We pretty clearly need chandra ult to go off, and this is the only way to do it turn 4, we maybe go infinite turn 5, but that's OK. (Edit: actually we have the cards in hand to trickery into witherbloom, pay 10 life to untap our lands and then trickery into chandra.)
Wait, crap. I think this setup goes infinite:
- Starting with X thaumabrooms, and a crypt, and an enchantment in hand
- Sac the crypt; in response play the enchantment. Make most of the brooms into druids, a few into crypts, and a few into random enchantments.
- Resolve the sac triggers; spending 3X mana to make X druids (so X^2 mana), at least 1 crypt, and at least 2 enchantments
- First enchantment turns them all into brooms
- In response to the second enchantment about to enter, sac the crypt, and do it again.
but we can't just "do it again" as the triggers are in the other order now. Isn't this the same logic as we had before with guilded goose/nyxbloom ancient: we need an enchantment ETB in response to the sacrifice/broom trigger for this to go infinite, right? But none of the brooms from that last trigger will also be enchantments, so they just double once.
As for the stage: yeah that sucks, one Quandrix command will need to put in some serious work. Nice catch though.
Oh yes you're right; i think it should be safe then to use crypts and omens.
To convince my self that this is indeed the case, the following operactions are possible:
a) Sac something: make X just-broom triggers
b) Play an enchantment: turn any number of just-broom triggers into anything-broom
c) Resolve a just-broom trigger: make a broom
d) Resolve an anything-broom trigger: make anything
Since making an enchantment with d cannot result in additional anything-broom triggers, the ordinal (number of enchantments we can play * w^2) + (number of anything-broom triggers * w) + (number of just-broom triggers) always decreases and thus it terminates.
It's not 100% obvious that the chandra ult is required to go off; since we can get a lot of milage off of just using blue mana to mutate and play trickeries. But now that there are alternatives to witherbloom I don't think it matters.
Stage mechanics:
- Start: UUU
- Octopus (UU); triggers a lot of reflections
- Use a small number of reflections to cast several things; including redcap, trickery on real octo, qcommand on island+octo, unkicked roil on omen for thaumabrooms, and some number of qcommands to recycle anything else we want. If we thaumabroom stormcallers before trickery-ing real octo, we can get several trickery copies to target each other the original trickery to cast whatever else we want.
- Then, thaumabroom stormcallers and reflections on octopus, and cast kicked roil. (U)
- Draw and play island (UU)
- Draw real octo; play it (U); do as above.
Stack:
- X octo
- X roil
- X octo
...
Looks like it works. One roil makes a lot of octos provided we've shuffled the island; and a small number of octos shuffle the island, generate additional value, and and make a lot of roils.
First layer: in place of "whatever else we want" above; we trickery into peer into the abyss (do we have an issue of running out of targets for trickery? I don't think so; as we can cast random creatures. We could also thaumabroom Omen of the dead just to be absolutely sure; this doesn't break the stage by skipping on shuffling octopuses as we still always need to shuffle the island.); converting a small number of octopus triggers and some life for blue; until we run out of life.
(edit: omen of the dead doesn't really help, but in fact we can always just trickery some random spell on the stack after getting stormcallers, counter the original trickery, and never counter the original spell; so it's fine).
Other layers are as in #72. (Except we don't have teach to copy heliod's intervention).
With a given amount of layers, the next best thing to do is to maximize how many times a Moraug triggers via landfall prior to combat. We can use our and the opponent's starting life totals to help with that, with the opponent's life taking priority. Peer into the Abyss runs counter to that, so it makes sense to use the other avenues to get sufficient card draw in the opponent rather than pay our life. If Peer into the Abyss isn't needed for the start then, it is probably better to use Sea Gate, Reborn for life into blue mana, since that gives roughly X/3 mana for X life rather than log_2 X mana.
I'll keep looking for more layers, with an eye towards the other mana colors. I think our use of green mana is maybe nonessential, and there is probably a way to still go off using the colorless mana engines, so we should be open to layer possibilities from green mana.
There are several cards that turn life into cards more efficiently, I think there might be thaumabroom shenanigans with a frogifyed Treacherous Blessing. But I'm not quite sure.
