Hmm, could you run through those 9 layers? I thought that we were already capable of getting enough mana from for the Broom triggers from Golden Goose and an appropriate number of Nyxbloom Ancients, and that it was neither mana nor life that was the limiter, but responding with constellation triggers.
Yeah, the combo uses up a lot of our resources, so there's not much left for the stage resource.
Looking at your current outline, I get:
Layer 1: Each playing of an enchantment can run the main combo, which takes X to more than 10^X.
Layer 2: Each resolution of Kaya's Wrath can destroy a lot of Citywatch Sphinxes, which allows us to bounce Disinformation Campaign many times: X to 10^^X.
Layer 3: Each casting of Kaya's Wrath produces a lot of copies, thanks to all the Thousand-Year Storms: X to 10^^^X.
Layer 4: Each casting of Vivid Revival can fetch Kaya's Wrath many times: X to 10^^^^X.
Layer 5: Each casting of Clear the Mind can fetch Vivid Revival many times: X to 10^^^^^X.
Layer 6: Each casting of one of our exile-to-retrieve cards can fetch Clear the Mind many times: X to 10^^^^^^X.
With 11 exile cards, we wind up with more than 10^^^^^^^12 damage at the end, 7 arrows.
Hmm, I need further explanation of jfb1337's setup. Which TM's can it execute? Of course "arbitrary TM's" is too much, as the set of all TM's have arbitrarily large inputs. Does starting with N mana allow one to set up exactly the TM's with N states? Why?
At first glance, it looks like his deck goes infinite, since we can retrace Raven's Crime to cast the other spells. Grim Discovery can get the land and Composite Golem back, which can be replayed to get the black mana plus more.
What I was saying with 4) was that we have to be able to execute very complicated TM's while still being restricted in the set of TM's that we can execute. If you are saying that jfb1337's setup can execute all N-state Turing machines for a large N, while not being able to execute any larger Turing machine, that's great - could you explain further?
That Thaumabroom combo looks very interesting! I'll have to look at it more deeply to see if it actually doesn't go infinite, and if there is a possibility for a stage combo out of it. Good stuff!
Edit: Okay, I think I agree that the combo doesn't go infinite, since we can't keep responding with constellation triggers. For the same reason, it doesn't look stagish to me. If the idea is to have alternating groups of food sacrifices and constellation triggers, I don't see how we rebuild the groups of constellation triggers.
Welp, it's been a long time since I posted here! Sorry about that, I had a bunch of stuff going on and this kind of fell by the wayside.
Ever since Alex Churchill posted his construction for encoding a UTM into Magic: the Gathering, there have been thoughts about how to perhaps translate that into the maximum damage challenge. I see four immediate problems that we face:
1) Alex's construction was for a four or five player game, whereas this challenge is for a two player game, with one player a goldfish with only basic lands in the deck. Making a version that basically uses just one deck may be difficult, especially given a 60 card limit.
2) In Alex's construction you could stop the execution of the UTM at various points. This would be a problem for the maximum damage challenge, since it means that you could run a program that kept going forever, and just choose to stop it whenever you pleased.
3) In order to create a specific, 18-symbol UTM, Alex made a very complicated construction using Rotlung Reanimator[c/]s and Artificial Evolution in order to make a copy of that UTM exactly. In order to do that, the decks basically had to have the freedom to make just about anything with Artificial Evolution. But instead of making a complicated UTM, it would seem to be much simpler to just create a simple infinite combo with all the power at one's disposal. (Note: I haven't actually tried to do this, but it does seem very likely that there is an infinite combo with all the freedom that the decks have.)
4) Note that while Alex had the decks set up a UTM, in order to have the UTM mimic an arbitrary Turing machine, you had to "program" it - that is, you had to set up the tape to a very specific configuration. Alex's construction doesn't actually run any programs, it just sets up the system. In order to have create an entry that would achieve BB(250), say, you would have to able to set up the initial tape to any configuration corresponding to any 250-state Turing machine. As with 3), the only way I can see being able to construct something that complicated, would be a deck or decks that have the power to construct any desired tape. But that would be too much power, since then would could implement Turing machines that output arbitrarily high numbers.
