So, this is a thread to discuss a challenge we started up recently: To create a 60-card Standard-legal deck that deals the most damage without going infinite.
There is of course a thread for the Vintage version of this challenge. The reason I decided to start a new thread rather than just keep the Standard discussion in that thread, is that I imagine a lot of people who might be interested in this don't look at that thread, for two reasons: 1) It's hard to catch up after 79 pages, and 2) the Vintage deck has gotten very complex, so that it takes quite a bit of studying to understand how it works. In contrast, work on the Standard deck is quite new, and there probably won't be anything as near as complicated as the Vintage version. So, I think a lot more people could contribute to this version, once they know that this exists.
Of course, I wouldn't want the front page of this forum to be full of max damage threads, so this will be the only other thread I intend to create on this subject.
So, without further ado, here are the rules, as stated on Stakfish's webpage:
The Rules of the Game
I’ve taken the liberty of adapting the rules from the original vintage challenge to this one. I’ve relaxed them in some places to allow for the limited cardpool, but for the most part I’ve left them as-is.
-Start with a Standard-legal deck of exactly 60 cards. No less, of course, and if we allowed more, you could deal arbitrary but finite damage by including as many copies of Rat Colony as you feel like, and it wouldn’t break the other rules.
-Conditions caused by randomness can resolve any way you like. In this deck, that mostly means that every single card draw is a Demonic Tutor in disguise: you can assume that the order of your deck is exactly what you want it to be. This veers pretty heavily into magical christmasland, but if we didn’t do it this way you’d have to figure out the average amount of damage a deck could deal, which is probably impossible.
-The opponent is a goldfish with a deck of 60 random basic lands. However, they are still playing to stop you: if you give your opponent a choice, they will pick whichever one is worse for you. The only exception is that they won’t concede the game. This is a sadistic goldfish that wants to make you play it out.
-No going infinite. Infinite really means “arbitrary” in magic, most of the time, so we define it like this: when you make your deck, I pick a finite number, say, a million, or Graham’s Number, or four. If, no matter what number I pick, there’s a line your deck can take that will deal at least that much damage, your deck goes infinite and is disqualified.
-This doesn’t matter to our deck, but other rules of magic apply: if I put 80,000,000 copies of Shock on the stack and target my opponent with each one, they’ll die on the tenth one, and I’ll have dealt only 20 damage. In practice, that means you’re either winning with a giant X-spell or by attacking with a lot of very big creatures.
-In the old challenge, you had to go off on turn one. Here, that rule is relaxed, with a caveat: the fewer turns required, the better. No one is impressed that you can deal a lot of damage on turn 50, or 50 million for that matter.
Stakfish has created two decks that were legal in the last iteration of Standard. First he created a Polyraptor deck that dealt more than 2^^^^^^^^(2^^^^^^7) damage, using Knuth arrow notation. (That's probably something that needs to be explained in this thread.) The second deck dealt an amount of damage greater than the infamous Graham's Number! See his decks here:
For this iteration of Standard, we actually started talking about this a bit in the other thread (discussion starts on page 77). FortyTwo has found a nice start that can go off by turn 3! I'll just quote him:
I have put a little bit of thought into the standard deck, and I'm pretty sure we can complete whatever setup we need by turn 3 (and possibly go off that turn as well).
Simple stuff so far, we have used 4 of our starting 7 cards and are about to draw our 9th giving us 5 cards in hand at the start of turn 3. Note that the lands are pretty unrestricted at this point, just that they are untapped and the first one makes green. Probably at least one of them makes blue.
Turn 3:
The recently spoiled Giant Growth on Marwyn. Marwyn taps for GGGG which is spent on a kicked Gift of Growth on Marwyn.
Marwyn now taps for 8xG and our two lands are still untapped. And we still have 3 whole cards in hand.
Here I see are several options:
We could go immediately for Emergency Powers and have access to pretty much anything, but we probably don't want to exile one already.
We could play an island and cast Omniscience and then a card draw spell like Chemister's insight into Thousand-Year Storm and jump start to draw enough to start going off. However, free spells might be hard to avoid infinites with.
We even have enough nongreen mana for straight land Thousand Year Storm, and a card draw spell into more untaps of Marwyn and mana rocks to turn green into other colors. (Pirate's Prize?) This route is narrow, but even if it doesn't work for turn 3, it should definitely be enough to go off turn 4.
Apex of Power is another option to get us kicked off, and seems safer than Omniscience.
Another route is by Experimental Frenzy which looks interesting as a gating mechanism. If we are recycling our deck with Clear the Mind then each time a copy resolves we get a card stuck in our hand until we spend R to sacrifice frenzy, which we can draw from the next Clear the Mind, but there's no way to cast the Frenzy with stuff on the stack, so we'd either need to resolve the whole stack, or put it into play with say an Emergency Powers. It seems like there may be an interaction with Runaway Steam-Kin as it would take 3 castings of frenzy to make the RRR to sacrifice it 3 times. However, this would require there be no other way to pump RSK and the forerunner is red... (RSK would be dying to the forerunner triggers a lot too so maybe they can coexist without going infinite?)
Other observations:
With an Arcane Adaptation
In addition to Raff Capashen giving our artifacts and legends (and sagas...) flash, we can give all our creatures flash with Arcane Adaptation naming dino and a death of Cherished Hatchling (also gives us a lot of on cast fight triggers). Also, the new Teferi, Time Raveler gives flash to our sorceries.
I don't see a way to make tokens of enchantments, However we can make copies of artifacts by first making them creatures with Skilled Animator, then using Quasiduplicate. We can also make copies of lands, though that seems less useful.
We also have access to a sideboard if we need it with Mastermind's Acquisition and War's Karn though I don't think that is likely to be needed.
That's it for now. What cool combos can you guys come up with?
Okay, so I will try to analyze decks and combos as people present them.
The numbers being tossed around in these challenges are much too large to be describable with ordinary mathematical notation, so we will use what is called Knuth arrow notation.
Knuth arrow notation is the following:
x^y is just normal exponentiation, x multiplied by itself y times.
x^^y is a exponentiated y times, that is, x^(x^(...(x^x)...)) with y appearances of x
x^^^y is x^^ applied y times, that is, x^^(x^^(...(x^^x)...)) with y appearances of x
x^^^^y is x^^^(x^^^(...(x^^^x)...)) with y appearances of x
As one can imagine, the numbers generated by this notation grow very fast!
Okay, so let's look at FortyTwo's combo.
So if Forerunner has X+1 toughness, and we let it keep damaging everything until the Forerunner is down to 1 toughness, then the number of Polyraptors gets multiplied by 2^X. (Actually c^X where c is a little less than 2 due to Dinosaurs dying off, but that hardly matters.) So if we interrupt at that point with a Might of the Masses, with a Thousand-Year Storm and an instant/sorcery count at Y, the Forerunner goes to about (Y+1)(2^X) life. Y will be much smaller than X so this is essentially exponentiation.
(Note: A process that performs exponentation is what we call Layer 1. More generally, a process is at Layer N if it performs X to 2^^^...^^^X with N arrows in the expression.)
If we have X green mana, we can cast Might of the Masses on the order of X times. This allows us to perform exponentiation X times on the number of Polyraptors, so we wind up with 2^^X Polyraptors, and untapping and tapping Marwyn, the Nurturer will get us 2^^X green mana. So this is layer 2. Note that we will also increase the instant/sorcery count by about X.
If we cast Rallying Roar we get X copies where X is the instant/sorcery count. Each copy can take X to 2^^X, so casting Rallying Roar will take X Polyraptors to 2^^^X Polyraptors.
Each casting of Emergency Powers gets X copies thanks to Thousand Year Storm, and each copy lets us cast Rallying Roar several times. So each Thousand-Year Storm trigger on an Emergency Powers takes X to 2^^^^X.
With 4 Thousand-Year Storms, and 4 Emergency Powers, we can get 16 Thousand-Year Storm triggers in total. So that should take us to between 2^^^^^18 and 2^^^^^19, or possibly between 2^^^^^19 and 2^^^^^20 if we can get in a couple of Rallying Roars before casting the first Emergency Powers.
So, here is the combo I've come up with at this point:
We will start with the same start as the one FortyTwo described in the OP. We will choose to cast Omniscience, and then Thousand-Year Storm and Divination drawing six. I haven't worked out exactly which six cards I want to draw, but there is still plenty of space in the deck, so there shouldn't be much trouble going off on turn 3 as the first player, especially with Omniscience on the battlefield.
At the bottom level, we will be casting Spit Flame repeatedly. Each casting of Spit Flame will get many copies thanks to having Thousand-Year Storm on the battlefield. Each copy will target and destroy Immortal Phoenix, which goes back to our hand, and we can cast it again immediately, putting a token on Runaway Steam-Kin. So each casting of Spit Flame will get us a lot of red mana, and increase the instant/sorcery count by one.
Spit Flame can be returned to our hand for a red mana, of which we have lots, but only when a Dragon comes onto the battlefield. Enter Nicole Bolas, the Ravager and Kamahl's Druidic Vow. We cast Kamahl's Druidic Vow for X=4 with two green and four red mana. Kamahl gets lots of copies; the first can put Gaea's Blessing in the graveyard, which reshuffles our graveyard into our library, and the second will fetch Nicole Bolas and Marwyn, the Nurturer (we need to remember to use one copy of Spit Flame to destroy Marwyn, and one to destroy Nicole Bolas) from the library. We can play Nicole Bolas and return Spit Flame to our hand, and also play Marwyn to get a green mana, to pay for the next Kamahl's Druidic Vow. Each casting of Kamahl with an instant/sorcery count of X gets us X/2 more casts of Spit Flame, so our instant sorcery count goes up to 3X/2.
Next, we have Board the Weatherlight. Each copy of Board the Weatherlight can fetch Kamahl's Druidic Vow, and each cast of Kamahl multiplies our instant/sorcery count by 3/2, so X copies will increase our instant/sorcery count from X to X*1.5^X.
Next up is Ajani's Influence, which can fetch Board the Weatherlight X times. So we increase our instant/sorcery count from X to more than 1.5^^X. Note that 1.5^^X only lags 2^^X by a constant amount, that is, 1.5^^X > 2^^(X-c) for a small constant c. So we will simplify this to just 2^^X.
The next step is a little complicated - we cast Ajani's Influence, and get a lot of copies due to TYS. We then cast Disdainful Stroke, targeting the original Ajani's Influece. (We get a bunch of copies, all of those will target the original Ajani's Influence as well.) Ajani's Influence goes to the graveyard, and we can bring it back to the library using Kamahl and Gaea's Blessing. Now, each copy of Ajani's Influence currently on the stack can bring back the original Ajani's Influence many times, and then each time we can cast Ajani's Influence to bring back Board the Weatherlight many times. So this makes Ajani's Influence worth two layers, and one casting of Disdainful Stroke takes X to 2^^^X.
After all the copies of Ajani are done, we leave Ajani's Influence in the graveyard. Then we can play The Mirari Conjecture, bringing Ajani back to our hand. We can destroy The Mirari Conjecture with Mortify, then bring it back with Nature's Spiral. So each casting of Nature's Spiral takes X to 2^^^^X.
Then we have Divination, which can fetch Nature's Spiral and Mortify X times, taking X to 2^^^^^X.
After than is Expansion // Explosion. Explosion can fetch Divination, and Divination can fetch Explosion - but, if we cast Explosion for free using Omniscience, it gets cast with X = 0, and does nothing. So we need to cast it with X > 0, and that means spending two blue mana. So it doesn't go infinite. Each casting of Explosion gets mana copies, so it takes X to 2^^^^^^X.
We can pay for Explosion with Simic Locket. We have no problem retrieving Simic Locket from the library, but we have no way currently to get it off the battlefield. So we will use Vona, Butcher of Magan, paying 7 life for the privilege of putting Simic Locket in the graveyard. We can pay for that life by casting Sanguine Sacrament, for which we can pay two white mana and all the red mana we've collected from Runaway Steam-Kin. Each Sanguine Sacrament gets many copies, so each casting takes X to 2^^^^^^^X.
For the final step, we want to generate as much white mana as we can. We can generate 49 mana by casting Smothering Tide and then casting Induced Amnesia seven times. We can also generate X mana by tapping X Plains, where X is however many Plains we can fit in our deck (probably between 25 to 30). So this gets us (49 + X)/2 more casts of Sanguine Sacrament. We can generate a TYS count of more than 2^^^^^^^^3 before any castings of Sanguine Sacrament, so after we will have more than 2^^^^^^^^(55+X)/2.
Finally, we can do the following trick: Equip Captain Lannery Storm with a Helm of the Host. Declare the start of combat, and a nonlegendary token copy of Captain Lannery is put on the battlefield. We can then use Quasiduplicate to create many copies of Captain Lannery, and then attack to gain lots of white mana. We then resolve our whole combo with all that white mana, and obtain more than 2^^^^^^^^(2^^^^^^^^(55+X)/2) red mana, which we pump into a huge Banefire and win the game.
Unfortunately, I just noticed an infinite: there's nothing stopping us from naming dragon with our Arcane Adaptation, which lets the phoenix return Spit Flame and net red mana. Even without the cherished hatchling's flash we pay R to get 2 counters on Runaway Steam-Kin which can remove at a 1:1 rate. and then Banefire for an arbitrarily large amount.
Ah, thanks for that. Fortunately, the castings of Immortal Phoenix are not that important; they get us more red mana, but nothing builds off of the red mana so we don't lose any layers by losing it. Instead, we can just direct Spit Flame at some indestructible creature; why not Impervious Greatworm. One Runaway Steam-Kin is exactly enough to get one red mana per Spit Flame casting. We can build up mana for later by destroying Marwyn, the Nurturer.
Also, I think I overestimated your previous combo, FortyTwo. The tricky thing with that combo is the Forerunner to the Empire / Polyraptor combo is continually resolving, and is not something that we can start and stop at will. So we need to interrupt with Might of the Masses, and the copies don't do much. The same is true with Rallying Roar; we get a lot of untaps, but we have no way of restarting the Polyraptor combo between each untap, so each untap just untaps Marwyn with the same power, and she taps for the same amount of mana each time. So Rallying Roar is still at Layer 2. Emergency Powers is still Layer 3 since we can gain a lot of white mana and use it at will. So the final damage will be around 2^^^^18 rather than 2^^^^^18.
Well, the extra red mana is kinda useful at the lower levels, but green does ramp up enough.
Looking deeper I found another issue: Expansion // Explosion and Gaea's Blessing When the real Expansion resolves on the Blessing, the copy can target Expansion and draw it, allowing you to cast expansion again. Unfortunately the only other x card drawer is Hydroid Krasis, which not only isn't a spell, but also gains life. Hopefully they preview something more suitable in WAR.
Good point about the polyraptor combo, the stack is kind of awkward here.
Well, we can stop it at will (by declining the triggers) but can't start it again. Probably the simplest fix is Cherished Hatchling, giving itself flash and making the Gaea's Blessing loop slightly less potent.
Welp, I guess Simic Locket can be tapped four times for mana, then sacrificed to draw two cards. If we want something more life-efficient, we can add Academy Elite. Either way, we lose a layer, down to seven.
So that won't give Might of the Masses another layer, since we would have to spend green mana to restart the combo, but it should give Rallying Roar a layer, since green mana is cheap by then. So back up to 2^^^^^18.
Edit: Okay, I have an improvement. We keep Helm of the Host, but instead of putting in on Captain Lannery Storm, we put it on Nikya of the Old Ways. We then [c}Quasiduplicate[/c] and get lots of Nikyas, and then we can get lots of white mana for each Plains that we put in play. So our final damage will be more than 2^^^^^^^^^(X+3), where X is the number of Plains that we can fit in the deck.
Edit: Another improvement: Keep Nikya of the Old Ways, add Tenth District Veteran. Use Sylvan Awakening to animate our lands, then attack with a gajillion Tenth District Veterans to untap a white mana producing land a gajillion times, increasing the number of Nikyas between each time we retap the land. However, we can't have Plains anymore, since we can Quasiduplicate them and get more white mana too cheaply if we do. So we need to use tapped lands like Orzhov Guildgate. That should take us to 2^^^^^^^^^Y, where Y is how many Veterans we can generate prior to the attack step... at least 2^^^^^^^^52, since we can used Smothering Tide and Induced Amnesia to gain some earlier white mana.
