Stak and Deed: ok sorry for beating a dead horse but I think it kinda makes sense now. I’m making mana for things that just aren’t all that practical as I ramp up my power level. I can see where making the extra replicate copies of everything that isn’t my exile twisters basically gets lost in the shuffle. That being said because the exile twisters do allow me to access everything again I just kinda assumed they where a good place to start going deep on. I still think Chandra/servant is an interesting concept but it might be too easy to go infinite with to really be abused too much.
You guys have been going at this for quite some time so picking out things to build around I’d assume becomes a bit intuitive. For me it’s a much tougher battle. This current deck was basically me taking my 20 exile twisters and then seeing how far I could push Chandra to help me towards those ends. I’m still going to try to work within the concept of the Twisters being my ultimate speed limit but I do think u guys have given me some good food for thought in terms of how to evaluate cards or series of cards.
Deed: one of my builds of this last list used thopter foundry as my sac outlet. Using this makes it impossible to get rid of all my abyssal persecutor tokens so I could hit them for a lot of damage but then not be able to get all my AP tokens off the board and be unable to win. TF allowed more WSZ looping via the life gain and Rowan emblems and yawg bargain. Unfortunately this list had an infinite in it and I had to swap a few cards out including TF.
deed: the line you are talking about w/ MS is meant to be MW for mirrorworks not doubling season, probably isn't super important tho.
i don't have time to fully respond but one thing that i will point out is that mana does actually kind of scale w/ DS creation in that when i start casting CC that while the CC does make more DS for sure, it also makes more mana echoes(and TYS etc) in that same process. not sure that was factored in or not. we will want to stack all DS creation to resolve before everything else on the PG spreads but we do get everything(all creatures anyway) else too. this includes echoes(mana), essence sliver(life->mana), TYS(bit of everything) and more PG too. i do understand that we need to compound harder and harder to jump arrow levels but just pointing out that other stuff is compounding. also essence sliver gains us xy life not just x life when x is damage and y is amount of essence slivers. while i agree combat gets clunky each combat phase gets us xyz WSZ when x is damage, y is slivers and z is rowan emblems. this gets run through DS to make xyzd new bodies to add to our initial count and we repeat this whole process STD copies number of times.
these first 4 cards are pretty standard so far. later on in our loops we will be able to use enter the infinite in a more abuse-able manner, but that's a ways off. for now, we have our deck(-1 card) in our hand, with an omniscience in play. now we start to play out some of our engine pieces
so now we have made a few things happen. every permanent in play is a creature and an artifact. with master biomancer some other cool stuff happens. if a normally non creature permanent would enter play it enters as a creature, because it does master biomancer makes it enter with some counters. this means stuff like lands and 0 cmc things don't just die to state based checks. also everything that enters also has the creature type mutant thanks to biomancer. this will be important shortly. also at this point all mana costs of any variety can be paid for using any mana(unless specified by the ability itself) via lattice.
so this is why biomancer is played when he is. now everything entering as a creature(everything) will generate 1 mana for each creature we have in play. this will be one of our mana generating engines, but not our most powerful one. we need it to help jump start our other engines. mana generation is vitally important to this deck and this is a nice stepping stone to larger things.
OK so the first of our engines is starting to come online. the nice thing with mana echos and riku is that as long as riku(and his copies) doesn't exceed 1/2 of the total amount of permanents in play we will always to be able to pay for all of rikus triggers. its actually an even smaller amount of the toal but its a good rule of thumb. also we will want many copies of riku. he allows us to accelerator on 2 separate fronts and is quite efficient at both of them. we will be attempting to make a lot of things in play and a lot of copies of instants and sorceries for various reasons.
so yeah this card. lets face it, its just super powerful. when it enters we will get a riku trigger for it, and we will pay for that trigger. this will attempt to put 1 token into play. that token sees a season in play already and makes 2 instead. so we get 3 total. this isn't super fast to start but we have ways to catch up soon enough
so now every non creature spell we cast gets us a blink from our original exemplar, this in turn gives us another riku trigger(or wave of riku triggers if we have multiple copies of him). the token copies of exemplar can all target the same thing to tap. later once we give our creatures something to tap to do we can stack our triggers so that exemplars tapping ability will be the last thing to resolve. giving first strike is a no no as we will be attacking and we don't want our first strike damage to kill them before our main force can get their damage in.
