I don't think the "many clues per collect evidence trigger -> many card draw activation per clue" part works out. After each draw we need to go through the whole combo. That includes resolving some Worldfires to clear the board, which gets rid of the stockpiled clues. Activating all clues before the next worldfire gets rid of the full increase to the "many" draws, so it's not worth a layer.
(also I'm not entirely sure where the "many clues per collect evidence trigger" come from in the latest version of the deck.)
The idea here is that the only way to get a win condition into play is Rise of the Dark Realms, and the only way to get creatures into the graveyard for that is Monomania, which puts all our creatures into the graveyard since we need to keep Rise. So to win we have to donate the Resplendent Mentor + Famished Paladin combo via Sky Swallower.
We can break that combo up with Phthisis. But we can't keep it in hand because of Monomania so we need to have it suspended before Monomania. And we can't cast Rise in response to the suspend trigger so the Phthisis cast will only happen in our upkeep a turn later. That means the opponent had 1 turn to gain an arbitrary amount of life. After taking out Resplendent Mentor the opponent is left with a Famished Paladin that can attack once but never kill us. Meanwhile we have a Sky Swallower that attacks for 8 each turn and will eventually take them down.
So we have a winning strategy but the opponent can choose the number of turns it takes us to win. No finite bound on the number of turns is big enough to guarantee our win has happened in that time! We have to resort to ordinals and say we have a win in omega!
Yeah, the Spiral Rise construction is a safe way to go universal without exceeding the creature type limit. But I think the number of bishops required for it will be way higher than with more direct constructions. And this 13 card deck is right in the range of bishops it can create where that seems to be the relevant limit.
I don't even know what a good universal tag system would be to start, but I think compiling to spiral rise and later compiling to flooding clocks both give an exponential increase to the numbers involved. So I don't have much hope of getting a universal program that's small enough that way. Though it would be interesting to see what that actually looks like.
I tried shoving the 15 state, 2 symbol universal turing machine by T. Neary and D. Woods into my TM to Waterfall compiler and the resulting waterfall program into Ais523s compiler to get a universal flooding program. The result ends up using 296 clocks and about 14 million bishops.
We need 1 creature type per clock, so this construction barely doesn't fit. We currently have 287 types. So close!
Further, if I remember the start correctly, we were only able to get to ~1.6 million bishops without using Dralnu for the bootstrap program. Although it's quite possible that this is improvable that currently also leaves us short of the 14 million bishops we need.
That leaves us in an uncomfortable position. The universal program mentioned above is certainly not optimal. I'd say it is virtually certain that there is some more efficient universal program within the reach of the 13 card deck. But we don't quite know that. We need to improve one of the compilation steps or find some other way to get a universal flooding waterfall computation.
It would allow us to refill the opponents library as much as we want. That wouldn't go infinite as long as Phabine, Boss's Confidant triggers from entering combat are the only way to get them to draw. (Them casting a copy of Infectious Inquiry is fine too. Limited by poison)
If it works that also improves the final limit for the ending sequence from 53 to how ever many Phabines we can get before combat.
Wow! Flooding Waterfall is turing complete? That's amazing news! Thanks for figuring that out ais523
It'll take me a while to understand how those flooding computations work, but apparently there's a working compiler so we can be reasonably confident that it will hold up. (Though I haven't tested the compiler yet. It's now on my todo list.)
The unique Arcbond plan is harder than it was back then because Sanctifier en-Vec can get it out of the graveyard. So we can't have Worldfire as the only way to get it unstuck. As far as I know there was no solid plan to get stages working with that approach.
Soul Collector + 3-life ETB/dies looks like a much better plan. It loses life as a resource, which makes a tier 3 stage hard. But other than that many of our old strategies should work. For the dual type creatures we can just not worry about it until we have a skeleton deck. I'd be surprised if we can't find the necessary dual types if we don't demand more than "doesn't go infinite".
I think even the tier 3 stage is doable with Aether Hub to store expensive colored mana as energy through the Worldpurge when resolving a transition while purging a less expensive color for the tier 2 stage.
I don't get why the A-H creature would die in either order?
