Well, it's looking like the turn 2 version can maybe get 8 layers. (Did you see the last edit to post #27?) So if it's 8 with turn 2 versus 10 or 11 with turn 3, what would you think is better? Anyway, I'm gonna keep an eye out for both.
Of course, if we can get a 2-stage chain, that would change everything again! Perhaps that's where our focus should be right now.
Hmm, those instant/sorcery fetchers could be useful. Of course, most of the card fetchers that can gain layers will be instants or sorceries anyway. But, there is one notable exception: Adventure cards, which are creature cards outside of the stack zone. We can use Seasonal Ritual to gain mana, and then the trusty Usher to Safety to bounce Rosethorn Acolyte.
So we have
Layer 1: Casting a Samut's Sprint creates a lot of copies, thanks to Thousand-Year Storm.
Layer 2: Casting Seasonal Ritual from Rosethorn Acolyte will add a lot of red mana.
Layer 3: Casting Usher to Safety from Shepherd of the Flock can bounce Rosethorn Acolyte many times. We can cast Usher to Safety from the library by paying one life, and then counter it with a drake.
Hmm, nice. Also, if we can't find a place for artifacts, we can animate a Selesnya Locket and make copies of it with Replicate.
Devious Cover-Up is interesting. However, without getting any card draws, it looks like we would need something like Experimental Frenzy, and I'm not sure why we would need to fetch cards if we have Experimental Frenzy.
Edit: While I certainly prefer the turn 3 setup at this point, I think it's worth keeping an eye on the turn 2 setup, and see how far we can take it. Maybe it's too much trouble to write up both decks, but I figure at least we can figure out both decks, and have the writeup concentrate on one, and give a mention to the other.
Looking at the turn 2 setup, which currently requires Gilded Goose if I'm not mistaken, I'm thinking right now it doesn't work with the current stage combo. While we can avoid having an easy way to give Gilded Goose haste, we can still Replicate it, and get lots of Food tokens. We can then spend a couple of mana to gain 3 life, which can be spent to cast Clear the Mind or Replicate using Bolas's Citadel. Or, could we make that part of the plan? Gain 2 mana from lands, and then spend that two mana to gain 3 life from Food, and use that 3 life to cast either of the spells. Maybe that could work. We do have to draw with Clear the Mind though - is there something that we can draw that we can put back in the graveyard or library easily? Maybe this is where we should go to Devious Cover-Up, to avoid drawing.
Since the stage combo is now based on life, I guess we can just hook into the life gain layer in our current setup? Which currently just skips the Samut's Sprint layer. We could even keep the Smothering Tithe layer, if we don't have any way to give Gilded Goose haste. Or, we could find some limited ways to give haste, and extend the combo even more. Anyway, even without an extension, that looks like a potential 8 layers, in 2 turns? Which looks like the preferable version at the moment. I might well be missing something though.
Even if I'm not missing something, this looks damnably hard to get started, even worse than the turn 3 version. In this one we can't get cheap mana from Leafkin Druid or Selesnya Locket, since any kind of mana can pay for food, which will give us life to extend the stage combo. But, there may be a lot of limited ways to gain life or mana, possibly enough to get going? It's worth exploring, at least.
So, right now we are using lands to make blue mana, creatures to make blue mana, and Smothering Tithe to make black mana. Green mana seems to be necessarily cheap. We aren't really using white or red mana right now. The main problem is coming up with different ways to generate mana, that can be hooked into different layers. There is of course artifacts, but Dance of the Manse seems to kibosh those. Other than that, I really don't know. (A couple of Domris can make red mana, but that seems pretty limited.) There may also be more ways to use the opponent's resources, although we are already using opponent life total and library.
One possibility - if we could change the stage combo so that we don't use Clear the Mind, could we get layers of cards fetching other cards? Of course, we would still need to be able to cast Repudiate // Replicate somehow. We could use Experimetal Frenzy I suppose. But in that case, I'm not sure what the advantage is of fetching a card rather than just casting it from the top of the library. We no longer have Omniscience, so we don't get out of paying the mana cost if the card is in our hand. And I think with Experimental Frenzy we can cast X spells just fine. So maybe there isn't a way to get card-fetching layers.
Also, I guess now is a good time to think about the start - we aren't allowed to use Nyxbloom Ancient or Samut, Tyrant Smasher, so it's much harder to get mana now I think.
For donating, probably the easiest is the Replicate a lot of Clackbridge Trolls, which will create a lot of Goat tokens on the opponent's side. Then we can Role Reversal a Teysa Karlov and a bunch of tapped creatures.
Edit: Thinking about artifacts some more, The Great Henge gives us two green mana (probably useless) and two life. I'm not sure where to go from there though; that life can be used to cast Disenchant, or any non-X spell.
Yeah, we haven't used the opponent's life yet. Something like a Devastate would be nice, to kill off creatures at the cost of the opponent's life, but I didn't see anything like that.
Hmm, but we can just have The Akroan War make lifelinked tapped creatures donated to the opponent deal damage to themselves, and give the opponent life. Then we can transfer that to our own life with Vicious Rumors or Grasping Thrull, gaining a layer. (Any way to get more?) That takes us to 3 -> 3 -> 55 -> 10.