Plumb the forbidden could be quite an efficient option; it can be cast off vadrok, copied by stormcaller, and has a built in way to copy it that also triggers brooms.
Hmmm, FortyTwo's Frogifyed Treacherous Blessing plan looks interesting - maybe we can turn a whole bunch of Thaumabrooms into Treacherous Blessings, get copies, and then turn them back, at the cost of a fixed amount of life? The issue I'm having is, if we have to cast a spell to turn them back after the Thaumabrooms are already Treacherous Blessings, then we will trigger a lot of life loss triggers. So we need to either use an ability, or have a spell already on the stack to put an enchantment into play. Tibalt's Trickery wouldn't work though, since it would cause the enchantment to be cast. I was thinking something like Auspicious Starrix, but I don't know if that is safe with the combo.
If we can turn them back without paying life though, then with a Frogifyed TB we wouldn't have to pay any life at all to loop. So maybe no Frogify? Then we need to remove the TB's ability from the battlefield sometimes so that we can do the lower level stuff without having to pay life. But Dance of the Manse requires white mana, which we would like to use higher up. True Polymorph could change it to something different, but then we can't change it back without anther animated TB.
What about a banisher, like Banishing Light? The Trickster-God's Heist can exchange two creatures, but after Trecherous Blessing comes back it won't be a creature anymore. TTGH's second ability can exchange noncreature permanents, but we don't have the ability to proc those with this setup. So I don't know.
I think treacherous blessing + frogify actually goes infinite, as we can get multiple enchantments on the stack at the same time with trickery and then use the first to draw cards and the second to turn the new thaumaturges back into something harmless.
Edit:
I might be missing something, but why can't we go off turn three with: t2:vorinclex->t3:chandra+ult?
This would also save us from burning green mana as we don't need the untapped land to cast kasmina.
Actually, if we want to be crazy, can we do turn 2(!?) with trickery into genesis ultimatum getting chandra, vorinclex, and other goodies?
I believe the issue was having an ability to draw cards without spending blue mana. It's not totally obvious it's infinite, since we can activate it only as a sorcery, so we should try creating an infinite line just to be safe; but it does look dangerous. If it turns out to be safe, what an incredible turn 2 start!
Genesis Ultimatum looks really good though, even without Vorinclex. The two turns required to pump up Chandra and Ugin seem to doom us to turn 4 though, if we can't have Vorinclex. If we can somehow get Semester's End cast on turn 2, we can go off on turn 3.
Edit: Yeah, I was looking for an alternative to Frogify, so that we would be forced to take some damage, but I didn't come up with a good way to hide or retrieve the TB.
Edit: I think with Vorinclex we get an infinite line with:
Activate Chandra, Flame's Catalyst's ultimate, discarding our hand and drawing 7 cards.
Draw Island Redcap Melee, Into the Roil, ...
Tap a Scaled Herbalists to put the Island into play.
Tap the Island for a blue mana.
Cast Redcap Melee to sacrifice the Island.
Cast Into the Roil unkicked to bring Omen of the Hunt back to our hand.
Cast four more instants/sorceries to put them in the graveyard.
Spend the new blue mana to mutate Sea-Dasher Octopus onto [c}Vadrok, Apex of Thunder[/c], giving us a bunch of casts from the graveyard.
Cast Into the Roil from our graveyard, returing Chandra, Flame's Catalyst to our hand.
sacrifice an Omen of the Hunt token, then respond by playing Omen of the Hunt to do our Thaumabroom combo to create new Sea Gate Stormcallers. Can also create new Scaled Herbalists and Omen of the Hunts, and Circle of the Dreams Druids.
Cast Quandrix Command from the graveyard, getting copies allowing us to shuffle at least 7 cards into the library.
After the stack is empty, replay Chandra, Flame's Catalyst.
Yeah Vorniclex goes infinite, I forgot that Into the roil could bounce chandra.
Genesis ultimatum allows for us to save green mana for later, as we won't need to cast kasmina. Though the Forsaken monument/crawling barrens engine is slower and moots life instead...
Even nicer than Trickery into Genesis Ultimatum is Trickery into Wizard's Spellbook, casting Genesis Ultimatum for free on turn 2, casting it twice on turn 3, and three times on turn 4 if we have to go that far.
