Splitting this off into a separate thread for limited-card challenges.
Rules from the 60-card Standard challenge:
The Rules of the Game
I’ve taken the liberty of adapting the rules from the original vintage challenge to this one. I’ve relaxed them in some places to allow for the limited cardpool, but for the most part I’ve left them as-is.
-Start with a Standard-legal deck of exactly 60 cards. No less, of course, and if we allowed more, you could deal arbitrary but finite damage by including as many copies of Rat Colony as you feel like, and it wouldn’t break the other rules.
-Conditions caused by randomness can resolve any way you like. In this deck, that mostly means that every single card draw is a Demonic Tutor in disguise: you can assume that the order of your deck is exactly what you want it to be. This veers pretty heavily into magical christmasland, but if we didn’t do it this way you’d have to figure out the average amount of damage a deck could deal, which is probably impossible.
-The opponent is a goldfish with a deck of 60 random basic lands. However, they are still playing to stop you: if you give your opponent a choice, they will pick whichever one is worse for you. The only exception is that they won’t concede the game. This is a sadistic goldfish that wants to make you play it out.
-No going infinite. Infinite really means “arbitrary” in magic, most of the time, so we define it like this: when you make your deck, I pick a finite number, say, a million, or Graham’s Number, or four. If, no matter what number I pick, there’s a line your deck can take that will deal at least that much damage, your deck goes infinite and is disqualified.
-This doesn’t matter to our deck, but other rules of magic apply: if I put 80,000,000 copies of Shock on the stack and target my opponent with each one, they’ll die on the tenth one, and I’ll have dealt only 20 damage. In practice, that means you’re either winning with a giant X-spell or by attacking with a lot of very big creatures.
-In the old challenge, you had to go off on turn one. Here, that rule is relaxed, with a caveat: the fewer turns required, the better. No one is impressed that you can deal a lot of damage on turn 50, or 50 million for that matter.
For this set of challenges, rather than using a 60-card deck, we're trying to reach massive damage using a limited number of cards. That can mean picking a damage target (ex. Graham's Number) and trying to build a deck that hits that target in as few cards as possible, or picking a relatively small number and trying to deal as much damage as possible using that number of cards. We can also aim for different card pools such as Standard, Modern, or Vintage. We're trying to minimize turns as well as card count, so typically, Standard decks would be limited to the minimum turns needed to get a combo on the scale in question, while higher-power formats would go off on Turn 1.
One other possible point of variation is defining exactly what it means to be limited to N cards. That could mean starting with a deck of only N cards and having an otherwise-empty library, or assuming that there's other cards filling space there and we just can't use them. This affects the power of cards like Ardent Dustspeaker and Junktroller that put cards on the bottom of the library.
I've currently been taking a look at the current Standard format, which can hit Graham's Number on Turn 2. There seems to be a few ways to do this in 18 cards, such as:
Some viewers might be wondering how things work and why basically every deck uses Toralf, God of Fury which on casual inspection doesn't seem like that special of a card for this kind of challenge.
And if we were limited to one copy due to the legend rule then yeah it'd be a lot harder to use. However we can use cards like mirror box or by mutating cubwarden on top of it to allow us to get multiple copies. Cubwarden is great in the vintage deck because it also gives lifelink and some 1/1s that pump up Urza's karnstruct token.
For ease of explanation, assume the opponent has essentially infinite 1/1s and we can turn life into additional toralfs at instant speed. (All of the above decks can do this at constant or better cost.)
Lets start by having two toralfs and doing just 4 lifelink damage to a 1/1.
Each toralf triggers for 3 and hits a fresh 1/1.
But before we let those resolve, we can spend the 4 life we gained to make more toralfs.
Then when the 3 damage trigger resolves we get more 2 damage triggers.
We can make more toralfs again.
Resolve a 2 damage trigger, and here we make 1 damage triggers that DONT create additional triggers.
After resolving all of those we can make more toralfs again and the stack has another 2 damage trigger waiting.
When we finally run out of 2 damage triggers, we now have that other 3 damage trigger and it makes a whole bunch of new 2 damage triggers.
So the stack ends up looking somethinglike:
4
33
32222
32221111
32211111111
321111111111111111
311111111111111111111111111111111
3
22222222222222222222222222222222
222222222222222222222222222222211111111111111111111111111111111
2222222222222222222222222222221111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111
2222222222222222222222222222211111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111
... I think you can get the point
Its easy to see that without a Furnace of Rath or Torbran, Thane of Red Fell effect that any toralf combo like this must be finite, there is no way to add a trigger to the stack without removing a larger numbered trigger from the stack, and we started with a finite number.
This grows roughly in line with the Ackermann function, (equivalent in Big O notation) which grows very quickly
A(3,3) is 61
A(4,4) has more than a googleplex digits.
And considering we start off with larger damage values, we can get very very large numbers out of our combo.
But that's not enough to catch Graham's number, We need to iterate this process at least 64 times, feeding the output back into the combo with a card like outnumber to kick off the whole combo again but with a (MUCH) bigger initial burst of damage, and (MANY) more Toralfs.
A way to turn life into clones of Toralf (despite the legend rule) and more opponent tokens
A damage source that we can repeat at least 64 times (but can't go infinite from more life inputs), scaling each time with the results of the previous round
A way to play all of those things within the allotted time
An effective damage source is Surtland Flinger, since we can get as many triggers as the number of Flingers we can make before combat, but the lifelink we gain from a Flinger trigger doesn't let us keep getting more Flinger triggers. In Standard, we use Slaughter Specialist to provide tokens to the opponent, which also grows as we progress and prepares to allow an even bigger Flinger trigger next time.
In Vintage, we can use Channel, Mycosynth Lattice, and Cogwork Assembler to convert life to mana and mana to tokens, as well as helping with our initial setup and providing haste. Cubwarden provides both a lifelink source and a way to make Toralf no longer legendary.
In Standard, it gets more complicated. To start making big plays on Turn 2, we need to use Goldhound, Tibalt's Trickery, two untapped lands (one red), and some 1-mana spell to counter. (Standard does not currently have any 0-mana spells.) From there, it seems like the best way to proceed is to have Trickery hit Wizard's Spellbook and start copying spells we've milled, beginning with Invoke the Winds so we can reuse it.
To make repeated clone tokens in Standard at instant speed, the best option seems to be Orvar, the All-Form, cloning our creatures each time we cast spells targeting them. Our options to get around the legend rule are Double Major (difficult to use in Standard since it's hard to cast our spells properly) or Mirror Box (requires another card to start building up multiple Orvars). Orvar requires a way to loop our spells mid-combo - Aberrant Mind Sorcerer is particularly powerful, but Ardent Elementalist and Biblioplex Assistant are additional options if their limitations are relevant.
This loop requires two instants we can cast repeatedly throughout the combo. When we cast one, Orvar generates tokens while the spell is on the stack, so we'll need something else for the recursion abilities to target. The second instant could be a second spell that can target our recursion creature, or Tibalt's Trickery if we haven't exiled it to the Spellbook - we can use Trickery to counter the first instant and take it off the stack, then start recasting it, and have Orvar triggers further down the stack make the clones that will recur both spells. (Unfortunately, not exiling Trickery tends to make it hard to get enough spells into our graveyard.)
