MTG Salvation

Oh right, we have targeting problems. I think the issue of bouncing things multiple times can be handled by resolving multiple copies of Pull from Eternity. So we resolve a Pull from Eternity, use a Soul Separator to create a Stern Proctor token, and bounce things to hand once, and replay those that we want to. Then we can resolve another Pull from Eternity to get another Stern Proctor, and bounce things again.

So we need to have a bunch of Panharmonicons on the battlefield. We tap a Soul Separator to exile Stern Proctor and create a Stern Proctor token, which triggers a bunch of bounce effects. We bounce our nontoken artifacts to our hand, play March of the Machines, play the artifacts to get copies, then bounce the March of the Machines and the artifacts back to our hand, with still some Stern Proctor ETB triggers left. Then, we tap a Soul Separator token to create a Tidal Barracuda token, tap a Soul Separator token to create a Desolation Giant token, play March of the Machines, and resolve the destruction effect. Afterwards, we will resolve more bounces and be able to bounce March of the Machines back to our hand.

Does this make sense?

Oh, it looks like Frazzle can work then.

Casting Army of the Damned to trigger a counterspell for Sanctum Plowbeast should be okay, so long as we are also able to return Stern Proctor in order to bounce Sanctum Plowbeast to our hand. Then Army of the Damned will have served its normal purpose, and we won't have to pay extra life for it. As far as I can see, this should be okay - we cast Sanctum Plowbeast, then we cast Army of the Damned with three Spellweaver Volutes in play, one on each of Essence Scatter, Repeated Reverberation, and Pull from Eternity. We resolve the Essence Scatter to counter the Plowbeast, then we resolve Repeated Reverberation and Pull from Eternity. (Not sure that Repeated Reverberation is necessary here, but whatever) Pull from Eternity returns our exiled cards, including Stern Proctor, and we can exile it to Soul Separator. We can then use Soul Separator to create Stern Proctors after Sanctum Plowbeast returns to the battlefield.

So I think it should work?

@FortyTwo: The worry with Blue Sun's Zenith was casting it with Recoup, where we can pay for X.

I believe we are fine so long as we have at least two Bloodbond Marches, and can get arbitrarily many of the other spell/ability (in this case copies of Pull from Eternity). But copying green enchantments would be nice, we could also copy things like Doubling Season and Mana Reflection.


Edit: Oh right, Blue Sun's Zenith isn't a sorcery. So I guess it is safe then!

Oh, we can counter Blue Sun's Zenith, and then repeatedly cast and counter it from the graveyard, allowing us to gain progress with the TYS copies. We could try to avoid BSZ with the counterspells - Essence Scatter will take care of the creature spells, and Spell Snare will take care of Recoup. But, I believe we need to counter Army of the Damned as well, and I don't have a way to do that in a restricted manner.

We can just drop BSZ, freeing up a card slot.

I don't suppose anyone has shown anything about the non-Dralnu's Crusade version of the computation?

Right, we want to add something like Repeated Reverberation to the deck.

@jfb: Hmm, but we can only play a land when the stack is empty, so we can't have trigger layers (e.g. Jester's Mask) afterwards.

@FortyTwo: The idea is to get many copies of Pull from Eternity, which will allow us to return Soul Proctor to the graveyard, so that we can use Soul Separator on it and bounce artifacts and enchantments to our hand.

But Thousand-Year Storm benefits from our storm count, which gets pumped with Mana Echoes and Invulnerability.

Ooh nice!

So I cooked up a deck using Faith of the Devoted:



Down to 6 layers at the end, due to not having many copies of enchantments.

Ooh, great job jfb!

Hmmm, how frequently do we need to give out Necromancers? Do we just have to build it up to 10^^^10 or whatever once each Worldfire?

Going from green to white would be awesome, not just for making things work in terms of donation, but also for gaining layers. I'm still not quite sure how to do it though.

For using the loyalty abilities of Planeswalkers, there is Teferi, Temporal Archmage. But I guess we can't use that with Garruk Wildspeaker, due to him being able to create a Beast creature. More generally, The Chain Veil can be used and bounced cheaply in this deck, so it can't be used for ending layers at least.

