I’ll have to check our start. It’s possible it’s too good actually. We might be able to play it all on t3, make enough mana to go off infinitely. I’ll dig into it and see if I can break it.
So this allows us to flip gateway into it’s land side just once during combat. We turn AG into CG then go to combat. I know we are going to be doing a lot in combat now so we will likely want to use up a Gideon activation to make our AG(and probably the CG too) not die to various things. Also they need to live to the end of combat to see this happen at all so yeah might need to protect them.
Tbh CG getting back a teferi for another activation sounds pretty legit so I think we might want 4 of these 2.
Currently we can attack with unlimited power into the walker we give our opponent so we can do this with pretty much as many artifact flip things as we can jam in. Also saheeli’s passive will help us make a ton more red mana with Radha, which is a nice bonus.
I’m not sure how strong multiple AG will be as we need to activate them one at a time as the transform triggers resolve and then we lose them to legendary rule. We can keep one till the very end(assuming it can live) to use it at our highest life totals and maybe even use it with teferi untap triggers.
Saheeli does worry me a bit but I don’t think she’s an issue. We can turn a locket into a servo(or any other creature) but when we quasiduplicate it we will get the copied creature not the locket.
I checked on the transform ruling and the locket scenario and both work out favorably for us. We don’t make a lot of lockets and the AG will transform.
it's possible but i think it will eat up a lot of slots, and probably run into the same issues anyway. also EP is our only way to get emergence zone into play so we'd have to figure that end of it out too without going infinite other ways. not sure it's worth a complete overhaul as out starting line of play is very efficient and also very infinite proof currently.
i think timebender's -3 would go infinite. it's first ability would be fine if his -3 is safe.
edit: it goes infinite. we can have timebeder as card 9 of our starters, play him and -3 drawing thousand-year storm and emergency powers and go infinite from there .... damn
we have to pull out the primal amulet(s) if we allow land destruction of any kind. too easy to play amulets, flip them, make mana, then destroy the lands they've become, then use that mana we made to draw and replay the amulets, flip them again. we can reset the whole thing using the mana we make from the flipped lands.
the first eruption goes infinite. it gets us damage onto our dino, which if we have it life linked(we can) makes us life gaining enrage triggers. this makes us life which we can use to rebuild the stages/processes which eruption can be a part of.
spreading rot goes infinite currently. we shoot a mountain(or many) losing life, reshuffle them, then use grow form ashes to put them back into play, making red mana which we convert into enrage triggers for life, replenishing our life and being way ahead of the life we lost to the spreading rot. we would need to change some stuff around to make this viable as 1 red mana is worth a lot of life currently.
spreading rot is interesting as it causes life loss and is a color we need to use draws for or give up white mana for. it might keep from going infinite at some point but as shown above it currently would be too good.
edit: we could use our stages to make black man instead of white. we would give up about a stage layers worth of growth(we just get X rebuilds of the stage rather than X's triangle number, which is only worth about 1 extra layer anyway). so in our old 10 stage layer example we would get 9(?) black mana with just 10 stage layer build ups, rather than the full 55 build ups(equaling about a 11 layer stage i believe) we'd get just making and reusing white mana.
until we can find a better way to limit our color production i think hijack is too good.
another interesting interaction with primal amulet is that depending on how we can layer our casting of spells we might be able to use amulet as a cost reducer until we need to flip them. so the charge counters that flip amulet are put on with triggers, which means we can respond to them. this means we can have some amulets in play cast a spell, then respond to the charge counter trigger(similar to blessing and TYS we already do) by casting another spell and responding again, and then again, and so on. we can do this a have our final spell(s) cast resolve in a manner that kills the amulets without flipping them, even if we have cast more than 4 triggering spells that would normally flip them. then we can get them back with excess elephant triggers, cast them and go again. this isn't a huge deal, and it may mess up our spell stacks too much, but it is a way to optimize mana use/conservation. this wasn't a big deal when we killed with the enrage trigger but with banefire if we can conserve mana we should.
i'm looking into land stuff but it's really tough to not go infinite. spreading rot is a possibility but we'd have to eliminate grow from ashes to not go infinite and i don't know if we'd have a good way to get our lands into play at that point.
hmmm, what happens if we just switch all the lands to shock lands? this bottle necks us on land/life as even the ability to play infinite lands it would require infinite life to get mana from them. it also slows our start as we'd be at 14 life pretty quickly near the start of t3. we'd have to really limit what colors our lands could tap for ... pretty sure this would require pulling the amulets out ... and then grow from ashes is not needed ..... but we might be able use this to move our restrictions/bottlenecks around to make interesting things happen.