Edit: So, I was thinking about getting started, and I ran into a problem. Our current setup depends on white mana being very restricted, but to get started we need to cast an Emergency Powers (either that, or cast Bolas's Citadel, which requires three black mana, and black is also supposed to be restricted). Also, later on we need to cast Dance of the Manse, which also requires a white mana. So the problem is, how are we supposed to get two white mana, without making white mana too cheap? I don't see a way yet.
One thing we could do is give up the artifact layer, and have life be used to cast Samut's Sprint instead. So then we could allow white mana to be plentiful. In that case though, I don't think we can use Kenrith, the Returned King, since he can use white mana to gain life.
Another thing we could give up is Dance of the Manse. I think we could give up having a lot of copies of Thousand-Year Storm. Our stage combo casts a bunch of instants/sorceries, so our storm count goes up a lot just processing the stage combo. The only question would be if we need many TYSes for targeting purposes - the only place it seems like we need it is for Disenchant recycling our lockets, but I think we can use Repeated Reverberation to fix that. So that seems all right. But, we would lose having many copies of The Akroan War and Smothering Tithe, so that would lose us two layers. So we don't want to give up Dance of the Manse.
Edit: I guess we could use one of the opponent's card draws to get one white mana. (or more if we need it, with more Smothering Tithes) We can play a white mana land that comes in tapped in the beginning, so we can use it for Emergency Powers without being able to recycle it later. Then, we can use an opponent card draw for Dance of the Manse. That loses one opponent card draw, so we go down to 3 -> 3 -> 54 -> 10. Still better than losing a layer.
Edit: Hmm, there's another problem with Dance of the Manse. It can animate enchantments, but it can also animate artifacts, which means we can animate our locket and then just Replicate it to get more red mana.
I don't see a way to fix this - dropping Dance of the Manse costs more layers than just dropping the artifact layer. Perhaps there could be a way to not be able to animate the locket, but I don't see how. A legendary artifact would work here; too bad Mox Amber is no longer legal. Nyx Lotus enters the battlefield tapped, and anyway we will have white and black permanents. So there doesn't seem to be a good legendary artifact that we can use.
I guess we can just drop the artifact layer. This means we can have plentiful white mana again, so we don't need to use an opponent draw. So we are at 3 -> 3 -> 55 -> 9, unless we find a way to use artifacts again.
Another improvement - we can use Dreadmalkin to sacrifice Planeswalkers at the cost of black mana. We can get a lot of black mana by putting a bunch of Smothering Tithes into play, and making the opponent draw cards. Kenrith, the Returned King seems like a good candidate. The other abilities seem okay - the red mana ability performs the same function as Samut's Sprint, so we could actually use Kenrith in place of Samut's Sprint, I think. The green mana ability seems harmless. White and black mana are very restricted, so those abilities shouldn't be a problem. So the only potential problem is the blue mana ability, if we use it to draw cards for ourselves. I think it should be okay though - an important aspect of Clear the Mind is shuffling the graveyard into the library, so spending four mana to just draw a card seems like an inferior version of that.
So we have:
Layer 1: Casting a Samut's Sprint creates a lot of copies, thanks to Thousand-Year Storm. We can use an Izzet Locket to generate the red mana.
Layer 2: Casting a Disenchant can destroy and recycle a lot of Izzet Lockets. We can spend two life to cast Disenchant.
Layer 3: A lifelink creature dealing damage to itself can gain us a lot of life, thanks to Angel of Vitality.
Layer 4: Triggering step III of The Akroan War will cause a lot of tapped lifelink creatures to deal damage to themselves.
Layer 5: Resolving a couple of proliferate triggers will add lore counters to a bunch of The Akroan Wars.
Layer 7: Activating a creature destruction planeswalker ability will destroy many copies of Martyr for the Cause, thanks to Repeated Reverberation.
Layer 8: Making the opponent draw a card will gain a lot of black mana thanks to Smothering Tithe, allowing us to destroy and recycle Planeswalkers many times.
Making the opponent draw 53 times will take us to more than 3 -> 3 -> 55 -> 9 damage.
Ah nice. I'm not seeing a way to add any layers by using artifacts in the stage combo instead of lands at the moment, but I'll keep it in mind.
I figure the lifelink creatures can be anything that has a tap ability. For example, Gyre Engineer tokens, given lifelink with Teysa Karlov, for example. Fortunately, Martyr for the Cause does not have a tap ability.
Speaking of Teysa Karlov, we can use her to get another layer, since with lots of copies of Teysa, killing off a single Martyr for the Cause will get a lot of proliferate triggers. So that takes us to X -> X -> N+1 -> 8.
Hmmm... but, we want being able to recycle the artifacts to be based on Replicate, just like with the current combo, so that we can't keep recycling the artifacts after each copy of Clear the Mind. So we need to have to copy some creature to either draw an artifact, or put it into play, or destroy/sacrifice it.
