I knew there was something like that, but I thought a spell that got countered remained on the stack until it would resolve, but I looked at the rulings and it seems like I'm wrong.
I think I'm missing something about Bloodbond March. Don't the triggers for it go onto the stack on top of the creature you're casting? How do you get the creature onto the battlefield without letting all the Bloodbond March triggers leave the stack?
Hmm, that's a shame. Looks like Glorious End might make that challenge impossible to optimize beyond 12 life loss. The opponent can cast it with 3 spirit guides on our upkeep, with 3 pact of negations backing it up, requiring 4 counterspells to stop. That's pretty disappointing.
Looks like Leyline + Lotus + Glorious End + 4 pact of negations needs 5 counterspells to stop, so 4 pact of negations, 1 force of will, one blue card, and two chancellors, gives 6 as the most damage that can be dealt.
Hmm, to get past 5 counterspells you'd want the last two cards to ideally provide access to the rest of the deck. So you'd want a mana source and a draw card. My first thought being cheap draw cards, possibly some with the drawback of discarding. Chancellor of the Annex stops their first counterspell, and acts as discard fodder for later. Chancellor of the Tangle is similar but for mana. Leyline of Lifeforce should also be kept in mind as a way of stopping creatures from being countered.
While that's the end of reveal from opening hand cards that seemed useful, there are lots of interesting cheap sources of draw. Bazaar of Baghdad can't be countered as its a land, and in combination with 3 reveal from hand cards, effectively gives us one more card to use in our opening hand. Disrupt is a free way of letting one of our spells go through, but is only effective on the last counterspell, any earlier and this could be countered too, not replacing itself. Brainstorm is like a more powerful Bazaar of Baghdad in this version of the challenge, but getting it to go off would be problematic, bazaar may end up being easier to work with. Winds of Change could also be amazing, after counterspells having the opponent draw 1 card.
That might be a bad direction after all, since only the fifth one cast would go off, and we need to produce mana for all of them. On cast effects happen even if the spell is countered, so what if there's a good on cast effect that we can reasonably cast? Well, 5 spirit guides/Chancellor of the Tangles + a land is the most mana we can do which our opponent can't stop. Cascade and storm are both useful, but I don't see storm being very useful without a cascade backing first.
Island, Simian Spirit Guide, 4x Chancellor of the Tangle, Etherium-Horn Sorcerer is the highest CMC cascade I could see us achieving. From there I think it's best to cascade into other cascades then into storm or a card which normally can't be cast (no mana cost suspend cards). I'll come back to this challenge a little later.
EDIT: Cascade looks like it won't end up dealing any damage, all the good storms are too high CMC, except for Grapeshot which gets stopped by Leyline of Sanctity. But there's still promising routes, Genesis Hydra + 6 Spirit guides/Chancellors can give us any nonland permanent with CMC 4 or less. Leyline of Lifeforce + 5 Spirit guides/Chancellors can let us cast any red or green creature with 5 or less CMC without it being countered. Replacing a spirit guide/chancellor with an Ancient Tomb can let us cast 6 or less CMC red/green creatures, and replacing that with Mishra's Workshop lets us cast 7 or less cmc artifact creatures.
I also would like a better way to point out small errors like that. "Well, I can't you that" should be "Well, I can't tell you that", the formatting went really weird during your example of rules 2 and 3 for ordinals, among others.
I also think it might be better to describe the magnitude of the numbers at the end, as was done with earlier versions of the article.
I'm also not sure what you mean by "adding a megastage will implement the function F3", it seems like something out of place or a typo.
Considering the reliance of this deck, and previous ones, on Cowardice, I wonder how different the best deck would be if the opponents' deck and card reveals were the worst possible for final damage numbers, just like the opponents' decisions. But I imagine this would take way too long to work through, and maybe even make the final damage numbers tiny due to something like Pact of Negation.
I like "megastage", referencing the "megacombo" prior versions of this deck were called. But I do see the allure of hyperhyperstage since it's more descriptive, but also seems like it could become unwieldy in the future if we ever get much further.
For the golem combo. You can oost it even more with 4 coat of arms
Just give an example. If you have 1001 3/3 golems that will grant you 1001 4003/4003 golems
Lock that into the grand total we have.