Edit: We can make many lands via Quasiduplicate, then untap them all using Jace, Ingenious Mind-Mage, to get another activation of layer 9. So we are up to 2^^^^^^^^^(2^^^^^^^^^(2^^^^^^^^52))
Edit: Throw in four Wilderness Reclamations as well, to untap our lands four times during the end phase. That takes us to more than 2^^^^^^^^^^8 final damage.
Edit: One more: throw in Nicol Bolas, Dragon-God to untap one more time. More than 2^^^^^^^^^^9.
Edit: Okay, after finding a bunch of different cards to untap lands, I've found something better. We can use Skilled Animator to animate Treasure Map, and then make a gazillion copies of it with Quasiduplicate. Then, we can make a gazillion copies of Evolution Sage; for each two copies of Evolution Sage triggering, we can trigger all the Treasure Maps on the battlefield, and get a bunch of tokens that can tap for a lot of white mana. We can then use the combo to create many more Treasure Maps for the next two Evolution Sage triggers. And we can do this for every land that we can cram into our deck. So we can deal more than 2^^^^^^^^^^(X+2) damage, where X is the number of lands we can cram into our deck, not counting the three we play at the start. So it looks like Nikya and company are no longer worth putting in the deck.
Edit: Whoops, found a problem. Mortify can destroy The Mirari Conjecture cheaply, which was part of the plan. But, I didn't notice that we could retrieve The Mirari Conjecture with Board the Weatherlight. So that needs to be fixed.
Edit: Ooh, I think I know how to make another layer. Replace Broken Bond with Thrashing Brontodon. Then replace Quasiduplicate with Repudiate // Replicate; Each copy of Replicate can make a copy of Thrashing Brontodon, to destroy The Mirari Conjecture so that we can bring it back to our hand. Then, we can retrieve Replicate with Vivid Revival, and Vivid Renewal can be retrieved by Divination. So we are up to 2^^^^^^^^^^^(X+2) (11 arrows!).
Edit: I found a nice card: Emergence Zone. This gives everything flash, so we could replace four cards with one!
Edit: Now that we have removed the need for Teferi, Time Raveler, we can add Bedeck // Bedazzle to the combo. We can cast Bedazzle to destroy a land, but, so long as we have no Planeswalkers in our deck, we are forced to damage the opponent for 2 at the same time. So we can destroy 9 lands and recycle them without killing the opponent.
Edit: Now that we don't need Arcane Adaptation / Cherished Hatchling, we could go back to Immortal Phoenix. Which gives us a lot of mana using Runaway Steam-Kin, so we could almost put Repeating Barrage as a lower layer - except that Repeating Barrage could destroy Immortal Phoenix as well. Does anyone know any other way to use red or green mana to recycle an instant/sorcery?
Edit: Nice - Teferi's Time Twist can exile all of our lands, and they will come back at the beginning of our end step. So we get two landfill activations per land, bumping us to 2^^^^^^^^^^^(2X+14).
Edit: I noticed that Flood of Recollection won't go infinite in this deck, since we need to use Ionize to counter it, otherwise it gets exiled. But, it doesn't seem to gain any layers - since we need to counter every cast, it's just worth one layer, and then Divination is also worth one layer if we don't counter it.
Hinterland Harbor
Tap Elves for G
Giant Growth on Marwyn the Nurterer
Tap Marwyn for GGGG
Play kicked Gift of Growth on Maryn
Tap Marwyn for GGGGGGGG
Tap all three lands for UUU
Play Omniscience (G left)
Play Crashing Tide, return Elves, draw Gaea's Blessing
Play Elves
Play Gaea's Blessing, draw Crashing Tide
Play Crashing Tide, return Elves, draw Emergency Powers
Play Elves
Play Emergency Powers, draw seven cards:
Thousand-Year Storm
Crashing Tide
Thrashing Brontodon
Path of Discovery
Ajani's Influence
Runaway Steam-Kin
Board the Weatherlight
Play Thousand-Year Storm, Path of Discovery
Cast Gift of Growth (TYS count 7): Gain 126 green mana
Cast Board the Weatherlight (TYS count 8)
Fetch Kamahl's Druidic Vow, Nicol Bolas, the Ravager, Garna, the Bloodflame, Teferi, Time Raveler, Treasure Map, Oath of Teferi, The Mirari Conjecture
Cast Kamahl's Druidic Vow for 0 (TYS count 9)
Play Teferi, Time Raveler
Play Runaway Steam Kin
Path of Discovery is triggered, shuffle graveyard into library
Cast Ajani's Influence (TYS count 10)
First AI, Fetch Board the Weatherlight and cast (TYS count 11)
Fetch Kamahl's Druidic Vow, cast for X=4 (TYS count 12)
Put Raff Capashen into play
PoD is triggered, shuffle graveyard into library
Second AI, cast Board the Weatherlight and KDW (TYS count 13 and 14)
Cast Garna, the Bloodflame
PoD is triggered, shuffle graveyard into library
Third AI, cast Board the Weatherlight and KDW (TYS count 15 and 16)
Cast Nicol Bolas, the Ravager
Fourth AI, cast Board the Weatherlight and KDW (TYS count 17 and 18)
Fifth AI, retrieve and cast Sanguine Sacrament (TYS count 19)
The other AIs do nothing
Cast Crashing Tide (TYS count 20), retrieve Garna the Bloodflame.
Get 20 draw triggers, enough to get the remaining nonland cards and get the combo running.
We can resolve this Crashing Tide, then draw it two more times using Teferi, Time Raveler and Tezzeret, Cruel Machinist. (since Oath of Teferi allows us to use them one more time for something outside of their original purpose) This will take us to more than 2^^^^^^^5 before we start using Ionize. We can use Ionize 9 times starting from more than 2^^^^^^^^3, so that pumps us to 2^^^^^^^^12. This is still less than 2^^^^^^^^^^^3, but more than 2^^^^^^^^^^^2 = 4. So then we start putting Plains onto the battlefield. After 26 Plains we are up to 2^^^^^^^^^^^28, then we use Oath of Teferi to exile them, plus our three starting lands, and all 29 come back at the beginning of the end step to trigger again. So that pumps us up to a final damage of more than 2^^^^^^^^^^^57.
Its probably time to switch to chained arrow notation its getting hard to see when more ^ are added.
Though I think you are missing a way to put all those plains into play as lands (Broken Bond was the choice?)
Also Emergency powers is not safe in that deck, as it can be countered then find itself. Can still go off this turn with Tezzeret drawing Teferi drawing oath then the walkers grabbing TYS and Crashing Tide int Gaia's Blessing. Might be other lines as well. Something like Chemister's Insight is still enough to go off.
Investigating that line I realized Banefire can also kill our own walkers to reuse them, probably safer to switch to Skilled Animator and Emergence Zone.
There's also an issue with Treasure Map: the token copies don't transform, (Comp rules: "711.5. Only permanents represented by double-faced cards can transform.") but do still make the treasure each time they are activated (gift of growth can untap them)
As for further progress here's a few thoughts on restrictive yet potentially useful cards Experimental Frenzy
Interesting with Runaway Steam-Kin, needs a hand only combo and a top of library combo, where neither makes red mana or put +1/+1 counters on RSK. Bolas's Citadel is similar, but with life.
donated Lavina, Azorious renegade
Lets us counter free spells played through omniscience, cutting us off of other spells in the mean time. Seems super awkward.
Nikya, of the Old Ways
+1 mana from our lands but can't cast most of our cards. Might have something but seems unlikely.
Lich's Mastery
Can't gain life, but can't lose either. Would need to respond to the lose the game trigger by playing it again. Can exile tokens to the life loss trigger. Once we are below 0 we can't remove this anymore.
Slinn voda, the Rising Deep
Bounce something at the cost of bouncing everything. Vital in the previous champion by Stackfish.
Thanks for the corrections FortyTwo. I'm using Kamahl's Druidic Vow to put lands onto the battlefild.
The other problems are fixable, but I don't see a way to deal with the Treasure Map problem. So I guess it's back to the Nikya of the Old Ways deck.
But the problems are, as you said, Banefire and Emergency Powers with our Planeswalkers. Is there any way to kill the opponent after the combat phase without being able to kill our Planeswalkers? And is there any good way to get started without Emergency Powers, or without expending our walkers? Chemister's Insight is no good, as we can just cast it once and draw Thousand-Year Storm and Crashing Tide. We could replace Crashing Tide with say, Secrets of the Golden City, and draw TYS and Gaea's Blessing - but once we cast Gaea's Blessing, it's stuck in the graveyard forever.
If worst comes to worst, I think we can just not have Tenth District Veteran or Wilderness Reclamation, and kill the opponent during the Combat Phase, so we don't need Banefire. And we if we don't have Oath of Teferi, I don't see any way to get card advantage so that we can draw TYS plus another card drawer. So I think that is safe with Emergency Powers. But that limits us to 2 -> 4 -> 11 rather than 2 -> 11 -> 11, so I was hoping for more.
Hmm, actually I guess there is a problem with having Nikya in the deck. I figured I could play Nikya, and have copies of Replicate and Spit Flame underneath it to both get lots of copies and then destroy it (tapping the land at the optimal time). But, to get a nonlegendary version of Nikya, I have to attack with it equipped with Helm of the Host. And going into the combat phase clears the stack. So it looks like the many Nikya idea doesn't work.
But, we still want replacements for Banefire and Emergency Powers.
Edit: Hmm, without the Treasure Map combo, or the Nikya combo, it might be better to switch to a configuration where life gain is at the top. We can do this by inserting Marwyn, the Nurturer into the chain in between Spit Flame and Kamahl's Druidic Vow. We insert Immortal Phoenix into the deck, and use Arcane Adaptation to turn it into a Dragon. Then Spit Flame can cycle the Phoenix, and we can trigger Spit Flame's return ability whenever we need to. So the limiting factor is now red mana. We add another Arcane Adaptation to make creatures into Elves, so that each return and casting of Immortal Phoenix adds another +1/+1 counter to Marwyn, the Nurturer. After getting a zillion counters, we can tap Marwyn for green mana, and turn that into red mana via Llanowar Envoy. So that adds another layer at the bottom. The downside is that now we can't have any more mana layers, but still we have the life layer at the top equal to the white mana layer in the previous version; each 2 life we pay to Ionize takes X to 2 -> X -> 8.
So now, we are looking for large life gains. Both Ajani, Wise Counselor and Huatli, Warrior Poet can be activated to gain lots of life (just use Replicate a lot on Thrashing Brontodon[/c], putting a lot of +1/+1 counters on Marwyn), and then Nicol Bolas, Dragon-God can copy either of those abilities. Oath of Teferi can then allow them to reuse their abilities. Finally, we can add Interplanar Beacon, use Nissa, Who Shakes the World to turn it into a creature, then make a zillion copies before putting any Planeswalker in to gain a lot of life. The goal then becomes putting as many Planeswalkers as we can into the deck.
So we can cram in 26 Planeswalkers, not counting Nissa, Who Shakes the World, since we have to put that in play before getting a lot of lands. Also, we can activate 3 of our Planeswalkers 6 times to add lots of life. So that's 32 increases, and since we generate 2 -> 3 -> 10 before we start, that takes us to more than 2 -> 35 -> 10.
Edit: So, there are a couple Planeswalkers that can be activated to kill themselves, like Hautli, Warrior Poet. So those need to be removed. On the plus side, there are some shenanigans that we can do with Ajani, the Greathearted; by using its -2 ability once or twice, it can put other Planeswalkers in a position where they can be activated once or twice to kill themselves. For example, we can put Jace, Cunning Castaway into play, gaining a lot of life; activate Ajani, bringing it to +4; activate Jace's +1, then its ultimate, killing it and creating two tokens, gaining a lot of life. Then we can retrieve Jace repeat the process for two more big life gains. Then we can retrieve Jace again, gaining life again. So we can get 5 life gains fro Jace alone.
Rearranging some of the Planeswalkers around, I managed to get 64 life gains, bringing us to more than 2 -> 67 -> 10.
We also need to watch out for walkers that can kill each other: Nicol Bolas, Dragon-God can kill himself (or two others as well with +2 loyalty from Ajani, the Greathearted). Nicol Bolas, the Ravager can become a PW as well and is pretty good at killing other walkers.
Also I hadn't really expected any more exciting cards to get spoiled but Spark Double lets us copy planeswalkers. They can still only be activated at sorcery speed but having lots of copies of say Ajani, the Greathearted lets Jace, Cunning Castaway grow pretty quick.
Yeah, Nicol Bolas, Dragon-God was one of those I removed when I rearranged the deck around Ajani, the Greathearted. Yes, a whole bunch of Planeswalkers can kill themselves with loyalty from Ajani, but that is the point - Ajani, the Greathearted cannot be killed, so it is limited to two activations of its loyalty bumping ability. I think I can bump it up to 2 -> 74 -> 10 now.
Spark Double is very interesting. But, I think you can cast it without copying anything, and it still gets the +1/+1 counter? If so, we can Replicate the original Spark Double and then the copy can copy any Planeswalker on the battlefield. So it brings Planeswalkers down to the level of replicate - since we can only activate loyalty abilities at sorcery speed, it seems best to leave them at the top of the chain.
So 68 life gains by my count, for around 2 -> 71 -> 10
Edit: Eh, I forgot that the first two token copies of Jace, Cunning Castaway will gain loyalty and can ultimate themselves. So that's two more life gains, for 2 -> 73 -> 10.
Edit: Hmmm, we don't have a way to prevent damage to the opponent, so we can't use Tezzeret's first ability for too much. So we lose four big life gains, down to 2 -> 69 -> 10.
Edit: So, I've thought of two fixes to the problem of being able to untap Treasure Map. One is to use Tezzeret, Cruel Machinist to animate the original Treasure Map, with no Oath of Teferi. All the token copies will then not be creatures, and we can't use Gift of Growth to untap them. Another is to remove Garna, the Bloodflame, so creatures do not have haste, and any Treasure Maps would not be able to be tapped once animated.
But, that just pointed out another problem with Treasure Map: We can't proliferate it until we tap it to get that first lore counter, and then we have to untap it somehow. But the untapping has to be limited somehow. I don't know how to do that.
Edit: So, I was mistaken above, it looks like Spark Double will die if it doesn't copy something. This means that we can use it without dropping Planeswalkers down to the Replicate level. Of course, it also means we still can't make a great many of them. (except for Gideons) So I think it will mostly be useful for "topping off" our decks by allowing us to iterate the top layer more times.
Edit: We can actually make Nikya of the Old Ways work; we just need something that can get rid of creatures as an activated ability. Pitiless Pontiff should work just fine. Helm of the Host can only make a nonlegendary version of Nikya once, but we can use Spark Double to make one whenever we need it to. We can use Gravitic Punch to damage the opponent during the end step without being able to target our Planeswalkers, so Wilderness Reclamation can come back in. We can add three more Spark Doubles to copy Jace, Ingenious Mind-Mage. So we have:
Not sure what to do with the remaining 17 slots. Our four Wilderness Reclamations, our two Planeswalkers, our three extra Spark Doubles, and Tenth District Veteran can all untap lots of lands, so we get more than 2 -> 12 -> 11.
I was wondering if there was a way to use our fourth Spark Double to gain lots of life, but then we can't get the Spark Double off the battlefield, and there's no way to make many Nikyas.
Edit: So, if we add Oath of Teferi, and Ajani, the Greathearted for more loyalty shenanigans, we should be able to get more mass untappings. Oath of Teferi is going to go infinite with Emergency Powers though, so let's switch out of it. There's probably something better, but if we add a whole bunch of Planeswalkers that can draw or fetch cards, along with Oath of Teferi, we can wind up with a bunch of cards before we have to cast our card drawer, Secrets of the Golden City. So we have the following:
We can use all four Spark Doubles to copy Jace and untap lands, then Ajani, the Greathearted can pump up loyalty twice, and the four Spark Doubles can ultimate, sending them to the graveyard to be reused. Then we can use three of them to untap lands twice each (not the fourth, since we won't be able to get it off the battlefield to use for Nikya). So we get 10 untappings from Spark Doubles, 2 from Jace, 4 from Wilderness Reclamations, and 1 from Tenth District Veterans, for 17 total. That will take us to more than 2 -> 19 -> 11.
Edit: Filled out the rest of the deck with life gain and untapping, enough to bring the damage over 2 -> 20 -> 11.