I think 3) and 4) are particularly problematic here - both the setup of the UTM, and the setup of the initial tape to implement a sufficiently powerful Turing machine, are very complicated. It seems very difficult to be able to do this without having the power to set up an infinite combo, which is comparatively a much simpler thing. Of course, we could cut out the UTM middleman and just have the deck implement a particular Turing machine that outputs a large number, but we still have that same problem I think.
So yeah, while achieving Busy Beaver numbers sounds very enticing, it seems like an incredibly difficult thing to try to pull off, which is why I haven't put a lot of work into it.
I still have to look at a bunch of recent posts, like J_kibbs deck, and the recent explanations of Stakfish and FortyTwo on the Chalice of the Void deck. Hopefully we can get discussion started up again.
bouncing Changeling Hero seems frequent enough for everything except Clockwork Gnomes (or whatever our stage srtifact creature turns out to be), unless I am missing something. And that would be something we need to sort out. Since we are imprinting it on Mimic Vat, we can put the artifact creature back in the graveyard by imprinting something else - presumably something that we can get back from exile. Misthollow Griffin seems like an obvious candidate, since it requires blue mana to cast. We would have to find a way to destroy it cheaply enough though; perhaps something targeting flying creatures? Other options like Nosferatu Sengir and Squee, the Immortal cost the wrong kind of mana.
A Sliver that can tap to target Slivers goes infinite with any other Sliver (including Changeling Hero), as we will have two nontoken creatures that each can tap to destroy/bounce both of them. So generally speaking, we haven't been able to make Slivers work in any of our decks, due to needing another Sliver to transition to something else. (We did have a copy of Crypt Sliver or Magma Sliver in a hyperstage deck, coupled with Chrome Mox to generate mana of the appropriate color.)
As for replacing Mirror of Fate - could Riftsweeper work? To reuse Riftsweeper, we would have to Champion it with Changeling Hero, then bounce the Hero. So that will break up the usages of Goryo's Vengeance. I'm not whether that fixes things or not. Also, we would have the problem of figuring out how to get Clockwork Gnomes back after it is exiled.
Concerning shaving cards, it would be nice if we could change to a K'rrik, Son of Yawgmoth version, or otherwise make it so that the gigastage resource was green mana, so that we could use the Elvish Spirit Guide / Everglove Courier / Grassland Crusader tech. But with needing our life creature to trigger on dying limits our options.
There are a few random things, like energy and experience counters, although those look a bit doubtful. And, there are cards like the Zuberas, which count the number of times certain things have happened. I haven't seen anything that looks really promising, but maybe something to look out for. There is of course Vile Redeemer, but that just gives us colorless mana. (It also gives us creatures, but we can also get those with Hunting Pack.)
An older deck used phasing on storage lands with counters to save our progress. That required a bunch of cards though.
Sorry, I'm still not understanding. By the trigger generator, do you mean Mirrorworks? We can have a number of Mirrorworks comparable to however much progress we have made before going up to the higher hyperstage. While processing the higher hyperstage, we are above the megastage transition in the stack, so we can't affect those Mirrorworks triggers. So we can't get a number of triggers that reflects the progress from the higher hyperstage, since during the higher hyperstage we can't access that part of the stack.
Can you explain what you mean by updating the trigger generator?
Looking at your current outline, I get:
Layer 1: Each playing of an enchantment can run the main combo, which takes X to more than 10^X.
Layer 2: Each resolution of Kaya's Wrath can destroy a lot of Citywatch Sphinxes, which allows us to bounce Disinformation Campaign many times: X to 10^^X.
Layer 3: Each casting of Kaya's Wrath produces a lot of copies, thanks to all the Thousand-Year Storms: X to 10^^^X.
Layer 4: Each casting of Vivid Revival can fetch Kaya's Wrath many times: X to 10^^^^X.
Layer 5: Each casting of Clear the Mind can fetch Vivid Revival many times: X to 10^^^^^X.
Layer 6: Each casting of one of our exile-to-retrieve cards can fetch Clear the Mind many times: X to 10^^^^^^X.
With 11 exile cards, we wind up with more than 10^^^^^^^12 damage at the end, 7 arrows.
