Actually, that does help a good bit. I will keep working on it and see it I can compete at all, lol. Thank you guys so much for giving me a few more tools to work with!
Thank you for the review! I am still a little unsure how to actually count the damage. If I understood that better, I think I could rework it with that concept in mind and weed out a lot of the stuff and focus it better. I did notice as I was even writing this up, I could improve, so I know it's nowhere near as good as it could be.
I will take some time and try again. This is a really, really bizarre exercise, lol
Ok. As it should be obvious, this will need some explanation. I'm going to try, but bear with me, as I have only just recently started this little adventure.
We start with the Black Lotus, Show and Tell, into Omniscience bit. Casting spells no longer requires mana, allowing us to continue freely for a bit.
Now, I struggled figuring out the most efficient way to do this, but I think dropping all the effects which only need one copy of a card to work is best to do here. Each of these will draw a card as well upon entering:
Ormos, Archive Keeper - Keeps us from decking out, bonus of getting counters Mycosynth Lattice - Artifact permanents and the mana fixing are valuable Hostility - We will use a damaging spell in this build, which we need to mitigate, and creating more tokens is a huge bonus Leyline of Anticipation - Plenty of times we will want instant-speed casting Reconnaissance - We will go to combat quite a bit and be attacking, but that is not the way we want to finish Silver Wyvern - It will let us stack triggers how we need to later
We still have 4 cards in hand (each thing we've played since Omniscience drew a card). Cast Channel. This lets us use our life as mana of any color thanks to Mycosynth Lattice.
Cast Flameshadow Conjuring. Every nontoken permanent that hits our field now not only draws a card, it triggers a chance to copy it. Because it is animated by the Opalescence, it triggers itself. We pay the one life to copy.
Next we drop Sakashima of a Thousand Faces. We have it come in as a copy of our Flameshadow Conjuring. It triggers itself and the two copies we have in play. The important thing here is that the copies spawned off of this will have the "The 'legend rule' doesn't apply to permanents you control" ability (because of the weird way copy effects work). We use three more life to pay for those triggers, and we have 6 total copies of Flameshadow Conjuring.
We now cast Verdant Sun's Avatar, we stack the triggers so we always gain the life before paying the copy triggers, and thanks to the Opalescence, we gain life equal to the mana value instead of its base. We gain 7, pay 1, gain 14, pay 1, gain 21, pay 1, gain 28, pay 1, gain 35, pay 1, gain 42, pay 1, and finally, gain 49 life, ending with 206 life. Effective from this point forward, we will always gain far, far more life than we need to pay for pretty much everything.
Casting and resolving Arcane Adaptation next will trigger the copying effects, giving us six more copies, and letting us make everything Shamans, Allies, Wolves, Golems, Dragons, Elves, and Goblins. Now we cast Harmonic Prodigy. Because everything is a Shaman, the triggers of everything we control are increased by the number of Harmonic Prodigy copies we have, so the Flameshadow Conjuring copies each trigger twice and we end up with 13 copies of Harmonic Prodigy and a lot of life.
Doubling Season is next. When it hits, there are 6 Flameshadow Conjuring copies and 13 Harmonic Prodigy copies. This creates 84 triggers, each of which will see a previous amount of Doubling Seasons. I do not really know how many it ends up with, but I know it's large. Increasing the Doubling Seasons will generally be the most optimal way to increase the power of this deck.
At this point, we have our entire deck in our hand because of all the draw triggers. However, upon drawing the last card (and before resolving the other triggers), we want to cast Beacon of Immortality. We gain a huge amount of life, then it shuffles itself back in. Given that we only draw one card at a time, and Ormos, Archive Keeper protects us anyways (much more relevant later), we can now translate every draw trigger which isn't eaten for counters into "Double target player's life total."
Now, this is where I struggled the second time to figure out the most efficient path. I opted to drop the other two beginning setup cards here:
Thousand-Year Storm - Fairly obvious, but we want to copy the bejeezus out of our instants and sorceries Vigor - We plan to damage our creatures a whole bunch, and we need at least two of these to save each other
Master Biomancer is next. This will cause all of our creature cards and copies of creature cards to enter with many counters on them. (Note: An animated enchantment will NOT enter with the counters because it is not a creature until it is already in play - this is why we will be adding counters to them via other means)
Joraga Warcaller is the next card. The unbelievable synergy of this with Master Biomancer cannot be understated. Given that each Joraga Warcaller entering increases the power of every Master Biomancer by the total sum of their powers multiplied by the Doubling Season copies, this means in turn each new Joraga Warcaller will enter with even more counters than that. These two cards are the crux of growth in the deck thanks to Doubling Season.
We want to start actually expanding our board with what we currently have. This is going to start getting very complicated (for me, at least). The first card we will use is Song of the Worldsoul. Now, every cast allows us to copy a buttload of things. As a general rule, the way we will choose to do so will be to leave one copy of the trigger per item we want to copy and have all the rest copy Doubling Season. We resolve the Doubling Season populates first, maximizing the amount of tokens we get of the other parts. We need the Sakashima of a Thousand Faces copies of Flameshadow Conjuring, Harmonic Prodigy, Thousand-Year Storm, Master Biomancer, Joraga Warcaller, and Verdant Sun's Avatar - a total of six of the many, many Song of the Worldsoul triggers to resolve after making Doubling Season tokens. Every other trigger will copy Doubling Season first.
