Pattern Matcher with duplicates of only the needed creatures? (poet, engineer, itself, torch courier, sphinx)? really eats at the deck slots but looks workable.
Edit: Pattern matcher does seem to work, even if we wrath and reshuffle in response to the trigger, we can only get a copy of a guy we have in play when the trigger resolves.
Though the start looks harder with it. (we have to spend draws on first copies of all the creatures). Pattern Matcher also can never find spark double. (and yeah a 4cmc artifact isnt great with half of our exile-able cards being 4s. but maybe the Nissa start over Bolas's citadel? putting our artifacts as 0,1,2,4 cmc)
Edit 2: Militia Bugler can find spark double, gyre sage, torch courier, and tragic poet, but cant find the sphinx. Maybe combine with Pattern Matcher?
Hmm, I'm not sure how Pattern Matcher and Militia Bugler are supposed to work here, since they bring creature cards to our hand.
Another card I was thinking of was Vivien's Arkbow, maybe with two copies. But, it looks like we would need three more copies of The Antiquities War to fetch it three times for all three creatures that we need, which is too many copies of TAW.
But, we can always default to Finale of Devastation, and just not have any copies of Spark Double, which is not necessary at the moment. The real question is whether we can find a way to convert life to destroying, fetching, or playing lands.
Oh, of course! That's an excellent idea, actually.
Hmm, now that I think about it, this will maybe let us use the Forerunner of the Empire idea, using a Dinosaur that we can't fetch with Pattern Matcher or Militia Bugler. We can of course cast Replicate on the Dinosaur, but we eventually have to reshuffle, which will kill off all of our Dinosaurs, and we would need to draw the original again. So let's see what we can get:
A couple of proliferates gets us layer 1.
Playing a land is layer 2.
Right now the best we have is Spreading Rot, which keeps us at layer 2.
Tapping a Vampire Neonate is layer 3.
Damaging an Imperial Ceratops is layer 4.
Resolving a Forerunner of the Empire trigger will damage a lot of Imperial Ceratopses, so that's layer 5.
Putting a Dinosaur into play can trigger a lot of Forerunner of the Empires, so that is layer 6.
Replicating a Dinosaur can put a lot of Dinosaurs into play, so that is layer 7.
Casting Honor the God-Pharoah will draw a lot of Dinosaurs, layer 8.
Activating Teferi, Hero of Dominaria will create a lot of copies via Repeated Reverberation, layer 9.
Casting Banefire will destroy Teferi, but we only get one activation out of it due to sorcery speed, layer 9.
Tapping a Sanctum of the Sun will generate a lot of red mana, layer 10.
Many activations of Teferi will untap a lot of Sanctum of the Suns, layer 11.
So it seems like we can do one layer better already. As before, if we can replace Spreading Rot with something better, we can add even more layers.
Well, that goes infinite as that will also kill the sphinx to trigger reshuffles which lets us Pattern Matcher to redraw the original Ceratops to get more Forerunner triggers. We still have to be careful about throwing damage around. (though stuff that doesn't hit fliers is ok) It would be cool to come full circle and get forerunner+polyraptor into this but it doesn't look likely.
As for replacing spreading rot, there's not a lot of ways to kill a basic, outside of the obvious red cards.
Hmm, we want to replace Imperial Ceratops with Truefire Captain and a lifelink granter, like Teysa Karlov. We still need a Dinosaur, but I think it can still work; we just need to kill all our Dinosaurs when we kill Citywatch Sphinx with damage. The easiest way to insure that is to have a toughness 1 Dinosaur, like Nest Robber.
Note that destroying a land is not the only possibility; we can have an easy way to destroy a land, and have the difficult part be bringing it to our hand. Or we could make bringing it to hand easy, and playing the land be the tough part. It seems difficult to convert life into any of those three things though.
The issue with the 1 toughness dino plan is that it means we can't have any pump spells. And Leyline of Abundance can pump for cheap. (we make a sphinx after pumping). Spark double is also an issue, as it enters with a +1/+1 off the bat.
Emergence zone is easy to sacrifice and we already need to do it once, but then how to make it hard to recycle?
