Hmmm, I see the problem. I had assumed we could just resolve down through extra Psychic Battle triggers to regenerate artifacts, but yeah that doesn't actually work.
Sadly, Populate won't do it: once we start running through the megastage, we can also make token copies of Goblin Dark-Dwellers, and make token copies of that instead. Keying off creature types also probably won't work, because Changeling Hero has them too. Of course, we could then go back to the Brudiclad, Telchor Engineer version, which can still probably reach 6 stages...
Thousand-Year Storm seems like the easiest way to solve this. If we can find another way to force us to use up a Muzzio in the hyperstage, it should become safe again. I'm not sure how to do that, though.
Also, if I have a Copy Enchantment copying Bloodbond March while Verdant Succession is out, and the Copy Enchantment dies, do I search for a card named Bloodbond March or a card named Copy Enchantment?
Hmm... Mirrorwing Dragon is an interesting idea, but having to resolve the previous Smite the Monstrous seems to be too expensive, as we only get Smite from the previous megastage transition.
I think Verdant Succession will search for Bloodbond March, since that is the current name of the creature when it dies. It might be worth asking on the Rules forum.
Edit: the Mirrorwing Dragon / Smite idea would work for the gigastage I think, so if we had an idea that used lands to bring stuff back, we could combine the two.
I don't think you have to resolve to the next one down for Mirrorwing Dragon to work. We have to add Copy Enchantment anyways, because we're trying to cast 2 instants with Volute. Once we have that ability, we can put one on Hunting Pack and two on Smite the Monstrous. The Hunting Pack one gets us N creatures covered by the Dragon, the first Smite gets us N copies of Smite the Monstrous, which can then repeatedly bounce and replay Mirrorworks (we can kill Mirrorworks, make a token with Vat, and then Muzzio the nontoken back during the transition, that's not very expensive). That gives us N copies of our other artifacts like Mimic Vat and Mirror of Fate, which is enough to turn all our mana into enchantments. Then, the second Smite works the same way as our current setup.
I'm not seeing how this works. We can't use the instants triggered by the Acorn Harvest of the current megastage transition, since those will resolve before the Smite the Monstrous that destroys the Child of Alara, and wipes out all our nonland permanents. If we try to use Hunting Pack and Smite the Monstrous after Child of Alara wipes everything out, then we can get Beasts, but we won't get anything else on the battlefield, so we can't take advantage of the combo.
No wait, we have Changeling Hero Championing the Orrery, so that comes back and we can replay everything. But isn't this a problem? We can have Goblin Dark-Dwellers in our hand, and have Orrery on the battlefield and Smite the Monstrous copies (or Psychic Battle triggers, even if we don't have copies) on the stack, below the Child of Alara breakpoint. It looks like then we can keep replaying and bouncing the Dark-Dwellers to greatly extend the lower hyperstage. Am I missing something?
Even though Dark-Dwellers can get back Engineered Explosives, you need a Myr Welder to put the Explosives back, and you have no way of generating that in the middle of the megastage transition.
The plan I'm gunning for is to use Hunting Pack after all the Smites resolve, generating a huge amount beasts after all the important parts of the Megastage transition, so they stick around as we start rebuilding our artifacts from the triggers below. Then we don't bother generating all the Psychic battles immediately. We generate some constant number that we need to kick-start a hyperstage, then cast Acorn Harvest. We get several copies of Smite the Monstrous, and all of them get to generate N copies, because of Mirrorwing. THat should be enough to generate all the artifact copies we need to convert our mana. But it's done after casting the new Harvest, not before.
Oh, I think I see what you are doing. But I'm not sure that it is enough. So we evaluate the top hyperstage to compute the function N -> F_{w^2}(N). Then, the top group of Psychic Battle triggers below that top hyperstage is supposed to compute the function F_{w^2+1}, then next group of Bloodbond March triggers below that is supposed to compute the function F_{w^2+2}, and so on. So the top layer of Psychic Battle triggers will indeed compute the function f_{w^2+1}(N), where N is the number of Psychic Battle triggers, in the sense that the numbers we see in the topmost hyperstage will be around that number. But after Child of Alara destroys everything, we won't see those numbers on the lower hyperstage. So when we destroy the nontoken Clockwork Gnomes and create a new token, and tap it, the number of Psychic Battle triggers we get will be equal to the small number of Psychic Battles that we have at this lower hyperstage. So we don't iterate F_{w^2+1}, we keep reapplying F_{w^2) N times where N is the small number of Psychic Battles.
Edit: So, I haven't had any new ideas for the Chalice of the Void deck. We can borrow Stakfish's stage sequence to get seven stages for the Soul Foundry deck:
Edit: Stakfish, a question: Even if we can't get Chalice of the Void to work, is there any mileage can we gain from restricting zone changing, with Millikin / Myr Welder? For example, can Muzzio be saved?
Edit: Random thought. What if, in the Chalice of the Void deck, we replace Changeling Hero and Anaba Ancestor with something more restrictive, like maybe Boggart Mob and Mad Auntie? I guess I don't see how this would fix the problem; it would allow Panharmonicon back in, and we couldn't Champion Vedalken Orrery anymore, if that helps. Hmm, I guess Mad Auntie is a 3 CMC anyway, so we can't use that, at least not directly.
Darn, you're right. And that knocks out one of my other ideas as well. I'm going to keep thinking on the changeling deck, but in the meantime we should probably move over to your list.
In terms of restricting zone-changing... the exile restriction isn't actually what made Muzzio safe in the Chalice deck: what made it safe was Chalice countering Hurkyl's Recall. So I don't know if that would help here.
I think there probably is a way to order triggers such that you don't need Tidal Courier, and can just use a Bearer token from Mimic Vat to bounce the Abolisher and a cast to kill it. Or vice versa. But I don't know what it is.
Yeah, that's a good idea. I was banking on Tidal Courier to bring back Jade Bearer, so we need something else. Verdant Succession is the obvious choice, and fortunately Stakfish's ending stage sequence doesn't interfere with it. Verdant Succession is a triggered ability, and we need to respond to playing Razorfin Abolisher with an activated ability. So, Verdant Succession brings back Jade Bearer, and we use it to bounce Razorfin Abolisher. Then we use Engineered Explosives to destroy the Jade Bearer, and imprint it on a Mimic Vat. We play and counter Razorfin Abolisher, and while there are still Bloodbond March triggers on the stack we tap the Mimic Vat to create a token copy of Jade Bearer. We destroy the Razorfin Abolisher and create a token copy, and use a Bloodbond March trigger to bring the original back to the battlefield. We can use the token Razorfin Abolisher to bounce Boggart Mob, bringing back Goblin Dark-Dwellers and going through the hyperstage transition, allowing us to get back Engineered Explosives. We let the Bloodbond March triggers run out, put the Jade Bearer in the library, and use the Verdant Succession trigger to bring it back to the battlefield, and the loop repeats. Crucially, we have to run out the Bloodbond March triggers for Razorfin Abolisher before we get to resolve the Verdant Succession triggers for Jade Bearer, so we can't utilize multiple Bloodbond March triggers with a single Razorfin Abolisher bounce. So it looks like it works.
I really hope that you can get the Changeling deck fixed, I like it a lot. I will think about it as well. What is allowing us to use Anaba Ancestor, is it having to bounce and replay Chalice of the Void?
Hey guys. Sorry been busy. Still very much interested in this project. Really cool watching you guys work through things as a group.
Anyway I’ve still been working on improving my lists. I’ve come across some interesting interactions and wanted some clarifications on how a few cards work with each other.
1) if I have DN in play and play CI but let CI is enter as itself, how do things happen? CI will want to die to state based checks as a 0/0 and DN will want to make tokens. I believe CI will indeed die and it will do so before the DN tokens are made and these tokens won’t get exiled by this death trigger as they are not on the field yet. Do I have that right?
2) assuming I’m right about 1, when the token attempting to be made by DN finally do get made I believe they should still have CIs “as it enters” clause. DN tries to make CI tokens but when it does those tokens get to become pretty much anything as they enter. Is this correct so far?
3) if after we do this(let’s say we let our tokens become more DN) what happens when we play another CI and let it enter/die just as before? DN sees a non token CI die and should try to exile all tokens sharing a name with it, but nothing in play, currently, meets that criteria. So does DN know the tokens we made where once CI tokens(before they ever really existed at least) or do the last generation of tokens avoid this because DN only cares about name?
1) Actually, when you play CI, you get a Dual Nature trigger, but first it is waiting to be put on the stack. It doesn't actually get put on the stack until a player would receive priority. When you do, first the game checks for state-based actions, and the CI is put in the graveyard. This triggers the Dual Nature destruction trigger, but it is also waiting to be put on the stack. Then state-based actions are checked again, and if nothing happens, then you put your triggered abilities on the stack, in any order you choose. So you could put the destruction trigger below the creation trigger, but you probably will want to put the creation trigger below the destruction trigger, and you can do this. (I'm not a rules expert, but I believe this is how it goes.)
2) Yes, this is correct.
3) DN does not care that the DN tokens were created from a CI card, it only checks for those tokens with that name. This is why it was so convenient in our previous decks to have Dual Nature and Copy Enchantment, we could freely bounce and replay the Copy Enchantment that would copy nothing, and not have to worry about Dual Nature getting rid of our tokens.
Edit: Looking to vet the latest decks - both the Soul Foundry and Bramblewood Paragon decks need the Goblin Dark-Dwellers to cast both Battle Cry and Rebuild, and we can't really be allowed to separate them, since no matter what ratio we are supposed to use, we can always tip the scales more towards Rebuild to create more stages in the lower hyperstage. So I think we need Panharmonicon in both decks. It can slide in easily enough by replacing the third Spider Spawning.
I don't think Panharmonicon causes any problems, since we don't have a Changeling Champion. Tireless Missionaries should still work, since it comes back when there are no other nonland permanents on the battlefield.
Edit: Since the decks do not have Muzzio, we need a way to bring back artifacts. Goblin Welder doesn't seem to work anymore, since we don't have an easy way to bring it back from the graveyard. We could add Goblin Welder and Dralnu's Crusade, but there are so many possible one card options that I figure at least one must work. Wormfang Behemoth should do the trick, we can bounce all the artifacts back to our hand, and then exile them with Wormfang Behemoth before Worldfire resolves. We still need to bring back Wormfang Behemoth with Bloodbond March triggers, so that safety net is still there.
To make room, we have to remove a stage from the stage sequence, but we can add Consecrated Sphinx back in.
Hey guys think I have a new list to post. Should have it up by Monday afternoon, possibly earlier.
Just wanted to check one last thing on legality: do we actaully have to win for the deck to be legal or are we just looking for max damage regardless of outcome?
It only effects one slot in my new build but it will slow me down a little. Pretty minor, but every bit helps. Also I borrowed a bit of tech from some of your lists which definitely helped out.
So far all our decks have killed the opponent, but looking at the rules, it looks like that was never specified. So it's okay to just deal a lot of damage to opponent without killing him. (presumably using something like Abyssal Persecutor to keep him alive)
Edit: Looking for creatures that we can't bounce and replay to protect from Worldfire, I suppose that we don't have any way to bounce Celestial Gatekeeper. So, it looks like we need to go back to Nylea's Disciple. Two Nylea's Disciple plus Arixmethes can substitute for two Celestial Gatekeepers plus Tireless Missionaries.
It would be nice if adding Radiant Purge allowed us to get rid of Ray of Revelation. After some thought, it does look like one copy of Psychic Battle is theoretically enough to implement the stage structure, and we won't need a bunch of Psychic Battles for Smite the Monstrous, since we have Thousand-Year Storm copies. But, with just one Psychic Battle we only get to bounce one artifact besides Metallurgeon, so we have only enough to bounce Obelisk of Bant once, paying just for the Metallurgeon. We will have nothing to pay for Karn, Silver Golem or Ray of Revelation, for instance.