Incidentally, this is the reason we have Ormos, Archive Keeper. Whenever something EtBs, we draw a card, cast Beacon of Immortality, the cast triggers Song of the Worldsoul, the populated tokens trigger draw effects, but because Beacon of Immortality is still on the stack, we get counters on Ormos, Archive Keeper instead, then stack resolves down to the Beacon of Immortality, and we resolve each next draw in the same way. Now, every draw also has the added effect of populating for however many Song of the Worldsoul triggers we have, making Doubling Season tokens and a lot of the other pieces.
We now follow that with Restoration Angel. The very important part of this card is that it cannot flicker an Angel. This is why we have to never select Angel for Arcane Adaptation (there's only seven of them anyways, and we need all seven). This stack is very weird, but it will eventually resolve to nothing.
1. Cast Restoration Angel
2. Trigger Song of the Worldsoul, populate
3. Draw triggers are created
4. Cast Beacon of Immortality
5. Trigger Song of the Worldsoul, populate
6. Ormos, Archive Keeper gets counters
7. Beacon of Immortality eventually returns to the library
8. Restoration Angel EtBs, draw triggers and flicker targets are created, all flickers target the Silver Wyvern
9. Move a flicker target to Doubling Season, resolve the flicker
10. Draw triggers are created
11. Cast Beacon of Immortality
12. Trigger Song of the Worldsoul, populate (NOTE: Populating the Restoration Angel with Beacon of Immortality on the stack will eventually run out due to having no more populate triggers)
13. Ormos, Archive Keeper gets counters
14. Beacon of Immortality returns to the library
15. Repeat steps 9-14 until all but one trigger per nontoken creature we control (depending on the current stage) have resolved
16. Repeat steps 9-14, but move the flicker targets to the rest of the board, (Eidolon of Blossoms, Song of the Worldsoul, Restoration Angel, Sakashima of a Thousand Faces copies of Flameshadow Conjuring, Harmonic Prodigy, Thousand-Year Storm, Master Biomancer, Joraga Warcaller, and Verdant Sun's Avatar are the ones we will continue repeating along with any new things we drop, but everything else currently in play needs at least one flicker to make tokens of them)
It's tricky to see, but there is no loop due to the one spell (which is being repeatedly cast) being on the stack when the populated Restoration Angel copies EtB. I think you can technically resolve this for more effect in a differnt order, but either way, the choke point keeping it from going infinite is that the Beacon of Immoratilty is on the stack for everything between draw triggers, thus never allowing you to continue without first resolving down to it and, subsequently, the next draw trigger originally created by whichever inital thing we did. If we make 50 draw triggers, for example, everything that happens in between each of them (as described above) happens with Beacon of Immortality on the stack because drawing a card doesn't trigger anything else. It is the casting of Beacon of Immortality itself that creates a cascading effect, namely steps 11-14.
The reason we have been gaining an absolutely insane amount of life is two-fold: it is our mana source and it fuels Cradle of Vitality. For each one we have, each life gain trigger is turned into counters and multiplied by a huge amount due to Doubling Season effects. We are going to choose one random token copy of Joraga Warcaller as our target. This adds an enormous amount of power to our board and makes each new creature enter with even more counters due to Master Biomancer.
To start ramping up the raw amount of triggers, we will cast Chancellor of the Forge. The tokens it creates will be base 0/0 creatures, but they enter with counters equal to the total power of the Master Biomancer copies and get an additional bonus equal to the total of all the counters on the Joraga Warcaller copies.
I decided this was the point to start setting up for the end game, so here are the next few things to add:
Sphinx of the Second Sun - We are going to create a huge amount of combat steps followed by main phases, so having each of those be another begin phase will let us use a lot of upkeep-based triggers Iridescent Hornbeetle - We will win in the end step, and this is going to be a gigantic increaser prior to the conclusion Hamletback Goliath - There is practically no faster way to generate counters in this deck Towering Titan - It will effectively just add our total power multiplied many times over to the Hamletback Goliath copies Deadbridge Chant - We stack the EtB triggers to draw first, then resolve the mill so we don't lose our Beacon of Immortality, but the important part is each upkeep, we get whatever we want back from our grave to repeat the engines we create up to that point
This next set is mostly just to increase the life gain and capitalize off of it, which will make our counters increase greatly via Cradle of Vitality:
Rhox Faithmender - It simply speeds up just how many counters we add to the Joraga Warcaller copies, in turn making our board much more powerful Aetherflux Reservoir - By my count, it and its copies will gain life fast enough to compete with the Beacon of Immortality (and fuels it, as well) and will alow us to simply add counters to our chosen token Joraga Warcaller directly with life and Vigor in play Loxodon Lifechanter - By spending all our life between itself (via Channel) and Aetherflux reservoir, we can go from 1 life to our total toughness multiplied many times over Archangel of Thune - It can't be flickered by Restoration Angel, but the sheer volume of triggers from Verdant Sun's Avatar, Aetherflux Reservoir, and the Beacon of Immortality casts will allow us to add an absurd amount of counters to everything, including the animated noncreature things Kazuul Warlord - It doesn't really interact necessarily with the life gain, but this is a good spot to drop it so we can use EtBs as well as life gain to trigger an effect like similar to Cathars' Crusade (which we do not use)
At this point, I think it's a good place to start building for the combat steps we will be taking. It should be noted the reason we chose to use Sakashima of a Thousand Faces was for the next few cards, which include a few legendaries we want to copy.
