we might be able to replace him, maybe with something even better.
Karn, the great creator
I think we want 2 of him. It lets us do squee like things, while still being limited enough to not break it wide open. It works out nicely that your list only has 2 artifacts currently. It also works out conveniently that the one that makes mana will die if we use karn to animate it for attempted copying via replicate. With 2 artifacts we still net losing 1 card per profane procession flip(actually its 2 as we can’t exile mox here for the reason just mentioned about not being able to live as a creature). He also lets us get 2 cards back from gateway flips(nope only 1 here as I was thinking we could exile actual gateway to a copy, but we can’t flip a copy properly). Hmm the more I think about this, maybe it’s just not worth the slot(s)?
Ooh, Karn, the Great Creator is totally worth the slot! We can have four artifacts besides Azor's Gateway, then exile those four plus another card that we can't get back. That way we only lose one card each time we get a Sanctum of the Sun, so we can get 20+ of them before the end step. Nice find!
We have to be careful. At most we want 2 artifacts he can get back. If we go to 3 we go infinite on profane flips. We can add 1 more currently as mox can’t get exiled. We could add a few more 0 drop artifacts to make getting 4 back from gateway possible and still keeping profane flips safe. Not sure what we would have access to but this would be possible if the cards allow it.
Edit: gateway cares about cmc so I think we only get 1 more. Still 1 does make profane and gateway flips more profitable
Edit: we also have to be careful with karn/gateway as the combo of them effectively gives a free draw per time we can reset and use it(once per empty stack, I believe?). Not sure if this is an issue, but it is probably worth checking.
Edit: ugh, it might be too good. We draw a card off gateway and exile mox, then bring mox back to hand, then play mox making white ... well I guess we can’t reset karn without red so maybe this is ok? Maybe gives us an extra white mana per banefire(cast)?
We don't have Profane Procession, so that's okay. (Profane Procession isn't worth it since Tomb of the Dusk Rose only produces one mana.) So I believe we can have four artifacts of different CMCs, which will mean we only need one more card to exile to Azor's Gateway.
One of the artifacts will have to be Mox Amber; I'm thinking Helm of the Host could be another, since it could get us an token copy of something that we can exile - maybe Sun-Crowned Hunters.
Karn is really nice, we can even cut Hijack now that we can untap the gateway with Gift of Growth.
We only want the Findbroker to be able to return the mox right? trusty packbeast only gets an artifact so it should be more resilient to other infinites.
Helm of the Host seems pretty good.
Is Millstone a possibility?
Oh and since we dont have quasiduplicate we can go back to Garna and improve the start.
Re Garna: We still have replicate, which still goes infinite. Also even without quasi/replicate it gives us access to red off mox. Without hijack this might not be an issue anymore tho ...
Hmm deed, u initially mentioned not being willing to give up quasiduplicate, but isn’t replicate just the same thing? Do we need to cut replicate?
hmm, how are we giving haste early? it seems really difficult to get up to 10GG to turn on the finale as a haste granter without the red legends: Samut or Garna (Torch courier and Goblin Motivator maybe?)
@J_kibbs: Oh, that's a big whoops! Yes, there should be no creature copiers at all in the deck.
@FortyTwo: Torch Courier is certainly a possibility. It's nice that we have the plenty of card slots for things that will make the opening easier. Anyway, we get a Gift of Growth each time we get a Finale of Devastation, and the first copy of Gift of Growth gets us 10 green mana from Marwyn, and that keeps going up.
I went away from Helm of the Host, since Smothering Tithe is better than a Sanctum of the Sun if we have to tap it at the very beginning. If there is another way to gain red mana besides Smothering Tithe, we could go back to Helm of the Host.
We can exile 5 cards (Llanowar Elves, Marwyn, the Nurturer, Gift of Growth, Gideon Blackblade, and Demolish) besides the 24 extra cards, for 29 total. Along with the early red mana from Smothering Tithe, that takes us to more than 3 -> 3 -> (3 -> 3 -> 31 -> 6) -> 6.
I guess I like Golgari Findbroker, since it makes it a little easier to fetch Planeswalkers when we need them? But yeah, we should keep an eye out for infinities.
Edit: Concerning Millstone, I don't see how we recycle it, unless we add a Naban and an Arcane Adaptation, which seems like a waste of cards. I guess we could include it though, unless we find CMC 2 card helpers that we really like.
I wonder if we can somehow finagle Nikya of the Old ways in here as the only way to let mox Amber tap for red, but I don't quite see a way, as we can wrath and then cast whatever spells we want and then play nikya.
