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Quote from Vertain »I just noticed my previous list has only 56 cards. That aside, this challenge is remarkably entertaining. My list has evolved another step:
Quote from tstorm823 » So we still need to cut off the ability of Cho-Arrim Alchemist to double. So we replace Rings of Brighthearth with Kurkesh, Onakke Ancient and we add a single copy of Silverskin Armor. We can only equip at sorcery speed, so we can only loop if it involves copying the ability of only one creature that isn't natively an artifact. If we equip the Alchemist, we can prevent 2 damage, gain 2 life, and then have to pay 2 life to draw the cards back anyway so that we don't even get the intended stacked layers. If we equip Yawgmoth's Bargain, we can only ever prevent one damage with Cho-Arrim Alchemist, so the combo works as intended. If we equip Harabaz Druid, we go really obviously infinite with Voltaic Construct, so we're going to have to cut Voltaic Construct. We lose 3 layers off the total with that exchange, but it's certainly acceptable loss to preserve the other 40 million billion. Side note, with this change, if it becomes less interference with future goals, the Cabal Pit can be replaced with Mortarpod, as it would also be a 1 damage effect that Kurkesh can't copy (the equipped germ has the ability, not the equipment) that can be reset with a Ghostly flicker. I don't know how that might help, but it's good to stay sanitized from as many mechanics as possible in case they help later. My regret with this so far is that my idea was incompatible with Spirit Guide/Cowardice shenanigans, since the next step in the evolution of maximum finite damage seems to be finding multiple "Ackerman combos" that can be safely embedded within one another.
Quote from SadisticMystic » Get Helix down, then spend the first 10 mana on buyback Seething Anger. First Helix Twinflame gets four Precursor triggers, resulting in 12, then 48, then 192, then 768 copies of the spell. Total after this is 1024 P, 2048 V.
Quote from SadisticMystic » So a single untap generates 2 arrows, a Precursor trigger on an untap spell generates 3 arrows, and the untap card itself is worth 4. Playing all the untap cards in succession, then, would take you to 4^^^^31. You don't have anything that creates layers on top of this, but Selvala's Charge can indeed be played 53 times at first, and each time is worth 30 untap spells again, for 4^^^^1590. After the Time Spirals and Time Reversals, though, the opponent's library only goes back to 59 cards (remember, they can dump a basic land off your Show and Tell), so on the second to ninth times through you only get 52 copies of Selvala's Charge. That's another 14,070 untap spells, for a final figure of 4^^^^15,660.
Quote from bakgat »If you can have it all your way I can think of 17 damage. 1x Black lotus 4x Vexing Devil 1x Mountain 1x Gut shot
Quote from tstorm823 » Yeah, I had that "dudoi, [facepalm]" moment while driving to family things. "Just target two different pyromancers, dummy." That can be fixed though. I haven't had too much chance to think of the best solution to that problem. I was thinking of finding a way to switch Rings to Kurkesh and make only what I want artifacts, but the easiest way is to jump into my as of yet unused lands category. Quick search of lands that hurt me, I've got tapping a Cabal Pit which is a mana ability so it can't be copied with Rings of Brighthearth, then stick a Ghostly Flicker in Eye of the Storm to untap the shrine each cycle. And then the only way to gain the second life is to copy the Alchemist ability, activate the Shrine, prevent the damage with the ability copy, then cast a spell to get a Ghostly Flicker before the original Alchemist ability resolves so that it can choose the Shrine after it reenters, but to cast a spell from hand again requires another 1 life paid to draw the card, so I end up not gaining an extra life anyway, and can only do that net free cast of Hinder while I have recurring Sphinx to cycle...
Even if that doesn't work, I'm very confident there is a solution that makes it so that no matter what I do, that Alchemist can only prevent 1 damage to me without paying a life to get there at all. So the real question is, does the rest of that thing I made seem to work out correctly? And if so, did I correctly assess the numbers?
Quote from KodiakCutpurse » How does Alarm cause the Vats/Portals to untap? They are not creatures. The only way to untap them is when the Scorpions die. The only way (non-enchantment) creatures can die is by Descent... or Silence, now that I'm looking at it, but that is remedied by changing Silence to Faith Healer (which is what I was originally going to use, then I changed it at the last moment).