I'm not clear on how we go infinite with a Dinosaur and Leyline of Abundance. Sure, we can kill off Citywatch Sphinx with Forerunner of the Empire damage, but we also need to kill off the original Dinosaur if we want to retrieve it with Pattern Matcher. And I don't see how to use Leyline of Abundance to kill off the original Dinosaur without also killing off any replicated copies. I guess I see the problem with Spark Double; we can copy the Dinosaur and have it at one more toughness than the original, so that we can kill off the original and the Sphinx, and then bring back the original with Pattern Matcher. But it looks like the combo can still work.
I guess the obvious way to make Emergence Zone hard to recycle is to have to redraw it.
I have another idea. Going back to the Banefire deck, we can again use Pattern Matcher to fetch only our stage creatures. Then, instead of Honor the God-Pharaoh drawing Tectonic Rift, it draws Blood for Bones, which in turn can fetch Clan Guildmage a lot of times. Once it is on the battlefield, we can Replicate it a lot of times, and activate them all to animate lands. After each resolves, we can Replicate the lands to create a bunch more, triggering our Evolution Sages.
So we get:
1 - A couple of proliferates animates our Manifold Key, allowing us to make many copies and get a lot of white mana.
2 - Each land we put into play triggers a lot of Evolution Sages and generates a lot of proliferates.
3 - Casting Replicate on an animated land will put a lot of lands onto the battlefield.
4 - Casting Replicate on Clan Guildmage will allow them to animate many lands.
5 - Casting Blood for Bones will allow us to draw Clan Guildmage many times.
6 - Casting Honor the God-Pharaoh or Bladebrand allows us to draw Blood for Bones many times.
7 - Casting Gaea's Blessing and Ionize allows us to draw our card drawer many times at the cost of 2 life.
8 - Tapping Vampire Noenate allows us to gain many life thanks to Angel of Vitality, at the cost of 1 life of the opponent.
9 - Damaging an Imperial Ceratops controlled by the opponent forces him to gain a lot of life.
10 - Casting Banefire can damage an Imperial Ceratops many times.
11 - Tapping a Sanctum of the Sun will generate a lot of red mana.
12 - Activating Teferi, Hero of Dominaria will untap Sanctum of the Sun many times.
So this is potentially 12 layers. Do you see any problems with this plan?
I'm not sure that that works, nothing is forcing us to purify, we do need to wrath to reshuffle and a wrath kills the animated one, but we can animate another one by going through the stages.
Unfortunately, we don't really need to give the opponent creatures, we can just damage Imperial Ceratops on our side to gain life.
I guess the best we can do then is have something like Rakdos Guildgate, and untap them a bunch of times using things like Wilderness Reclamation. That can still get us to around 10 -> 10 -> 7 -> 12, I think.
Last time, we had a problem with Sarkhan, Dragonsoul because we needed Casualties of War to destroy lands, which could also destroy Sarkhan. But we've found a way around it this time, so it seems like a good time to bring Sarkhan back.
So we have:
9 - Damaging an Imperial Ceratops controlled by the opponent forces him to gain a lot of life.
10 - Resolving a loyalty ability of Sarkhan, Dragonsoul allows to damage many Imperial Ceratopses.
11 - Activating Sarkhan gets many copies due to Repeated Reverberation.
12 - Animating a Treasure token
13 - Getting many Treasure tokens
Going back to black mana brings up the possibility of using Nikya of the Old Ways again. But as you mentioned, Spark Double is off the table if we have Sarkhan and Repeated Reverberation, and for Helm of the Host, we need to grant the token indestructible, and we can't be allowed to give creatures indestructible with our animating plans.
So, the question is whether or not we are forced to use Purify Novas to gain a benefit from our Treasure tokens. Right now, I don't see a way around it. If it works, we can get up to around 10 -> 10 -> (10 -> 10 -> 237 -> 13) -> 13.
Unfortunately, the treasures can short circuit the Blood for bones by paying for it instead of being forced to draw it.
Other thoughts:
a minor optimization
- pattern matcher #2
- The Antiquities war #2
+ Mystic Forge
Now the one copy we have of Antiquities war finds Mystic Forge, which then lets us cast our artifacts and Pattern Matcher to find the stage creatures.
This saves a deck slot and some card draws.
Since we can sacrifice creatures now, Bankrupt in blood seems much better than Bladebrand (which has targetting issues now anyway with nothing indestructible).