Converting life to mana is easier, because of the ZNR mythic MDFCs. If our second land is Turntimber, Serpentine Wood, we can clone it with Tamiyo's Safekeeping, allowing us to generate green mana at a cost of 3 life each. (We get 2 life back when we play the Safekeeping, but that's not enough to go infinite. Alternatively, if we use Moritte of the Frost to give something Orvar can copy to make more Orvars (rather than True Polymorph), Moritte can also enter as a copy of one of those lands. (We'd have the original Moritte enter untransformed, and survive because of Mirror Box.)
Another benefit to those MDFCs is that Lorehold Command can sacrifice them to get them into our graveyard as spells for Wizard's Spellbook to exile, and therefore activate it more times. Lorehold Command also has the benefit of providing a haste source for Surtland Flinger, and helixing our own creatures to give us some extra life and clones.
Other MDFCs are options if we want to pick a different secondary color, but they have downsides. Emeria, Shattered Skyclave allows us access to Blessed Defiance, incorporating lifelink without devoting a slot to Angelfire Ignition. However, if the deck can repeatedly generate both red and white mana, including Lorehold Command risks going infinite, and I don't see a way around that. Blue and black don't seem to have much to offer this strategy, Malakir Rebirth looks potentially useful but countering it with Trickery means getting tokens without losing life. Shatterskull, the Hammer Pass is tempting, but again raises concerns about going infinite.
Ziatora, the Incinerator is a potential alternative to Surtland Flinger, to avoid needing a haste source. However, it throws a wrench into mana generation by making Treasures, which can easily go infinite with ways of copying permanents. Callous Bloodmage and Beledros Witherbloom offer two other ways of incorporating life costs but they take up the deck slot we'd save and just make things even harder.
A big issue I've run into when trying to get to 17 cards in Standard is letting the spell count get too low, limiting the number of times we can activate Wizard's Spellbook. We tend to end up not building up enough Orvars by the time we need to start looping our spells, and either run out of life too fast or not be able to trade up in other resources in the first place. So hitting 17 cards could mean either finding a way to lower the card count without cutting as far down on Spellbook activations, or finding some other way to fill up our board.
I think I have a smaller deck that exceeds Graham's Number in Vintage.
The key card is the upcoming Saw in Half, which is almost perfect for this purpose (consuming one thing to make (increaseable) two smaller things), except that the rounding up means it can produce 1/1s without limit. I get around that flaw by pairing it with Temur Ascendancy, which is productive only with higher powers.
Start with Black Lotus and Show and Tell to get Omniscience onto the battlefield.
Cast Doubling Season and Temur Ascendancy, then Astral Dragon makes four copies of Temur Ascendancy and draws a card.
Next, cast Wheel of Sun and Moon on oneself, and Avabruck Caretaker, generating five "draw a card" triggers from Temur Ascendancys.
With the first three, draw Saw in Half and cast it on an Astral Dragon, and have the Astral Dragon tokens target Doubling Season. This does a tetration each time, and ends up with more than 2^^^5 copies of Doubling Season.
With the fourth trigger, draw Saw in Half again, but this time, cast it on Avabruck Caretaker, getting more than 2^^^5 copies of Avabruck Caretaker. With the fifth trigger, draw Saw in Half, and keep it in hand this time.
Proceed to the combat step; the Avabruck Caretakers trigger. Have them target each other, targeting each one once; each trigger adds lots of +1/+1 counters because of the Doubling Seasons. While there are creatures with at least 7 power, Saw in Half the lowest-powered of those, getting many Temur Ascendancy triggers that redraw Saw in Half, and after all but the last, cast Saw in Half on an Astral Dragon for more copies of Doubling Season.
EDIT: For the version where the library contains additional cards, use Feldon's Cane instead of Wheel of Sun and Moon, having to rely on luck early on (later, one can afford to draw the extra cards).
All the counters from a single Fangren Firsthborn trigger are added at the same time, so it doesn't look obviously better. I think Avabruck Caretaker may be a little bit better, since once we add twice as many +1/+1 counters to a creature (say an animated Doubling Season, we can cast Saw in Half on it to get a lot more Doubling Seasons with power roughly equal to what we would get from Fangren FIrstborn,
Some other things I've been looking at for the Standard deck:
Kaya, Geist Hunter - we can't get more activations out of her while we're in the middle of going off, but she helps us quickly increase our cloning output to the threshold needed. I haven't found a way to make space for her in a 17-card deck though.
Surtland Elementalist - requires a spell like Lantern Flare to use it as a damage source, but it could theoretically help with making sure all our spells get played. One idea I had was to try to cut Wizard's Spellbook by trying to get this out first, then use Moraug, Fury of Akoum for more combat steps later, but it does not look viable.
Thousand-Faced Shadow + Nezumi Prowler - an alternative way to turn mana into clones, except it can only take place later in combat. So it can't work with Surtland Flinger, but it could work with Pyre-Sledge Arsonist since the new tokens are tapped... but that means having some other way to get a bunch of untapped clones, so what's even the point.
Hofri Ghostforge - I don't even know how this would work. It would require Kaya, probably, as well as ways to keep sacrificing and reanimating. It would be funny, but I don't think this is a good way to get clones.
Atsushi, the Blazing Sky - I'm not entirely sure what it does to the math to make mana generation depend on throwing Toralf triggers at your own creatures, but it's probably not ideal.
Unfortunately there seems to be an infinite with the proposed 9 cards: With the last 2 draws from casting an Avabruck Caretaker we can draw Saw in Half, use that to destroy the Caretaker and put it into the library with Wheel of Sun and Moon or Feldon's Cane. Then use the last draw to redraw Caretaker and cast it again to get more draws.
Unfortunately there seems to be an infinite with the proposed 9 cards: With the last 2 draws from casting an Avabruck Caretaker we can draw Saw in Half, use that to destroy the Caretaker and put it into the library with Wheel of Sun and Moon or Feldon's Cane. Then use the last draw to redraw Caretaker and cast it again to get more draws.
Hmm. I was going to suggest Thundering Raiju for its lower power, but that would mess up the start. Is there a way to incorporate something that would make sure only Saw in Half loops, not the creatures?
---
My previous attempts to mess with the combo haven't gone well, but if there's anything to the Atsushi, the Blazing Sky strategy, here's a theoretical 17-card for Standard:
Turntimber (14 life), Draught, counter it with Trickery. (0 cards in hand.) Mill Invoke, Storm, and Rampage. Play Spellbook.
Tap Spellbook, exile Invoke. Untap Spellbook.
Tap Spellbook, exile Storm. Play Orvar and Kaya, untap Spellbook. -2 Kaya. (2x tokens.)
Tap Spellbook, exile Rampage. Destroy Shatterskull (make 2 untapped Shatterskulls, 8 life, fail to find basic), play Mirror Box and Elementalist (return Draught). Untap Spellbook.
Tap Spellbook, exile Shatterskull. Deal 0 damage to Kaya (make 2 Kayas), destroy Turntimber (make 2 untapped Turntimbers, 2 life). Play Toralf and Specialist, untap Spellbook. -2 both Kayas (x8 tokens).
Tap Spellbook, exile Turntimber, play Ziatora. Deal 0 damage to Kaya (make 8 Kayas), untap Elementalist (make 8 Elementalists, return Trickery), destroy Mirror Box (make 8 Boxes), play Atsushi.
-2 all Kayas (x2048 tokens). Using the RRGG from lands, play Draught on Elementalist (2048 Elementalists), counter it with Trickery, get it back, play it on Ziatora (2048 Ziatoras), get both back. Go to end step.