so now we can make more copies of riku(or any other legendaries) without worrying about needing to sacrifice any of them. as will be true of several things moving forward making extra copies of this piece doesn't inherently do much for us. that being said it only requires 2 mana to make riku copies and each of these activations will create more than 2 mana in the process. we want more mana so we will still activate as many rikus as possible. this will help us maximize our mana production. in general this is a go wide strategy deck and making extra bodies has additional value later on.
OK so this is where things start to get very interesting. this card is very powerful and we are gonna abuse the hell out of it. because it is so powerful we do need to be very careful with our list going forward. i'm going to spend a lot of time talking about things we do with this card right now. ill be quite blunt in saying this card has been a source of many unintended infinite loops already, but its so versatile that i think its worth the risk. its important to talk about what it can and what it cannot do. while we have the ability to change our mirror into any permanent we have in play we do not get that permanents enter triggers. this is very very important as it cuts us off some infinites later. that being said i think we should now talk about how it coming into play the first time should be handled. i'm very confident in this part as it sets up some very cool interactions that also happen to be absurdly powerful. so we start mapping some of our stacks here. i will map them like this going forward
stack resolving order
last
x
y
z
first
so with the case of our mirror we will pick up our stack after our exemplar triggers have cleared and mirror has resolved. i think its important to note that we want it to stay as itself for now. this lets us copy the mirror with rikus trigger and we get some number of these tokens from doubling season buffs. of note here is that even after we change our mirrors into something else(say more copies of doubling season for instance) that because of the way mtg rules on actual layers work our newly changed into object will maintain its mutant creature type and keep it counters too. this is only true because we remain a creature. if it became a non creature at any point it would lose its mutant type, but lukily for us it stays a mutant and continues to help us make mana echoes mana. so at this point i will concede that i'm not entirely sure what the most profitable objects are for us. i assume its a mix of rikus and doubling seasons, but i'm not sure what the ratio should be. for the sake of argument lets just say its 50/50 on season and riku. we will take one token mirror and make it into another mana echoes to help pay for our mirror changes but the rest of our batch we will make rikus and seasons. its important here that our actual mirror card is still a mirror as we are about to start comboing with it. so we use 2 more mana and turn our actual mirror into a copy of exemplar.
so, what have we done? well just think about what happens on the next cast of a non creature spell. yes our actual exemplar will blink as it was before creating a few nice triggers. the real cool stuff happens when our exemplar that is actually a mirror blinks. it comes back as a mirror and procs riku as a mirror. this allows us blink/trigger mirror on every non creature spell for the rest of the game. there are only 6 or so creatures in this deck so 50+ spells will be blinking our ememplared mirror allowing us to have it reenter as mirror, generate more riku triggers making more of them and turning them into more rikus and more seasons. this is one of my favorite interactions in the deck and one i'm super proud to have discovered it. plus all of these interactions will happen with the non creature spell on the stack which means we have time to turn them into riku/season before they resolve and will get there added benefits from triggers they created just by being cast.
so just for tghe sake of thuroghness the stack will look like this after we blink the exemplared mirror
last
original non creature spell
actual exemplar blink
riku triggers for newly etb blinked mirror
first
after riku triggers are paid for we can then turn our mirrors into whatever we want with actual exemplars blink trigger still on the stack. then let triggers resolve as needed. mana echos is happening in there too but we can probably have it resolve near the end as i noted before about riku/echos costs and the longer we can wait the more beneficial it will become. so importantly in all of this we want our actual mirror to stay a mirror until we are ready to do something cool with it. if we turn it into something that isn't exemplar we won't be able to do any of this as all riku copies will be what the original copied and also we cant do this trick with a token copy. it exiles for the blink and ceases to exist and cant come back(seems bad for us).