Hmm, I just noticed though that Bolas's Citadel can tap to sacrifice Sarkhan. So we would have to go to the Nissa version to make Sarkhan work. But, if we have a black mana land, Nissa can untap and animate it, and we can use the black mana on Dreadmalkin to recycle Nissa. So I don't know how to get any black mana to recycle Sarkhan at all.
If worst comes to worst, we can just have one Sarkhan, and I guess one Ugin, to be able to activate Sarkhan twice, for something like 10 -> 10 -> (10 -> 10 -> X -> 11) -> 11. That's not too bad I guess, but it would be nice to be able to recycle Sarkhan more.
I completely forgot about Grow from the Ashes. That seems better than wayward swordtooth in my line.
Though it might be too good and allow for an infinite...
My issue is that we get to reshuffle stony strength in with Gaea's blessing before the Emergency powers/Finale and we also get to draw an extra card. so its hard to show we can't possibly get TYS in play before the big blue spell.
Stony Strength also improves our line before the first Emergency powers.
3x leyline, shockland, elf.
untap
land elf taps for GGGG, stony strength it for +GGG have GG left over after Emergency powers.
That extra GG is real nice, don't have to tap mox to get the next elf in play.
Edit: for the 3 leyline line with GG floating
We just put TYS into play from the Emergency powers!
Stony strength now makes a bunch of green. Which we can use to cast Samut, and Grow from the ashes (or Swordtooth) to get an island for Gyre engineer.
Now we can Replicate and make enough to cast omniscience.
Mox Amber (12 G, 4U, R)
Thousand-Year Storm (8G, 3U)
L-Finale of Devastation
So we can't have that. If we don't have Grow from the Ashes, but instead say Llanowar Scout and Island, then we are short one slot for the infinite. Or we could just go with your previous sequence, and have 4 Leyline of Abundances and only 2 Stony Strengths. But yeah, with Mox Amber being able to make red, this does look quite dangerous.
Yeah i think a second copy of a Emergency powers will probably go infinite.
So turn 2's setup is: X denote amount of green mana (cards in hand) [Storm count]
play land, tap elf, Stony strength the elf for 7, Emergency powers with 2 floating
Addendum: TYS in play (6)
Stony strength the elf for three copies. 1+4+4+4=13 (5) [3]
Samut 9 (4)
Grow from the ashes 6UU (3) [4] (fetch at least 2 islands)
Gyre Engineer 8UU (2)
Precognition field 5U (1)
L-Replicate 23UUUUU (1) [5]
Omniscience 16UU (0)
L-Gaea's Blessing 14UU [6]
Incubation //incongruity got cut for the pattern matcher package.
Hmm, now we can untap the guildmage's animated lands with Stony Strength, to make lots of black. We can still get a lot of landfall triggers with llanowar scout+Emergence Zone
Sarkhan also goes infinite with lifegain walkers.
Edit: Also my start is short a card. We need to Ionize Gaea's Blessing before resolving the Thousand Year Storm trigger. (the quick fix is to include a basic mountain to fetch with the Grow From the Ashes)
Finale: pretty good but then spark double or useful planeswalkers will have to be cut.
Vivien's invocation: almost perfect but the fighting is bad.
various Zombify effects: require black mana (or at least white)
Neoform goes infinite
Pattern Matcher with duplicates of only the needed creatures? (poet, engineer, itself, torch courier, sphinx)? really eats at the deck slots but looks workable.
Edit: Pattern matcher does seem to work, even if we wrath and reshuffle in response to the trigger, we can only get a copy of a guy we have in play when the trigger resolves.
Though the start looks harder with it. (we have to spend draws on first copies of all the creatures). Pattern Matcher also can never find spark double. (and yeah a 4cmc artifact isnt great with half of our exile-able cards being 4s. but maybe the Nissa start over Bolas's citadel? putting our artifacts as 0,1,2,4 cmc)
Edit 2: Militia Bugler can find spark double, gyre sage, torch courier, and tragic poet, but cant find the sphinx. Maybe combine with Pattern Matcher?
Another card I was thinking of was Vivien's Arkbow, maybe with two copies. But, it looks like we would need three more copies of The Antiquities War to fetch it three times for all three creatures that we need, which is too many copies of TAW.
But, we can always default to Finale of Devastation, and just not have any copies of Spark Double, which is not necessary at the moment. The real question is whether we can find a way to convert life to destroying, fetching, or playing lands.