There is limited space in the deck, so every card needs to have as much impact as possible. Coat of arms multiplies the final damage dealt by the golems by a number, but the rest of the cards do much better than multiplication. It's better to take a huge number like 1001 and square it than to multiply it by 2. And all the cards in the deck do much better than squaring.
Coat of arms would have a place in a deck with unlimited space, but that sounds like a nightmare to make and figure out; you'd just want to put in as many cards which don't go infinite as possible.
EDIT: The same thing would also work with a second Opalescence copy, and with Starfield of Nyx; since enchantments are already animated when they entered you get token copies of them. Just champion the Oplaescence in response to Dual Nature's LTB trigger.
Where does the extra layer for Precursor Golem come from? Reality Spasm already targets everything we need it to, and Precursor Golem only copies spells with a single target.
Do any of the alternatives to Mox Emerald that stop us from facing the problem with March of the Machines come with their own problems?
Green Mana Battery taps for 1 green, but I'm worried about its ability to put counters on itself which can turn into green later. Would this go infinite? Horn of Ramos makes me worried about an infinite by tapping then sacrificing it for green with March of the Machines and Mimic Vat out. Granted, I can't think of a way it would go infinite, but I also can't rule it out. Moss Diamond comes into play tapped, so that may be too big of a problem for it to work. Weatherseed Totem gets returned to hand if it dies as a creature. I'm not sure of that would do anything useful, but it makes me worried.
Which means that the first Copy Enchantment brings us to 4 Dual Natures (1 original, 1 token from first playing, then those two witness Copy Enchantment entering giving two more). Which means that each enchantment played after only gives 5 copies, not 6.
Oh, nevermind, you just use stack shenanigans to keep the exile all token copies portion from over mattering?
What are you going to do between combat phases? Because Dual Nature triggers will come around to clean up all the tokens, and everything else on the stack will need to empty, and at end of phase mana gets cleared from the mana pool.
I'm guessing you'd keep an arbitrarily large Atog around with Fungal Sprouting in hand?
for the hyperstage we trigger instants via Spellweaver Volute; and for the hyperhyperstage we trigger sorceries via Spellweaver Helix. We would need some other type of thing to get another level for a hyperhyperhyperstage.
Ahh, so that's a difference between the hyperstage and the hyperhyperstage.
So we just remove layers until we have room for a hyperhyperhyperstage? I guess. I have the sinking feeling we are working with quickly diminishing returns here.
Before stages were discovered, the best deck had 408 layers. This one I believe has around 5. With the way that stages/hyperstages increase values, it's worth removing any amount (that we could get in a magic deck) to add one that's higher up.
What are the problems with setting up a hyperhyperhyperstage? I know there aren't very many things we can prevent ourselves from saving progress through left, but there's still life.
I'd like to confidently rule out hyperhyperhyperstages as a possibility, or make a deck with one.
Maybe we could make the hyperstage wipe out fewer things from later use? Such that what's the current hyperhyperstage (with worldpurge as the marker) becomes the hyperhyperhyperstage, and we insert an (obliterate?) hyperhyperstage.
Looks like Leyline + Lotus + Glorious End + 4 pact of negations needs 5 counterspells to stop, so 4 pact of negations, 1 force of will, one blue card, and two chancellors, gives 6 as the most damage that can be dealt.
While that's the end of reveal from opening hand cards that seemed useful, there are lots of interesting cheap sources of draw. Bazaar of Baghdad can't be countered as its a land, and in combination with 3 reveal from hand cards, effectively gives us one more card to use in our opening hand. Disrupt is a free way of letting one of our spells go through, but is only effective on the last counterspell, any earlier and this could be countered too, not replacing itself. Brainstorm is like a more powerful Bazaar of Baghdad in this version of the challenge, but getting it to go off would be problematic, bazaar may end up being easier to work with. Winds of Change could also be amazing, after counterspells having the opponent draw 1 card.
That might be a bad direction after all, since only the fifth one cast would go off, and we need to produce mana for all of them. On cast effects happen even if the spell is countered, so what if there's a good on cast effect that we can reasonably cast? Well, 5 spirit guides/Chancellor of the Tangles + a land is the most mana we can do which our opponent can't stop. Cascade and storm are both useful, but I don't see storm being very useful without a cascade backing first.