Edit: Okay, let's talk about making a stage combo. The best reference for this is Stakfish's article on his Graham's number beating deck for the last version of Standard. After seeing his breakdown of how to construct a stage, it certainly seems like the Bloodbond March / Psychic Battle version of the stage follows a similar recipe: Bloodbond March and Psychic Battle are triggers A and B, our creature tokens (or mana if we are using that version) are the resource, enchantments on the battlefield are the output, and the states are the location of our stage creature. So we just need to find the right cards to fit the recipe. Fortunately, Muldrotha, the Gravetide, which we can use and recycle to lock and unlock the state, is still available. So is Slinn Voda, the Rising Deep, which we used for triggers in the last version - except we don't have Panharmonicon to turn a single ETB trigger into many. So we can't really use triggers from a single permanent as triggers A and B; if we want to use triggered abilities as our layers, we need to make lots of creatures with that triggered ability. I could see Slinn Voda's trigger being used in the transition though, rather than making up a layer.
The loss of Panharmonicon is probably the biggest loss. Stakfish was of the opinion that making a stage in this version of Standard will be much easier, due to Emergence Zone giving all our spells flash. He also mentioned Thousand-Year Storm being key - does that mean that we should use instants/sorceries to make our layers? That would be a change from triggered abilities, but it doesn't seem impossible to me that we could make our layers out of spells or activated abilities.
Edit: Going back to the previous deck, I've figured out how to get a twelfth layer. Replace Nicol Bolas, the Ravager with Arcane Adapatation, so that we can name Dragon. Add Biogenic Ooze and God-Eternal Rhonas. So we cast Kamahl's Druidic Vow with a TYS count of X, and reveal Marwyn the Nurturer and God-Eternal Rhonas. We can keep casting Spit Flame to destroy Rhonas, since Rhonas is a Dragon, and retrieving Rhonas with the next copy of Kamahl's Druidic Vow. After X+1 copies of Kamahl, Maryn's power is pumped up to 2^(X+1), so we can tap for 2^(X+1) mana and create 2^(X+1)/4 = 2^(X-1) Oozes using Biogenic Ooze, allowing us to recast Spit Flame 2^(X-1) times, pumping the TYS count by 2^(X-1). So each casting of Kamahl exponentiates the TYS count rather than just doubling, and we get another layer. Up to more than 2 -> 20 -> 12 final damage.
It would certainly be nice to be able to replicate the last stage combo! However, there is something that is really worrying me: we can just use Quasiduplicate on Slinn Voda, the Rising Deep or Raging Swordtooth to manufacture ETB triggers. So if Quasiduplicate is too cheap (like if Naru Meha is in the deck, and we can recycle her easily), then we can just use it rather than paying I to create many triggers of A or using a trigger of A to create many triggers of B. On the other hand, if Quasiduplicate is too expensive, then we don't get layers off of the triggers. So I don't know how to handle that. I guess it was really nice that Panharmonicon was an artifact, and we could create more with Cogwork Assembler.
Edit: So, here is a possibility:
Instead of triggered abilities, we can use instants/sorceries. For ability A, we can use Electrodominance. We can use Electrodominance to cast some spell that we otherwise wouldn't have mana for; that other spell would be ability B. The input resource is red mana (in groups of two). The output resource is our TYS count, which keeps building. For locking - once we cast Electrodominance it is out of our hand, so we could consider that as "locking" the state. Then, the spell that we cast with Electrodominance could be something that could fecth Electrodominance, and itself, back; something that draws cards for instance. So we have:
1. We can spend two red mana (and generic mana, which we can make cheap) to cast Electrodominance.
2. We can use a copy of Electrodominance to cast the other spell. This doesn't "lock the state", #1 does, but I think we can deviate a bit from the recipe, and it still could work; we should check on a case-by-case basis.
3. Each casting of a Electrodominance or the other spell increases the TYS count.
4. We can use a copy of the other spell to fetch Electrodominance and itself, unlocking the state.
The tricky part is #5: how do we, if the state is unlocked, use Electrodominance (or possibly the other spell) to create two red mana, and lock the state? I have no idea.
Edit: Okay, I think I know how to make a stage!
So, we keep Muldrotha, the Gravetide, which really is a very useful card for locking and unlocking the state. Also Slinn Voda, the Rising Deep, although I guess we just need a creature that can bounce other creatures. We won't use Quasiduplicate to make many copies of creatures, instead we just have Naban, Dean of Iteration increasing the number of Slinn Vodas to two. So we don't get layers from Slinn Voda, but that should be okay; it's enough to get layers from our other ability. For that, instead of Raging Swordtooth, we have Fight with Fire. (or some other burn spell, but preferably a sorcery) Fight with Fire will get many copies from Thousand-Year Storm, and each casting of Fight with Fire will increase the TYS count, so that is our output. Our input is the red mana we need to cast Fight with Fire. Note that since Muldrotha makes us cast things from the graveyard, it's okay for us to have Omniscience. So we have:
1. For a red mana (and some cheap generic mana) we can cast Fight with Fire from the graveyard, and get many copies.
2. When we resolve a couple of copies of Fight with Fire, we can destroy Slinn Voda, and use Muldrotha to cast it from the graveyard, getting a couple of ETB triggers. This locks the state, since we can no longer cast a creature from the graveyard.
3. Each time we cast Fight with Fire we increase the TYS count, which is our output.
4. We can resolve a Slinn Voda trigger to bounce all our creatures, then replay Muldrotha, unlocking the state.
5. We can use a copy of Fight with Fire to destroy Gleaming Barrier, gaining us a treasure token that we can tap for a red mana. We need to use Muldrotha to get Gleaming Barrier back however, so we can't keep gaining red mana with our copies of Fight with Fire.
The problem now is: How do we gain a lot of red mana? We can't use Quasiduplicate, since we could make many copies of Gleaming Barrier, then later we can destroy them all with a single Fight with Fire cast, gaining lots of red mana with an investment of just one. Without Quasiduplicate or Replicate, we are really hampered in our ability to create lots of things. Lands that make red mana are also currently out, as Unwind will untap them for cheap. I guess Unwind can probably be replaced though.
So we have a stage, but not yet an obvious way to beat Graham's number.
So, we start off with our traditional opening to cast Omniscience. Next is Emergency Powers, drawing seven cards. We play Thousand-Year Storm, then recast Giant Growth and Gift of Growth so that we can tap Marwyn for hundreds of mana. Next comes Precognitive Perception, which gets five copies so we draw 18 cards. That allows us to get our entire deck except for our 25 Mountains and a few Legendary permanents. We use Kamahl's Druidic Vow to put those remaining cards into play.
With Nikya of the Old Ways, and copies from our 4 Spark Doubles and 4 Mirror Images, we can tap each of our Mountains for 10 red mana. So we can start off with 250 red mana. We then cast Slinn Voda to bounce all of our Nikyas back to our hand, and proceed with our combo.
The real action comes in the end step though. Our 4 Wilderness Reclamations trigger allowing us to untap our 25 Mountains and 2 Sulfur Falls 4 times each. We replay our Nikyas and copiers to tap each land 4 times for 10 mana each time, generating 1080 red mana. We can then proceed with our combo again. Our final number is roughly 3 -> (3 -> 3 -> 250) -> 1080 then. This beats the best Vintage layer deck, but still quite a ways from Graham's number.
So, instead of Mountains, we will use Sanctum of the Sun to gain lots of red mana. We will first start off with 44 red mana, from 22 Mountains aided by Nikya of the Old Ways. After finishing the stage combo, we will then cast Sanguine Sacrament to gain a lot of life. We can exile Llanowar Elves, Marwyn the Nurturer], Nikya of the Old Ways, and two random cards with different CMCs to transform Azor's Gateway into Sanctum of the Sun. We can then tap it to gain a huge amount of red mana, then do the combo again. We can activate Teferi, Hero of Dominaria twice with Oath of Teferi, then repeat that four more times with our four Spark Doubles. God-Eternal Rhonas can keep being reshuffled into our library to avoid drawing out. Also we have four Wilderness Reclamations to untap lands as well. So at the beginning of our end step, we get 14 different untap triggers, and each time we can tap Sanctum for a lot of red mana, run the stage combo again, and cast Sanguine Sacrament to gain oodles of more life. Each tapping of Sanctum of the Sun takes us from X to about 3 -> 3 -> X, and we start out with more than 3 -> 3 -> 2 -> 2 thanks to our initial 44 red mana, so we wind up with more than 3 -> 3 -> 16 -> 2 in the end.
Edit: Heh, I forgot about FortyTwo's combo of Smothering Tithe plus Emergency Powers, that's a powerful combo. We can only cast Emergency Powers up to four times normally, but if we use Ionize, we can turn life into more casts of Emergency Powers. Then it is all about gaining as much life as possible. So we can go with:
The Interplanar Beacons and all the Planeswalkers are just there to gain us some initial life before we do the really big life gaining; it should take us to 176 life at the start. Then, after we use 174 life on Ionize, we start using Ajani, Wise Counselor and our Spark Double copies, allowing us to gain a great deal of life. (Assure / Assemble gets us our creature tokens to gain a lot of life via Ajani.) Each use of Ionize takes X to about 3 -> 3 -> X, so each gaining of a lot of life takes X to about 3 -> 3 -> X -> 2. We start out at about 3 -> 3 -> 87 -> 2, which is more than 3 -> 3 -> 2 -> 3, and we can gain lots of life 10 times, so we wind up with more than 3 -> 3 -> 12 -> 3 final damage.
That takes us beyond Graham's number, and beyond Stakfish's previous deck as well!
Ooh, that looks close to working. But we only get a constant number of etb triggers each time right? I thought the number of both A and B needed to increase as the combo progressed? This seems to grow much much slower than the other stage combos.
Also, how are you casting/getting Fight with Fire back from the graveyard? I presume a missing Gaia's Blessing? And Fight with fire doesn't need to be kicked to kill creatures, so the whole thing doesn't need red mana, replace with say Banefire as we don't need to worry about killing our own walkers anymore?
Additionally Muldrotha, the Gravetide can bring Gleaming Barrier back a lot more, as barrier is an artifact. (Muldrotha rulings: "For example, you may cast an artifact creature card as your artifact card and cast another artifact creature card as your creature card.")
Finally, we still need to turn all of that Thousand-Year Storm count into a big chunk of damage, as our opponent would just die from the second (or third) Fight with Fire to resolve at the end for a max of less than 30 damage. I kind of want to Thud a pumped Yargle, Glutton of Urborg for the style points but that's probably not optimal.
I don't believe we actually need both A and B to grow; just growing one will do. Yes, it will then grow slower than the other stage combos, with X red mana creating X stages rather than 2X stages, but that disadvantage will be overwhelmed by the number of times we iterate the stage combo.
Hmm yes, we don't actually have a way of getting Fight with Fire from the graveyard. So Spit Flame then, using one red mana to get it back? We can add another Arcane Adaptation to turn creatures into Dragons.
Oops, I guess being able to deal a lot of damage in the end is kinda important! I don't want to waste cards though - is a Gravitic Punch from a pumped up Slinn Voda snazzy enough?
Edit: So, I think we can add some more life gains by doing more Planeswalker self-destruction shenanigans. Ajani, Wise Counselor and its Spark Double copies cannot kill themselves normally. However, with Evolution Sage, whenever a land enters the battlefield we can add two loyalty counters to Ajani and one to each of the Spark Doubles. Then, Each one can use the +2 ability to gain a lot of life, then use the -9 to destroy themselves. So we can get 5 life gains per land we can put in play, and then 10 more after we run out of lands.
I guess we don't really need Precognitive Perception, since we can just cast Emergency Powers with Thousand-Year Storm on the battlefield, and then one of the copies of Emergency Powers can draw Ionize to counter the original EP. And we don't really need Gravitic Punch since we can just attack with a ginormous Slinn Voda.
With 25 Mountains we can get 5*25 + 10 = 135 life gains, for about 3 -> 3 -> 137 -> 3 final damage.
Edit: Looking at it again, I don't have quite enough nonred mana to cast Slinn Voda from the graveyard. We need a third Dimir Locket, which requires a second Skilled Animator to animate it, and then we also need generic mana. God-Eternal Rhonas can pump Marwyn up to power 8, which is more than enough.
Edit: We can save a couple of cards by replacing the Dimir Lockets and Skilled Animators with 3 Blossom Dryads, so long as our lands can produce blue and black but not red. Also, we only need one Evolution Sage, thanks to Naban.
Edit: Nope, we still need two Evolution Sages; Naban won't trigger on a land entering the battlefield.
Edit: Hmm, it looks like we can sacrifice Emergence Zone, put it back in the library using Emergency Powers without drawing it, then put it into play using Kamahl's Druidic Vow, and repeat the process. So that is a problem. We could replace Emergence Zone with Cherished Hatchling and another {c]Arcane Adaptation[/c], but Cherished Hatchling would give all our creatures the ability to fight other creatures, so for example we could bring Slinn Voda onto the battlefield and have it fight and kill Dire Fleet Hoarder. So that doesn't look safe. How do we deal with this?
Edit: So, we can avoid retrieving Emergence Zone by using, say, Grow from the Ashes rather than Kamahl's Druidic Vow. That gives us another problem though - we already played a land on turn 3, so we don't have a way of putting Emergence Zone on the battlefield to sacrifice it and give our spells flash. Wayward Swordtooth seems like the answer, allowing us to play an additional land, but only a limited number of times.
We can actually use our Spark Doubles as well, to allow us to play Emergence Zone up to five times. First, we have as many Spark Doubles as we need copy Wayward Swordtooth, then we play our Emergence Zone. This triggers our two Evolution Sages; while the triggers are still on the stack, we cast Spit Flame to destroy all our Spark Doubles, and run a ministage so that we can repeatedly cast Muldrotha and cast the Spark Doubles from our graveyard (if we haven't sacrificed Emergence Zone yet, we do so first). This may cost us a few red mana, that's fine. The Spark Doubles come back in as copies of Ajani, Wise Counselor, and we are ready to resolve our populate triggers.
We get to play Emergence Zone five times along with 23 Islands, for 28*5 + 10 life gains. Damage goes up to 3 -> 3 -> 152 -> 3.
Edit: We can replace two of our Blossom Dryads with Mirror Images, and then we can do the same trick; use the Mirror Images to copy Wayward Swordtooth if necessary when playing Emergence Zone, then destroy the Mirror Images and then go back to using them to copy Blossom Dryad. That allows us to play Emergence Zone two more times, upping the damage to 3 -> 3 -> 162 -> 3.
We could remove the second Evolution Sage, and use a Spark Double or Mirror Image to get a second copy, but I don't think the same trick will work; we need to have all our Mirror Images and Spark Doubles copying Wayward Swordtooth when we play Emergence Zone for the last time, and we need our Evolution Sages on the battlefield at that time for them to trigger.
Although, we can just have one Evolution Sage on the battlefield for that one time, and then we can populate the four Spark Doubles, and forget about recycling the original Ajani for that one land. So that will give us one more land play for 4 life gains, bumping us to 3 -> 3 -> 166 -> 3.
I still think the TYS count increases too slowly, the count only goes up by one and only when we cast Spit Flame, which is limited by our red mana / Dire Fleet Hoarder. Which we only get back by resetting Muldrotha via Slinn voda, which we only have 6 triggers for (spark doubles being Nabans)*, so a whole batch of both triggers only gives us +6, and two batches would approximately square that? This is much much slower than if TYS increased on say resolving a Spit Flame instead.
All the extra Thousand-Year Storm copies of Spit flames are just fizzling so much and not doing any work for us, only a few get to kill Slinn Voda and Dire Fleet Hoarder, the rest don't have profitable targets. If we had Psychic Battle, then itd' be fine, but the best we can do is ...Bolt Bend? Or something that doesn't target like ...Gates Ablaze? Fiery Cannonade? (doesnt kill Dire fleet Hoarder...)
We can at least have the copies be profitable by splitting polyraptors to give us more creatures to gain life from.
*Oh, Spark double can be a Muldrotha to give us our state back for cheap...
Edit: Okay, here's another attempt. We use Precognition Field to cast Gates Ablaze, costing us a red mana. We also have Path of Discovery, so when a creature comes onto the battlefield we can draw Gaea's Blessing, put it in the graveyard, and then shuffle our graveyard into our library.
