I just noticed: Do the spells triggered by Precursor Golem actually trigger Psychic Battle? There seems to be some debate on this question, but I believe the answer is no. So, we need to switch to Grip of Chaos. A pity - I was hoping we could achieve our best deck without relying on truly ridiculous luck.
Now, Grip of Chaos does trigger Psychic Battle, so if we find a way to save a card, we can add a layer while still keeping Words of Wisdom at the end. (while being able to avoid ridiculous luck)
EDIT: Whoops, we don't get a final layer that way - we need to untap with Reality Spasm.
EDIT: I think I found an improvement for the start:
We have the same starting hand and mill, eventually drawing 10 cards:
Play Volcanic Island and tap it. (1 blue, 1 green, 10 colorless, 4 life)
Play Guildmage.
Play Vedalken Orrery.
Play Spellweaver Volute on Broken Ambitions.
Play Acorn Harvest, triggering Spellweaver Volute.
Spellweaver Volute gets placed on Words of Wisdom.
Use Izzet Guildmage to copy Broken Ambitions. (1 green, 8 colorless, 4 life)
Two Broken Ambitions mill eight cards.
March of the Machines
Grip of Chaos
Cowardice
Flash of Defiance
Flash of Defiance
Kiora's Dismissal
Rebuild
Evacuation
Play Spellweaver Helix, exiling Replenish and a Flash of Defiance.
Play Flash of Defiance, triggering Volute and Helix.
The Helix trigger resolves, and Replenish brings our enchantments to the battlefield.
The Volute trigger resolves, and Words of Wisdom gets placed on the stack. Do not resolve it yet!
Spellweaver Volute gets placed on Kiora's Dismissal.
Flashback Acorn's Harvest, triggering Spellweaver Volute. (7 colorless, 1 life)
Kiora's Dismissal is cast, triggering Grip of Chaos four times and Cowardice five times.
Spellweaver Volute is placed on Rebuild.
Bounce Copy Enchantment five times, getting 6, 12, 24, 50, and 100 Dual Natures. (Copying Dual Nature the last two times)
Play Precursor Golem, getting 100 token copies and 202 vanilla Golem tokens.
Resolve the destruction trigger for Dual Nature, destroying 98 token copies of Dual Nature. This triggers a bunch of "destroy all tokens created by this Dual Nature" triggers; leave those on the stack.
Cast Terashi's Grasp, getting 101 Precursor Golem triggers and a Spellweaver Volute trigger.
Do nothing with the Volute trigger.
Resolve the first Precursor Golem trigger. We get 302 copies of Terashi's Grasp. Cowardice triggers and bounces all but one Precursor Golem, including the original Precursor Golem.
We get 4 Grip of Choas triggers per copy, for 1208 Grip of Chaos triggers.
The first trigger we use to bounce Azorius Signet. Replay and get 100 token copies.
Use the second trigger to bounce March of the Machines.
Tap the 101 Azorios Signets to get 101 blue mana, so that we have 108 mana in total.
Use that mana to copy Kiora's Dismissal 34 times. The first Kiora's Dismissal generates five bounces.
The first bounce returns Copy Enchantment; all our Dual Nature tokens are already destroyed.
We replay and bounce four more times, getting 2, 4, 8, and 16 copies of Dual Nature.
We replay Copy Enchantment one more time, copying Grip of Chaos to get 19 copies in total.
We resolve the second Kiora's Dismissal, getting 20 bounces. We wind up with 16 * 2^19 Dual Natures and 16 * 2^19 + 2 Grip of Chaoses; this is more than 2^^4 for both.
The remaining 32 Kiora's Dismissal increases the numbers to 2^^36; leave one Kiora's Dismissal bounce on the stack.
Replay March of the Machines.
Resolve the next Terashi's Grasp Grip of Chaos trigger to bounce Azorius Signet.
Replay Azorius Signet and get more than 2^^36 copies.
Copy another Kiora's Dismissal, generating more than 2^^37 Dual Natures and Grip of Chaoses, and bringing March of the Machines back to our hand.
Tap the Azorius Signets, generating more than 2^^36 mana. Copy Kiora's Dismissal more than 2^^36 times, generating more than 2^^2^^36 Dual Natures and Grip of Chaoses, or more than 2^^^4.
Repeat the process for the remaining 1205 Grip of Chaos triggers, increasing our numbers to more than 2^^^1209, or more than 2^^^^4.
Replay Precursor Golem, getting more than 2^^^^4 copies and vanilla Golems.
Repeat the process for the remaining 100 triggers of Precursor Golem, getting more than 2^^^^104 Dual Natures and Grip of Chaoses in the end.
Make sure to gain some life at the end.
Resolve the "destroy all tokens created by this Dual Nature" triggers, destroying nothing useful. (We already lost the Psychic Battles from those Dual Natures.)
Play Reality Spasm with X=1, getting 2^^^^104 Golem triggers.
Do the same procedure as for the Terashi's Grasp, resulting in more than 2^^^^2^^^^104 Dual Natures.
Remember to bounce the original Consecrated Sphinx and the original Spellweaver Helix towards the end of the procedure, and use a Reality Spasm copy to untap Volcanic Island.
Tap the Volcanic Island for a red mana.
Play Helix, exiling Terashi's Grasp and Flash of Defiance.
Flashback Flash of Defiance, triggering Helix and Volute.
Do nothing with the Volute trigger.
The Spellweaver Helix casts Terashi's Grasp.
We repeat the previous precedure yet another time, taking the number to 2^^^^2^^^^2^^^^104.
Cast Consecrated Sphinx, getting more than 2^^^^2^^^^2^^^^104 copies.
Resolve the Words of Wisdom.
We don't have enough Flash of Defiances for that start. After triggering the Volute with Words of Wisdom the Flash of Defiance we cast from hand remains on the stack until after we resolve the Words of Wisdom. But a second Volute is already exiled from the Helix we just used, so we have only one Flash of Defiance left in the graveyard and can't both exile it for the second Helix and flash it back to trigger said Helix. Maybe that is fixable somehow, but I haven't found anything.
Hmm, yes. We could try flashbacking Acorn Harvest prior to casting Flash of Defiance, but then the Flash of Defiance would be responsible for putting Kiora's Dismissal on the stack, and it would still get stuck. Basically, if we don't have Kiora's Dismissal in our hand, then we need to trigger Words of Wisdom to put Spellweaver Volute on Kiora's Dismissal, and so two of our sorceries will end up getting stuck on the stack. Only one of those sorceries can be Acorn Harvest; the other would need to be something we need.
EDIT: I think it is possible to get to 2^^^^2^^^^2^^^^104 if we go with your starting ten but replace Reality Spasm with another Flash of Defiance. Then we can use the Volcanic Island to tap for red at the start, and just mill four cards. The one problem: We can't bounce Consecrated Sphinx to get more copies! And since we only mill four cards, there's no room to get Evacuation, say.
We could also replace Volcanic Island with Flash of Defiance instead. This winds up working out much like your sequence, and also gets 2^^^^2^^^^2^^^^6.
If we had just one more card, we could mill four and save Broken Ambitions. Then we could repeatedly cast Flash of Defiance and counter it, and we can get lots of red mana from Reality Spasm and lots of life from Terashi's Grasp. But, there's no card we can cut, as far as I can see.
EDIT: We could forget all the sorceries if we could insert another creature in the sequence, so that Reality Spasm could untap a hasted token of the creature, and the creature could bounce Azorius Signet. By my count, that should be five Knuth arrows. But, the best I could do was eleven cards again:
Kiora's Dismissal
Izzet Guildmage
Vedalken Orrery
Precursor Golem
Reality Spasm
Metallurgeon
Mimic Vat
March of the Machines
Grip of Chaos
Cowardice
Terashi's Grasp
EDIT: This may be premature, since there still may be changes to the deck, but I've started writing the article again. I just put up the section on the Metallurgeon here.
Of course, the Getting Started section is now all wrong - I'll probably write that up at the end.
It's great to read another part of the article. Nice work. And yeah, waiting to write up the start until it is more optimized is probably for the best
Here's another take on the start, where we draw a second Flash of Defiance in order to recur Terashi's Grasp one more time. Sadly I wasn't able to get Kiora's Dismissal on the stack for the first of those, so it is not quite another set of quad arrows.
Play Volcanic Island and tap it for blue.
Play Guildmage, get tokens.
Play Vedalken Orrery.
Play Precursor Golem, get tokens.
Play Terashi's Grasp, targeting a Golem token. Volute and Golems trigger and we resolve Volute first to cast Broken Ambitions targeting the Terashi's. Volute ends up on Words of Wisdom. Use Guildmage to create a copy of Broken Ambitions. ( 1 green, 8 colorless, 4 life)
Mill 8 cards: March of the Machines, Grip of Chaos, Cowardice, Flash of Defiance, Kiora's Dismissal , Acorn Harvest , ? .
Leave the Precursor triggers on the stack.
Play Helix, exile a Flash of Defiance and Replenish.
Play Flash of Defiance. Helix and Volute trigger. Volute triggers again from casting the Replenish. Choose to not cast the spell on the Volutes.
The enchantments end up on the Battlefield.
We resolve the first Precursor trigger and get 11 copies of Terashi's targeting our Golems. Cowardice triggers and we will end up bouncing them all. We also trigger a total of 44 Grip of Chaos.
We use all of them to bounce Copy Enchantment. Use 43 of them to double the dual Nature count to 3*2^43 and get Grip of Chaoses on the last bounce.
Replay the Precursor Golem and get tokens. Then resolve the second Precursor trigger. Get over 2^90 Grip of Chaos triggers. Use those to double Dual Natures and top of on Grip of Chaos. New count: ~2^2^90
Repeat for third and fourth trigger, going to 2^2^2^2^90 > 2^^8
Towards the end let a Copy Enchantment token enter as Volute, enchanting the Kiora's Dismissal. Also bounce Azorius Signet.
Flash back the Acorn Harvest, triggering the Volutes. (7 colorless, 1 life)
Resolve the Kiora's Volute first. After using most of the Grip of Chaos triggers to double the Dual Nature count again (going to 2^^9) we replay Azorius Signet and use the last of the Kiora's bounces to bounce March of the Machines. Then we tap all the Signet tokens to get 2^^9 mana.
Use all that mana to create copies to Kiora's Dismissal, going to 2^^2^^9 Dual Natures.
Play Precursor Golem, get tokens.
Cast Reality Spasm with X=1, targeting a golem. We get 2^^2^^9 Golem triggers. When we resolve these we get a bunch of Psychic Battle triggers that can each be usesd to bounce Signet and repeat the process above.
We end up with ~2^^^^(2^^2^^9) Dual Natures.
Towards the end bounce Sphinx, bounce Helix and let a Reality Spasm copy resolve on Volcanic Island. Tap the Volcanic for red.
Play Helix, exile Terashi's Grasp and Flash of Defiance.
Play Flash of Defiance. We choose not to cast anything with the Volute triggers from this one.
When we cast Tereshi's Grasp from under the Helix we target a golem and get ~2^^^^(2^^2^^9) Golem triggers. When we resolve these we get a bunch of Psychic Battle triggers that can each be usesd to bounce Signet and repeat the process above. Before we resolve the next Golem trigger we also bounce and replay the Precursor Golem.
We end up with ~2^^^^2^^^^(2^^2^^9) Dual Natures.
Towards the end let a Terashi's resolve to gain at least 3 life.
Flash back Flash of Defiance and repeat the above again. We end up with ~2^^^^2^^^^2^^^^(2^^2^^9) Dual Natures.
Play Sphinx, get tokens.
Resolve the Words of Wisdom Volute (originally triggered by Acorn Harvest).
We get 2^^^^2^^^^2^^^^(2^^2^^9) draws, which is more than 2^^^^^5.
I'm still thinking about ways we could get repeated Flash of Defiance Flashbacks, for that 6 arrow start. In the above sequence we could replace one of the Flash of Defiance draws with Mirror of Fate to get cards out of exile, but I haven't managed to get going without losing access to Broken Ambitions. Although I seem to get reeeally close.
Great, getting better and better! Minor correction: 2^2^2^2^90 < 2^^8, so the final lower bound is 2^^^^2^^^^2^^^^(2^^2^^8).
Yeah, I too am really close to keeping access to Broken Ambitions. Drawing Mirror of Fate seems unnecessary, since if we can have Broken Ambitions around to mill cards, we can have it around to counter our spells.
Play Volcanic Island and tap it for blue. (1 green, 1 blue, 10 colorless, 4 life)
Play Guildmage.
Play Vedalken Orrery.
Play Precursor Golem.
Play Spellweaver Volute, enchanting Broken Ambitions.
Play Flash of Defiance, triggering Volute.
Resolve the Volute to cast Broken Ambitions.
Volute gets placed on Words of Wisdom.
Use Guildmage to create a copy of Broken Ambitions. (1 green, 8 colorless, 4 life)
Resolve the copy, and counter Flash of Defiace.
Play Spellweaver Helix, imprinting a Flash of Defiance and Replenish.
Play Flash of Defiance, triggering Helix and Volute.
Do nothing with the Volute trigger.
Resolve the Helix trigger and bring March of the Machines, Grip of Chaos, and Cowardice to the battlefield.
Cast Terashi's Grasp, triggering four Precursor Golems.
We resolve the first Precursor trigger and get 11 copies of Terashi's targeting our Golems. Cowardice triggers and we will end up bouncing them all. We also trigger a total of 44 Grip of Chaos.
We use all of them to bounce Copy Enchantment. Use 43 of them to double the dual Nature count to 3*2^43 and get Grip of Chaoses on the last bounce.
Replay the Precursor Golem and get tokens. Then resolve the second Precursor trigger. Get over 2^90 Grip of Chaos triggers. Use those to double Dual Natures and top of on Grip of Chaos. New count: ~2^2^90
Repeat for third and fourth trigger, going to 2^2^2^2^90 > 2^^7.
Towards the end, let a Copy Enchantment enter as a copy of Spellweaver Volute, enchanting Kiora's Dismissal.
Use the fourth to last Grip of Chaos to bounce Precursor Golem.
Use the third to last Grip of Chaos to bounce Spellweaver Helix.
Use the second to last Grip of Chaos to bounce Azorius Signet.