there is another really cool interaction that we can do with mirror itself. for this case we can do this will any 2 mirrors that are still actual mirrors and only if this interaction doesn't involve attempted blinks. so what we can do is allow a mirror to become something and then still be allowed to return to being an actual mirror. the way this works is a bit complicated but its one of the ways i found at least 1 infinite i had to eliminate from the deck. so how this works is this. we activate it's ability to copy an chose another mirror. with that ability on the stack we activate again targeting something else(say riku). our stack looks like this
last
copy another mirror
copy riku
first
this means we will become riku with the ability to return to being a mirror still on the stack. so if we can do something while its riku we can reap the benefits without ,actually fully giving up a mirror. the reason u need 2 mirrors to do this is pretty simple. if we try to do this entirely with one mirror targeting itself, the abilities will indeed resolve in the order we need them to but it wont have the effect we need(want). so our mirror will indeed become something else, but when it resolves the copy original mirror it will become what it already is. because the copy ability actually reads "become what the targeted object is when this ability resolves" it will still be targeting itself which is now not a mirror, and attempt to become that again, which is not what we want. so it works fine with 2 mirrors but not with just 1. while this interaction is very cool it is limited a bit. unfortunately we cannot get strings of etb triggers by changing the mirrors in response to each etb. we can get our mirrors to be the best one for one etb but then all the etb triggers will resolve before we get the chance to change again. i haven't dug to far into this interaction as the limiting factor here is timing and generally it feels wasteful to be doing to much of this type of thing. generally we just wan to change all but our orginal mirror into what we want as soon as it enters and just let it be that. if you want to save 1 copy of a token mirror as a mirror tht is fine. this leaves options open for later discoveries to be abused.
so going forward from this point we will just assume we make actual mirror into a exemplar every time before we cast a non creature spell and then make the generated tokens into the most beneficial things and then let our non creature spell resolve. every, single, time .... this means will be very quickly growing our amounts of doubling season, riku and later anything else that we want additional copies of.
so wit hall of that noted, we move on. importantly i guess is that i put this combo as early in our sequencing as possible. lets us abuse it the most times as we progress through the deck.
1
You guys have been going at this for quite some time so picking out things to build around I’d assume becomes a bit intuitive. For me it’s a much tougher battle. This current deck was basically me taking my 20 exile twisters and then seeing how far I could push Chandra to help me towards those ends. I’m still going to try to work within the concept of the Twisters being my ultimate speed limit but I do think u guys have given me some good food for thought in terms of how to evaluate cards or series of cards.
Deed: one of my builds of this last list used thopter foundry as my sac outlet. Using this makes it impossible to get rid of all my abyssal persecutor tokens so I could hit them for a lot of damage but then not be able to get all my AP tokens off the board and be unable to win. TF allowed more WSZ looping via the life gain and Rowan emblems and yawg bargain. Unfortunately this list had an infinite in it and I had to swap a few cards out including TF.
1
i don't have time to fully respond but one thing that i will point out is that mana does actually kind of scale w/ DS creation in that when i start casting CC that while the CC does make more DS for sure, it also makes more mana echoes(and TYS etc) in that same process. not sure that was factored in or not. we will want to stack all DS creation to resolve before everything else on the PG spreads but we do get everything(all creatures anyway) else too. this includes echoes(mana), essence sliver(life->mana), TYS(bit of everything) and more PG too. i do understand that we need to compound harder and harder to jump arrow levels but just pointing out that other stuff is compounding. also essence sliver gains us xy life not just x life when x is damage and y is amount of essence slivers. while i agree combat gets clunky each combat phase gets us xyz WSZ when x is damage, y is slivers and z is rowan emblems. this gets run through DS to make xyzd new bodies to add to our initial count and we repeat this whole process STD copies number of times.