8 mycosynth lattice
9 mirrorworks(MW)
10 doubling season(DS)
11 clever impersonator(CI) - let resolve as CI, get echoes triggers, make all MW tokens into more MW
12 phyrexian metamorph(PM) - same, let resolve as PM, get echos triggers, all but last wave(waves of MW token making) come in as DS, last wave all MS except one copy will be another arcane adaptation naming sliver
13 vedalken orrery
14 thousand-year storm(TYS)
15 djinn illuminatus
16 steady progress(SP) - ok so not going to reveal every card we draw here. importantly we will draw the rest of the deck and will still have many SP copies still on the stack that would kill us if we aren't careful. so, we draw the deck and before we start abusing the next of our SP draws we will play out some more engine pieces
26 white sun's zenith(WSZ) - so this is what we use the rest of our SP draws for. we empty our mana pool into WSZ, that makes a bunch of mana, and then we redraw WSZ and do it again. repeat until we run out of SP draws(we still have our full deck in hand, WSZ has been and will continue to be the only card in our deck for quite some time)
27 domri rade(domri) - we will make as many copies as we can and then emblem him. so before we move to our first attack we will abuse WSZ a bit more. we still have 10 life we can pay to YB, so we will. with each activation we will draw and then cast WSZ making a bunch of mana and pumping all that mana into the next casting of WSZ. this will be compounded by each TYS getting better each time through.
so before we get to attacking we have another loop we can bring online. we can sac 2 artifacts(mirror gallery copies for example) to give 2 token copies of syndicate trafficker a few counters and make them indestructible. once we have done that we will use domri to have these 2 indestructible creatures start fighting each other. we will use the life gained from this(thanks essence sliver) to draw and cast WSZ a bunch more.
now we move to our first attack. we have a bunch of mana floating from WSZ but that's ok. we play upwelling for this exact reason. so we attack with vigilance, haste, double strike and because all our creatures are slivers, we also have better lifelink. so as u can see this is a great life gain engine. this we can run back through YB and draw and cast WSZ a bunch which in turn creates a ton of bodies and a bunch of mana. while WSZ will be the card we cast the most, it is not our most powerful ins/sor and we are making all this mana to make our later ins/sor that much better. so we are back to 1 life and we have a bunch of mana floating and we now move on.
28 cackling counterpart - so now we are starting to ramp up the power. so we take all the mana we have accumulated and max cast our CC. this gets spread around a bunch via PG. we get a bunch of doubling seasons, TYS, etc. we let this stuff fully resolve. once it does we will have again a large amount of mana and a bunch of new bodies.
29 seize the day(STD) - so this doesn't make mana but it does do cool stuff. we will be max casting it but we will leave 4,5,6 or 7 mana in reserve(we want at least 4 but at 8 we could get another copy of STD). so we let these all resolve after being spread around via PGs. we now have a lot of extra combat phases and extra main phases. the 4 mana will be important momentarily. so with all of our newly acquired bodies and combat steps we move into attacking our opponent again. between each combat step while we are in main phase we use the life we gained from the attack to draw and cast WSZ. this is what we needed the 4 mana for. it allows us to start the loop. it starts small but it does grow quickly and we don't lose the mana we make because of upwelling as we move in and out of combat.
so at some point we will have finally gone through all our combat steps(using YB/WSZ loops between each of course). at this point we will repeat the use of CC/STD from graveyard. this will lead to making more bodies and then more combat steps with YB/WSZ between each. this will take awhile to run through but it is pretty potent and by the end we should have a huge amount of mana. this being as powerful as it is we will want to loop these, so that is what we will do next.
30 runic repetition - so you should know how this loop works with RR/CC/GF. we max cast RR and target CC with all of them. the first one resolves getting us back CC. before the other copies go to resolve and fizzle we cast CC from hand(generate the value), then max flashback(value) it putting it back into exile. we then sac one our GFs(which CC makes us more of) to redirect an about to fizzle RR to our newly in exile CC to keep the loop alive. with our last 2 RR resolving we will get both CC and STD. we then repeat our sequencing from earlier and max cast CC from hand followed by max casting STD leaving 4 mana and proceed to combat steps(with our final 2 RR resolving off the stack the stack is now empty so we can get in some combat here). we again use our combat steps and our 4 starting mana to draw and cast WSZ a ton between each combat. again once all of our combats have finished from our hand casting of CC/STD(and all YB/WSZ loops) we go ahead and flash back CC/STD for max cast on both(saving 4 mana). repeat the last few steps until we have used everything up. now we need to move on to our next stage.
31 rowan kenrith(RK) - so rowan doesn't actually do much but what she does do it very important. so we will cast and resolve RK and make all copies we can via our MW. once all of the have finished resolving we will start embleming our RKs. we will let each ability resolve fully before popping the next one so we get an exponentially growing amount of emblems.
32 chandra ablaze(chandra) - so, just like RK we will be using chandra for her ultimate ability. it does get a bit weird here in the ordering and playing of the spells from our graveyard. the spells we can play are: SnT, SP, and RR. so we only have a finite number of times we can cast SnT before we will have to stop. while SnT doesn't actually gain us a lot of value it does increase our TYS count which is a good thing for us. i will discuss this again once it becomes an issue. so for now we will be casting all 3 of our legal possibilities. we do choose the order here but they do all go on the stack at the same time. this means we need to pay all additional costs(like replicate) now before we finish putting things onto the stack. it also means we get max TYS copies on all of the spells. we will be max casting RR and just getting TYS amounts of SP and SnT. one thing of note here is we have multiple chandra activation's on the stack. we only activated 1 but because of all our RK embelms we got a whole bunch of chandra activation's. so our stack gets pretty messy here but looks like this
last
chanrda casting group
replicate group
TYS group
first
so within each of these groups we do get choice in order. the only replicate copies we will have will be of RR as its the most powerful thing we will be doing. we will be max replicating RR but we will leave 4 mana floating. the other 2 group groups will be full of all 3 spells but we will always order them this way
last
runic rep
steady progress
show n tell
first
so our full stack looks like this:
last
remaining chandra -7 abilities still on the stack
RR original
SP original
SnT original
RR replicated copies
RR TYS copies
SP TYS copies
SnT TYS copies
first
so as this stuff starts to resolve we will basically be repeating many of the steps we have done up to this point. our opponent wants to resist us as much as possible so they will put all their wastes from hand into play via SnT, we will do nothing with the SnT resolutions, it just adds to our TYS counts. with our SP resolutions we will use our 4 mana and drawing cards to loop WSZ again. we will also proliferate each of our planeswalker's and any creatures that have +1/+1 counters on them. once our copies of RR start to resolve we will get back CC every time until our last 2 RR where we will again get back both CC and STD. we will cast them in the same order as before but this time we will save 4 mana for our last SP resolution to draw and cast WSZ one last time. our last RR(original) will resolve and we will get and cast CC from hand and from graveyard(saving 4 mana). now our next chandra -7 still on the stack will resolve and we repeat this process again. we do this process until all of our first chandra's activation's have fully resolved. we will have a lot of guys and a lot of mana. we will now move into using up all of our newly acquired combat phases. as before between each combat phases we will use YB to loop WSZ, but its even more efficient this time through as RK emblems do work on YBs draw ability. it works the same way we just get more iterations of the loop for the same amount of life. so we make it all the way through all of our combat steps and all loops associated with them. we now activate our next chanrda and repeat these steps again. once all chandra's have been used up and we have gotten all value from all combat steps its finally time to cast more new things.
32 the chain veil(TCV) - so again we up the proverbial power level. so we can see how this is gonna work, but is there a best way to do it? yes, i think there is. so first we cast TCV and make all copies via MW we can. that's simple enough. next we will activate a single TCV. this will give us multiple copies of the ability. this is why we wanted to have steady progress in our list. we needed a way to keep our walkers from running out of loyalty. now we let all of the TCV abilities from our first one fully resolve. then we use up our RKs again. then we move onto the next TCV activation. we will repeat this process until our rowans are too low in loyalty to continue the process. we will then activate a single chandra once. we do the chandra value dance for one activation and in that process we refill our all of our walkers loyalty via SP. once we have extracted all value from this one chandra activation we go back to using TCV and RK to just buff our activated abilities into oblivion and also give us hella planeswalker activation's. we repeat this process of TCV/RK and occasional chandra activation's until we have used up all TCV and RK. we will then go back to domri and use up his fight ability's via walker activation's to gain a ton of life. we will again use that life to draw and loop WSZ off of YB which again is super powered from RK emblems. so now domri is all used up. we then move onto using up our chandras and her ultimate's. we get RR loops(which gives CC and combat loops(which gets YB/WSZ loops)), and also some SP/WSZ loops. we do this until we have used up everything. all combat, all YB/WSZ, and planeswalker's. the stack is empty, we are at 1 life, our walkers are all used up, all TCV have been activated and used, and we should have a massive amount of mana(YB/WSZ loops will be the last thing we will have done). moving on
33 bloodbond march(BM) - ok so i'm gonna be honest, this is the tech i stole from you guys. also i'm going to be honest i'm not sure its proper to wait to cast it until now(edit: i'm pretty sure we want it earlier). this is going to be when we start abusing it but we can cast it much earlier. it is a creature so it will have copies made from all the CC raining down earlier. i don't know if we make more now or if we have it in play near the beginning. so at this point we will cast and make as many copies as possible via MW. so we have a new engine to abuse, but how?
34-36 clever impersonator(CI or clones) and 37-40 phyrexian metamorph(PM or clones) - so ultimately we want to abuse these cards to make as a many copies of TCV as possible. its gonna be a bit weird but its very cyclical so once i explain it once it'll start to make make more sense. while these cards are themselves creatures their important trait is that we can copy non creature things.
so how is this is gonna work? we are going to cast one of our clones and get a bunch of BM triggers. we will use our first BM trigger to bring back our graveyard copies of this card. these (1 currently) will come into play and we will again let them just enter as themselves and go back to yard. We will get a small amount of mana as they enter and die, more importantly them entering will trigger MW just as before. we will pay for all of these triggers. all of the waves will enter as DS except the last wave which we will have become copies of MW. now our next BM trigger will go to resolve repeating this process. we continue making DS and MW with our clone still on the stack. so our last BM trigger just ended and the last wave put more MW into play, our clone finally gets to resolve now. we will have it enter and die just as all the others and our clone will go to the yard. with these MW triggers we will again look to make all these waves except the final wave be DS. for this final wave tho we will have them enter as copies of TCV. so at this point we have 5 more clones we can cast from our hand but we will wait on doing that. we just made hella TCVs and the stack is clear. lets use them up. it makes us a bunch more BM in the process and so when we finally have used up all our TCV activation's we will have turbo powered our BM loops. so we move into getting all of our value from our TCV activation's doing the same basic sequencing we did before trying to use as many RK emblems and TCV before we need to use any chandras. repeating this process until all TCV have been activated. then use the remaining walker activation's from domri and then finally chandra. we will be using breaks in the stack to do combat things as well to generate mana/bodies via extra combat steps and YB/WSZ. just as before we will repeat this process of generating value and using that value to generate more value until all of the resources our playing of our clone from hand had generated has finally been used.
so now we've established how the BM loops work. we want to pause between each actual casting as we can use that time while the stack is clear to get in for some combat steps(and their resulting loops). so we do this series of things for awhile as we play through all of our clones. we extract as much value as we can both while the stack isn't clear and also when it is clear.