Anyway, I found an improvement with the current setup, so perhaps we don't need to switch. It's going back to proliferate/sagas, but using Martyr for the Cause rather than Evolution Sage:
Layer 1: Casting a Samut's Sprint creates a lot of copies, thanks to Thousand-Year Storm. We can use an Izzet Locket to generate the red mana.
Layer 2: Casting a Disenchant can destroy and recycle a lot of Izzet Lockets. We can spend two life to cast Disenchant.
Layer 3: A lifelink creature dealing damage to itself can gain us a lot of life, thanks to Angel of Vitality.
Layer 4: Triggering step III of The Akroan War will cause a lot of tapped lifelink creatures to deal damage to themselves.
Layer 5: Killing a couple of Martyr for the Cause will add lore counters to a bunch of The Akroan Wars.
Layer 6: Activating a creature destroying planeswalker ability can kill a lot of Martyr for the Cause, thanks to Repeated Reverberation.
So we get to X -> X -> N+1 -> 7, where N is the number of times we can activate a creature destroying planeswalker ability.
Unfortunately, I couldn't find a suitable Planeswalker that could destroy a bunch of creatures with a single ability. The second ability of Chandra, Awakened Inferno seems ideal, but unfortunately, we can use the -X ability to kill off some Martyr for the Cause, while also destroying Chandra, allowing her to be recycled. Chandra, Flame's Fury has an ultimate that looks promising, but it seems pretty easy to arrange for Chandra to have exactly 8 loyalty after some proliferates, so that Chandra will destroy herself with her ultimate. Too bad, it would have been another layer.
Hmm, that's looking pretty good. Yeah, Frilled Mystic seems like it should work.
Is it too early to start thinking about how we could add on layers? We would need ways to generate lots of blue mana.
One possibility: Have a creature that can generate blue mana, like Gyre Engineer. Make a lot of copies of it, then cast say a Samut's Sprint to give them all haste? Then we find a way to get lots of red mana - or possibly life, if we cast it using Bolas's Citadel.
Edit: So for example, we could do the following:
Layer 1: Casting a Samut's Sprint creates a lot of copies, thanks to Thousand-Year Storm, allowing us to haste a lot of Gyre Engineers. We can use an Izzet Locket to generate the red mana.
Layer 2: Casting a Disenchant can destroy and recycle a lot of Izzet Lockets. We can spend two life to cast Disenchant.
Layer 3: A lifegain planeswalker ability can gain a lot of life.
Layer 4: Activating a lifegain planeswalker ability can get a lot of copies, thanks to Repeated Reverberation.
So that gets us to X -> X -> N+1 -> 5, where N is however many lifegain planeswalker abilities we can activate. Not a bad start, I guess.
We could get more layers if we used something other than lands for the stage, like perhaps artifacts. But, I didn't see a way to make the switch. Unfortunately, there don't seem to be any cards in Standard that put artifacts into play without paying their mana cost.
The simplest solution for Emergence Zone is probably just switching it out for Leyline of Anticipation. Or, we could keep Emergence Zone, and use Arboreal Grazer to put additional lands into play, rather than the Dryads. That way we could use Emergence Zone once for the flash, and then recycle it once for the landfall.
What's the problem with Korvold sacrificing Cavalier of Thorns? We don't want to exile the Cavalier. Oh, perhaps it could be a token copy?
Edit: It looks like we can revive that extra Adventure layer, by using Stomp from Bonecrusher Giant rather than Shepherd of the Flock. Four copies of Stomp can destroy Realm-Cloaked Giant, allowing us to recycle it. And this time, we can't use Realm-Cloaked Giant to destroy Bonecrusher Giant, since the latter is a Giant. So I think this works? And takes us to 10 layers with Goose, 14 layers without.
Okay, I have a better ending life combo. We can use step III of The Akroan War to cause a lot of tapped creatures to deal damage to themselves, which can gain us life in a lot of ways, say with Teysa Karlov. We can trigger step III with Evolution Sages and lands.
So, we have:
Layers 7-8: Cast Clear the Mind, and counter it using Ionize, at the cost of two life.
Layer 9: A lifelinked creature dealing damage to itself can gain us a lot of life, with the aid of Angel of Vitality.
Layer 10: Triggering step III of The Akroan War will cause a lot of tapped creatures to deal damage to themselves.
Layer 11: A couple of proliferates from Evolution Sages can add counters to a lot of The Akroan Wars.
Layer 12: Putting a land into play can trigger a lot of Evolution Sages.
So we can deal more than 10 -> X+1 -> 13 damage, where X is the number of lands that we can put into play.
That Clear the Mind / Cerulean Drake / Quasiduplicate setup looks interesting. But yeah, getting the right amount of mana each time seems difficult. An instant/sorcery that gives us mana, or copying a permanent that gives us mana with Quasiduplicate, will give us too much thanks to Thousand-Year Storm. Perhaps 3 lockets that we can send to the graveyard after use? We would need to put them back into play without using up mana though. Perhaps Bolas's Citadel, with a way to get cheap life, but no way to get cheap mana?
Ah - I was under the impression that Adventures could only be cast from our hand, but perhaps that is wrong.