Play Azorius Signet and get more than 2^^7 copies.
Use the last grip of Chaos trigger to bounce March of the Machines.
Tap the Azorius Signets for more than 2^^7 blue mana.
Cast March of the Machines.
Copy Broken Ambitions to counter March of the Machines.
Do not let March of the Machines, be countered.
Mill four cards: Acorn's harvest, Flash of Defiance, ?, ?
Flashback Acorn's Harvest.
Trigger Spellweaver Volute, casting Kiora's Dismissal.
Resolve the Grip of Chaos triggers to get more than 2^^8 Dual Natures.
Spend nearly all of our blue mana to copy Kiora's Dismissal, getting more than 2^^2^^7 Dual Natures.
Cast Reality Spasm, with X=1. Get more than 2^^2^^7 Precursor Golem triggers.
Do a lot of bouncing for more Dual Natures and mana, but in the end change the all the targets to Volcanic Island.
Untap and tap Volcanic Island more than 2^^^^(2^^2^^7) times, for red mana.
Also remember to bounce Consecrated Sphinx.
Play Spellweaver Helix, imprinting a Flash of Defiance and Terashi's Grasp.
Repeatedly do the following:
Flashback Flash of Defiance. Helix and Volutes trigger.
Resolve the Helix to cast Terashi's Grasp.
Activate Broken Ambitions to counter Flash of Defiance.
Resolve Terashi's Grasp, taking X Dual Natures to more than 2^^^^X Dual Natures.
Use a couple copies to gain life and mana as needed.
In the end, we wind up with more than 2^^^^^(2^^^^(2^^(2^^7))) Dual Natures.
On the last Flash of Defiance, put Words of Wisdom on the stack below Terashi's Grasp.
Replay Consecrated Sphinx, getting more than 2^^^^^(2^^^^(2^^(2^^7))) copies.
Resolve Words of Wisdom.
We reach 2^^^^^(2^^^^(2^^(2^^7))) Consecrated Sphinxes.
EDIT: It's too bad Pull from Eternity brings the exiled card to the graveyard rather than the library, or else we could mill it instead of having to draw Mirror of Fate.
EDIT: I thought of a way to save Show and Tell: If we replace Titania, Protector of Argoth with say Expedition Map, then we are forced to use Show and Tell in order to put the land back onto the battlefield, so we can't use it for Fountain of Youth instead. But, that would squeeze out Terashi's Grasp. I don't know how to fix it except to add another Flash of Defiance. That would make the decks even, so the winner would be which one gave the better start. The Replenish deck looks to get the better start.
EDIT: What if we replace Terashi's Grasp with say Lifegift? Could that make Show and Tell work?
EDIT: Wait a minute. How does the infinite for Show and Tell work? We can resolve spells in the order Worldfire / Show and Tell / Retract to get one more use of a Fountain of Youth, so we wind up with one extra life. But, our flashback spells use 3 life, so we need to get to gain three extra life to do anything profitable. I don't see how to get that three extra life - if we flashback Flash of Defiance to cast the same three spells again, we are back to 2 life.
Yeah, requiring it for the landdrop would definitely make Show and Tell safe. It would only work if a destroyed Spellweaver Helix uses last known information to cast its spells even if the cards have since moved from exile, as we'd need to keep both Show and Tell and Worldfire on the stack for each transition; even after the Helix is destroyed by higher transitions and the spells reexiled on another Helix to put those higher transitions on the stack again.
We can't resolve the Show and Tell immediately because then we won't actually have the land in hand when we put multiple transitions on the stack while building the hyper^2stage back up.
For the same reason Lifegift won't work. We just can't always put the land into play at the moment we put the transition on the stack.
How the infinite works has, on the surface, an easy answer: We can use even a single extra life to leave a Fountain of Youth activation on the stack below the transition. The next time we will have two extra life and keep two activations on the stack. The next time we have 3 extra life and get an extra Hyperstage transition. Even if that didn't work, we can put Vedalken Orrery into play with Show and Tell and then just cast the fountains.
But let's look at it a bit closer: If we use Show and Tell instead of Terashi's Grasp on a Helix we will not have any extra life for the higher hyperstage. That means we can't cast any instants there. As we have concluded when looking at Mox Emerald that means we don't naturally gain any life back from the Flash of Defiance and the 3 life we can gain via Show and Tell are all that we get. That means we barely break even on the ressources for Flash of Defiance.
That is actually the same standard as we had for Acorn Harvest before we limited green mana. So the only thing that is required for this to not go infinite is the need to use some required Metallurgeon activations somewhere along the line. If we need them, then we also slowly consume hyperstage below the transition to keep them around.
Currently we need Metallurgeon to generate green via Copper Myr, which means if we want to go infinite we can't use any instants triggered by Acorn Harvest. With that restriction I don't think there is a way to keep Wormfang Behemoth around through repeated Worldfires.
So it might actually be safe to just use Show and tell again and we free up one card slot from the start.
I am however not very confident in that conclusion. Especially with Terashi's Grasp around to potentially target Copper Myr or Metallurgeon, there might be some way to go infinite via mixing up transitions with Terashi's Grasp and transitions with Show and Tell. If we go back to Harmony of Nature I'd be more comfortable, but would still like to see if there is some stricter argument against the infinite.
I think that is a very good point. In particular, if we don't cast Terashi's Grasp in the higher hyperstage, then we can't cast Acorn Harvest, so we can't cast Evacuation, so we can't bring Wormfang Behemoth back to our hand if we try to use it to exile our hand.
EDIT: Well, we could try to handle the preparation for Worldfire in the lower hyperstage. But, I don't believe that works out. We would have to cast Wormfang Behemoth, then flashback Acorn Harvest as a response. But, we spend our 3 life this way, and as we have seen we can't get an extra 3 uses out of the Fountain of Youths when we do this. So we can't actually build another stage and use it for the higher hyperstage. We can build a higher stage (even 2) and just resolve them like we were in the first hyperstage, but that doesn't go infinite.
So I've been thinking about it and without Terashi's Grasp we should have a clear argument against going infinite:
We require Arcorn Harvest to correctly time instants to use Wormfang Behemoth -> Copper Myr needs artifact targeting to produce green -> we need to consume ressources from a hyperstage below to keep Metallurgeon around.
But Terashi's Grasp invalidates that chain and I think it just goes infinite - whether we have Show and Tell or not:
Play Metallurgeon to get Bloodbond March triggers.
Cast Flash of Defiance. Use Terashi's to destroy Metallurgeon and put it under Mimic Vat. Tap Vat to get a token.
Play Copper Myr, destroy it with Metallurgeon, get myr token, return myr with bloodbond march.
Use a Batttle Cry triggered by the Flash of defiance to untap metallurgeon. use it to bounce the myr.
Use another Battle Bry to untap the token and repeat that process to create green mana until you we run out of Battle Cries.
Do normal transitiony stuff to resolve Worldfire and return Metallurgeon to the Battlefield with Bloodbond March.
Cast another Flash of Defiance. This time use Terashi's to bounce Metallurgeon. After doing normal transitiony stufgf to resolve Worldfire again, we are right were we started.
Along the way we had plenty of extra Grip of Chaos triggers to increase our numbers, soooo... infinite.
So, time to think about the start again! Using Words of Wisdom would be ideal, if we can get it started. If we can't, then probably Selvala's Enforcer?
EDIT: So, without being able to get many draws from Consecrated Sphinx, I guess our goal in the opening is to mill as many of our cards that we can use from our graveyard as we can, while redrawing as few cards as we can. We have 15 instants/sorceries/lands, so that gives us a potential of 15 drawings of Reality Spasm. But, we definitely have to Show and Tell, and probably a few others, like Evacuation and Kiora's Dismissal. I'm uncertain whether or not we need to cast Worldfire prior to the ending Reality Spasms... hopefully not. If we can get away with just casting Show and Tell, Kiora's Dismissal, and Evacuation, and go from there to the Reality Spasms, then we can draw Reality Spasm 12 times. We need to wind up milling 11 instants/sorceries/lands and no others - hopefully we can manage this with appropriate usage of Mirror of Fate and Spellweaver Helix. The biggest question is getting the mana to get started.
Cast Grip of Chaos, Cowardice, March of the Machines, and Vedalken Orrery.
Cast Kiora's Dismissal, getting 7 Grip of Chaos triggers and 8 bounces.
Get 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 Dual Natures after the first five bounces.
After the sixth bounce, get 13 more Dual Natures, 18 more Grip of Chaoses, and an Opalescence.
Play the Azorius Keyrune, get 45 Dual Nature tokens.
Bounce March of the Machines and Opalescence with the last two Grip of Chaos triggers.
Play Evacuation, bounce Selvala's Enforcer back to our hand.
Play Selvala's Enforcer, get 45 Dual Nature triggers and eventually draw 46 more cards.
I think this isn't too bad. We do need to draw Broken Ambitions later, so we wind up drawing for instants/sorceries, reducing the number of Reality Spasm draws to 11. I don't think there are any problems from here on out.
Play Titania, Protector of Argoth.
Bring Taiga onto the battlefield.
Play Vedalken Orrery.
Cast Evacuation, bringing Selvala's Enforcer and all our enchantments back to our hand.
Play out our enchantments, getting 6 Dual Natures and 7 Grip of Chaoses.
The problem: We only have one Spellweaver Volute, so if we try to flashback Flash of Defiance, we can only get trigger one of Evacuation or Kiora's Dismissal. Obviously we need another Evacuation, but without Kiora's Dismissal we only get 7 more Selvala's Enforcers, not enough, and then Evacuation is exiled. We can only afford to flashback one sorcery. So, we need to draw another sorcery, and we can only draw 11 Reality Spasms again.
With one more card, we could draw all of Vedalken Orrery, Grip of Chaos and Cowardice, and we should be golden. As it is, we need to decide which card to drop. Let's try without Vedalken.
We cast Kiora's Dismissal. We can bounce up to seven things, but we can't cast any non-instants in between. If we bounce Copy Enchantment, then Dual Nature destruction tokens will trigger, and we will lose all our Dual Nature tokens. I don't think we can possibly get enough Dual Nature tokens to allow Selvala's Enforcer to get us to the Reality Spasms. So this doesn't work out so well, and we will need at least one more sorcery.
What if we keep Vedalken Orrery, but give up our Grip of Chaos. Then, Kiora's Dismissal can only bounce one thing. It might as well be Copy Enchantment, but we get Dual Nature destruction triggers again. We can try to respond to the Dual Nature triggers. We can then replay Copy Enchantment and get five token copies, for which we can have one copy Spellweaver Volute and the other four copy Dual Nature. We now have nine Dual Natures. We next flashback Flash of Defiance, and trigger the Spellweaver Volutes on both Kiora's Dismissal and Evacuation. If we don't bounce Opalescence, we will lose all our progress, so that seems like the natural thing to bounce. So, we wind up casting Evacuation and then replaying Selvala's Enforcer for 10 card draws. Not enough, so this doesn't work either.
So, I'm not seeing a way yet to get 12 Reality Spasms. Am I missing something?
Why wouldn't 10 draws be enough? Seems plenty to get in a Mirror of Fate, mill Evacuation again and recast Selvala's Enforcer. As long as we don't need to draw extra instants/sorceries/lands to continue it makes no difference how often we play Enforcer.
Although one thing you don't seem to address is that Azorius Signet doesn't give us mana because we don't have any in the pool to begin with. We need to get the land on the battlefield and tapped before we generate any mana through it, which means we can only start flashing stuff back after we used Reality Spasm to untap the land. Still, the start where we draw Evacuation and Kiora's Dismissal looks very doable. Not sure about the variations where we try to mill one of those instead.
Also, don't forget that we can play Selvala's Enforcer any time between Dual Nature triggers, so if we want to draw 30 cards, but can get up to 64 Dual Natures, we just play the Enforcer before we get all Dual Natures. It seems way more effective to replay Enforce later instead of sacrificing the potential of combo now.
__
It does look like we can mill Evacuation again, but I don't see a way to get the mana for another flashback spell. So, we would need to draw another sorcery, which would drop that opening to 11 Reality Spasms as well. I was just checking the latter three openings to see if they get 12 Reality Spasms; it seems that they can still get going and get 11 Reality Spasms, so they are all in the running for best opening. (Although the first two look better to me)
I replaced Azorius Signet with Azorius Keyrune for precisely the reason you mention. Seems like the Keyrune should work just as well.
Yeah, this is assuming the Kithkin Mourncaller / World at War ending. Getting a full layer more seems hard; perhaps if we added Winding Constrictor and two cards that used counters? But, that would be unlikely to work because of Worldfire. Besides that, the only ways to get double layers per card was either to use Archangel of Thune, which doesn't work because life total is already used, or double up on card usage, either with Boon Reflection for the life totals of both players, or with damage bouncers for both 1-2 damage and 3+ damage (for Pain Magnification). The latter seems undoable with just five cards. Oh, and there's Precursor Golem; this seems like the most promising. To get an extra layer, we probably need to use it on more than one instant/sorcery.
Otherwise, the ideal ending would be four layers ending in Consecrated Sphinx / Words of Wisdom. This seems doable, but I haven't found anything yet. It's too bad that Indomitable Creativity ending didn't work out, although we can't use red mana at the end anymore. We do have colorless mana available now, so we could throw in something like Kozilek's Pathfinder. But, how to generate colorless mana? As far as I know, there isn't a colorless version of Black Lotus.
So, is there a way to stick something in between Reality Spasm and Consecrated Sphinx? We could make it a two or three card transition if need be. But we need to draw something that gets an extra usage out of Reality Spasm... I don't know how it could be safe unless it was an X instant/sorcery or a 0 costing artifact/enchantment that you had to sacrifice. I don't see any good candidates from those categories; Diabolic Revelation isn't worth a layer by itself. Should Reality Spasm be replaced? It does seem to be very good, allowing us to get that initial hasted token and still getting a layer, with Precursor Golem bumping it to two. Can we move Consecrated Sphinx and/or Words of Wisdom further down? We would then need some way to refill the opponent's library, and it looks like we would lose a layer.
How about squeezing in something in between Minion of Tevesh Szat and Reality Spasm? This seems like it has some potential, but I'm not sure what could work. I thought about Minion of Leshrac, but it can be targeted by Godtoucher, and anyway doesn't seem to get a layer.