Ah yes, I rememeber we were at 6 Dralnu's Crusades. (without formal proof)

Three copies of Faith of the Devoted allows us to get 6 life per discard, can we make the life payment that big? I guess there is Army of the Damned, coupled with K'rrik, Son of Yawgmoth. Oh, but how are we going to get enough Xathrid Necromancers? We can only get one copy of Doubling Season / Primal Vigor / Parallel Lives et al.

Oh, with this version we could have Rings of Brighthearth. Hmm, maybe.

Smothering Tithe: Drat, I hate the whole opponent cooperating to go infinite thing!


Edit: Okay, I have a possible deck using Faith of the Devoted, which frees up card draw. Problem: what do we do with card draw?

An idea I had was to use Tolarian Kraken, to untap something like Marble Diamond. But, we can donate Marble Diamond to the opponent, for the same cooperative infinite that FortyTwo was talking about. Since Tolarian Kraken can only untap creatures, it seems hard to be able to untap a mana producer without being able to donate it.

Another idea was to have something like Lion's Eye Diamond, letting it die with March of the Machines on the battlefield, and reshuffling it into the deck using Mortuary. We take advantage with the Mirrorworks copies. But, unlike with Dual Nature, here we can get the copies without March of the Machines, so we can copy it and then bounce it back to our hand.

We couldn't do that with a legendary artifact that we had to sacrifice, but there doesn't appear to be a card like that.

So, we may be able to make this deck work - but I haven't found an ending sequence that makes it better.

Oh so things have advanced on the proof front, nice.

I think Copy Enchantment is no good for that deck though, since it can copy Faith of the Devoted.

Right, I forgot Doubling Season again! We do have Kurkesh, Onakke Ancient, but it's too expensive at that point.

Hmmm... so, I think we can have 5 different blue creatures. We have one creature that is the "main" stage creature, and we will have it's Bloodbond Marches on the stack. So say we have the five blue creatures in our hand. We play the main stage creature first, and get its Bloodbond March triggers. We then play the other four, and get four different groups of Bloodbond March triggers. We then cast Distorting Wake, costing us three blue mana. This will bring our five blue creatures to our hand. We can exile them one at a time to different Chrome Moxes, and get five blue mana. We then resolve the first four groups of Bloodbond March triggers, and one from the fifth group, to bring them back to the battlefield. (After putting them back in the graveyard with Pull from Eternity, of course) We then cast Distorting Wake again, costing us three mana again. This brings the five blue creatures back to our hand again. Now, we will exile the main stage creature for one blue mana, and cast the other four to get Bloodbond March triggers for them again. So for every two Bloodbond March triggers of the main stage creature, we will pay 3+3 = 6 blue mana for Distorting Wake, and gain 5+1 mana from exiling our blue creatures.

So yeah, we need 5 different blue creatures for this setup. (Or, we could go for three of the same blue creature, or two of the same creature plus two others)


Edit: So, here's a better ending sequence:

Layer 0: Tapping a Treasure token generates a lot of white mana
Layer 1: Resolving a Smothering Tithe trigger creates a lot of Treasure tokens
Layer 2: Making the opponent draw a card triggers many Smothering Tithes
Layer 3: Making the opponent shuffle their deck triggers many Widespread Panics
Layer 4: Activating a Jester's Mask generates many copies
Layer 5: An Awakening can untap many copies of Jester's Mask
Layer 6: An upkeep will trigger many copies of Awakening
Layer 7: Each postcombat main phase will be followed by many upkeeps thanks to Sphinx of the Second Sun
Layer 8: We will get many postcombat main phases thanks to World at War




Those deck slots filled up fast!

So, back to thinking about the Worldfire deck possibilities. I still haven't found a good way to bounce artifacts, so I'm thinking about how to manage if we bounce creatures instead. We can still try using Nihilistic Glee. Problem: If Soul Separator is to only way to still be able to use creatures after a Worldfire, then we won't be able to bounce and discard those creatures to Nihilistic Glee. On the other hand, if we have enough recyclable creatures to gain enough life from Nihilistic Glee without counting creatures lost to Worldfire, then we will be able to gain life with Nihilistic Glee just be never casting Worldfire, and that should go infinite.