I guess I'm also confused by this:
And two AB necromancers one making As when B dies one making Bs when A dies.
Why would we have necromancers set up like that? We can key everything off an outside heartbeat that happens every K ticks. The choice is not between 2 types in the loop, it is between 1 type that disturbs the loop and 1 type that keeps A-H alive.
Say creating B lets the A-H creature lose a toughness. Creating H makes it gain a toughness. Choice is between creating B or H first. B first it dips down for a moment and dies before it can go back up. H first it spikes for a moment and then goes back to normal. That's how that choice always worked and I don't see how Sliver Legion changes anything about it?
The toughness of the oldest supporting H tokens depends on the setup. Let A-H drop down to 1 and then start creating 1 H per tick on average. As long as the base toughness for H is high enough to survive the fluctuation during a cycle they'll be fine. If for some reason that is not good enough we can even adjust the supporters life independently from the A-H creature, by having a T->H and T->O dralnu and creating the average 1/tick as base T while keeping them alive with however many O/tick we want.
Plus, with Sliver Legion we need to be able to turn them indestructible for the normal operation, so we could do that for other stuff. I don't think getting the supporting cast right would be much of a problem.
I don't see how Sliver Legion helps? In the infinite setups, the fact that the newly-created-interrupt-creature-of-a-type-that-didn't-exist-before starts buffing the arcbond creature via Coat of Arms is more of a hindrance than a boon. We have to work around it by increasing the buff the arcbond creature recieves when there is no creature with only that type around. So we can just have no Sliver Legion of that type. Then there is no Sliver Legion of the important type to change dependencies. And it actually gets easier to go infinite because there is no replacement buff from CoA.
I'm pretty sure the infinites with Dralnu's Crusade work without any Sliver Legion of a type in the potential loop. And I suspect a theoretical Dralnu's effect without the +1/+1 could still be made to go infinite by omitting the Sliver Legion for key types.
Nah, we would still be able to turn Serrated Scorpion tokens into life. First into the opponents by killing a bunch of them after donating. And then into ours by killing a bunch of them and stealing the opponents life. That prevents us from using our life as a tier 2 or 3 stage resource, where we would want it.
Unfortunately Attendant of Vraska can be used to go infinite from a computation:
- have a token copy of attendant (hacked) that is barely kept alive by some heartbeat clock
- keep the opponent at constant life with the attendant card
- at an arbitrary point switch the arcbond source so that creature cards don't come back anymore
- after a fixed number of turns this leads to all arcbond creatures and the copy of attendant dying by disabling the heartbeat
- the attendant copy gives the opponent enough life to survive through all the arcbonds on the stack
Hmm. Typically those are bad because they let us target anything for cheap. But we are playing Artificial Evolution which can do that anyway, so... it might be fine. Depends on the full list I guess. If we want to have cheap copies of enchantments or artifacts that would rule out one or the other, since creature copies need to remain somewhat expensive for the Soul Foundry stage.
Sarkhan the Masterless's triggered ability to deal damage to attacking dragons could start illegal computations just before it is too late to profit from them via combat damage. So that one is out.
Luxior, Giada's Gift's equip ability would go infinite with a Cowardice based stage. So we'd need to use a natural bouncing ability for the stage.
(also I'm not entirely sure where the "many clues per collect evidence trigger" come from in the latest version of the deck.)
- Bottomless Vault
- Monomania
- Rise of the Dark Realms
- Sky Swallower
- Resplendent Mentor
- Famished Paladin
- Phthisis
The idea here is that the only way to get a win condition into play is Rise of the Dark Realms, and the only way to get creatures into the graveyard for that is Monomania, which puts all our creatures into the graveyard since we need to keep Rise. So to win we have to donate the Resplendent Mentor + Famished Paladin combo via Sky Swallower.We can break that combo up with Phthisis. But we can't keep it in hand because of Monomania so we need to have it suspended before Monomania. And we can't cast Rise in response to the suspend trigger so the Phthisis cast will only happen in our upkeep a turn later. That means the opponent had 1 turn to gain an arbitrary amount of life. After taking out Resplendent Mentor the opponent is left with a Famished Paladin that can attack once but never kill us. Meanwhile we have a Sky Swallower that attacks for 8 each turn and will eventually take them down.