All 2049 Ziatoras trigger. Ziatora #1 sacrifices an Elementalist token and makes 6144 Treasures. Use 9 of them on three Draught+Trickery rounds to get 6144 Elementalist triggers, 1 to make 2048 Specialists, 1 to make 2048 Atsushis, and the other 6133 to make 12 million Toralfs.
Between Draught and the Mirror Boxes, original Toralf should have about 108 million power by now. Ziaora #2 sacrifices original Toralf for 108 million damage to a Human token, triggering the other Toralfs which will target the other 2048 Human tokens and the 2048 Atsushi tokens. (We'll have to waste most of the Toralf triggers.) Killing the Atsushis makes about 12 million Treasures.
From there, I think we can just keep going? At high damage numbers we'll probably focus on making Specialists to preserve big Toralf triggers, but then at low numbers we can kill a bunch of Atsushis, increase our Toralf count, and end up with a ton of mana to handle bigger spreads when we return to high numbers.
Mystic Sanctuary can do the restricted retrieval (in place of Wheel of Sun and Moon), but it doesn't allow Saw in Half to be gotten back after casting it on Avabruck Caretaker.
...Aha! I think Dromoka, the Eternal in place of Avabruck Caretaker works; it allows for always targeting Astral Dragon with Saw in Half, which as a bonus increases the number of triggers from >2^^^5 to >2^^^6 (because the copies of Doubling Season made by Astral Dragon are also Dragons).
(Having to target Mystic Sanctuary twice with Astral Dragons after the first Saw in Half makes it a bit worse, but it looks like it still ends up >2^^^6: with the first Saw in Half, there remain two Astral Dragons that can target Doubling Season, producing 4 copies (making 5), then 64 (making 69), and then the second Saw in Half produces 2^70 > 2^16 = 2^^^3 Astral Dragons.)
EDIT: We have to be careful to ensure that the final bolster can go to an attacking creature, but that can be done easily, as there will be plenty of 1/1 Astral Dragons that can attack, and many more will be created throughout the process.
The problem with Atsushi, the Blazing Sky is that it is legendary. That means we don't need Toralf's damage to kill it. If we don't play Mirror Box we can have the copies die to the legend rule whenever we create token copies.
With the start above, skipping Mirror Box we don't get as many Kayas, as they die to legend rule before we can activate them. But skimming it I think we can still -2 three times, so targeting a Atsushi gives 8 token copies, each giving 24 treasures. Easily enough to pay for the 2x Drought + 1x Trickery we need to loop this.
Thinking about it now, there is actually also a problem with the Ardent Elementalist loop. After countering the first Drought each loop with Trickery we resolve the Orvar trigger on Elementalist. All token copies enter at the same time in one big batch so we need to select targets now. That means that after returning the Drought and casting it again we can't pick it up with the Elementalist triggers. So we need a second Drought card, or some other way to make progress (perhaps the free cast we get from Trickery countering something?).
Previous decks didn't have that problem since with multiple Orvars the Elemntalist tokens don't enter in a single batch and we can leave a few token creation triggers on the stack until after we cast the second Drought.
EDIT: Just saw the Mystic Sanctuary post. Nice fix! That seems like it should work.
The problem with Atsushi, the Blazing Sky is that it is legendary. That means we don't need Toralf's damage to kill it. If we don't play Mirror Box we can have the copies die to the legend rule whenever we create token copies.
With the start above, skipping Mirror Box we don't get as many Kayas, as they die to legend rule before we can activate them. But skimming it I think we can still -2 three times, so targeting a Atsushi gives 8 token copies, each giving 24 treasures. Easily enough to pay for the 2x Drought + 1x Trickery we need to loop this.
Thinking about it now, there is actually also a problem with the Ardent Elementalist loop. After countering the first Drought each loop with Trickery we resolve the Orvar trigger on Elementalist. All token copies enter at the same time in one big batch so we need to select targets now. That means that after returning the Drought and casting it again we can't pick it up with the Elementalist triggers. So we need a second Drought card, or some other way to make progress (perhaps the free cast we get from Trickery countering something?).
Previous decks didn't have that problem since with multiple Orvars the Elemntalist tokens don't enter in a single batch and we can leave a few token creation triggers on the stack until after we cast the second Drought.
EDIT: Just saw the Mystic Sanctuary post. Nice fix! That seems like it should work.
Oh, hmm. Using Riveteers Requisitioner or Shambling Ghast could get treasures from death triggers of a non-legendary creature, but that doesn't solve the Elementalist problem.
Edit: Maybe we could fix that with more death triggers, such as Kairi, the Swirling Sky? That would complicate the Toralf section further and mean we couldn't recur instants until the end step, but it would also mean being able to exile Tibalt's Trickery for another Spellbook round since we'd only need to loop one instant, letting us point Invoke the Winds at Ziatora and allowing another batch of Kaya tokens.
Edit: Cormela, Glamour Thief is a lot easier to play, assuming she doesn't have any infinites to worry about. Unfortunately I don't think we can count on another chance to clone Kaya (or Ziatora) since this strategy requires cloning our recursion creature before we can start using it to recur our instant.
Mulligan to 4.
Shatterskull (17 life), Goldhound, pass.
Turntimber (14 life), Draught, counter it with Trickery. (0 cards in hand.) Mill Invoke, Storm, and Rampage. Play Spellbook.
Tap Spellbook, exile Invoke. Untap Spellbook.
Tap Spellbook, exile Storm. Play Orvar and Kaya, untap Spellbook. -2 Kaya. (2x tokens.)
Tap Spellbook, exile Rampage. Destroy Shatterskull, play Mirror Box and Toralf. Untap Spellbook.
Tap Spellbook, exile Shatterskull. Deal 0 damage to Kaya (make 2 Kayas), destroy Turntimber (make 2 untapped Turntimbers, 8 life). Play Specialist and Ghast, untap Spellbook. -2 both Kayas (x8 tokens).
Tap Spellbook, exile Turntimber, play Ziatora and Cormela. Deal 0 damage to Kaya (make 8 Kayas), destroy Mirror Box (make 8 Boxes), untap Spellbook. -2 all Kayas (x2048 tokens).
Tap Spellbook, exile Trickery. Deal 0 damage to Ziatora (make 2048 Ziatoras), untap Cormela (make 2048 Cormelas), destroy Mirror Box (make 2048 Boxes), play Kairi.
Go to end step, all 2049 Ziatoras trigger. Ziatora #1 sacrifices original Cormela to kill a Cormela token and makes 6144 Treasures. Recur Draught twice and use it on original Toralf twice, making 4096 tokens and giving the original about 8 million power. Ziatora #2 triggers, sacrifices original Toralf, start to combo off. Continue from there.
One potential problem with Cormela, Glamour Thief is the haste, as that could allow us to activate Toralf's Hammer. If we there is some line of play that manages to get set up with a few Toralf, God of Furys in play together with the hammer that would go infinite. Well, it also needs to be before the end step, otherwise we can't equip the hammer.
To get there one could skip Mirror Box for a while and get the original Toralf into the graveyard via legend rule after creating a copy. Then get it back via Kairi, the Swirling Sky, also dying from the legend rule. That looks tricky to set up, and may be impossible, but there is some danger there.
Another potential danger is Dire-Strain Rampage targeting Treasures, getting us mana without requiring any damage at all, if we can get set up without exiling it. But the saving grace there is that Treasures can only show up in the end step from Ziatora, the Incinerator or Shambling Ghast. Where the death of the latter usually has to be kicked off by the former as the ultimate source of damage.