Quote from SadisticMystic » With the peculiarity of Zhur-Taa Druid actually dealing damage on its trigger, we might have to cut Guilty Conscience, going back to a simple AEther Flash or something so it doesn't say "T: Grow itself". One layer per step that makes use of it isn't such a big deal now.
Quote from KodiakCutpurse »Okay... I revamped my deck and now it is now significantly more powerful than before.
Quote from tstorm823 » To clarify, when I say resolve them all, I mean to say resolve the entire stack, resolve every trigger that results from a single activation of Ezuri before activating Ezuri again. I didn't quite comprehend the way Elvish Spirit Guide was actually working. I kept thinking "the only activated ability to trigger rings is Ezuri, and that's going to keep taking 1 mana, where is he expecting those triggers from?" I understand now. I still don't trust the method, but I was definitely being stupid.
Quote from tstorm823 » So here's the next question. The power you're describing is entirely dependent on being done in one single shot, so you have to maintain the growth of every resource needed to keep going within the combo (except lower tier triggers, the intended limitting factor). By what mechanism are you generating hasty Millikin and Mirror of Fate in scale with the growth of the combo, and why can it not be applied to Zhur-Taa Druids?
Quote from tstorm823 » Consider me still unconvinced at your sudden ability to multiply arrows. I understand that when you have X of each thing and go from one to the next, like Grip of Chaos to Psychic Battle, multiplying them along the way, you get X iteration of raising X to itself, which is pretty much adding one of those arrows by definition. Why is adding iterations of Ezuri on top of that multiplicative of the arrows, and not just adding one more layer? And if you leave the Rings of Brighthearth triggers floating around, they don't multiply, so when you eventually resolve back down to them, you get way less than the current X number of iterations, where the other pieces of the chain multiply better as you go. So it would be most efficient to resolve them first rather than leave them on the stack waiting. Much like you were questioning whether the Pyromancer Ascensions would be active in time for the next round, you're artificially holding a level back by stacking it like that. Also, if you play Abyssal Persecutor, your opponent can't draw out and you go infinite.
Quote from SadisticMystic »It looks like that all checks out, so we have something new to build around. The obvious question, then, is if we can do something similar with Simian Spirit Guide at a later point. ESG + SSG + land is enough to cast Chaos Warp from the opening hand, so we wouldn't need to downgrade to Mana Crypt just for a usable bootstrap. SSG is a lot harder to single out, though, and the red mana activated abilities are far less friendly. The only one that looks promising (while leaving room for at least a red mana producer above it) is Paragon of Fierce Defiance, which probably fails both for granting haste and for giving +1/+1 in greater and greater numbers with its ability to bounce other copies of itself. Even if it does pan out, these numbers still won't approach Graham, not without about 63 separate analogs of the ESG step. An ESG-based deck should be able to get somewhere around 2 -> X -> (2 -> Y -> 300), which will comfortably beat G_2, and if SSG can work somehow then it'll be over G_3, but still a long way off. If we go on to use Frontier Siege, I think the most efficient way to set it up involves a Scrambleverse that gives them a few copies of Rite of Passage and nothing else. With Primal Vigor, a single Rite of Passage donation would be enough, but Frontier Guide requires Elspeth which requires Doubling Season, since Primal Vigor doesn't double loyalty counters. Or if we're going to use Avacyn, donating a token of that (in response to a Dual Nature trigger to get back another token) works just as well--the idea is to set it up so that nothing on either side will ever die as a result of the fights. Obviously with Scrambleverse potentially doubling as an "untap all" spell, we can't run Mnemonic Wall or anything like that with the potential to return it, but since a Frontier Siege-based setup will probably top out at Chaos Warp and Yawgmoth's Bargain anyway, Scrambleverse plays right into that direction.
Quote from tstorm823 » Ok, so in case you haven't noticed, I'm not an expert on the mathematics here, but I think your suggested procedure doesn't scale the way you want it to because the Rings of Brighthearth triggers are a set amount from when you activate Ezuri, so to scale it to another layer, you need that many activations of Ezuri (I think).