Otherwise, things are the same. I took out the Spark Doubles so that we can't duplicate Muldrotha anymore. So we have:
Edit: It looks like God-Eternal Rhonas isn't necessary anymore, since now we can cast Giant Growth and Gift of Growth cheaply for a zillion mana. Same for the Mirror Images of Blossom Dryad, although those don't hurt the final tally; I might just keep four copies for the hell of it. Also, I think Smothering Tithe is unnecessary as well. Each time we resolve a copy of Emergency Powers, we can draw Gates Ablaze and Dire Fleet Hoarder, so we can play and destroy the Hoarder and gain a red mana without having to spend one.
I'm also changing Gates Ablaze to Deafening Clarion; doesn't require a Gate, and requires fewer copies to destroy Slinn Voda.
Edit: It looks like Teferi, Hero of Dominaria can help out a lot. Each time we proliferate twice, not only can we have Ajani activate his +2 and then destroy himself, Teferi can then activate his -3 twice, each time putting Ajani in the library, and destroy himself as well. Each time Ajani can activate his +2 twice before getting destroyed by Teferi, so we get 5 life gains per 2 proliferates. So that will take us up to 3 -> 3 -> 151 -> 3.
Shoot, it looks like the stage combo doesn't work after all.
Let's say we have Dire Fleet Hoarder and Slinn Voda, the Rising Deep on the battlefield, Muldrotha, the Gravetide in our hand along with our mana producing creatures, and Deafening Clarion on the top of the library. We spend a red and some other mana to cast Deafening Clarion, creating a bunch of copies on the stack. We use a few to destroy Dire Fleet Hoarder and Slinn Voda; that gives us our red mana back. We play Muldrotha and Blossom Druid, and cast Gift of Growth from the library to give us plenty of mana to cast Slinn Voda from the graveyard. This gives us two ETB triggers. With the first, we bounce Muldrotha and Blossom Druid back to our hand. We replay them, and are able to cast Dire Fleet Hoarder from the graveyard. Then we resolve the second ETB trigger, and bounce our creatures (besides Slinn Voda) back to our hand. We replay Dire Fleet Hoarder, and now we are at our initial configuration. So we can keep resolving a few copies of Deafening Clarion to gain red mana, which is no good.
Looking at the stage recipe, the problem seems to be that, when we use rules 2 and 5 (using ability A to either create some of ability B, or create one of resource I, and lock the state), we don't lock the state immediately; we only lock the state after using Muldrotha to bring our creatures back. This allows us to use Deafening Clarion to destroy both Slinn Voda and Dire Fleet Hoarder. We then lock the state when we play Slinn Voda from the graveyard, but doing so allows us to immediately unlock the state and play Dire Fleet Hoarder. So that's the loophole I guess.
The above loop relies crucially on Naban, Dean of Iteration to allow us to bounce Muldrotha twice. Can it work without Naban? Unfortunately, I don't see how to create the stage without Slinn Voda triggering at least twice. When we are creating the stage, after putting a bunch of Deafening Clarion copies on the stack, we need to alternate that with at least one Slinn Voda ETB trigger. But after we play Slinn Voda, we lock the state, so we need another copy of Muldrotha to be able to play Slinn Voda again for the next ETB trigger we need to put on the stack. I don't know how to do that other than resolving the ETB trigger. But then there are no ETB triggers left, and so there is nothing to separate the groups of Deafening Clarion copies.
So, we need to fix this. Unfortunately, it does look like any instant/sorcery that we use as our other ability will also have only an indirect connection to locking the state, since Muldrotha is only locked when we play a permanent. So I don't see how to avoid the delay loophole. And we want to have an instant/sorcery so that at least one of our abilities can have arbitrarily many copies on the stack. I mentioned the problem with ETB abilities - to get lots of ETB abilities, we need to use Quasiduplicate or Replicate to create lots of creatures. But, if Quasiduplicate is too cheap, we can just Quasiduplicate to generate more ETB triggers, and if Quasiduplicate is too expensive, we won't get layers from our ETB abilities. It would be nice if we could make copies of Naban, without being able to make copies of our ETB creatures, but that doesn't seem possible.
The other possibility is to create lots of creatures with some triggered ability other than ETB. I'm not sure what we would use for this combo though - anyone have any ideas? Whatever we use, I'm worried that this will also have only an indirect connection to Muldrotha, since the abilities won't trigger on casting the creatures from the graveyard.
If we can't fix the above, then maybe Muldrotha isn't the way to go. What other things can we use to represent a locked/unlocked state? I'm wondering about Experimental Frenzy - the state could be whether Experimental Frenzy is on or off the battlefield. I'm not seeing how to make this work with our recipe though.
Oh, hmm. that is a problem, even if we are gated on both red and white. and I'm pretty certain that Naban is needed, otherwise we only get 1 etb trigger and the stage combo falls apart.
I agree that Experimental Frenzy seems a likely candidate, it has an interesting interaction with Muldrotha, the Gravetide and bounce eg:Slinn Voda, the Rising Deep. After bouncing Muldrotha then we'd need to sacrifice EF to replay Muldrotha, who lets us replay EF to get access to the top of our library again. So each bounce lets us play a creature from the yard, and however many cards from the top, at the cost of some red mana. I am not sure what other cards we need to make it work.
As for other locks I listed a few above, and another possible card to manage state is Arcane Adaptation, if there's one copy but we needed both wizard and dragon we'd need to reset it by either killing or bouncing it and replaying it.
I'm also not sure what the combo would be here either, other than probably involving Naban and Spit Flame.
Some of the newly spoiled cards are also interesting, Charmed Stray lets us set up a chain of increasing toughness (and kill them all with Massacre Girl?)
Hmm, that's a very interesting interaction between Experimental Frenzy and Muldrotha, the Gravetide. How can we take advantage of it? Unfortunately, it looks like the previous combo of Slinn Voda, the Rising Deep plus Dire Fleet Hoarder plus a mass damager like Deafening Clarion still goes infinite, since we can run the loop with Experimental Frenzy off the battlefield to gain a lot of red mana, then spend three red mana to bring back Experimental Frenzy, cast Deafening Clarion from the library, and then destroy Expermental Frenzy again. So we need some other combination of cards.
For the other locks, could you give a brief description of how they could be used as locks?
Bolas's Citadel could certainly be useful. I couldn't get it to work, because the only creature I could find that gained us life upon dying, Highland Game, gained us 2 life, whereas our mass damagers all cost 3 mana. Well, there's Teshar, which adds life equal to its toughness, but that could be who knows what with Gift of Growth.
Sure, in order from my earlier post: (and yes I know these wont all work as locks)
donated Lavina, Azorious renegade
Lets us counter free spells played through omniscience, cutting us off of other spells in the mean time. Seems super awkward.
The idae is if Lavinia is in play we can't cast something large like star of extinction to kill our guys that need to die, but can counter our other spells so that they don't self exile. It seems really hard to make this work and is probably the least likely to be viable. Especially with the amount of setup and fiddling to get her to change controllers at the right time.
Nikya, of the Old Ways
+1 mana from our lands but can't cast most of our cards. Might have something but seems unlikely.
Another use for this would be if this was our only red legend it would be the only way to get red mana from mox amber. But it locks us off of spells. This seems maybe promising?
Lich's Mastery
Can't gain life, but can't lose either. Would need to respond to the lose the game trigger by playing it again. Can exile tokens to the life loss trigger. Once we are below 0 we can't remove this anymore.
So this would be our only way to draw cards, but part of the combo pays life. so we can either be in the state where we draw cards or the state where we can gain life but never both, also each time we remove it we need to replay it again or lose to the trigger so it locks away everything below it on the stack.
So, first attempt: We use Deafening Clarion to destroy Nikya and allow us to cast spells again. Rampage of the Clans will destroy our Mox Amber, allowing us to recycle it. We will use Primevals' Glorious Rebirth to bring our legendaries back onto the battlefield. We will add Path of Discovery and Gaea's Blessing, so that Primevals' Glorious Rebirth can reshuffle our sorceries back into our library, so that we can cast them with Precognition Field or Experimental Frenzy. But PGR also locks the state, by putting Nikya back onto the battlefield.
So, let's say we have a large alternating stack of Deafening Clarion and Rampage of the Clans copies. The top group can be Clarion copies - we resolve a couple to destroy Nikya, freeing us up so that we can cast PGR. PGR brings Nikya back to the battlefield (along with presumably some ways to get mana), which allows us to shuffle Clarion and PGR into our library. We can now repeat this process while we still have Clarion copies. When our Clarion copies run out, we can resolve a Rampage of the Clans copy to destroy the Mox Amber, then cast Deafening Clarion again and getting a bunch of copies (so we need to hold a red mana in reserve, but I don't see that being a problem). Then we can cast PGR to bring back Nikya and Mox Amber, and tap the Mox Amber to restore the red mana that we just used. Then we can repeat the process.
When we run out of Rampage of the Clans copies, we need to recast it. We can cast PGR to shuffle it back into the library, but this puts Nikya back onto the battlefield. So we need to resolve a couple of Deafening Clarion copies on the stack below to get Nikya off the battlefield, so that we can recast Rampage of the Clans.
So, this seems to have at least the theoretical makings of a stage combo. One major problem is that Rampage of the clans destroys all artifacts and enchantments, including Omniscience and Precognitive Field. I guess we can do without Omniscience once we are set up, but losing Precognitive Field is a pain. Could we use Muldrotha? But that would allow us to cast Mox Amber and Nikya from the graveyard, which looks bad.
We'd need a way to get skilled animator back, but there's quite a few ways to do that, probably the simplest would be something like Finale of Devastation?
We can still grant haste with Arcane Adaption on Dino and Regisaur Alpha which can be shuffled back in when it dies to deafening clarion, then fetched with Finale of Devastation. (though Finale itself gives haste so...)
As for ways to turn a bunch of casting of deafening clarion into damage Polyraptor seems like a good choice. Then we pump all our Marwyn mana into a giant Finale of Devastation.
Edit: Finale of Devastation itself can give haste, very convenient.
Also there's the issue of how to set this stack up in the first place?
I think if it works right this can be VERY potent as we can set the stack up on top of the TYS trigger so that when it resolves, its seen all the spells we cast in the meantime.
There is of course a thread for the Vintage version of this challenge. The reason I decided to start a new thread rather than just keep the Standard discussion in that thread, is that I imagine a lot of people who might be interested in this don't look at that thread, for two reasons: 1) It's hard to catch up after 79 pages, and 2) the Vintage deck has gotten very complex, so that it takes quite a bit of studying to understand how it works. In contrast, work on the Standard deck is quite new, and there probably won't be anything as near as complicated as the Vintage version. So, I think a lot more people could contribute to this version, once they know that this exists.
Of course, I wouldn't want the front page of this forum to be full of max damage threads, so this will be the only other thread I intend to create on this subject.
So, without further ado, here are the rules, as stated on Stakfish's webpage:
Stakfish has created two decks that were legal in the last iteration of Standard. First he created a Polyraptor deck that dealt more than 2^^^^^^^^(2^^^^^^7) damage, using Knuth arrow notation. (That's probably something that needs to be explained in this thread.) The second deck dealt an amount of damage greater than the infamous Graham's Number! See his decks here:
http://alex.shankland.org/index.php/category/mtg/megacombos/
For this iteration of Standard, we actually started talking about this a bit in the other thread (discussion starts on page 77). FortyTwo has found a nice start that can go off by turn 3! I'll just quote him:
That's it for now. What cool combos can you guys come up with?
Back to my original comment:
Here's a quick example of some of the power we can draw on: (Note: This example is not safe with the Gift of Growth in the setup)
Forerunner of the Empire+Polyraptor
If forerunner has X toughness, this makes 2^X polyraptors,
Might of the Masses
This in turn buffs the Forerunner's toughness for each creature we make.
Thousand-Year Storm
Casts Might of the Masses many times.
Gaea's Blessing(x2)
Lets us reshuffle and redraw Might of the masses
Marwyn, the nurturer+Arcane Adaptation (=elf)
Give us a bunch of green mana to cast those spells
Rallying Roar
Untaps Marwyn (and buffs team, but that's insignificant at this point)
Smothering Tithe+Emergency Powersx4
Provides the white mana (and some blue), but emergency Powers self exiles so the chain ends here.
Cast Garna, the Bloodflame and swing
The numbers being tossed around in these challenges are much too large to be describable with ordinary mathematical notation, so we will use what is called Knuth arrow notation.
Knuth arrow notation is the following:
x^y is just normal exponentiation, x multiplied by itself y times.
x^^y is a exponentiated y times, that is, x^(x^(...(x^x)...)) with y appearances of x
x^^^y is x^^ applied y times, that is, x^^(x^^(...(x^^x)...)) with y appearances of x
x^^^^y is x^^^(x^^^(...(x^^^x)...)) with y appearances of x
As one can imagine, the numbers generated by this notation grow very fast!
Okay, so let's look at FortyTwo's combo.
So if Forerunner has X+1 toughness, and we let it keep damaging everything until the Forerunner is down to 1 toughness, then the number of Polyraptors gets multiplied by 2^X. (Actually c^X where c is a little less than 2 due to Dinosaurs dying off, but that hardly matters.) So if we interrupt at that point with a Might of the Masses, with a Thousand-Year Storm and an instant/sorcery count at Y, the Forerunner goes to about (Y+1)(2^X) life. Y will be much smaller than X so this is essentially exponentiation.
(Note: A process that performs exponentation is what we call Layer 1. More generally, a process is at Layer N if it performs X to 2^^^...^^^X with N arrows in the expression.)
If we have X green mana, we can cast Might of the Masses on the order of X times. This allows us to perform exponentiation X times on the number of Polyraptors, so we wind up with 2^^X Polyraptors, and untapping and tapping Marwyn, the Nurturer will get us 2^^X green mana. So this is layer 2. Note that we will also increase the instant/sorcery count by about X.
If we cast Rallying Roar we get X copies where X is the instant/sorcery count. Each copy can take X to 2^^X, so casting Rallying Roar will take X Polyraptors to 2^^^X Polyraptors.
Each casting of Emergency Powers gets X copies thanks to Thousand Year Storm, and each copy lets us cast Rallying Roar several times. So each Thousand-Year Storm trigger on an Emergency Powers takes X to 2^^^^X.
With 4 Thousand-Year Storms, and 4 Emergency Powers, we can get 16 Thousand-Year Storm triggers in total. So that should take us to between 2^^^^^18 and 2^^^^^19, or possibly between 2^^^^^19 and 2^^^^^20 if we can get in a couple of Rallying Roars before casting the first Emergency Powers.
We will start with the same start as the one FortyTwo described in the OP. We will choose to cast Omniscience, and then Thousand-Year Storm and Divination drawing six. I haven't worked out exactly which six cards I want to draw, but there is still plenty of space in the deck, so there shouldn't be much trouble going off on turn 3 as the first player, especially with Omniscience on the battlefield.
In addition to Omniscience, TYS, and Marwyn, the Nurturer we will have Arcane Adaptation, naming Dinosaur, Cherished Hatchling, Teferi, Time Raveler (with the sorcery flash ability activated), Raff Capashen, Ship's Mage, Runaway Steam-Kin, and Garna, the Bloodflame on the battlefield. We will also have Gaea's Blessing in our library.
At the bottom level, we will be casting Spit Flame repeatedly. Each casting of Spit Flame will get many copies thanks to having Thousand-Year Storm on the battlefield. Each copy will target and destroy Immortal Phoenix, which goes back to our hand, and we can cast it again immediately, putting a token on Runaway Steam-Kin. So each casting of Spit Flame will get us a lot of red mana, and increase the instant/sorcery count by one.
Spit Flame can be returned to our hand for a red mana, of which we have lots, but only when a Dragon comes onto the battlefield. Enter Nicole Bolas, the Ravager and Kamahl's Druidic Vow. We cast Kamahl's Druidic Vow for X=4 with two green and four red mana. Kamahl gets lots of copies; the first can put Gaea's Blessing in the graveyard, which reshuffles our graveyard into our library, and the second will fetch Nicole Bolas and Marwyn, the Nurturer (we need to remember to use one copy of Spit Flame to destroy Marwyn, and one to destroy Nicole Bolas) from the library. We can play Nicole Bolas and return Spit Flame to our hand, and also play Marwyn to get a green mana, to pay for the next Kamahl's Druidic Vow. Each casting of Kamahl with an instant/sorcery count of X gets us X/2 more casts of Spit Flame, so our instant sorcery count goes up to 3X/2.