Combining those dangers we could potentially go infinite without creature Toralfs. Just using the Hammer as damage source to initially kill Shambling Ghast and later Cormela to recur Rampage for mana.
Edit2: Wait, Cormela would replace Kairi, so the Toralf + Hammer problem wouldn't happen because Toralf gets stuck in the graveyard. There's still the problem with Rampage + Hammer, so Kairi seems like the safer option.
Edit3: Can we bring Shatterskull Smashing to our hand with a Kairi legend rule death and use that to kill Shambling Ghast to get Treasures before the end step? Might be too much to ask of the setup, but that could lead to another Ramapage infinite.
One potential problem with Cormela, Glamour Thief is the haste, as that could allow us to activate Toralf's Hammer. If we there is some line of play that manages to get set up with a few Toralf, God of Furys in play together with the hammer that would go infinite. Well, it also needs to be before the end step, otherwise we can't equip the hammer.
To get there one could skip Mirror Box for a while and get the original Toralf into the graveyard via legend rule after creating a copy. Then get it back via Kairi, the Swirling Sky, also dying from the legend rule. That looks tricky to set up, and may be impossible, but there is some danger there.
Another potential danger is Dire-Strain Rampage targeting Treasures, getting us mana without requiring any damage at all, if we can get set up without exiling it. But the saving grace there is that Treasures can only show up in the end step from Ziatora, the Incinerator or Shambling Ghast. Where the death of the latter usually has to be kicked off by the former as the ultimate source of damage.
Combining those dangers we could potentially go infinite without creature Toralfs. Just using the Hammer as damage source to initially kill Shambling Ghast and later Cormela to recur Rampage for mana.
Edit2: Wait, Cormela would replace Kairi, so the Toralf + Hammer problem wouldn't happen because Toralf gets stuck in the graveyard. There's still the problem with Rampage + Hammer, so Kairi seems like the safer option.
Edit3: Can we bring Shatterskull Smashing to our hand with a Kairi legend rule death and use that to kill Shambling Ghast to get Treasures before the end step? Might be too much to ask of the setup, but that could lead to another Ramapage infinite.
If we leave Toralf in hand, we can make up to 4 untapped Shatterskulls, which is enough to use Toralf's Hammer. Even without Rampage, we can just keep looping Draught to make more Cormelas and Ghasts and keep killing them. So yeah, looks like Cormela is off the table.
To get damage out of Shatterskull Smashing, we'd need to make 3 untapped lands. I don't think we can get that without exiling Shatterskull Smashing or Dire-Strain Rampage, since we'd need either multiple Rampage casts or a way to copy Kaya. So I don't think Kairi goes infinite.
But the fact that both Kairi and Ziatora cost too much to play with Storm the Festival means I'm not sure how to get enough copies of both before the end step. We'd need a way to play them both before tapping the Spellbook the final time, which cuts into the number of times we can copy Kaya.
I wonder if we can use Toralf, God of Fury or Saw in Half to make a more efficient non-Busy Beaver megastage deck? Or perhaps it can help make the gigastage deck more tractible.
Can Saw in Half help out with the Modern GN challenge as well? Of course, it should substitute nicely for Toralf in the next version of Standard.
I wonder if we can use Toralf, God of Fury or Saw in Half to make a more efficient non-Busy Beaver megastage deck? Or perhaps it can help make the gigastage deck more tractible.
Can Saw in Half help out with the Modern GN challenge as well? Of course, it should substitute nicely for Toralf in the next version of Standard.
Unfortunately, Saw in Half is in Unfinity, so it's not legal in Modern or Standard. (It's one of the Unfinity cards that will be legal in Legacy/Vintage/Commander, though.)
Another challenge we could look at would be the one issued by Gavin Verhey here. Basically the same except we have access to unlimited mana. His challenge was for three cards, but we could look at other deck sizes as well.
Most of the decks we have can't just be converted by removing Black Lotus / Channel / Omniscience, but I see two that can: The Precursor Golem 7 card deck, that becomes more than 2^^2^^8 for 4 cards, and I think plopfill's 9 card deck that beats Graham's number. It looks like with unlimited mana, it should work at 6 cards, and even get a couple more initial draws of Saw in Half, for maybe F_{w+1}(2^^^8)?
Edit: Looking at the 17 card Standard deck, it seems like it would work out if we just replaced one or more of the creatures with instants and/or sorceries. I was thinking Slaughter Specialist and Shambling Ghoul would be prime candidates to be replaced with instants/sorceries, but we need to recurse them to get the benefits frequently enough, so that doesn't allow more usages of Wizard's Spellbook. But maybe there is some way to add another instant/sorcery.
Edit: Looking at the 17 card Standard deck, it seems like it would work out if we just replaced one or more of the creatures with instants and/or sorceries. I was thinking Slaughter Specialist and Shambling Ghoul would be prime candidates to be replaced with instants/sorceries, but we need to recurse them to get the benefits frequently enough, so that doesn't allow more usages of Wizard's Spellbook. But maybe there is some way to add another instant/sorcery.
Now that you mention it, I think Fake Your Own Death would work. Making it the spell that Kairi recurs would let us exile the 1-mana instant for another Spellbook use.
Yes, that should work! In addition, it would be nice to switch to Emeria, Shattered Skyclave and Light the Way, so that we can bounce and replay Kaya rather than just copy it.
Emeria (14 life), Light the Way, counter it with Trickery. (0 cards in hand.) Mill Invoke, Storm. Play Spellbook.
Tap Spellbook, exile Invoke. Untap Spellbook.
Tap Spellbook, exile Storm. Play Orvar and Kaya, untap Spellbook. -2 Kaya. (2x tokens.)
Tap Spellbook, exile Light the Way. Play Mirror Box and Toralf, bounce Kaya (create 2 more Kayas). Untap Spellbook. -2 all Kayas (x16 tokens).
Tap Spellbook, exile Tibalt's Trickery. Use Trickery to counter Storm, mill Rampage, play Ziatora. Bounce Kaya. (Create 16 more Kayas.) Untap Spellbook. -2 on 17 Kayas (x 2^21 tokens).
Tap Spellbook, exile Rampage. Use Trickery to counter Storm, mill Fake Your Own Death, play Kairi. Destroy Shatterskull (create 2^21 useless copies) Bounce Kaya. (Create 2^21 more Kayas.) Untap Spellbook. -2 on all Kayas (x more than 2^2^21 tokens).
Tap Spellbook, exile Shatterskull. Play Slaughter Specialist, bounce Kaya (create more than 2^2^21 tokens), deal 0 damage to Kairi (x 2^2^21), destroy Emeria. Untap Spellbook. -2 on all Kayas (x more than 2^2^2^21 tokens).
Tap Spellbook, exile Emeria. Bounce, untap, and deal 0 damage to Ziatora (create more than 2^2^2^21 tokens).
Go to end step, more than 2^2^2^21 Ziatoras trigger. Resolve one Ziatora, sacrifice a Ziatora to destroy a Kairi. Create more than 2^2^2^21 Treasure tokens, and bring Fake Your Own Death back to our hand. Cast Fake Your Own Death on, say, Slaughter Specialist. Resolve another Ziatora trigger, and sacrifice a Ziatora to deal a whole bunch of damage to an opponent's creature, starting a Toralf combo.