So yeah, I'm can't see anything better to do with the extra card currently.
Oh sorry, I didn't notice the change to Azorius Keyrune. You are correct, that should work. A way to get mana for another flashback spell would be Reality Spasm. We can't make full use of the first cast anyway, since the Minion of Tevesh Szats Bloodbond March triggers will be below all Precursor Golem triggers on the Reality Spasm. So we should be able to take advantage of a few untaps without throwing the whole Reality Spasm value away.
Cast Vedalken Orrery.
Cast Spellweaver Volute, enchanting Evacuation.
Cast Azorius Keyrune.
Cast Titania, Protector of Argoth. Taiga comes onto the battlefield.
Tap Azorius Keyrune and Taiga for a blue and green mana.
Flashback Acorn Harvest.
Spellweaver Volute triggers. Place it on Kiora's Dismissal.
Evacuation resolves, and brings almost all our enchantments back to our hand, as well as Selvala's Enforcer.
Dual Nature destruction triggers go on the stack.
Respond to the triggers by replaying Dual Nature, getting 5 token copies (going up to 10 total), and then Copy Enchantment copying Dual Nature, getting 11 token copies. (going up to 22 total)
Play Selvala's Enforcer, getting 22 copies and drawing 23 cards.
That seems pretty good, but there is a problem. We now have no flashback sorceries in the graveyard, so we need to use Mirror of Fate to bring Acorn Harvest back to the library, and Broken Ambitions to put it back into the graveyard. But, we can't use Mirror of Fate until we bounce March of the Machines, unless we are willing to sacrifice it, and we can't use Broken Ambitions until we trigger it from the graveyard via a sorcery. So we are stuck here unless we draw a sorcery.
So, it looks like we can get a maximum of 12 Reality Spasms, unless I am missing something. Doing that shouldn't be hard; it's just a matter of finding the strongest approach, I think.
Some problems I ran into with the start:
- Evacuation with Opalescence on board bounces Omniscience completely stopping us.
- If we ever resolve Spellweaver Volute and don't have an instant in the graveyard after that, the Volute dies and we need to redraw it. Even if the spell it casts is Broken Ambitions it won't mill new instants fast enough.
- We need to be able to counter creature spells before we can take advantage of Bloodbond March.
Cast Flash of Defiance triggering Volute and Helix. Resolve Helix first, putting Show and Tell on the stack and triggering Volute again.
Resolve the Volute, put it on Kiora's. Resolve the Evacuation returning all our creatures, including the animated enchantments to our hand.
Resolve the Show and Tell, put Omniscience into play.
Play Dual Nature, Copy Enchantment as itself with tokens as Dual Nature, Grip of Chaos and Cowardice.
Resolve the Volute trigger. Volute is currently enchanting Kiora's, so we copy and cast that. Volute ends up on broken ambitions.
The Kiora's cast triggers Cowardice and 5 Grip of Chaos, so we get 6 bounces. Use 5 of those to double the Dual Nature count. We will end up with 128 Dual Natures. During that process, at the moment we have 34 Dual Natures replay Selvala's Enforcer and draw all enchantments, creatures, artifacts and Reality Spasm.
Before the Last bounce play March of the Machines and Azorius Keyrune. Then use the bounce to return March of the Machines to our hand. Tap the Keyrunes for 129 mana.
Play Izzet Guildmage and copy Kiora's 40 times, each time raising the number of Dual Natures. We end up with more than 2^^42.
Play Titania, Protector of Argoth and grab Taiga to produce a red. Flashback Flash of Defiance, triggering Volute. We resolve the Volute and put Broken Ambitions on the stack. We can now copy that when we want to mill, but Volute already died.
Cast Reality Spasm with X=1 targeting a Golem. We initially destroy the Minion of Tevesh Szat and put it on a Mimic Vat. All Precursor triggers will be used to untap that Mimic Vat multiple times. Between them we go through as many stages of the combo as possible without destroying the Mimic Vat. To do so we need one additional draw for the Spellweaver Volute that died. After creating the last batch of hasty Minion tokens we can finally return the original Minion and go for the full Hyper^2stage.
After that we can draw Reality Spasm 10 more times before combat.
That start ends up with 11 Reality Spasms. Does one of the other approaches for 12 work? I saw that some of them had problems, but kinda lost track. ^^'
Nice, that gets one more bounce than my first opening. I'll just mention the microscopic improvements from having the original Copy Enchantment copy other enchantments: If we have Copy Enchantment copy Dual Nature after the second to last bounce, we'll get 130 Dual Natures, so we'll be able to pay for 41 Kiora's Dismissals. Most of our enchantments will get destroyed on the next Kiora's Dismissal, but with 5 Psychic Battles we'll get 33 Dual Natures and 36 Psychic Battles at the end (Copying Dual Nature and Psychic Battle on the last two Copy Enchantments). Then the next Kiora's Dismissal will bump the numbers to 33*2^36 + 1 Dual Natures and 33*2^36 + 4 Psychic Battles. By comparison, starting with 128 Dual Natures and 5 Psychic Battles will take us to 2^12 + 1 Dual Natures and 2^12 + 7 Psychic Battles after Kiora's Dismissal, so that extra Kiora's Dismissal is worth it.
I forgot about bouncing Omniscience! Taking that into consideration, my favored opening of drawing Evacuation and milling Kiora's Dismissal doesn't look so great anymore. But, I'll give it a looksee just in case.
EDIT: I think I see how to save 12 Reality Spasms in your opening: Make a copy of Spellweaver Volute, enchanting Broken Ambitions, then bounce the original back to your hand. We can do this with the last copy of Kiora's Dismissal, so we should still get more than 2^^43 Dual Natures, and an extra Reality Spasm.
EDIT: Welp, I'm pretty convinced that 13 Reality Spasms is impossible, but I suppose it is still possible that we could have a slightly better 12 Reality Spasm opening. I thought of the possibility of using the last remaining potential Spellweaver Volute trigger for something - but, clearly we need to cast Broken Ambitions first, so that we can mill some new instants. But then we need to resolve the Broken Ambitions spell to get to the other Volute trigger. That means that we don't have Broken Ambitions on the stack when we need to counter Minion of Tevesh Szat. If we try to respond with casting Minion of Tevesh Szat, then the Bloodbond March triggers will be resolved before we get to the other Volute trigger.
EDIT: Trying to come up with an estimate, the main problem is how much recursion we get for the initial Precursor Golem triggers for the first Reality Spasm. We can't afford to cast either Worldfire or Rebuild, so I'm thinking that the w^3 becomes w + 3. Also, we lose the Minion of Tevesh Szat stage, since we can't access the Bloodbond March triggers, but the other stages should be fine. So, I'm thinking the Precursor Golem triggers are worth F_{w12}, except for the last one, which is worth the full F_{w^3 + w12}. So I have the whole final lower bound to be:
EDIT: I just noticed that we can cycle Rebuild without it costing us a casting of Reality Spasm. So, we could flashback Flash of Defiance with a Spellweaver Volute on Rebuild, bounce our artifacts, then put Vedalken Orrery back onto the battlefield using Show and Tell. Then, we could replay Azorius Keyrune, and get more than 2^^43 copies. Unfortunately, we can neither tap those Keyrunes or use the mana they would generate without Kiora's Dismissal. And Kiora's Dismissal will be gone by the time we cast Rebuild, since we need to flashback Flash of Defiance, and the Flash of Defiance we need to flashback will be stuck below the Kiora's Dismissal copies on the stack. The only solution I can think of would be to counter Flash of Defiance - but, we can't cast Broken Ambitions because we need to cast Flash of Defiance to trigger it. So, I don't see a solution here.
Can we put Kiora's Dismissal back into the graveyard? We could, but only after we cast Broken Ambitions. But that happens after we flashback Flash of Defiance, and we have no more ability to cast or flashback a sorcery, except for Show and Tell. So, we could do the following: Flashback Flash of defiance, put the Volute trigger above the Helix trigger, have the Volute trigger cast Broken Ambitions. Put the Spellweaver Volute on Rebuild, which we cycled. Copy or resolve Broken Ambitions to put Kiora's Dismissal in the graveyard. Play Copy Enchantment and create a copy of Spellweaver Volute, enchanting Kiora's Dismissal. Resolve the Helix, and cast Show and Tell, triggering both Rebuild and Kiora's Dismissal. Hmm... if we resolve Rebuild first, then we can't replay the Azorius Keyrune until Kiora's Dismissal is resolved, and if we resolve Kiora's Dismissal first, then we certainly can't bounce the March of the Machines after Azorius Keyrune is replayed. So I don't see how to make this work.
EDIT: Actually, we can put Spellweaver Volutes on both Broken Ambitions and Rebuild. Then we flashback Flash of Defiance, triggering both Volutes and the Spellweaver Helix. Put the Helix on top; when we resolve it, it triggers both Volutes again. We resolve Broken Ambitions, and put Kiora's Dismissal in the graveyard. Then we resolve the Volute trigger on Rebuild, and the Volute gets placed on Kiora's Dismissal. We resolve Rebuild, bringing our artifacts back to our hand. Resolve Show and Tell, putting Vedalken Orrery on the battlefield. Replay Azorius Keyrune, getting more than 2^^43 copies. Then the Volute on Kiora's Dismissal resolves again, and casts Kiora's Dismissal, and we can bounce March of the Machines and start copying Kiora's Dismissal, getting more than 2^^2^^43 copies of Dual Nature. Does this work?
No wait, Broken Ambitions is now off the stack, and we need to have it on. We don't have any other sorceries that we can cast. Can we put the original card back in the graveyard? I don't see why not. But, we won't be able to put both triggered Volutes on Broken Ambitions and Kiora's Dismissal, since the triggered Volute on Broken Ambitions resolves before we can put those two cards back in the graveyard. If we put two Volutes on Rebuild, I'm pretty sure we can only move one of them. So again, it's not working. So close, and yet so far.
EDIT: Thought about improving the ending again. Herbal Poultice seems like it has some potential, as it is a single card that can target and is worth a layer, and recycling artifacts may be easier than recycling instants/sorceries. The first thing that came to mind was following it by Indomitable Creativity + Precursor Golem, but this has the same problem as the previous ending with Indomitable Creativity: We need to make progress with each spell copy, but then we need to cast Worldfire to make the maximum progress, and that will eliminate all the Golems, and the rest of the spell copies will fizzle. I guess this happens with Precursor Golem whenever the copied instant/sorcery has one or more layers beneath it.
That improved Reality Spasm start where we put Vedalken Orrery back via Show and Tell should work, actually. We can cast Bloodbond March and Minion of Tevesh Szat before the flashback of Flash of Defiance. Then we counter the Minion while we have Broken Ambitions on the stack, mill Broken Ambitions and more flashback spells at the same time, get more Dual Natures when we have Kiora's Dismissal on the stack, and then resolve that part to get Minion back to the battlefield. After resolving a Precursor Golem trigger for Reality Spasm we then easily have enough ressources to put Broken Ambitions back on the stack, mill Kiora's Dismissal again and put that on the stack as well.
Oh, nice! I think we can counter Minion of Tevesh Szat and mill Kiora's Dismissal and Broken Ambitions all with the same Broken Ambitions copy, so I don't think we need to spend any extra mana to activate Izzet Guildmage. This saves us 3 mana, of which we need to spend 2 to cycle Rebuild. So we still get 41 Kiora's Dismissal initially, except this time we don't need to copy Dual Nature with the original Copy Enchantment, so it works out a little better. Lower bound is still 2^^2^^43.
Thinking about Herbal Poultice: If we go for the Consecrated Sphinx / Words of Wisdom ending, we need those drawn cards to do one of two things: either we draw something important, or the draw triggers something important. The most likely important thing that we could draw would be an instant/sorcery with an X cost; otherwise, I think it would need to be a permanent that we can't reuse. We have an artifact with a 0 cost at the bottom, so the permanent would need to be... a planeswalker? But, it would take too much work to make planeswalkers work at instant speed. If we use an instant/sorcery with an X cost, the problem is that usually those won't get a layer. Adding a card like Swarm Intelligence will probably make it one layer for two cards, which is not good enough. We'd like to get the two layers from Precursor Golem, but it looks like Worldfire messes up those double layers. I'm not seeing a scenario that could get around the Worldfire problem..
The other possibility is using triggered abilities that trigger off of a draw. There are cards like Spiteful Visions and Underworld Dreams, but I'm not seeing how to turn damage into something profitable; triggered targeting of Minion of Tevesh Szat won't get layers, and targeting Herbal Poultice doesn't help. There's Night Dealings, but that won't work with Herbal Poultice, and it won't create a hasted token of Minion of Tevesh Szat. I suppose we could put Reality Spasm below it. But, we would have to deal with restoring the opponent's life, and usually that would cost a card. If we could have a creature that can deal damage to the opponent as part of the stage sequence, then we could use Tamanoa after Underworld Dreams to heal the opponent, and then go into Night Dealings. But, we would need to give Tamanoa to the opponent somehow, and that would cost cards. So, Night Dealings seems unlikely to work.
EDIT: I notice that if we go with the Herbal Poultice / Arbiter of the Ideal / Curse of Bounty / World at War ending, then we can go back to using Psychic Battle. We get F_{w^3+w12+3}(F_{w^3+w12+2}(...) on the outside, but the inner functions are slightly smaller. But, we get rid of the insane luck required for Grip of Chaos. I'm not sure which one I prefer. What do you think?
Another way we could handle the ending sequence would be Torrent of Souls, Kithkin Mourncaller, Militia's Pride, World at War. But just like with Herbal Poultice we don't get as much progress before combat. Sadly Torrent of Souls is pretty resistant to adding layers, because the mana spent to cast it can't be copied.
I prefer going with the highest possible damage. Even if that means we require all that luck for Grip of Chaos.
EDIT: actually, that last sequence wouldn't even work, since we wouldn't be able to use Harmony of Nature to tap the Arbiter of the Ideals if we replace it with the card we want to use to untap them
Militia's Pride can add another layer, nice. Now we just need to find another card savings!
Giving creatures haste is an excellent way to both add a layer and to create at least one hasted Minion of Tevesh Szat token. Sadly, I couldn't find any safe way to give creatures haste other than Torrent of Souls. Harness by Force can still target one creature without paying its mana cost, so that doesn't work.