So those we would still need to draw.
Though good point about Spark double not being needed right now.
Hmm, now that I think about it, this will maybe let us use the Forerunner of the Empire idea, using a Dinosaur that we can't fetch with Pattern Matcher or Militia Bugler. We can of course cast Replicate on the Dinosaur, but we eventually have to reshuffle, which will kill off all of our Dinosaurs, and we would need to draw the original again. So let's see what we can get:
A couple of proliferates gets us layer 1.
Playing a land is layer 2.
Right now the best we have is Spreading Rot, which keeps us at layer 2.
Tapping a Vampire Neonate is layer 3.
Damaging an Imperial Ceratops is layer 4.
Resolving a Forerunner of the Empire trigger will damage a lot of Imperial Ceratopses, so that's layer 5.
Putting a Dinosaur into play can trigger a lot of Forerunner of the Empires, so that is layer 6.
Replicating a Dinosaur can put a lot of Dinosaurs into play, so that is layer 7.
Casting Honor the God-Pharoah will draw a lot of Dinosaurs, layer 8.
Activating Teferi, Hero of Dominaria will create a lot of copies via Repeated Reverberation, layer 9.
Casting Banefire will destroy Teferi, but we only get one activation out of it due to sorcery speed, layer 9.
Tapping a Sanctum of the Sun will generate a lot of red mana, layer 10.
Many activations of Teferi will untap a lot of Sanctum of the Suns, layer 11.
So it seems like we can do one layer better already. As before, if we can replace Spreading Rot with something better, we can add even more layers.
As for replacing spreading rot, there's not a lot of ways to kill a basic, outside of the obvious red cards.
Green can do it by making it a creature? (make it a 0/0 with waker of the wilds, or legend rule it with awakening of vitu-ghazi)
we can give our opponent some Silverclad ferocidons? But it seems hard to force our best sac to be the land.
Note that destroying a land is not the only possibility; we can have an easy way to destroy a land, and have the difficult part be bringing it to our hand. Or we could make bringing it to hand easy, and playing the land be the tough part. It seems difficult to convert life into any of those three things though.
Emergence zone is easy to sacrifice and we already need to do it once, but then how to make it hard to recycle?
I guess the obvious way to make Emergence Zone hard to recycle is to have to redraw it.
We Reduplicate a Nest robber, activate/resolve Leyline 4 times, cast sphinx, resolve 4 forerunner triggers, reshuffle. Repeat.
Edit: the line is a little more complicated than that because of Pattern Matcher and if we only have one reduplicate.
But we can use the stack to resolve a reduplicate copy on sphinx then one on Nest robber.
I have another idea. Going back to the Banefire deck, we can again use Pattern Matcher to fetch only our stage creatures. Then, instead of Honor the God-Pharaoh drawing Tectonic Rift, it draws Blood for Bones, which in turn can fetch Clan Guildmage a lot of times. Once it is on the battlefield, we can Replicate it a lot of times, and activate them all to animate lands. After each resolves, we can Replicate the lands to create a bunch more, triggering our Evolution Sages.
So we get:
1 - A couple of proliferates animates our Manifold Key, allowing us to make many copies and get a lot of white mana.
2 - Each land we put into play triggers a lot of Evolution Sages and generates a lot of proliferates.
3 - Casting Replicate on an animated land will put a lot of lands onto the battlefield.
4 - Casting Replicate on Clan Guildmage will allow them to animate many lands.
5 - Casting Blood for Bones will allow us to draw Clan Guildmage many times.
6 - Casting Honor the God-Pharaoh or Bladebrand allows us to draw Blood for Bones many times.
7 - Casting Gaea's Blessing and Ionize allows us to draw our card drawer many times at the cost of 2 life.
8 - Tapping Vampire Noenate allows us to gain many life thanks to Angel of Vitality, at the cost of 1 life of the opponent.
9 - Damaging an Imperial Ceratops controlled by the opponent forces him to gain a lot of life.
10 - Casting Banefire can damage an Imperial Ceratops many times.
11 - Tapping a Sanctum of the Sun will generate a lot of red mana.
12 - Activating Teferi, Hero of Dominaria will untap Sanctum of the Sun many times.
So this is potentially 12 layers. Do you see any problems with this plan?