Can't we just skip playing Mirror Box and alternate casting Fake your own Death and Light the Way on Kairi, the Swirling Sky?
With 2+ Kaya activations that produces more than enough treasures from legend rule deaths to pay for the loop. We don't have initial black mana to pay for the first Fake your own Death, but we can get around that by exiling Trickery to the Spellbook and casting it from the deck for free.
Hmm, that's troublesome. We don't need Light the Way, but we do need something that will target Kayas in order to get a sufficient number of copies, and then we need to target Ziatora and Kiara. It seems like whatever that would be can substitute for Light the Way in the loop.
I was thinking about needing to cast Light the Way to get a Kaya reuse (we can get rid of Shatterskull Smashing), but it seems like we can then cast Fake Your Own Death on Kairi to retrieve Light the Way, so that doesn't help.
Edit: What could have no Light the Way, and just have Shatterskull and FYOD, but I imagine that mana cost increase isn't enough to stop the loop.
Hmm, that's troublesome. We don't need Light the Way, but we do need something that will target Kayas in order to get a sufficient number of copies, and then we need to target Ziatora and Kiara. It seems like whatever that would be can substitute for Light the Way in the loop.
I was thinking about needing to cast Light the Way to get a Kaya reuse (we can get rid of Shatterskull Smashing), but it seems like we can then cast Fake Your Own Death on Kairi to retrieve Light the Way, so that doesn't help.
Edit: What could have no Light the Way, and just have Shatterskull and FYOD, but I imagine that mana cost increase isn't enough to stop the loop.
I think using Shatterskull and a non-targeting 1-mana spell takes care of the problems? We can get enough Kayas from exiling Shatterskull, but we couldn't go infinite unless we could loop Shatterskull, which would mean no Kayas beyond our original one.
Turntimber (14 life), Turn the Earth, counter it with Trickery. (0 cards in hand.) Mill Invoke, Storm, Rampage. Play Spellbook.
Tap Spellbook, exile Invoke. Untap Spellbook.
Tap Spellbook, exile Storm. Play Orvar and Kaya, untap Spellbook. -2 Kaya. (2x tokens.)
Tap Spellbook, exile Rampage. Play Mirror Box and Toralf, destroy Shatterskull (create 2 copies). Untap Spellbook.
Tap Spellbook, exile Shatterskull. Play Slaughter Specialist, deal 0 damage to Kaya (create 2 tokens), destroy Turntimber. Untap Spellbook. -2 for 2 Kayas (x8 tokens).
Tap Spellbook, exile Turntimber. Play Ziatora, deal 0 damage to Kaya (create 8 tokens). Untap Spellbook. -2 for 8 Kayas (x2048 tokens).
Tap Spellbook, exile Tibalt's Trickery. Play Kairi, deal 0 damage to Kaya (create 2048 tokens). Untap Spellbook. -2 for 2048 Kayas (x2^2059 tokens).
Tap Spellbook, exile Turn the Earth. Deal 0 damage to Ziatora (create 2^2059 tokens), untap Ziatora (create 2^2059 tokens).
Go to end phase, 2^2060 + 1 Ziatoras trigger. Resolve one Ziatora trigger, to sacrifice a Ziatora to kill a Kaya. We gain 3*2^2059 Treasure tokens. We cast Fake Your Own Death on Kairi, creating 2^2059 token copies of Kairi, and giving the original the ability.
We have plenty of resources to continue the combo.
Edit: Forgot we don't have Treasure tokens in main phase to cast FYOD. Moved the cast to end phase.
Edit: MTGS is really annoying with changes often not being updated.
Rules from the 60-card Standard challenge:
More details in the current Standard and Vintage threads.
For this set of challenges, rather than using a 60-card deck, we're trying to reach massive damage using a limited number of cards. That can mean picking a damage target (ex. Graham's Number) and trying to build a deck that hits that target in as few cards as possible, or picking a relatively small number and trying to deal as much damage as possible using that number of cards. We can also aim for different card pools such as Standard, Modern, or Vintage. We're trying to minimize turns as well as card count, so typically, Standard decks would be limited to the minimum turns needed to get a combo on the scale in question, while higher-power formats would go off on Turn 1.
One other possible point of variation is defining exactly what it means to be limited to N cards. That could mean starting with a deck of only N cards and having an otherwise-empty library, or assuming that there's other cards filling space there and we just can't use them. This affects the power of cards like Ardent Dustspeaker and Junktroller that put cards on the bottom of the library.
Some recent minimum-card challenges, using Toralf, God of Fury:
Vintage Graham's Number (Turn 1, 10 cards)
Modern Graham's Number (Turn 1, 14 cards)
Pioneer Graham's Number (Turn 1, 16 cards)
I've currently been taking a look at the current Standard format, which can hit Graham's Number on Turn 2. There seems to be a few ways to do this in 18 cards, such as:
2 Turntimber, Serpentine Wood
3 Goldhound
4 Tamiyo's Safekeeping
5 Fortifying Draught
6 Tibalt's Trickery
7 Wizard's Spellbook
8 Invoke the Winds
9 Storm the Festival
10 True Polymorph
11 Lorehold Command
12 Angelfire Ignition
13 Orvar, the All-Form
14 Mirror Box
15 Aberrant Mind Sorcerer
16 Toralf, God of Fury
17 Surtland Flinger
18 Slaughter Specialist
I've been trying for 17 by using cards like Malakir Rebirth, Moritte of the Frost, and Ziatora, the Incinerator, but haven't had any luck so far.
I also tried to incorporate An Offer You Can't Refuse into the Pioneer deck to speed up the opening, but between Thousand-Year Storm and Tibalt's Trickery, it seems to go infinite too easily.
In addition to Graham's Number challenges, this can also be a place for other damage targets, 7/8/9 card challenges, and so on.
And if we were limited to one copy due to the legend rule then yeah it'd be a lot harder to use. However we can use cards like mirror box or by mutating cubwarden on top of it to allow us to get multiple copies. Cubwarden is great in the vintage deck because it also gives lifelink and some 1/1s that pump up Urza's karnstruct token.
For ease of explanation, assume the opponent has essentially infinite 1/1s and we can turn life into additional toralfs at instant speed. (All of the above decks can do this at constant or better cost.)
Lets start by having two toralfs and doing just 4 lifelink damage to a 1/1.
Each toralf triggers for 3 and hits a fresh 1/1.
But before we let those resolve, we can spend the 4 life we gained to make more toralfs.
Then when the 3 damage trigger resolves we get more 2 damage triggers.
We can make more toralfs again.
Resolve a 2 damage trigger, and here we make 1 damage triggers that DONT create additional triggers.
After resolving all of those we can make more toralfs again and the stack has another 2 damage trigger waiting.
When we finally run out of 2 damage triggers, we now have that other 3 damage trigger and it makes a whole bunch of new 2 damage triggers.
So the stack ends up looking somethinglike:
4
33
32222
32221111
32211111111
321111111111111111
311111111111111111111111111111111
3
22222222222222222222222222222222
222222222222222222222222222222211111111111111111111111111111111
2222222222222222222222222222221111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111
2222222222222222222222222222211111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111
... I think you can get the point
Its easy to see that without a Furnace of Rath or Torbran, Thane of Red Fell effect that any toralf combo like this must be finite, there is no way to add a trigger to the stack without removing a larger numbered trigger from the stack, and we started with a finite number.