Edit: hmm, We can use Ritual of soot + packbeast as a wrath that doesn't hit nikya.
Hmm, not having the lockets means we have both red and black mana available for after the stage. Can we make two different sources for the red and the black mana? I suppose we could have Mountains for red mana and Sanctum of the Sun for black for instance. So, if we could spend black mana to destroy a land, or put a land on the battlefield, that could be worth something.
Hmm, we would have to get rid of Omniscience to force us to pay black for those cards. In addition to making the start much easier, Omniscience allows for drawing cards to get us a couple of layers, so that would be tough to give up.
Edit: We could also go the other way. If we found a way to spend red mana to recycle swamps or somehow else make black mana, we could spend the mana on Finale of Eternity, destroying Dreadhorde Butcher.
Hmm, is there any way to use Dreadhorde Butcher so that we get another layer over Sun-Crowned Hunters? Dreadhorde Butcher can gain us a lot more life when we destroy it with Finale of Eternity or Banefire, but we won't be able to target more copies with our other copies of the spell. We could retarget the spell with Bolt Bend - but that would allow us to retarget the target of Dreadhorde Butcher, so that we could refetch the Butcher and retarget the ability back to the Butcher. We could limit the lifelink by using Gideon Blackblade for the lifelink, but that would also limit us to one life gain per Banefire. (or two with Teysa Karlov, I guess)
Edit: Random thought - if we could make recycling Planeswalkers cheaper, then we could activate Tibalt, Rakish Instigator many times to create a lot of Devil tokens. Then a Banefire or Finale of Devastation can kill each of the tokens, and each token can kill off a Dreadhorde Butcher, where we keep pumping up Dreadhorde Butcher's power (say with God-Eternal Rhonas). That would gain us another layer, if only Tibalt wasn't a red planeswalker.
Edit: Hmm, maybe we can just switch to black mana alone, and allow red legendaries and planeswalkers. We also need to make recycling planeswalkers cheaper. It would be nice to make them not too cheap so that we can keep Teferi, but until then we can just remove Teferi.
can one of you post the sequencing for the stage in this one? just want to see how it works so it's easier see possible issues for me.
how are we actually doing damage with this version, at the end?
lastly, kinda ties to my first question/request, is finale of eternity an issue in the stage? it can get back anything once we get to high enough mana totals
edit: one more idea. it seems copiers are off limits but would saheeli, sublime artificer be ok? we should't get the copied body etb but it would allow copying of some variety. not sure it gains us much though
How are you not going infinite while Nova is also killing Dreadhorde butcher?
Oh, without Quasiduplicate, we only get one Gideon activation.
Also I'm not seeing what Finale of Eternity is doing? (Rules issue: each copy has the same number of targets, so it'll have to target indestructible creatures a lot. or it will fizzle)
Edit: Saheeli is interesting, we can use a servo to kill gideon via legend rule to get another activation. But probably a second copy of Gideon would be better for that. (and similarly with Mox Amber)
Probably the best way to make our opponent make a bunch of guys is swapping a Thorn Lieutenant over and then giant growthing it a bunch.
Then we can return the artifacts with Elephant, meaning one locket has to be in play to give us the initial W. (if we have Deadeye Quartermaster we can fetch the dagger for free here and save a white for after the first purify)
Then we exchange everything over, which we can actually really easily to do because Sphinx+Teysa is SO many reshuffles. (and Grasping Thrull them to 1 in the meantime)
Then one of the final wraths kills their sphinx and drains us to 1. And we can easily drain them back to go up to 221.
Yeah this seems like there's a good amount of leeway to get other things set up. Fortunately we don't need to maximize green mana early as we lose it when we go to combat. (we do want to maximize the number of Proliferators though so its still nontrivial.)
Edit: Hmm, it's probably profitable to Profane Procession precombat to proliferate prodigiously.
Welp, we've spent a lot of time polishing this latest deck, but now I want to make a major overhaul.
So, what I want to do is to go back to Mox Amber and Golgari Findbroker. Last time we tried this, we discovered that it didn't work with Quasiduplicate, and I wasn't willing to give up Quasiduplicate back then. But I'm willing now.
What we gain: We can cast Gaea's Blessing, and get a lot of copies; each copy of Gaea's Blessing can draw Honor the God-Phaoroh, which we can cast to get a lot of copies: Each copy can draw Bedeck // Bedazzle, and we can cast Bedazzle to get a lot of copies; and each copy can destroy a nonbasic land, which we can refetch and tap to gain a white mana for our stage.
