MTG Salvation

So looking at what we could possibly achieve, it looks like Spellweaver Volute is going to enable recasting of our instants without necessarily sweeping our side of the board, as I don't know of any flashback spells that sweep. Perhaps our enabling sorcery could be something that isn't flashback, but if we are to keep recasting the sweeper sorcery due to some mechanism we have in place, we would probably have a nonsweeper sorcery that we could recast as well. So this probably doesn't work.

Worldfire seems like it could work - the mechanism we had in place in the last deck, where Kaervek's Spite sent our permanents to the graveyard, and Worldfire sent our permanents to exile, and we could only bring cards from exile into the library, probably won't work because of Sanctifier en-Vec. But, we could still have Worldfire be the only/cheapest spell we have that can send our needed resource to the graveyard/exile (a land, for instance). So we could still use Spellweaver Helix for a stage tier.

For our previous gigastage attempts, we had tried to use Goblin Dark-Dwellers or Spell Queller for an extra stage tier. I don't know how feasible these are right now, but they were quite difficult to make work in the gigastage decks. I suppose we should first try to get a hyperstage deck going before we try to add another stage tier.


Edit: Actually, looking at our previous deck, Mox Ruby couldn't be sent into exile by Sanctifier en-Vec, since it doesn't have any color. So the Mox Ruby strategy could still work, I suppose.


Edit: I'm thinking Goblin Dark-Dwellers probably doesn't work, since it can cast Arcbond from the graveyard, but Spell Queller would just exile a spell on the stack, which wouldn't help Arcbond but could help a spell that can be copied (which I suppose would be a spell of mana value less than or equal to 2, assuming we use Sea Gate Stormcaller).

Looks like CaptainMarcia is working on making Last Laugh and Massacre Girl decks in the other thread. So what are the restrictions we face if we use those cards as substitutes for Arcbond?

Making Flaring Pain mandatory would be nice, but I'm not sure how to go about doing so - having it deal damage without a sweep effect is no good, for example.

How does Last Laugh work as a replacement for Arcbond? Arcbond allows the computation to halt when the Arcbond creature dies, but it seems like Last Laugh would either die early if Opalescence was in play, or never die if it wasn't. I suppose the computation can halt when Last Laugh runs out of triggers with a long enough stretch with nothing being put into the graveyard - do we have a way to control that?

Ooh, Vesuvan Duplimancy would have been a very good card for the deck that no longer exists. Does the job of Mirror Gallery, and also allows the creation of duplicates using spells you already have.

If you want to make sure the Doubling Seasons die, just don't create tokens of their creature type, I guess.

So, hopefully we can find a new way to do computation - but if not, then I guess it's Sway of the Stars, coupled with a limited way to recycle it? It looks like we can do the normal stuff we do on the ending sequence to get a few layers of top of Busy Beaver, perhaps ending on combat or the opponent's library.

Thinking about how to get a stage going - the creature token stages dependent on Mimic Vat or Soul Foundry depend on bringing stuff back from exile, so maybe those don't work. But, perhaps we can get stages based on color. Sway of the Stars can put cards back in our hand though, so does that mess up our stages?

A thought that doesn't seem to go anywhere, but I figured I would mention it: We can have one Arcbond, along with Comeuppance, and then the computation will stop when the one Arcbonded creature dies, and to start up again we need to Arcbond another creature. Another way to do it is to have two Arcbonded creatures, and then the Arcbonds will alternate between the two, with no choice ever occurring, until one of them dies. Then again we need another Arcbond to start things up again.

As far as I can tell there's no real advantage to one over the other, other than the latter needing two Arcbonds to start and only one to restart. But, maybe someone will have an idea using this.

Keeping the Arcbond creature around does seem like a promising idea. Leonin Relic-Warder does look like it goes infinite by being able to bring Vedalken Orrery back to the battlefield, allowing us to plop down a creature or whatever. Some cards like Silkwrap are more restrictive on what cards they can exile, but none of the ones I saw had creature types, so they would all die early.

Hmm, so maybe Pull from Eternity if we want to be able to fetch/draw cards from our library? And go for a Worldfire hyperstage.

Then we have to figure out how to get back our stuff with Pull from Eternity after a Worldfire.

So, currently it looks like we don't have a way to do computation without any infinites. The Churchill Turing machine setup is maybe something to look at, if we're willing to look at a multiturn version of the challenge. Of course, we should look for the possibility of doing computations first turn - the Waterfall model is still looks like a simple way to achieve Turing completeness, even if we don't have an implementation as of right now.

Until we find something, I may look at the traditional megastage version of the deck. We had a deck that was supposed to achieve F_{w^3 + w13 + 4}(X), but of course it had Mimic Vat. I think it had Worldpurge as well, which maybe doesn't work with Soul Foundry? But, I think we should be able to get at least to around that area with our various new ideas.

So I believe we're looking at:



The loss of Mind's Eye drops us to around BB_{w^3 + w3 + 1}(55).

I’m away now, just popping in to say sadge.


does anyone have any idea how to fix this? One way of course would be to prove the flooding waterfall model Turing complete. Or, if we failed at that, we could try to build big machines using the flooding waterfall model anyway.


any other ways to do computation? There’s the original Churchill UTM, I imagine that’s just plain harder to keep from going infinite, but I don’t know if we’ve investigated it thoroughly.

We don't have access to the 17th card before we cast SSA, but we can have access before we perform the full combo.


Edit: Eh, I guess your point about Worldfire applies here as well. After we resolve the 9th II, SSA will be in our hand, so we have to cast it before any WOrldfires get resolved and it gets put into exile.

So, if we the most SSA full combos we can perform is two, the question is how many treasure tokens we can make with the first SSA. We can make use of the two other cards we draw on the 8th and 9th II's before we full combo, so we can actually get 5 cards in addition to the 11 creatures we need to draw. (Correct me if I am wrong.) We can do a megacombo with "one red mana" (which could just be casting Abandon the Post from hand) and 20 life, that seems like the most that we can get. So that should be like a hyperstage with around 20 stages, maybe a bit less? So maybe around BB_{w^2}(X) with X around 20. That then feeds into BB_{w^3 + w3} (BB_{w^3 + w3} (X)), which then feeds into BB_{w^3 + w3 + 1}^53 (X).


Edit: I'm not thinking clearly, we should be able to cast Starlight to gain a lot of life, and we can perhaps use that life to set up a large hyperstage on the bottom, then put on a megastage transition with our Abandon the Post from hand, and have another hyperstage on top? So perhaps we can get BB_{w^2 * 2}(X) treasure tokens with X large? I guess we have to go through the opening to see how large we can make X, and if we can actually set up a proper double hyperstage.

Okay, fair enough. It would perhaps be nice if we could change things up so we wouldn't need Worldfire to get started... maybe have a colored mana left over from the start. I don't see a replacement for Epic Experiment off hand. Or possibly a replacement for Smoke Spirits' Aid - a black X spell could work, although black isn't ldeal for generating mana.

We can draw SSA with the first 14 draws, cast it to get Aura tokens, then shuffle SSA into the library and cast II again, drawing SSA and another card. If that extra card gets us access to the full deck, then we can do a full combo, I believe. So if 14 cards besides SSA are needed, we should be able to still get 3 SSA full combos.

Oh yeah, I was talking about getting perhaps 3 full combos - we won't get enough cards with 4 copies of II, but perhaps we could cast II another 5 times (without TYS of course), drawing SSA the last 3 times, which would beat out the max of 2 combos we can get if we draw 14 cards initially. Just a thought, it may not be possible.