4 Circle of the Dream Druids + Tuktuk Rubblefort gives us 4X mana, where X is at least 5. Oh, but we need a white mana, so we can't have spent all our mana on Tibalt's Trickery; is there any way to get a third mana on turn 2?
If not, on turn 3 we can cast another 4 GU's, plus another 4 spells of our choosing if we so desire. That might be overkill. However, we would need to make sure the sequence works without being able to cast spells for free from our hand; can we rely on TT for our casting needs?
Edit: Oh, we can probably go off on turn 2 with Vault Robber plus Xorn for a limited amount of Treasure tokens.
Edit: Even better is if we could make a non-CFC stage work with Teach By Example allowable, would allow us to get a layer back, and probably a more powerful start.
Unfortunately Genesis Ultimatum doesn't work: it can put the island into play without needing to draw it off a kicked roil.
But if we could find some other way to get a lot of permanents into play on turn 2 or 3, we certainly could go off without chandra using vault robber / xorn. The only things that need to be cast from hand in the current deck outside of setup are octopus and omen.
Edit: Actually ultimatum exiles itself, and we can't copy it except by spellbook, so it's fine (as long as we can't untap the spellbooks)
Edit: In fact even if we could untap the spellbooks we'd be limited by the number of instants and sorceries in the deck so we're definitely fine.
Edit: The only obstacle with using colourless mana as the base resource is how to put enchantments into play at instant speed for brooms. I think Pyre of heroes is safe; not going infinite due to being limited by the number of enchantment creatures in the deck, which requires casting spells to reset.
Unfortunately, Pyre of Heroes can only be activated as a sorcery.
Good, it's nice that the stage works without the CFC free casting. But, it looks like the infinite line in post #100 wouldn't work without CFC free casting, since the infinite loop appears to be drawing and casting cards. So, is Teach By Example safe again, or is there another problem in the stage?
If it's safe in the stage, the other question is, what can we get away with in the startup without being able to preserve a Genesis Ultimatum for infinite looping. It certainly looks like the first one is safe, since we have to cast it right away; can we get away with a second or third?
So, here is what it seems we need to do in order to keep the Genesis Ultimatum around. We start by casting Tibalt's Tricery, and then respond by casting a Teach By Example. We then resolve the Teach By Example, and then the Trickery, getting Genesis Ultimatum cast and getting a copy. We then have to respond again with a Tibalt's Trickery, so we spend a blue to mutate Sea-Dasher Octopus onto Vadrok. Actually, this is clearly more trouble to fetch an Island than just spending a blue for Into the Roil; we have to spend a blue for the Octopus, and two blue or red for the Teach by Example, so we're actually worse off.
That's good news, it looks like Genesis Ultimatum is fine with Teach By Example.
It looks safe with regards to the stage; in the stage then the only way for a stack of roil triggers to net extra blue through something like the loop in #100 is to cast spells, which requires mana - either red mana for trickery, which is more expensive than the stage (as long as we're not using red mana as our base resource, through, say, birgi); or an octopus.
As for the ultimatum: I'm not fully sure, given that stuff can be cast via trickery. Here's a possible almost-loop:
Start: UUU
- Cast octo, get lots of octo triggers (UU)
- Use a few to do normal stage things; like shuffle the island and make brooms on stormcallers
- Shuffle in more stuff including roil, ultimatum, and teach, and the original octo
- Use one more octo to trickery; get a lot of stormcaller triggers
- Resolve one, counter original trickery, get roil unkicked to bounce omen
- Broom stormcallers
- Resolve another trickery, counter something random on the stack; get teach
- Resolve another trickery, counter another random thing; get ultimatum; get some teach triggers
- Resolve an ultimatum; get the island (UUU), draw the octo
- Cast the octo (UU)
- Do normal stage stuff, including trickery the original ultimatum
- On the last few octo triggers, shuffle the island
- Resolve another ultimatum, get the island again (UUU)
- Resolve down the full stack
We now have as much mana as we had when we started, plus extra brooms, and the only cost was to counter two extra spells on the stack. I'm not sure whether that's enough to keep it from being infinite but it doesn't feel like it is.