We do need some Tragic Poets. I think we can get away with just two, if we have both The Mending of Dominaria and Citywatch Sphinx. If this turns out to not be enough, we can add more Tragic Poets. We can also remove Citywatch Sphinx if it turns out not to reduce the number of Tragic Poets we need.
So, what I've come up with is:
1 Breeding Pool
2 Llanowar Elves
3 Glacial Fortress
4 Marwyn, the Nurturer
5 Glacial Fortress
6 Giant Growth
7 Gift of Growth
8 Omniscience
9 Emergency Powers
10 Emergence Zone
11 Thousand-Year Storm
12 Precognition Field
13 Finale of Devastation
14 Gyre Engineer
15 Repudiate // Replicate
16 Mox Amber
17 Golgari Findbroker
18 Cleansing Nova
19 Disdainful Stroke
Rebuild and reshuffle:
20 Tragic Poet
21 Tragic Poet
22 The Mending of Dominaria
23 Citywatch Sphinx
24 Gaea's Blessing
White Mana and Drawing:
25 Bedeck // Bedazzle
26 Llanowar Scout
27 Honor the God-Phaoroh
28 Ionize
29 Banefire
30 Sun-Crowned Hunters
31 Gideon Blackblade
32 Angrath's Marauders
Red Mana:
33 Azor's Gateway
34 Hijack
Untapping:
35 Teferi, Hero of Dominaria
Exilable Cards:
36 Squee, the Immortal
23 other cards
60 Mountain
If all of the above works (probably not), this should get us to 3 -> 3 -> (3 -> 3 -> 8 -> 7) -> 7.
The first thing I noticed was that Squee is a red legend, and we cant let the mox tap for red so that cuts down on how many Azor's Gateway flips we can do.
Honor The God-Pharaoh seems risky with the start as it is a draw 2, but I don't immediately see a problem there. Seems like an improvement over Warlord's Fury.
The start with Finale instead of AI is awkward (I'm assuming samut for haste)
Without Quasiduplicate, we really don't gain much life. (which also means that Sanctum of the Sun isn't tapping for much red)
So I don't think you found a way for us to are reach ->7 yet.
Edit: sorry had just read through end of page 14. Didn’t realize 15 had even happened yet.
@J_kibbs: I found difficulty not using Citywatch Sphinx or Ionize in the beginning, it is a bit hard to get off the ground that way. Anyway, with Thorn Lieutenant we can easily get to the maximum 221 life, and Deadeye Quartermaster makes it easier still, so no worries.
Edit: So, I made some changes. First thing, we don't really need Bedeck // Bedazzle without having a lot of Nikyas to pump up our lands, Hijack will do just as well. We still need a card to destroy our Sanctum of the Suns, so we add Demolish.
I think we do need three Tragic Poets after all. I was thinking that we could just not fetch Omniscience most of the time, since we cast our spells from the library and fetch our creatures with Finale of Devastation. But, we need to cast Thousand-Year Storm, so we need Omniscience for that. I'm thinking with 3 Tragic Poets though we can do without Citywatch Sphinx.
So, without Squee, the Immortal we need to exile 5 cards for each Sanctum of the Sun. We can exile up to 9 of our main combo cards (our 4 initial lands, Giant Growth, Llanowar Elves, Marwyn, the Nurturer, Gideon Blackblade, and Demolish), so exiling another 26 allows us to transform Profane Procession 7 times. So that should get us to 3 -> 3 -> (3 -> 3 -> 8 -> 6) -> 6.
1 Breeding Pool
2 Llanowar Elves
3 Glacial Fortress
4 Marwyn, the Nurturer
5 Glacial Fortress
6 Giant Growth
7 Gift of Growth
8 Omniscience
9 Emergency Powers
10 Emergence Zone
11 Thousand-Year Storm
12 Precognition Field
13 Finale of Devastation
14 Gyre Engineer
15 Repudiate // Replicate
16 Mox Amber
17 Golgari Findbroker
18 Cleansing Nova
19 Disdainful Stroke
Rebuild and reshuffle:
20 Tragic Poet
21 Tragic Poet
22 Tragic Poet
23 The Mending of Dominaria
24 Gaea's Blessing
White Mana and Drawing:
25 Hijack
26 Honor the God-Pharaoh
27 Ionize
28 Banefire
29 Sun-Crowned Hunters
30 Gideon Blackblade
Red Mana:
31 Azor's Gateway
32 Demolish
Untapping:
33 Teferi, Hero of Dominaria
Exilable Cards:
26 other cards
I'm not sure what to do with the remaining card slot. We could add Citywatch Sphinx. But actually, we could add 4 Citywatch Sphinxes and exile them to Profane Procession.