i'll probably respond a bit more later on today
1
1 black lotus
2 show and tell
3 omnisience
4 enter the infinite(ETI)
these first 4 cards are pretty standard so far. later on in our loops we will be able to use enter the infinite in a more abuse-able manner, but that's a ways off. for now, we have our deck(-1 card) in our hand, with an omniscience in play. now we start to play out some of our engine pieces
5 master biomancer
6 march of the machines
7 mycosynth lattice
so now we have made a few things happen. every permanent in play is a creature and an artifact. with master biomancer some other cool stuff happens. if a normally non creature permanent would enter play it enters as a creature, because it does master biomancer makes it enter with some counters. this means stuff like lands and 0 cmc things don't just die to state based checks. also everything that enters also has the creature type mutant thanks to biomancer. this will be important shortly. also at this point all mana costs of any variety can be paid for using any mana(unless specified by the ability itself) via lattice.
8 mana echoes
so this is why biomancer is played when he is. now everything entering as a creature(everything) will generate 1 mana for each creature we have in play. this will be one of our mana generating engines, but not our most powerful one. we need it to help jump start our other engines. mana generation is vitally important to this deck and this is a nice stepping stone to larger things.
9 riku of two refections
OK so the first of our engines is starting to come online. the nice thing with mana echos and riku is that as long as riku(and his copies) doesn't exceed 1/2 of the total amount of permanents in play we will always to be able to pay for all of rikus triggers. its actually an even smaller amount of the toal but its a good rule of thumb. also we will want many copies of riku. he allows us to accelerator on 2 separate fronts and is quite efficient at both of them. we will be attempting to make a lot of things in play and a lot of copies of instants and sorceries for various reasons.
10 doubling season
so yeah this card. lets face it, its just super powerful. when it enters we will get a riku trigger for it, and we will pay for that trigger. this will attempt to put 1 token into play. that token sees a season in play already and makes 2 instead. so we get 3 total. this isn't super fast to start but we have ways to catch up soon enough
11 ojatui exemplars
so now every non creature spell we cast gets us a blink from our original exemplar, this in turn gives us another riku trigger(or wave of riku triggers if we have multiple copies of him). the token copies of exemplar can all target the same thing to tap. later once we give our creatures something to tap to do we can stack our triggers so that exemplars tapping ability will be the last thing to resolve. giving first strike is a no no as we will be attacking and we don't want our first strike damage to kill them before our main force can get their damage in.
12 mirror gallery
so now we can make more copies of riku(or any other legendaries) without worrying about needing to sacrifice any of them. as will be true of several things moving forward making extra copies of this piece doesn't inherently do much for us. that being said it only requires 2 mana to make riku copies and each of these activations will create more than 2 mana in the process. we want more mana so we will still activate as many rikus as possible. this will help us maximize our mana production. in general this is a go wide strategy deck and making extra bodies has additional value later on.
13 mirage mirror
OK so this is where things start to get very interesting. this card is very powerful and we are gonna abuse the hell out of it. because it is so powerful we do need to be very careful with our list going forward. i'm going to spend a lot of time talking about things we do with this card right now. ill be quite blunt in saying this card has been a source of many unintended infinite loops already, but its so versatile that i think its worth the risk. its important to talk about what it can and what it cannot do. while we have the ability to change our mirror into any permanent we have in play we do not get that permanents enter triggers. this is very very important as it cuts us off some infinites later. that being said i think we should now talk about how it coming into play the first time should be handled. i'm very confident in this part as it sets up some very cool interactions that also happen to be absurdly powerful. so we start mapping some of our stacks here. i will map them like this going forward
stack resolving order
last
x
y
z
first
so with the case of our mirror we will pick up our stack after our exemplar triggers have cleared and mirror has resolved. i think its important to note that we want it to stay as itself for now. this lets us copy the mirror with rikus trigger and we get some number of these tokens from doubling season buffs. of note here is that even after we change our mirrors into something else(say more copies of doubling season for instance) that because of the way mtg rules on actual layers work our newly changed into object will maintain its mutant creature type and keep it counters too. this is only true because we remain a creature. if it became a non creature at any point it would lose its mutant type, but lukily for us it stays a mutant and continues to help us make mana echoes mana. so at this point i will concede that i'm not entirely sure what the most profitable objects are for us. i assume its a mix of rikus and doubling seasons, but i'm not sure what the ratio should be. for the sake of argument lets just say its 50/50 on season and riku. we will take one token mirror and make it into another mana echoes to help pay for our mirror changes but the rest of our batch we will make rikus and seasons. its important here that our actual mirror card is still a mirror as we are about to start comboing with it. so we use 2 more mana and turn our actual mirror into a copy of exemplar.