41-60 exile twisters - so we have the same end game as as my last few lists have used. we can use our syndicate trafficker to sac important pieces to come back and be recast. while it isn't a ton of value we will want to sac all pieces we can. even our redundant pieces can still be sacked to trafficker for additional counters so looping them does have value. as a bit of sequencing we will need painter's servantto always come down after mycosynth lattice. if lattice comes down after servant it turns RR and SP into colorless cards that chandra cannot cast. once we start raining down CCs it shouldn't be a big deal, but it does need to happen. lattice won't get copied by CC so it should never really be an issue but it can be messy if you really mess with the ordering of things. as before things do get a bit weird as we put our exile twisters onto the stack. it messes with the stack a bunch. while we have copies of our twisters on the stack we won't be able to activate our walkers or move to combat. that being said we will still want to generate as many TCV as possible and also generate as many combat steps as possible. we will still be able to do BM loops and also our RR loops. so our loops will focus on generating what mana we can without combat steps. a bit limiting but its not too bad a thing. we still will be able generate a decent amount of mana just off 1 SP loop per twister copy which we can use to power our 1 RR loop. we will end that loop free casting STD from hand and then just casting it via flashback but not replicating it. this means that while we won't have full access all of our engines we can still generate some decent value per twister loop. we can then cash even more of that value in when the stack finally clears of our twisters. before we will be putting any new twisters onto the stack we will be cashing in all of our sorcery speed value. this includes all of our walker activation's, all TCV activation's(they work best between RK activation's), and all of our stock piled combat steps. while we cannot activate any of these things during the twister loops, we can recycle them back into the deck to be drawn again via the twisters which will allow us to recast and copy them with all of our MW. we will give up a few activation's(sac'ing an unused walker) doing this but we will net many more in the long run and the recasts. so basically our twister loops will have a period between them where we will be recouping the sorcery speed value we couldn't use during the loops. this value isn't lost, its just re-positioned to happen when it can instead of just being outright lost. so to draw our deck once we start our twister loops we can do it 2 different ways. we can set aside an amount of life for YB(one copy will still be in play, and 1 activation per copy of twister will suffice to draw the deck) or we can just be lucky and have SP in our opener each time. its worth considering that praetors council(PC) doesn't require drawing the deck. this means we don't need to dedicate resources to drawing the deck and we can use those resources elsewhere. that might make PC the most valuable of the twisters. normally i would start with casting the highest cmc first and working backwards in terms of cost highest->lowest so they get progressively more efficient as our ability to copy them gets more and more potent. PC might break that rule and might belong at the end instead of the beginning, not really sure tbh. oh as a last note i need to explain the not casting of SnT at some point. so if we just keep casting SnT as our twisters resolve our opponent will just keep putting lands into play. we can't destroy those as the deck is written currently. so at some point once they have played more than 53(our 8th twister resolving would then mean if we cast SnT they'd have 54) lands the next twister will see them only having 6 cards in library and they will deck and die, stopping us prematurely.
last notes: yeah, one post for this list! the question about actually winning ended up not being an issue. i found a infinite as i was writing this up and needed to change a few cards around. the changes i needed to make made winning possible anyway.
@J_kibbs Interesting deck again. Here is my analysis:
On your Phyrexian Metamorph line, near the end you say "all MS but one copy", did you mean DS instead? I will assume that is the case.
So there will be plenty of mana for the initial cards. When you play Doubling Season, you get one copy via a Mirrorworks ability, which becomes two tokens. So you have three total. Then you get 8 Clever Impersonator tokens, which become Mirrorworks copies. Then, when Phyrexian Metamorph comes into play, it triggers all nine copies of Mirrorworks, allowing us to generate D Doubling Seasons, where D is between 2^^10 and 2^^11. Every creature from that point forward will generate 9 * 2^D token copies, which will be between 2^^11 and 2^^12. This will generate about C(9 * 2^D)^2 = 81C * 2^(2D) mana, which will also be between 2^^11 and 2^^12.
Next we come to Steady Progress and White Suns' Zenith. With Djinn Illuminatus maxed out and TYS, we will get between 2^^11 and 2^^12 copies of Steady Progress, each time drawing a White Sun's Zenith. If we have M mana before we cast WSZ, the best bet is to use M/2 mana on WSZ, and M/2 mana on Djinn Illuminatus, creating M/6 copies, and thus generating (M^2 * 2^D)/12 token Cats. This will generate about (M^2 * 2^D)^2/144 mana, or roughly M^4 mana since M is much greater than 2^D, and growing rapidly while 2^D is staying constant. So if we cast WSZ N times, we get about M^4^N mana at the end. So with between 2^^11 and 2^^12 casts, we get between 2^^13 and 2^^14 mana.
We get some more casts via Yawgmoth's Bargain and {c]Domri Rade[/c], but we only get 10 WSZ casts from YB and between 2^^11 and 2^^12 casts from Domri Rade, so we are still between 2^^13 and 2^^14.
Next up is Cackling Counterpart. First we use the TYS and DI copies and have them all target Doubling Season, and each copy takes X Doubling Seasons to about 2^X Doubling Seasons. So after more than 2^^13 copies we wind up with more than 2^^(2^^13) copies of Doubling Season. Then we start resolving the Precursor Golem triggers. Each one creates a copy for each Doubling Season, each of which takes X to 2^X, so we wind up taking X Doubling Seasons to roughly 2^^X Doubling Seasons. So we wind up appending "2^^" more than 2^^11 times to 2^^(2^^13), so we eventually get between 2^^^(2^^11) and 2^^^(2^^12) Doubling Seasons.
It's instructive at this point to look at how much mileage we got out of all the work we did to get more mana; the result is, the effect is unnoticeable. Yes, before the Precursor Golem triggers we wound up with 2^^(2^^13) Doubling Seasons rather than 2^^(2^^11) Doubling Seasons, which is noticeable if not an enormous difference; but, each Precursor Golem trigger appended a "2^^" to the numbers, and we had more than 2^^11 of them, so the difference between 13 and 11 becomes insignificant. Either way we wind up between 2^^^(2^^11) and 2^^^(2^^12) Doubling Seasons. So the mana isn't really making a significant impact here.
Neither is Seize the Day, which increases our mana, but not our Doubling Seasons, so the effect is unnoticable; basically our mana becomes roughly the square of our number of Doubling Seasons, and the squaring operation is completely unnoticeable for numbers at the triple arrow level. Also, we can't go into and out of combat while the stack is not empty, so we can't do this step while there are copies of Runic Repetition, activated abilities, or Mirrorworks or Bloodbond March triggers on the stack. So even if this step did something significant, it couldn't be recursed over with what follows next.
Runic Repetition can fetch Cackling Counterpart and gets lots of copies via DI and TYS, so it takes X to 2^^^^X. So the first time we cast it we produce more than X = 2^^^^(2^^^(2^^11)) copies of Doubling Season.
We then create roughly X Rowan Kenriths and Rowan Kenrith emblems (actually 2^X and 2^2^X respectively, but the difference is unnoticeable), and then create roughly X Chandra Ablazes. So we can cast Runic Repetition X times (technically 2^X * 2^2^X), to generate 2^^^^^(2^^^^(2^^^(2^^11))) Doubling Seasons.
We then create about Y copies of The Chain Veil. When we tap a single TCV, we get E copies where E is the number of Rowan Kenrith emblems, allowing us to activate each of R Rowan Kenriths E times each, generating 2^(RE) more emblems. So after Y such abilities we get roughly 2^^Y RK emblems at the end. This allows us to use Chandra roughly 2^^Y more times, allowing us to generate 2^^^^^(2^^Y) Doubling Seasons, or more than 2^^^^^(2^^^^^(2^^^^(2^^^(2^^11)))) Doubling Seasons.
You may notice that the arrows are not increasing as fast as one might expect. This is because the requirements to stack layers are not being met. Specifically, if, between each activation of Chandra Ablaze, we could update the number of Rowan Kenrith Emblems to roughly the number of Doubling Seasons in play, then each Chandra Ablaze could cast X Doubling Seasons and thus take X to 2^^^^^X, and then having X Chandras would take X to 2^^^^^^X. Then, if between each activation of a The Chain Veil we could increase the number of emblems or Chandras to roughly the number of Doubling Seasons, then X The Chain Veils would take X to 2^^^^^^^X. But, since we can't update any of our numbers, except when casting one of our permanents, we are stuck at the five arrow level.
Another problem is that are Planeswalkers require the stack to be empty to use their loyalty abilities. This means that we can't take advantage of any further recursion that requires abilities on the stack. So, while we might expect that Clever Impersonator would take us to six arrows because of Bloodbond March, and the exile cards would take us to seven because of DI and TYS copies, those extra layers only function properly if we can keep the Bloodbond March, DI, and TYS triggers on the stack, which we can't.
So, it looks like the best we can do is to have each of the CI and PM cards implement another X to 2^^^^^X, taking us to between 2^^^^^^11 and 2^^^^^^12 DSes. Then the exile cards can retrieve all 10 CI/PM/CA/TCV cards, allowing another 10 implementations of X to 2^^^^^X. So that takes us to between 2^^^^^^211 and 2^^^^^^212.
Unfortunately, this is less than your first two decks. I encourage you to look at what is creating layers and what isn't - some things that are interfering with layer creation are:
1) independent layers - in all your decks you have both doubling season creation and mana generation, and they never stack on top of each other. So we just wind up building on whatever is stronger, which is usual the doubling season creation. (Yes, it's true that the mana generated depends on the number of Doubling Seasons. But that mana never gets translated back into Doubling Seasons, which is necessary for stacking layers.)
2) Numbers not getting updated - It would be nice if having many Rowan Kenrith emblems or Mirrorworks tokens translated into layers. Unfortunately, they are not getting updated frequntly enough to count as layers, as I talked about above. I don't know how to fix that in this particular deck, but it is something to keep in mind. Rings of Brighthearth would be nice if you could update artifacts frequently, but of course you can't if you are using The Chain Veil to recurse over Chandra Ablaze.
3) stack needing to be cleared for combat or planeswalker abilities. I also don't know how to fix this in this deck - the obvious solution is Teferi, Temporal Archmage, but his second ability can untap The Chain Veil, so that's no good.
@J_Kibbs: That's a sweet deck! I'm gonna go along with what Deedlit has said here. When these decks get this complicated, it's hard to figure out what counts and what doesn't, because frankly none of us have any intuition for how these numbers work.
What we've found works best in our deck, and probably would work best with yours, is to set up this simple "chain" of resources. You can see what I mean in my old standard combo with Polyraptor, which I wrote up here.
With that deck, the objective is to make as many Polyraptors, the final source of damage, as possible. Then, I have a sequence of different combos that each turn one of some resource into an amount of some other resource equal to the number of Polyraptors I've already created. One point of toughness on Forerunner of the Empire creates N Polyraptors, where N is the number of Polyraptors I've already created. One green mana (well, more than one, but you get the idea) turns into N points of toughness on Forerunner of the Empire, each of which turn into N Polyraptors, one after the other. One energy counter turns into N green mana, each of which turns into N points of toughness, each of which turns into N Polyraptors...
You get the idea. The key here is that every new group of cards I'm adding has two things going for it: it directly creates whatever thing the last group I added was using up, and the amount it creates is directly tied to the number of Polyraptors (key being that this thing I'm tying it to is the bottom level) I've created so far. That both makes my life easier because it's easier to follow what's happening in the deck (and easier to correct for infinites: if one of these modules is broken and goes infinite, I can just slot it out of the deck and the rest of it is intact), and because I can guarantee that each new group I add adds a layer, and isn't just spinning my wheels.