Next, we have Board the Weatherlight. Each copy of Board the Weatherlight can fetch Kamahl's Druidic Vow, and each cast of Kamahl multiplies our instant/sorcery count by 3/2, so X copies will increase our instant/sorcery count from X to X*1.5^X.
Next up is Ajani's Influence, which can fetch Board the Weatherlight X times. So we increase our instant/sorcery count from X to more than 1.5^^X. Note that 1.5^^X only lags 2^^X by a constant amount, that is, 1.5^^X > 2^^(X-c) for a small constant c. So we will simplify this to just 2^^X.
The next step is a little complicated - we cast Ajani's Influence, and get a lot of copies due to TYS. We then cast Disdainful Stroke, targeting the original Ajani's Influece. (We get a bunch of copies, all of those will target the original Ajani's Influence as well.) Ajani's Influence goes to the graveyard, and we can bring it back to the library using Kamahl and Gaea's Blessing. Now, each copy of Ajani's Influence currently on the stack can bring back the original Ajani's Influence many times, and then each time we can cast Ajani's Influence to bring back Board the Weatherlight many times. So this makes Ajani's Influence worth two layers, and one casting of Disdainful Stroke takes X to 2^^^X.
After all the copies of Ajani are done, we leave Ajani's Influence in the graveyard. Then we can play The Mirari Conjecture, bringing Ajani back to our hand. We can destroy The Mirari Conjecture with Mortify, then bring it back with Nature's Spiral. So each casting of Nature's Spiral takes X to 2^^^^X.
Then we have Divination, which can fetch Nature's Spiral and Mortify X times, taking X to 2^^^^^X.
After than is Expansion // Explosion. Explosion can fetch Divination, and Divination can fetch Explosion - but, if we cast Explosion for free using Omniscience, it gets cast with X = 0, and does nothing. So we need to cast it with X > 0, and that means spending two blue mana. So it doesn't go infinite. Each casting of Explosion gets mana copies, so it takes X to 2^^^^^^X.
We can pay for Explosion with Simic Locket. We have no problem retrieving Simic Locket from the library, but we have no way currently to get it off the battlefield. So we will use Vona, Butcher of Magan, paying 7 life for the privilege of putting Simic Locket in the graveyard. We can pay for that life by casting Sanguine Sacrament, for which we can pay two white mana and all the red mana we've collected from Runaway Steam-Kin. Each Sanguine Sacrament gets many copies, so each casting takes X to 2^^^^^^^X.
For the final step, we want to generate as much white mana as we can. We can generate 49 mana by casting Smothering Tide and then casting Induced Amnesia seven times. We can also generate X mana by tapping X Plains, where X is however many Plains we can fit in our deck (probably between 25 to 30). So this gets us (49 + X)/2 more casts of Sanguine Sacrament. We can generate a TYS count of more than 2^^^^^^^^3 before any castings of Sanguine Sacrament, so after we will have more than 2^^^^^^^^(55+X)/2.
Finally, we can do the following trick: Equip Captain Lannery Storm with a Helm of the Host. Declare the start of combat, and a nonlegendary token copy of Captain Lannery is put on the battlefield. We can then use Quasiduplicate to create many copies of Captain Lannery, and then attack to gain lots of white mana. We then resolve our whole combo with all that white mana, and obtain more than 2^^^^^^^^(2^^^^^^^^(55+X)/2) red mana, which we pump into a huge Banefire and win the game.
Also, I think I overestimated your previous combo, FortyTwo. The tricky thing with that combo is the Forerunner to the Empire / Polyraptor combo is continually resolving, and is not something that we can start and stop at will. So we need to interrupt with Might of the Masses, and the copies don't do much. The same is true with Rallying Roar; we get a lot of untaps, but we have no way of restarting the Polyraptor combo between each untap, so each untap just untaps Marwyn with the same power, and she taps for the same amount of mana each time. So Rallying Roar is still at Layer 2. Emergency Powers is still Layer 3 since we can gain a lot of white mana and use it at will. So the final damage will be around 2^^^^18 rather than 2^^^^^18.
Looking deeper I found another issue: Expansion // Explosion and Gaea's Blessing When the real Expansion resolves on the Blessing, the copy can target Expansion and draw it, allowing you to cast expansion again. Unfortunately the only other x card drawer is Hydroid Krasis, which not only isn't a spell, but also gains life. Hopefully they preview something more suitable in WAR.
Good point about the polyraptor combo, the stack is kind of awkward here.
Well, we can stop it at will (by declining the triggers) but can't start it again. Probably the simplest fix is Cherished Hatchling, giving itself flash and making the Gaea's Blessing loop slightly less potent.
How are you getting Cherished Hatchling back from the graveyard? I guess Find // Finality will work, if we use Teferi, Time Raveler. Or perhaps Verdant Rebirth? That should work.
So that won't give Might of the Masses another layer, since we would have to spend green mana to restart the combo, but it should give Rallying Roar a layer, since green mana is cheap by then. So back up to 2^^^^^18.
Edit: Oh, I just realized: Why not use Ionize? Ionize can replace Expansion // Explosion, Simic Locket, and Vona, Butcher of Magan, and it's cheaper to boot. So that should take us back to my original estimate.
Edit: Okay, I have an improvement. We keep Helm of the Host, but instead of putting in on Captain Lannery Storm, we put it on Nikya of the Old Ways. We then [c}Quasiduplicate[/c] and get lots of Nikyas, and then we can get lots of white mana for each Plains that we put in play. So our final damage will be more than 2^^^^^^^^^(X+3), where X is the number of Plains that we can fit in the deck.
Edit: Another improvement: Keep Nikya of the Old Ways, add Tenth District Veteran. Use Sylvan Awakening to animate our lands, then attack with a gajillion Tenth District Veterans to untap a white mana producing land a gajillion times, increasing the number of Nikyas between each time we retap the land. However, we can't have Plains anymore, since we can Quasiduplicate them and get more white mana too cheaply if we do. So we need to use tapped lands like Orzhov Guildgate. That should take us to 2^^^^^^^^^Y, where Y is how many Veterans we can generate prior to the attack step... at least 2^^^^^^^^52, since we can used Smothering Tide and Induced Amnesia to gain some earlier white mana.
Edit: We can make many lands via Quasiduplicate, then untap them all using Jace, Ingenious Mind-Mage, to get another activation of layer 9. So we are up to 2^^^^^^^^^(2^^^^^^^^^(2^^^^^^^^52))
Edit: Throw in four Wilderness Reclamations as well, to untap our lands four times during the end phase. That takes us to more than 2^^^^^^^^^^8 final damage.
Edit: One more: throw in Nicol Bolas, Dragon-God to untap one more time. More than 2^^^^^^^^^^9.
Edit: Okay, after finding a bunch of different cards to untap lands, I've found something better. We can use Skilled Animator to animate Treasure Map, and then make a gazillion copies of it with Quasiduplicate. Then, we can make a gazillion copies of Evolution Sage; for each two copies of Evolution Sage triggering, we can trigger all the Treasure Maps on the battlefield, and get a bunch of tokens that can tap for a lot of white mana. We can then use the combo to create many more Treasure Maps for the next two Evolution Sage triggers. And we can do this for every land that we can cram into our deck. So we can deal more than 2^^^^^^^^^^(X+2) damage, where X is the number of lands we can cram into our deck, not counting the three we play at the start. So it looks like Nikya and company are no longer worth putting in the deck.
Edit: Whoops, found a problem. Mortify can destroy The Mirari Conjecture cheaply, which was part of the plan. But, I didn't notice that we could retrieve The Mirari Conjecture with Board the Weatherlight. So that needs to be fixed.
We can simply replace Mortify and Nature's Spiral by Broken Bond.
Edit: Ooh, I think I know how to make another layer. Replace Broken Bond with Thrashing Brontodon. Then replace Quasiduplicate with Repudiate // Replicate; Each copy of Replicate can make a copy of Thrashing Brontodon, to destroy The Mirari Conjecture so that we can bring it back to our hand. Then, we can retrieve Replicate with Vivid Revival, and Vivid Renewal can be retrieved by Divination. So we are up to 2^^^^^^^^^^^(X+2) (11 arrows!).
Edit: I found a nice card: Emergence Zone. This gives everything flash, so we could replace four cards with one!
Edit: Now that we have removed the need for Teferi, Time Raveler, we can add Bedeck // Bedazzle to the combo. We can cast Bedazzle to destroy a land, but, so long as we have no Planeswalkers in our deck, we are forced to damage the opponent for 2 at the same time. So we can destroy 9 lands and recycle them without killing the opponent.
Edit: Now that we don't need Arcane Adaptation / Cherished Hatchling, we could go back to Immortal Phoenix. Which gives us a lot of mana using Runaway Steam-Kin, so we could almost put Repeating Barrage as a lower layer - except that Repeating Barrage could destroy Immortal Phoenix as well. Does anyone know any other way to use red or green mana to recycle an instant/sorcery?
Edit: Nice - Teferi's Time Twist can exile all of our lands, and they will come back at the beginning of our end step. So we get two landfill activations per land, bumping us to 2^^^^^^^^^^^(2X+14).
Edit: I noticed that Flood of Recollection won't go infinite in this deck, since we need to use Ionize to counter it, otherwise it gets exiled. But, it doesn't seem to gain any layers - since we need to counter every cast, it's just worth one layer, and then Divination is also worth one layer if we don't counter it.
2 Hinterland Harbor
1 Llanowar Elves
1 Marwyn, the Nurturer
1 Giant Growth
1 Gift of Growth
1 Omniscience
1 Thousand-Year Storm
1 Crashing Tide
1 Spit Flame
1 Runaway Steam-Kin
1 Nicol Bolas, the Ravager
1 Kamahl's Druidic Vow
1 Board the Weatherlight
1 Ajani's Influence
1 Disdainful Stroke
1 The Mirari Conjecture
1 Thrashing Brontodon
1 Repudiate // Replicate
1 Vivid Revival
1 Ionize
1 Sanguine Sacrament
1 Treasure Map
1 Evolution Sage
1 Teferi, Time Raveler
1 Raff Capashen, Ship's Mage
1 Banefire
1 Gaea's Blessing
1 Oath of Teferi
1 Emergency Powers
1 Path of Discovery
1 Garna, the Bloodflame
26 Plains
It starts as follows:
Turn 1
Breeding Pool, Llanowar Elves
Turn 2
Hinterland Harbor, Marwyn, the Nurterer
Turn 3
Hinterland Harbor
Tap Elves for G
Giant Growth on Marwyn the Nurterer
Tap Marwyn for GGGG
Play kicked Gift of Growth on Maryn
Tap Marwyn for GGGGGGGG
Tap all three lands for UUU
Play Omniscience (G left)
Play Crashing Tide, return Elves, draw Gaea's Blessing
Play Elves
Play Gaea's Blessing, draw Crashing Tide
Play Crashing Tide, return Elves, draw Emergency Powers
Play Elves
Play Emergency Powers, draw seven cards:
Thousand-Year Storm
Crashing Tide
Thrashing Brontodon
Path of Discovery
Ajani's Influence
Runaway Steam-Kin
Board the Weatherlight
Play Thousand-Year Storm, Path of Discovery
Cast Gift of Growth (TYS count 7): Gain 126 green mana
Cast Board the Weatherlight (TYS count 8)
Fetch Kamahl's Druidic Vow, Nicol Bolas, the Ravager, Garna, the Bloodflame, Teferi, Time Raveler, Treasure Map, Oath of Teferi, The Mirari Conjecture
Cast Kamahl's Druidic Vow for 0 (TYS count 9)
Play Teferi, Time Raveler
Play Runaway Steam Kin
Path of Discovery is triggered, shuffle graveyard into library
Cast Ajani's Influence (TYS count 10)
First AI, Fetch Board the Weatherlight and cast (TYS count 11)
Fetch Kamahl's Druidic Vow, cast for X=4 (TYS count 12)
Put Raff Capashen into play
PoD is triggered, shuffle graveyard into library
Second AI, cast Board the Weatherlight and KDW (TYS count 13 and 14)
Cast Garna, the Bloodflame
PoD is triggered, shuffle graveyard into library
Third AI, cast Board the Weatherlight and KDW (TYS count 15 and 16)
Cast Nicol Bolas, the Ravager
Fourth AI, cast Board the Weatherlight and KDW (TYS count 17 and 18)
Fifth AI, retrieve and cast Sanguine Sacrament (TYS count 19)
The other AIs do nothing
Cast Crashing Tide (TYS count 20), retrieve Garna the Bloodflame.
Get 20 draw triggers, enough to get the remaining nonland cards and get the combo running.
We can resolve this Crashing Tide, then draw it two more times using Teferi, Time Raveler and Tezzeret, Cruel Machinist. (since Oath of Teferi allows us to use them one more time for something outside of their original purpose) This will take us to more than 2^^^^^^^5 before we start using Ionize. We can use Ionize 9 times starting from more than 2^^^^^^^^3, so that pumps us to 2^^^^^^^^12. This is still less than 2^^^^^^^^^^^3, but more than 2^^^^^^^^^^^2 = 4. So then we start putting Plains onto the battlefield. After 26 Plains we are up to 2^^^^^^^^^^^28, then we use Oath of Teferi to exile them, plus our three starting lands, and all 29 come back at the beginning of the end step to trigger again. So that pumps us up to a final damage of more than 2^^^^^^^^^^^57.
Though I think you are missing a way to put all those plains into play as lands (Broken Bond was the choice?)
Also Emergency powers is not safe in that deck, as it can be countered then find itself. Can still go off this turn with Tezzeret drawing Teferi drawing oath then the walkers grabbing TYS and Crashing Tide int Gaia's Blessing. Might be other lines as well. Something like Chemister's Insight is still enough to go off.
Investigating that line I realized Banefire can also kill our own walkers to reuse them, probably safer to switch to Skilled Animator and Emergence Zone.
There's also an issue with Treasure Map: the token copies don't transform, (Comp rules: "711.5. Only permanents represented by double-faced cards can transform.") but do still make the treasure each time they are activated (gift of growth can untap them)
As for further progress here's a few thoughts on restrictive yet potentially useful cards
Experimental Frenzy
Interesting with Runaway Steam-Kin, needs a hand only combo and a top of library combo, where neither makes red mana or put +1/+1 counters on RSK. Bolas's Citadel is similar, but with life.
donated Lavina, Azorious renegade
Lets us counter free spells played through omniscience, cutting us off of other spells in the mean time. Seems super awkward.
Nikya, of the Old Ways
+1 mana from our lands but can't cast most of our cards. Might have something but seems unlikely.
Lich's Mastery
Can't gain life, but can't lose either. Would need to respond to the lose the game trigger by playing it again. Can exile tokens to the life loss trigger. Once we are below 0 we can't remove this anymore.
Slinn voda, the Rising Deep
Bounce something at the cost of bouncing everything. Vital in the previous champion by Stackfish.
Muldrotha, the Gravetide
For limited recursion of a lot of types.
Bolt Bend
A terrible Psychic Battle replacement?
The other problems are fixable, but I don't see a way to deal with the Treasure Map problem. So I guess it's back to the Nikya of the Old Ways deck.
But the problems are, as you said, Banefire and Emergency Powers with our Planeswalkers. Is there any way to kill the opponent after the combat phase without being able to kill our Planeswalkers? And is there any good way to get started without Emergency Powers, or without expending our walkers? Chemister's Insight is no good, as we can just cast it once and draw Thousand-Year Storm and Crashing Tide. We could replace Crashing Tide with say, Secrets of the Golden City, and draw TYS and Gaea's Blessing - but once we cast Gaea's Blessing, it's stuck in the graveyard forever.
If worst comes to worst, I think we can just not have Tenth District Veteran or Wilderness Reclamation, and kill the opponent during the Combat Phase, so we don't need Banefire. And we if we don't have Oath of Teferi, I don't see any way to get card advantage so that we can draw TYS plus another card drawer. So I think that is safe with Emergency Powers. But that limits us to 2 -> 4 -> 11 rather than 2 -> 11 -> 11, so I was hoping for more.
Hmm, actually I guess there is a problem with having Nikya in the deck. I figured I could play Nikya, and have copies of Replicate and Spit Flame underneath it to both get lots of copies and then destroy it (tapping the land at the optimal time). But, to get a nonlegendary version of Nikya, I have to attack with it equipped with Helm of the Host. And going into the combat phase clears the stack. So it looks like the many Nikya idea doesn't work.