so, what have we done? well just think about what happens on the next cast of a non creature spell. yes our actual exemplar will blink as it was before creating a few nice triggers. the real cool stuff happens when our exemplar that is actually a mirror blinks. it comes back as a mirror and procs riku as a mirror. this allows us blink/trigger mirror on every non creature spell for the rest of the game. there are only 6 or so creatures in this deck so 50+ spells will be blinking our ememplared mirror allowing us to have it reenter as mirror, generate more riku triggers making more of them and turning them into more rikus and more seasons. this is one of my favorite interactions in the deck and one i'm super proud to have discovered it. plus all of these interactions will happen with the non creature spell on the stack which means we have time to turn them into riku/season before they resolve and will get there added benefits from triggers they created just by being cast.
so just for tghe sake of thuroghness the stack will look like this after we blink the exemplared mirror
last
original non creature spell
actual exemplar blink
riku triggers for newly etb blinked mirror
first
after riku triggers are paid for we can then turn our mirrors into whatever we want with actual exemplars blink trigger still on the stack. then let triggers resolve as needed. mana echos is happening in there too but we can probably have it resolve near the end as i noted before about riku/echos costs and the longer we can wait the more beneficial it will become. so importantly in all of this we want our actual mirror to stay a mirror until we are ready to do something cool with it. if we turn it into something that isn't exemplar we won't be able to do any of this as all riku copies will be what the original copied and also we cant do this trick with a token copy. it exiles for the blink and ceases to exist and cant come back(seems bad for us).
there is another really cool interaction that we can do with mirror itself. for this case we can do this will any 2 mirrors that are still actual mirrors and only if this interaction doesn't involve attempted blinks. so what we can do is allow a mirror to become something and then still be allowed to return to being an actual mirror. the way this works is a bit complicated but its one of the ways i found at least 1 infinite i had to eliminate from the deck. so how this works is this. we activate it's ability to copy an chose another mirror. with that ability on the stack we activate again targeting something else(say riku). our stack looks like this
last
copy another mirror
copy riku
first
this means we will become riku with the ability to return to being a mirror still on the stack. so if we can do something while its riku we can reap the benefits without ,actually fully giving up a mirror. the reason u need 2 mirrors to do this is pretty simple. if we try to do this entirely with one mirror targeting itself, the abilities will indeed resolve in the order we need them to but it wont have the effect we need(want). so our mirror will indeed become something else, but when it resolves the copy original mirror it will become what it already is. because the copy ability actually reads "become what the targeted object is when this ability resolves" it will still be targeting itself which is now not a mirror, and attempt to become that again, which is not what we want. so it works fine with 2 mirrors but not with just 1. while this interaction is very cool it is limited a bit. unfortunately we cannot get strings of etb triggers by changing the mirrors in response to each etb. we can get our mirrors to be the best one for one etb but then all the etb triggers will resolve before we get the chance to change again. i haven't dug to far into this interaction as the limiting factor here is timing and generally it feels wasteful to be doing to much of this type of thing. generally we just wan to change all but our orginal mirror into what we want as soon as it enters and just let it be that. if you want to save 1 copy of a token mirror as a mirror tht is fine. this leaves options open for later discoveries to be abused.
so going forward from this point we will just assume we make actual mirror into a exemplar every time before we cast a non creature spell and then make the generated tokens into the most beneficial things and then let our non creature spell resolve. every, single, time .... this means will be very quickly growing our amounts of doubling season, riku and later anything else that we want additional copies of.
so wit hall of that noted, we move on. importantly i guess is that i put this combo as early in our sequencing as possible. lets us abuse it the most times as we progress through the deck.