Tanazir Quandrix is absolutely beautiful for both its EtB trigger and its attack trigger. I will explain a bit when we get there. All the doubling effects will target our special Joraga Warcaller token.
Ardent Speaker will let us effectively cast any instant or sorcery from our graveyard on attack. Because it does not target, we can choose the same spells over and over, so long as we stack things correctly. In general, it should resolve by putting something on the bottom, exilng both Beacon of Immortality and the card we chose to its effect, and Leyline of Anticipation will let us cast both using life from the Channel/Mycosynth Lattice synergy.
Rionya, Fire Dancer is a fairly obvious choice to translate our spell storm count into raw token counts. It effectively acts like Thousand-Year Storm, but turns the copies into tokens of our permanents instead.
Ghired, Conclave Exile not only creates a token on entering, it populates on attack. Very powerful in this setup.
Pathbreaker Ibex translates the highest power we control to everything we control - several times over.
The next part is creating a very strong way to use activated abilities with an ever increasing set of pwoer behind them. The first card in this sequence is Rowan Kenrith. It will enter with far more than enough counters to use the final ability, allowing us to copy activated abilities a huge amount of times. Because we will normally (more or less) resolve a stack to its end, every time we can, we will activate every unactivated Rowan Kenrith we can, getting as many emblems as we can. It should be noted, each one in turn will increase the number of emblems we get, as planeswalker abilities are activated abilities.
The next will be The Chain Veil. This will allow us to basically use the final ability of each Rowan Kenrith and our one other planeswalker all the way down to 0 once we have a few other things in play (if it doesn't already).
Now that we can use activated abilities more effectively, we want to get a few of them going. The best one in this deck is going to be Master of the Hunt. Because we have at least two copies of Vigor and everything is a Wolf, it effectively reads, "Target creature gains counters equal to the collective power of all creatures you control other than this one. Spread counters equal to that creature's new power amongst any creatures you control except the target and this creature." This means our token Joraga Warcaller we've been pumping is going to be very, very large, but we now have another Joraga Warcaller that will be even bigger.
We now have two concerns. The tokens copied by populate triggers do not have haste and we have no way to untap our creatures. Karrthus, Tyrant of Jund solves both problems because all of our creatures are Dragons, as well. Each EtB will untap all of our creatures multiple times and, just by existing in play, everything has haste.
Gnostro, Voice of the Crags gives us an activated ability with the option to either gain life or add counters to something based on our total storm count.
Hobgoblin Bandit Lord is an anthem effect and has the ability to add counters to a target equal to the number of things we have in play.
We can add a few more cards to the field now before we get to the real meat of the deck's combo:
Sphinx-Bone Wand - Makes every recast of Beacon of Immortality also do a very hefty amount of damage/adding of counters to our new big Joraga Warcaller Precursor Golem - This will be very powerful multiplier of our instants and sorceries Basri Ket - This will create an incredible amount of triggers at the beginning of every combat we will take Arcbound Ravager - The last permanent in the deck, it is our only sacrifice outlet and it can help distribute counters as well as generate them
Rite of Replication will target a Golem token created by the Precursor Golems. It will be kicked, of course. The resulting triggers will multiply the board many, many times. The reason we target the random Golem token is because it will be the last thing copied and it is by far the lease useful thing to be multiplied.
Supplant Form will allow us to perform a one time super multiplier to our board while also letting us recast all of our permanents again. We should have at least one token copy of the first few things we cast, including Omniscience and Leyline of Anticipation, if not, we'll make them now. This will let us respond to each Precursor trigger by flashing in something and triggering everything yet again. Because of the Silver Wyvern lets us redirect its targeted effects and spells, the best way to do things is typically stack every trigger and copied spell onto it and then allow things to resolve, move the target over to the same object again, then repeat until all triggers and spells are gone. This will get very complicated now that we have tokens being populated, because for each Silver Wyvern, we get a copy of our targeted spells per Precursor Golem.
We will now activate all activated abilities we can and sacrifice every nontoken permanent other than Opalescence to Arcbound Ravager. This includes the nontoken copy of Arcbound Ravager, which will donate its counters to the Joraga Warcaller we are pumping. The reason we do this is to follow all that up with Eerie Ultimatum, returning everything in our graveyard other than instants and sorceries to the battlefield, triggering everything again. Before the next copy resolves, we will sacrifice these permanents again, activating every ability we can from them each time. The planeswalkers will not be able to react, but we will have so many by the time its all done that we can just activate their abilities for a very impressive number of times. Either way, Eerie Ultimatum will basically let us redo our entire combo thus far multiple times over, each starting where the last one ended.
If you are counting, we only have 4 cards left to work with. The Beacon of Immortality is in the deck as the only card in that place. One we will be the very last card we cast, so we will get to that in a bit. The other three will include Chandra's Ignition. Because we have Hostility in play, we do not kill the opponent, but get a bunch of tokens instead and our creatures simply get bigger due to Vigor. Furthermore, we will also target the Silver Wyvern with every copy we can so we can redirect as necessary. I don't really know which creature is the biggest each time one of these resolves, but between all the Precursor Golems and such, we should be able to always target the biggest thing in play with any of the copies targeting a Silver Wyvern.