Edit: In fact it's not. One of those extra spells can be a broom cast prior to the first step and the other can be a reflections trigger for broom. During this loop the broom gets shuffled and drawn by the ultimatum so it's back in hand to go again.
Yes; with only one ultimatum then it shouldn't be possible to go off without it turn 2 as it's the only way to get certain engine pieces into play without mana.
We can GU into spellbook to get an extra GU; and I believe Corridor Monitor is safe to untap spellbook and get as many ultimatums as we need, limited by spells in deck.
For the start, we of course cast Tibalt's Trickery on turn 2, and mill Genesis Ultimatum, Teach By Example, and one other card. (Into the Roil perhaps?) We bring out Wizard's Spellbook and exile GU, getting lucky and rolling a 20. GU brings out 4 copies of Sea Gate Stormcaller and the Corridor Monitor. We untap the Spellbook, tap it again to exile Teach By Example, and cast both TBE and GU. We resolve TBE and its four copies, and then get 6 copies of GU, fetching 30 cards, of which we can put any permanents into play. We have now accessed 47 cards, of which we need only 41 even including all the cards for layers. So we're totally fine in terms of draw.
We have 41 creatures, of which the number of non-expendable creatures is... one? I can only see Sea-Dasher Octopus being a card we need to hold onto, as we need to keep mutating it. All the others we can just make use of copies. I think we can probably replace Omen of the Hunt with an enchantment creature, but it won't be expendable, as we need to respond to put one into play, so that doesn't really help. So we can exile 40 creatures to Vault Robber. Vault Robber gets us to more than 3 -> 3 -> 40 -> 7, provided we can get more than 27 Treasure tokens from the first Vault Robber exile, which I'm pretty sure we can. Then Moraug, Fury of Akoum gets us to more than 3 -> 3 -> (3 -> 3 -> 40 -> 7) -> 9.
Wow, excellent work! I hadn't considered the spellbook for setup but it seems pretty good.
One note is that we don't get teach by example copies of genesis ultimatum in that line as they both go on the stack as part of spellbook's 20, se we'd need one more activation to get through the deck.
Ah true. So another Corridor Monitor and another exiled instant or sorcery will get us there. That will take our expendable creatures down to 39.
A possibility for staying at 40 is to have two GU's, getting us 15 cards, and then use Peer Into the Abyss to draw most of the rest of the deck. Would that be enough to get off the ground? We probably couldn't get over 27 treasures with the first Vault Robber then, so probably still at 3 -> 3 -> 39 -> 7 rather than 3 -> 3 -> 40 -> 7, and it's not obvious which version would be better. But maybe there are some optimizations we can do for the 2 GU version.
I don't think Treacherous blessing works: we can play it, trigger thaumaturges, one of them targets the blessing, saccing it without having to cast a spell.
I'm thinking our extra creatures should be full of enchantment creatures, so that we get a bunch of constellation triggers for our Thaumabroom combo. (We need at least one sacrifice creature though.) Each enchantment creature can roughly exponentiate our number of Thaumabrooms, and flashing in our Omen of the Hunt will apply a tetration, so we should be able to make about 2^^(2^^17) Xorns before we need to use Vault Robber.
Yeah, ideally the extra cards would be green enchantment creatures with flash, but Boon satyr is long rotated, so we don't have any of those.
Edit: Hmm we don't need dance of the manse after animating what we need, so we can exile it with the spellbook, to get an extra casting of ultimatum.
Also I've gotten started on the writeup, I'm sending edit links in DMs as usual
Edit:
Oops! the line I had for the stage doesn't work, I think its not fatal but I had us casting a kicked Stormcaller for free when sea gate stormcaller's kicker actually costs blue. That was mostly to keep the stack self contained and adding an uncounterable spell at the bottom of the stack definitely fixes it, but I'm not sure it's necessary.
I don't think it is necessary; my stage line in #103 doesn't require it.
An uncounterable spell does go infinite with multiple qcommands in the deck (make stormcallers, trickery; counter original trickery, counter uncounterable into qcommand, then roil for brooms for stormcallers, then trickery) but it seems like its safe with just one, even with teach.
but we can't just "do it again" as the triggers are in the other order now. Isn't this the same logic as we had before with guilded goose/nyxbloom ancient: we need an enchantment ETB in response to the sacrifice/broom trigger for this to go infinite, right? But none of the brooms from that last trigger will also be enchantments, so they just double once.