Two other notes: planeswalkers usually don't work out well in these decks. Every version of our deck, all the way back to 2009, has played either Vedalken Orrery or Leyline of Anticipation because sorcery-speed is the bane of our existence. Planeswalkers are pretty much guaranteed to be sorcery speed, which makes it damn near impossible to fit in any shenanigans AFTER the stage of your deck where you use them. And you absolutely don't have to win the game that turn! Every deck I've ever seen for this challenge does, simply because the amounts of damage involved are so absurdly high, but there's nothing /requiring/ you to do so.
In fact, if you were to build a deck that required your opponent to still be alive after dealing the damage, I'd love to see it regardless of how much damage it deals.
@Deedlit: I'm still trying to fix my deck, but no real updates.
What made Anaba Ancestor work was the combination of Chalice of the Void and Myr Welder. Myr Welder meant you had to actually resolve down to a Clockwork Gnomes section to continue with the combo, while Chalice of the Void meant that doing so had a real cost associated with it: any time you made that transition, you had to at some point cast a Hurkyl's Recall to do it. Neither one was enough to make the Ancestor safe on its own.
deed: the line you are talking about w/ MS is meant to be MW for mirrorworks not doubling season, probably isn't super important tho.
i don't have time to fully respond but one thing that i will point out is that mana does actually kind of scale w/ DS creation in that when i start casting CC that while the CC does make more DS for sure, it also makes more mana echoes(and TYS etc) in that same process. not sure that was factored in or not. we will want to stack all DS creation to resolve before everything else on the PG spreads but we do get everything(all creatures anyway) else too. this includes echoes(mana), essence sliver(life->mana), TYS(bit of everything) and more PG too. i do understand that we need to compound harder and harder to jump arrow levels but just pointing out that other stuff is compounding. also essence sliver gains us xy life not just x life when x is damage and y is amount of essence slivers. while i agree combat gets clunky each combat phase gets us xyz WSZ when x is damage, y is slivers and z is rowan emblems. this gets run through DS to make xyzd new bodies to add to our initial count and we repeat this whole process STD copies number of times.
@J_kibbs: Yes, I kept track of the mana, but it is not enough of an effect to make an appreciable difference. Basically, you get mana on the order of our number of creatures squared, and squaring is not enough to make a noticeable difference in large exponential towers. An important point is that mana is not serving to create more Doubling Seasons, at least not at a low level - it does allow for more Djinn Illuminatus copies for spells like Cackling Counterpart, but since mana is not significantly higher than our number of creatures (relative to Knuth arrow scale), it's not mattering.
@Stakfish: How is Nylea's Disciple supposed to work again? The problem I am seeing is that Worldfire will exile our Nylea's Disciples, and we have to get them back somehow. I was hoping that Verdant Succession could bring them back, but we can only trigger it by destroying a Child of Alara, and then we have to resolve all the Verdant Successions until we get to the creation of another Vedalken Orrery. So we can't store up Verdant Successions, and if we hold a Child of Alara destruction on the stack, the Nylea's Disciples won't be on the battlefield, so they won't trigger Verdant Succession. So Verdant Succession doesn't seem to solve the problem. Natural Order won't work since they can bring the Disciples back to the battlefield below the Worldfire, and we can gain life after dropping down to 1, and put an additional megastage on the stack, I think. So I don't know how we used Nylea's Disciple in previous decks.
@J_kibbs: hmm, I see what you're saying. The mana definitely scales with Doubling Season creation. The problem is that there isn't an ideal place to put all that mana once you've got it, because the mana isn't what's limiting you.
Imagine for a moment you had just enough mana to cast/flashback Cackling Counterpart 1000 times. That's helpful for sure, but if you only have a way to get Cackling Counterpart back from exile 100 times, then you can only cast/flashback it 200 times total, no matter how much mana you generate. The rest of it just gets wasted.
Right now, your end goal is "make a gigantic amount of Doubling Seasons". The way you make lots of those (as well as lots of Mana Echoes, Thousand-Year Storms, etc.), is by casting Cackling Counterpart. And yes, every time you cast it, you can pump all your mana (proportional to the number of Doubling Seasons) into replicate. So if you have N Doubling Seasons, each replicated copy will make 2^N more Doubling Seasons. You have N replicate copies, which is enough to add a second arrow.
BUT, you also have all these Precursor Golems. Each Precursor Golem token copy you have puts a separate trigger on the stack, and each of those triggers ON ITS OWN makes N Cackling Counterpart copies targeting Doubling Season. So in other words, you can get the same amount of benefit from generating all that mana and feeding it into Djinn Illuminatus, just by creating one more copy of Precursor Golem. If you can find a way to make two copies, you'll actually be doing even better than you are now.
That's where the inefficiency is coming from in the list. It's a really common problem in these decks, and hard to spot when it happens, because it doesn't /look/ inefficient. You can still see how Djinn Illuminatus and the extra mana will make the damage total way higher at the end. But because it's only running alongside some bigger combo, it winds up disappearing into the margins when you try to calculate your end result.
If I could make a suggestion for your deck: try making a version that starts by just converting mana into enchantments. We have some... convoluted ways to do that which you don't need. A simpler way might be something like this:
Start by cutting Mana Echoes (which would go infinite this time) for Dual Nature, and add a copy of Copy Enchantment. That's a trick from our big write-up at the top of this thread. You play Copy Enchantment and don't copy anything. Then, the Dual Nature triggers combine with Doubling Season to make lots of copies, all of which can become whatever enchantment you want. You also don't have to worry about Dual Nature exiling your tokens anymore, because it's looking at a card named Copy Enchantment.
That way, every time you play a Copy Enchantment, you get a bunch of Dual Nature triggers. They all resolve one at a time, each one making 2^N copies of Doubling Season. With N Dual Natures, that's two layers already.
Then, to turn mana alone into copies of your enchantments, use Allay, Mortuary, and Rememberance. For 3 mana, you can play Allay, getting a bunch of Thousand-Year Storm triggers. With N Thousand-Year Storms, you can kill Copy Enchantment N times. Then, Mortuary puts that Copy Enchantment back into your library. Finally, Remembrance lets you search your library for Copy Enchantment and put it in your hand. You replay it, and you get more triggers, making more Doubling Seasons, Dual Natures, and Thousand-Year Storms.
So, for just 3 generic mana, you get:
N copies of Allay, one for each Thousand Year Storm (there are probably ways to get full mileage out of the copies here, I just haven't found one). Each of those become:
N triggers of Dual Nature, each of which get doubled by:
N copies of Doubling Season.
That's three arrows on its own. Then, you can find a way to turn all those Cackling Counterparts into ways to produce colorless mana (say, by making copies of Emrakul's Hatcher, where the tokens also get doubled by Doubling Season...), you can probably get close to 6 or 7 arrows at the point in your deck where you have only 4 right now.
@Deedlit: I'm not sure I follow why we need Panharmonicon back. With your version, we can't champion Vedalken Orrery anymore, so what good do multiple rebuilds get us?
Also, Wormfang Behemoth worries me because it lets us save a lot of cards though the gigastage transition, including some potentially unsafe ones like Engineered Explosives. If we can make it safe though, it might be worth seeing if we can swap the order of life/mana to save cards.
@Stakfish: We don't need multiple Rebuilds, but we do want the same Goblin Dark-Dwellers to cast both Battle Cry and Rebuild. I suppose that we could rejigger the hyperstage so that we get can have the Dwellers enter the battlefield twice per Engineered Explosives, but if those two ETB effects happen independently, then we can have each one cast a Rebuild and wind up getting two Engineered Explosives out of it, allowing us to add layers to the lower stage. I suppose it should work if so long as the two ETB effects are triggered at the same time, but right now Panharmonicon is the only way I see how to do that.
Yeah, Wormfang Behemoth worried me a little too. But, the situation looks the same as for the megastage transition - we get an Engineered Explosives and Goblin Dark-Dwellers back in our hand, but this is supposed to be nullified by our need to create and use Verdant Succession triggers. Actually, can you go over again how our extra EE and GDD are normally used up in the megastage transition? That's a really important thing that we need to keep track of.
Switching over to Worldpurge is certainly always on the table. I believe the problem we were having is that we were using Elvish Spirit Guide to gain mana for the megastage transition, and using Worldpurge in the gigastage transition also brought Elvish Spirit Guide back to our hand, so that we wound up with an extra green mana afterwards. If we could use something else to gain green mana in the megastage transition, that might be useful.
Deed: Hmm I’m not sure if you correct it later when talking about them but the WSZ and SP math early on is definitely off. Replicate and X spells are very much a nonbo in terms of efficiency as with replicate u need to pay the entire cost again. Also while u figured TYS into the SP draws u didn’t seem to calculate their added oomph to the casting of the WSZ. This is a pretty significant amount of copies and will increase on each additional cast as the amount of starting mana will have been increased and the ins/sor count will also have gone up 1 adding an additional Y copies where Y is the number of TYS permanents we have. Maybe u adjusted later on for the other castings of WSZ but if not that seems like a big addition that is missing currently as it adds far more bodies and therefore far more mana each time through. WSZ will be by far the thing we cast the most in my current list so it’s math being under represented kinda hurts a lot. I don’t think my lists will threaten your current champ by any means but I’d be curious to what the corrections would do considering how often the deck loops WSZ.
Oh yeah, for some reason I thought we wouldn't have to pay the X cost when replicating it - stupid of me. So yeah, the best thing to do is to just max out the WSZ and pay none to the DI, so you wind up with much fewer Cats. I didn't forget the TYS copies, but they didn't make a dent when I thought that we had DI copies. So now each casting of WSZ takes M mana to roughly STM^2 mana, where T is the number of TYS copies and S is the number of previously cast instants/sorceries. So after N castings we get roughly N!*T^N*(M^2^N), and that is completely dominated by M^2^N. This is less than before, but still enough to get to between 2^^13 and 2^^14 mana after all the SPs run out. So the main point still holds; all the advantage we get from the WSZs and other mana producers become unnoticeable once we get to the three arrow level, i.e. after we start casting Cackling Counterparts.
@Stakfish: Just wondering if you saw my post #1894, where I asked how we could retrieve Nylea's Disciple after it gets exiled by Worldfire. If neither Nylea's Disciple nor Tireless Missionaries can be retrieved after Worldfire hits, then I guess both of my latest decks are currently nonworking. The only stage artifact that is currently usable is Metallurgeon, which requires white, and both Izzet Guildmage and Razorfin Abolisher require blue; the alternative to the Abolisher requires black. So we need three colors by the megastage, which rules out Centaur Safeguard, and I don't know what else to use for the life-gaining creature. I guess we could consider using Bramblewood Paragon + Abzan Falconer, maybe there's something we could make out of that.
@J_kibbs: the problem is that extra tokens there won't matter. Even though you have these tokens, which in turn generate more mana, you aren't turning all that mana into more Doubling Seasons, at least not meaningfully. You're still making somewhere around 2^(number of Doubling Seasons) mana from all your White Sun's Zenith casts. That's not a bad thing to have, but the replicate copies you get from it are so dwarfed by stuff you're doing later on in the deck that there's no way to count it.
Let me put it this way. Right now, the first chance you get to turn all that extra mana from your Zeniths into Doubling Seasons is when you replicate Cackling Counterpart. But even if you're generating 2^N mana, where N is the number of Doubling Seasons you have out, all those replicated copies are STILL only doing as much as having 1 extra token copy of Precursor Golem out. Since you're making more Precursor Golems than there are atoms in the universe every time you cast a Cackling Counterpart, the extra copy kinda gets lost in the shuffle.