hmmm, the lands idea i find pretty interesting. only thing i've found that's even close is primal amulet and then the bedazzle half of bedazzle//bedeck. bedazzle is good because it can't hit basics(which would go very infinite with grow from ashes). i still think this might go infinite but it's not obvious, so maybe it doesn't. we need red or black mana or using up a draw to make this work at all. bedazzle also let's us kill off walkers to replay as the damage to target walker clause should try to resolve even if the land is invalid (from being destroyed). might be something.
edit: pretty sure it's infinite. we can make a lot of red mana, blow it up. then make a lot of black mana, blow it up. then make a lot of white mana. use up all the white making storm, then use up some red and black to make a lot more white, then as we get low on red or black just go back and repeat ... using lands is really hard to not go infinite *sigh*
edit: would 4 primal amulets be better than 4 mountains? we should be able to get them(1 at a time) with elephants with blessing shuffle on the stack from mending, so we wouldn't have to use up draws to get them into our hand .... also with taps/untaps they are strictly better than mountain's ...
hmm, so don't know if this helps(also it might go infinite, not sure yet) but i found a cool series of cards that might be really interesting.
so i've always had squee, the immortal and azor's gateway in the back of my head as something to maybe jam in here but it never really made sense. after realizing a few things about the current deck and a bit of digging i found another card to pair with them that might be really interesting; hijack.
so how this would work is we target gateway with hijack many times. this gives us the ability to tap, draw a card then discard(edit: exile) squee. we then pay RR (the 1 is irrelevant, we will have plenty of green to do this) and cast squee into play. now we need squee in our hand to repeat. that's ok we can do some nova/mending stuff here to get squee back into the deck w/ impluse in the deck as well. we cast impulse getting squee and the rest of our creatures into hand. now we let another hijack resolve and repeat. as long as nothing in this process makes red mana we can't keep doing it infinitely. we may have an issue being able to make lots of extra white, but i can't think of a direct problem just yet.
i also realized that we are actually pretty close to easily removing 5 cards from our deck to meet the gateway flip clause without really giving up much value. hijack can't target the land after it flips so that isn't a problem. still our only way to untap lands is teferi and we can use him as one of our perma exile's to gateway as we transition into the end step where teferi is no longer useful. this means we can let all 3 walkers go to exile, then emergence zone, and then 1 more card of our choice and gateway flips for us to use with teferi triggers. i know we need to have a walker just to hit with enrage triggers(that can take damage) but i think we can make that work with spark double as long as we prep properly for it.
this would allow us to convert red->white mana(also green blue or black) and also red mana into draws with out needing to use life. maybe this causes issues, but i thought i could at least bring it to the light here and see if it can do something.
edit: shoot, pretty sure mending/nova stuff will need to kill the gateway .... nuts. still it's something to look at, maybe?
Ok so it looks like losing garna isn’t catastrophic which is good news.
As far as set up vs just going straight into the stage end of things, don’t we want to make some indestructible creatures first? This makes things awkward as Gideon is currently our only way to do this. We will get max 2 activations(1 original, 1 quasi copy) and I don’t think with our current list/set up we will be able to have access to using his ability until our first stage has already happened. This is awkward as we won’t be able to save marwyn or have a copy of poet to quasi easily.
So can someone do a mini mock up of how the mending stage is built and works? I just want to make sure it works without garna. I can’t wrap my head around it working without garna but I could be missing something. Edit: I don’t need a full explanation just if garna is needed I guess.
If it doesn’t then we probably need to go back to the Sphinx build. While this is a loss, we do pick up the added storm count generation quasi+Sphinx gives us. We lose a mountain but we pick up a compounder inside the stage loops.
This also means our green mana generation will be almost sticky tied to gift of growth resolutions. I think that’s pretty minor as each quasi resolution will be an entire reshuffle once we have a wrath to set them off, and each of those let’s us recast gift of growth again.
Also yeah we may need to use up our first life/draw tower to just be used as primarily a set up to get the combo set up optimized before starting another life/draw tower and really “going off”.
You should be fine. Your combo isn’t infinite. You can’t keep casting quasiduplicate as after casting it will go to yard.