Island, Simian Spirit Guide, 4x Chancellor of the Tangle, Etherium-Horn Sorcerer is the highest CMC cascade I could see us achieving. From there I think it's best to cascade into other cascades then into storm or a card which normally can't be cast (no mana cost suspend cards). I'll come back to this challenge a little later.
Something else I tried: 4xSimian Spirit Guide, 2x Demigod of Revenge, and Bazaar of Baghdad drawing into two then discarding 3 copies of Demigod of Revenge is 1 source of uncounterable red/black mana that doesn't take a land drop away from dealing 15 damage. Sadly, the opponent can stop this by having Leyline of the Void in their opening hand.
EDIT: Cascade looks like it won't end up dealing any damage, all the good storms are too high CMC, except for Grapeshot which gets stopped by Leyline of Sanctity. But there's still promising routes, Genesis Hydra + 6 Spirit guides/Chancellors can give us any nonland permanent with CMC 4 or less. Leyline of Lifeforce + 5 Spirit guides/Chancellors can let us cast any red or green creature with 5 or less CMC without it being countered. Replacing a spirit guide/chancellor with an Ancient Tomb can let us cast 6 or less CMC red/green creatures, and replacing that with Mishra's Workshop lets us cast 7 or less cmc artifact creatures.
I also think it might be better to describe the magnitude of the numbers at the end, as was done with earlier versions of the article.
I'm also not sure what you mean by "adding a megastage will implement the function F3", it seems like something out of place or a typo.
Considering the reliance of this deck, and previous ones, on Cowardice, I wonder how different the best deck would be if the opponents' deck and card reveals were the worst possible for final damage numbers, just like the opponents' decisions. But I imagine this would take way too long to work through, and maybe even make the final damage numbers tiny due to something like Pact of Negation.
There is limited space in the deck, so every card needs to have as much impact as possible. Coat of arms multiplies the final damage dealt by the golems by a number, but the rest of the cards do much better than multiplication. It's better to take a huge number like 1001 and square it than to multiply it by 2. And all the cards in the deck do much better than squaring.
Coat of arms would have a place in a deck with unlimited space, but that sounds like a nightmare to make and figure out; you'd just want to put in as many cards which don't go infinite as possible.
EDIT: The same thing would also work with a second Opalescence copy, and with Starfield of Nyx; since enchantments are already animated when they entered you get token copies of them. Just champion the Oplaescence in response to Dual Nature's LTB trigger.
Oh right, Precursor Golem works differently to Zada, Hedron Grinder and Ink-Treader Nephilim.
Green Mana Battery taps for 1 green, but I'm worried about its ability to put counters on itself which can turn into green later. Would this go infinite?
Horn of Ramos makes me worried about an infinite by tapping then sacrificing it for green with March of the Machines and Mimic Vat out. Granted, I can't think of a way it would go infinite, but I also can't rule it out.
Moss Diamond comes into play tapped, so that may be too big of a problem for it to work.
Weatherseed Totem gets returned to hand if it dies as a creature. I'm not sure of that would do anything useful, but it makes me worried.
Which means that the first Copy Enchantment brings us to 4 Dual Natures (1 original, 1 token from first playing, then those two witness Copy Enchantment entering giving two more). Which means that each enchantment played after only gives 5 copies, not 6.
Oh, nevermind, you just use stack shenanigans to keep the exile all token copies portion from over mattering?
What are you going to do between combat phases? Because Dual Nature triggers will come around to clean up all the tokens, and everything else on the stack will need to empty, and at end of phase mana gets cleared from the mana pool.
I'm guessing you'd keep an arbitrarily large Atog around with Fungal Sprouting in hand?
Ahh, so that's a difference between the hyperstage and the hyperhyperstage.
Before stages were discovered, the best deck had 408 layers. This one I believe has around 5. With the way that stages/hyperstages increase values, it's worth removing any amount (that we could get in a magic deck) to add one that's higher up.
I'd like to confidently rule out hyperhyperhyperstages as a possibility, or make a deck with one.
Maybe we could make the hyperstage wipe out fewer things from later use? Such that what's the current hyperhyperstage (with worldpurge as the marker) becomes the hyperhyperhyperstage, and we insert an (obliterate?) hyperhyperstage.