I think there are stack issues around step 4 or 5. Though I think actually we work around them with a careful line.
The main issue I see is that we can also animate Sanctum of the sun and replicate it to untap it.
I'm not sure that that works, nothing is forcing us to purify, we do need to wrath to reshuffle and a wrath kills the animated one, but we can animate another one by going through the stages.
We also have to not use Dowsing Dagger as Lost Vale goes infinite with animation, so Baffling End+Thorn Lieutenant to make them have guys.
I guess that would actually force us to use purify in a layer? otherwise they have no guys for us to make them gain life with?
Unfortunately, we don't really need to give the opponent creatures, we can just damage Imperial Ceratops on our side to gain life.
I guess the best we can do then is have something like Rakdos Guildgate, and untap them a bunch of times using things like Wilderness Reclamation. That can still get us to around 10 -> 10 -> 7 -> 12, I think.
What if we can't damage our own dinos?
Sarkhan, dragonsoul/dreadmalkin was only infinite with Spark double right?
Last time, we had a problem with Sarkhan, Dragonsoul because we needed Casualties of War to destroy lands, which could also destroy Sarkhan. But we've found a way around it this time, so it seems like a good time to bring Sarkhan back.
So we have:
9 - Damaging an Imperial Ceratops controlled by the opponent forces him to gain a lot of life.
10 - Resolving a loyalty ability of Sarkhan, Dragonsoul allows to damage many Imperial Ceratopses.
11 - Activating Sarkhan gets many copies due to Repeated Reverberation.
12 - Animating a Treasure token
13 - Getting many Treasure tokens
Going back to black mana brings up the possibility of using Nikya of the Old Ways again. But as you mentioned, Spark Double is off the table if we have Sarkhan and Repeated Reverberation, and for Helm of the Host, we need to grant the token indestructible, and we can't be allowed to give creatures indestructible with our animating plans.
So, the question is whether or not we are forced to use Purify Novas to gain a benefit from our Treasure tokens. Right now, I don't see a way around it. If it works, we can get up to around 10 -> 10 -> (10 -> 10 -> 237 -> 13) -> 13.
Unfortunately, the treasures can short circuit the Blood for bones by paying for it instead of being forced to draw it.
Other thoughts:
a minor optimization
- pattern matcher #2
- The Antiquities war #2
+ Mystic Forge
Now the one copy we have of Antiquities war finds Mystic Forge, which then lets us cast our artifacts and Pattern Matcher to find the stage creatures.
This saves a deck slot and some card draws.
Since we can sacrifice creatures now, Bankrupt in blood seems much better than Bladebrand (which has targetting issues now anyway with nothing indestructible).
Bankrupt in Blood is indeed a lot better than Bladebrand.
Hmm, I just noticed though that Bolas's Citadel can tap to sacrifice Sarkhan. So we would have to go to the Nissa version to make Sarkhan work. But, if we have a black mana land, Nissa can untap and animate it, and we can use the black mana on Dreadmalkin to recycle Nissa. So I don't know how to get any black mana to recycle Sarkhan at all.
If worst comes to worst, we can just have one Sarkhan, and I guess one Ugin, to be able to activate Sarkhan twice, for something like 10 -> 10 -> (10 -> 10 -> X -> 11) -> 11. That's not too bad I guess, but it would be nice to be able to recycle Sarkhan more.
One possibility is that now Samut Tyrant smasher is safe as a haste granter we put it into play off of the Emergency powers.
Then Mox Amber can tap for green for another elf. And we can make GGGGG with 4 cards still in hand.
Wayward swordtooth lets us play island and Gyre Engineer. now we have UGGGGG and one card in hand.
For i guess, Precognition field ? into...?
Edit: Stony strength? gets us to us U+6G. A second one gets us to UU+10G.... Exactly enough for Finale of revelation?
we can definitely go off after that, but proving we cant go infinite from this setup is tricky.
Edit: hmm, one stony strength, reduplicate, then gaea's blessing them both back, gets us to UU+14G (drawing:??? off of Gaea's blessing)
Though it might be too good and allow for an infinite...
My issue is that we get to reshuffle stony strength in with Gaea's blessing before the Emergency powers/Finale and we also get to draw an extra card. so its hard to show we can't possibly get TYS in play before the big blue spell.
Stony Strength also improves our line before the first Emergency powers.
