but the start will be different with only one TYS and creature flash, and Aid the Fallen needs targeting help from Repeated Reverberation.
Edit:
Hmm, what to look into next? Modern, I guess? or try to figure out the Vintage tech? Hmm, I guess Historic and Frontier are even smaller eternal formats, though they don't have nearly as big of a following.
I posted it to reddit but it got buried under spoilers, (though one user did point out an error: TYS triggers' # is set when the spell is cast, only nerfs the initial storm by 20% or so). Gonna wait until they are done to try again.
Precognition field is also leaving. We lose both Ixalan sets, Dominaria and M19. Ixalan had a few useful cards, and won't be too terrible of a loss, but losing the other two sets really hurts a lot. But Experimental Frenzy will still be legal, though it will be harder to use.
Angrath's Rampage almost does a half passable Cleansing Nova impression, though I hope we get something that works better with animated artifacts like a cmc based sweeper. Maybe along the lines of XBW destroy all nonland permanents with CMC X.
I don't think losing Omniscience is all that bad, we barely needed it in the stage combo. It will hurt for layer extensions, and for getting a second stage in there anywhere. (still sad we couldn't get crafty cutpurse to work in here.)
And as for recursion, if a set with "Beyond Death" in the title doesn't have a good way to get things back I'd be shocked.
I'll probably start looking into Modern, though that will require a better understanding of higher order stages. But I can at least look into openings. (though the banlist eliminates some of the obvious lines.)
As for Throne of Eldrane, rotation will kill the speed of the deck, but Danse of the Manse finally lets us animate Thousand Year Storm, and Mirrormade is also very good for this.
Edit: Post rotation, assuming we want to be able to Replicate or Quasiduplicate TYS, reshuffling looks tricky. Midnight Clock and Enhanced Surveillance look too cheap, we can animate them once and use tokens to reshuffle. Any sweeper will also likely kill the TYS and need another dance of the manse to animate it, which we could also use to animate the reshuffler.
Spells like Finale of Revelation and Emergency powers would eliminate a lot of countermagic, which we probably need to be able to recast whatever spells make the stage.
One crazy idea I had early on for this deck was to use Clear the Mind+Experimental Frenzy to get our deck stuck in our hand as we go, and then we's need to pay R to sacrifice the frenzy to continue. But this seems unlikely to work.
Probably best to wait for at least the next set before trying to make anything actually work.
Oh, we don't actually need to ever get kykar with concoct, we can just make the needed red at the very end of a stage. That seems much more efficient. Kykar gets exiled anyway too.
I got the extra red back by fizzling Ionize after Omniscience, so everything after stays the same.
Added a tappedout link to the decklist.
Thanks for the explanation, these corner cases with relatively small numbers really help.
Yeah I'm just using 7 because we add 6 storm each top level reshuffle and have X of those so we bring X to 7X, and it'll be easier to follow that than switching the base halfway through.
Edit: hmm, it looks like we can use disdainful stroke to fizzle ionize before the first gaea's blessing too, and get an extra storm.
Edit2: I know this doesn't impact any of the estimations, but someone will probably ask. Do you have any clue about how to optimally make/spend our red mana once we have flash? Other than Kykar its generally better as white mana from mox amber, instead, but we can get Kykar back with a connive, and will have to to cast Repeated Reverberation for Sarkhan. Though we can't save it in hand like we could with blood for bones, so we dont get a ton of mana, it is still more than enough to cast a few extra repeated reverberations. Actually no, we can replicate the elemental tokens, so we can get X red.
I kinda think we want to concoct back kykar as little as possible, as Worldshaper is a better target all the time. but we do want to still repeated reverberate the card draw and the concoct itself. But do we want to use the red in the stage? Do we want to get RR on RR for the next layer card? Do we want to just spend all the red we can ASAP to make the stage combo stronger?
Yeah, its hard to get a picture of how the different estimations are all linked, especially with things like Whispering Snitch and extra TYS.
How big does x2 need to be for 7 -> (7 -> x2 -> 21 -> 11) -> 6 -> 12 to be greater than 2 -> 4 -> 7 -> 12?
My estimate isn't great either,
Because of not factoring in the extra sphinxes each top level wrath actually squares the storm and we get a huge number in the front as well, but actually saying that involves some more fiddling with exponents in an already fiddly section.