But, we still want replacements for Banefire and Emergency Powers.
Edit: Hmm, without the Treasure Map combo, or the Nikya combo, it might be better to switch to a configuration where life gain is at the top. We can do this by inserting Marwyn, the Nurturer into the chain in between Spit Flame and Kamahl's Druidic Vow. We insert Immortal Phoenix into the deck, and use Arcane Adaptation to turn it into a Dragon. Then Spit Flame can cycle the Phoenix, and we can trigger Spit Flame's return ability whenever we need to. So the limiting factor is now red mana. We add another Arcane Adaptation to make creatures into Elves, so that each return and casting of Immortal Phoenix adds another +1/+1 counter to Marwyn, the Nurturer. After getting a zillion counters, we can tap Marwyn for green mana, and turn that into red mana via Llanowar Envoy. So that adds another layer at the bottom. The downside is that now we can't have any more mana layers, but still we have the life layer at the top equal to the white mana layer in the previous version; each 2 life we pay to Ionize takes X to 2 -> X -> 8.
So now, we are looking for large life gains. Both Ajani, Wise Counselor and Huatli, Warrior Poet can be activated to gain lots of life (just use Replicate a lot on Thrashing Brontodon[/c], putting a lot of +1/+1 counters on Marwyn), and then Nicol Bolas, Dragon-God can copy either of those abilities. Oath of Teferi can then allow them to reuse their abilities. Finally, we can add Interplanar Beacon, use Nissa, Who Shakes the World to turn it into a creature, then make a zillion copies before putting any Planeswalker in to gain a lot of life. The goal then becomes putting as many Planeswalkers as we can into the deck.
2 Hinterland Harbor
3 Hinterland Harbor
4 Llanowar Elves
5 Marwyn, the Nurturer
6 Giant Growth
7 Gift of Growth
8 Omniscience
9 Thousand-Year Storm
10 Crashing Tide
11 Spit Flame
12 Runaway Steam-Kin
13 Nicol Bolas, the Ravager
14 Kamahl's Druidic Vow
15 Board the Weatherlight
16 Ajani's Influence
17 Disdainful Stroke
18 The Mirari Conjecture
19 Thrashing Brontodon
20 Repudiate // Replicate
21 Vivid Revival
22 Ionize
24 Nissa, Who Shakes the World
25 Llanowar Envoy
26 Immortal Phoenix
27 Arcane Adaptation
28 Arcane Adaptation
29 Emergence Zone
30 Gaea's Blessing
31 Oath of Teferi
32 Emergency Powers
33 Path of Discovery
34 Garna, the Bloodflame
35 Ajani, Wise Counselor
36 Huatli Warrior Poet
37 Nicol Bolas, Dragon-God
38 Ajani, the Greathearted
39 Ajani, Adversary of Tyrants
40 Angrath, Minotaur Pirate
41 Angrath, the Flame-Chained
42 Domri, Chaos Bringer
43 Dovin, Grand Arbiter
44 Jace, Cunning Castaway
45 Jaya Ballard
46 Kaya, Orzhov Usurper
47 Liliana, the Necromancer
48 Liliana, Untouched by Death
49 Sarkhan, Fireblood
50 Vivien of the Arkbow
51 Vivien Reid
52 Vraska, Regal Gorgon
53 Vraska, Relic Seeker
54 Vraska, Scheming Gorgon
55 Karn, the Great Creator
56 Gideon Blackblade
57 Teyo, the Shieldmage
58 Kasmina, Enigmatic Mentor
59 Davriel, Rogue Shadowmage
60 Liliana, Dreadhorde General
So we can cram in 26 Planeswalkers, not counting Nissa, Who Shakes the World, since we have to put that in play before getting a lot of lands. Also, we can activate 3 of our Planeswalkers 6 times to add lots of life. So that's 32 increases, and since we generate 2 -> 3 -> 10 before we start, that takes us to more than 2 -> 35 -> 10.
Edit: So, there are a couple Planeswalkers that can be activated to kill themselves, like Hautli, Warrior Poet. So those need to be removed. On the plus side, there are some shenanigans that we can do with Ajani, the Greathearted; by using its -2 ability once or twice, it can put other Planeswalkers in a position where they can be activated once or twice to kill themselves. For example, we can put Jace, Cunning Castaway into play, gaining a lot of life; activate Ajani, bringing it to +4; activate Jace's +1, then its ultimate, killing it and creating two tokens, gaining a lot of life. Then we can retrieve Jace repeat the process for two more big life gains. Then we can retrieve Jace again, gaining life again. So we can get 5 life gains fro Jace alone.
Rearranging some of the Planeswalkers around, I managed to get 64 life gains, bringing us to more than 2 -> 67 -> 10.
Immortal Phoenix + Spit Flame + Runaway Steam-Kin goes infinite.
We also need to watch out for walkers that can kill each other: Nicol Bolas, Dragon-God can kill himself (or two others as well with +2 loyalty from Ajani, the Greathearted). Nicol Bolas, the Ravager can become a PW as well and is pretty good at killing other walkers.
(Also: Nicol Bolas, Dragon-God + Jace, Cunning Castaway + Oath of Teferi is an infinite that's probably going to feature on an Against the Odds)
Also I hadn't really expected any more exciting cards to get spoiled but Spark Double lets us copy planeswalkers. They can still only be activated at sorcery speed but having lots of copies of say Ajani, the Greathearted lets Jace, Cunning Castaway grow pretty quick.
Yeah, Nicol Bolas, Dragon-God was one of those I removed when I rearranged the deck around Ajani, the Greathearted. Yes, a whole bunch of Planeswalkers can kill themselves with loyalty from Ajani, but that is the point - Ajani, the Greathearted cannot be killed, so it is limited to two activations of its loyalty bumping ability. I think I can bump it up to 2 -> 74 -> 10 now.
Spark Double is very interesting. But, I think you can cast it without copying anything, and it still gets the +1/+1 counter? If so, we can Replicate the original Spark Double and then the copy can copy any Planeswalker on the battlefield. So it brings Planeswalkers down to the level of replicate - since we can only activate loyalty abilities at sorcery speed, it seems best to leave them at the top of the chain.
Edit: Okay, the rejiggered deck is:
2 Hinterland Harbor
3 Hinterland Harbor
4 Llanowar Elves
5 Marwyn, the Nurturer
6 Giant Growth
7 Gift of Growth
8 Omniscience
9 Thousand-Year Storm
10 Crashing Tide
11 Spit Flame
12 Kamahl's Druidic Vow
13 Board the Weatherlight
14 Ajani's Influence
15 Disdainful Stroke
16 The Mirari Conjecture
17 Thrashing Brontodon
18 Repudiate // Replicate
19 Vivid Revival
20 Ionize
22 Llanowar Envoy
23 Immortal Phoenix
24 Arcane Adaptation
25 Arcane Adaptation
26 Emergence Zone
27 Gaea's Blessing
28 Oath of Teferi
28 Emergency Powers
30 Path of Discovery
31 Tezzeret, Master of the Bridge
32 Ajani, Wise Counselor
33 Jace, Cunning Castaway
34 Angrath, Minotaur Pirate
35 Domri, Chaos Bringer
36 Huatli, Dinosaur Knight
37 Kaya, Orzhov Usurper
38 Ral, Izzet Viceroy
39 Vivien of the Arkbow
40 Vivien Reid
41 Vraska, Regal Gorgon
42 Vraska, Scheming Gorgon
43 Domri, Anarch of Bolas
45 Jaya Ballard
46 Liliana, the Necromancer
47 Liliana, Dreadhorde General
48 Nissa, Who Shakes the World
49 Samut, Tyrant Smasher
50 Ajani, the Greathearted
51 Dovin, Grand Arbiter
52 Karn, the Great Creator
53 Gideon Blackblade
54 Teyo, the Shieldmage
55 Kasmina, Enigmatic Mentor
56 Davriel, Rogue Shadowmage
57 Arlinn, Voice of the Pack
58 Jiang Yanggu, Wildcrafter
59 Angrath, Captain of Chaos
60 Saheeli, Sublime Artificer
So 68 life gains by my count, for around 2 -> 71 -> 10
Edit: Eh, I forgot that the first two token copies of Jace, Cunning Castaway will gain loyalty and can ultimate themselves. So that's two more life gains, for 2 -> 73 -> 10.
Edit: Hmmm, we don't have a way to prevent damage to the opponent, so we can't use Tezzeret's first ability for too much. So we lose four big life gains, down to 2 -> 69 -> 10.
Edit: So, I've thought of two fixes to the problem of being able to untap Treasure Map. One is to use Tezzeret, Cruel Machinist to animate the original Treasure Map, with no Oath of Teferi. All the token copies will then not be creatures, and we can't use Gift of Growth to untap them. Another is to remove Garna, the Bloodflame, so creatures do not have haste, and any Treasure Maps would not be able to be tapped once animated.
But, that just pointed out another problem with Treasure Map: We can't proliferate it until we tap it to get that first lore counter, and then we have to untap it somehow. But the untapping has to be limited somehow. I don't know how to do that.
Edit: So, I was mistaken above, it looks like Spark Double will die if it doesn't copy something. This means that we can use it without dropping Planeswalkers down to the Replicate level. Of course, it also means we still can't make a great many of them. (except for Gideons) So I think it will mostly be useful for "topping off" our decks by allowing us to iterate the top layer more times.
Edit: We can actually make Nikya of the Old Ways work; we just need something that can get rid of creatures as an activated ability. Pitiless Pontiff should work just fine. Helm of the Host can only make a nonlegendary version of Nikya once, but we can use Spark Double to make one whenever we need it to. We can use Gravitic Punch to damage the opponent during the end step without being able to target our Planeswalkers, so Wilderness Reclamation can come back in. We can add three more Spark Doubles to copy Jace, Ingenious Mind-Mage. So we have:
2 Hinterland Harbor
3 Hinterland Harbor
4 Llanowar Elves
5 Marwyn, the Nurturer
6 Giant Growth
7 Gift of Growth
8 Omniscience
9 Thousand-Year Storm
10 Crashing Tide
11 Spit Flame
12 Runaway Steam-Kin
13 Nicol Bolas, the Ravager
14 Kamahl's Druidic Vow
15 Board the Weatherlight
16 Ajani's Influence
17 Disdainful Stroke
18 The Mirari Conjecture
19 Thrashing Brontodon
20 Repudiate // Replicate
21 Vivid Revival
22 Ionize
23 Nikya of the Old Ways
24 Spark Double
25 Tenth District Veteran
27 Wilderness Reclamation
28 Wilderness Reclamation
29 Wilderness Reclamation
30 Jace, Ingenious Mind-Mage
31 Nicol Bolas, Dragon-God
32 Spark Double
33 Spark Double
34 Spark Double
35 Sylvan Awakening
36 Emergence Zone
37 Pitiless Pontiff
38 Gravitic Punch
39 Gaea's Blessing
41 Path of Discovery
42 Garna, the Bloodflame
43 Orzhov Guildgate
Not sure what to do with the remaining 17 slots. Our four Wilderness Reclamations, our two Planeswalkers, our three extra Spark Doubles, and Tenth District Veteran can all untap lots of lands, so we get more than 2 -> 12 -> 11.
I was wondering if there was a way to use our fourth Spark Double to gain lots of life, but then we can't get the Spark Double off the battlefield, and there's no way to make many Nikyas.
Edit: So, if we add Oath of Teferi, and Ajani, the Greathearted for more loyalty shenanigans, we should be able to get more mass untappings. Oath of Teferi is going to go infinite with Emergency Powers though, so let's switch out of it. There's probably something better, but if we add a whole bunch of Planeswalkers that can draw or fetch cards, along with Oath of Teferi, we can wind up with a bunch of cards before we have to cast our card drawer, Secrets of the Golden City. So we have the following:
2 Hinterland Harbor
3 Hinterland Harbor
4 Llanowar Elves
5 Marwyn, the Nurturer
6 Giant Growth
7 Gift of Growth
8 Omniscience
9 Thousand-Year Storm
10 Secrets of the Golden City
11 Spit Flame
12 Runaway Steam-Kin
13 Nicol Bolas, the Ravager
14 Kamahl's Druidic Vow
15 Board the Weatherlight
16 Ajani's Influence
17 Disdainful Stroke
18 The Mirari Conjecture
19 Thrashing Brontodon
20 Repudiate // Replicate
21 Vivid Revival
22 Ionize
23 Nikya of the Old Ways
24 Spark Double
25 Tenth District Veteran
27 Wilderness Reclamation
28 Wilderness Reclamation
29 Wilderness Reclamation
30 Jace, Ingenious Mind-Mage
31 Oath of Teferi
32 Spark Double
33 Spark Double
34 Spark Double
35 Ajani, the Greathearted
36 Nissa, Who Shakes the World
37 Emergence Zone
38 Pitiless Pontiff
39 Gravitic Punch
40 Gaea's Blessing
41 Path of Discovery
42 Samut, Tyrant Smasher
43 Orzhov Guildgate
44 Vraska, Golgari Queen
45 Tamiyo, Collector of Tales
46 Teferi, Hero of Dominaria
48 Kiora, Behemoth Beckoner
49 Ajani, Wise Counselor
50 Tezzeret, Master of the Bridge
51 Jace, Cunning Castaway
52 Angrath, Minotaur Pirate
53 Domri, Chaos Bringer
54 Huatli, Dinosaur Knight
55 Kaya, Orzhov Usurper
56 Vivien of the Arkbow
57 Vivien Reid
58 Vraska, Regal Gorgon
59 Vraska, Scheming Gorgon
60 Interplanar Beacon
We can use all four Spark Doubles to copy Jace and untap lands, then Ajani, the Greathearted can pump up loyalty twice, and the four Spark Doubles can ultimate, sending them to the graveyard to be reused. Then we can use three of them to untap lands twice each (not the fourth, since we won't be able to get it off the battlefield to use for Nikya). So we get 10 untappings from Spark Doubles, 2 from Jace, 4 from Wilderness Reclamations, and 1 from Tenth District Veterans, for 17 total. That will take us to more than 2 -> 19 -> 11.
Edit: Filled out the rest of the deck with life gain and untapping, enough to bring the damage over 2 -> 20 -> 11.
Edit: Okay, let's talk about making a stage combo. The best reference for this is Stakfish's article on his Graham's number beating deck for the last version of Standard. After seeing his breakdown of how to construct a stage, it certainly seems like the Bloodbond March / Psychic Battle version of the stage follows a similar recipe: Bloodbond March and Psychic Battle are triggers A and B, our creature tokens (or mana if we are using that version) are the resource, enchantments on the battlefield are the output, and the states are the location of our stage creature. So we just need to find the right cards to fit the recipe. Fortunately, Muldrotha, the Gravetide, which we can use and recycle to lock and unlock the state, is still available. So is Slinn Voda, the Rising Deep, which we used for triggers in the last version - except we don't have Panharmonicon to turn a single ETB trigger into many. So we can't really use triggers from a single permanent as triggers A and B; if we want to use triggered abilities as our layers, we need to make lots of creatures with that triggered ability. I could see Slinn Voda's trigger being used in the transition though, rather than making up a layer.
The loss of Panharmonicon is probably the biggest loss. Stakfish was of the opinion that making a stage in this version of Standard will be much easier, due to Emergence Zone giving all our spells flash. He also mentioned Thousand-Year Storm being key - does that mean that we should use instants/sorceries to make our layers? That would be a change from triggered abilities, but it doesn't seem impossible to me that we could make our layers out of spells or activated abilities.
Edit: Going back to the previous deck, I've figured out how to get a twelfth layer. Replace Nicol Bolas, the Ravager with Arcane Adapatation, so that we can name Dragon. Add Biogenic Ooze and God-Eternal Rhonas. So we cast Kamahl's Druidic Vow with a TYS count of X, and reveal Marwyn the Nurturer and God-Eternal Rhonas. We can keep casting Spit Flame to destroy Rhonas, since Rhonas is a Dragon, and retrieving Rhonas with the next copy of Kamahl's Druidic Vow. After X+1 copies of Kamahl, Maryn's power is pumped up to 2^(X+1), so we can tap for 2^(X+1) mana and create 2^(X+1)/4 = 2^(X-1) Oozes using Biogenic Ooze, allowing us to recast Spit Flame 2^(X-1) times, pumping the TYS count by 2^(X-1). So each casting of Kamahl exponentiates the TYS count rather than just doubling, and we get another layer. Up to more than 2 -> 20 -> 12 final damage.