This grows roughly in line with the Ackermann function, (equivalent in Big O notation) which grows very quickly
A(3,3) is 61
A(4,4) has more than a googleplex digits.
And considering we start off with larger damage values, we can get very very large numbers out of our combo.
But that's not enough to catch Graham's number, We need to iterate this process at least 64 times, feeding the output back into the combo with a card like outnumber to kick off the whole combo again but with a (MUCH) bigger initial burst of damage, and (MANY) more Toralfs.
To expand a bit more, what this means is that the Toralf decks need:
In Vintage, we can use Channel, Mycosynth Lattice, and Cogwork Assembler to convert life to mana and mana to tokens, as well as helping with our initial setup and providing haste. Cubwarden provides both a lifelink source and a way to make Toralf no longer legendary.
In Standard, it gets more complicated. To start making big plays on Turn 2, we need to use Goldhound, Tibalt's Trickery, two untapped lands (one red), and some 1-mana spell to counter. (Standard does not currently have any 0-mana spells.) From there, it seems like the best way to proceed is to have Trickery hit Wizard's Spellbook and start copying spells we've milled, beginning with Invoke the Winds so we can reuse it.
To make repeated clone tokens in Standard at instant speed, the best option seems to be Orvar, the All-Form, cloning our creatures each time we cast spells targeting them. Our options to get around the legend rule are Double Major (difficult to use in Standard since it's hard to cast our spells properly) or Mirror Box (requires another card to start building up multiple Orvars). Orvar requires a way to loop our spells mid-combo - Aberrant Mind Sorcerer is particularly powerful, but Ardent Elementalist and Biblioplex Assistant are additional options if their limitations are relevant.
This loop requires two instants we can cast repeatedly throughout the combo. When we cast one, Orvar generates tokens while the spell is on the stack, so we'll need something else for the recursion abilities to target. The second instant could be a second spell that can target our recursion creature, or Tibalt's Trickery if we haven't exiled it to the Spellbook - we can use Trickery to counter the first instant and take it off the stack, then start recasting it, and have Orvar triggers further down the stack make the clones that will recur both spells. (Unfortunately, not exiling Trickery tends to make it hard to get enough spells into our graveyard.)
Converting life to mana is easier, because of the ZNR mythic MDFCs. If our second land is Turntimber, Serpentine Wood, we can clone it with Tamiyo's Safekeeping, allowing us to generate green mana at a cost of 3 life each. (We get 2 life back when we play the Safekeeping, but that's not enough to go infinite. Alternatively, if we use Moritte of the Frost to give something Orvar can copy to make more Orvars (rather than True Polymorph), Moritte can also enter as a copy of one of those lands. (We'd have the original Moritte enter untransformed, and survive because of Mirror Box.)
Another benefit to those MDFCs is that Lorehold Command can sacrifice them to get them into our graveyard as spells for Wizard's Spellbook to exile, and therefore activate it more times. Lorehold Command also has the benefit of providing a haste source for Surtland Flinger, and helixing our own creatures to give us some extra life and clones.
Other MDFCs are options if we want to pick a different secondary color, but they have downsides. Emeria, Shattered Skyclave allows us access to Blessed Defiance, incorporating lifelink without devoting a slot to Angelfire Ignition. However, if the deck can repeatedly generate both red and white mana, including Lorehold Command risks going infinite, and I don't see a way around that. Blue and black don't seem to have much to offer this strategy, Malakir Rebirth looks potentially useful but countering it with Trickery means getting tokens without losing life. Shatterskull, the Hammer Pass is tempting, but again raises concerns about going infinite.
Ziatora, the Incinerator is a potential alternative to Surtland Flinger, to avoid needing a haste source. However, it throws a wrench into mana generation by making Treasures, which can easily go infinite with ways of copying permanents. Callous Bloodmage and Beledros Witherbloom offer two other ways of incorporating life costs but they take up the deck slot we'd save and just make things even harder.
A big issue I've run into when trying to get to 17 cards in Standard is letting the spell count get too low, limiting the number of times we can activate Wizard's Spellbook. We tend to end up not building up enough Orvars by the time we need to start looping our spells, and either run out of life too fast or not be able to trade up in other resources in the first place. So hitting 17 cards could mean either finding a way to lower the card count without cutting as far down on Spellbook activations, or finding some other way to fill up our board.
The key card is the upcoming Saw in Half, which is almost perfect for this purpose (consuming one thing to make (increaseable) two smaller things), except that the rounding up means it can produce 1/1s without limit. I get around that flaw by pairing it with Temur Ascendancy, which is productive only with higher powers.
Start with Black Lotus and Show and Tell to get Omniscience onto the battlefield.
Cast Doubling Season and Temur Ascendancy, then Astral Dragon makes four copies of Temur Ascendancy and draws a card.
Next, cast Wheel of Sun and Moon on oneself, and Avabruck Caretaker, generating five "draw a card" triggers from Temur Ascendancys.
With the first three, draw Saw in Half and cast it on an Astral Dragon, and have the Astral Dragon tokens target Doubling Season. This does a tetration each time, and ends up with more than 2^^^5 copies of Doubling Season.
With the fourth trigger, draw Saw in Half again, but this time, cast it on Avabruck Caretaker, getting more than 2^^^5 copies of Avabruck Caretaker. With the fifth trigger, draw Saw in Half, and keep it in hand this time.
Proceed to the combat step; the Avabruck Caretakers trigger. Have them target each other, targeting each one once; each trigger adds lots of +1/+1 counters because of the Doubling Seasons. While there are creatures with at least 7 power, Saw in Half the lowest-powered of those, getting many Temur Ascendancy triggers that redraw Saw in Half, and after all but the last, cast Saw in Half on an Astral Dragon for more copies of Doubling Season.
EDIT: For the version where the library contains additional cards, use Feldon's Cane instead of Wheel of Sun and Moon, having to rely on luck early on (later, one can afford to draw the extra cards).
I feel like there should be a better card than Avabruck Caretaker, but most of them are legends. Fangren firstborn?
Some other things I've been looking at for the Standard deck:
Unfortunately there seems to be an infinite with the proposed 9 cards: With the last 2 draws from casting an Avabruck Caretaker we can draw Saw in Half, use that to destroy the Caretaker and put it into the library with Wheel of Sun and Moon or Feldon's Cane. Then use the last draw to redraw Caretaker and cast it again to get more draws.
Hmm. I was going to suggest Thundering Raiju for its lower power, but that would mess up the start. Is there a way to incorporate something that would make sure only Saw in Half loops, not the creatures?
---
My previous attempts to mess with the combo haven't gone well, but if there's anything to the Atsushi, the Blazing Sky strategy, here's a theoretical 17-card for Standard:
2 Turntimber Symbiosis
3 Goldhound
4 Fortifying Draught
5 Tibalt's Trickery
6 Wizard's Spellbook
7 Invoke the Winds
8 Storm the Festival
9 Dire-Strain Rampage
10 Orvar, the All-Form
11 Kaya, Geist Hunter
12 Mirror Box
13 Ardent Elementalist
14 Toralf, God of Fury
15 Slaughter Specialist
16 Atsushi, the Blazing Sky
17 Ziatora, the Incinerator
Mulligan to 4.
Shatterskull (17 life), Goldhound, pass.
Turntimber (14 life), Draught, counter it with Trickery. (0 cards in hand.) Mill Invoke, Storm, and Rampage. Play Spellbook.
