MTG Salvation

Potentially interesting things possible with counters:

- Crucible of the Spirit Dragon can get creature/tribal-only mana (can be hacked to any creature type)
- Floodchaser can make a lot of lands into islands for one counter via Rings of brighthearth

If the plan is to use The Chain Veil then Jaya would be able to get to 8, and that's the main reason to have pws below artifacts.

Jaya doesn't work because of her -8 which allows AE to be cast during a computation.

Kiora could still be used, perhaps with another colour in between so a bounce land can be used, or just using Great Furnace + having it be cheap to bounce it.

I was thinking we could get a layer out of 1 untapped chain veil = X pw uses, but that doesn't work since a pw use doesn't update the number of Rings of Brighthearth.
Unless, Rowan Kenrith could be used, since she makes an embelem that's basically Rings; but the -2 ability dealing damage might be an issue, as that can kill creatures to get haste tokens early. Perhaps we could try to ensure that there's no way to tap creatures before combat (so, Orb of Dreams -> Root Maze) but then we'd lose Deepwood Elder.


Edit: I had another idea to replace sek'kuar, but it doesn't work: Bonded Fetch + Cairn Wanderer, which needs Bonded Fetch to be in the gy to have haste. But it can simply be played after mirrorweaving for more necromancers.

Oh no, new issue: Unstable Shapeshifter can copy Sek'kuar, killing it with the legend rule, thus getting a haste token early.

Bringing back sek'kuar allows us to get more haste tokens after mirrorweaving for our own necromancers.

Idea: Horned Kavu + Panharmonicon makes bouncing green and red creatures free, so shapeshifters can be freely set to lieges, without it being possible to bounce necromancers which would be bad.

The trouble with Revive is that it also gets back Sek'kuar. Hibernation is also an instant which is bad.

Ah, actually this plan to have flickering be as expensive as populating doesn't work to add a layer, since we need to pay a white mana every time we want to kill a shapeshifter-liege.
So we'd like to make it somehow cheap to bounce or flicker or otherwise reuse Liege, but expensive or not possible to do the same with Necromancer.

I was looking for alternatives to Necromancer to maybe allow different colour or cmc constraints on things like bouncing or reanimation, but the only things with that direct effect are Bishop of Wings, Rotlung Reanimator, and Xathrid Necromancer.
The other interesting case is Requiem Angel; perhaps a sequence of Dralnu's Crusades could be used such that "non-X" essentially means the same thing as Y for some other creature type Y?

I was thinking about Horned Kavu to bounce Sarkahn-animated PWs + colour or cmc limited reanimation - but reanimatable creatures have to be in a layer above kiling creatures for value, while sarkahn must be in a layer below creature flickering, which we want to have in the same layer as populating - argh.

I was also thinking about having the PW layer be below the artifact copying layer, so The Chain Veil could be used - but that would lose the Red Mana Battery layer.

Ah, Unstable Shapeshifter tokens can copy necromancer, which while doesn't create a haltable infinite computation, does allow you to repeatedly kill a creature to get more back. And unlike in the 1-necromancer situation, the extra creatures are sufficient to keep everything involved alive. So this plan doesn't actually work. (The same is also true of a nontoken shapeshifter - so we lose those from the previous deck).
Although, this is only actually an issue if flickering creatures, to reset the shapeshifters, is cheap. If flickering creatures is at a higher layer than what's gained by killing them then it's not an issue, which maybe could be arranged by using white populate effects with white flicker effects. However, we'd then need to find an alternate way to reuse Kiora.

I checked with judges and the oracle text is actually "except it has this ability", which *does* work the way we want it to. I was looking at the page for the card on this site which had outdated oracle text.

Ooh, I think I have it: We use Unstable Shapeshifter, have it copy an enchantment, mirrorweave it onto an opponent's token, steal it with aura thief, and then we can start populating that. We can flicker a real liege to set all the shapeshifters to lieges before killing one. Copying necromancer isn't an issue as they would transform as soon as the necromancers trigger once. This should get the extra layer.

Edit: Actually, this might not work, since Unstable Shapeshifter is worded "becomes a copy and gains this ability" rather than "becomes a copy except it has this ability" as is more common; which means that making further copies of it won't have the ability. So this makes getting a token version of it harder, but also makes getting a token of it bad since the token could copy a necromancer which could then be populated into necromancer copies without the unstable shapeshifter ability.

Since Starfield of Nyx only affects our own enchantments, we are still able to give the opponent a lot of Primal Vigors before getting the haste token. Although the number of extra tokens this gives through Reef Worm is negligable compared to the number we get from a single liege, I guess it's the best thing we can currently do with our remaining card slots.

What we'd really like is a repeatable way to get lots of doubling seasons or primal vigors.
An idea I had was the populate mechanic:
We would first get a Doubling Season token, by, say, giving the opponent some and using Aura Thief to steal them.
Then, we'd use Full Flowering to get a lot more of them, or more of any creature token we have.
We'd have to restructure the layers to put green mana (or there's also a couple of other suitable populate effects in white) above creatures.
We can make sure there's no way to get a token Necromancer so we couldn't populate those.

However, this plan doesn't get the full 3 layers out of Reef Worm as you couldn't reset the number of doubling seasons in between killing each kind of token, so I'm not sure it actually gains any layers at all.

Ah yes, good point. The second deck also appears to be missing Amulet of Vigor, Caged Sun, and Thousand-Year Elixir.

Burning Sands doesn't work because we can donate lands to allow the opponent to sacrifice them off of their own creature deaths, which are cheap.

Unfortunately, I've found another big problem with Death Pit Offering setups.
It's possible, and previously thought to be safe, to have just one necromancer alongside a haste token, with no opponent necromancers. However, with one other creature, it's possible to repeatedly kill that creature in combat for value (by having one arcbond on a blocker) and have it be replaced by our necromancer.

This currently sets us back to shadowborn apostle decks again, but a possible way to salvage it might be to note that doing this also requires damaging an opponent's creature.
So we'd get rid of indestructible (anything that needs to be kept alive during a computation can be kept alive by kiora's +1 and/or output waterclocks), and we'd need to somehow make giving the opponent creatures as expensive as getting our own (outside of computations at least) - which would mean cutting Dowsing Dagger. But then, the problem becomes how do we give our opponent a large-ish number of creatures before using mirrorweave to make them necromancers, while also being as expensive as getting our own creatues? (Somewhere on the order of 2^2^1000 should do). We'd probably want to be able to make a large number of creatures and then donate them, but how do we do that? We can't kill a leige because it would allow us to get a haste token early. Perhaps we could donate a liege, kill it with something that could only hit opponent's stuff? Because liege's death trigger is symmetric, that would allow us to make a bunch of squirrels, and then donate them.

Edit: Ah, it's a lot simpler than that: Such a setup has no way of pumping our necromancer's toughness, or that of the haste token; so all we need to do to solve the issue is to cut Roar of Challenge.

While another "must block" effect would be an obvious replacement, it might be easier to use Caltrops - that way we wouldn't have to fiddle with managing how much combat damage gets assigned and which creatures are tapped - we can simply have everything be tapped, all attacks go through unblocked to face, but deal no damage due to Chameleon Blur.
I was trying to find a way to use Sarkhan's static to do this but couldn't find a way to reuse him after he's donated that didn't use up the card slot it would otherwise save.

Dual Nature doesn't work anyway, as it allows us to get 2 necromancers alongside a haste token.