The next card will be World at War. This will generate an absolutely enormous amount of combat steps and main phases because of our ridiculous spell storm count. Each combat phase will create a huge influx of repetition due to the Ardent Dustspeaker tirgger, allowing us to copy the World at War many, many more times. Each one of those main phases will trigger the Sphinx of the Second Sun abilities. Each of those will trigger our upkeep abilities. The goal here will now be to copy that spell as many times as possible in this main phase, the combat phase, and during the first postcombat main phase. After that, the card has no effect, preventing us from going infinite.
The last card we have other than our finisher is Primal Command. The modes useful to us will be to shuffle our graveyard back into our deck and the creature tutor. The life is mostly irrelevant compared to what we already gain, and the only legal target for the noncreature permanent to bounce is our Opalescence, which would be bad for us to lose. After casting it we sacrifice all our nontoken permanents again (except Opalescence) and let the first one shuffle and find Harmomic Prodigy. We flash it in, creating the draw triggers to get everything else back out of our deck again, recast everything, sacrifice it all again, use Eerie Ultimatum to repeat everything again, cast the World at War, and finally repeat until all copies of Primal Command are complete. Activate every ability we can, starting with the Rowan Kenrith emblems.
We have only our finisher in hand. But, we are not ready for it. We start the first combat. There are so many triggers here, I'm not sure I even correctly got all of them. We need one of the Rionya, Fire Dancer abilities to resolve first, however. We need the ability to draw and cast the Beacon of Immortality to populate the Karrthus, Tyrant of Jund tokens so we can fully untap. From here on out, we will generally want to leave our stuff untapped after all triggers are considered. Rionya, Fire Dancer triggers should almost exclusively copy Doubling Season.
We attack with every single thing with a trigger. The Ardent Dustspeaker triggers will put Primal Command below the Beacon of Immortality, exile both, and we will respond to each subsequent one with the whole process we did before. We will also cast the Channel and Show and Tell simply for the storm count and the opponent can drop the lands if they like, but they'll just die to being animated 0/0 creatures. As a general preference, we want to try resolve the World at War near last to get as many possible phases in, because we have a limited time frame to actually cast it. We still have Ghired, Conclave Exile triggers to resolve, choosing to make as many Doubling Season copies as possible before copying the rest of the important parts of the board. The Tanazir Quandrix triggers should resolve next, stacked such that we resolve them in a chain that loops back onto itself with the copies of the abilities from the Harmonic Prodigy copies. Because of the way counters and the bonuses from the Joraga Warcallers work with these abilities, we can stack the power pretty high. After those are complete, we finish with the Pathbreaker Ibex triggers outright multiplying everything.
We use Reconnaissance to completely remove all our attacking creatures from combat. All we wanted were the triggers.
When we move to our first postcombat main phase, we get a large number of triggers from the Sphinx of the Second Sun copies. We activate as many things as we can. This should Rowan Kenrith emblems and Basri Ket emblems first, and the others after that because we will get a pretty incredible amount of untap steps before our second combat. There aren't any spells we can cast right now aside from our finisher, but that's fine. We need to finish every other phase we have in this turn. The most important thing is that this is the last time World at War matters. We have no more ways to generate new combat phases or main phases.
However, we will get a pretty silly increase for each of those phases we actually do get. In each upkeep we get, the Deadbridge Chant will return Primal Command to our hand, which we will use to repeat everything. We will now start casting World at War as early as possible simply to increase the storm count, alongside Channel and Show and Tell (which do also do nothing but offer more triggers). Each upkeep also triggers the Master of the Wild Hunt token generation.
Once we repeat the whole thing each phase until we finally get to the end step, we have one final trick. All the counters we've been placing on things will make the Iridescent Hornbeetle triggers produce such a huge amount of creatures, each getting all the new counters, triggering everything again, and making each subsequent Iridescent Hornbeetle even more impressive.
With every tirgger done, every spell cast, and every ability activated possible, our final spell will be Soulblast. It will take every single thing in play other than Opalescence, add it together, and do the damage. Because it sacrifices ALL creatures you control, nothing will trigger off of it. It just resolves and blows the opponent's life total away.
Ok, well that's my deck. Please tell me what you see. I'd love to try fixing it. I'm working on a commander/EDH variant, but that's much, much harder. Thank you guys!