I should look at other instants/sorceries that don't work without paying their mana costs, other than just the X spells.
EDIT: I wonder, if we add a legendary creature that can target a general creature, but don't add Mirror Gallery, does it go infinite with Minion of Tevesh Szat?
I actually don't think so. Let's say we have a Minion of Tevesh Szat token on the battlefield, and the original Minion of Tevesh Szat and say Visara the Dreadful in our hand. We play both of those creatures in some order. Say we play the Minion first, and Visara second, so that the Visara Bloodbond March triggers are on top. Then, we can tap the Minion token and destroy both Visara and the original Minion, creating token copies of both. The Visara token can now target the original Minion, except it is not on the battlefield. If we try to wait until the Minion Bloodbond March triggers, then we have to go through all the Bloodbond March triggers for Visara. But then we cannot allow the original Visara to come back and stay on the battlefield, since that would destroy the token. So Visara winds up stuck in the graveyard.
Next, suppose we play Visara first and the Minion second. Again, we can tap the Minion token to destroy both original creatures and get token copies of both. We can now use the Visara token to destroy the original Minion, after using a Bloodbond March trigger to bring it back to the battlefield. Essentially, we can convert the Visara token into a Minion token, and we have two. But, before all the Bloodbond March triggers for the Minion resolve, we need to bounce the Minion back to our hand, and that uses up a Minion token, and we are back down to one. Then we can use a Visara Bloodbond March trigger to bring it back to the battlefield, and we are back to where we started, except we have one less Visara Bloodbond March trigger. So it doesn't look like this goes infinite either.
So that's interesting - but, that only means something if we can find a way to use it for an improvement. It would be nice if adding a legendary creature would add an extra layer, but it doesn't look like it does. Muzzio, Visionary Architect and Herbal Poultice definitely look like they go infinite together. What about Niv-Mizzet, the Firemind, or Nin, the Pain Artist? Or maybe Xira Arien, if drawing and targeting is too much.
EDIT: Hmm, actually I think we can get an extra layer or two by adding a legendary creature. In the first example above, we can gain an extra Minion of Tevesh Szat token, provided that we don't bother to bounce either of the creatures back to our hand. So, if in the ending sequence we use something that can target a creature, every two targetings can bounce both creatures and restart the procedure with one more Minion token on the battlefield.
I think such a legendary creature goes infinite: We play it with Dual Nature and get a token copy. Legendrule kills the original, we imprint it on Mimic Vat. We use the token to target stuff. Repeat for all but one Bloodbond March trigger. After the last trigger let the original legendary creature stay on the battlefield and bounce it with Evacuation.
A possible idea: start with Korozda Gorgon and Bellowing Aegisaur, to get two layers in a similar way to Archangel of Thune. However, it is more difficult to deal damage to many creatures than to just gain life. If we follow up with Magmaquake, then that is two layers with three cards, not quite good enough. No way to get Precursor Golem to add two layers, I don't think. Another possibility is to use Cave-In to deal damage to all creatures and players, and then use something like Alabaster Potion to heal the opponent. But, that is three layers with four cards.
Still, utilizing the life total of the opponent may be a possibility. Grollub may turn out to be useful.
EDIT: Looking again at how to save a card: It doesn't look like there are any obvious pairs of cards that can be combined anymore. It would be nice if there was a card that said "permanents are creatures", which could take care of both Opalescence and March of the Machines, but there doesn't seem to be such a card. No way I see to cut down on the number of Fountain of Youths. So perhaps shortening the stage sequence is the most likely possibility.
The obvious weakness is that three card second stage. If we could add another stage post-Everglove Courier, that might eliminate it. Iijil found one such sequence, but it turned out to be longer, as the Royal Assassin sequence was three cards, and losing Godtoucher meant only saving two cards in the pre-Everglove Courier part.
Some possible stages to add in: creatures with toughness 2 or less. The pairing of Phantasmal Mount followed by Old Man of the Sea seems to be very good; however, I was unable to make a stage sequence that doesn't lose at least a couple of stages somewhere else. For example, we can no longer have both Possessed Aven and Centaur Archer. Ending with Tsabo's Assassin and Blinding Drone doesn't seem to work out either, as it eliminates Frightshroud Courier and Dwarven Warriors. Actually trading two for two might be okay, but when we lose Dwarven Warriors we lose the transition to red, that I haven't been able to replace. Another idea was to try to stick Goblins in the sequence using Slingshot Goblin, but then it is hard to squeeze in Centaur Archer.
EDIT: I wonder if we could somehow put Consecrated Sphinx and/or Words of Wisdom into the layer sequence. Then, we would need to have something that can refill the opponent's library as the next step. Widespread Panic seems like a promising card, but I'm not sure where to go next. Preator's Grasp is a possibility, but it can only be cast about 60 times, so the end result is about as good as our previous three layer sequence that ended in Words of Wisdom.
EDIT: Another idea is to have our card drawer also cause us to discard a card, and then have discarding a card trigger something else. A possible sequence:
Unfortunately, our deck now has Facevaulter, which allows a much cheaper sacrifice. If we could redo the initial part of the stage sequence, that would allow Dragon Appeasement to be used again.
EDIT: It would be nice to use damage to ourselves to power up Angelheart Vial. If Megrim were red, then we could perhaps use Reality Spasm / Angelheart Vial / Justice / Megrim / Windfall. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a card that causes damage to ourselves when we or the opponent discard a card.
EDIT: If we could have Goblins somehow be able to produce blue mana but not black mana, then we could get a thirteenth stage. One possibility is if there were a version of Black Lotus that produced blue mana only, but as far as I know there isn't. Another possibility is to go to Wood Elves, and have Goblins recycle nonforest lands somehow. One way to do that would be to turn a land into a creature, so that it could be bounced using Evacuation, and put back on the battlefield using Show and Tell. Ignition Team has the right idea, but unfortunately it doesn't have to tap to use it.
EDIT: I'm liking the idea of using Goblin Burrows to target Goblins, and having the next stage down recycle Goblin Burrows somehow. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a good Merfolk or Thrull to recycle Goblin Burrows. There are a couple Merfolk that can explore to draw a land, but those are ETB effects, too cheap. There are also a couple of Merfolk that can turn lands into creatures, but again they don't require the creature to tap. We have a few Merfolk like Tideshaper Mystic that can turn Goblin Burrows into a basic land like a Forest, but it won't stay a Forest when it leaves the battlefield, so that doesn't help with Wood Elves. We could add Life and Limb to turn Forests into creatures, but that is a card slot we can't spare.
EDIT: Well, we can hook Elves into Goblin Burrows using Quirion Druid, which allows us to follow with Iijil's sequence for 13 stages:
EDIT: I feel like there should be a way to get a five card sequence ending in a card drawing card, but I haven't found a way yet. My latest idea was trying to trigger off a discard; the possible cards to use seem to be Pitchstone Wall, Megrim, Telekenetic Bonds, and Spirit Cairn. Confessor and Sangromancer cause a gain of life, which is mooted by that point; Spiritual Focus and Geth's Grimoire allows us to draw a card, which doesn't seem to be any better than just using Consecrated Sphinx.
Telekenetic Bonds seems to be the most versatile, but it also seems to have problems gaining layers. If we go
then not only does Sphinx's Disciple not get a layer, Telekenetic Bonds won't get a layer either, because of the problem of Worldfire destroying the things we want to untap. Reality Spasm / Angelheart Vial / Orcish Mine will get us one layer more, since we can trigger them all at the same time, but we still have Telekenetic Bonds not getting a layer. So, I don't know. Iijil, do you have any interesting ideas?
I mostly see a lot of potential problems. Discard/draw triggering stuff is problematic with Rebuilds cycling ability. If we try to reuse the opponents library we can't really use triggered abilities to move cards into it, since Worldfire will exile all their cards that are not currently in the library.
An interesting card to use would be Breath of Fury instead of World at War. The idea being that we can use the opponents life to trigger additional combat phases multiple times. But Worldfire also reduces the opponents life to 1 so we actually can't trigger Breath of Fury after going through the full combo and it ends up inferior. Thinking about it, casting it targets any creature way too cheaply since we can bounce it to our hand with Kiora's Dismissal so it goes infinite anyway.
EDIT: Patron of the Vein looks interesting. With Korozda Gorgon that is 2 layers below giving the opponent a creature. Of course if we give them more than one at a time the extras will get removed by Worldfire again, so I don't know how to continue from there without wasting a card.
Hmm yes, Rebuild messes up discard and draw triggering. I think using triggered abilities to move cards into the opponent's library could be okay, so long as we can use say Words of Wisdom to make the opponent draw a card, then follow that up resolving the trigger to put that card back into the library. But that means Consecrated Sphinx is out. We could still do
I suppose we could save enchant creature auras, as well as draw/discard triggering, if we give up a card slot. That's a pretty steep price to pay though. Breath of Fury could be worth two layers, one for untapping bunches of creatures and one for having many of them. It could then link to something that gives the opponent life, although I don't see how to do that while gaining a layer. So we could go
But, not an improvement, since giving the opponent life only lets Breath of Fury work once because of the Worldfire problem; we need to improve the third card.
Concerning Patron of the Vein, the only cards I see that give the opponent creatures without doing it too cheaply are Sylvan Offering, Forbidden Orchard, and Fickle Efreet. Unfortunately, none of them are worth a layer, with Sylvan Offering not working because of the Worldfire problem. Of course, we know one way to put many creatures on the battlefield one at a time; put a nontoken creature on the battlefield, under an opponent's control. But, I don't know any way of doing that that isn't too cheap; all the ways seem to be ETB effects or go to the graveyard effects. In the old decks, we used Thieves' Auction to get the opponent copies of Gruul Ragebeast and Mitotic Slime. This could indeed put a nontoken creature under the opponent's control and generate lots of token copies; but Thieves' Auction is too cheap.
It may not work for Patron of the Vein, but for Bellowing Aegisaur we could replace Korozda Gorgon with something like Stone Giant, since if we give a Stone Giant +2/+2, it can target Minion of Tevesh Szat. But, that's not an improvement. Maybe if we could put a card like that into the stage sequence, like if we could fit in Old Man of the Sea somehow.
EDIT: I took a look at the Worldpurge version that we abandoned a while back, and it's not so bad:
It does seem like there is some room for improvement, particularly with the "saving progress" section of the deck, which I feel really should be able to be cut down. Also, we have red available for later, which might allow us to cut down on the stage sequence. I don't know if Izzet Guildmage can be used for any benefit.
I just noticed: Do the spells triggered by Precursor Golem actually trigger Psychic Battle? There seems to be some debate on this question, but I believe the answer is no. So, we need to switch to Grip of Chaos. A pity - I was hoping we could achieve our best deck without relying on truly ridiculous luck.
Now, Grip of Chaos does trigger Psychic Battle, so if we find a way to save a card, we can add a layer while still keeping Words of Wisdom at the end. (while being able to avoid ridiculous luck)
EDIT: Whoops, we don't get a final layer that way - we need to untap with Reality Spasm.
EDIT: I think I found an improvement for the start:
We have the same starting hand and mill, eventually drawing 10 cards:
Acorn Harvest
Izzet Guildmage
Spellweaver Volute
Flash of Defiance
Spellweaver Helix
Volcanic Island
Vedalken Orrery
Precursor Golem
Terashi's Grasp
Reality Spasm
Play Volcanic Island and tap it. (1 blue, 1 green, 10 colorless, 4 life)
Play Guildmage.
Play Vedalken Orrery.
Play Spellweaver Volute on Broken Ambitions.
Play Acorn Harvest, triggering Spellweaver Volute.
Spellweaver Volute gets placed on Words of Wisdom.
Use Izzet Guildmage to copy Broken Ambitions. (1 green, 8 colorless, 4 life)
Two Broken Ambitions mill eight cards.
March of the Machines
Grip of Chaos
Cowardice
Flash of Defiance
Flash of Defiance
Kiora's Dismissal
Rebuild
Evacuation
Play Spellweaver Helix, exiling Replenish and a Flash of Defiance.
Play Flash of Defiance, triggering Volute and Helix.
The Helix trigger resolves, and Replenish brings our enchantments to the battlefield.
The Volute trigger resolves, and Words of Wisdom gets placed on the stack. Do not resolve it yet!
Spellweaver Volute gets placed on Kiora's Dismissal.
Flashback Acorn's Harvest, triggering Spellweaver Volute. (7 colorless, 1 life)
Kiora's Dismissal is cast, triggering Grip of Chaos four times and Cowardice five times.
Spellweaver Volute is placed on Rebuild.
Bounce Copy Enchantment five times, getting 6, 12, 24, 50, and 100 Dual Natures. (Copying Dual Nature the last two times)
Play Precursor Golem, getting 100 token copies and 202 vanilla Golem tokens.
Resolve the destruction trigger for Dual Nature, destroying 98 token copies of Dual Nature. This triggers a bunch of "destroy all tokens created by this Dual Nature" triggers; leave those on the stack.
Cast Terashi's Grasp, getting 101 Precursor Golem triggers and a Spellweaver Volute trigger.
Do nothing with the Volute trigger.
Resolve the first Precursor Golem trigger. We get 302 copies of Terashi's Grasp. Cowardice triggers and bounces all but one Precursor Golem, including the original Precursor Golem.
We get 4 Grip of Choas triggers per copy, for 1208 Grip of Chaos triggers.
The first trigger we use to bounce Azorius Signet. Replay and get 100 token copies.
Use the second trigger to bounce March of the Machines.
Tap the 101 Azorios Signets to get 101 blue mana, so that we have 108 mana in total.
Use that mana to copy Kiora's Dismissal 34 times. The first Kiora's Dismissal generates five bounces.
The first bounce returns Copy Enchantment; all our Dual Nature tokens are already destroyed.
We replay and bounce four more times, getting 2, 4, 8, and 16 copies of Dual Nature.
We replay Copy Enchantment one more time, copying Grip of Chaos to get 19 copies in total.
We resolve the second Kiora's Dismissal, getting 20 bounces. We wind up with 16 * 2^19 Dual Natures and 16 * 2^19 + 2 Grip of Chaoses; this is more than 2^^4 for both.