We want to do it before the first Ionize because thats 2 life that could've been 8.
Edit: @deedlit: Aren't you gaining roughly the same amount of life as teferi untaps? I don't think that deck is an improvent to the Elephant version.
Hmm actually it doesn’t. U aren’t using lockets so u have no way to convert white mana into draws. Getting lockets out of the deck feels like an upgrade. We do lose access to squee to do it but we might be able to replace him, maybe with something even better.
Karn, the great creator
I think we want 2 of him. It lets us do squee like things, while still being limited enough to not break it wide open. It works out nicely that your list only has 2 artifacts currently. It also works out conveniently that the one that makes mana will die if we use karn to animate it for attempted copying via replicate. With 2 artifacts we still net losing 1 card per profane procession flip(actually its 2 as we can’t exile mox here for the reason just mentioned about not being able to live as a creature). He also lets us get 2 cards back from gateway flips(nope only 1 here as I was thinking we could exile actual gateway to a copy, but we can’t flip a copy properly). Hmm the more I think about this, maybe it’s just not worth the slot(s)?
Edit: gateway cares about cmc so I think we only get 1 more. Still 1 does make profane and gateway flips more profitable
Edit: we also have to be careful with karn/gateway as the combo of them effectively gives a free draw per time we can reset and use it(once per empty stack, I believe?). Not sure if this is an issue, but it is probably worth checking.
Edit: ugh, it might be too good. We draw a card off gateway and exile mox, then bring mox back to hand, then play mox making white ... well I guess we can’t reset karn without red so maybe this is ok? Maybe gives us an extra white mana per banefire(cast)?
One of the artifacts will have to be Mox Amber; I'm thinking Helm of the Host could be another, since it could get us an token copy of something that we can exile - maybe Sun-Crowned Hunters.
We only want the Findbroker to be able to return the mox right? trusty packbeast only gets an artifact so it should be more resilient to other infinites.
Helm of the Host seems pretty good.
Is Millstone a possibility?
Oh and since we dont have quasiduplicate we can go back to Garna and improve the start.
Edit: oops Garna is a red legend
Hmm deed, u initially mentioned not being willing to give up quasiduplicate, but isn’t replicate just the same thing? Do we need to cut replicate?
@FortyTwo: Torch Courier is certainly a possibility. It's nice that we have the plenty of card slots for things that will make the opening easier. Anyway, we get a Gift of Growth each time we get a Finale of Devastation, and the first copy of Gift of Growth gets us 10 green mana from Marwyn, and that keeps going up.
Edit - Update:
1 Breeding Pool
2 Llanowar Elves
3 Glacial Fortress
4 Marwyn, the Nurturer
5 Glacial Fortress
6 Giant Growth
7 Gift of Growth
8 Omniscience
9 Emergency Powers
10 Emergence Zone
11 Thousand-Year Storm
12 Precognition Field
13 Finale of Devastation
14 Gyre Engineer
Stage Combo:
15 Mox Amber
16 Golgari Findbroker
17 Cleansing Nova
18 Disdainful Stroke
19 Tragic Poet
20 Tragic Poet
21 Tragic Poet
22 The Mending of Dominaria
23 Gaea's Blessing
White Mana and Drawing:
24 Hijack
25 Honor the God-Pharaoh
26 Ionize
Life Gain:
27 Banefire
28 Sun-Crowned Hunters
29 Gideon Blackblade
Red Mana:
30 Azor's Gateway
31 Demolish
Untapping:
32 Teferi, Hero of Dominaria
Returning from Exile:
33 Karn, the Great Creator
34 Parhelion II
35 Sphinx of the Guildpact
36 Mishra's Self-Replicator
37 Smothering Tithe
38 Smothering Tithe
39 Smothering Tithe
40 Smothering Tithe
41 Unmoored Ego
42 Citywatch Sphinx
43 Citywatch Sphinx
44 Citywatch Sphinx
45 Citywatch Sphinx
46 Teysa Karlov
47 Adventurous Impulse
48 Torch Courier
49 Torch Courier
50 Torch Courier
51 Torch Courier
I went away from Helm of the Host, since Smothering Tithe is better than a Sanctum of the Sun if we have to tap it at the very beginning. If there is another way to gain red mana besides Smothering Tithe, we could go back to Helm of the Host.
We can exile 5 cards (Llanowar Elves, Marwyn, the Nurturer, Gift of Growth, Gideon Blackblade, and Demolish) besides the 24 extra cards, for 29 total. Along with the early red mana from Smothering Tithe, that takes us to more than 3 -> 3 -> (3 -> 3 -> 31 -> 6) -> 6.