I will take some time and try again. This is a really, really bizarre exercise, lol
// 5 Artifact
1 Aetherflux Reservoir
1 Black Lotus
1 Mycosynth Lattice
1 Sphinx-Bone Wand
1 The Chain Veil
// 31 Creature
1 Arcbound Ravager
1 Archangel of Thune
1 Ardent Dustspeaker
1 Chancellor of the Forge
1 Eidolon of Blossoms
1 Ghired, Conclave Exile
1 Gnostro, Voice of the Crags
1 Hamletback Goliath
1 Harmonic Prodigy
1 Hobgoblin Bandit Lord
1 Hostility
1 Iridescent Hornbeetle
1 Joraga Warcaller
1 Karrthus, Tyrant of Jund
1 Kazuul Warlord
1 Loxodon Lifechanter
1 Master Biomancer
1 Master of the Wild Hunt
1 Ormos, Archive Keeper
1 Pathbreaker Ibex
1 Precursor Golem
1 Restoration Angel
1 Rhox Faithmender
1 Rionya, Fire Dancer
1 Sakashima of a Thousand Faces
1 Silver Wyvern
1 Sphinx of the Second Sun
1 Tanazir Quandrix
1 Towering Titan
1 Verdant Sun's Avatar
1 Vigor
1 Arcane Adaptation
1 Cradle of Vitality
1 Deadbridge Chant
1 Doubling Season
1 Enchanted Evening
1 Flameshadow Conjuring
1 Leyline of Anticipation
1 Omniscience
1 Opalescence
1 Reconnaissance
1 Song of the Worldsoul
1 Thousand-Year Storm
// 3 Instant
1 Beacon of Immortality
1 Soulblast
1 Supplant Form
// 2 Planeswalker
1 Basri Ket
1 Rowan Kenrith
// 7 Sorcery
1 Chandra's Ignition
1 Channel
1 Eerie Ultimatum
1 Primal Command
1 Rite of Replication
1 Show and Tell
1 World at War
Ok. As it should be obvious, this will need some explanation. I'm going to try, but bear with me, as I have only just recently started this little adventure.
We start with the Black Lotus, Show and Tell, into Omniscience bit. Casting spells no longer requires mana, allowing us to continue freely for a bit.
Then, we drop Eidolon of Blossoms, drawing a card. We follow that with Opalescence and Enchanted Evening, drawing two more and ensuring everything that hits the field draws us a card.
Now, I struggled figuring out the most efficient way to do this, but I think dropping all the effects which only need one copy of a card to work is best to do here. Each of these will draw a card as well upon entering:
Ormos, Archive Keeper - Keeps us from decking out, bonus of getting counters
Mycosynth Lattice - Artifact permanents and the mana fixing are valuable
Hostility - We will use a damaging spell in this build, which we need to mitigate, and creating more tokens is a huge bonus
Leyline of Anticipation - Plenty of times we will want instant-speed casting
Reconnaissance - We will go to combat quite a bit and be attacking, but that is not the way we want to finish
Silver Wyvern - It will let us stack triggers how we need to later
We still have 4 cards in hand (each thing we've played since Omniscience drew a card). Cast Channel. This lets us use our life as mana of any color thanks to Mycosynth Lattice.
Cast Flameshadow Conjuring. Every nontoken permanent that hits our field now not only draws a card, it triggers a chance to copy it. Because it is animated by the Opalescence, it triggers itself. We pay the one life to copy.
Next we drop Sakashima of a Thousand Faces. We have it come in as a copy of our Flameshadow Conjuring. It triggers itself and the two copies we have in play. The important thing here is that the copies spawned off of this will have the "The 'legend rule' doesn't apply to permanents you control" ability (because of the weird way copy effects work). We use three more life to pay for those triggers, and we have 6 total copies of Flameshadow Conjuring.
We now cast Verdant Sun's Avatar, we stack the triggers so we always gain the life before paying the copy triggers, and thanks to the Opalescence, we gain life equal to the mana value instead of its base. We gain 7, pay 1, gain 14, pay 1, gain 21, pay 1, gain 28, pay 1, gain 35, pay 1, gain 42, pay 1, and finally, gain 49 life, ending with 206 life. Effective from this point forward, we will always gain far, far more life than we need to pay for pretty much everything.
Casting and resolving Arcane Adaptation next will trigger the copying effects, giving us six more copies, and letting us make everything Shamans, Allies, Wolves, Golems, Dragons, Elves, and Goblins. Now we cast Harmonic Prodigy. Because everything is a Shaman, the triggers of everything we control are increased by the number of Harmonic Prodigy copies we have, so the Flameshadow Conjuring copies each trigger twice and we end up with 13 copies of Harmonic Prodigy and a lot of life.
Doubling Season is next. When it hits, there are 6 Flameshadow Conjuring copies and 13 Harmonic Prodigy copies. This creates 84 triggers, each of which will see a previous amount of Doubling Seasons. I do not really know how many it ends up with, but I know it's large. Increasing the Doubling Seasons will generally be the most optimal way to increase the power of this deck.
At this point, we have our entire deck in our hand because of all the draw triggers. However, upon drawing the last card (and before resolving the other triggers), we want to cast Beacon of Immortality. We gain a huge amount of life, then it shuffles itself back in. Given that we only draw one card at a time, and Ormos, Archive Keeper protects us anyways (much more relevant later), we can now translate every draw trigger which isn't eaten for counters into "Double target player's life total."
Now, this is where I struggled the second time to figure out the most efficient path. I opted to drop the other two beginning setup cards here:
Thousand-Year Storm - Fairly obvious, but we want to copy the bejeezus out of our instants and sorceries
Vigor - We plan to damage our creatures a whole bunch, and we need at least two of these to save each other
Master Biomancer is next. This will cause all of our creature cards and copies of creature cards to enter with many counters on them. (Note: An animated enchantment will NOT enter with the counters because it is not a creature until it is already in play - this is why we will be adding counters to them via other means)
Joraga Warcaller is the next card. The unbelievable synergy of this with Master Biomancer cannot be understated. Given that each Joraga Warcaller entering increases the power of every Master Biomancer by the total sum of their powers multiplied by the Doubling Season copies, this means in turn each new Joraga Warcaller will enter with even more counters than that. These two cards are the crux of growth in the deck thanks to Doubling Season.