As for the stage: yeah that sucks, one Quandrix command will need to put in some serious work. Nice catch though.
To convince my self that this is indeed the case, the following operactions are possible:
a) Sac something: make X just-broom triggers
b) Play an enchantment: turn any number of just-broom triggers into anything-broom
c) Resolve a just-broom trigger: make a broom
d) Resolve an anything-broom trigger: make anything
Since making an enchantment with d cannot result in additional anything-broom triggers, the ordinal (number of enchantments we can play * w^2) + (number of anything-broom triggers * w) + (number of just-broom triggers) always decreases and thus it terminates.
It's not 100% obvious that the chandra ult is required to go off; since we can get a lot of milage off of just using blue mana to mutate and play trickeries. But now that there are alternatives to witherbloom I don't think it matters.
- Start: UUU
- Octopus (UU); triggers a lot of reflections
- Use a small number of reflections to cast several things; including redcap, trickery on real octo, qcommand on island+octo, unkicked roil on omen for thaumabrooms, and some number of qcommands to recycle anything else we want. If we thaumabroom stormcallers before trickery-ing real octo, we can get several trickery copies to target
each otherthe original trickery to cast whatever else we want.- Then, thaumabroom stormcallers and reflections on octopus, and cast kicked roil. (U)
- Draw and play island (UU)
- Draw real octo; play it (U); do as above.
Stack:
- X octo
- X roil
- X octo
...
Looks like it works. One roil makes a lot of octos provided we've shuffled the island; and a small number of octos shuffle the island, generate additional value, and and make a lot of roils.
First layer: in place of "whatever else we want" above; we trickery into peer into the abyss (do we have an issue of running out of targets for trickery? I don't think so; as we can cast random creatures. We could also thaumabroom Omen of the dead just to be absolutely sure; this doesn't break the stage by skipping on shuffling octopuses as we still always need to shuffle the island.); converting a small number of octopus triggers and some life for blue; until we run out of life.
(edit: omen of the dead doesn't really help, but in fact we can always just trickery some random spell on the stack after getting stormcallers, counter the original trickery, and never counter the original spell; so it's fine).
Other layers are as in #72. (Except we don't have teach to copy heliod's intervention).
Provisional decklist:
1 Lorehold campus
2 Forest
3 Tormod's Crypt
4 Tibalt's trickery
5 Chandra, Flame's Catalyst
6 Island
7 Kasmina, Enigma sage
8 Dance of the manse
Engine/utility:
9 Circle of dreams druid
10 Sorcerer's Broom
11 Protean Thaumaturge
12 Tuktuk Rubblefort
13 Reflections of littjara
14 Sea-gate Stormcaller
15 Omen of the dead
16 Vadrok, Apex of Thunder
17 Sea-dasher octopus
18 Into the roil
19 Redcap Melee
20 Quandrix command
Layers:
21 Peer into the abyss
22 Honor troll
23 Chandra's Incinerator
24 Unexpected fangs
25 Shock
26 Clackbridge troll
28 True polymorph
29 Kinnan, Bonder Prodigy
30 Kargan Intimidator
31 Xorn
32 Hamar pashar, ruin seeker
33 Planar Ally
34 Moraug, Fury of Akoum
Plenty of deck space to spare; so might as well put in some stuff like flumph, ageless insight, extra reflections, etc, to help with the opening.
So losing the copying for Heliod's Intervention means we lose the extra layer we get from Kinnan, Bonder Prodigy, so we stay at 8 layers. Without copying, we don't even need to give Honor Troll to the opponent, so if that is what True Polymorph is for it can be removed.
With a given amount of layers, the next best thing to do is to maximize how many times a Moraug triggers via landfall prior to combat. We can use our and the opponent's starting life totals to help with that, with the opponent's life taking priority. Peer into the Abyss runs counter to that, so it makes sense to use the other avenues to get sufficient card draw in the opponent rather than pay our life. If Peer into the Abyss isn't needed for the start then, it is probably better to use Sea Gate, Reborn for life into blue mana, since that gives roughly X/3 mana for X life rather than log_2 X mana.