Bolas's Citadel is very useful, it would be hard to drop that. (We could use Experimental Frenzy, but that does the same thing with regards to Shepherd of the Flock.) I would think The Caldron of Eternity would be easier to get rid of, but I don't see an easy way to deal with Disinformation Campaign. Spells like Repudiate are too expensive, and I don't see a way to put a card from our hand into the library.
Getting started on turn 2 without Gilded Goose also looks hard. How much improvement do we need to consider a delay until turn 3 - would a few layers be enough, or would we want something like a stage combo?
Layer 7-8: Cast Clear the Mind, and counter it with Ionize, at the cost of two life.
Layer 9: Resolving a planeswalker lifegain ability gains a lot of life (perhaps with the aid of Angel of Vitality).
Layer 10: Activating a planeswalker lifegain ability gets a lot of copies, thanks to Repeated Reverberation.
I had the thought that perhaps we could use Spark Double to create a lot of nonlegendary planeswalkers, and then limit them by requiring them to use an ultimate. Then we could activate them by say playing a land, with a lot of Evolution Sages in play. But, I haven't found a good ultimate to use. Chandra, Fire Artisan or Kaya, Orzhov Usurper could gain life if we had Sorin, Imperious Bloodlord, but then we could just use Sorin's first ability.
Or we could use:
Layer 7-8: Cast Clear the Mind, and counter it with Ionize, at the cost of two life.
Layer 9: Gaining a life from a lifeland gains us a lot of life thanks to Angel of Vitality
Layer 10: Playing a lifeland triggers many life gains thanks to Yarok, the Desecrated.
So, two more layers for right now, if we can use life. Probably there is a way to get more.
Ah, good point. I think that makes my assessment without Prismite wrong as well, so we do need Prismite to get to 8 layers.
Edit: No, it doesn't look like I require changing any of the new Brooms, so we can get 8 layers without Prismite.
Edit: So, this Thaumabroom combo is pretty good. I'm just not liking how all the mana colors and life get mooted. I think we should keep an eye out for ways to keep mana and life in the picture.
If we kept life around, then for example we could get a double layer from Clear the Mind, by countering it with Ionize. Then we could figure out ways to gain life from there - maybe Repeated Reverberation and some lifegain planeswalkers, for starters.
Mana could also be very productive, thanks to Nyxbloom Ancients. We could get one layer from casting an instant sorcery that uses a particular color with lots of Thousand-Year Storms, and then get another layer from tapping a permanent for lots of mana. So that's potentially two layers per color.
Edit: Okay, unless I am mistaken, I see a way to add two more layers.
Instead of Kaya's Wrath, we will cast Cast Off from Realm-Cloaked Giant, which provides the same function. After all the copies are resolved, we can then cast the Realm Cloaked Giant as a creature. We can then bounce the Realm-Cloaked Giant many times using Usher to Safety from Shepherd of the Flock. We can only bounce one Realm-Cloaked Giant per Thousand-Year Storm trigger, but that is okay, since we will have lots of Thousand-Year Storms. We can then cast Shepherd of the Flock as a creature, and bounce it using Applied Biomancy. Then Applied Biomancy get be retrieved using Vivid Renewal, and the rest of the combo proceeds as normal.
Okay, thanks! Yeah, it seems there is not quite as much mana as we would want.
It looks like we can actually get a lot more food. From the initial Constellation trigger, we can turn the first Thauamabroom that will be copied into a Gilded Goose, and the second into a Nyxbloom Ancient. Then we can do whatever we want with the remaining Thaumabrooms; we will want to make a bunch of them into copies of Yarok, the Desecrated. So the first Broom trigger is resolved, and we get a Gilded Goose, which gives us a lot of Food tokens. We sacrifice the Food tokens one by one, doing that part of the combo and increasing the number of Thaumabrooms. Then, we resolve the second Broom trigger, getting us a Nyxbloom Ancient and triggering Constellation. This will allow us to make the next two Thauamabrooms to be copied into a Gilded Goose and a Nyxbloom Ancient again, and we can make a lot more Yaroks now. So the next Gilded Goose gets exponentially or tetrationally more Food tokens, and it looks like this is worth a layer.
However, I'm not sure how that fits in with the restriction of mana in the combo. I'm thinking the constraint of mana keeps us from gaining another layer, so we are still at x -> 12 -> 8.
Actually, though, it looks like we can get the extra layer without Dalakos or Prismite. So the first Constellation trigger turns the first two Thaumabrooms to be copied into a Gilded Goose and a Nyxbloom Ancient. Besides those, we we can turn the rest into a bunch of Yaroks. So say we have X Yaroks. Then the Gilded Goose comes into play, and we get about X food tokens. Then the Nyxbloom Ancient comes into play, and we get about X Constellation triggers. We can use one Constellation trigger to turn the X Thauamabrooms into X Nyxbloom Ancients, allowing the Gilded Goose to tap for about 3^X mana. (This is more than we need, so we could keep some Thaumabrooms as Brooms) Then we use the next Constellation trigger to turn the Thaumabrooms back into Brooms, and we can use our X food to double the amount of Thaumabrooms X times. So X Brooms go to X * 2^X. We do this a bunch of times for all the initial Broom triggers, so we go from X to 2^^X for the initial response of a Constellation trigger, and we get 8 layers.