We want to start actually expanding our board with what we currently have. This is going to start getting very complicated (for me, at least). The first card we will use is Song of the Worldsoul. Now, every cast allows us to copy a buttload of things. As a general rule, the way we will choose to do so will be to leave one copy of the trigger per item we want to copy and have all the rest copy Doubling Season. We resolve the Doubling Season populates first, maximizing the amount of tokens we get of the other parts. We need the Sakashima of a Thousand Faces copies of Flameshadow Conjuring, Harmonic Prodigy, Thousand-Year Storm, Master Biomancer, Joraga Warcaller, and Verdant Sun's Avatar - a total of six of the many, many Song of the Worldsoul triggers to resolve after making Doubling Season tokens. Every other trigger will copy Doubling Season first.
Incidentally, this is the reason we have Ormos, Archive Keeper. Whenever something EtBs, we draw a card, cast Beacon of Immortality, the cast triggers Song of the Worldsoul, the populated tokens trigger draw effects, but because Beacon of Immortality is still on the stack, we get counters on Ormos, Archive Keeper instead, then stack resolves down to the Beacon of Immortality, and we resolve each next draw in the same way. Now, every draw also has the added effect of populating for however many Song of the Worldsoul triggers we have, making Doubling Season tokens and a lot of the other pieces.
We now follow that with Restoration Angel. The very important part of this card is that it cannot flicker an Angel. This is why we have to never select Angel for Arcane Adaptation (there's only seven of them anyways, and we need all seven). This stack is very weird, but it will eventually resolve to nothing.
1. Cast Restoration Angel
2. Trigger Song of the Worldsoul, populate
3. Draw triggers are created
4. Cast Beacon of Immortality
5. Trigger Song of the Worldsoul, populate
6. Ormos, Archive Keeper gets counters
7. Beacon of Immortality eventually returns to the library
8. Restoration Angel EtBs, draw triggers and flicker targets are created, all flickers target the Silver Wyvern
9. Move a flicker target to Doubling Season, resolve the flicker
10. Draw triggers are created
11. Cast Beacon of Immortality
12. Trigger Song of the Worldsoul, populate (NOTE: Populating the Restoration Angel with Beacon of Immortality on the stack will eventually run out due to having no more populate triggers)
13. Ormos, Archive Keeper gets counters
14. Beacon of Immortality returns to the library
15. Repeat steps 9-14 until all but one trigger per nontoken creature we control (depending on the current stage) have resolved
16. Repeat steps 9-14, but move the flicker targets to the rest of the board, (Eidolon of Blossoms, Song of the Worldsoul, Restoration Angel, Sakashima of a Thousand Faces copies of Flameshadow Conjuring, Harmonic Prodigy, Thousand-Year Storm, Master Biomancer, Joraga Warcaller, and Verdant Sun's Avatar are the ones we will continue repeating along with any new things we drop, but everything else currently in play needs at least one flicker to make tokens of them)
It's tricky to see, but there is no loop due to the one spell (which is being repeatedly cast) being on the stack when the populated Restoration Angel copies EtB. I think you can technically resolve this for more effect in a differnt order, but either way, the choke point keeping it from going infinite is that the Beacon of Immoratilty is on the stack for everything between draw triggers, thus never allowing you to continue without first resolving down to it and, subsequently, the next draw trigger originally created by whichever inital thing we did. If we make 50 draw triggers, for example, everything that happens in between each of them (as described above) happens with Beacon of Immortality on the stack because drawing a card doesn't trigger anything else. It is the casting of Beacon of Immortality itself that creates a cascading effect, namely steps 11-14.
The reason we have been gaining an absolutely insane amount of life is two-fold: it is our mana source and it fuels Cradle of Vitality. For each one we have, each life gain trigger is turned into counters and multiplied by a huge amount due to Doubling Season effects. We are going to choose one random token copy of Joraga Warcaller as our target. This adds an enormous amount of power to our board and makes each new creature enter with even more counters due to Master Biomancer.
To start ramping up the raw amount of triggers, we will cast Chancellor of the Forge. The tokens it creates will be base 0/0 creatures, but they enter with counters equal to the total power of the Master Biomancer copies and get an additional bonus equal to the total of all the counters on the Joraga Warcaller copies.