The remaining 32 Kiora's Dismissal increases the numbers to 2^^36; leave one Kiora's Dismissal bounce on the stack.
Replay March of the Machines.
Resolve the next Terashi's Grasp Grip of Chaos trigger to bounce Azorius Signet.
Replay Azorius Signet and get more than 2^^36 copies.
Copy another Kiora's Dismissal, generating more than 2^^37 Dual Natures and Grip of Chaoses, and bringing March of the Machines back to our hand.
Tap the Azorius Signets, generating more than 2^^36 mana. Copy Kiora's Dismissal more than 2^^36 times, generating more than 2^^2^^36 Dual Natures and Grip of Chaoses, or more than 2^^^4.
Repeat the process for the remaining 1205 Grip of Chaos triggers, increasing our numbers to more than 2^^^1209, or more than 2^^^^4.
Replay Precursor Golem, getting more than 2^^^^4 copies and vanilla Golems.
Repeat the process for the remaining 100 triggers of Precursor Golem, getting more than 2^^^^104 Dual Natures and Grip of Chaoses in the end.
Make sure to gain some life at the end.
Resolve the "destroy all tokens created by this Dual Nature" triggers, destroying nothing useful. (We already lost the Psychic Battles from those Dual Natures.)
Play Reality Spasm with X=1, getting 2^^^^104 Golem triggers.
Do the same procedure as for the Terashi's Grasp, resulting in more than 2^^^^2^^^^104 Dual Natures.
Remember to bounce the original Consecrated Sphinx and the original Spellweaver Helix towards the end of the procedure, and use a Reality Spasm copy to untap Volcanic Island.
Tap the Volcanic Island for a red mana.
Play Helix, exiling Terashi's Grasp and Flash of Defiance.
Flashback Flash of Defiance, triggering Helix and Volute.
Do nothing with the Volute trigger.
The Spellweaver Helix casts Terashi's Grasp.
We repeat the previous precedure yet another time, taking the number to 2^^^^2^^^^2^^^^104.
Cast Consecrated Sphinx, getting more than 2^^^^2^^^^2^^^^104 copies.
Resolve the Words of Wisdom.
EDIT: I think it is possible to get to 2^^^^2^^^^2^^^^104 if we go with your starting ten but replace Reality Spasm with another Flash of Defiance. Then we can use the Volcanic Island to tap for red at the start, and just mill four cards. The one problem: We can't bounce Consecrated Sphinx to get more copies! And since we only mill four cards, there's no room to get Evacuation, say.
We could also replace Volcanic Island with Flash of Defiance instead. This winds up working out much like your sequence, and also gets 2^^^^2^^^^2^^^^6.
If we had just one more card, we could mill four and save Broken Ambitions. Then we could repeatedly cast Flash of Defiance and counter it, and we can get lots of red mana from Reality Spasm and lots of life from Terashi's Grasp. But, there's no card we can cut, as far as I can see.
EDIT: We could forget all the sorceries if we could insert another creature in the sequence, so that Reality Spasm could untap a hasted token of the creature, and the creature could bounce Azorius Signet. By my count, that should be five Knuth arrows. But, the best I could do was eleven cards again:
Kiora's Dismissal
Izzet Guildmage
Vedalken Orrery
Precursor Golem
Reality Spasm
Metallurgeon
Mimic Vat
March of the Machines
Grip of Chaos
Cowardice
Terashi's Grasp
EDIT: This may be premature, since there still may be changes to the deck, but I've started writing the article again. I just put up the section on the Metallurgeon here.
Of course, the Getting Started section is now all wrong - I'll probably write that up at the end.
Here's another take on the start, where we draw a second Flash of Defiance in order to recur Terashi's Grasp one more time. Sadly I wasn't able to get Kiora's Dismissal on the stack for the first of those, so it is not quite another set of quad arrows.
Play Lotus, crack for green, play channel, play Signet, tap it, cast replenish and try to counter it with broken ambitions for X=0. (1 green, 10 colorless, 4 life)
Mill 4 cards: Omniscience, Opalescence, Dual Nature, Copy Enchantment.
Don't let replenish get countered, resolve it to get those enchantments into play. The Copy Enchantment token copies Dual Nature.
Play Sphinx, get 3 tokens.
Play Words of Wisdom, Draw 10 cards: Izzet Guildmage, Spellweaver Volute, Flash of Defiance x2, Spellweaver Helix, Volcanic Island, Vedalken Orrery, Precursor Golem, Terashi's Grasp, Reality Spasm.
Play Volcanic Island and tap it for blue.
Play Guildmage, get tokens.
Play Vedalken Orrery.
Play Precursor Golem, get tokens.
Play Terashi's Grasp, targeting a Golem token. Volute and Golems trigger and we resolve Volute first to cast Broken Ambitions targeting the Terashi's. Volute ends up on Words of Wisdom. Use Guildmage to create a copy of Broken Ambitions. ( 1 green, 8 colorless, 4 life)
Mill 8 cards: March of the Machines, Grip of Chaos, Cowardice, Flash of Defiance, Kiora's Dismissal , Acorn Harvest , ? .
Leave the Precursor triggers on the stack.
Play Helix, exile a Flash of Defiance and Replenish.
Play Flash of Defiance. Helix and Volute trigger. Volute triggers again from casting the Replenish. Choose to not cast the spell on the Volutes.
The enchantments end up on the Battlefield.
We resolve the first Precursor trigger and get 11 copies of Terashi's targeting our Golems. Cowardice triggers and we will end up bouncing them all. We also trigger a total of 44 Grip of Chaos.
We use all of them to bounce Copy Enchantment. Use 43 of them to double the dual Nature count to 3*2^43 and get Grip of Chaoses on the last bounce.
Replay the Precursor Golem and get tokens. Then resolve the second Precursor trigger. Get over 2^90 Grip of Chaos triggers. Use those to double Dual Natures and top of on Grip of Chaos. New count: ~2^2^90
Repeat for third and fourth trigger, going to 2^2^2^2^90 > 2^^8
Towards the end let a Copy Enchantment token enter as Volute, enchanting the Kiora's Dismissal. Also bounce Azorius Signet.
Flash back the Acorn Harvest, triggering the Volutes. (7 colorless, 1 life)
Resolve the Kiora's Volute first. After using most of the Grip of Chaos triggers to double the Dual Nature count again (going to 2^^9) we replay Azorius Signet and use the last of the Kiora's bounces to bounce March of the Machines. Then we tap all the Signet tokens to get 2^^9 mana.
Use all that mana to create copies to Kiora's Dismissal, going to 2^^2^^9 Dual Natures.
Play Precursor Golem, get tokens.
Cast Reality Spasm with X=1, targeting a golem. We get 2^^2^^9 Golem triggers. When we resolve these we get a bunch of Psychic Battle triggers that can each be usesd to bounce Signet and repeat the process above.
We end up with ~2^^^^(2^^2^^9) Dual Natures.
Towards the end bounce Sphinx, bounce Helix and let a Reality Spasm copy resolve on Volcanic Island. Tap the Volcanic for red.
Play Helix, exile Terashi's Grasp and Flash of Defiance.
Play Flash of Defiance. We choose not to cast anything with the Volute triggers from this one.
When we cast Tereshi's Grasp from under the Helix we target a golem and get ~2^^^^(2^^2^^9) Golem triggers. When we resolve these we get a bunch of Psychic Battle triggers that can each be usesd to bounce Signet and repeat the process above. Before we resolve the next Golem trigger we also bounce and replay the Precursor Golem.
We end up with ~2^^^^2^^^^(2^^2^^9) Dual Natures.
Towards the end let a Terashi's resolve to gain at least 3 life.
Flash back Flash of Defiance and repeat the above again. We end up with ~2^^^^2^^^^2^^^^(2^^2^^9) Dual Natures.
Play Sphinx, get tokens.
Resolve the Words of Wisdom Volute (originally triggered by Acorn Harvest).
I'm still thinking about ways we could get repeated Flash of Defiance Flashbacks, for that 6 arrow start. In the above sequence we could replace one of the Flash of Defiance draws with Mirror of Fate to get cards out of exile, but I haven't managed to get going without losing access to Broken Ambitions. Although I seem to get reeeally close.
Yeah, I too am really close to keeping access to Broken Ambitions. Drawing Mirror of Fate seems unnecessary, since if we can have Broken Ambitions around to mill cards, we can have it around to counter our spells.
EDIT: I think I have it:
We draw:
Volcanic Island, Izzet Guildmage, Veldaken Orrery, Precursor Golem, Spellweaver Volute, Spellweaver Helix, Terashi's Grasp, Reality Spasm, Flash of Defiance, Flash of Defiance.
Play Volcanic Island and tap it for blue. (1 green, 1 blue, 10 colorless, 4 life)
Play Guildmage.
Play Vedalken Orrery.
Play Precursor Golem.
Play Spellweaver Volute, enchanting Broken Ambitions.
Play Flash of Defiance, triggering Volute.
Resolve the Volute to cast Broken Ambitions.
Volute gets placed on Words of Wisdom.
Use Guildmage to create a copy of Broken Ambitions. (1 green, 8 colorless, 4 life)
Resolve the copy, and counter Flash of Defiace.
Mill four cards: March of the Machines, Cowardice, Kiora's Dismissal, Grip of Chaos.
Play Spellweaver Helix, imprinting a Flash of Defiance and Replenish.
Play Flash of Defiance, triggering Helix and Volute.
Do nothing with the Volute trigger.
Resolve the Helix trigger and bring March of the Machines, Grip of Chaos, and Cowardice to the battlefield.
Cast Terashi's Grasp, triggering four Precursor Golems.
We resolve the first Precursor trigger and get 11 copies of Terashi's targeting our Golems. Cowardice triggers and we will end up bouncing them all. We also trigger a total of 44 Grip of Chaos.
We use all of them to bounce Copy Enchantment. Use 43 of them to double the dual Nature count to 3*2^43 and get Grip of Chaoses on the last bounce.
Replay the Precursor Golem and get tokens. Then resolve the second Precursor trigger. Get over 2^90 Grip of Chaos triggers. Use those to double Dual Natures and top of on Grip of Chaos. New count: ~2^2^90
Repeat for third and fourth trigger, going to 2^2^2^2^90 > 2^^7.
Towards the end, let a Copy Enchantment enter as a copy of Spellweaver Volute, enchanting Kiora's Dismissal.
Use the fourth to last Grip of Chaos to bounce Precursor Golem.
Use the third to last Grip of Chaos to bounce Spellweaver Helix.
Use the second to last Grip of Chaos to bounce Azorius Signet.
Play Azorius Signet and get more than 2^^7 copies.
Use the last grip of Chaos trigger to bounce March of the Machines.
Tap the Azorius Signets for more than 2^^7 blue mana.
Cast March of the Machines.
Copy Broken Ambitions to counter March of the Machines.
Do not let March of the Machines, be countered.
Mill four cards: Acorn's harvest, Flash of Defiance, ?, ?
Flashback Acorn's Harvest.
Trigger Spellweaver Volute, casting Kiora's Dismissal.
Resolve the Grip of Chaos triggers to get more than 2^^8 Dual Natures.
Spend nearly all of our blue mana to copy Kiora's Dismissal, getting more than 2^^2^^7 Dual Natures.
Cast Reality Spasm, with X=1. Get more than 2^^2^^7 Precursor Golem triggers.
Do a lot of bouncing for more Dual Natures and mana, but in the end change the all the targets to Volcanic Island.
Untap and tap Volcanic Island more than 2^^^^(2^^2^^7) times, for red mana.
Also remember to bounce Consecrated Sphinx.
Play Spellweaver Helix, imprinting a Flash of Defiance and Terashi's Grasp.
Repeatedly do the following:
Flashback Flash of Defiance. Helix and Volutes trigger.
Resolve the Helix to cast Terashi's Grasp.
Activate Broken Ambitions to counter Flash of Defiance.
Resolve Terashi's Grasp, taking X Dual Natures to more than 2^^^^X Dual Natures.
Use a couple copies to gain life and mana as needed.
In the end, we wind up with more than 2^^^^^(2^^^^(2^^(2^^7))) Dual Natures.
On the last Flash of Defiance, put Words of Wisdom on the stack below Terashi's Grasp.
Replay Consecrated Sphinx, getting more than 2^^^^^(2^^^^(2^^(2^^7))) copies.
Resolve Words of Wisdom.
We reach 2^^^^^(2^^^^(2^^(2^^7))) Consecrated Sphinxes.
Yeah, it doesn't look like we have room for Mirror of Fate. Then we would have room for one Terashi's Grasp, one Flash of Defiance, and no Kiora's Dismissal, and we won't mill enough cards for Kiora's Dismissal.
EDIT: It's too bad Pull from Eternity brings the exiled card to the graveyard rather than the library, or else we could mill it instead of having to draw Mirror of Fate.
EDIT: I thought of a way to save Show and Tell: If we replace Titania, Protector of Argoth with say Expedition Map, then we are forced to use Show and Tell in order to put the land back onto the battlefield, so we can't use it for Fountain of Youth instead. But, that would squeeze out Terashi's Grasp. I don't know how to fix it except to add another Flash of Defiance. That would make the decks even, so the winner would be which one gave the better start. The Replenish deck looks to get the better start.
EDIT: What if we replace Terashi's Grasp with say Lifegift? Could that make Show and Tell work?
EDIT: Wait a minute. How does the infinite for Show and Tell work? We can resolve spells in the order Worldfire / Show and Tell / Retract to get one more use of a Fountain of Youth, so we wind up with one extra life. But, our flashback spells use 3 life, so we need to get to gain three extra life to do anything profitable. I don't see how to get that three extra life - if we flashback Flash of Defiance to cast the same three spells again, we are back to 2 life.
We can't resolve the Show and Tell immediately because then we won't actually have the land in hand when we put multiple transitions on the stack while building the hyper^2stage back up.
For the same reason Lifegift won't work. We just can't always put the land into play at the moment we put the transition on the stack.
How the infinite works has, on the surface, an easy answer: We can use even a single extra life to leave a Fountain of Youth activation on the stack below the transition. The next time we will have two extra life and keep two activations on the stack. The next time we have 3 extra life and get an extra Hyperstage transition. Even if that didn't work, we can put Vedalken Orrery into play with Show and Tell and then just cast the fountains.