What if we add Dalakos and Prismite to the deck? In thise case, instead of the step where we turn all the Thaumabrooms into Nyxbloom Ancients, we can instead turn them all into Angel of Vitality, and gain a bunch of life from a Food token. So we have about X life, and can then use a Constellation trigger to turn the Thaumabrooms into X Nyxbloom Ancients (but leaving at least one a Broom). We spend a fixed amount of life to recast Dalakos, and gain on the order of 3^X mana, enough for roughly 3^X more brooms. We can then use another Constellation trigger to turn almost all of the new Brooms into Nyxbloom Ancients, and repeat the process. After X repetitions we get about 3^^X Brooms. We can repeat this for all of the initial Constellation triggers, so we get about 3^^^X Brooms after all is said and done. This allows us to get to 9 layers.
Of course, if we can get a 2-stage chain, that would change everything again! Perhaps that's where our focus should be right now.
So we have
Layer 1: Casting a Samut's Sprint creates a lot of copies, thanks to Thousand-Year Storm.
Layer 2: Casting Seasonal Ritual from Rosethorn Acolyte will add a lot of red mana.
Layer 3: Casting Usher to Safety from Shepherd of the Flock can bounce Rosethorn Acolyte many times. We can cast Usher to Safety from the library by paying one life, and then counter it with a drake.
Layer 4: A Grasping Thrull can gain us a lot of life thanks to Angel of Vitality, at the cost of 2 life from the opponent.
Layer 5: A lifelink creature dealing damage to itself can gain us a lot of life for the opponent, thanks to Angel of Vitality.
Layer 6: Triggering step III of The Akroan War will cause a lot of tapped lifelink creatures to deal damage to themselves.
Layer 7: Resolving a couple of proliferate triggers will add lore counters to a bunch of The Akroan Wars.
Layer 8: Destroying a Martyr for the Cause will trigger many proliferates, thanks to Teysa Karlov
Layer 9: Activating a creature destruction planeswalker ability will destroy many copies of Martyr for the Cause, thanks to Repeated Reverberation.
Back to 10 layers?
However, the above improvement doesn't work for the turn 2 version, since there we can turn mana back into life.
Devious Cover-Up is interesting. However, without getting any card draws, it looks like we would need something like Experimental Frenzy, and I'm not sure why we would need to fetch cards if we have Experimental Frenzy.
Edit: While I certainly prefer the turn 3 setup at this point, I think it's worth keeping an eye on the turn 2 setup, and see how far we can take it. Maybe it's too much trouble to write up both decks, but I figure at least we can figure out both decks, and have the writeup concentrate on one, and give a mention to the other.
Looking at the turn 2 setup, which currently requires Gilded Goose if I'm not mistaken, I'm thinking right now it doesn't work with the current stage combo. While we can avoid having an easy way to give Gilded Goose haste, we can still Replicate it, and get lots of Food tokens. We can then spend a couple of mana to gain 3 life, which can be spent to cast Clear the Mind or Replicate using Bolas's Citadel. Or, could we make that part of the plan? Gain 2 mana from lands, and then spend that two mana to gain 3 life from Food, and use that 3 life to cast either of the spells. Maybe that could work. We do have to draw with Clear the Mind though - is there something that we can draw that we can put back in the graveyard or library easily? Maybe this is where we should go to Devious Cover-Up, to avoid drawing.
Since the stage combo is now based on life, I guess we can just hook into the life gain layer in our current setup? Which currently just skips the Samut's Sprint layer. We could even keep the Smothering Tithe layer, if we don't have any way to give Gilded Goose haste. Or, we could find some limited ways to give haste, and extend the combo even more. Anyway, even without an extension, that looks like a potential 8 layers, in 2 turns? Which looks like the preferable version at the moment. I might well be missing something though.
Even if I'm not missing something, this looks damnably hard to get started, even worse than the turn 3 version. In this one we can't get cheap mana from Leafkin Druid or Selesnya Locket, since any kind of mana can pay for food, which will give us life to extend the stage combo. But, there may be a lot of limited ways to gain life or mana, possibly enough to get going? It's worth exploring, at least.
One possibility - if we could change the stage combo so that we don't use Clear the Mind, could we get layers of cards fetching other cards? Of course, we would still need to be able to cast Repudiate // Replicate somehow. We could use Experimetal Frenzy I suppose. But in that case, I'm not sure what the advantage is of fetching a card rather than just casting it from the top of the library. We no longer have Omniscience, so we don't get out of paying the mana cost if the card is in our hand. And I think with Experimental Frenzy we can cast X spells just fine. So maybe there isn't a way to get card-fetching layers.
Also, I guess now is a good time to think about the start - we aren't allowed to use Nyxbloom Ancient or Samut, Tyrant Smasher, so it's much harder to get mana now I think.
For donating, probably the easiest is the Replicate a lot of Clackbridge Trolls, which will create a lot of Goat tokens on the opponent's side. Then we can Role Reversal a Teysa Karlov and a bunch of tapped creatures.