So we have a winning strategy but the opponent can choose the number of turns it takes us to win. No finite bound on the number of turns is big enough to guarantee our win has happened in that time! We have to resort to ordinals and say we have a win in omega!
I don't even know what a good universal tag system would be to start, but I think compiling to spiral rise and later compiling to flooding clocks both give an exponential increase to the numbers involved. So I don't have much hope of getting a universal program that's small enough that way. Though it would be interesting to see what that actually looks like.
We need 1 creature type per clock, so this construction barely doesn't fit. We currently have 287 types. So close!
Further, if I remember the start correctly, we were only able to get to ~1.6 million bishops without using Dralnu for the bootstrap program. Although it's quite possible that this is improvable that currently also leaves us short of the 14 million bishops we need.
That leaves us in an uncomfortable position. The universal program mentioned above is certainly not optimal. I'd say it is virtually certain that there is some more efficient universal program within the reach of the 13 card deck. But we don't quite know that.
It would allow us to refill the opponents library as much as we want. That wouldn't go infinite as long as Phabine, Boss's Confidant triggers from entering combat are the only way to get them to draw. (Them casting a copy of Infectious Inquiry is fine too. Limited by poison)
If it works that also improves the final limit for the ending sequence from 53 to how ever many Phabines we can get before combat.
Using Panharmonicon instead should be fine.
It'll take me a while to understand how those flooding computations work, but apparently there's a working compiler so we can be reasonably confident that it will hold up. (Though I haven't tested the compiler yet. It's now on my todo list.)
Soul Collector + 3-life ETB/dies looks like a much better plan. It loses life as a resource, which makes a tier 3 stage hard. But other than that many of our old strategies should work. For the dual type creatures we can just not worry about it until we have a skeleton deck. I'd be surprised if we can't find the necessary dual types if we don't demand more than "doesn't go infinite".
I think even the tier 3 stage is doable with Aether Hub to store expensive colored mana as energy through the Worldpurge when resolving a transition while purging a less expensive color for the tier 2 stage.
I guess I'm also confused by this:
Why would we have necromancers set up like that? We can key everything off an outside heartbeat that happens every K ticks. The choice is not between 2 types in the loop, it is between 1 type that disturbs the loop and 1 type that keeps A-H alive.
Say creating B lets the A-H creature lose a toughness. Creating H makes it gain a toughness. Choice is between creating B or H first. B first it dips down for a moment and dies before it can go back up. H first it spikes for a moment and then goes back to normal. That's how that choice always worked and I don't see how Sliver Legion changes anything about it?
The toughness of the oldest supporting H tokens depends on the setup. Let A-H drop down to 1 and then start creating 1 H per tick on average. As long as the base toughness for H is high enough to survive the fluctuation during a cycle they'll be fine. If for some reason that is not good enough we can even adjust the supporters life independently from the A-H creature, by having a T->H and T->O dralnu and creating the average 1/tick as base T while keeping them alive with however many O/tick we want.
Plus, with Sliver Legion we need to be able to turn them indestructible for the normal operation, so we could do that for other stuff. I don't think getting the supporting cast right would be much of a problem.
I'm pretty sure the infinites with Dralnu's Crusade work without any Sliver Legion of a type in the potential loop. And I suspect a theoretical Dralnu's effect without the +1/+1 could still be made to go infinite by omitting the Sliver Legion for key types.
- have a token copy of attendant (hacked) that is barely kept alive by some heartbeat clock
- keep the opponent at constant life with the attendant card
- at an arbitrary point switch the arcbond source so that creature cards don't come back anymore
- after a fixed number of turns this leads to all arcbond creatures and the copy of attendant dying by disabling the heartbeat
- the attendant copy gives the opponent enough life to survive through all the arcbonds on the stack
Luxior, Giada's Gift's equip ability would go infinite with a Cowardice based stage. So we'd need to use a natural bouncing ability for the stage.