So the better estimate would be X1->X1->6->12.
where X1= X2->X2->21->11 (extra sarkhans)
and X2= x3->x3->x3->9 (extra life gain triggers from the snitch)
and so on... with their extra life, our extra life, the extra cards from hand from the setup... and extra TYS triggers the whole way, making everything more powerful.
Edit: sent you the edit link again, good catch on the free stony strength I missed.
Concoct is almost the same exact card as blood for bones here, and either way it doesnt really show in the estimate, but Connive is also a blue instant we can cast in the stage too, which contributes to the leading 7 in my estimate.
Stony Strength is better to keep than Leyline as it can make white mana from an animated key. I actually couldn't find a better card to kill them with, though I didn't look very hard.
Oh I see, the 2 -> 4 -> 2 -> 12 is the base storm before doing any flips and we are increasing that by the 5 flips we get to come to 2 -> 4 -> 7 -> 12. Kind of a tricky way to get the extra number, the first two numbers seem like they really shouldn't matter so much, but when the numbers are small it works out like that.
That a -> b -> 2 -> 12 identity seems odd, but actually checks out a -> b -> 2 -> 12 = a -> b -> (a -> b -> 1 -> 12) -> 11 = a -> b -> (a -> b) -> 11 = a -> b -> a^b -> 11
I guess by that logic we get past 2->2->2->13 (which is just 4), and are one flip shy of getting to 2->3->2->13 (which is much more than 4).
It does seem like these would not be nearly as tight of a bound as the 7 -> (7 -> x2 -> 21 -> 11) -> 6 -> 12 estimate, even though they have bigger ending numbers.
Edit: Well, I refactored Karn out, redid the beginning with an extra stony strength for storm, and updated all of the changed images. I'm gonna give us one more day to find any other errors then post the view only link to r/magictcg.
The Gatebreaker is unfortunately not naturally a creature to replicate.
Edit: i tried a bunch of lines, but cant seem to get to another card for 5 flips. Oh well, will rewrite karn out tomorrow.
Edit2: the start needs an extra untap effect, to have enough blue for Precognition field, TYS, and replicate. Making the last Blood for bones a Stony Strength
Edit3: isn't Connive // Concoct just better than Blood for bones? we get a free reshuffle with each resolution instead of a free guy to hand. If we had an extra creature worth returning (worldshaper#2?), that could be worth it, but we don't.
Also, we are actually 2 cards away from 5 flips, we need to keep a Stony Strength to actually make the guy we Gravitic punch them with giant.
edit4: rereading your estimation and I think I'm missing something?
Are you sure we get to ...->7->12?
I agree that we get to 7->X1->6->12 where X1 is 7->x2->21->11 but I don't see how that can possibly be big enough to give us something like 7->c->7->12? where c is some small non chained arrow constant like 3x10^18 or 4.
By definition, 7->c->7->12 = 7->c->(7->c->6->12)->11 which seems difficult to compare to 7->(7->x2->21->11)->6->12
Yeah, I checked for that infinite before but that was before sarkhan+repeated reverberation was a layer. Oh well, its still ->12.
We cant use karn for an early animation so there's no ministage before the Emergence Zone. So we make more like 10^13 Evolution sages.
Our exileable cards are a bit clogged at 4, with 2x leyline 3x blood for bones, kykar, and raging regisaur. Good thing connive // concoct is basically the same card for this challenge.
Being one card short of 5 flips is kind of frustrating, but I don't see any way to squeeze an extra slot, and still kill them.
I think we can cut Militia bugler, Kaya's Ghostform, and one The Antiquities War for Mystic Forge and Tezzeret's Gatebreaker. Hmm, no this is still short a way to recycle Teshar.
Hmm with 1 black from Hadana's climb and the 3 mana from dowsing dagger, is Nikya of the old ways better than a connive // concoct? Just for the 2 extra black before the first real azor's gateway flip?
EDIT: ABORT, UGH
I found an infinite:
Activate Azor's Gateway, draw bankrupt in blood, exile an artifact (like dowsing dagger)
use Karn to return the artifact
Repeated reverberation Sarkhan, dragonsoul kills both karn and himself
cast bankrupt in blood
combo off.
use excess draws to redraw the walkers.
I don't see any sort of simple fix.
Cut repeated reverberation? loses the Sarkhan layer, Also makes the start much less explosive.