Tap Spellbook, exile Invoke. Untap Spellbook.
Tap Spellbook, exile Storm. Play Orvar and Kaya, untap Spellbook. -2 Kaya. (2x tokens.)
Tap Spellbook, exile Rampage. Destroy Shatterskull (make 2 untapped Shatterskulls, 8 life, fail to find basic), play Mirror Box and Elementalist (return Draught). Untap Spellbook.
Tap Spellbook, exile Shatterskull. Deal 0 damage to Kaya (make 2 Kayas), destroy Turntimber (make 2 untapped Turntimbers, 2 life). Play Toralf and Specialist, untap Spellbook. -2 both Kayas (x8 tokens).
Tap Spellbook, exile Turntimber, play Ziatora. Deal 0 damage to Kaya (make 8 Kayas), untap Elementalist (make 8 Elementalists, return Trickery), destroy Mirror Box (make 8 Boxes), play Atsushi.
-2 all Kayas (x2048 tokens). Using the RRGG from lands, play Draught on Elementalist (2048 Elementalists), counter it with Trickery, get it back, play it on Ziatora (2048 Ziatoras), get both back. Go to end step.
All 2049 Ziatoras trigger. Ziatora #1 sacrifices an Elementalist token and makes 6144 Treasures. Use 9 of them on three Draught+Trickery rounds to get 6144 Elementalist triggers, 1 to make 2048 Specialists, 1 to make 2048 Atsushis, and the other 6133 to make 12 million Toralfs.
Between Draught and the Mirror Boxes, original Toralf should have about 108 million power by now. Ziaora #2 sacrifices original Toralf for 108 million damage to a Human token, triggering the other Toralfs which will target the other 2048 Human tokens and the 2048 Atsushi tokens. (We'll have to waste most of the Toralf triggers.) Killing the Atsushis makes about 12 million Treasures.
From there, I think we can just keep going? At high damage numbers we'll probably focus on making Specialists to preserve big Toralf triggers, but then at low numbers we can kill a bunch of Atsushis, increase our Toralf count, and end up with a ton of mana to handle bigger spreads when we return to high numbers.
Does that all work out?
...Aha! I think Dromoka, the Eternal in place of Avabruck Caretaker works; it allows for always targeting Astral Dragon with Saw in Half, which as a bonus increases the number of triggers from >2^^^5 to >2^^^6 (because the copies of Doubling Season made by Astral Dragon are also Dragons).
(Having to target Mystic Sanctuary twice with Astral Dragons after the first Saw in Half makes it a bit worse, but it looks like it still ends up >2^^^6: with the first Saw in Half, there remain two Astral Dragons that can target Doubling Season, producing 4 copies (making 5), then 64 (making 69), and then the second Saw in Half produces 2^70 > 2^16 = 2^^^3 Astral Dragons.)
EDIT: We have to be careful to ensure that the final bolster can go to an attacking creature, but that can be done easily, as there will be plenty of 1/1 Astral Dragons that can attack, and many more will be created throughout the process.
With the start above, skipping Mirror Box we don't get as many Kayas, as they die to legend rule before we can activate them. But skimming it I think we can still -2 three times, so targeting a Atsushi gives 8 token copies, each giving 24 treasures. Easily enough to pay for the 2x Drought + 1x Trickery we need to loop this.
Thinking about it now, there is actually also a problem with the Ardent Elementalist loop. After countering the first Drought each loop with Trickery we resolve the Orvar trigger on Elementalist. All token copies enter at the same time in one big batch so we need to select targets now. That means that after returning the Drought and casting it again we can't pick it up with the Elementalist triggers. So we need a second Drought card, or some other way to make progress (perhaps the free cast we get from Trickery countering something?).
Previous decks didn't have that problem since with multiple Orvars the Elemntalist tokens don't enter in a single batch and we can leave a few token creation triggers on the stack until after we cast the second Drought.
EDIT: Just saw the Mystic Sanctuary post. Nice fix! That seems like it should work.
Edit: Maybe we could fix that with more death triggers, such as Kairi, the Swirling Sky? That would complicate the Toralf section further and mean we couldn't recur instants until the end step, but it would also mean being able to exile Tibalt's Trickery for another Spellbook round since we'd only need to loop one instant, letting us point Invoke the Winds at Ziatora and allowing another batch of Kaya tokens.
2 Turntimber Symbiosis
3 Goldhound
4 Fortifying Draught
5 Tibalt's Trickery
6 Wizard's Spellbook
7 Invoke the Winds
8 Storm the Festival
9 Dire-Strain Rampage
10 Orvar, the All-Form
11 Kaya, Geist Hunter
12 Mirror Box
13 Kairi, the Swirling Sky
14 Toralf, God of Fury
15 Slaughter Specialist
16 Shambling Ghast
17 Ziatora, the Incinerator
Edit: Cormela, Glamour Thief is a lot easier to play, assuming she doesn't have any infinites to worry about. Unfortunately I don't think we can count on another chance to clone Kaya (or Ziatora) since this strategy requires cloning our recursion creature before we can start using it to recur our instant.
Shatterskull (17 life), Goldhound, pass.
Turntimber (14 life), Draught, counter it with Trickery. (0 cards in hand.) Mill Invoke, Storm, and Rampage. Play Spellbook.
Tap Spellbook, exile Invoke. Untap Spellbook.
Tap Spellbook, exile Storm. Play Orvar and Kaya, untap Spellbook. -2 Kaya. (2x tokens.)
Tap Spellbook, exile Rampage. Destroy Shatterskull, play Mirror Box and Toralf. Untap Spellbook.
Tap Spellbook, exile Shatterskull. Deal 0 damage to Kaya (make 2 Kayas), destroy Turntimber (make 2 untapped Turntimbers, 8 life). Play Specialist and Ghast, untap Spellbook. -2 both Kayas (x8 tokens).
Tap Spellbook, exile Turntimber, play Ziatora and Cormela. Deal 0 damage to Kaya (make 8 Kayas), destroy Mirror Box (make 8 Boxes), untap Spellbook. -2 all Kayas (x2048 tokens).
Tap Spellbook, exile Trickery. Deal 0 damage to Ziatora (make 2048 Ziatoras), untap Cormela (make 2048 Cormelas), destroy Mirror Box (make 2048 Boxes), play Kairi.
Go to end step, all 2049 Ziatoras trigger. Ziatora #1 sacrifices original Cormela to kill a Cormela token and makes 6144 Treasures. Recur Draught twice and use it on original Toralf twice, making 4096 tokens and giving the original about 8 million power. Ziatora #2 triggers, sacrifices original Toralf, start to combo off. Continue from there.
To get there one could skip Mirror Box for a while and get the original Toralf into the graveyard via legend rule after creating a copy. Then get it back via Kairi, the Swirling Sky, also dying from the legend rule. That looks tricky to set up, and may be impossible, but there is some danger there.
Another potential danger is Dire-Strain Rampage targeting Treasures, getting us mana without requiring any damage at all, if we can get set up without exiling it. But the saving grace there is that Treasures can only show up in the end step from Ziatora, the Incinerator or Shambling Ghast. Where the death of the latter usually has to be kicked off by the former as the ultimate source of damage.
Combining those dangers we could potentially go infinite without creature Toralfs. Just using the Hammer as damage source to initially kill Shambling Ghast and later Cormela to recur Rampage for mana.
Edit: I didn't spot any infinites with Kairi, the Swirling Sky, for what it's worth.