Also it doesn’t make sense to make more than 1 marwyn. We get the most value untapping only 1 huge one. Even if they survive the wraths they don’t untap. The best way to use each untap is always on the largest(after we make the needed other mana to continue combining of course). We can short cut the arcane adaptation nonsense by just making a bunch of llan elves. This will give give a solid boost to marwyn and also makes 1 mana on their own allowing a sort of double dipping on efficiency. Maybe there is room for more trigger makers but remember we need a Gideon activation per unit we want to survive the wraths. We are restricted on when we can do this and tbh at best we are getting 1 Gideon to use per reshuffle. If we do spark double stuff with Gideon the spark double is stuck in play. We can’t legend rule it and we can’t kill it with damage. Maybe we could tuck it with teferi but again timing is super awkward and we give up a teferi activation to do it.
Edit: extra copies of marwyn would be better than elves(they all get made and trigger each other, then we tap them, then they die to a wrath). The proper use would be to make the original unkillable, then make 1 non legendary unkillable. We will actually not tap this one at all until the very end. It will store up counters as a progress retainer we can use at the end as one final tap.
Edit: ugh, no that’s not quite right either. So we make 1 non legendary unkillable and this will be the one we untap. We then make 1 also unkillable we don’t tap. Neither of these should be the actual marwyn card. That we want to kill so we can redraw and recast it. Getting an extra cast/enter trigger each reshuffle. Small but i think that’s the optimized play with just marwyn anyway.
Edit: ugh again lol. I think the combo is infinite. We at some point make an wrath proof copy of garna(and any other legendary creature we want to infinitely recur). Now we cast actual garna from hard. We let the actual card die to state based legend rule and then retrieve it with its own trigger. If this works timing wise we do need to replace garna. Hopefully this doesn’t mess up the mending stage you guys ended up settling on.
so i agree that the stack will be fully open only when we finish a batch of banefire resolutions, but that doesn't quite equate to the number of teferi activation's. that number is tied to how much life we have(divided by 2)when we get to that open stack. this will happen after each casting of a banefire, after the stack clears. we will be getting 3x life and can convert that into (3/2)x teferi activation's for each casting of banfire. this is true with 2 teferi if we can only get 1 activation per 2 life loop iteration. it might be 2 tho and i'm just missing something. again not sure this changes the math
edit: i'm pretty sure teferi is worse. we stop being able to update the amount of teferi activation's once we get into end step. the end step is where we will be doing our largest scaling so giving up a layer(iteration?) of mountains is probably far worse than being able to get more teferi activation's but only for part of our combo. yeah i think 1 teferi is correct.
so i don't understand the math quite well enough to write out what this looks like but we have an additional 2 times the stack is clear and not tied to banefire castings. 1st will be when we use our initial starting life to make stages and the 2nd will be after combat when we refresh that life total again. its not a ton but it is 16+20 life worth of empty stack(18 times).
we don't actually need to use any mountain taps up pre combat. we can get our dino to 19 power via buffs and we can make all copies of radha without needing to use any red mana. for the mountain v teferi debate we can save all of our tapping until have used all initial life up and converted it into storm, which helps the mountain's argument as this means we can delay using them until higher storm counts.
another thing is that each teferi untap is 2 sources and not just one. not sure that changes the math at all but 2 iterations should be stronger than 1 i would think, although the scale of that difference might get lost in the math.
edit: as far as the banefire finish i think its way better actually. mawmyr's power will be tied to our storm count. it will actually be even higher than that. we will be using quasi to make enough blue mana to keep our combo running but the extra copies can make more llan elves. this will mean she will be growing at 9x our storm count per reshuffle(7x on just buffs and 2x(1 for counter, 1 for them tapping) for the elves). also we will be getting 1x number of untaps too.
edit: this making of mana would really only up the stating number from 3 to our storm count, but that isn't even our final storm number. it's our storm when we cast the final banefire. so its x(2^y) as our final damage where x is our BF casting storm plus buff modifiers and untaps and Y is our final storm count. you guys are much better at putting numbers(or at least representations of functions) on the x and y but it should be roughly this on the final hit
Saheeli, sublime artificer
Conqueror’s galleon
Azor’s gateway(x4?)
So this allows us to flip gateway into it’s land side just once during combat. We turn AG into CG then go to combat. I know we are going to be doing a lot in combat now so we will likely want to use up a Gideon activation to make our AG(and probably the CG too) not die to various things. Also they need to live to the end of combat to see this happen at all so yeah might need to protect them.
Tbh CG getting back a teferi for another activation sounds pretty legit so I think we might want 4 of these 2.
Currently we can attack with unlimited power into the walker we give our opponent so we can do this with pretty much as many artifact flip things as we can jam in. Also saheeli’s passive will help us make a ton more red mana with Radha, which is a nice bonus.