At first glance, it looks like his deck goes infinite, since we can retrace Raven's Crime to cast the other spells. Grim Discovery can get the land and Composite Golem back, which can be replayed to get the black mana plus more.
What I was saying with 4) was that we have to be able to execute very complicated TM's while still being restricted in the set of TM's that we can execute. If you are saying that jfb1337's setup can execute all N-state Turing machines for a large N, while not being able to execute any larger Turing machine, that's great - could you explain further?
Edit: Okay, I think I agree that the combo doesn't go infinite, since we can't keep responding with constellation triggers. For the same reason, it doesn't look stagish to me. If the idea is to have alternating groups of food sacrifices and constellation triggers, I don't see how we rebuild the groups of constellation triggers.
Ever since Alex Churchill posted his construction for encoding a UTM into Magic: the Gathering, there have been thoughts about how to perhaps translate that into the maximum damage challenge. I see four immediate problems that we face:
1) Alex's construction was for a four or five player game, whereas this challenge is for a two player game, with one player a goldfish with only basic lands in the deck. Making a version that basically uses just one deck may be difficult, especially given a 60 card limit.
2) In Alex's construction you could stop the execution of the UTM at various points. This would be a problem for the maximum damage challenge, since it means that you could run a program that kept going forever, and just choose to stop it whenever you pleased.
3) In order to create a specific, 18-symbol UTM, Alex made a very complicated construction using Rotlung Reanimator[c/]s and Artificial Evolution in order to make a copy of that UTM exactly. In order to do that, the decks basically had to have the freedom to make just about anything with Artificial Evolution. But instead of making a complicated UTM, it would seem to be much simpler to just create a simple infinite combo with all the power at one's disposal. (Note: I haven't actually tried to do this, but it does seem very likely that there is an infinite combo with all the freedom that the decks have.)
4) Note that while Alex had the decks set up a UTM, in order to have the UTM mimic an arbitrary Turing machine, you had to "program" it - that is, you had to set up the tape to a very specific configuration. Alex's construction doesn't actually run any programs, it just sets up the system. In order to have create an entry that would achieve BB(250), say, you would have to able to set up the initial tape to any configuration corresponding to any 250-state Turing machine. As with 3), the only way I can see being able to construct something that complicated, would be a deck or decks that have the power to construct any desired tape. But that would be too much power, since then would could implement Turing machines that output arbitrarily high numbers.
I think 3) and 4) are particularly problematic here - both the setup of the UTM, and the setup of the initial tape to implement a sufficiently powerful Turing machine, are very complicated. It seems very difficult to be able to do this without having the power to set up an infinite combo, which is comparatively a much simpler thing. Of course, we could cut out the UTM middleman and just have the deck implement a particular Turing machine that outputs a large number, but we still have that same problem I think.
So yeah, while achieving Busy Beaver numbers sounds very enticing, it seems like an incredibly difficult thing to try to pull off, which is why I haven't put a lot of work into it.
I still have to look at a bunch of recent posts, like J_kibbs deck, and the recent explanations of Stakfish and FortyTwo on the Chalice of the Void deck. Hopefully we can get discussion started up again.
I'm sorry that I haven't had time to contribute in a little while. I do intend to get back into this soon.
Is there any reason why we need Clockwork Gnomes over Rust Tick? That might handle the March of the Machines problem, if that works out better.
We do have the possibility of getting a ninth stage if we switch the gigastage to green mana; otherwise, we have to keep looking.
@J_kibbs: Unfortunately, I don't really have the energy right now to try to analyze your deck. But best of luck with it!
As for replacing Mirror of Fate - could Riftsweeper work? To reuse Riftsweeper, we would have to Champion it with Changeling Hero, then bounce the Hero. So that will break up the usages of Goryo's Vengeance. I'm not whether that fixes things or not. Also, we would have the problem of figuring out how to get Clockwork Gnomes back after it is exiled.
Edit: Oh, I see. We get two replacement effects, so we get to choose which one we process.
An older deck used phasing on storage lands with counters to save our progress. That required a bunch of cards though.
Can you explain what you mean by updating the trigger generator?