But let's look at it a bit closer: If we use Show and Tell instead of Terashi's Grasp on a Helix we will not have any extra life for the higher hyperstage. That means we can't cast any instants there. As we have concluded when looking at Mox Emerald that means we don't naturally gain any life back from the Flash of Defiance and the 3 life we can gain via Show and Tell are all that we get. That means we barely break even on the ressources for Flash of Defiance.
That is actually the same standard as we had for Acorn Harvest before we limited green mana. So the only thing that is required for this to not go infinite is the need to use some required Metallurgeon activations somewhere along the line. If we need them, then we also slowly consume hyperstage below the transition to keep them around.
Currently we need Metallurgeon to generate green via Copper Myr, which means if we want to go infinite we can't use any instants triggered by Acorn Harvest. With that restriction I don't think there is a way to keep Wormfang Behemoth around through repeated Worldfires.
So it might actually be safe to just use Show and tell again and we free up one card slot from the start.
I am however not very confident in that conclusion. Especially with Terashi's Grasp around to potentially target Copper Myr or Metallurgeon, there might be some way to go infinite via mixing up transitions with Terashi's Grasp and transitions with Show and Tell. If we go back to Harmony of Nature I'd be more comfortable, but would still like to see if there is some stricter argument against the infinite.
EDIT: Well, we could try to handle the preparation for Worldfire in the lower hyperstage. But, I don't believe that works out. We would have to cast Wormfang Behemoth, then flashback Acorn Harvest as a response. But, we spend our 3 life this way, and as we have seen we can't get an extra 3 uses out of the Fountain of Youths when we do this. So we can't actually build another stage and use it for the higher hyperstage. We can build a higher stage (even 2) and just resolve them like we were in the first hyperstage, but that doesn't go infinite.
We require Arcorn Harvest to correctly time instants to use Wormfang Behemoth -> Copper Myr needs artifact targeting to produce green -> we need to consume ressources from a hyperstage below to keep Metallurgeon around.
But Terashi's Grasp invalidates that chain and I think it just goes infinite - whether we have Show and Tell or not:
Play Metallurgeon to get Bloodbond March triggers.
Cast Flash of Defiance. Use Terashi's to destroy Metallurgeon and put it under Mimic Vat. Tap Vat to get a token.
Play Copper Myr, destroy it with Metallurgeon, get myr token, return myr with bloodbond march.
Use a Batttle Cry triggered by the Flash of defiance to untap metallurgeon. use it to bounce the myr.
Use another Battle Bry to untap the token and repeat that process to create green mana until you we run out of Battle Cries.
Do normal transitiony stuff to resolve Worldfire and return Metallurgeon to the Battlefield with Bloodbond March.
Cast another Flash of Defiance. This time use Terashi's to bounce Metallurgeon. After doing normal transitiony stufgf to resolve Worldfire again, we are right were we started.
Along the way we had plenty of extra Grip of Chaos triggers to increase our numbers, soooo... infinite.
We need to get rid of Terashi's Grasp and gain life via Harmony of Nature again.
So, time to think about the start again! Using Words of Wisdom would be ideal, if we can get it started. If we can't, then probably Selvala's Enforcer?
EDIT: So, without being able to get many draws from Consecrated Sphinx, I guess our goal in the opening is to mill as many of our cards that we can use from our graveyard as we can, while redrawing as few cards as we can. We have 15 instants/sorceries/lands, so that gives us a potential of 15 drawings of Reality Spasm. But, we definitely have to Show and Tell, and probably a few others, like Evacuation and Kiora's Dismissal. I'm uncertain whether or not we need to cast Worldfire prior to the ending Reality Spasms... hopefully not. If we can get away with just casting Show and Tell, Kiora's Dismissal, and Evacuation, and go from there to the Reality Spasms, then we can draw Reality Spasm 12 times. We need to wind up milling 11 instants/sorceries/lands and no others - hopefully we can manage this with appropriate usage of Mirror of Fate and Spellweaver Helix. The biggest question is getting the mana to get started.
EDIT: So, here is an okay start:
1 Black Lotus
2 Show and Tell
3 Omniscience
4 Opalescence
5 Dual Nature
6 Copy Enchantment
get 6 Dual Natures
7 Selvala's Enforcer
draw 7 cards
8 Grip of Chaos
9 Cowardice
10 Vedalken Orrery
11 Evacuation
12 Kiora's Dismissal
13 Azorius Keyrune
14 March of the Machines
Cast Grip of Chaos, Cowardice, March of the Machines, and Vedalken Orrery.
Cast Kiora's Dismissal, getting 7 Grip of Chaos triggers and 8 bounces.
Get 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 Dual Natures after the first five bounces.
After the sixth bounce, get 13 more Dual Natures, 18 more Grip of Chaoses, and an Opalescence.
Play the Azorius Keyrune, get 45 Dual Nature tokens.
Bounce March of the Machines and Opalescence with the last two Grip of Chaos triggers.
Play Evacuation, bounce Selvala's Enforcer back to our hand.
Play Selvala's Enforcer, get 45 Dual Nature triggers and eventually draw 46 more cards.
I think this isn't too bad. We do need to draw Broken Ambitions later, so we wind up drawing for instants/sorceries, reducing the number of Reality Spasm draws to 11. I don't think there are any problems from here on out.
Perhaps we can do better, by using Broken Ambitions to mill at least one of Kiora's Dismissal or Evacuation. So, we could try:
8 Broken Ambitions
9 Spellweaver Volute
10 Evacuation
11 Titania, Protector of Argoth
12 Vedalken Orrery
13 Grip of Chaos
14 Cowardice
Cast Broken Ambitions, mill:
15 Kiora's Dismissal
16 Rebuild
17 Flash of Defiance
18 Taiga
Play Titania, Protector of Argoth.
Bring Taiga onto the battlefield.
Play Vedalken Orrery.
Cast Evacuation, bringing Selvala's Enforcer and all our enchantments back to our hand.
Play out our enchantments, getting 6 Dual Natures and 7 Grip of Chaoses.
Draw seven cards:
19 Azorius Signet
20 March of the machines
21 Izzet Guildmage
22-25 ?
The problem: We only have one Spellweaver Volute, so if we try to flashback Flash of Defiance, we can only get trigger one of Evacuation or Kiora's Dismissal. Obviously we need another Evacuation, but without Kiora's Dismissal we only get 7 more Selvala's Enforcers, not enough, and then Evacuation is exiled. We can only afford to flashback one sorcery. So, we need to draw another sorcery, and we can only draw 11 Reality Spasms again.
Trying again, this time drawing Kiora's Dismissal:
8 Broken Ambitions
9 Spellweaver Volute
10 Kiora's Dismissal
11 Titania, Protector of Argoth
12 Azorius Keyrune
13 Grip of Chaos
14 Cowardice
Cast Broken Ambitions, mill:
15 Evacuation
16 Rebuild
17 Flash of Defiance
18 Taiga
With one more card, we could draw all of Vedalken Orrery, Grip of Chaos and Cowardice, and we should be golden. As it is, we need to decide which card to drop. Let's try without Vedalken.
We cast Kiora's Dismissal. We can bounce up to seven things, but we can't cast any non-instants in between. If we bounce Copy Enchantment, then Dual Nature destruction tokens will trigger, and we will lose all our Dual Nature tokens. I don't think we can possibly get enough Dual Nature tokens to allow Selvala's Enforcer to get us to the Reality Spasms. So this doesn't work out so well, and we will need at least one more sorcery.
What if we keep Vedalken Orrery, but give up our Grip of Chaos. Then, Kiora's Dismissal can only bounce one thing. It might as well be Copy Enchantment, but we get Dual Nature destruction triggers again. We can try to respond to the Dual Nature triggers. We can then replay Copy Enchantment and get five token copies, for which we can have one copy Spellweaver Volute and the other four copy Dual Nature. We now have nine Dual Natures. We next flashback Flash of Defiance, and trigger the Spellweaver Volutes on both Kiora's Dismissal and Evacuation. If we don't bounce Opalescence, we will lose all our progress, so that seems like the natural thing to bounce. So, we wind up casting Evacuation and then replaying Selvala's Enforcer for 10 card draws. Not enough, so this doesn't work either.
So, I'm not seeing a way yet to get 12 Reality Spasms. Am I missing something?
Although one thing you don't seem to address is that Azorius Signet doesn't give us mana because we don't have any in the pool to begin with. We need to get the land on the battlefield and tapped before we generate any mana through it, which means we can only start flashing stuff back after we used Reality Spasm to untap the land. Still, the start where we draw Evacuation and Kiora's Dismissal looks very doable. Not sure about the variations where we try to mill one of those instead.
Also, don't forget that we can play Selvala's Enforcer any time between Dual Nature triggers, so if we want to draw 30 cards, but can get up to 64 Dual Natures, we just play the Enforcer before we get all Dual Natures. It seems way more effective to replay Enforce later instead of sacrificing the potential of combo now.
__
We are going for the Kithkin Mourncaller + World at War ending, right? Are there any better ways to use the last card slot?
I replaced Azorius Signet with Azorius Keyrune for precisely the reason you mention. Seems like the Keyrune should work just as well.
Yeah, this is assuming the Kithkin Mourncaller / World at War ending. Getting a full layer more seems hard; perhaps if we added Winding Constrictor and two cards that used counters? But, that would be unlikely to work because of Worldfire. Besides that, the only ways to get double layers per card was either to use Archangel of Thune, which doesn't work because life total is already used, or double up on card usage, either with Boon Reflection for the life totals of both players, or with damage bouncers for both 1-2 damage and 3+ damage (for Pain Magnification). The latter seems undoable with just five cards. Oh, and there's Precursor Golem; this seems like the most promising. To get an extra layer, we probably need to use it on more than one instant/sorcery.
Otherwise, the ideal ending would be four layers ending in Consecrated Sphinx / Words of Wisdom. This seems doable, but I haven't found anything yet. It's too bad that Indomitable Creativity ending didn't work out, although we can't use red mana at the end anymore. We do have colorless mana available now, so we could throw in something like Kozilek's Pathfinder. But, how to generate colorless mana? As far as I know, there isn't a colorless version of Black Lotus.
So, is there a way to stick something in between Reality Spasm and Consecrated Sphinx? We could make it a two or three card transition if need be. But we need to draw something that gets an extra usage out of Reality Spasm... I don't know how it could be safe unless it was an X instant/sorcery or a 0 costing artifact/enchantment that you had to sacrifice. I don't see any good candidates from those categories; Diabolic Revelation isn't worth a layer by itself. Should Reality Spasm be replaced? It does seem to be very good, allowing us to get that initial hasted token and still getting a layer, with Precursor Golem bumping it to two. Can we move Consecrated Sphinx and/or Words of Wisdom further down? We would then need some way to refill the opponent's library, and it looks like we would lose a layer.
How about squeezing in something in between Minion of Tevesh Szat and Reality Spasm? This seems like it has some potential, but I'm not sure what could work. I thought about Minion of Leshrac, but it can be targeted by Godtoucher, and anyway doesn't seem to get a layer.
So yeah, I'm can't see anything better to do with the extra card currently.
A sequence ending in Words of Wisdom would be great.
I did try to start with Words of Wisdom instead of Selvala's Enforcer but got stuck 8 cards in. Not much hope for that one.
Is it possible to get 13 Reality Spasms? Let's give it a try:
1 Black Lotus
2 Show and Tell
3 Omniscience
4 Opalescence
5 Dual Nature
6 Copy Enchantment
get 6 Dual Natures
7 Selvala's Enforcer
draw 7 cards
8 Broken Ambitions
9 Spellweaver Volute
10 Titania, Protector of Argoth
11 Azorius Keyrune
12 Vedalken Orrery
13 Reality Spasm
14 Mirror of Fate
Cast Broken Ambitions, mill four cards:
15 Kiora's Dismissal
16 Evacuation
17 Taiga
18 Acorn Harvest
Cast Vedalken Orrery.
Cast Spellweaver Volute, enchanting Evacuation.
Cast Azorius Keyrune.
Cast Titania, Protector of Argoth. Taiga comes onto the battlefield.
Tap Azorius Keyrune and Taiga for a blue and green mana.
Flashback Acorn Harvest.
Spellweaver Volute triggers. Place it on Kiora's Dismissal.
Evacuation resolves, and brings almost all our enchantments back to our hand, as well as Selvala's Enforcer.
Dual Nature destruction triggers go on the stack.
Respond to the triggers by replaying Dual Nature, getting 5 token copies (going up to 10 total), and then Copy Enchantment copying Dual Nature, getting 11 token copies. (going up to 22 total)
Play Selvala's Enforcer, getting 22 copies and drawing 23 cards.
That seems pretty good, but there is a problem. We now have no flashback sorceries in the graveyard, so we need to use Mirror of Fate to bring Acorn Harvest back to the library, and Broken Ambitions to put it back into the graveyard. But, we can't use Mirror of Fate until we bounce March of the Machines, unless we are willing to sacrifice it, and we can't use Broken Ambitions until we trigger it from the graveyard via a sorcery. So we are stuck here unless we draw a sorcery.
So, it looks like we can get a maximum of 12 Reality Spasms, unless I am missing something. Doing that shouldn't be hard; it's just a matter of finding the strongest approach, I think.
2 Grip of Chaos
3 Cowardice
4 Horobi, Death's Wail
5 Bloodbond March
6 Broken Ambitions
7 Mimic Vat
8 Omniscience
9 Vedalken Orrery
10 Mirror of Fate
11 March of the Machines
12 Izzet Guildmage
13 Dual Nature
14 Copy Enchantment
15 Kiora's Dismissal
16 Azorius Keyrune
17 Copper Myr
18 Metallurgeon
19 Acorn Harvest
20 Battle Cry
21 Rebuild
22 Spellweaver Volute
23 Fountain of Youth
24 Fountain of Youth
25 Fountain of Youth
27 Wormfang Behemoth
28 Harmony of Nature
29 Worldfire
30 Flash of Defiance
31 Flash of Defiance
32 Flash of Defiance
33 Spellweaver Helix
34 Titania, Protector of Argoth
35 Taiga
36 Goblin Gardener
37 Mad Auntie
38 Facevaulter
39 Basal Thrull
40 Thrull Champion
41 Godtoucher
42 Everglove Courier
43 Nectar Faerie
44 Ghosthelm Courier
45 Possessed Aven
47 Maze Glider
48 Possessed Centaur
49 Eastern Paladin
50 Frightshroud Courier
51 Dwarven Warriors
52 Possessed Barbarian
53 Minion of Tevesh Szat
54 Reality Spasm
55 Precursor Golem
56 Kithkin Mourncaller
57 World at War
58 Selvala's Enforcer
59 Show and Tell
60 Black Lotus
Some problems I ran into with the start:
- Evacuation with Opalescence on board bounces Omniscience completely stopping us.