Cut Azor's gateway? Can't make much black then.
Cut Karn? This seems the best, we can still exile enough for a few flips, but more like 4 than 20
Yeah definitely, this was hard enough. Its kind of fun to learn more about how these notations work, but explaining it is a bit of a chore, and the vintage deck is a whole 'nother beast. I tried to puzzle it out on my own, and its just incredible how fast these things get completely intractable.
You might want to improve my estimates a bit, and currently its at 6->2^(700,000)->20->12 but it should really probably be something like 6->(6->2^(700,000)->X->6)->20->12. Or some further nested chain nonsense.
Edit: Hmm, just double checking the combat triggers, which seem like they need to be really good to be worth it. I think maybe Hadana's Climb is the closest? It looks like it would definitely be better than a Concoct if we didn't already use Sarkhan precombat to let Raging Regisaur kill him. It is an extra black mana from combat though, so it is probably still good.
Another thought is using gideon6 and Role reversal to kill sarkhan in combat by attacking him, without using Raging Regisaur at all. One bonus to this is that we can equip gideon and then wrath in combat, though we still can't Purify, so it's probably not worth it. (Edit2: oops gideon doesnt become indestructible himself, so this is definitely a no go)
Feel free to comment or edit if you notice anything amiss. I'd like to get it finalized before we get too many Eldrane spoilers.
You are right, there are 20. I double counted Saheeli.
Edit: oops the decklist was 61 cards, I cut a connive//concoct.
Edit2: changed the 'small' example to a full resolution of 2 storm 6 mana.
I'm not exactly sure how to post the writeup? I don't have a blog to throw this on, and its pretty long to just cut up across several reddit posts. It's probably too niche to get put on any of the main sites. (though Frank Karsten does so some wacky magic math articles...)
1 Leyline of Abundance
2 Leyline of Abundance
3 Breeding Pool
4 Llanowar Elves
5 Plains
6 Stony Strength
7 Stony Strength
8 Emergency Powers
9 Kykar, Wind's Fury
10 Samut, Tyrant Smasher
11 Mox Amber
12 Gyre Engineer
13 Precognition Field
14 Stony Strength
15 Thousand-Year Storm
16 Omniscience
17 Emergence Zone
18 Wayward Swordtooth
Stage Combo:
19 Manifold Key
20 The Antiquities War
21 The Antiquities War
22 Cleansing Nova
23 Cleansing Nova
24 Disdainful Stroke
25 Teshar, Ancestor's Apostle
26 Militia Bugler
27 Tragic Poet
28 Gaea's Blessing
29 Citywatch Sphinx
30 Kaya's Ghostform
31 Repudiate // Replicate
Landfall:
32 Evolution Sage
33 World Shaper
34 Lotus Field
Drawing:
35 Aid the fallen
36 Bankrupt in Blood
37 Ionize
Life Gain:
38 Angel of Vitality
39 Vicious Rumors
40 Imperial Ceratops
41 Dowsing Dagger
42 Switcheroo
43 Sarkhan, Dragonsoul
44 Repeated Reverberation
45 Dreadmalkin
46 Azor's Gateway
Disposable Cards:
47 Saheeli, Sublime Artificer
48 Dowsing Dagger
49 Dowsing Dagger
50 Dowsing Dagger
51 Hadana's Climb
52 Nikya of the Old Ways
53 Raging Regisaur
54 Whispering Snitch
55 Vivien, Champion of the Wilds
56 Vivien, Champion of the Wilds
57 Vivien, Champion of the Wilds
58 Aid the fallen
59 Aid the fallen
The Final Hit:
60 Gravitic Punch
but the start will be different with only one TYS and creature flash, and Aid the Fallen needs targeting help from Repeated Reverberation.
Edit:
Hmm, what to look into next? Modern, I guess? or try to figure out the Vintage tech? Hmm, I guess Historic and Frontier are even smaller eternal formats, though they don't have nearly as big of a following.
Hmm, does being sorcery speed matter there? It looks fine because Aid the Fallen still gets the World Shaper when we want it.
Angrath's Rampage almost does a half passable Cleansing Nova impression, though I hope we get something that works better with animated artifacts like a cmc based sweeper. Maybe along the lines of XBW destroy all nonland permanents with CMC X.