@Deedlit: I think I'm still missing something, because I don't see why we need the Dwellers to enter twice. Could you walk me through how your hyperstage transition works, exactly? I'm probably missing some detail involved.
Edit: Did not see your post. Hmm. This might mean moving over to Worldpurge. We should be able to use up the green mana by having Acorn Harvest be the flashback sorcery, no?
Stak and Deed: ok sorry for beating a dead horse but I think it kinda makes sense now. I’m making mana for things that just aren’t all that practical as I ramp up my power level. I can see where making the extra replicate copies of everything that isn’t my exile twisters basically gets lost in the shuffle. That being said because the exile twisters do allow me to access everything again I just kinda assumed they where a good place to start going deep on. I still think Chandra/servant is an interesting concept but it might be too easy to go infinite with to really be abused too much.
You guys have been going at this for quite some time so picking out things to build around I’d assume becomes a bit intuitive. For me it’s a much tougher battle. This current deck was basically me taking my 20 exile twisters and then seeing how far I could push Chandra to help me towards those ends. I’m still going to try to work within the concept of the Twisters being my ultimate speed limit but I do think u guys have given me some good food for thought in terms of how to evaluate cards or series of cards.
Deed: one of my builds of this last list used thopter foundry as my sac outlet. Using this makes it impossible to get rid of all my abyssal persecutor tokens so I could hit them for a lot of damage but then not be able to get all my AP tokens off the board and be unable to win. TF allowed more WSZ looping via the life gain and Rowan emblems and yawg bargain. Unfortunately this list had an infinite in it and I had to swap a few cards out including TF.
J_kibbs: Glad to hear that it is making some sense! We like to be helpful as much as possible.
Stakfish: Oh, I see: when we tap Godtoucher or Razorfin Abolisher, we get a lot of Psychic Battle triggers, and each of them can bounce Boggart Mob back to our hand, which brings Goblin Dark-Dwellers back to the battlefield, allowing us to cast either Battle Cry or Rebuild. But, there is no point in casting Rebuild before the last targeting of Boggart Mob, since then we lose Vedalken Orrery, and can no longer do anything substantial until we resolve a Vedalken Orrery token. So I guess yeah, we don't really need Panharmonicon. But, since Panharmonicon doesn't lose us a card slot, we might as well keep it unless it causes problems; technically, it allows for a greater final number, even if that improvement is unnoticeable in the final estimate.
Also, I guess not having Panharmonicon prevents that problem I was mentioning with Natural Order. But, Natural Order doesn't help get back Nylea's Disciple either, since we can only cast Natural Order in the gigastage transition, and we can't afford to resolve all the way down to the previous gigastage transition to get Nylea's Disciple back.
Sadly, Populate won't do it: once we start running through the megastage, we can also make token copies of Goblin Dark-Dwellers, and make token copies of that instead. Keying off creature types also probably won't work, because Changeling Hero has them too. Of course, we could then go back to the Brudiclad, Telchor Engineer version, which can still probably reach 6 stages...
Thousand-Year Storm seems like the easiest way to solve this. If we can find another way to force us to use up a Muzzio in the hyperstage, it should become safe again. I'm not sure how to do that, though.
Edit: one suggestion and one rules question. If we use Mirrorwing Dragon instead of Precursor Golem, then Smite the Monstrous will get a copy for each Hunting Pack token we make.
Also, if I have a Copy Enchantment copying Bloodbond March while Verdant Succession is out, and the Copy Enchantment dies, do I search for a card named Bloodbond March or a card named Copy Enchantment?
I think Verdant Succession will search for Bloodbond March, since that is the current name of the creature when it dies. It might be worth asking on the Rules forum.
Edit: the Mirrorwing Dragon / Smite idea would work for the gigastage I think, so if we had an idea that used lands to bring stuff back, we could combine the two.
No wait, we have Changeling Hero Championing the Orrery, so that comes back and we can replay everything. But isn't this a problem? We can have Goblin Dark-Dwellers in our hand, and have Orrery on the battlefield and Smite the Monstrous copies (or Psychic Battle triggers, even if we don't have copies) on the stack, below the Child of Alara breakpoint. It looks like then we can keep replaying and bouncing the Dark-Dwellers to greatly extend the lower hyperstage. Am I missing something?
The plan I'm gunning for is to use Hunting Pack after all the Smites resolve, generating a huge amount beasts after all the important parts of the Megastage transition, so they stick around as we start rebuilding our artifacts from the triggers below. Then we don't bother generating all the Psychic battles immediately. We generate some constant number that we need to kick-start a hyperstage, then cast Acorn Harvest. We get several copies of Smite the Monstrous, and all of them get to generate N copies, because of Mirrorwing. THat should be enough to generate all the artifact copies we need to convert our mana. But it's done after casting the new Harvest, not before.
Edit: So, I haven't had any new ideas for the Chalice of the Void deck. We can borrow Stakfish's stage sequence to get seven stages for the Soul Foundry deck:
2 Psychic Battle
3 Cowardice
4 Brudiclad, Telchor Engineer
5 Bloodbond March
6 Broken Ambitions
7 Soul Foundry
8 Omniscience
9 Vedalken Orrery
10 Pull from Eternity
11 Izzet Guildmage
12 Karn, Silver Golem
13 Canal Dredger
14 Mimic Vat
15 Ray of Revelation
16 Skull of Orm
17 Mana Vault
18 Obelisk of Bant
19 Metallurgeon
20 Battle Cry
21 Rebuild
22 Goblin Dark-Dwellers
23 Boggart Mob
24 Godtoucher
25 Wirewood Herald
26 Verdant Succession
27 Engineered Explosives
28 Salvaging Station
30 Acorn Harvest
31 Smite the Monstrous
32 Thousand-Year Storm
33 Child of Alara
34 Tireless Mercenaries
35 Celestial Gatekeeper
36 Celestial Gatekeeper
37 Spellweaver Helix
38 Worldfire
39 Spider Spawning
40 Spider Spawning
41 Spider Spawning
42 Molderhulk
43 Divine Congregation
44 Bayou
45 Eureka
46 Mox Emerald
47 Polluted Dead
48 Frightshroud Courier
50 Ghosthelm Courier
51 Devout Chaplain
52 Royal Assassin
53 Simian Spirit Guide
54 Goblin Kites
55 Old Man of the Sea
56 Sea Snidd
57 Reign of Chaos
58 Xathrid Gorgon
59 Tribal Unity
60 Reforge the Soul
Edit: Stakfish, a question: Even if we can't get Chalice of the Void to work, is there any mileage can we gain from restricting zone changing, with Millikin / Myr Welder? For example, can Muzzio be saved?
Edit: Random thought. What if, in the Chalice of the Void deck, we replace Changeling Hero and Anaba Ancestor with something more restrictive, like maybe Boggart Mob and Mad Auntie? I guess I don't see how this would fix the problem; it would allow Panharmonicon back in, and we couldn't Champion Vedalken Orrery anymore, if that helps. Hmm, I guess Mad Auntie is a 3 CMC anyway, so we can't use that, at least not directly.
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 Karn, Silver Golem
12 Perpetual Timepiece
13 Ray of Revelation
14 Skull of Orm
15 Mirrorworks
16 Mana Vault
17 Obelisk of Bant
18 Metallurgeon
19 Battle Cry
20 Rebuild
21 Goblin Dark-Dwellers
22 Boggart Mob
23 Razorfin Abolisher
24 Tidal Courier
25 Jade Bearer
26 Bramblewood Paragon
27 Engineered Explosives
28 Salvaging Station
30 Acorn Harvest
31 Smite the Monstrous
32 Thousand-Year Storm
33 Child of Alara
34 Tireless Missionaries
35 Celestial Gatekeeper
36 Celestial Gatekeeper
37 Spellweaver Helix
38 Worldfire
39 Spider Spawning
40 Spider Spawning
41 Spider Spawning
42 Molderhulk
43 Divine Congregation
44 Bayou
45 Eureka
46 Mox Emerald
47 Polluted Dead
48 Frightshroud Courier
50 Ghosthelm Courier
51 Devout Chaplain
52 Royal Assassin
53 Simian Spirit Guide
54 Goblin Kites
55 Old Man of the Sea
56 Sea Snidd
57 Reign of Chaos
58 Xathrid Gorgon
59 Tribal Unity
60 Words of Wisdom
Same number of cards required as the Soul Foundry deck, but perhaps one or the other could be improved.
In terms of restricting zone-changing... the exile restriction isn't actually what made Muzzio safe in the Chalice deck: what made it safe was Chalice countering Hurkyl's Recall. So I don't know if that would help here.
I think there probably is a way to order triggers such that you don't need Tidal Courier, and can just use a Bearer token from Mimic Vat to bounce the Abolisher and a cast to kill it. Or vice versa. But I don't know what it is.
I really hope that you can get the Changeling deck fixed, I like it a lot. I will think about it as well. What is allowing us to use Anaba Ancestor, is it having to bounce and replay Chalice of the Void?
Anyway I’ve still been working on improving my lists. I’ve come across some interesting interactions and wanted some clarifications on how a few cards work with each other.
So I have 3 questions all revolving around dual nature(DN) and clever impersonator(CI).
1) if I have DN in play and play CI but let CI is enter as itself, how do things happen? CI will want to die to state based checks as a 0/0 and DN will want to make tokens. I believe CI will indeed die and it will do so before the DN tokens are made and these tokens won’t get exiled by this death trigger as they are not on the field yet. Do I have that right?
2) assuming I’m right about 1, when the token attempting to be made by DN finally do get made I believe they should still have CIs “as it enters” clause. DN tries to make CI tokens but when it does those tokens get to become pretty much anything as they enter. Is this correct so far?
3) if after we do this(let’s say we let our tokens become more DN) what happens when we play another CI and let it enter/die just as before? DN sees a non token CI die and should try to exile all tokens sharing a name with it, but nothing in play, currently, meets that criteria. So does DN know the tokens we made where once CI tokens(before they ever really existed at least) or do the last generation of tokens avoid this because DN only cares about name?
2) Yes, this is correct.
3) DN does not care that the DN tokens were created from a CI card, it only checks for those tokens with that name. This is why it was so convenient in our previous decks to have Dual Nature and Copy Enchantment, we could freely bounce and replay the Copy Enchantment that would copy nothing, and not have to worry about Dual Nature getting rid of our tokens.
Edit: Looking to vet the latest decks - both the Soul Foundry and Bramblewood Paragon decks need the Goblin Dark-Dwellers to cast both Battle Cry and Rebuild, and we can't really be allowed to separate them, since no matter what ratio we are supposed to use, we can always tip the scales more towards Rebuild to create more stages in the lower hyperstage. So I think we need Panharmonicon in both decks. It can slide in easily enough by replacing the third Spider Spawning.
I don't think Panharmonicon causes any problems, since we don't have a Changeling Champion. Tireless Missionaries should still work, since it comes back when there are no other nonland permanents on the battlefield.
Edit: Since the decks do not have Muzzio, we need a way to bring back artifacts. Goblin Welder doesn't seem to work anymore, since we don't have an easy way to bring it back from the graveyard. We could add Goblin Welder and Dralnu's Crusade, but there are so many possible one card options that I figure at least one must work. Wormfang Behemoth should do the trick, we can bounce all the artifacts back to our hand, and then exile them with Wormfang Behemoth before Worldfire resolves. We still need to bring back Wormfang Behemoth with Bloodbond March triggers, so that safety net is still there.
To make room, we have to remove a stage from the stage sequence, but we can add Consecrated Sphinx back in.