Edit: Thinking about artifacts some more, The Great Henge gives us two green mana (probably useless) and two life. I'm not sure where to go from there though; that life can be used to cast Disenchant, or any non-X spell.
Hmm, but we can just have The Akroan War make lifelinked tapped creatures donated to the opponent deal damage to themselves, and give the opponent life. Then we can transfer that to our own life with Vicious Rumors or Grasping Thrull, gaining a layer. (Any way to get more?) That takes us to 3 -> 3 -> 55 -> 10.
Edit: So, I was thinking about getting started, and I ran into a problem. Our current setup depends on white mana being very restricted, but to get started we need to cast an Emergency Powers (either that, or cast Bolas's Citadel, which requires three black mana, and black is also supposed to be restricted). Also, later on we need to cast Dance of the Manse, which also requires a white mana. So the problem is, how are we supposed to get two white mana, without making white mana too cheap? I don't see a way yet.
One thing we could do is give up the artifact layer, and have life be used to cast Samut's Sprint instead. So then we could allow white mana to be plentiful. In that case though, I don't think we can use Kenrith, the Returned King, since he can use white mana to gain life.
Another thing we could give up is Dance of the Manse. I think we could give up having a lot of copies of Thousand-Year Storm. Our stage combo casts a bunch of instants/sorceries, so our storm count goes up a lot just processing the stage combo. The only question would be if we need many TYSes for targeting purposes - the only place it seems like we need it is for Disenchant recycling our lockets, but I think we can use Repeated Reverberation to fix that. So that seems all right. But, we would lose having many copies of The Akroan War and Smothering Tithe, so that would lose us two layers. So we don't want to give up Dance of the Manse.
Edit: I guess we could use one of the opponent's card draws to get one white mana. (or more if we need it, with more Smothering Tithes) We can play a white mana land that comes in tapped in the beginning, so we can use it for Emergency Powers without being able to recycle it later. Then, we can use an opponent card draw for Dance of the Manse. That loses one opponent card draw, so we go down to 3 -> 3 -> 54 -> 10. Still better than losing a layer.
Edit: Hmm, there's another problem with Dance of the Manse. It can animate enchantments, but it can also animate artifacts, which means we can animate our locket and then just Replicate it to get more red mana.
I don't see a way to fix this - dropping Dance of the Manse costs more layers than just dropping the artifact layer. Perhaps there could be a way to not be able to animate the locket, but I don't see how. A legendary artifact would work here; too bad Mox Amber is no longer legal. Nyx Lotus enters the battlefield tapped, and anyway we will have white and black permanents. So there doesn't seem to be a good legendary artifact that we can use.
I guess we can just drop the artifact layer. This means we can have plentiful white mana again, so we don't need to use an opponent draw. So we are at 3 -> 3 -> 55 -> 9, unless we find a way to use artifacts again.
So we have:
Layer 1: Casting a Samut's Sprint creates a lot of copies, thanks to Thousand-Year Storm. We can use an Izzet Locket to generate the red mana.
Layer 2: Casting a Disenchant can destroy and recycle a lot of Izzet Lockets. We can spend two life to cast Disenchant.
Layer 3: A lifelink creature dealing damage to itself can gain us a lot of life, thanks to Angel of Vitality.
Layer 4: Triggering step III of The Akroan War will cause a lot of tapped lifelink creatures to deal damage to themselves.
Layer 5: Resolving a couple of proliferate triggers will add lore counters to a bunch of The Akroan Wars.
Layer 6: Destroying a Martyr for the Cause will trigger many proliferates, thanks to Teysa Karlov
Layer 7: Activating a creature destruction planeswalker ability will destroy many copies of Martyr for the Cause, thanks to Repeated Reverberation.
Layer 8: Making the opponent draw a card will gain a lot of black mana thanks to Smothering Tithe, allowing us to destroy and recycle Planeswalkers many times.
Making the opponent draw 53 times will take us to more than 3 -> 3 -> 55 -> 9 damage.
I figure the lifelink creatures can be anything that has a tap ability. For example, Gyre Engineer tokens, given lifelink with Teysa Karlov, for example. Fortunately, Martyr for the Cause does not have a tap ability.
Speaking of Teysa Karlov, we can use her to get another layer, since with lots of copies of Teysa, killing off a single Martyr for the Cause will get a lot of proliferate triggers. So that takes us to X -> X -> N+1 -> 8.
Anyway, I found an improvement with the current setup, so perhaps we don't need to switch. It's going back to proliferate/sagas, but using Martyr for the Cause rather than Evolution Sage:
Layer 1: Casting a Samut's Sprint creates a lot of copies, thanks to Thousand-Year Storm. We can use an Izzet Locket to generate the red mana.
Layer 2: Casting a Disenchant can destroy and recycle a lot of Izzet Lockets. We can spend two life to cast Disenchant.
Layer 3: A lifelink creature dealing damage to itself can gain us a lot of life, thanks to Angel of Vitality.
Layer 4: Triggering step III of The Akroan War will cause a lot of tapped lifelink creatures to deal damage to themselves.