- If we ever resolve Spellweaver Volute and don't have an instant in the graveyard after that, the Volute dies and we need to redraw it. Even if the spell it casts is Broken Ambitions it won't mill new instants fast enough.
- We need to be able to counter creature spells before we can take advantage of Bloodbond March.
Opener: Black Lotus, Show and Tell, Omniscience, Opalescence, Dual Nature, Copy Enchantment, Selvala's Enforcer.
Play them all.
We draw 7: Cowardice, Grip of Chaos, Vedalken Orrery, Broken Ambitions, Spellweaver Volute, Spellweaver Helix, Flash of Defiance.
Play Orrery. Use Broken Ambitions to mill 4, but don't counter it.
Milled cards: Flash of Defiance, Evacuation, Kiora's Dismissal, Taiga
Play Helix, exiling Flash of Defiance and Show and Tell. Play Volute, enchanting Evacuation.
Cast Flash of Defiance triggering Volute and Helix. Resolve Helix first, putting Show and Tell on the stack and triggering Volute again.
Resolve the Volute, put it on Kiora's. Resolve the Evacuation returning all our creatures, including the animated enchantments to our hand.
Resolve the Show and Tell, put Omniscience into play.
Play Dual Nature, Copy Enchantment as itself with tokens as Dual Nature, Grip of Chaos and Cowardice.
Resolve the Volute trigger. Volute is currently enchanting Kiora's, so we copy and cast that. Volute ends up on broken ambitions.
The Kiora's cast triggers Cowardice and 5 Grip of Chaos, so we get 6 bounces. Use 5 of those to double the Dual Nature count. We will end up with 128 Dual Natures. During that process, at the moment we have 34 Dual Natures replay Selvala's Enforcer and draw all enchantments, creatures, artifacts and Reality Spasm.
Before the Last bounce play March of the Machines and Azorius Keyrune. Then use the bounce to return March of the Machines to our hand. Tap the Keyrunes for 129 mana.
Play Izzet Guildmage and copy Kiora's 40 times, each time raising the number of Dual Natures. We end up with more than 2^^42.
Play Titania, Protector of Argoth and grab Taiga to produce a red. Flashback Flash of Defiance, triggering Volute. We resolve the Volute and put Broken Ambitions on the stack. We can now copy that when we want to mill, but Volute already died.
Play March of the Machines, Mirror of Fate, Mimic Vat, Precursor Golem, Bloodbond March and Minion of Tevesh Szat. Counter the last one and resolve a Bloodbond march trigger.
Cast Reality Spasm with X=1 targeting a Golem. We initially destroy the Minion of Tevesh Szat and put it on a Mimic Vat. All Precursor triggers will be used to untap that Mimic Vat multiple times. Between them we go through as many stages of the combo as possible without destroying the Mimic Vat. To do so we need one additional draw for the Spellweaver Volute that died. After creating the last batch of hasty Minion tokens we can finally return the original Minion and go for the full Hyper^2stage.
After that we can draw Reality Spasm 10 more times before combat.
That start ends up with 11 Reality Spasms. Does one of the other approaches for 12 work? I saw that some of them had problems, but kinda lost track. ^^'
I forgot about bouncing Omniscience! Taking that into consideration, my favored opening of drawing Evacuation and milling Kiora's Dismissal doesn't look so great anymore. But, I'll give it a looksee just in case.
EDIT: I think I see how to save 12 Reality Spasms in your opening: Make a copy of Spellweaver Volute, enchanting Broken Ambitions, then bounce the original back to your hand. We can do this with the last copy of Kiora's Dismissal, so we should still get more than 2^^43 Dual Natures, and an extra Reality Spasm.
EDIT: Welp, I'm pretty convinced that 13 Reality Spasms is impossible, but I suppose it is still possible that we could have a slightly better 12 Reality Spasm opening. I thought of the possibility of using the last remaining potential Spellweaver Volute trigger for something - but, clearly we need to cast Broken Ambitions first, so that we can mill some new instants. But then we need to resolve the Broken Ambitions spell to get to the other Volute trigger. That means that we don't have Broken Ambitions on the stack when we need to counter Minion of Tevesh Szat. If we try to respond with casting Minion of Tevesh Szat, then the Bloodbond March triggers will be resolved before we get to the other Volute trigger.
EDIT: Trying to come up with an estimate, the main problem is how much recursion we get for the initial Precursor Golem triggers for the first Reality Spasm. We can't afford to cast either Worldfire or Rebuild, so I'm thinking that the w^3 becomes w + 3. Also, we lose the Minion of Tevesh Szat stage, since we can't access the Bloodbond March triggers, but the other stages should be fine. So, I'm thinking the Precursor Golem triggers are worth F_{w12}, except for the last one, which is worth the full F_{w^3 + w12}. So I have the whole final lower bound to be:
(F_{w^3 + w12 + 3}) (F_{w^3 + w12 + 2}) (F_{w^3 + 12 + 1})^11 (F_{w^3 + w12}) (F_{w12 + 1}) (F_2)^40 (35).
Simpler: (F_{w^3 + w12 + 3}) (F_{w^3 + w12 + 2})^2 (11)
Simplest: F_{w^3 + w12 + 4} (2)
EDIT: I just noticed that we can cycle Rebuild without it costing us a casting of Reality Spasm. So, we could flashback Flash of Defiance with a Spellweaver Volute on Rebuild, bounce our artifacts, then put Vedalken Orrery back onto the battlefield using Show and Tell. Then, we could replay Azorius Keyrune, and get more than 2^^43 copies. Unfortunately, we can neither tap those Keyrunes or use the mana they would generate without Kiora's Dismissal. And Kiora's Dismissal will be gone by the time we cast Rebuild, since we need to flashback Flash of Defiance, and the Flash of Defiance we need to flashback will be stuck below the Kiora's Dismissal copies on the stack. The only solution I can think of would be to counter Flash of Defiance - but, we can't cast Broken Ambitions because we need to cast Flash of Defiance to trigger it. So, I don't see a solution here.
Can we put Kiora's Dismissal back into the graveyard? We could, but only after we cast Broken Ambitions. But that happens after we flashback Flash of Defiance, and we have no more ability to cast or flashback a sorcery, except for Show and Tell. So, we could do the following: Flashback Flash of defiance, put the Volute trigger above the Helix trigger, have the Volute trigger cast Broken Ambitions. Put the Spellweaver Volute on Rebuild, which we cycled. Copy or resolve Broken Ambitions to put Kiora's Dismissal in the graveyard. Play Copy Enchantment and create a copy of Spellweaver Volute, enchanting Kiora's Dismissal. Resolve the Helix, and cast Show and Tell, triggering both Rebuild and Kiora's Dismissal. Hmm... if we resolve Rebuild first, then we can't replay the Azorius Keyrune until Kiora's Dismissal is resolved, and if we resolve Kiora's Dismissal first, then we certainly can't bounce the March of the Machines after Azorius Keyrune is replayed. So I don't see how to make this work.
EDIT: Actually, we can put Spellweaver Volutes on both Broken Ambitions and Rebuild. Then we flashback Flash of Defiance, triggering both Volutes and the Spellweaver Helix. Put the Helix on top; when we resolve it, it triggers both Volutes again. We resolve Broken Ambitions, and put Kiora's Dismissal in the graveyard. Then we resolve the Volute trigger on Rebuild, and the Volute gets placed on Kiora's Dismissal. We resolve Rebuild, bringing our artifacts back to our hand. Resolve Show and Tell, putting Vedalken Orrery on the battlefield. Replay Azorius Keyrune, getting more than 2^^43 copies. Then the Volute on Kiora's Dismissal resolves again, and casts Kiora's Dismissal, and we can bounce March of the Machines and start copying Kiora's Dismissal, getting more than 2^^2^^43 copies of Dual Nature. Does this work?
No wait, Broken Ambitions is now off the stack, and we need to have it on. We don't have any other sorceries that we can cast. Can we put the original card back in the graveyard? I don't see why not. But, we won't be able to put both triggered Volutes on Broken Ambitions and Kiora's Dismissal, since the triggered Volute on Broken Ambitions resolves before we can put those two cards back in the graveyard. If we put two Volutes on Rebuild, I'm pretty sure we can only move one of them. So again, it's not working. So close, and yet so far.
EDIT: Thought about improving the ending again. Herbal Poultice seems like it has some potential, as it is a single card that can target and is worth a layer, and recycling artifacts may be easier than recycling instants/sorceries. The first thing that came to mind was following it by Indomitable Creativity + Precursor Golem, but this has the same problem as the previous ending with Indomitable Creativity: We need to make progress with each spell copy, but then we need to cast Worldfire to make the maximum progress, and that will eliminate all the Golems, and the rest of the spell copies will fizzle. I guess this happens with Precursor Golem whenever the copied instant/sorcery has one or more layers beneath it.
Another thought was going Glissa, the Traitor / Sylvan Offering, but Glissa, the Traitor isn't worth a layer.
Treasury Thull looks like it goes to the combat phase too early.
Arbiter of the Ideal is a possibility, but I don't know what to follow it with.
EDIT: We could go:
Herbal Poultice
Arbiter of the Ideal
Curse of Bounty
World at War
getting the same four layers as our current setup. Which version starts better?
Obviously Reality Spasm is better, since it gets F_{w^3+w12+1} whereas Herbal Poultice gets F_{w^3+w12}
That improved Reality Spasm start where we put Vedalken Orrery back via Show and Tell should work, actually. We can cast Bloodbond March and Minion of Tevesh Szat before the flashback of Flash of Defiance. Then we counter the Minion while we have Broken Ambitions on the stack, mill Broken Ambitions and more flashback spells at the same time, get more Dual Natures when we have Kiora's Dismissal on the stack, and then resolve that part to get Minion back to the battlefield. After resolving a Precursor Golem trigger for Reality Spasm we then easily have enough ressources to put Broken Ambitions back on the stack, mill Kiora's Dismissal again and put that on the stack as well.
Thinking about Herbal Poultice: If we go for the Consecrated Sphinx / Words of Wisdom ending, we need those drawn cards to do one of two things: either we draw something important, or the draw triggers something important. The most likely important thing that we could draw would be an instant/sorcery with an X cost; otherwise, I think it would need to be a permanent that we can't reuse. We have an artifact with a 0 cost at the bottom, so the permanent would need to be... a planeswalker? But, it would take too much work to make planeswalkers work at instant speed. If we use an instant/sorcery with an X cost, the problem is that usually those won't get a layer. Adding a card like Swarm Intelligence will probably make it one layer for two cards, which is not good enough. We'd like to get the two layers from Precursor Golem, but it looks like Worldfire messes up those double layers. I'm not seeing a scenario that could get around the Worldfire problem..
The other possibility is using triggered abilities that trigger off of a draw. There are cards like Spiteful Visions and Underworld Dreams, but I'm not seeing how to turn damage into something profitable; triggered targeting of Minion of Tevesh Szat won't get layers, and targeting Herbal Poultice doesn't help. There's Night Dealings, but that won't work with Herbal Poultice, and it won't create a hasted token of Minion of Tevesh Szat. I suppose we could put Reality Spasm below it. But, we would have to deal with restoring the opponent's life, and usually that would cost a card. If we could have a creature that can deal damage to the opponent as part of the stage sequence, then we could use Tamanoa after Underworld Dreams to heal the opponent, and then go into Night Dealings. But, we would need to give Tamanoa to the opponent somehow, and that would cost cards. So, Night Dealings seems unlikely to work.
EDIT: I notice that if we go with the Herbal Poultice / Arbiter of the Ideal / Curse of Bounty / World at War ending, then we can go back to using Psychic Battle. We get F_{w^3+w12+3}(F_{w^3+w12+2}(...) on the outside, but the inner functions are slightly smaller. But, we get rid of the insane luck required for Grip of Chaos. I'm not sure which one I prefer. What do you think?
I prefer going with the highest possible damage. Even if that means we require all that luck for Grip of Chaos.
It is too bad that Dryad's Caress is an instant instead of a sorcery. Otherwise we could use that instead of Harmony of Nature and end with Herbal Poultice, Arbiter of the Ideal, Kithkin Mourncaller, World at War.
EDIT: actually, that last sequence wouldn't even work, since we wouldn't be able to use Harmony of Nature to tap the Arbiter of the Ideals if we replace it with the card we want to use to untap them
We actually have an alternative way to tap the Arbiter of the Ideals: We can regenerate them via Herbal Poultice, and then destroy them using Possessed Aven. So we could switch out Harmony of Nature if we wanted to. But yeah... Dryad's Caress is an instant.
Militia's Pride can add another layer, nice. Now we just need to find another card savings!
Giving creatures haste is an excellent way to both add a layer and to create at least one hasted Minion of Tevesh Szat token. Sadly, I couldn't find any safe way to give creatures haste other than Torrent of Souls. Harness by Force can still target one creature without paying its mana cost, so that doesn't work.
I should look at other instants/sorceries that don't work without paying their mana costs, other than just the X spells.
EDIT: I wonder, if we add a legendary creature that can target a general creature, but don't add Mirror Gallery, does it go infinite with Minion of Tevesh Szat?
I actually don't think so. Let's say we have a Minion of Tevesh Szat token on the battlefield, and the original Minion of Tevesh Szat and say Visara the Dreadful in our hand. We play both of those creatures in some order. Say we play the Minion first, and Visara second, so that the Visara Bloodbond March triggers are on top. Then, we can tap the Minion token and destroy both Visara and the original Minion, creating token copies of both. The Visara token can now target the original Minion, except it is not on the battlefield. If we try to wait until the Minion Bloodbond March triggers, then we have to go through all the Bloodbond March triggers for Visara. But then we cannot allow the original Visara to come back and stay on the battlefield, since that would destroy the token. So Visara winds up stuck in the graveyard.