Just wanted to check one last thing on legality: do we actaully have to win for the deck to be legal or are we just looking for max damage regardless of outcome?
It only effects one slot in my new build but it will slow me down a little. Pretty minor, but every bit helps. Also I borrowed a bit of tech from some of your lists which definitely helped out.
Edit: Looking for creatures that we can't bounce and replay to protect from Worldfire, I suppose that we don't have any way to bounce Celestial Gatekeeper. So, it looks like we need to go back to Nylea's Disciple. Two Nylea's Disciple plus Arixmethes can substitute for two Celestial Gatekeepers plus Tireless Missionaries.
Also, the Soul Foundry deck doesn't have any easy way to bounce Izzet Guilmage it looks like. We can add Radiant Purge, but that takes another card slot, removing Consecrated Sphinx.
It would be nice if adding Radiant Purge allowed us to get rid of Ray of Revelation. After some thought, it does look like one copy of Psychic Battle is theoretically enough to implement the stage structure, and we won't need a bunch of Psychic Battles for Smite the Monstrous, since we have Thousand-Year Storm copies. But, with just one Psychic Battle we only get to bounce one artifact besides Metallurgeon, so we have only enough to bounce Obelisk of Bant once, paying just for the Metallurgeon. We will have nothing to pay for Karn, Silver Golem or Ray of Revelation, for instance.
1 black lotus
2 show and tell(SnT)
3 omniscience
4 arcane adaptation(golem)
5 opalescence
6 mana echoes
7 yawgmoth's bargain(YB)
pay 9 life, drawing
8 mycosynth lattice
9 mirrorworks(MW)
10 doubling season(DS)
11 clever impersonator(CI) - let resolve as CI, get echoes triggers, make all MW tokens into more MW
12 phyrexian metamorph(PM) - same, let resolve as PM, get echos triggers, all but last wave(waves of MW token making) come in as DS, last wave all MS except one copy will be another arcane adaptation naming sliver
13 vedalken orrery
14 thousand-year storm(TYS)
15 djinn illuminatus
16 steady progress(SP) - ok so not going to reveal every card we draw here. importantly we will draw the rest of the deck and will still have many SP copies still on the stack that would kill us if we aren't careful. so, we draw the deck and before we start abusing the next of our SP draws we will play out some more engine pieces
17 goblin flectomancer(GF)
18 painter's servant - naming red
19 abyssal persecutor
20 essence sliver
21 syndicate trafficker
22 mirror gallery
23 upwelling
24 precursor golem(PG)
25 sensor splicer
26 white sun's zenith(WSZ) - so this is what we use the rest of our SP draws for. we empty our mana pool into WSZ, that makes a bunch of mana, and then we redraw WSZ and do it again. repeat until we run out of SP draws(we still have our full deck in hand, WSZ has been and will continue to be the only card in our deck for quite some time)
27 domri rade(domri) - we will make as many copies as we can and then emblem him. so before we move to our first attack we will abuse WSZ a bit more. we still have 10 life we can pay to YB, so we will. with each activation we will draw and then cast WSZ making a bunch of mana and pumping all that mana into the next casting of WSZ. this will be compounded by each TYS getting better each time through.
so before we get to attacking we have another loop we can bring online. we can sac 2 artifacts(mirror gallery copies for example) to give 2 token copies of syndicate trafficker a few counters and make them indestructible. once we have done that we will use domri to have these 2 indestructible creatures start fighting each other. we will use the life gained from this(thanks essence sliver) to draw and cast WSZ a bunch more.
now we move to our first attack. we have a bunch of mana floating from WSZ but that's ok. we play upwelling for this exact reason. so we attack with vigilance, haste, double strike and because all our creatures are slivers, we also have better lifelink. so as u can see this is a great life gain engine. this we can run back through YB and draw and cast WSZ a bunch which in turn creates a ton of bodies and a bunch of mana. while WSZ will be the card we cast the most, it is not our most powerful ins/sor and we are making all this mana to make our later ins/sor that much better. so we are back to 1 life and we have a bunch of mana floating and we now move on.
28 cackling counterpart - so now we are starting to ramp up the power. so we take all the mana we have accumulated and max cast our CC. this gets spread around a bunch via PG. we get a bunch of doubling seasons, TYS, etc. we let this stuff fully resolve. once it does we will have again a large amount of mana and a bunch of new bodies.
29 seize the day(STD) - so this doesn't make mana but it does do cool stuff. we will be max casting it but we will leave 4,5,6 or 7 mana in reserve(we want at least 4 but at 8 we could get another copy of STD). so we let these all resolve after being spread around via PGs. we now have a lot of extra combat phases and extra main phases. the 4 mana will be important momentarily. so with all of our newly acquired bodies and combat steps we move into attacking our opponent again. between each combat step while we are in main phase we use the life we gained from the attack to draw and cast WSZ. this is what we needed the 4 mana for. it allows us to start the loop. it starts small but it does grow quickly and we don't lose the mana we make because of upwelling as we move in and out of combat.
so at some point we will have finally gone through all our combat steps(using YB/WSZ loops between each of course). at this point we will repeat the use of CC/STD from graveyard. this will lead to making more bodies and then more combat steps with YB/WSZ between each. this will take awhile to run through but it is pretty potent and by the end we should have a huge amount of mana. this being as powerful as it is we will want to loop these, so that is what we will do next.
30 runic repetition - so you should know how this loop works with RR/CC/GF. we max cast RR and target CC with all of them. the first one resolves getting us back CC. before the other copies go to resolve and fizzle we cast CC from hand(generate the value), then max flashback(value) it putting it back into exile. we then sac one our GFs(which CC makes us more of) to redirect an about to fizzle RR to our newly in exile CC to keep the loop alive. with our last 2 RR resolving we will get both CC and STD. we then repeat our sequencing from earlier and max cast CC from hand followed by max casting STD leaving 4 mana and proceed to combat steps(with our final 2 RR resolving off the stack the stack is now empty so we can get in some combat here). we again use our combat steps and our 4 starting mana to draw and cast WSZ a ton between each combat. again once all of our combats have finished from our hand casting of CC/STD(and all YB/WSZ loops) we go ahead and flash back CC/STD for max cast on both(saving 4 mana). repeat the last few steps until we have used everything up. now we need to move on to our next stage.
31 rowan kenrith(RK) - so rowan doesn't actually do much but what she does do it very important. so we will cast and resolve RK and make all copies we can via our MW. once all of the have finished resolving we will start embleming our RKs. we will let each ability resolve fully before popping the next one so we get an exponentially growing amount of emblems.
32 chandra ablaze(chandra) - so, just like RK we will be using chandra for her ultimate ability. it does get a bit weird here in the ordering and playing of the spells from our graveyard. the spells we can play are: SnT, SP, and RR. so we only have a finite number of times we can cast SnT before we will have to stop. while SnT doesn't actually gain us a lot of value it does increase our TYS count which is a good thing for us. i will discuss this again once it becomes an issue. so for now we will be casting all 3 of our legal possibilities. we do choose the order here but they do all go on the stack at the same time. this means we need to pay all additional costs(like replicate) now before we finish putting things onto the stack. it also means we get max TYS copies on all of the spells. we will be max casting RR and just getting TYS amounts of SP and SnT. one thing of note here is we have multiple chandra activation's on the stack. we only activated 1 but because of all our RK embelms we got a whole bunch of chandra activation's. so our stack gets pretty messy here but looks like this
last
chanrda casting group
replicate group
TYS group
first
so within each of these groups we do get choice in order. the only replicate copies we will have will be of RR as its the most powerful thing we will be doing. we will be max replicating RR but we will leave 4 mana floating. the other 2 group groups will be full of all 3 spells but we will always order them this way
last
runic rep
steady progress
show n tell
first
so our full stack looks like this:
last
remaining chandra -7 abilities still on the stack
RR original
SP original
SnT original
RR replicated copies
RR TYS copies
SP TYS copies
SnT TYS copies
first
so as this stuff starts to resolve we will basically be repeating many of the steps we have done up to this point. our opponent wants to resist us as much as possible so they will put all their wastes from hand into play via SnT, we will do nothing with the SnT resolutions, it just adds to our TYS counts. with our SP resolutions we will use our 4 mana and drawing cards to loop WSZ again. we will also proliferate each of our planeswalker's and any creatures that have +1/+1 counters on them. once our copies of RR start to resolve we will get back CC every time until our last 2 RR where we will again get back both CC and STD. we will cast them in the same order as before but this time we will save 4 mana for our last SP resolution to draw and cast WSZ one last time. our last RR(original) will resolve and we will get and cast CC from hand and from graveyard(saving 4 mana). now our next chandra -7 still on the stack will resolve and we repeat this process again. we do this process until all of our first chandra's activation's have fully resolved. we will have a lot of guys and a lot of mana. we will now move into using up all of our newly acquired combat phases. as before between each combat phases we will use YB to loop WSZ, but its even more efficient this time through as RK emblems do work on YBs draw ability. it works the same way we just get more iterations of the loop for the same amount of life. so we make it all the way through all of our combat steps and all loops associated with them. we now activate our next chanrda and repeat these steps again. once all chandra's have been used up and we have gotten all value from all combat steps its finally time to cast more new things.
32 the chain veil(TCV) - so again we up the proverbial power level. so we can see how this is gonna work, but is there a best way to do it? yes, i think there is. so first we cast TCV and make all copies via MW we can. that's simple enough. next we will activate a single TCV. this will give us multiple copies of the ability. this is why we wanted to have steady progress in our list. we needed a way to keep our walkers from running out of loyalty. now we let all of the TCV abilities from our first one fully resolve. then we use up our RKs again. then we move onto the next TCV activation. we will repeat this process until our rowans are too low in loyalty to continue the process. we will then activate a single chandra once. we do the chandra value dance for one activation and in that process we refill our all of our walkers loyalty via SP. once we have extracted all value from this one chandra activation we go back to using TCV and RK to just buff our activated abilities into oblivion and also give us hella planeswalker activation's. we repeat this process of TCV/RK and occasional chandra activation's until we have used up all TCV and RK. we will then go back to domri and use up his fight ability's via walker activation's to gain a ton of life. we will again use that life to draw and loop WSZ off of YB which again is super powered from RK emblems. so now domri is all used up. we then move onto using up our chandras and her ultimate's. we get RR loops(which gives CC and combat loops(which gets YB/WSZ loops)), and also some SP/WSZ loops. we do this until we have used up everything. all combat, all YB/WSZ, and planeswalker's. the stack is empty, we are at 1 life, our walkers are all used up, all TCV have been activated and used, and we should have a massive amount of mana(YB/WSZ loops will be the last thing we will have done). moving on
33 bloodbond march(BM) - ok so i'm gonna be honest, this is the tech i stole from you guys. also i'm going to be honest i'm not sure its proper to wait to cast it until now(edit: i'm pretty sure we want it earlier). this is going to be when we start abusing it but we can cast it much earlier. it is a creature so it will have copies made from all the CC raining down earlier. i don't know if we make more now or if we have it in play near the beginning. so at this point we will cast and make as many copies as possible via MW. so we have a new engine to abuse, but how?