I'll keep looking for more layers, with an eye towards the other mana colors. I think our use of green mana is maybe nonessential, and there is probably a way to still go off using the colorless mana engines, so we should be open to layer possibilities from green mana.
Edit: Oh, I guess Sea Gate, Reborn comes with Sea Gate Restoration, which is not good perhaps?
There are several cards that turn life into cards more efficiently, I think there might be thaumabroom shenanigans with a frogifyed Treacherous Blessing. But I'm not quite sure.
If we can turn them back without paying life though, then with a Frogifyed TB we wouldn't have to pay any life at all to loop. So maybe no Frogify? Then we need to remove the TB's ability from the battlefield sometimes so that we can do the lower level stuff without having to pay life. But Dance of the Manse requires white mana, which we would like to use higher up. True Polymorph could change it to something different, but then we can't change it back without anther animated TB.
What about a banisher, like Banishing Light? The Trickster-God's Heist can exchange two creatures, but after Trecherous Blessing comes back it won't be a creature anymore. TTGH's second ability can exchange noncreature permanents, but we don't have the ability to proc those with this setup. So I don't know.
Edit:
I might be missing something, but why can't we go off turn three with: t2:vorinclex->t3:chandra+ult?
This would also save us from burning green mana as we don't need the untapped land to cast kasmina.
Actually, if we want to be crazy, can we do turn 2(!?) with trickery into genesis ultimatum getting chandra, vorinclex, and other goodies?
Genesis Ultimatum looks really good though, even without Vorinclex. The two turns required to pump up Chandra and Ugin seem to doom us to turn 4 though, if we can't have Vorinclex. If we can somehow get Semester's End cast on turn 2, we can go off on turn 3.
Edit: Yeah, I was looking for an alternative to Frogify, so that we would be forced to take some damage, but I didn't come up with a good way to hide or retrieve the TB.
Edit: I think with Vorinclex we get an infinite line with:
Activate Chandra, Flame's Catalyst's ultimate, discarding our hand and drawing 7 cards.
Draw Island Redcap Melee, Into the Roil, ...
Tap a Scaled Herbalists to put the Island into play.
Tap the Island for a blue mana.
Cast Redcap Melee to sacrifice the Island.
Cast Into the Roil unkicked to bring Omen of the Hunt back to our hand.
Cast four more instants/sorceries to put them in the graveyard.
Spend the new blue mana to mutate Sea-Dasher Octopus onto [c}Vadrok, Apex of Thunder[/c], giving us a bunch of casts from the graveyard.
Cast Into the Roil from our graveyard, returing Chandra, Flame's Catalyst to our hand.
sacrifice an Omen of the Hunt token, then respond by playing Omen of the Hunt to do our Thaumabroom combo to create new Sea Gate Stormcallers. Can also create new Scaled Herbalists and Omen of the Hunts, and Circle of the Dreams Druids.
Cast Quandrix Command from the graveyard, getting copies allowing us to shuffle at least 7 cards into the library.
After the stack is empty, replay Chandra, Flame's Catalyst.
Genesis ultimatum allows for us to save green mana for later, as we won't need to cast kasmina. Though the Forsaken monument/crawling barrens engine is slower and moots life instead...
I guess since we are using lands for the stage: haste + Kinnan, bonder prodigy + palladium myr?
Even nicer than Trickery into Genesis Ultimatum is Trickery into Wizard's Spellbook, casting Genesis Ultimatum for free on turn 2, casting it twice on turn 3, and three times on turn 4 if we have to go that far.
Or on turn 2 we could just go Tibalt's Trickery - Genesis Ultimatum - Wizard's Spellbook - GU - WS - GU - WS - GU, fetching 17 cards besides the 3 Spellbooks, and being able to put any permanents into play.
4 Circle of the Dream Druids + Tuktuk Rubblefort gives us 4X mana, where X is at least 5. Oh, but we need a white mana, so we can't have spent all our mana on Tibalt's Trickery; is there any way to get a third mana on turn 2?