I’m not sure how strong multiple AG will be as we need to activate them one at a time as the transform triggers resolve and then we lose them to legendary rule. We can keep one till the very end(assuming it can live) to use it at our highest life totals and maybe even use it with teferi untap triggers.
Saheeli does worry me a bit but I don’t think she’s an issue. We can turn a locket into a servo(or any other creature) but when we quasiduplicate it we will get the copied creature not the locket.
I checked on the transform ruling and the locket scenario and both work out favorably for us. We don’t make a lot of lockets and the AG will transform.
edit: it goes infinite. we can have timebeder as card 9 of our starters, play him and -3 drawing thousand-year storm and emergency powers and go infinite from there .... damn
spreading rot is interesting as it causes life loss and is a color we need to use draws for or give up white mana for. it might keep from going infinite at some point but as shown above it currently would be too good.
edit: we could use our stages to make black man instead of white. we would give up about a stage layers worth of growth(we just get X rebuilds of the stage rather than X's triangle number, which is only worth about 1 extra layer anyway). so in our old 10 stage layer example we would get 9(?) black mana with just 10 stage layer build ups, rather than the full 55 build ups(equaling about a 11 layer stage i believe) we'd get just making and reusing white mana.
another interesting interaction with primal amulet is that depending on how we can layer our casting of spells we might be able to use amulet as a cost reducer until we need to flip them. so the charge counters that flip amulet are put on with triggers, which means we can respond to them. this means we can have some amulets in play cast a spell, then respond to the charge counter trigger(similar to blessing and TYS we already do) by casting another spell and responding again, and then again, and so on. we can do this a have our final spell(s) cast resolve in a manner that kills the amulets without flipping them, even if we have cast more than 4 triggering spells that would normally flip them. then we can get them back with excess elephant triggers, cast them and go again. this isn't a huge deal, and it may mess up our spell stacks too much, but it is a way to optimize mana use/conservation. this wasn't a big deal when we killed with the enrage trigger but with banefire if we can conserve mana we should.
i'm looking into land stuff but it's really tough to not go infinite. spreading rot is a possibility but we'd have to eliminate grow from ashes to not go infinite and i don't know if we'd have a good way to get our lands into play at that point.
hmmm, what happens if we just switch all the lands to shock lands? this bottle necks us on land/life as even the ability to play infinite lands it would require infinite life to get mana from them. it also slows our start as we'd be at 14 life pretty quickly near the start of t3. we'd have to really limit what colors our lands could tap for ... pretty sure this would require pulling the amulets out ... and then grow from ashes is not needed ..... but we might be able use this to move our restrictions/bottlenecks around to make interesting things happen.
edit: pretty sure it's infinite. we can make a lot of red mana, blow it up. then make a lot of black mana, blow it up. then make a lot of white mana. use up all the white making storm, then use up some red and black to make a lot more white, then as we get low on red or black just go back and repeat ... using lands is really hard to not go infinite *sigh*
edit: would 4 primal amulets be better than 4 mountains? we should be able to get them(1 at a time) with elephants with blessing shuffle on the stack from mending, so we wouldn't have to use up draws to get them into our hand .... also with taps/untaps they are strictly better than mountain's ...
so i've always had squee, the immortal and azor's gateway in the back of my head as something to maybe jam in here but it never really made sense. after realizing a few things about the current deck and a bit of digging i found another card to pair with them that might be really interesting; hijack.
so how this would work is we target gateway with hijack many times. this gives us the ability to tap, draw a card then discard(edit: exile) squee. we then pay RR (the 1 is irrelevant, we will have plenty of green to do this) and cast squee into play. now we need squee in our hand to repeat. that's ok we can do some nova/mending stuff here to get squee back into the deck w/ impluse in the deck as well. we cast impulse getting squee and the rest of our creatures into hand. now we let another hijack resolve and repeat. as long as nothing in this process makes red mana we can't keep doing it infinitely. we may have an issue being able to make lots of extra white, but i can't think of a direct problem just yet.
i also realized that we are actually pretty close to easily removing 5 cards from our deck to meet the gateway flip clause without really giving up much value. hijack can't target the land after it flips so that isn't a problem. still our only way to untap lands is teferi and we can use him as one of our perma exile's to gateway as we transition into the end step where teferi is no longer useful. this means we can let all 3 walkers go to exile, then emergence zone, and then 1 more card of our choice and gateway flips for us to use with teferi triggers. i know we need to have a walker just to hit with enrage triggers(that can take damage) but i think we can make that work with spark double as long as we prep properly for it.
this would allow us to convert red->white mana(also green blue or black) and also red mana into draws with out needing to use life. maybe this causes issues, but i thought i could at least bring it to the light here and see if it can do something.
edit: shoot, pretty sure mending/nova stuff will need to kill the gateway .... nuts. still it's something to look at, maybe?