3x leyline, shockland, elf.
untap
land elf taps for GGGG, stony strength it for +GGG have GG left over after Emergency powers.
That extra GG is real nice, don't have to tap mox to get the next elf in play.
Edit: for the 3 leyline line with GG floating
We just put TYS into play from the Emergency powers!
Stony strength now makes a bunch of green. Which we can use to cast Samut, and Grow from the ashes (or Swordtooth) to get an island for Gyre engineer.
Now we can Replicate and make enough to cast omniscience.
Samut, Tyrant Smasher (GG)
Stony Strength (GGGGG)
Grow from the Ashes, Island (GGU)
Gyre Engineer (GGGGU)
Precognition Field (G)
L-Stony Strength (GGGGU)
L-Gaea's Blessing (GGGU)
L-3x Stony Strength (12 G, 4U)
Mox Amber (12 G, 4U, R)
Thousand-Year Storm (8G, 3U)
L-Finale of Devastation
So we can't have that. If we don't have Grow from the Ashes, but instead say Llanowar Scout and Island, then we are short one slot for the infinite. Or we could just go with your previous sequence, and have 4 Leyline of Abundances and only 2 Stony Strengths. But yeah, with Mox Amber being able to make red, this does look quite dangerous.
Edit: Oh, good plan.
So turn 2's setup is:
X denote amount of green mana (cards in hand) [Storm count]
play land, tap elf, Stony strength the elf for 7, Emergency powers with 2 floating
Addendum: TYS in play (6)
Stony strength the elf for three copies. 1+4+4+4=13 (5) [3]
Samut 9 (4)
Grow from the ashes 6UU (3) [4] (fetch at least 2 islands)
Gyre Engineer 8UU (2)
Precognition field 5U (1)
L-Replicate 23UUUUU (1) [5]
Omniscience 16UU (0)
L-Gaea's Blessing 14UU [6]
Note: we don't have Emergence Zone's flash yet.
1 Leyline of Abundance
2 Leyline of Abundance
3 Leyline of Abundance
4 Temple Garden
5 Llanowar Elves
6 Island
7 Stony Strength
8 Emergency Powers
9 Thousand-Year Storm
10 Stony Strength
11 Samut, Tyrant Smasher
12 Grow from the Ashes
13 Island
14 Island
15 Gyre Engineer
16 Repudiate // Replicate
17 Omniscience
18 Emergence Zone
19 Precognition Field
20 Incubation // Incongruity
21 Mox Amber
22 Manifold Key
23 The Antiquities War
24 Mystic Forge
25 Cleansing Nova
26 Cleansing Nova
27 Disdainful Stroke
Rebuild and Reshuffle:
28 Pattern Matcher
29 Gyre Engineer
30 Tragic Poet
31 Tragic Poet
32 Gaea's Blessing
33 Citywatch Sphinx
34 Citywatch Sphinx
Proliferation:
35 Evolution Sage
36 Evolution Sage
Animating Lands:
37 Clan Guildmage
Drawing:
38 Blood for Bones
39 Bankrupt in Blood
40 Ionize
41 Sarkhan, Dragonsoul
42 Repeated Reverberation
43 Imperial Ceratops
44 Angel of Vitality
45 Vampire Neonate
46 Baffling End
47 Thorn Lieutenant
Land Untapping:
48 Rakdos Guildgate
49 Tenth District Veteran
50 Teferi, Hero of Dominaria
51 Wilderness Reclamation
52 Wilderness Reclamation
53 Wilderness Reclamation
54 Wilderness Reclamation
Land Playing:
55 Llanowar Scout
Early Life Gain:
56 Huatli, the Sun's Heart
57 Ajani, Wise Counselor
58 Ajani, Strength of the Pride
59 Ajani, the Greathearted
60 Ugin, the Ineffable
The longer start and all the cards needed for the Pattern Matcher really bumped up the number of card slots needed, but we have room.
Hmm, now we can untap the guildmage's animated lands with Stony Strength, to make lots of black. We can still get a lot of landfall triggers with llanowar scout+Emergence Zone
Sarkhan also goes infinite with lifegain walkers.
Edit: Also my start is short a card. We need to Ionize Gaea's Blessing before resolving the Thousand Year Storm trigger. (the quick fix is to include a basic mountain to fetch with the Grow From the Ashes)