Edit: Just noticed that Naban, Dean of Iteration is basically a Panharmonicon for Wizards, so with Arcane Adaptation, we can get it to work for all creatures, just not artifacts.
I think that gives us essentially the same entire combo from last standard.
We replace Panharmonicon and Cogwork Assembler with something like: Naban, Dean of Iteration, Spark Double, Quasiduplicate and Arcane Adaptation. I'm pretty sure this still works even though the copies will be dying to the Raging Swordtooth triggers a lot, we can make more of them with the next Quasiduplicate. (Though I'm not sure if whatever recursion we have for those will conflict with the rest of the combo though)
I think everything else key in last standard's deck has clear analogues to other cards in standard now, we even keep Yargle.
Though the setup may need to shift to say Emergency Powers instead of Omniscience. I think Gift of Growth remains safe, so turn 3 is still the target.
Edit: So, here is a possibility:
Instead of triggered abilities, we can use instants/sorceries. For ability A, we can use Electrodominance. We can use Electrodominance to cast some spell that we otherwise wouldn't have mana for; that other spell would be ability B. The input resource is red mana (in groups of two). The output resource is our TYS count, which keeps building. For locking - once we cast Electrodominance it is out of our hand, so we could consider that as "locking" the state. Then, the spell that we cast with Electrodominance could be something that could fecth Electrodominance, and itself, back; something that draws cards for instance. So we have:
1. We can spend two red mana (and generic mana, which we can make cheap) to cast Electrodominance.
2. We can use a copy of Electrodominance to cast the other spell. This doesn't "lock the state", #1 does, but I think we can deviate a bit from the recipe, and it still could work; we should check on a case-by-case basis.
3. Each casting of a Electrodominance or the other spell increases the TYS count.
4. We can use a copy of the other spell to fetch Electrodominance and itself, unlocking the state.
The tricky part is #5: how do we, if the state is unlocked, use Electrodominance (or possibly the other spell) to create two red mana, and lock the state? I have no idea.
Edit: Okay, I think I know how to make a stage!
So, we keep Muldrotha, the Gravetide, which really is a very useful card for locking and unlocking the state. Also Slinn Voda, the Rising Deep, although I guess we just need a creature that can bounce other creatures. We won't use Quasiduplicate to make many copies of creatures, instead we just have Naban, Dean of Iteration increasing the number of Slinn Vodas to two. So we don't get layers from Slinn Voda, but that should be okay; it's enough to get layers from our other ability. For that, instead of Raging Swordtooth, we have Fight with Fire. (or some other burn spell, but preferably a sorcery) Fight with Fire will get many copies from Thousand-Year Storm, and each casting of Fight with Fire will increase the TYS count, so that is our output. Our input is the red mana we need to cast Fight with Fire. Note that since Muldrotha makes us cast things from the graveyard, it's okay for us to have Omniscience. So we have:
1. For a red mana (and some cheap generic mana) we can cast Fight with Fire from the graveyard, and get many copies.
2. When we resolve a couple of copies of Fight with Fire, we can destroy Slinn Voda, and use Muldrotha to cast it from the graveyard, getting a couple of ETB triggers. This locks the state, since we can no longer cast a creature from the graveyard.
3. Each time we cast Fight with Fire we increase the TYS count, which is our output.
4. We can resolve a Slinn Voda trigger to bounce all our creatures, then replay Muldrotha, unlocking the state.
5. We can use a copy of Fight with Fire to destroy Gleaming Barrier, gaining us a treasure token that we can tap for a red mana. We need to use Muldrotha to get Gleaming Barrier back however, so we can't keep gaining red mana with our copies of Fight with Fire.
So, I believe that should work as a stage!
So our deck so far is:
2 Slinn Voda, the Rising Deep
3 Naban, Dean of Iteration
4 Fight with Fire
5 Gleaming Barrier
7 Emergence Zone
8 Unwind
The problem now is: How do we gain a lot of red mana? We can't use Quasiduplicate, since we could make many copies of Gleaming Barrier, then later we can destroy them all with a single Fight with Fire cast, gaining lots of red mana with an investment of just one. Without Quasiduplicate or Replicate, we are really hampered in our ability to create lots of things. Lands that make red mana are also currently out, as Unwind will untap them for cheap. I guess Unwind can probably be replaced though.
So we have a stage, but not yet an obvious way to beat Graham's number.
Edit: So here is a possible deck to start off:
1 Slinn Voda, the Rising Deep
1 Naban, Dean of Iteration
1 Fight with Fire
1 Gleaming Barrier
1 Thousand-Year Storm
1 Emergence Zone
1 Simic Locket
1 Skilled Animator
1 Samut, Tyrant Smasher
1 Arcane Adaptation
1 Sulfur Falls
1 Sulfur Falls
1 Llanowar Elves
1 Marwyn, the Nurturer
1 Giant Growth
1 Gift of Growth
1 Omniscience
1 Emergency Powers
1 Precognitive Perception
4 Wilderness Reclamation
4 Spark Double
4 Mirror Image
1 Nikya of the Old Ways
25 Mountain
So, we start off with our traditional opening to cast Omniscience. Next is Emergency Powers, drawing seven cards. We play Thousand-Year Storm, then recast Giant Growth and Gift of Growth so that we can tap Marwyn for hundreds of mana. Next comes Precognitive Perception, which gets five copies so we draw 18 cards. That allows us to get our entire deck except for our 25 Mountains and a few Legendary permanents. We use Kamahl's Druidic Vow to put those remaining cards into play.
With Nikya of the Old Ways, and copies from our 4 Spark Doubles and 4 Mirror Images, we can tap each of our Mountains for 10 red mana. So we can start off with 250 red mana. We then cast Slinn Voda to bounce all of our Nikyas back to our hand, and proceed with our combo.
The real action comes in the end step though. Our 4 Wilderness Reclamations trigger allowing us to untap our 25 Mountains and 2 Sulfur Falls 4 times each. We replay our Nikyas and copiers to tap each land 4 times for 10 mana each time, generating 1080 red mana. We can then proceed with our combo again. Our final number is roughly 3 -> (3 -> 3 -> 250) -> 1080 then. This beats the best Vintage layer deck, but still quite a ways from Graham's number.
Edit: An improvement:
1 Slinn Voda, the Rising Deep
1 Naban, Dean of Iteration
1 Fight with Fire
1 Gleaming Barrier
1 Thousand-Year Storm
1 Emergence Zone
1 Azorius Locket
1 Skilled Animator
1 Samut, Tyrant Smasher
1 Arcane Adaptation
1 Sulfur Falls
1 Sulfur Falls
1 Llanowar Elves
1 Marwyn, the Nurturer
1 Giant Growth
1 Gift of Growth
1 Omniscience
1 Emergency Powers
1 Kamahl's Druidic Vow
1 Precognitive Perception
1 Ghalta, Primal Hunger
1 Impervious Greatwurm
1 Nikya of the Old Ways
1 Sanguine Sacrament
1 Teferi, Hero of Dominaria
1 Oath of Teferi
4 Spark Double
4 Wilderness Reclamation
1 God-Eternal Rhonas
22 Mountain
So, instead of Mountains, we will use Sanctum of the Sun to gain lots of red mana. We will first start off with 44 red mana, from 22 Mountains aided by Nikya of the Old Ways. After finishing the stage combo, we will then cast Sanguine Sacrament to gain a lot of life. We can exile Llanowar Elves, Marwyn the Nurturer], Nikya of the Old Ways, and two random cards with different CMCs to transform Azor's Gateway into Sanctum of the Sun. We can then tap it to gain a huge amount of red mana, then do the combo again. We can activate Teferi, Hero of Dominaria twice with Oath of Teferi, then repeat that four more times with our four Spark Doubles. God-Eternal Rhonas can keep being reshuffled into our library to avoid drawing out. Also we have four Wilderness Reclamations to untap lands as well. So at the beginning of our end step, we get 14 different untap triggers, and each time we can tap Sanctum for a lot of red mana, run the stage combo again, and cast Sanguine Sacrament to gain oodles of more life. Each tapping of Sanctum of the Sun takes us from X to about 3 -> 3 -> X, and we start out with more than 3 -> 3 -> 2 -> 2 thanks to our initial 44 red mana, so we wind up with more than 3 -> 3 -> 16 -> 2 in the end.
Edit: Heh, I forgot about FortyTwo's combo of Smothering Tithe plus Emergency Powers, that's a powerful combo. We can only cast Emergency Powers up to four times normally, but if we use Ionize, we can turn life into more casts of Emergency Powers. Then it is all about gaining as much life as possible. So we can go with:
1 Slinn Voda, the Rising Deep
1 Naban, Dean of Iteration
1 Fight with Fire
1 Gleaming Barrier
1 Thousand-Year Storm
1 Emergence Zone
1 Azorius Locket
1 Skilled Animator
1 Samut, Tyrant Smasher
1 Arcane Adaptation
1 Sulfur Falls
1 Sulfur Falls
1 Llanowar Elves
1 Marwyn, the Nurturer
1 Giant Growth
1 Gift of Growth
1 Omniscience
2 Emergency Powers
1 Precognitive Perception
1 Kamahl's Druidic Vow
1 Ionize
1 Ajani, Wise Counselor
1 Oath of Teferi
4 Spark Double
1 Assure / Assemble
4 Interplanar Beacon
4 Mirror Image
1 Nissa, Who Shakes the World
19 random Planeswalkers
The Interplanar Beacons and all the Planeswalkers are just there to gain us some initial life before we do the really big life gaining; it should take us to 176 life at the start. Then, after we use 174 life on Ionize, we start using Ajani, Wise Counselor and our Spark Double copies, allowing us to gain a great deal of life. (Assure / Assemble gets us our creature tokens to gain a lot of life via Ajani.) Each use of Ionize takes X to about 3 -> 3 -> X, so each gaining of a lot of life takes X to about 3 -> 3 -> X -> 2. We start out at about 3 -> 3 -> 87 -> 2, which is more than 3 -> 3 -> 2 -> 3, and we can gain lots of life 10 times, so we wind up with more than 3 -> 3 -> 12 -> 3 final damage.
That takes us beyond Graham's number, and beyond Stakfish's previous deck as well!
Also, how are you casting/getting Fight with Fire back from the graveyard? I presume a missing Gaia's Blessing? And Fight with fire doesn't need to be kicked to kill creatures, so the whole thing doesn't need red mana, replace with say Banefire as we don't need to worry about killing our own walkers anymore?
Additionally Muldrotha, the Gravetide can bring Gleaming Barrier back a lot more, as barrier is an artifact. (Muldrotha rulings: "For example, you may cast an artifact creature card as your artifact card and cast another artifact creature card as your creature card.")
Finally, we still need to turn all of that Thousand-Year Storm count into a big chunk of damage, as our opponent would just die from the second (or third) Fight with Fire to resolve at the end for a max of less than 30 damage. I kind of want to Thud a pumped Yargle, Glutton of Urborg for the style points but that's probably not optimal.
Hmm yes, we don't actually have a way of getting Fight with Fire from the graveyard. So Spit Flame then, using one red mana to get it back? We can add another Arcane Adaptation to turn creatures into Dragons.
Good point about Gleaming Barrier. We can use Dire Fleet Hoarder instead.
Oops, I guess being able to deal a lot of damage in the end is kinda important! I don't want to waste cards though - is a Gravitic Punch from a pumped up Slinn Voda snazzy enough?
1 Slinn Voda, the Rising Deep
1 Naban, Dean of Iteration
1 Spit Flame
1 Dire Fleet Hoarder
1 Thousand-Year Storm
1 Emergence Zone
2 Dimir Locket
1 Skilled Animator
1 Samut, Tyrant Smasher
2 Arcane Adaptation
1 Sulfur Falls
1 Sulfur Falls
1 Llanowar Elves
1 Marwyn, the Nurturer
1 Giant Growth
1 Gift of Growth
1 Omniscience
2 Emergency Powers
1 Precognitive Perception
1 Kamahl's Druidic Vow
1 Gravitic Punch
1 Ionize
1 Ajani, Wise Counselor
1 Oath of Teferi
4 Spark Double
4 Interplanar Beacon
4 Mirror Image
1 Nissa, Who Shakes the World
17 random Planeswalkers
Edit: So, I think we can add some more life gains by doing more Planeswalker self-destruction shenanigans. Ajani, Wise Counselor and its Spark Double copies cannot kill themselves normally. However, with Evolution Sage, whenever a land enters the battlefield we can add two loyalty counters to Ajani and one to each of the Spark Doubles. Then, Each one can use the +2 ability to gain a lot of life, then use the -9 to destroy themselves. So we can get 5 life gains per land we can put in play, and then 10 more after we run out of lands.
1 Slinn Voda, the Rising Deep
1 Naban, Dean of Iteration
1 Spit Flame
1 Dire Fleet Hoarder
1 Thousand-Year Storm
1 Emergence Zone
2 Dimir Locket
1 Skilled Animator
1 Samut, Tyrant Smasher
2 Arcane Adaptation
1 Sulfur Falls
1 Sulfur Falls
1 Llanowar Elves
1 Marwyn, the Nurturer
1 Giant Growth
1 Gift of Growth
1 Omniscience
2 Emergency Powers
1 Smothering Tithe
1 Ionize
1 Ajani, Wise Counselor
1 Oath of Teferi
4 Spark Double
1 Assure / Assemble
2 Evolution Sage
25 Mountain
I guess we don't really need Precognitive Perception, since we can just cast Emergency Powers with Thousand-Year Storm on the battlefield, and then one of the copies of Emergency Powers can draw Ionize to counter the original EP. And we don't really need Gravitic Punch since we can just attack with a ginormous Slinn Voda.
With 25 Mountains we can get 5*25 + 10 = 135 life gains, for about 3 -> 3 -> 137 -> 3 final damage.
Edit: Looking at it again, I don't have quite enough nonred mana to cast Slinn Voda from the graveyard. We need a third Dimir Locket, which requires a second Skilled Animator to animate it, and then we also need generic mana. God-Eternal Rhonas can pump Marwyn up to power 8, which is more than enough.
1 Slinn Voda, the Rising Deep
1 Naban, Dean of Iteration
1 Spit Flame
1 Dire Fleet Hoarder
1 Thousand-Year Storm
1 Emergence Zone
3 Dimir Locket
2 Skilled Animator
1 Samut, Tyrant Smasher
2 Arcane Adaptation
1 God-Eternal Rhonas
2 Sulfur Falls
1 Llanowar Elves
1 Marwyn, the Nurturer
1 Giant Growth
1 Gift of Growth
1 Omniscience
2 Emergency Powers
1 Kamahl's Druidic Vow
1 Ionize
1 Ajani, Wise Counselor
1 Oath of Teferi
4 Spark Double
1 Assure / Assemble
2 Evolution Sage
22 Mountain
We lose 3 Mountains, down to 3 -> 3 -> 122 -> 3.
Edit: We can save a couple of cards by replacing the Dimir Lockets and Skilled Animators with 3 Blossom Dryads, so long as our lands can produce blue and black but not red. Also, we only need one Evolution Sage, thanks to Naban.
1 Slinn Voda, the Rising Deep
1 Naban, Dean of Iteration
1 Spit Flame
1 Dire Fleet Hoarder
1 Thousand-Year Storm
1 Emergence Zone
3 Blossom Dryad
1 Samut, Tyrant Smasher
2 Arcane Adaptation
1 God-Eternal Rhonas
2 Drowned Catacomb
1 Llanowar Elves
1 Marwyn, the Nurturer
1 Giant Growth
1 Gift of Growth
1 Omniscience
2 Emergency Powers
1 Kamahl's Druidic Vow
1 Ionize
1 Ajani, Wise Counselor
1 Oath of Teferi
4 Spark Double
1 Assure / Assemble
2 Evolution Sage
24 Island
Back up to 3 -> 3 -> 132 -> 3.
Edit: Nope, we still need two Evolution Sages; Naban won't trigger on a land entering the battlefield.