Another possibility is to use something like Sanctum Plowbeast, along with perhaps Faith of the Devoted. Then, we can't be able to make copies of enchantments, which means no making copies of general creatures. That seems possibly problematic, but we'll see how it goes.

We still have Peace of Mind, but that does use up white mana, and with Wormfang Behemoth presumably using up blue mana, I don't see how to get an additional stage with the other colors.


Edit: Hmmm, without being able to make copies of enchantments, we won't be able to make enough copies of Dralnu's Crusade. I suppose we could switch back to Mirrorweave, but as jfb mentioned that can overwrite the Guardian of the Guildpact, and then it could be bounced cheaply.

There is also Cytoshape, which for example Oversoul of Dusk would be protected from. That could transform a damaged creature into a Goblin Boom Keg, but perhaps we could use Soulblast to avoid that. But, we can Cytoshape another creature into Faith of the Devoted anyway.


Edit: Okay, another attempt:



So, instead of bouncing artifacts with Into Thin Air, we use Stern Proctor. Stern Proctor can be generated by Soul Separator. What keeps us from repeating this process is the fact that the nontoken Stern Proctor gets exiled by Soul Separator, so we have to return it to the battlefield with Pull From Eternity.

We can probably replace Pulse of the Forge, but I think we want to have Wormfang Behemoth, since we don't want to lose Invulnerability to Kaervik's Spite. And if we add Wormfang Behemoth, we can switch from Platinum Emperion to Spell Burst.

That costs us another card slot, which loses us another copy of Sanguine Sacrament.


Edit: Hmm, now the Thrumming Stone combo is only getting us one layer for three card slots, not very efficient. We can do better by switching from Farsight Mask to Night Dealings, and adding Wormfang Constrictor. This frees up two card slots. I don't know how to add more layers at this point, but we can add two Stream of Lifes at least.


Edit: OOF. Kaervek's Spite can destroy whatever land we are using in the hyperstage. We still need to trigger Restore, but we don't need to cast Jokulhaups, and we need to need to do that.

Being able to use a sorcery like Reduce to Dreams would be nice, but I don't know how to be able to cast it at that point. What we would really like would be an activated ability that returned artifacts, but I couldn't find anything quite right; there are cards like Master Transmuter and Goblin Welder, but I don't think those work.


Edit: Oh, there's a problem with Wormfang Behemoth in the above deck, we can bounce it and imprint it for blue mana. Is there an alternative to using Wormfang Behemoth? Soul Separator can take care of creatures cards possibly, but artifacts and enchantments need to be saved from Worldfire somehow. If there is no solution, then we can't have a blue mana stage in the Worldfire / Cowardice deck. What about a white mana stage? With Cowardice, we need both the stage creature(s) and the transition creature(s) to be protected from Arcbond and Artificial Evolution, so either protection from red and blue, or something special like Guardian of the Guildpact. I only know of the Guardian, Oversoul of Dusk, and Sabertooth Nishoba for that. So we can't use white mana for the stage, since all those creatures are white; we could use green mana, and have Guardian of the Guildpact be the transition creature, but the only cards that I could find that target with a green mana are green creatures that could themselves be bounced for green mana. So we are kind of stuck if we have to use Wormfang Behemoth.

What about without Cowardice? Then we have a possibility, but we have to not be able to bounce Wormfang Behemoth. Bouncing artifact creatures was the promising idea, but currently we are stuck on that as well.


Edit: Oh, I guess without Cowardice we don't need protection from red and blue, so there are more possibilities for transition creatures. So we can make it work with Wormfang Behemoth.


Edit: Okay, just sticking in Kaervek's Spite and Platinum Emperion in place of Death Pit Offering. Since we use an extra card, we have to remove a Sanguine Sacrament, losing us a layer.



Any problems?