Layer 5: Killing a couple of Martyr for the Cause will add lore counters to a bunch of The Akroan Wars.
Layer 6: Activating a creature destroying planeswalker ability can kill a lot of Martyr for the Cause, thanks to Repeated Reverberation.
So we get to X -> X -> N+1 -> 7, where N is the number of times we can activate a creature destroying planeswalker ability.
Unfortunately, I couldn't find a suitable Planeswalker that could destroy a bunch of creatures with a single ability. The second ability of Chandra, Awakened Inferno seems ideal, but unfortunately, we can use the -X ability to kill off some Martyr for the Cause, while also destroying Chandra, allowing her to be recycled. Chandra, Flame's Fury has an ultimate that looks promising, but it seems pretty easy to arrange for Chandra to have exactly 8 loyalty after some proliferates, so that Chandra will destroy herself with her ultimate. Too bad, it would have been another layer.
Is it too early to start thinking about how we could add on layers? We would need ways to generate lots of blue mana.
One possibility: Have a creature that can generate blue mana, like Gyre Engineer. Make a lot of copies of it, then cast say a Samut's Sprint to give them all haste? Then we find a way to get lots of red mana - or possibly life, if we cast it using Bolas's Citadel.
Edit: So for example, we could do the following:
Layer 1: Casting a Samut's Sprint creates a lot of copies, thanks to Thousand-Year Storm, allowing us to haste a lot of Gyre Engineers. We can use an Izzet Locket to generate the red mana.
Layer 2: Casting a Disenchant can destroy and recycle a lot of Izzet Lockets. We can spend two life to cast Disenchant.
Layer 3: A lifegain planeswalker ability can gain a lot of life.
Layer 4: Activating a lifegain planeswalker ability can get a lot of copies, thanks to Repeated Reverberation.
So that gets us to X -> X -> N+1 -> 5, where N is however many lifegain planeswalker abilities we can activate. Not a bad start, I guess.
I was hoping that I could factor in Crashing Drawbridge to multiply the effect of Samut's Sprint, but it looks like that goes infinite with Quasiduplicate.
We could get more layers if we used something other than lands for the stage, like perhaps artifacts. But, I didn't see a way to make the switch. Unfortunately, there don't seem to be any cards in Standard that put artifacts into play without paying their mana cost.
What's the problem with Korvold sacrificing Cavalier of Thorns? We don't want to exile the Cavalier. Oh, perhaps it could be a token copy?
Edit: It looks like we can revive that extra Adventure layer, by using Stomp from Bonecrusher Giant rather than Shepherd of the Flock. Four copies of Stomp can destroy Realm-Cloaked Giant, allowing us to recycle it. And this time, we can't use Realm-Cloaked Giant to destroy Bonecrusher Giant, since the latter is a Giant. So I think this works? And takes us to 10 layers with Goose, 14 layers without.
So, we have:
Layers 7-8: Cast Clear the Mind, and counter it using Ionize, at the cost of two life.
Layer 9: A lifelinked creature dealing damage to itself can gain us a lot of life, with the aid of Angel of Vitality.
Layer 10: Triggering step III of The Akroan War will cause a lot of tapped creatures to deal damage to themselves.
Layer 11: A couple of proliferates from Evolution Sages can add counters to a lot of The Akroan Wars.
Layer 12: Putting a land into play can trigger a lot of Evolution Sages.
So we can deal more than 10 -> X+1 -> 13 damage, where X is the number of lands that we can put into play.
That Clear the Mind / Cerulean Drake / Quasiduplicate setup looks interesting. But yeah, getting the right amount of mana each time seems difficult. An instant/sorcery that gives us mana, or copying a permanent that gives us mana with Quasiduplicate, will give us too much thanks to Thousand-Year Storm. Perhaps 3 lockets that we can send to the graveyard after use? We would need to put them back into play without using up mana though. Perhaps Bolas's Citadel, with a way to get cheap life, but no way to get cheap mana?
Bolas's Citadel is very useful, it would be hard to drop that. (We could use Experimental Frenzy, but that does the same thing with regards to Shepherd of the Flock.) I would think The Caldron of Eternity would be easier to get rid of, but I don't see an easy way to deal with Disinformation Campaign. Spells like Repudiate are too expensive, and I don't see a way to put a card from our hand into the library.
Getting started on turn 2 without Gilded Goose also looks hard. How much improvement do we need to consider a delay until turn 3 - would a few layers be enough, or would we want something like a stage combo?
If we got rid of the Goose, instead of:
Layer 7: Cast Clear the Mind to retrieve Vivid Revival many times.
Layer 8: Cast Emergency Powers to retrieve Clear the Mind many times.
we could have:
Layer 7-8: Cast Clear the Mind, and counter it with Ionize, at the cost of two life.
Layer 9: Resolving a planeswalker lifegain ability gains a lot of life (perhaps with the aid of Angel of Vitality).
Layer 10: Activating a planeswalker lifegain ability gets a lot of copies, thanks to Repeated Reverberation.