34-36 clever impersonator(CI or clones) and 37-40 phyrexian metamorph(PM or clones) - so ultimately we want to abuse these cards to make as a many copies of TCV as possible. its gonna be a bit weird but its very cyclical so once i explain it once it'll start to make make more sense. while these cards are themselves creatures their important trait is that we can copy non creature things.
so how is this is gonna work? we are going to cast one of our clones and get a bunch of BM triggers. we will use our first BM trigger to bring back our graveyard copies of this card. these (1 currently) will come into play and we will again let them just enter as themselves and go back to yard. We will get a small amount of mana as they enter and die, more importantly them entering will trigger MW just as before. we will pay for all of these triggers. all of the waves will enter as DS except the last wave which we will have become copies of MW. now our next BM trigger will go to resolve repeating this process. we continue making DS and MW with our clone still on the stack. so our last BM trigger just ended and the last wave put more MW into play, our clone finally gets to resolve now. we will have it enter and die just as all the others and our clone will go to the yard. with these MW triggers we will again look to make all these waves except the final wave be DS. for this final wave tho we will have them enter as copies of TCV. so at this point we have 5 more clones we can cast from our hand but we will wait on doing that. we just made hella TCVs and the stack is clear. lets use them up. it makes us a bunch more BM in the process and so when we finally have used up all our TCV activation's we will have turbo powered our BM loops. so we move into getting all of our value from our TCV activation's doing the same basic sequencing we did before trying to use as many RK emblems and TCV before we need to use any chandras. repeating this process until all TCV have been activated. then use the remaining walker activation's from domri and then finally chandra. we will be using breaks in the stack to do combat things as well to generate mana/bodies via extra combat steps and YB/WSZ. just as before we will repeat this process of generating value and using that value to generate more value until all of the resources our playing of our clone from hand had generated has finally been used.
so now we've established how the BM loops work. we want to pause between each actual casting as we can use that time while the stack is clear to get in for some combat steps(and their resulting loops). so we do this series of things for awhile as we play through all of our clones. we extract as much value as we can both while the stack isn't clear and also when it is clear.
41-60 exile twisters - so we have the same end game as as my last few lists have used. we can use our syndicate trafficker to sac important pieces to come back and be recast. while it isn't a ton of value we will want to sac all pieces we can. even our redundant pieces can still be sacked to trafficker for additional counters so looping them does have value. as a bit of sequencing we will need painter's servantto always come down after mycosynth lattice. if lattice comes down after servant it turns RR and SP into colorless cards that chandra cannot cast. once we start raining down CCs it shouldn't be a big deal, but it does need to happen. lattice won't get copied by CC so it should never really be an issue but it can be messy if you really mess with the ordering of things. as before things do get a bit weird as we put our exile twisters onto the stack. it messes with the stack a bunch. while we have copies of our twisters on the stack we won't be able to activate our walkers or move to combat. that being said we will still want to generate as many TCV as possible and also generate as many combat steps as possible. we will still be able to do BM loops and also our RR loops. so our loops will focus on generating what mana we can without combat steps. a bit limiting but its not too bad a thing. we still will be able generate a decent amount of mana just off 1 SP loop per twister copy which we can use to power our 1 RR loop. we will end that loop free casting STD from hand and then just casting it via flashback but not replicating it. this means that while we won't have full access all of our engines we can still generate some decent value per twister loop. we can then cash even more of that value in when the stack finally clears of our twisters. before we will be putting any new twisters onto the stack we will be cashing in all of our sorcery speed value. this includes all of our walker activation's, all TCV activation's(they work best between RK activation's), and all of our stock piled combat steps. while we cannot activate any of these things during the twister loops, we can recycle them back into the deck to be drawn again via the twisters which will allow us to recast and copy them with all of our MW. we will give up a few activation's(sac'ing an unused walker) doing this but we will net many more in the long run and the recasts. so basically our twister loops will have a period between them where we will be recouping the sorcery speed value we couldn't use during the loops. this value isn't lost, its just re-positioned to happen when it can instead of just being outright lost. so to draw our deck once we start our twister loops we can do it 2 different ways. we can set aside an amount of life for YB(one copy will still be in play, and 1 activation per copy of twister will suffice to draw the deck) or we can just be lucky and have SP in our opener each time. its worth considering that praetors council(PC) doesn't require drawing the deck. this means we don't need to dedicate resources to drawing the deck and we can use those resources elsewhere. that might make PC the most valuable of the twisters. normally i would start with casting the highest cmc first and working backwards in terms of cost highest->lowest so they get progressively more efficient as our ability to copy them gets more and more potent. PC might break that rule and might belong at the end instead of the beginning, not really sure tbh. oh as a last note i need to explain the not casting of SnT at some point. so if we just keep casting SnT as our twisters resolve our opponent will just keep putting lands into play. we can't destroy those as the deck is written currently. so at some point once they have played more than 53(our 8th twister resolving would then mean if we cast SnT they'd have 54) lands the next twister will see them only having 6 cards in library and they will deck and die, stopping us prematurely.
last notes: yeah, one post for this list! the question about actually winning ended up not being an issue. i found a infinite as i was writing this up and needed to change a few cards around. the changes i needed to make made winning possible anyway.
enjoy!
On your Phyrexian Metamorph line, near the end you say "all MS but one copy", did you mean DS instead? I will assume that is the case.
So there will be plenty of mana for the initial cards. When you play Doubling Season, you get one copy via a Mirrorworks ability, which becomes two tokens. So you have three total. Then you get 8 Clever Impersonator tokens, which become Mirrorworks copies. Then, when Phyrexian Metamorph comes into play, it triggers all nine copies of Mirrorworks, allowing us to generate D Doubling Seasons, where D is between 2^^10 and 2^^11. Every creature from that point forward will generate 9 * 2^D token copies, which will be between 2^^11 and 2^^12. This will generate about C(9 * 2^D)^2 = 81C * 2^(2D) mana, which will also be between 2^^11 and 2^^12.
Next we come to Steady Progress and White Suns' Zenith. With Djinn Illuminatus maxed out and TYS, we will get between 2^^11 and 2^^12 copies of Steady Progress, each time drawing a White Sun's Zenith. If we have M mana before we cast WSZ, the best bet is to use M/2 mana on WSZ, and M/2 mana on Djinn Illuminatus, creating M/6 copies, and thus generating (M^2 * 2^D)/12 token Cats. This will generate about (M^2 * 2^D)^2/144 mana, or roughly M^4 mana since M is much greater than 2^D, and growing rapidly while 2^D is staying constant. So if we cast WSZ N times, we get about M^4^N mana at the end. So with between 2^^11 and 2^^12 casts, we get between 2^^13 and 2^^14 mana.
We get some more casts via Yawgmoth's Bargain and {c]Domri Rade[/c], but we only get 10 WSZ casts from YB and between 2^^11 and 2^^12 casts from Domri Rade, so we are still between 2^^13 and 2^^14.
Next up is Cackling Counterpart. First we use the TYS and DI copies and have them all target Doubling Season, and each copy takes X Doubling Seasons to about 2^X Doubling Seasons. So after more than 2^^13 copies we wind up with more than 2^^(2^^13) copies of Doubling Season. Then we start resolving the Precursor Golem triggers. Each one creates a copy for each Doubling Season, each of which takes X to 2^X, so we wind up taking X Doubling Seasons to roughly 2^^X Doubling Seasons. So we wind up appending "2^^" more than 2^^11 times to 2^^(2^^13), so we eventually get between 2^^^(2^^11) and 2^^^(2^^12) Doubling Seasons.
It's instructive at this point to look at how much mileage we got out of all the work we did to get more mana; the result is, the effect is unnoticeable. Yes, before the Precursor Golem triggers we wound up with 2^^(2^^13) Doubling Seasons rather than 2^^(2^^11) Doubling Seasons, which is noticeable if not an enormous difference; but, each Precursor Golem trigger appended a "2^^" to the numbers, and we had more than 2^^11 of them, so the difference between 13 and 11 becomes insignificant. Either way we wind up between 2^^^(2^^11) and 2^^^(2^^12) Doubling Seasons. So the mana isn't really making a significant impact here.
Neither is Seize the Day, which increases our mana, but not our Doubling Seasons, so the effect is unnoticable; basically our mana becomes roughly the square of our number of Doubling Seasons, and the squaring operation is completely unnoticeable for numbers at the triple arrow level. Also, we can't go into and out of combat while the stack is not empty, so we can't do this step while there are copies of Runic Repetition, activated abilities, or Mirrorworks or Bloodbond March triggers on the stack. So even if this step did something significant, it couldn't be recursed over with what follows next.
Runic Repetition can fetch Cackling Counterpart and gets lots of copies via DI and TYS, so it takes X to 2^^^^X. So the first time we cast it we produce more than X = 2^^^^(2^^^(2^^11)) copies of Doubling Season.
We then create roughly X Rowan Kenriths and Rowan Kenrith emblems (actually 2^X and 2^2^X respectively, but the difference is unnoticeable), and then create roughly X Chandra Ablazes. So we can cast Runic Repetition X times (technically 2^X * 2^2^X), to generate 2^^^^^(2^^^^(2^^^(2^^11))) Doubling Seasons.
We then create about Y copies of The Chain Veil. When we tap a single TCV, we get E copies where E is the number of Rowan Kenrith emblems, allowing us to activate each of R Rowan Kenriths E times each, generating 2^(RE) more emblems. So after Y such abilities we get roughly 2^^Y RK emblems at the end. This allows us to use Chandra roughly 2^^Y more times, allowing us to generate 2^^^^^(2^^Y) Doubling Seasons, or more than 2^^^^^(2^^^^^(2^^^^(2^^^(2^^11)))) Doubling Seasons.
You may notice that the arrows are not increasing as fast as one might expect. This is because the requirements to stack layers are not being met. Specifically, if, between each activation of Chandra Ablaze, we could update the number of Rowan Kenrith Emblems to roughly the number of Doubling Seasons in play, then each Chandra Ablaze could cast X Doubling Seasons and thus take X to 2^^^^^X, and then having X Chandras would take X to 2^^^^^^X. Then, if between each activation of a The Chain Veil we could increase the number of emblems or Chandras to roughly the number of Doubling Seasons, then X The Chain Veils would take X to 2^^^^^^^X. But, since we can't update any of our numbers, except when casting one of our permanents, we are stuck at the five arrow level.
Another problem is that are Planeswalkers require the stack to be empty to use their loyalty abilities. This means that we can't take advantage of any further recursion that requires abilities on the stack. So, while we might expect that Clever Impersonator would take us to six arrows because of Bloodbond March, and the exile cards would take us to seven because of DI and TYS copies, those extra layers only function properly if we can keep the Bloodbond March, DI, and TYS triggers on the stack, which we can't.
So, it looks like the best we can do is to have each of the CI and PM cards implement another X to 2^^^^^X, taking us to between 2^^^^^^11 and 2^^^^^^12 DSes. Then the exile cards can retrieve all 10 CI/PM/CA/TCV cards, allowing another 10 implementations of X to 2^^^^^X. So that takes us to between 2^^^^^^211 and 2^^^^^^212.
Unfortunately, this is less than your first two decks. I encourage you to look at what is creating layers and what isn't - some things that are interfering with layer creation are:
1) independent layers - in all your decks you have both doubling season creation and mana generation, and they never stack on top of each other. So we just wind up building on whatever is stronger, which is usual the doubling season creation. (Yes, it's true that the mana generated depends on the number of Doubling Seasons. But that mana never gets translated back into Doubling Seasons, which is necessary for stacking layers.)
2) Numbers not getting updated - It would be nice if having many Rowan Kenrith emblems or Mirrorworks tokens translated into layers. Unfortunately, they are not getting updated frequntly enough to count as layers, as I talked about above. I don't know how to fix that in this particular deck, but it is something to keep in mind. Rings of Brighthearth would be nice if you could update artifacts frequently, but of course you can't if you are using The Chain Veil to recurse over Chandra Ablaze.
3) stack needing to be cleared for combat or planeswalker abilities. I also don't know how to fix this in this deck - the obvious solution is Teferi, Temporal Archmage, but his second ability can untap The Chain Veil, so that's no good.
