With the Vintage deck at 61 cards and most of the sets released, its about time for a new thread for the standard version of the challenge. And while I am skeptical that we will be able to beat last year’s deck now that we don't have Thousand-Year Storm, there are still some powerful combos we have access to.
So, without further ado, here are the rules, as stated on Stakfish's webpage:
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.
There are a few caveats and corner cases requiring some clarification in those rules:
1.Standard legal means that bans matter. Past Standards have not had any impactful bans for this challenge. That is no longer the case here as Lucky clover is a potentially useful card that we just don't get.
2.Even though Fae of Wishes could make sideboards relevant, we do not get a sideboard or a companion.
3.Since we control randomness and our opponent’s deck is “random” basic lands, we actually get to specify that they are all islands or plains or whatever. This is useful to avoid possibly going infinite if our opponent had, say, a mountain we could somehow steal and go infinite with.
4.The deck must be finite for all lines in the time limit, it doesn’t matter if the deck can go infinite on a later turn, as that turn doesn’t happen.
5.Our opponent will cooperate with any infinites, while opposing us otherwise. Cooperating leads to the deck’s disqualification giving it a terrible score This makes any way to give our opponent any meaningful choices doubly dangerous now.
6.Speaking of scoring, the final score is: -1 * our opponent’s life total at the end of the game. It does not matter how they got there, only the net total matters.
7.Finally, there is some discretion as to whether a slower deck that does more damage is preferred over a faster deck that does much less. In general, we have passed up turn 1 shock pass for large amounts on turn 2-3 this should be obvious, and there hasn’t been much conflict over this point, but if it does come up, we can make a judgement then.
For those who are new to the challenge, here are the writeups of the past standard decks:
Panharmonicon here– Good explanation of how a ‘stage’ is constructed
Alternating Nova Stage here - has a full example of a stage with the scaling kept constant.
Last year's three stage deck: here - explains the different known 'types' of stages
Additionally, there are old Vintage writeups here
And an incomplete, but more current (though still outdated) one here - Has the TM explanation in it which is still relevant for vintage
Also recommended is some reading of the large number notation we will probably need to use for this deck. Specifically Conway Arrow Notation, and Chained Arrow Notation.
First I'll note some glaring holes left by rotation: Leyline of anticipation we currently have no possible way to get flash. Leyline of abundance we can't accelerate nearly as fast as before. Even T4 looks unlikely. Omniscience/Bolas's Citadel we can't cheat on mana much at all.
and of course: Thousand-year storm losing this means we lose probably our most powerful scaling tool
It's not all gloom and doom, we still have the powerful 'thaumabroom' combo from last standard: Protean Thaumaturge + Sorcerer's Broom + enchantment creature (nyxbloom ancient) + sacrifice outlet (Gilded goose) + mana (gilded goose) + (+ flash enchantment etb)
Gives us a pretty good way of making many copies of any creatures.
We can also animate enchantments with Dance of the manse and make copies of legends like Orvar, the all-form by mutating onto them and then copying them. (humans and changelings need to become cowards via Kargan Intimidator)
So, without further ado, here are the rules, as stated on Stakfish's webpage:
There are a few caveats and corner cases requiring some clarification in those rules:
1.Standard legal means that bans matter. Past Standards have not had any impactful bans for this challenge. That is no longer the case here as Lucky clover is a potentially useful card that we just don't get.
2.Even though Fae of Wishes could make sideboards relevant, we do not get a sideboard or a companion.
3.Since we control randomness and our opponent’s deck is “random” basic lands, we actually get to specify that they are all islands or plains or whatever. This is useful to avoid possibly going infinite if our opponent had, say, a mountain we could somehow steal and go infinite with.
4.The deck must be finite for all lines in the time limit, it doesn’t matter if the deck can go infinite on a later turn, as that turn doesn’t happen.
5.Our opponent will cooperate with any infinites, while opposing us otherwise. Cooperating leads to the deck’s disqualification giving it a terrible score This makes any way to give our opponent any meaningful choices doubly dangerous now.
6.Speaking of scoring, the final score is: -1 * our opponent’s life total at the end of the game. It does not matter how they got there, only the net total matters.
7.Finally, there is some discretion as to whether a slower deck that does more damage is preferred over a faster deck that does much less. In general, we have passed up turn 1 shock pass for large amounts on turn 2-3 this should be obvious, and there hasn’t been much conflict over this point, but if it does come up, we can make a judgement then.
For those who are new to the challenge, here are the writeups of the past standard decks:
Panharmonicon here– Good explanation of how a ‘stage’ is constructed
Alternating Nova Stage here - has a full example of a stage with the scaling kept constant.
Last year's three stage deck: here - explains the different known 'types' of stages
Additionally, there are old Vintage writeups here
And an incomplete, but more current (though still outdated) one here - Has the TM explanation in it which is still relevant for vintage
Also recommended is some reading of the large number notation we will probably need to use for this deck. Specifically Conway Arrow Notation, and Chained Arrow Notation.
First I'll note some glaring holes left by rotation:
Leyline of anticipation we currently have no possible way to get flash.
Leyline of abundance we can't accelerate nearly as fast as before. Even T4 looks unlikely.
Omniscience/Bolas's Citadel we can't cheat on mana much at all.
and of course:
Thousand-year storm losing this means we lose probably our most powerful scaling tool
It's not all gloom and doom, we still have the powerful 'thaumabroom' combo from last standard:
Protean Thaumaturge + Sorcerer's Broom + enchantment creature (nyxbloom ancient) + sacrifice outlet (Gilded goose) + mana (gilded goose) + (+ flash enchantment etb)
Gives us a pretty good way of making many copies of any creatures.
We can also animate enchantments with Dance of the manse and make copies of legends like Orvar, the all-form by mutating onto them and then copying them. (humans and changelings need to become cowards via Kargan Intimidator)