With the new goal of playing with Possibility Storm triggers as much at possible, I did a quick search of things that trigger off of casts, and realized that I can also do nonsense with Bloodbond March myself. Every time I bounce and cast Quicksilver Gargantuan, it's triggers the Possibility Storms, one of which recasts the Gargantuan, each cast can trigger a Bloodbond March. Where you bounce, cast, counter, recur, I can't do that efficiently because bouncing is my non-free mechanism and if I find a way to make the mana keep up, it would go infinite. So instead, I'll resolve the March triggers with the creature still on the stack each time by using a second Gargantuan and a sac outlet (I'm picking Vish Kal, Blood Arbiter). So plus Bloodbond March, Vish Kal, and a duplicate Gargantuan, now instead of having 1 Gargantuan enter for each Barrin bounce, we have 1 for every Bloodbond March followed by another for every March that exists after the Gargantuan copies finish entering allowing Possibility Storm to cast the Gargantuan a second time. Now if only we could get the Gargantuan back in the deck like Hinder to use ALL of the Possibility Storm triggers. Good news! With its cloning ability and the newly acquired sac outlet, we are one Mirage common away from doing just that. If Quicksilver Gargantuan copies Gravebane Zombie when it enters the battlefield, we can sacrifice it to Vish Kal to put it back on top before each Possibility Storm trigger resolves. So our Doubling Seasons explode for every Doubling Season for every Dual Nature for every Bloodbond March for every Possibility Storm for 1/2 every Harabaz Druid for every Harabaz Druid for Insurrections for every Pyromancer Ascension for every Possibility Storm for every Boon Reflection for every Bargain cast which, as of right now, is 53 times. And then at the end, the attack power on the swing gets increased whatever amount more because instead of stopping the cycle after the last Insurrection because anything else made wouldn't have haste, we can continute making creatures until we absolutely exhaust the mana supply and simultaneously raising the power to some rediculous exponent by sacrificing every other creature to Vish Kal. So that's adding 4 cards: Bloodbond March, Vish Kal, Blood Arbiter, Quicksilver Gargantuan, and Gravebane Zombie. I'm thinking the most efficient method would be to only play 1 Doubling Season and 1 Dual Nature, so cut 6 cards there, and one enabling card (still Parallel Evolution), at least as a place holder), so 7 cards out of the previous assembly. That should put the deck at 24 slots used, 36 left open, and access to the full procedure from Hinder down for 3 full cycles before the first casting of bargain (8 if we play Possibility Storm before any of the creatures and use the duplicate Possibility Storms to pull every creature out of the deck). So that's a lot of efficiency gained while simultaneously pumping the output up a couple levels. Things we have access to for those other 36 cards: mega mana, mega creature ETB's, mega creature casts, mega instant and sorcery casts, mega death triggers, and mega +1/+1 counters on Vish Kal.
Quote from tstorm823 » Before I start listing what I've come up with since, I'm going to explain more clearly how the multiple Eyes are helping. Pretend for a moment that we had Opalescence, 2 Eye of the Storms, and 1 Pyromancer Ascension. We have a Healing Salve in the graveyard, 2 Healing Salves in one Eye of the Storm, and 1 Cackling Counterpart in the other, and for the sake of arguement, no counters on Pyromancer Ascension. If we cast an instant or sorcery, both Eyes trigger. We put the one with Cackling Counterpart on bottom and the one with Healing Salves on top. The one on top resolves, exiling the spell we cast, and then casting out a copy of the spell we cast in, healing salve, and healing salve. Both Healing Salves are cast while having the same name as a card in the graveyard, so Pyromancer Ascension triggers the ability to add a counter twice. Then all three spells resolve leaving only the other Eye of the Storm trigger on the stack. When it resolves, it casts Cackling Counterpart, which triggers the copy ability of Pyromancer Ascension since it acquired its 2 counters. So two copies of the spell makes 2 more Ascensions. If we cast another spell and stack the triggers the same, those copies will have 2 counters as well before we get back around to Cackling Counterpart again. The spells cast out of a single Eye of the Storm all happen all at once without chance for Pyromancer Ascension triggers to go on the stack until after they're all cast, so there is no wizardry to get more triggers out of the same Eye. I apologize if that's what it sounded like I was getting at. It's all irrelevant now though, because the only spell we care to have copied a million billion times anymore is Insurrection.