I decided this was the point to start setting up for the end game, so here are the next few things to add:
Sphinx of the Second Sun - We are going to create a huge amount of combat steps followed by main phases, so having each of those be another begin phase will let us use a lot of upkeep-based triggers
Iridescent Hornbeetle - We will win in the end step, and this is going to be a gigantic increaser prior to the conclusion
Hamletback Goliath - There is practically no faster way to generate counters in this deck
Towering Titan - It will effectively just add our total power multiplied many times over to the Hamletback Goliath copies
Deadbridge Chant - We stack the EtB triggers to draw first, then resolve the mill so we don't lose our Beacon of Immortality, but the important part is each upkeep, we get whatever we want back from our grave to repeat the engines we create up to that point
This next set is mostly just to increase the life gain and capitalize off of it, which will make our counters increase greatly via Cradle of Vitality:
Rhox Faithmender - It simply speeds up just how many counters we add to the Joraga Warcaller copies, in turn making our board much more powerful
Aetherflux Reservoir - By my count, it and its copies will gain life fast enough to compete with the Beacon of Immortality (and fuels it, as well) and will alow us to simply add counters to our chosen token Joraga Warcaller directly with life and Vigor in play
Loxodon Lifechanter - By spending all our life between itself (via Channel) and Aetherflux reservoir, we can go from 1 life to our total toughness multiplied many times over
Archangel of Thune - It can't be flickered by Restoration Angel, but the sheer volume of triggers from Verdant Sun's Avatar, Aetherflux Reservoir, and the Beacon of Immortality casts will allow us to add an absurd amount of counters to everything, including the animated noncreature things
Kazuul Warlord - It doesn't really interact necessarily with the life gain, but this is a good spot to drop it so we can use EtBs as well as life gain to trigger an effect like similar to Cathars' Crusade (which we do not use)
At this point, I think it's a good place to start building for the combat steps we will be taking. It should be noted the reason we chose to use Sakashima of a Thousand Faces was for the next few cards, which include a few legendaries we want to copy.
Tanazir Quandrix is absolutely beautiful for both its EtB trigger and its attack trigger. I will explain a bit when we get there. All the doubling effects will target our special Joraga Warcaller token.
Ardent Speaker will let us effectively cast any instant or sorcery from our graveyard on attack. Because it does not target, we can choose the same spells over and over, so long as we stack things correctly. In general, it should resolve by putting something on the bottom, exilng both Beacon of Immortality and the card we chose to its effect, and Leyline of Anticipation will let us cast both using life from the Channel/Mycosynth Lattice synergy.
Rionya, Fire Dancer is a fairly obvious choice to translate our spell storm count into raw token counts. It effectively acts like Thousand-Year Storm, but turns the copies into tokens of our permanents instead.
Ghired, Conclave Exile not only creates a token on entering, it populates on attack. Very powerful in this setup.
Pathbreaker Ibex translates the highest power we control to everything we control - several times over.
The next part is creating a very strong way to use activated abilities with an ever increasing set of pwoer behind them. The first card in this sequence is Rowan Kenrith. It will enter with far more than enough counters to use the final ability, allowing us to copy activated abilities a huge amount of times. Because we will normally (more or less) resolve a stack to its end, every time we can, we will activate every unactivated Rowan Kenrith we can, getting as many emblems as we can. It should be noted, each one in turn will increase the number of emblems we get, as planeswalker abilities are activated abilities.
The next will be The Chain Veil. This will allow us to basically use the final ability of each Rowan Kenrith and our one other planeswalker all the way down to 0 once we have a few other things in play (if it doesn't already).
Now that we can use activated abilities more effectively, we want to get a few of them going. The best one in this deck is going to be Master of the Hunt. Because we have at least two copies of Vigor and everything is a Wolf, it effectively reads, "Target creature gains counters equal to the collective power of all creatures you control other than this one. Spread counters equal to that creature's new power amongst any creatures you control except the target and this creature." This means our token Joraga Warcaller we've been pumping is going to be very, very large, but we now have another Joraga Warcaller that will be even bigger.
We now have two concerns. The tokens copied by populate triggers do not have haste and we have no way to untap our creatures. Karrthus, Tyrant of Jund solves both problems because all of our creatures are Dragons, as well. Each EtB will untap all of our creatures multiple times and, just by existing in play, everything has haste.
Gnostro, Voice of the Crags gives us an activated ability with the option to either gain life or add counters to something based on our total storm count.
Hobgoblin Bandit Lord is an anthem effect and has the ability to add counters to a target equal to the number of things we have in play.
We can add a few more cards to the field now before we get to the real meat of the deck's combo:
Sphinx-Bone Wand - Makes every recast of Beacon of Immortality also do a very hefty amount of damage/adding of counters to our new big Joraga Warcaller
Precursor Golem - This will be very powerful multiplier of our instants and sorceries
Basri Ket - This will create an incredible amount of triggers at the beginning of every combat we will take
Arcbound Ravager - The last permanent in the deck, it is our only sacrifice outlet and it can help distribute counters as well as generate them
Rite of Replication will target a Golem token created by the Precursor Golems. It will be kicked, of course. The resulting triggers will multiply the board many, many times. The reason we target the random Golem token is because it will be the last thing copied and it is by far the lease useful thing to be multiplied.
Supplant Form will allow us to perform a one time super multiplier to our board while also letting us recast all of our permanents again. We should have at least one token copy of the first few things we cast, including Omniscience and Leyline of Anticipation, if not, we'll make them now. This will let us respond to each Precursor trigger by flashing in something and triggering everything yet again. Because of the Silver Wyvern lets us redirect its targeted effects and spells, the best way to do things is typically stack every trigger and copied spell onto it and then allow things to resolve, move the target over to the same object again, then repeat until all triggers and spells are gone. This will get very complicated now that we have tokens being populated, because for each Silver Wyvern, we get a copy of our targeted spells per Precursor Golem.