Anyway, best of luck!
What we've found works best in our deck, and probably would work best with yours, is to set up this simple "chain" of resources. You can see what I mean in my old standard combo with Polyraptor, which I wrote up here.
With that deck, the objective is to make as many Polyraptors, the final source of damage, as possible. Then, I have a sequence of different combos that each turn one of some resource into an amount of some other resource equal to the number of Polyraptors I've already created. One point of toughness on Forerunner of the Empire creates N Polyraptors, where N is the number of Polyraptors I've already created. One green mana (well, more than one, but you get the idea) turns into N points of toughness on Forerunner of the Empire, each of which turn into N Polyraptors, one after the other. One energy counter turns into N green mana, each of which turns into N points of toughness, each of which turns into N Polyraptors...
You get the idea. The key here is that every new group of cards I'm adding has two things going for it: it directly creates whatever thing the last group I added was using up, and the amount it creates is directly tied to the number of Polyraptors (key being that this thing I'm tying it to is the bottom level) I've created so far. That both makes my life easier because it's easier to follow what's happening in the deck (and easier to correct for infinites: if one of these modules is broken and goes infinite, I can just slot it out of the deck and the rest of it is intact), and because I can guarantee that each new group I add adds a layer, and isn't just spinning my wheels.
Two other notes: planeswalkers usually don't work out well in these decks. Every version of our deck, all the way back to 2009, has played either Vedalken Orrery or Leyline of Anticipation because sorcery-speed is the bane of our existence. Planeswalkers are pretty much guaranteed to be sorcery speed, which makes it damn near impossible to fit in any shenanigans AFTER the stage of your deck where you use them. And you absolutely don't have to win the game that turn! Every deck I've ever seen for this challenge does, simply because the amounts of damage involved are so absurdly high, but there's nothing /requiring/ you to do so.
In fact, if you were to build a deck that required your opponent to still be alive after dealing the damage, I'd love to see it regardless of how much damage it deals.
@Deedlit: I'm still trying to fix my deck, but no real updates.
What made Anaba Ancestor work was the combination of Chalice of the Void and Myr Welder. Myr Welder meant you had to actually resolve down to a Clockwork Gnomes section to continue with the combo, while Chalice of the Void meant that doing so had a real cost associated with it: any time you made that transition, you had to at some point cast a Hurkyl's Recall to do it. Neither one was enough to make the Ancestor safe on its own.
i don't have time to fully respond but one thing that i will point out is that mana does actually kind of scale w/ DS creation in that when i start casting CC that while the CC does make more DS for sure, it also makes more mana echoes(and TYS etc) in that same process. not sure that was factored in or not. we will want to stack all DS creation to resolve before everything else on the PG spreads but we do get everything(all creatures anyway) else too. this includes echoes(mana), essence sliver(life->mana), TYS(bit of everything) and more PG too. i do understand that we need to compound harder and harder to jump arrow levels but just pointing out that other stuff is compounding. also essence sliver gains us xy life not just x life when x is damage and y is amount of essence slivers. while i agree combat gets clunky each combat phase gets us xyz WSZ when x is damage, y is slivers and z is rowan emblems. this gets run through DS to make xyzd new bodies to add to our initial count and we repeat this whole process STD copies number of times.
i'll probably respond a bit more later on today
@Stakfish: How is Nylea's Disciple supposed to work again? The problem I am seeing is that Worldfire will exile our Nylea's Disciples, and we have to get them back somehow. I was hoping that Verdant Succession could bring them back, but we can only trigger it by destroying a Child of Alara, and then we have to resolve all the Verdant Successions until we get to the creation of another Vedalken Orrery. So we can't store up Verdant Successions, and if we hold a Child of Alara destruction on the stack, the Nylea's Disciples won't be on the battlefield, so they won't trigger Verdant Succession. So Verdant Succession doesn't seem to solve the problem. Natural Order won't work since they can bring the Disciples back to the battlefield below the Worldfire, and we can gain life after dropping down to 1, and put an additional megastage on the stack, I think. So I don't know how we used Nylea's Disciple in previous decks.
Imagine for a moment you had just enough mana to cast/flashback Cackling Counterpart 1000 times. That's helpful for sure, but if you only have a way to get Cackling Counterpart back from exile 100 times, then you can only cast/flashback it 200 times total, no matter how much mana you generate. The rest of it just gets wasted.
Right now, your end goal is "make a gigantic amount of Doubling Seasons". The way you make lots of those (as well as lots of Mana Echoes, Thousand-Year Storms, etc.), is by casting Cackling Counterpart. And yes, every time you cast it, you can pump all your mana (proportional to the number of Doubling Seasons) into replicate. So if you have N Doubling Seasons, each replicated copy will make 2^N more Doubling Seasons. You have N replicate copies, which is enough to add a second arrow.
BUT, you also have all these Precursor Golems. Each Precursor Golem token copy you have puts a separate trigger on the stack, and each of those triggers ON ITS OWN makes N Cackling Counterpart copies targeting Doubling Season. So in other words, you can get the same amount of benefit from generating all that mana and feeding it into Djinn Illuminatus, just by creating one more copy of Precursor Golem. If you can find a way to make two copies, you'll actually be doing even better than you are now.
That's where the inefficiency is coming from in the list. It's a really common problem in these decks, and hard to spot when it happens, because it doesn't /look/ inefficient. You can still see how Djinn Illuminatus and the extra mana will make the damage total way higher at the end. But because it's only running alongside some bigger combo, it winds up disappearing into the margins when you try to calculate your end result.
If I could make a suggestion for your deck: try making a version that starts by just converting mana into enchantments. We have some... convoluted ways to do that which you don't need. A simpler way might be something like this:
Start by cutting Mana Echoes (which would go infinite this time) for Dual Nature, and add a copy of Copy Enchantment. That's a trick from our big write-up at the top of this thread. You play Copy Enchantment and don't copy anything. Then, the Dual Nature triggers combine with Doubling Season to make lots of copies, all of which can become whatever enchantment you want. You also don't have to worry about Dual Nature exiling your tokens anymore, because it's looking at a card named Copy Enchantment.
That way, every time you play a Copy Enchantment, you get a bunch of Dual Nature triggers. They all resolve one at a time, each one making 2^N copies of Doubling Season. With N Dual Natures, that's two layers already.
Then, to turn mana alone into copies of your enchantments, use Allay, Mortuary, and Rememberance. For 3 mana, you can play Allay, getting a bunch of Thousand-Year Storm triggers. With N Thousand-Year Storms, you can kill Copy Enchantment N times. Then, Mortuary puts that Copy Enchantment back into your library. Finally, Remembrance lets you search your library for Copy Enchantment and put it in your hand. You replay it, and you get more triggers, making more Doubling Seasons, Dual Natures, and Thousand-Year Storms.
So, for just 3 generic mana, you get:
N copies of Allay, one for each Thousand Year Storm (there are probably ways to get full mileage out of the copies here, I just haven't found one). Each of those become:
N triggers of Dual Nature, each of which get doubled by:
N copies of Doubling Season.
That's three arrows on its own. Then, you can find a way to turn all those Cackling Counterparts into ways to produce colorless mana (say, by making copies of Emrakul's Hatcher, where the tokens also get doubled by Doubling Season...), you can probably get close to 6 or 7 arrows at the point in your deck where you have only 4 right now.
@Deedlit: I'm not sure I follow why we need Panharmonicon back. With your version, we can't champion Vedalken Orrery anymore, so what good do multiple rebuilds get us?
Also, Wormfang Behemoth worries me because it lets us save a lot of cards though the gigastage transition, including some potentially unsafe ones like Engineered Explosives. If we can make it safe though, it might be worth seeing if we can swap the order of life/mana to save cards.
Yeah, Wormfang Behemoth worried me a little too. But, the situation looks the same as for the megastage transition - we get an Engineered Explosives and Goblin Dark-Dwellers back in our hand, but this is supposed to be nullified by our need to create and use Verdant Succession triggers. Actually, can you go over again how our extra EE and GDD are normally used up in the megastage transition? That's a really important thing that we need to keep track of.
Switching over to Worldpurge is certainly always on the table. I believe the problem we were having is that we were using Elvish Spirit Guide to gain mana for the megastage transition, and using Worldpurge in the gigastage transition also brought Elvish Spirit Guide back to our hand, so that we wound up with an extra green mana afterwards. If we could use something else to gain green mana in the megastage transition, that might be useful.
@Stakfish: Just wondering if you saw my post #1894, where I asked how we could retrieve Nylea's Disciple after it gets exiled by Worldfire. If neither Nylea's Disciple nor Tireless Missionaries can be retrieved after Worldfire hits, then I guess both of my latest decks are currently nonworking. The only stage artifact that is currently usable is Metallurgeon, which requires white, and both Izzet Guildmage and Razorfin Abolisher require blue; the alternative to the Abolisher requires black. So we need three colors by the megastage, which rules out Centaur Safeguard, and I don't know what else to use for the life-gaining creature. I guess we could consider using Bramblewood Paragon + Abzan Falconer, maybe there's something we could make out of that.
Let me put it this way. Right now, the first chance you get to turn all that extra mana from your Zeniths into Doubling Seasons is when you replicate Cackling Counterpart. But even if you're generating 2^N mana, where N is the number of Doubling Seasons you have out, all those replicated copies are STILL only doing as much as having 1 extra token copy of Precursor Golem out. Since you're making more Precursor Golems than there are atoms in the universe every time you cast a Cackling Counterpart, the extra copy kinda gets lost in the shuffle.
@Deedlit: I think I'm still missing something, because I don't see why we need the Dwellers to enter twice. Could you walk me through how your hyperstage transition works, exactly? I'm probably missing some detail involved.
Edit: Did not see your post. Hmm. This might mean moving over to Worldpurge. We should be able to use up the green mana by having Acorn Harvest be the flashback sorcery, no?
You guys have been going at this for quite some time so picking out things to build around I’d assume becomes a bit intuitive. For me it’s a much tougher battle. This current deck was basically me taking my 20 exile twisters and then seeing how far I could push Chandra to help me towards those ends. I’m still going to try to work within the concept of the Twisters being my ultimate speed limit but I do think u guys have given me some good food for thought in terms of how to evaluate cards or series of cards.
Deed: one of my builds of this last list used thopter foundry as my sac outlet. Using this makes it impossible to get rid of all my abyssal persecutor tokens so I could hit them for a lot of damage but then not be able to get all my AP tokens off the board and be unable to win. TF allowed more WSZ looping via the life gain and Rowan emblems and yawg bargain. Unfortunately this list had an infinite in it and I had to swap a few cards out including TF.
Stakfish: Oh, I see: when we tap Godtoucher or Razorfin Abolisher, we get a lot of Psychic Battle triggers, and each of them can bounce Boggart Mob back to our hand, which brings Goblin Dark-Dwellers back to the battlefield, allowing us to cast either Battle Cry or Rebuild. But, there is no point in casting Rebuild before the last targeting of Boggart Mob, since then we lose Vedalken Orrery, and can no longer do anything substantial until we resolve a Vedalken Orrery token. So I guess yeah, we don't really need Panharmonicon. But, since Panharmonicon doesn't lose us a card slot, we might as well keep it unless it causes problems; technically, it allows for a greater final number, even if that improvement is unnoticeable in the final estimate.
Also, I guess not having Panharmonicon prevents that problem I was mentioning with Natural Order. But, Natural Order doesn't help get back Nylea's Disciple either, since we can only cast Natural Order in the gigastage transition, and we can't afford to resolve all the way down to the previous gigastage transition to get Nylea's Disciple back.