I had the thought that perhaps we could use Spark Double to create a lot of nonlegendary planeswalkers, and then limit them by requiring them to use an ultimate. Then we could activate them by say playing a land, with a lot of Evolution Sages in play. But, I haven't found a good ultimate to use. Chandra, Fire Artisan or Kaya, Orzhov Usurper could gain life if we had Sorin, Imperious Bloodlord, but then we could just use Sorin's first ability.
Or we could use:
Layer 7-8: Cast Clear the Mind, and counter it with Ionize, at the cost of two life.
Layer 9: Gaining a life from a lifeland gains us a lot of life thanks to Angel of Vitality
Layer 10: Playing a lifeland triggers many life gains thanks to Yarok, the Desecrated.
So, two more layers for right now, if we can use life. Probably there is a way to get more.
Edit: No, it doesn't look like I require changing any of the new Brooms, so we can get 8 layers without Prismite.
Edit: So, this Thaumabroom combo is pretty good. I'm just not liking how all the mana colors and life get mooted. I think we should keep an eye out for ways to keep mana and life in the picture.
If we kept life around, then for example we could get a double layer from Clear the Mind, by countering it with Ionize. Then we could figure out ways to gain life from there - maybe Repeated Reverberation and some lifegain planeswalkers, for starters.
Mana could also be very productive, thanks to Nyxbloom Ancients. We could get one layer from casting an instant sorcery that uses a particular color with lots of Thousand-Year Storms, and then get another layer from tapping a permanent for lots of mana. So that's potentially two layers per color.
Edit: Okay, unless I am mistaken, I see a way to add two more layers.
Instead of Kaya's Wrath, we will cast Cast Off from Realm-Cloaked Giant, which provides the same function. After all the copies are resolved, we can then cast the Realm Cloaked Giant as a creature. We can then bounce the Realm-Cloaked Giant many times using Usher to Safety from Shepherd of the Flock. We can only bounce one Realm-Cloaked Giant per Thousand-Year Storm trigger, but that is okay, since we will have lots of Thousand-Year Storms. We can then cast Shepherd of the Flock as a creature, and bounce it using Applied Biomancy. Then Applied Biomancy get be retrieved using Vivid Renewal, and the rest of the combo proceeds as normal.
That should get us to 10 -> 12 -> 10, I believe.
It looks like we can actually get a lot more food. From the initial Constellation trigger, we can turn the first Thauamabroom that will be copied into a Gilded Goose, and the second into a Nyxbloom Ancient. Then we can do whatever we want with the remaining Thaumabrooms; we will want to make a bunch of them into copies of Yarok, the Desecrated. So the first Broom trigger is resolved, and we get a Gilded Goose, which gives us a lot of Food tokens. We sacrifice the Food tokens one by one, doing that part of the combo and increasing the number of Thaumabrooms. Then, we resolve the second Broom trigger, getting us a Nyxbloom Ancient and triggering Constellation. This will allow us to make the next two Thauamabrooms to be copied into a Gilded Goose and a Nyxbloom Ancient again, and we can make a lot more Yaroks now. So the next Gilded Goose gets exponentially or tetrationally more Food tokens, and it looks like this is worth a layer.
However, I'm not sure how that fits in with the restriction of mana in the combo. I'm thinking the constraint of mana keeps us from gaining another layer, so we are still at x -> 12 -> 8.
Actually, though, it looks like we can get the extra layer without Dalakos or Prismite. So the first Constellation trigger turns the first two Thaumabrooms to be copied into a Gilded Goose and a Nyxbloom Ancient. Besides those, we we can turn the rest into a bunch of Yaroks. So say we have X Yaroks. Then the Gilded Goose comes into play, and we get about X food tokens. Then the Nyxbloom Ancient comes into play, and we get about X Constellation triggers. We can use one Constellation trigger to turn the X Thauamabrooms into X Nyxbloom Ancients, allowing the Gilded Goose to tap for about 3^X mana. (This is more than we need, so we could keep some Thaumabrooms as Brooms) Then we use the next Constellation trigger to turn the Thaumabrooms back into Brooms, and we can use our X food to double the amount of Thaumabrooms X times. So X Brooms go to X * 2^X. We do this a bunch of times for all the initial Broom triggers, so we go from X to 2^^X for the initial response of a Constellation trigger, and we get 8 layers.
What if we add Dalakos and Prismite to the deck? In thise case, instead of the step where we turn all the Thaumabrooms into Nyxbloom Ancients, we can instead turn them all into Angel of Vitality, and gain a bunch of life from a Food token. So we have about X life, and can then use a Constellation trigger to turn the Thaumabrooms into X Nyxbloom Ancients (but leaving at least one a Broom). We spend a fixed amount of life to recast Dalakos, and gain on the order of 3^X mana, enough for roughly 3^X more brooms. We can then use another Constellation trigger to turn almost all of the new Brooms into Nyxbloom Ancients, and repeat the process. After X repetitions we get about 3^^X Brooms. We can repeat this for all of the initial Constellation triggers, so we get about 3^^^X Brooms after all is said and done. This allows us to get to 9 layers.
So it looks like we do get to X -> 12 -> 9.