I guess I like Golgari Findbroker, since it makes it a little easier to fetch Planeswalkers when we need them? But yeah, we should keep an eye out for infinities.
Edit: Concerning Millstone, I don't see how we recycle it, unless we add a Naban and an Arcane Adaptation, which seems like a waste of cards. I guess we could include it though, unless we find CMC 2 card helpers that we really like.
I wonder if we can somehow finagle Nikya of the Old ways in here as the only way to let mox Amber tap for red, but I don't quite see a way, as we can wrath and then cast whatever spells we want and then play nikya.
Edit: hmm, We can use Ritual of soot + packbeast as a wrath that doesn't hit nikya.
Oh: and Molderhulk and Muldrotha, the Gravetide.
Edit: We could also go the other way. If we found a way to spend red mana to recycle swamps or somehow else make black mana, we could spend the mana on Finale of Eternity, destroying Dreadhorde Butcher.
Hmm, is there any way to use Dreadhorde Butcher so that we get another layer over Sun-Crowned Hunters? Dreadhorde Butcher can gain us a lot more life when we destroy it with Finale of Eternity or Banefire, but we won't be able to target more copies with our other copies of the spell. We could retarget the spell with Bolt Bend - but that would allow us to retarget the target of Dreadhorde Butcher, so that we could refetch the Butcher and retarget the ability back to the Butcher. We could limit the lifelink by using Gideon Blackblade for the lifelink, but that would also limit us to one life gain per Banefire. (or two with Teysa Karlov, I guess)
Edit: Random thought - if we could make recycling Planeswalkers cheaper, then we could activate Tibalt, Rakish Instigator many times to create a lot of Devil tokens. Then a Banefire or Finale of Devastation can kill each of the tokens, and each token can kill off a Dreadhorde Butcher, where we keep pumping up Dreadhorde Butcher's power (say with God-Eternal Rhonas). That would gain us another layer, if only Tibalt wasn't a red planeswalker.
Edit: Hmm, maybe we can just switch to black mana alone, and allow red legendaries and planeswalkers. We also need to make recycling planeswalkers cheaper. It would be nice to make them not too cheap so that we can keep Teferi, but until then we can just remove Teferi.
So maybe something like:
1 Breeding Pool
2 Llanowar Elves
3 Glacial Fortress
4 Marwyn, the Nurturer
5 Glacial Fortress
6 Giant Growth
7 Gift of Growth
8 Omniscience
9 Emergency Powers
10 Emergence Zone
11 Thousand-Year Storm
12 Precognition Field
13 Finale of Devastation
14 Gyre Engineer
Stage Combo:
15 Mox Amber
16 Golgari Findbroker
17 Cleansing Nova
18 Disdainful Stroke
19 Tragic Poet
20 Tragic Poet
21 Tragic Poet
22 The Mending of Dominaria
23 Gaea's Blessing
White Mana and Drawing:
24 Casualties of War
25 Llanowar Scout
26 Bladebrand
27 Ionize
Life Gain:
28 Finale of Eternity
29 Dreadhorde Butcher
30 Gideon Blackblade
31 Tibalt, Rakish Instigator
Red Mana:
32 Azor's Gateway
Returning from Exile:
33 Karn, the Great Creator
34 Parhelion II
35 Sphinx of the Guildpact
36 Mishra's Self-Replicator
37 Smothering Tithe
38 Smothering Tithe
39 Smothering Tithe
40 Smothering Tithe
41 Unmoored Ego
42 Citywatch Sphinx
43 Citywatch Sphinx
44 Citywatch Sphinx
45 Citywatch Sphinx
46 Adventurous Impulse
47 Torch Courier
48 Torch Courier
49 Torch Courier
50 Torch Courier
can hopefully get us to 7 layers.
can one of you post the sequencing for the stage in this one? just want to see how it works so it's easier see possible issues for me.
how are we actually doing damage with this version, at the end?
lastly, kinda ties to my first question/request, is finale of eternity an issue in the stage? it can get back anything once we get to high enough mana totals
edit: one more idea. it seems copiers are off limits but would saheeli, sublime artificer be ok? we should't get the copied body etb but it would allow copying of some variety. not sure it gains us much though
Oh, without Quasiduplicate, we only get one Gideon activation.
Also I'm not seeing what Finale of Eternity is doing? (Rules issue: each copy has the same number of targets, so it'll have to target indestructible creatures a lot. or it will fizzle)
Edit: Saheeli is interesting, we can use a servo to kill gideon via legend rule to get another activation. But probably a second copy of Gideon would be better for that. (and similarly with Mox Amber)