Edit: Hmm, it looks like we can sacrifice Emergence Zone, put it back in the library using Emergency Powers without drawing it, then put it into play using Kamahl's Druidic Vow, and repeat the process. So that is a problem. We could replace Emergence Zone with Cherished Hatchling and another {c]Arcane Adaptation[/c], but Cherished Hatchling would give all our creatures the ability to fight other creatures, so for example we could bring Slinn Voda onto the battlefield and have it fight and kill Dire Fleet Hoarder. So that doesn't look safe. How do we deal with this?
Edit: So, we can avoid retrieving Emergence Zone by using, say, Grow from the Ashes rather than Kamahl's Druidic Vow. That gives us another problem though - we already played a land on turn 3, so we don't have a way of putting Emergence Zone on the battlefield to sacrifice it and give our spells flash. Wayward Swordtooth seems like the answer, allowing us to play an additional land, but only a limited number of times.
We can actually use our Spark Doubles as well, to allow us to play Emergence Zone up to five times. First, we have as many Spark Doubles as we need copy Wayward Swordtooth, then we play our Emergence Zone. This triggers our two Evolution Sages; while the triggers are still on the stack, we cast Spit Flame to destroy all our Spark Doubles, and run a ministage so that we can repeatedly cast Muldrotha and cast the Spark Doubles from our graveyard (if we haven't sacrificed Emergence Zone yet, we do so first). This may cost us a few red mana, that's fine. The Spark Doubles come back in as copies of Ajani, Wise Counselor, and we are ready to resolve our populate triggers.
1 Slinn Voda, the Rising Deep
1 Naban, Dean of Iteration
1 Spit Flame
1 Dire Fleet Hoarder
1 Thousand-Year Storm
1 Emergence Zone
3 Blossom Dryad
1 Samut, Tyrant Smasher
2 Arcane Adaptation
1 God-Eternal Rhonas
2 Drowned Catacomb
1 Llanowar Elves
1 Marwyn, the Nurturer
1 Giant Growth
1 Gift of Growth
1 Omniscience
2 Emergency Powers
1 Grow from the Ashes
1 Wayward Swordtooth
1 Ionize
1 Ajani, Wise Counselor
1 Oath of Teferi
4 Spark Double
1 Assure / Assemble
2 Evolution Sage
23 Island
We get to play Emergence Zone five times along with 23 Islands, for 28*5 + 10 life gains. Damage goes up to 3 -> 3 -> 152 -> 3.
Edit: We can replace two of our Blossom Dryads with Mirror Images, and then we can do the same trick; use the Mirror Images to copy Wayward Swordtooth if necessary when playing Emergence Zone, then destroy the Mirror Images and then go back to using them to copy Blossom Dryad. That allows us to play Emergence Zone two more times, upping the damage to 3 -> 3 -> 162 -> 3.
We could remove the second Evolution Sage, and use a Spark Double or Mirror Image to get a second copy, but I don't think the same trick will work; we need to have all our Mirror Images and Spark Doubles copying Wayward Swordtooth when we play Emergence Zone for the last time, and we need our Evolution Sages on the battlefield at that time for them to trigger.
Although, we can just have one Evolution Sage on the battlefield for that one time, and then we can populate the four Spark Doubles, and forget about recycling the original Ajani for that one land. So that will give us one more land play for 4 life gains, bumping us to 3 -> 3 -> 166 -> 3.
1 Slinn Voda, the Rising Deep
1 Naban, Dean of Iteration
1 Spit Flame
1 Dire Fleet Hoarder
1 Thousand-Year Storm
1 Emergence Zone
1 Blossom Dryad
2 Mirror Image
1 Samut, Tyrant Smasher
2 Arcane Adaptation
1 God-Eternal Rhonas
2 Drowned Catacomb
1 Llanowar Elves
1 Marwyn, the Nurturer
1 Giant Growth
1 Gift of Growth
1 Omniscience
2 Emergency Powers
1 Grow from the Ashes
1 Wayward Swordtooth
1 Ionize
1 Ajani, Wise Counselor
1 Oath of Teferi
4 Spark Double
1 Assure / Assemble
1 Evolution Sage
24 Island
All the extra Thousand-Year Storm copies of Spit flames are just fizzling so much and not doing any work for us, only a few get to kill Slinn Voda and Dire Fleet Hoarder, the rest don't have profitable targets. If we had Psychic Battle, then itd' be fine, but the best we can do is ...Bolt Bend? Or something that doesn't target like ...Gates Ablaze? Fiery Cannonade? (doesnt kill Dire fleet Hoarder...)
We can at least have the copies be profitable by splitting polyraptors to give us more creatures to gain life from.
*Oh, Spark double can be a Muldrotha to give us our state back for cheap...
Bolt Bend would be great, if we could retrieve it. Same for Gates Ablaze, although we would have to find a way to spend mana on it.
I think it's time to look at Experimental Frenzy and Precognition Field.
Edit: Okay, here's another attempt. We use Precognition Field to cast Gates Ablaze, costing us a red mana. We also have Path of Discovery, so when a creature comes onto the battlefield we can draw Gaea's Blessing, put it in the graveyard, and then shuffle our graveyard into our library.
Otherwise, things are the same. I took out the Spark Doubles so that we can't duplicate Muldrotha anymore. So we have:
1 Slinn Voda, the Rising Deep
1 Naban, Dean of Iteration
1 Gates Ablaze
1 Dire Fleet Hoarder
1 Precognition Field
1 Gaea's Blessing
1 Path of Discovery
1 Thousand-Year Storm
1 Emergence Zone
1 Blossom Dryad
2 Mirror Image
1 Samut, Tyrant Smasher
1 Arcane Adaptation
1 God-Eternal Rhonas
2 Drowned Catacomb
1 Llanowar Elves
1 Marwyn, the Nurturer
1 Giant Growth
1 Gift of Growth
1 Omniscience
2 Emergency Powers
1 Grow from the Ashes
1 Wayward Swordtooth
1 Smothering Tithe
1 Ionize
1 Oath of Teferi
1 Assure / Assemble
2 Evolution Sage
1 Dimir Guildgate
24 Island
Edit: It looks like God-Eternal Rhonas isn't necessary anymore, since now we can cast Giant Growth and Gift of Growth cheaply for a zillion mana. Same for the Mirror Images of Blossom Dryad, although those don't hurt the final tally; I might just keep four copies for the hell of it. Also, I think Smothering Tithe is unnecessary as well. Each time we resolve a copy of Emergency Powers, we can draw Gates Ablaze and Dire Fleet Hoarder, so we can play and destroy the Hoarder and gain a red mana without having to spend one.
I'm also changing Gates Ablaze to Deafening Clarion; doesn't require a Gate, and requires fewer copies to destroy Slinn Voda.
1 Slinn Voda, the Rising Deep
1 Naban, Dean of Iteration
1 Deafening Clarion
1 Dire Fleet Hoarder
1 Precognition Field
1 Gaea's Blessing
1 Path of Discovery
1 Thousand-Year Storm
1 Emergence Zone
1 Blossom Dryad
4 Mirror Image
1 Samut, Tyrant Smasher
1 Arcane Adaptation
1 Drowned Catacomb
1 Glacial Fortress
1 Llanowar Elves
1 Marwyn, the Nurturer
1 Giant Growth
1 Gift of Growth
1 Omniscience
2 Emergency Powers
1 Grow from the Ashes
1 Wayward Swordtooth
1 Ajani, Wise Counselor
1 Oath of Teferi
1 Assure / Assemble
2 Evolution Sage
25 Island
This should deal around 3 -> 3 -> 34 -> 3 damage.
Edit: It looks like Teferi, Hero of Dominaria can help out a lot. Each time we proliferate twice, not only can we have Ajani activate his +2 and then destroy himself, Teferi can then activate his -3 twice, each time putting Ajani in the library, and destroy himself as well. Each time Ajani can activate his +2 twice before getting destroyed by Teferi, so we get 5 life gains per 2 proliferates. So that will take us up to 3 -> 3 -> 151 -> 3.
Let's say we have Dire Fleet Hoarder and Slinn Voda, the Rising Deep on the battlefield, Muldrotha, the Gravetide in our hand along with our mana producing creatures, and Deafening Clarion on the top of the library. We spend a red and some other mana to cast Deafening Clarion, creating a bunch of copies on the stack. We use a few to destroy Dire Fleet Hoarder and Slinn Voda; that gives us our red mana back. We play Muldrotha and Blossom Druid, and cast Gift of Growth from the library to give us plenty of mana to cast Slinn Voda from the graveyard. This gives us two ETB triggers. With the first, we bounce Muldrotha and Blossom Druid back to our hand. We replay them, and are able to cast Dire Fleet Hoarder from the graveyard. Then we resolve the second ETB trigger, and bounce our creatures (besides Slinn Voda) back to our hand. We replay Dire Fleet Hoarder, and now we are at our initial configuration. So we can keep resolving a few copies of Deafening Clarion to gain red mana, which is no good.
Looking at the stage recipe, the problem seems to be that, when we use rules 2 and 5 (using ability A to either create some of ability B, or create one of resource I, and lock the state), we don't lock the state immediately; we only lock the state after using Muldrotha to bring our creatures back. This allows us to use Deafening Clarion to destroy both Slinn Voda and Dire Fleet Hoarder. We then lock the state when we play Slinn Voda from the graveyard, but doing so allows us to immediately unlock the state and play Dire Fleet Hoarder. So that's the loophole I guess.
The above loop relies crucially on Naban, Dean of Iteration to allow us to bounce Muldrotha twice. Can it work without Naban? Unfortunately, I don't see how to create the stage without Slinn Voda triggering at least twice. When we are creating the stage, after putting a bunch of Deafening Clarion copies on the stack, we need to alternate that with at least one Slinn Voda ETB trigger. But after we play Slinn Voda, we lock the state, so we need another copy of Muldrotha to be able to play Slinn Voda again for the next ETB trigger we need to put on the stack. I don't know how to do that other than resolving the ETB trigger. But then there are no ETB triggers left, and so there is nothing to separate the groups of Deafening Clarion copies.
So, we need to fix this. Unfortunately, it does look like any instant/sorcery that we use as our other ability will also have only an indirect connection to locking the state, since Muldrotha is only locked when we play a permanent. So I don't see how to avoid the delay loophole. And we want to have an instant/sorcery so that at least one of our abilities can have arbitrarily many copies on the stack. I mentioned the problem with ETB abilities - to get lots of ETB abilities, we need to use Quasiduplicate or Replicate to create lots of creatures. But, if Quasiduplicate is too cheap, we can just Quasiduplicate to generate more ETB triggers, and if Quasiduplicate is too expensive, we won't get layers from our ETB abilities. It would be nice if we could make copies of Naban, without being able to make copies of our ETB creatures, but that doesn't seem possible.
The other possibility is to create lots of creatures with some triggered ability other than ETB. I'm not sure what we would use for this combo though - anyone have any ideas? Whatever we use, I'm worried that this will also have only an indirect connection to Muldrotha, since the abilities won't trigger on casting the creatures from the graveyard.
If we can't fix the above, then maybe Muldrotha isn't the way to go. What other things can we use to represent a locked/unlocked state? I'm wondering about Experimental Frenzy - the state could be whether Experimental Frenzy is on or off the battlefield. I'm not seeing how to make this work with our recipe though.
I agree that Experimental Frenzy seems a likely candidate, it has an interesting interaction with Muldrotha, the Gravetide and bounce eg:Slinn Voda, the Rising Deep. After bouncing Muldrotha then we'd need to sacrifice EF to replay Muldrotha, who lets us replay EF to get access to the top of our library again. So each bounce lets us play a creature from the yard, and however many cards from the top, at the cost of some red mana. I am not sure what other cards we need to make it work.
As for other locks I listed a few above, and another possible card to manage state is Arcane Adaptation, if there's one copy but we needed both wizard and dragon we'd need to reset it by either killing or bouncing it and replaying it.
I'm also not sure what the combo would be here either, other than probably involving Naban and Spit Flame.
Some of the newly spoiled cards are also interesting, Charmed Stray lets us set up a chain of increasing toughness (and kill them all with Massacre Girl?)
Finale of revelation is an X cost Emergency powers.
Finale of devastation works very nicely with Marwyn.
Bolas's Citadel is a different Experimental Frenzy
For the other locks, could you give a brief description of how they could be used as locks?
Finale of Revelation looks like the safe version of Expansion // Explosion, although we wound up not needing it.
Bolas's Citadel could certainly be useful. I couldn't get it to work, because the only creature I could find that gained us life upon dying, Highland Game, gained us 2 life, whereas our mass damagers all cost 3 mana. Well, there's Teshar, which adds life equal to its toughness, but that could be who knows what with Gift of Growth.
The idae is if Lavinia is in play we can't cast something large like star of extinction to kill our guys that need to die, but can counter our other spells so that they don't self exile. It seems really hard to make this work and is probably the least likely to be viable. Especially with the amount of setup and fiddling to get her to change controllers at the right time.
Another use for this would be if this was our only red legend it would be the only way to get red mana from mox amber. But it locks us off of spells. This seems maybe promising?
So this would be our only way to draw cards, but part of the combo pays life. so we can either be in the state where we draw cards or the state where we can gain life but never both, also each time we remove it we need to replay it again or lose to the trigger so it locks away everything below it on the stack.
As for ways to gain life from a creature dying there's also: Blight keeper and Ashes of the Abhorrent.
Looking into creature type synergies for an Arcane Adaptation lock, theres:
Elf (Marwyn, the Nurturer)
Dinosaur (Cherished Hatchling, Forerunner of the Empire)
Dragon (Spit Flame)
Wizard (Naban, dean of iteration)
Saproling (fungal plots?)
Pirate (Siren's Ruse)
Merfolk (several, but nothing insane, pumping or card draw, Slinn Voda doesn't bounce them)
Vampire (deathless ancient)
Goblin (several ways to sac them)
So, first attempt: We use Deafening Clarion to destroy Nikya and allow us to cast spells again. Rampage of the Clans will destroy our Mox Amber, allowing us to recycle it. We will use Primevals' Glorious Rebirth to bring our legendaries back onto the battlefield. We will add Path of Discovery and Gaea's Blessing, so that Primevals' Glorious Rebirth can reshuffle our sorceries back into our library, so that we can cast them with Precognition Field or Experimental Frenzy. But PGR also locks the state, by putting Nikya back onto the battlefield.
So, let's say we have a large alternating stack of Deafening Clarion and Rampage of the Clans copies. The top group can be Clarion copies - we resolve a couple to destroy Nikya, freeing us up so that we can cast PGR. PGR brings Nikya back to the battlefield (along with presumably some ways to get mana), which allows us to shuffle Clarion and PGR into our library. We can now repeat this process while we still have Clarion copies. When our Clarion copies run out, we can resolve a Rampage of the Clans copy to destroy the Mox Amber, then cast Deafening Clarion again and getting a bunch of copies (so we need to hold a red mana in reserve, but I don't see that being a problem). Then we can cast PGR to bring back Nikya and Mox Amber, and tap the Mox Amber to restore the red mana that we just used. Then we can repeat the process.
When we run out of Rampage of the Clans copies, we need to recast it. We can cast PGR to shuffle it back into the library, but this puts Nikya back onto the battlefield. So we need to resolve a couple of Deafening Clarion copies on the stack below to get Nikya off the battlefield, so that we can recast Rampage of the Clans.
So, this seems to have at least the theoretical makings of a stage combo. One major problem is that Rampage of the clans destroys all artifacts and enchantments, including Omniscience and Precognitive Field. I guess we can do without Omniscience once we are set up, but losing Precognitive Field is a pain. Could we use Muldrotha? But that would allow us to cast Mox Amber and Nikya from the graveyard, which looks bad.
Maybe Skilled Animator + Ritual of Soot to kill the mox and leave our enchantments safe?
We'd need a way to get skilled animator back, but there's quite a few ways to do that, probably the simplest would be something like Finale of Devastation?
We can still grant haste with Arcane Adaption on Dino and Regisaur Alpha which can be shuffled back in when it dies to deafening clarion, then fetched with Finale of Devastation. (though Finale itself gives haste so...)
As for ways to turn a bunch of casting of deafening clarion into damage Polyraptor seems like a good choice. Then we pump all our Marwyn mana into a giant Finale of Devastation.
Edit: Finale of Devastation itself can give haste, very convenient.
Also there's the issue of how to set this stack up in the first place?
I think if it works right this can be VERY potent as we can set the stack up on top of the TYS trigger so that when it resolves, its seen all the spells we cast in the meantime.