Play Possibility Storm. I chose Knowledge Pool over Possibility Storm earlier because it's easier to control when just going for 2 cast triggers, but Knowledge Pool gets in the way of the Barrin bounce/cast combo. With an empty library, 2 Possibility Storms will get you what you originally cast by failing to find on the first trigger and then finding the card the second time. Possibility Storm also has no intervening if clause, so if you have a million billion of them, they will attempt to cast a matching card from your library a million billion times. We now have a million billion Possibility Storms. Now we cast the saddest spell in the universe, because it's going to stay on the bottom of the stack waiting for a the end of the game. It doesn't matter what the spell is, so for comedy's sake, I'm going to call is Storm Crow. In response to Storm Crow, Hinder it. All the Possibility Storms Trigger, all the Eye of the Storms trigger, all the Pyromancer Ascensions trigger. Allow one Pyromancer Ascension Trigger to happen, copying Hinder and using it to target the original Hinder. The copy resolves, putting Hinder on the top or bottom of the library (doesn't matter which, same thing). The two relevant Eyes do their thing and raise the number of permanents to some rediculous exponent of their previous state.
And then the Possibility Storm triggers start resolving. The first one to resolve looks for an instant and finds Hinder and casts it which retriggers ever Eye and Ascension all over again (because neither of those things care if the spell was cast from hand). This process of casting Hinder and triggering things will repeat once for every single copy of Possibility Storm that existed when Hinder was cast from hand. Eventually it runs out, and on the last copy of the trigger, Hinder gets put onto the bottom of the library and stays there. After one more round of Insurrections, Stor Crow can finally see the light of day as it tries to resolve, so we pay 1 life to draw Hinder and reignite the process with a million billion times as many Possibility Storms. We repeat the whole process a million billion times until we get down to 1 life, and on that cycle of casts, we'll choose to cast 1 copy of Bargain, putting our life back up to astronomical, so we can do the whole thing over again until we've cast Bargain 53 times and the opponent has no cards left to draw. And that is the deck so far, 33 unused decks slots remaining.
Quote from Programmer_112 »After reading this thread again, and paying more attention, I have determined that Precursor Golem is stupid. Thus, I have a new idea: <snip> I have no idea how to calculate this, but it feels insanely large. After just the first Helix+Weave+Rite+Hymn+Unwilling Recruit, factoring in Eye of the Storm, I think we have about 600 million creatures (rough estimate, but accurate-ish), each getting a HUGE pump from the 4 giant copies of Unwilling Recruit, not to mention all of the Cathars' Crusade triggers. Does anyone have any idea how to calculate this? I'm just not good enough with big numbers, and Eye of the Storm, though awesome, makes everything difficult. Also, sorry for my grammar here. I'm tired, and my keyboard is buggy, so typing is hard. It's also very possible that my list is all screwed up, because it took a long time to trim down to 60, and I might have done something stupid.
Quote from tstorm823 » With regards to getting the Pyromancer Ascensions active before casting the spells from Eye of the Storm, I have a solution for that. One thing we've been ignoring is that we don't have 1 Eye of the Storm, we have 30 * 2^(2^^^5) copies of it. In almost any other case, copies of Eye of the Storm are useless because they all trigger off of each card cast, they all resolve the trigger, and only one of them get's to exile the spell, so that the end result is that no matter how many copies there are of Eye of the Storm, you cast every spell exiled by any Eye of the storm exactly once. But here it matters, because we care about the order, so if we put the 2 copies of whatever spell is in the graveyard for Ascension activating into one Eye and then put our mighty pile of spells into another while always resolving the first eye's trigger first, the last patch of ascensions will always be active for the bulk of what we care about.
Recap of used deck slots. Black Lotus, Show and Tell, Omniscience, Enter the Infinite, Opalescence, 4 Doubling Season, 4 Dual Nature, Pyromancer Ascension, Eye of the Storm, Vedalken Orrery, Tradewind Rider, Quicksilver Gargantuan, Barrin, Master Wizard, Harabaz Druid, 3 of something to activate Acensions, Knowledge Pool, Rite of Replication, Insurrection, Supplant Form, and 4 Radiate. That's 31 cards leaving almost half of the deck open, more than half since those 3 cards to activate Ascension can definitely be made highly impactful. And if the Knowledge Pool and Eye triggers are used optimally, I'm pretty sure all 4 Radiates can be cast for every cast trigger, including their own, while having every existing Ascension activated every time. If we try to maximize Radiates, we can have 38 casts of it once they're all in the eye, with 30 instants or sorceries left which will trigger the eye 60 times, leading to a total of 278 casts of radiate (all copied a million billion times) without counting any fork effects.