We will now activate all activated abilities we can and sacrifice every nontoken permanent other than Opalescence to Arcbound Ravager. This includes the nontoken copy of Arcbound Ravager, which will donate its counters to the Joraga Warcaller we are pumping. The reason we do this is to follow all that up with Eerie Ultimatum, returning everything in our graveyard other than instants and sorceries to the battlefield, triggering everything again. Before the next copy resolves, we will sacrifice these permanents again, activating every ability we can from them each time. The planeswalkers will not be able to react, but we will have so many by the time its all done that we can just activate their abilities for a very impressive number of times. Either way, Eerie Ultimatum will basically let us redo our entire combo thus far multiple times over, each starting where the last one ended.
If you are counting, we only have 4 cards left to work with. The Beacon of Immortality is in the deck as the only card in that place. One we will be the very last card we cast, so we will get to that in a bit. The other three will include Chandra's Ignition. Because we have Hostility in play, we do not kill the opponent, but get a bunch of tokens instead and our creatures simply get bigger due to Vigor. Furthermore, we will also target the Silver Wyvern with every copy we can so we can redirect as necessary. I don't really know which creature is the biggest each time one of these resolves, but between all the Precursor Golems and such, we should be able to always target the biggest thing in play with any of the copies targeting a Silver Wyvern.
The next card will be World at War. This will generate an absolutely enormous amount of combat steps and main phases because of our ridiculous spell storm count. Each combat phase will create a huge influx of repetition due to the Ardent Dustspeaker tirgger, allowing us to copy the World at War many, many more times. Each one of those main phases will trigger the Sphinx of the Second Sun abilities. Each of those will trigger our upkeep abilities. The goal here will now be to copy that spell as many times as possible in this main phase, the combat phase, and during the first postcombat main phase. After that, the card has no effect, preventing us from going infinite.
The last card we have other than our finisher is Primal Command. The modes useful to us will be to shuffle our graveyard back into our deck and the creature tutor. The life is mostly irrelevant compared to what we already gain, and the only legal target for the noncreature permanent to bounce is our Opalescence, which would be bad for us to lose. After casting it we sacrifice all our nontoken permanents again (except Opalescence) and let the first one shuffle and find Harmomic Prodigy. We flash it in, creating the draw triggers to get everything else back out of our deck again, recast everything, sacrifice it all again, use Eerie Ultimatum to repeat everything again, cast the World at War, and finally repeat until all copies of Primal Command are complete. Activate every ability we can, starting with the Rowan Kenrith emblems.
We have only our finisher in hand. But, we are not ready for it. We start the first combat. There are so many triggers here, I'm not sure I even correctly got all of them. We need one of the Rionya, Fire Dancer abilities to resolve first, however. We need the ability to draw and cast the Beacon of Immortality to populate the Karrthus, Tyrant of Jund tokens so we can fully untap. From here on out, we will generally want to leave our stuff untapped after all triggers are considered. Rionya, Fire Dancer triggers should almost exclusively copy Doubling Season.
We attack with every single thing with a trigger. The Ardent Dustspeaker triggers will put Primal Command below the Beacon of Immortality, exile both, and we will respond to each subsequent one with the whole process we did before. We will also cast the Channel and Show and Tell simply for the storm count and the opponent can drop the lands if they like, but they'll just die to being animated 0/0 creatures. As a general preference, we want to try resolve the World at War near last to get as many possible phases in, because we have a limited time frame to actually cast it. We still have Ghired, Conclave Exile triggers to resolve, choosing to make as many Doubling Season copies as possible before copying the rest of the important parts of the board. The Tanazir Quandrix triggers should resolve next, stacked such that we resolve them in a chain that loops back onto itself with the copies of the abilities from the Harmonic Prodigy copies. Because of the way counters and the bonuses from the Joraga Warcallers work with these abilities, we can stack the power pretty high. After those are complete, we finish with the Pathbreaker Ibex triggers outright multiplying everything.
We use Reconnaissance to completely remove all our attacking creatures from combat. All we wanted were the triggers.
When we move to our first postcombat main phase, we get a large number of triggers from the Sphinx of the Second Sun copies. We activate as many things as we can. This should Rowan Kenrith emblems and Basri Ket emblems first, and the others after that because we will get a pretty incredible amount of untap steps before our second combat. There aren't any spells we can cast right now aside from our finisher, but that's fine. We need to finish every other phase we have in this turn. The most important thing is that this is the last time World at War matters. We have no more ways to generate new combat phases or main phases.
However, we will get a pretty silly increase for each of those phases we actually do get. In each upkeep we get, the Deadbridge Chant will return Primal Command to our hand, which we will use to repeat everything. We will now start casting World at War as early as possible simply to increase the storm count, alongside Channel and Show and Tell (which do also do nothing but offer more triggers). Each upkeep also triggers the Master of the Wild Hunt token generation.
Once we repeat the whole thing each phase until we finally get to the end step, we have one final trick. All the counters we've been placing on things will make the Iridescent Hornbeetle triggers produce such a huge amount of creatures, each getting all the new counters, triggering everything again, and making each subsequent Iridescent Hornbeetle even more impressive.
With every tirgger done, every spell cast, and every ability activated possible, our final spell will be Soulblast. It will take every single thing in play other than Opalescence, add it together, and do the damage. Because it sacrifices ALL creatures you control, nothing will trigger off of it. It just resolves and blows the opponent's life total away.
Ok, well that's my deck. Please tell me what you see. I'd love to try fixing it. I'm working on a commander/EDH variant, but that's much, much harder. Thank you guys!