If not, on turn 3 we can cast another 4 GU's, plus another 4 spells of our choosing if we so desire. That might be overkill. However, we would need to make sure the sequence works without being able to cast spells for free from our hand; can we rely on TT for our casting needs?
Edit: Oh, we can probably go off on turn 2 with Vault Robber plus Xorn for a limited amount of Treasure tokens.
Edit: Even better is if we could make a non-CFC stage work with Teach By Example allowable, would allow us to get a layer back, and probably a more powerful start.
But if we could find some other way to get a lot of permanents into play on turn 2 or 3, we certainly could go off without chandra using vault robber / xorn. The only things that need to be cast from hand in the current deck outside of setup are octopus and omen.
Edit: Actually ultimatum exiles itself, and we can't copy it except by spellbook, so it's fine (as long as we can't untap the spellbooks)
Edit: In fact even if we could untap the spellbooks we'd be limited by the number of instants and sorceries in the deck so we're definitely fine.
Edit: The only obstacle with using colourless mana as the base resource is how to put enchantments into play at instant speed for brooms. I think Pyre of heroes is safe; not going infinite due to being limited by the number of enchantment creatures in the deck, which requires casting spells to reset.
Good, it's nice that the stage works without the CFC free casting. But, it looks like the infinite line in post #100 wouldn't work without CFC free casting, since the infinite loop appears to be drawing and casting cards. So, is Teach By Example safe again, or is there another problem in the stage?
If it's safe in the stage, the other question is, what can we get away with in the startup without being able to preserve a Genesis Ultimatum for infinite looping. It certainly looks like the first one is safe, since we have to cast it right away; can we get away with a second or third?
So, here is what it seems we need to do in order to keep the Genesis Ultimatum around. We start by casting Tibalt's Tricery, and then respond by casting a Teach By Example. We then resolve the Teach By Example, and then the Trickery, getting Genesis Ultimatum cast and getting a copy. We then have to respond again with a Tibalt's Trickery, so we spend a blue to mutate Sea-Dasher Octopus onto Vadrok. Actually, this is clearly more trouble to fetch an Island than just spending a blue for Into the Roil; we have to spend a blue for the Octopus, and two blue or red for the Teach by Example, so we're actually worse off.
That's good news, it looks like Genesis Ultimatum is fine with Teach By Example.
As for the ultimatum: I'm not fully sure, given that stuff can be cast via trickery. Here's a possible almost-loop:
Start: UUU
- Cast octo, get lots of octo triggers (UU)
- Use a few to do normal stage things; like shuffle the island and make brooms on stormcallers
- Shuffle in more stuff including roil, ultimatum, and teach, and the original octo
- Use one more octo to trickery; get a lot of stormcaller triggers
- Resolve one, counter original trickery, get roil unkicked to bounce omen
- Broom stormcallers
- Resolve another trickery, counter something random on the stack; get teach
- Resolve another trickery, counter another random thing; get ultimatum; get some teach triggers
- Resolve an ultimatum; get the island (UUU), draw the octo
- Cast the octo (UU)
- Do normal stage stuff, including trickery the original ultimatum
- On the last few octo triggers, shuffle the island
- Resolve another ultimatum, get the island again (UUU)
- Resolve down the full stack
We now have as much mana as we had when we started, plus extra brooms, and the only cost was to counter two extra spells on the stack. I'm not sure whether that's enough to keep it from being infinite but it doesn't feel like it is.
Edit: In fact it's not. One of those extra spells can be a broom cast prior to the first step and the other can be a reflections trigger for broom. During this loop the broom gets shuffled and drawn by the ultimatum so it's back in hand to go again.
We can GU into spellbook to get an extra GU; and I believe Corridor Monitor is safe to untap spellbook and get as many ultimatums as we need, limited by spells in deck.