As far as set up vs just going straight into the stage end of things, don’t we want to make some indestructible creatures first? This makes things awkward as Gideon is currently our only way to do this. We will get max 2 activations(1 original, 1 quasi copy) and I don’t think with our current list/set up we will be able to have access to using his ability until our first stage has already happened. This is awkward as we won’t be able to save marwyn or have a copy of poet to quasi easily.
If it doesn’t then we probably need to go back to the Sphinx build. While this is a loss, we do pick up the added storm count generation quasi+Sphinx gives us. We lose a mountain but we pick up a compounder inside the stage loops.
This also means our green mana generation will be almost sticky tied to gift of growth resolutions. I think that’s pretty minor as each quasi resolution will be an entire reshuffle once we have a wrath to set them off, and each of those let’s us recast gift of growth again.
Also yeah we may need to use up our first life/draw tower to just be used as primarily a set up to get the combo set up optimized before starting another life/draw tower and really “going off”.
Also it doesn’t make sense to make more than 1 marwyn. We get the most value untapping only 1 huge one. Even if they survive the wraths they don’t untap. The best way to use each untap is always on the largest(after we make the needed other mana to continue combining of course). We can short cut the arcane adaptation nonsense by just making a bunch of llan elves. This will give give a solid boost to marwyn and also makes 1 mana on their own allowing a sort of double dipping on efficiency. Maybe there is room for more trigger makers but remember we need a Gideon activation per unit we want to survive the wraths. We are restricted on when we can do this and tbh at best we are getting 1 Gideon to use per reshuffle. If we do spark double stuff with Gideon the spark double is stuck in play. We can’t legend rule it and we can’t kill it with damage. Maybe we could tuck it with teferi but again timing is super awkward and we give up a teferi activation to do it.
Edit: extra copies of marwyn would be better than elves(they all get made and trigger each other, then we tap them, then they die to a wrath). The proper use would be to make the original unkillable, then make 1 non legendary unkillable. We will actually not tap this one at all until the very end. It will store up counters as a progress retainer we can use at the end as one final tap.
Edit: ugh, no that’s not quite right either. So we make 1 non legendary unkillable and this will be the one we untap. We then make 1 also unkillable we don’t tap. Neither of these should be the actual marwyn card. That we want to kill so we can redraw and recast it. Getting an extra cast/enter trigger each reshuffle. Small but i think that’s the optimized play with just marwyn anyway.
Edit: ugh again lol. I think the combo is infinite. We at some point make an wrath proof copy of garna(and any other legendary creature we want to infinitely recur). Now we cast actual garna from hard. We let the actual card die to state based legend rule and then retrieve it with its own trigger. If this works timing wise we do need to replace garna. Hopefully this doesn’t mess up the mending stage you guys ended up settling on.
edit: i'm pretty sure teferi is worse. we stop being able to update the amount of teferi activation's once we get into end step. the end step is where we will be doing our largest scaling so giving up a layer(iteration?) of mountains is probably far worse than being able to get more teferi activation's but only for part of our combo. yeah i think 1 teferi is correct.
we don't actually need to use any mountain taps up pre combat. we can get our dino to 19 power via buffs and we can make all copies of radha without needing to use any red mana. for the mountain v teferi debate we can save all of our tapping until have used all initial life up and converted it into storm, which helps the mountain's argument as this means we can delay using them until higher storm counts.
another thing is that each teferi untap is 2 sources and not just one. not sure that changes the math at all but 2 iterations should be stronger than 1 i would think, although the scale of that difference might get lost in the math.
edit: as far as the banefire finish i think its way better actually. mawmyr's power will be tied to our storm count. it will actually be even higher than that. we will be using quasi to make enough blue mana to keep our combo running but the extra copies can make more llan elves. this will mean she will be growing at 9x our storm count per reshuffle(7x on just buffs and 2x(1 for counter, 1 for them tapping) for the elves). also we will be getting 1x number of untaps too.
edit: this making of mana would really only up the stating number from 3 to our storm count, but that isn't even our final storm number. it's our storm when we cast the final banefire. so its x(2^y) as our final damage where x is our BF casting storm plus buff modifiers and untaps and Y is our final storm count. you guys are much better at putting numbers(or at least representations of functions) on the x and y but it should be roughly this on the final hit