Edit2: Wait, Cormela would replace Kairi, so the Toralf + Hammer problem wouldn't happen because Toralf gets stuck in the graveyard. There's still the problem with Rampage + Hammer, so Kairi seems like the safer option.
Edit3: Can we bring Shatterskull Smashing to our hand with a Kairi legend rule death and use that to kill Shambling Ghast to get Treasures before the end step? Might be too much to ask of the setup, but that could lead to another Ramapage infinite.
If we leave Toralf in hand, we can make up to 4 untapped Shatterskulls, which is enough to use Toralf's Hammer. Even without Rampage, we can just keep looping Draught to make more Cormelas and Ghasts and keep killing them. So yeah, looks like Cormela is off the table.
To get damage out of Shatterskull Smashing, we'd need to make 3 untapped lands. I don't think we can get that without exiling Shatterskull Smashing or Dire-Strain Rampage, since we'd need either multiple Rampage casts or a way to copy Kaya. So I don't think Kairi goes infinite.
But the fact that both Kairi and Ziatora cost too much to play with Storm the Festival means I'm not sure how to get enough copies of both before the end step. We'd need a way to play them both before tapping the Spellbook the final time, which cuts into the number of times we can copy Kaya.
Can Saw in Half help out with the Modern GN challenge as well? Of course, it should substitute nicely for Toralf in the next version of Standard.
Another challenge we could look at would be the one issued by Gavin Verhey here. Basically the same except we have access to unlimited mana. His challenge was for three cards, but we could look at other deck sizes as well.
Most of the decks we have can't just be converted by removing Black Lotus / Channel / Omniscience, but I see two that can: The Precursor Golem 7 card deck, that becomes more than 2^^2^^8 for 4 cards, and I think plopfill's 9 card deck that beats Graham's number. It looks like with unlimited mana, it should work at 6 cards, and even get a couple more initial draws of Saw in Half, for maybe F_{w+1}(2^^^8)?
Edit: Looking at the 17 card Standard deck, it seems like it would work out if we just replaced one or more of the creatures with instants and/or sorceries. I was thinking Slaughter Specialist and Shambling Ghoul would be prime candidates to be replaced with instants/sorceries, but we need to recurse them to get the benefits frequently enough, so that doesn't allow more usages of Wizard's Spellbook. But maybe there is some way to add another instant/sorcery.
How about the following:
2 Goldhound
3 Emeria, Shattered Skyclave
4 Light the Way
5 Tibalt's Trickery
6 Wizard's Spellbook
7 Invoke the Winds
8 Storm the Festival
9 Dire-Strain Rampage
10 Fake Your Own Death
11 Orvar, the All-Form
12 Kaya, Geist Hunter
13 Mirror Box
14 Kiari, the Swirling Sky
15 Toralf, God of Fury
16 Slaughter Specialist
17 Ziatora, the Incinerator
Sequence of play:
Mulligan to 4.
Shatterskull (17 life), Goldhound, pass.
Emeria (14 life), Light the Way, counter it with Trickery. (0 cards in hand.) Mill Invoke, Storm. Play Spellbook.
Tap Spellbook, exile Invoke. Untap Spellbook.
Tap Spellbook, exile Storm. Play Orvar and Kaya, untap Spellbook. -2 Kaya. (2x tokens.)
Tap Spellbook, exile Light the Way. Play Mirror Box and Toralf, bounce Kaya (create 2 more Kayas). Untap Spellbook. -2 all Kayas (x16 tokens).
Tap Spellbook, exile Tibalt's Trickery. Use Trickery to counter Storm, mill Rampage, play Ziatora. Bounce Kaya. (Create 16 more Kayas.) Untap Spellbook. -2 on 17 Kayas (x 2^21 tokens).
Tap Spellbook, exile Rampage. Use Trickery to counter Storm, mill Fake Your Own Death, play Kairi. Destroy Shatterskull (create 2^21 useless copies) Bounce Kaya. (Create 2^21 more Kayas.) Untap Spellbook. -2 on all Kayas (x more than 2^2^21 tokens).
Tap Spellbook, exile Shatterskull. Play Slaughter Specialist, bounce Kaya (create more than 2^2^21 tokens), deal 0 damage to Kairi (x 2^2^21), destroy Emeria. Untap Spellbook. -2 on all Kayas (x more than 2^2^2^21 tokens).
Tap Spellbook, exile Emeria. Bounce, untap, and deal 0 damage to Ziatora (create more than 2^2^2^21 tokens).
Go to end step, more than 2^2^2^21 Ziatoras trigger. Resolve one Ziatora, sacrifice a Ziatora to destroy a Kairi. Create more than 2^2^2^21 Treasure tokens, and bring Fake Your Own Death back to our hand. Cast Fake Your Own Death on, say, Slaughter Specialist. Resolve another Ziatora trigger, and sacrifice a Ziatora to deal a whole bunch of damage to an opponent's creature, starting a Toralf combo.
With 2+ Kaya activations that produces more than enough treasures from legend rule deaths to pay for the loop. We don't have initial black mana to pay for the first Fake your own Death, but we can get around that by exiling Trickery to the Spellbook and casting it from the deck for free.
I was thinking about needing to cast Light the Way to get a Kaya reuse (we can get rid of Shatterskull Smashing), but it seems like we can then cast Fake Your Own Death on Kairi to retrieve Light the Way, so that doesn't help.
Edit: What could have no Light the Way, and just have Shatterskull and FYOD, but I imagine that mana cost increase isn't enough to stop the loop.
Sequence of play:
Mulligan to 5.
Shatterskull (17 life), Goldhound, pass.
Turntimber (14 life), Turn the Earth, counter it with Trickery. (0 cards in hand.) Mill Invoke, Storm, Rampage. Play Spellbook.
Tap Spellbook, exile Invoke. Untap Spellbook.
Tap Spellbook, exile Storm. Play Orvar and Kaya, untap Spellbook. -2 Kaya. (2x tokens.)
Tap Spellbook, exile Rampage. Play Mirror Box and Toralf, destroy Shatterskull (create 2 copies). Untap Spellbook.
Tap Spellbook, exile Shatterskull. Play Slaughter Specialist, deal 0 damage to Kaya (create 2 tokens), destroy Turntimber. Untap Spellbook. -2 for 2 Kayas (x8 tokens).
Tap Spellbook, exile Turntimber. Play Ziatora, deal 0 damage to Kaya (create 8 tokens). Untap Spellbook. -2 for 8 Kayas (x2048 tokens).
Tap Spellbook, exile Tibalt's Trickery. Play Kairi, deal 0 damage to Kaya (create 2048 tokens). Untap Spellbook. -2 for 2048 Kayas (x2^2059 tokens).
Tap Spellbook, exile Turn the Earth. Deal 0 damage to Ziatora (create 2^2059 tokens), untap Ziatora (create 2^2059 tokens).
Go to end phase, 2^2060 + 1 Ziatoras trigger. Resolve one Ziatora trigger, to sacrifice a Ziatora to kill a Kaya. We gain 3*2^2059 Treasure tokens. We cast Fake Your Own Death on Kairi, creating 2^2059 token copies of Kairi, and giving the original the ability.
We have plenty of resources to continue the combo.
Edit: Forgot we don't have Treasure tokens in main phase to cast FYOD. Moved the cast to end phase.
Edit: MTGS is really annoying with changes often not being updated.