I don't think losing Omniscience is all that bad, we barely needed it in the stage combo. It will hurt for layer extensions, and for getting a second stage in there anywhere. (still sad we couldn't get crafty cutpurse to work in here.)
And as for recursion, if a set with "Beyond Death" in the title doesn't have a good way to get things back I'd be shocked.
I'll probably start looking into Modern, though that will require a better understanding of higher order stages. But I can at least look into openings. (though the banlist eliminates some of the obvious lines.)
Edit: Post rotation, assuming we want to be able to Replicate or Quasiduplicate TYS, reshuffling looks tricky. Midnight Clock and Enhanced Surveillance look too cheap, we can animate them once and use tokens to reshuffle. Any sweeper will also likely kill the TYS and need another dance of the manse to animate it, which we could also use to animate the reshuffler.
Spells like Finale of Revelation and Emergency powers would eliminate a lot of countermagic, which we probably need to be able to recast whatever spells make the stage.
One crazy idea I had early on for this deck was to use Clear the Mind+Experimental Frenzy to get our deck stuck in our hand as we go, and then we's need to pay R to sacrifice the frenzy to continue. But this seems unlikely to work.
Probably best to wait for at least the next set before trying to make anything actually work.
Added a tappedout link to the decklist.
Thanks for the explanation, these corner cases with relatively small numbers really help.
Yeah I'm just using 7 because we add 6 storm each top level reshuffle and have X of those so we bring X to 7X, and it'll be easier to follow that than switching the base halfway through.
Edit: hmm, it looks like we can use disdainful stroke to fizzle ionize before the first gaea's blessing too, and get an extra storm.
Edit2: I know this doesn't impact any of the estimations, but someone will probably ask. Do you have any clue about how to optimally make/spend our red mana once we have flash? Other than Kykar its generally better as white mana from mox amber, instead, but we can get Kykar back with a connive, and will have to to cast Repeated Reverberation for Sarkhan. Though we can't save it in hand like we could with blood for bones, so we dont get a ton of mana, it is still more than enough to cast a few extra repeated reverberations. Actually no, we can replicate the elemental tokens, so we can get X red.
I kinda think we want to concoct back kykar as little as possible, as Worldshaper is a better target all the time. but we do want to still repeated reverberate the card draw and the concoct itself. But do we want to use the red in the stage? Do we want to get RR on RR for the next layer card? Do we want to just spend all the red we can ASAP to make the stage combo stronger?
How big does x2 need to be for 7 -> (7 -> x2 -> 21 -> 11) -> 6 -> 12 to be greater than 2 -> 4 -> 7 -> 12?
My estimate isn't great either,
Because of not factoring in the extra sphinxes each top level wrath actually squares the storm and we get a huge number in the front as well, but actually saying that involves some more fiddling with exponents in an already fiddly section.
So the better estimate would be X1->X1->6->12.
where X1= X2->X2->21->11 (extra sarkhans)
and X2= x3->x3->x3->9 (extra life gain triggers from the snitch)
and so on... with their extra life, our extra life, the extra cards from hand from the setup... and extra TYS triggers the whole way, making everything more powerful.
Edit: sent you the edit link again, good catch on the free stony strength I missed.
Stony Strength is better to keep than Leyline as it can make white mana from an animated key. I actually couldn't find a better card to kill them with, though I didn't look very hard.
Oh I see, the 2 -> 4 -> 2 -> 12 is the base storm before doing any flips and we are increasing that by the 5 flips we get to come to 2 -> 4 -> 7 -> 12. Kind of a tricky way to get the extra number, the first two numbers seem like they really shouldn't matter so much, but when the numbers are small it works out like that.
That a -> b -> 2 -> 12 identity seems odd, but actually checks out a -> b -> 2 -> 12 = a -> b -> (a -> b -> 1 -> 12) -> 11 = a -> b -> (a -> b) -> 11 = a -> b -> a^b -> 11
I guess by that logic we get past 2->2->2->13 (which is just 4), and are one flip shy of getting to 2->3->2->13 (which is much more than 4).
It does seem like these would not be nearly as tight of a bound as the 7 -> (7 -> x2 -> 21 -> 11) -> 6 -> 12 estimate, even though they have bigger ending numbers.
Edit: Well, I refactored Karn out, redid the beginning with an extra stony strength for storm, and updated all of the changed images. I'm gonna give us one more day to find any other errors then post the view only link to r/magictcg.