Next, suppose we play Visara first and the Minion second. Again, we can tap the Minion token to destroy both original creatures and get token copies of both. We can now use the Visara token to destroy the original Minion, after using a Bloodbond March trigger to bring it back to the battlefield. Essentially, we can convert the Visara token into a Minion token, and we have two. But, before all the Bloodbond March triggers for the Minion resolve, we need to bounce the Minion back to our hand, and that uses up a Minion token, and we are back down to one. Then we can use a Visara Bloodbond March trigger to bring it back to the battlefield, and we are back to where we started, except we have one less Visara Bloodbond March trigger. So it doesn't look like this goes infinite either.
So that's interesting - but, that only means something if we can find a way to use it for an improvement. It would be nice if adding a legendary creature would add an extra layer, but it doesn't look like it does. Muzzio, Visionary Architect and Herbal Poultice definitely look like they go infinite together. What about Niv-Mizzet, the Firemind, or Nin, the Pain Artist? Or maybe Xira Arien, if drawing and targeting is too much.
EDIT: Hmm, actually I think we can get an extra layer or two by adding a legendary creature. In the first example above, we can gain an extra Minion of Tevesh Szat token, provided that we don't bother to bounce either of the creatures back to our hand. So, if in the ending sequence we use something that can target a creature, every two targetings can bounce both creatures and restart the procedure with one more Minion token on the battlefield.
So, what about ending with:
Visara the Dreadful (or many other possibilities)
Psychic Battle
Grip of Chaos
Herbal Poultice
Consecrated Sphinx
Words of Wisdom
Does that work?
Still, utilizing the life total of the opponent may be a possibility. Grollub may turn out to be useful.
EDIT: Looking again at how to save a card: It doesn't look like there are any obvious pairs of cards that can be combined anymore. It would be nice if there was a card that said "permanents are creatures", which could take care of both Opalescence and March of the Machines, but there doesn't seem to be such a card. No way I see to cut down on the number of Fountain of Youths. So perhaps shortening the stage sequence is the most likely possibility.
The obvious weakness is that three card second stage. If we could add another stage post-Everglove Courier, that might eliminate it. Iijil found one such sequence, but it turned out to be longer, as the Royal Assassin sequence was three cards, and losing Godtoucher meant only saving two cards in the pre-Everglove Courier part.
Some possible stages to add in: creatures with toughness 2 or less. The pairing of Phantasmal Mount followed by Old Man of the Sea seems to be very good; however, I was unable to make a stage sequence that doesn't lose at least a couple of stages somewhere else. For example, we can no longer have both Possessed Aven and Centaur Archer. Ending with Tsabo's Assassin and Blinding Drone doesn't seem to work out either, as it eliminates Frightshroud Courier and Dwarven Warriors. Actually trading two for two might be okay, but when we lose Dwarven Warriors we lose the transition to red, that I haven't been able to replace. Another idea was to try to stick Goblins in the sequence using Slingshot Goblin, but then it is hard to squeeze in Centaur Archer.
EDIT: We can save lands for later by replacing Titania, Protector of Argoth with Wood Elves. The problem is that typically, abilities of lands don't get you a layer. Otherwise, Nivix, Aerie of the Firemind or Mirrorpool would be interesting.
EDIT: I wonder if we could somehow put Consecrated Sphinx and/or Words of Wisdom into the layer sequence. Then, we would need to have something that can refill the opponent's library as the next step. Widespread Panic seems like a promising card, but I'm not sure where to go next. Preator's Grasp is a possibility, but it can only be cast about 60 times, so the end result is about as good as our previous three layer sequence that ended in Words of Wisdom.
EDIT: Another idea is to have our card drawer also cause us to discard a card, and then have discarding a card trigger something else. A possible sequence:
Reality Spasm
Precursor Golem
Dragon Appeasement
Pitchstone Wall
Windfall
Unfortunately, our deck now has Facevaulter, which allows a much cheaper sacrifice. If we could redo the initial part of the stage sequence, that would allow Dragon Appeasement to be used again.
EDIT: It would be nice to use damage to ourselves to power up Angelheart Vial. If Megrim were red, then we could perhaps use Reality Spasm / Angelheart Vial / Justice / Megrim / Windfall. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a card that causes damage to ourselves when we or the opponent discard a card.
EDIT: If we could have Goblins somehow be able to produce blue mana but not black mana, then we could get a thirteenth stage. One possibility is if there were a version of Black Lotus that produced blue mana only, but as far as I know there isn't. Another possibility is to go to Wood Elves, and have Goblins recycle nonforest lands somehow. One way to do that would be to turn a land into a creature, so that it could be bounced using Evacuation, and put back on the battlefield using Show and Tell. Ignition Team has the right idea, but unfortunately it doesn't have to tap to use it.
EDIT: I'm liking the idea of using Goblin Burrows to target Goblins, and having the next stage down recycle Goblin Burrows somehow. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a good Merfolk or Thrull to recycle Goblin Burrows. There are a couple Merfolk that can explore to draw a land, but those are ETB effects, too cheap. There are also a couple of Merfolk that can turn lands into creatures, but again they don't require the creature to tap. We have a few Merfolk like Tideshaper Mystic that can turn Goblin Burrows into a basic land like a Forest, but it won't stay a Forest when it leaves the battlefield, so that doesn't help with Wood Elves. We could add Life and Limb to turn Forests into creatures, but that is a card slot we can't spare.
EDIT: Well, we can hook Elves into Goblin Burrows using Quirion Druid, which allows us to follow with Iijil's sequence for 13 stages:
2 Psychic Battle
3 Cowardice
4 Horobi, Death's Wail
5 Bloodbond March
6 Cephalid Shrine
7 Mimic Vat
8 Omniscience
9 Vedalken Orrery
10 Mirror of Fate
11 March of the Machines
12 Drake Familiar
13 Perpetual Timepiece
14 Dual Nature
15 Copy Enchantment
16 Allay
17 Tooth of Ramos
18 Copper Myr
19 Metallurgeon
20 Acorn Harvest
21 Battle Cry
22 Retract
23 Spellweaver Volute
24 Fountain of Youth
25 Fountain of Youth
26 Fountain of Youth
28 Wormfang Behemoth
29 Divine Congregation
30 Worldfire
31 Flash of Defiance
32 Flash of Defiance
33 Flash of Defiance
34 Spellweaver Helix
35 Wood Elves
36 Taiga
37 Hurloon Shaman
38 Anaba Ancestor
39 Spectral Shepherd
40 Goblin Welder
41 Mad Auntie
42 Goblin Burrows
43 Quirion Druid
44 Everglove Courier
45 Nectar Faerie
46 Ghosthelm Courier
47 Possessed Aven
49 Maze Glider
50 Possessed Centaur
51 Eastern Paladin
52 Frightshroud Courier
53 Embalmer's Tools
54 Devout Chaplain
55 Royal Assassin
56 Paragon of Open Graves
57 Lightbringer
58 Dwarven Warriors
59 Karplusan Yeti
60 Reality Spasm
61 Selvala's Enforcer
62 Show and Tell
63 Black Lotus
Of course, we are 3 cards over, so this probably will only be useful for the sideboard version. I don't see any savings for 12 stages.
EDIT: Actually, it's better to stick with Godtoucher and make Tideshaper Mystic work using Omen of Fire:
2 Psychic Battle
3 Cowardice
4 Horobi, Death's Wail
5 Bloodbond March
6 Cephalid Shrine
7 Mimic Vat
8 Omniscience
9 Vedalken Orrery
10 Mirror of Fate
11 March of the Machines
12 Drake Familiar
13 Perpetual Timepiece
14 Dual Nature
15 Copy Enchantment
16 Allay
17 Tooth of Ramos
18 Copper Myr
19 Metallurgeon
20 Acorn Harvest
21 Battle Cry
22 Retract
23 Spellweaver Volute
24 Fountain of Youth
25 Fountain of Youth
26 Fountain of Youth
28 Wormfang Behemoth
29 Harmony of Nature
30 Worldfire
31 Flash of Defiance
32 Flash of Defiance
33 Flash of Defiance
34 Spellweaver Helix
35 Wood Elves
36 Taiga
37 Hurloon Shaman
38 Anaba Ancestor
39 Spectral Shepherd
40 Goblin Welder
41 Mad Auntie
42 Goblin Burrows
43 Omen of Fire
44 Tideshaper Mystic
45 Merfolk Sovereign
46 Godtoucher
47 Everglove Courier
49 Ghosthelm Courier
50 Possessed Aven
51 Centaur Archer
52 Maze Glider
53 Possessed Centaur
54 Eastern Paladin
55 Frightshroud Courier
56 Dwarven Warriors
57 Possessed Barbarian
58 Minion of Tevesh Szat
59 Reality Spasm
60 Selvala's Enforcer
61 Show and Tell
62 Black Lotus
EDIT: I feel like there should be a way to get a five card sequence ending in a card drawing card, but I haven't found a way yet. My latest idea was trying to trigger off a discard; the possible cards to use seem to be Pitchstone Wall, Megrim, Telekenetic Bonds, and Spirit Cairn. Confessor and Sangromancer cause a gain of life, which is mooted by that point; Spiritual Focus and Geth's Grimoire allows us to draw a card, which doesn't seem to be any better than just using Consecrated Sphinx.
Telekenetic Bonds seems to be the most versatile, but it also seems to have problems gaining layers. If we go
Reality Spasm
Precursor Golem
Sphinx's Disciple
Telekenetic Bonds
Windfall
then not only does Sphinx's Disciple not get a layer, Telekenetic Bonds won't get a layer either, because of the problem of Worldfire destroying the things we want to untap. Reality Spasm / Angelheart Vial / Orcish Mine will get us one layer more, since we can trigger them all at the same time, but we still have Telekenetic Bonds not getting a layer. So, I don't know. Iijil, do you have any interesting ideas?
An interesting card to use would be Breath of Fury instead of World at War. The idea being that we can use the opponents life to trigger additional combat phases multiple times. But Worldfire also reduces the opponents life to 1 so we actually can't trigger Breath of Fury after going through the full combo and it ends up inferior. Thinking about it, casting it targets any creature way too cheaply since we can bounce it to our hand with Kiora's Dismissal so it goes infinite anyway.
EDIT: Patron of the Vein looks interesting. With Korozda Gorgon that is 2 layers below giving the opponent a creature. Of course if we give them more than one at a time the extras will get removed by Worldfire again, so I don't know how to continue from there without wasting a card.
Reality Spasm
Precursor Golem
Selvala's Enforcer
Widespread Panic
Praetor's Grasp
if we wanted.
I suppose we could save enchant creature auras, as well as draw/discard triggering, if we give up a card slot. That's a pretty steep price to pay though. Breath of Fury could be worth two layers, one for untapping bunches of creatures and one for having many of them. It could then link to something that gives the opponent life, although I don't see how to do that while gaining a layer. So we could go
Curse of Bounty
Breath of Fury
Alabaster Potion
Selvala's Enforcer
But, not an improvement, since giving the opponent life only lets Breath of Fury work once because of the Worldfire problem; we need to improve the third card.
Concerning Patron of the Vein, the only cards I see that give the opponent creatures without doing it too cheaply are Sylvan Offering, Forbidden Orchard, and Fickle Efreet. Unfortunately, none of them are worth a layer, with Sylvan Offering not working because of the Worldfire problem. Of course, we know one way to put many creatures on the battlefield one at a time; put a nontoken creature on the battlefield, under an opponent's control. But, I don't know any way of doing that that isn't too cheap; all the ways seem to be ETB effects or go to the graveyard effects. In the old decks, we used Thieves' Auction to get the opponent copies of Gruul Ragebeast and Mitotic Slime. This could indeed put a nontoken creature under the opponent's control and generate lots of token copies; but Thieves' Auction is too cheap.
It may not work for Patron of the Vein, but for Bellowing Aegisaur we could replace Korozda Gorgon with something like Stone Giant, since if we give a Stone Giant +2/+2, it can target Minion of Tevesh Szat. But, that's not an improvement. Maybe if we could put a card like that into the stage sequence, like if we could fit in Old Man of the Sea somehow.
EDIT: I took a look at the Worldpurge version that we abandoned a while back, and it's not so bad:
2 Grip of Chaos
3 Cowardice
4 Horobi, Death's Wail
5 Bloodbond March
6 Cephalid Shrine
7 Mimic Vat
8 Omniscience
9 Vedalken Orrery
10 Mirror of Fate
11 March of the Machines
12 Perpetual Timepiece
13 Dual Nature
14 Copy Enchantment
15 Allay
16 Calciform Pools
17 Core Prowler
18 Metallurgeon
19 Chatter of the Squirrel
20 Battle Cry
21 Rebuild
22 Spellweaver Volute
23 Mox Emerald
25 Shimmer
26 Sealock Monster
27 Time and Tide
28 Deconstruct
29 Precursor Golem
30 Worldpurge
31 Acorn Harvest
32 Acorn Harvest
33 Acorn Harvest
34 Spellweaver Helix
35 Titania, Protector of Argoth
36 Glimmerpost
37 Radiant Fountain
38 Goblin Gardener
39 Mad Auntie
40 Facevaulter
41 Basal Thrull
42 Thrull Champion
43 Godtoucher
44 Everglove Courier
46 Ghosthelm Courier
47 Possessed Aven
48 Centaur Archer
49 Maze Glider
50 Possessed Centaur
51 Eastern Paladin
52 Frightshroud Courier
53 Dwarven Warriors
54 Possessed Barbarian
55 Minion of Tevesh Szat
56 Reality Spasm
57 Consecrated Sphinx
58 Words of Wisdom
59 Show and Tell
60 Black Lotus
If that works, then if we could save one more card, we could improve on the Worldfire deck by ending with
Goblin Bushwacker
Black Lotus
Indomitable Creativity
Precursor Golem
Consecrated Sphinx
Words of Wisdom
It does seem like there is some room for improvement, particularly with the "saving progress" section of the deck, which I feel really should be able to be cut down. Also, we have red available for later, which might allow us to cut down on the stage sequence. I don't know if Izzet Guildmage can be used for any benefit.