1 Lorehold campus
2 Island
3 Tormod's Crypt
4 Tibalt's trickery
5 Wizard's Spellbook
6 Genesis Ultimatum
7 Teach By Example
8 Teach By Example
9 Sea Gate Stormcaller
10 Sea Gate Stormcaller
11 Sea Gate Stormcaller
12 Sea Gate Stormcaller
13 Corridor Monitor
14 Dance of the manse
15 Vault Robber
16 Circle of dreams druid
17 Sorcerer's Broom
18 Protean Thaumaturge
19 Scaled Herbalist
20 Tuktuk Rubblefort
21 Reflections of littjara
22 Sea-Dasher Octopus
23 Omen of the Hunt
Stage:
24 Vadrok, Apex of Thunder
25 Into the roil
26 Redcap Melee
27 Quandrix command
Layers:
28 Treacherous Blessing
29 Honor troll
30 Chandra's Incinerator
31 Unexpected fangs
32 Shock
33 Clackbridge troll
35 True Polymorph
36 Kinnan, Bonder Prodigy
37 Kargan Intimidator
38 Xorn
39 Hamar pashar, ruin seeker
40 Planar Ally
41 Moraug, Fury of Akoum
Optimization:
3 Circle of the Dreams Druid
4 Glasspool Mimic
3 Protean Thaumaturge
9 other creatures
For the start, we of course cast Tibalt's Trickery on turn 2, and mill Genesis Ultimatum, Teach By Example, and one other card. (Into the Roil perhaps?) We bring out Wizard's Spellbook and exile GU, getting lucky and rolling a 20. GU brings out 4 copies of Sea Gate Stormcaller and the Corridor Monitor. We untap the Spellbook, tap it again to exile Teach By Example, and cast both TBE and GU. We resolve TBE and its four copies, and then get 6 copies of GU, fetching 30 cards, of which we can put any permanents into play. We have now accessed 47 cards, of which we need only 41 even including all the cards for layers. So we're totally fine in terms of draw.
We have 41 creatures, of which the number of non-expendable creatures is... one? I can only see Sea-Dasher Octopus being a card we need to hold onto, as we need to keep mutating it. All the others we can just make use of copies. I think we can probably replace Omen of the Hunt with an enchantment creature, but it won't be expendable, as we need to respond to put one into play, so that doesn't really help. So we can exile 40 creatures to Vault Robber. Vault Robber gets us to more than 3 -> 3 -> 40 -> 7, provided we can get more than 27 Treasure tokens from the first Vault Robber exile, which I'm pretty sure we can. Then Moraug, Fury of Akoum gets us to more than 3 -> 3 -> (3 -> 3 -> 40 -> 7) -> 9.
One note is that we don't get teach by example copies of genesis ultimatum in that line as they both go on the stack as part of spellbook's 20, se we'd need one more activation to get through the deck.
A possibility for staying at 40 is to have two GU's, getting us 15 cards, and then use Peer Into the Abyss to draw most of the rest of the deck. Would that be enough to get off the ground? We probably couldn't get over 27 treasures with the first Vault Robber then, so probably still at 3 -> 3 -> 39 -> 7 rather than 3 -> 3 -> 40 -> 7, and it's not obvious which version would be better. But maybe there are some optimizations we can do for the 2 GU version.
I don't think Treacherous blessing works: we can play it, trigger thaumaturges, one of them targets the blessing, saccing it without having to cast a spell.
Hmm, so we can go back to Plumb the Forbidden, or perhaps Peer Into the Abyss for the no-extra-TBE version.
I'm thinking our extra creatures should be full of enchantment creatures, so that we get a bunch of constellation triggers for our Thaumabroom combo. (We need at least one sacrifice creature though.) Each enchantment creature can roughly exponentiate our number of Thaumabrooms, and flashing in our Omen of the Hunt will apply a tetration, so we should be able to make about 2^^(2^^17) Xorns before we need to use Vault Robber.
Edit: Hmm we don't need dance of the manse after animating what we need, so we can exile it with the spellbook, to get an extra casting of ultimatum.
Also I've gotten started on the writeup, I'm sending edit links in DMs as usual
Edit:
Oops! the line I had for the stage doesn't work, I think its not fatal but I had us casting a kicked Stormcaller for free when sea gate stormcaller's kicker actually costs blue. That was mostly to keep the stack self contained and adding an uncounterable spell at the bottom of the stack definitely fixes it, but I'm not sure it's necessary.
An uncounterable spell does go infinite with multiple qcommands in the deck (make stormcallers, trickery; counter original trickery, counter uncounterable into qcommand, then roil for brooms for stormcallers, then trickery) but it seems like its safe with just one, even with teach.