Edit: i tried a bunch of lines, but cant seem to get to another card for 5 flips. Oh well, will rewrite karn out tomorrow.
Edit2: the start needs an extra untap effect, to have enough blue for Precognition field, TYS, and replicate. Making the last Blood for bones a Stony Strength
Edit3: isn't Connive // Concoct just better than Blood for bones? we get a free reshuffle with each resolution instead of a free guy to hand. If we had an extra creature worth returning (worldshaper#2?), that could be worth it, but we don't.
Also, we are actually 2 cards away from 5 flips, we need to keep a Stony Strength to actually make the guy we Gravitic punch them with giant.
edit4: rereading your estimation and I think I'm missing something?
Are you sure we get to ...->7->12?
I agree that we get to 7->X1->6->12 where X1 is 7->x2->21->11 but I don't see how that can possibly be big enough to give us something like 7->c->7->12? where c is some small non chained arrow constant like 3x10^18 or 4.
By definition, 7->c->7->12 = 7->c->(7->c->6->12)->11 which seems difficult to compare to 7->(7->x2->21->11)->6->12
We cant use karn for an early animation so there's no ministage before the Emergence Zone. So we make more like 10^13 Evolution sages.
Our exileable cards are a bit clogged at 4, with 2x leyline 3x blood for bones, kykar, and raging regisaur. Good thing connive // concoct is basically the same card for this challenge.
Being one card short of 5 flips is kind of frustrating, but I don't see any way to squeeze an extra slot, and still kill them.
It looks like the rebuild section is the most likely to have a cuttable card, but we need to have a way to get Gyre engineer, Citywatch sphinx, tragic poet and evolution sage, without getting World shaper. Oh, and still have a white legend
I think we can cut Militia bugler, Kaya's Ghostform, and one The Antiquities War for Mystic Forge and Tezzeret's Gatebreaker. Hmm, no this is still short a way to recycle Teshar.
Hmm with 1 black from Hadana's climb and the 3 mana from dowsing dagger, is Nikya of the old ways better than a connive // concoct? Just for the 2 extra black before the first real azor's gateway flip?
EDIT: ABORT, UGH
I found an infinite:
Activate Azor's Gateway, draw bankrupt in blood, exile an artifact (like dowsing dagger)
use Karn to return the artifact
Repeated reverberation
Sarkhan, dragonsoul kills both karn and himself
cast bankrupt in blood
combo off.
use excess draws to redraw the walkers.
I don't see any sort of simple fix.
Cut repeated reverberation? loses the Sarkhan layer, Also makes the start much less explosive.
Cut Azor's gateway? Can't make much black then.
Cut Karn? This seems the best, we can still exile enough for a few flips, but more like 4 than 20
This sucks, but at least I caught it.
You might want to improve my estimates a bit, and currently its at 6->2^(700,000)->20->12 but it should really probably be something like 6->(6->2^(700,000)->X->6)->20->12. Or some further nested chain nonsense.
Edit: Hmm, just double checking the combat triggers, which seem like they need to be really good to be worth it. I think maybe Hadana's Climb is the closest? It looks like it would definitely be better than a Concoct if we didn't already use Sarkhan precombat to let Raging Regisaur kill him. It is an extra black mana from combat though, so it is probably still good.
Another thought is using gideon6 and Role reversal to kill sarkhan in combat by attacking him, without using Raging Regisaur at all. One bonus to this is that we can equip gideon and then wrath in combat, though we still can't Purify, so it's probably not worth it. (Edit2: oops gideon doesnt become indestructible himself, so this is definitely a no go)
Good idea putting it on a google sites or wordpress account. I'll look into that.
Edit: I don't want to get stuck reformatting everything again, so I'm currently leaning towards just posting a comment or view only link to the gdoc.
Feel free to comment or edit if you notice anything amiss. I'd like to get it finalized before we get too many Eldrane spoilers.
You are right, there are 20. I double counted Saheeli.
Edit: oops the decklist was 61 cards, I cut a connive//concoct.
Edit2: changed the 'small' example to a full resolution of 2 storm 6 mana.
I'm not exactly sure how to post the writeup? I don't have a blog to throw this on, and its pretty long to just cut up across several reddit posts. It's probably too niche to get put on any of the main sites. (though Frank Karsten does so some wacky magic math articles...)