The challenge described here has had a number of attackers and contributors since it was first posed to a wide audience around early 2009.
The current page was last updated 2015/06/24 by Russell Jones (SadisticMystic), with significant support from Kaitlyn Burnell (metroid composite), Royce Peng (Deedlit11), and forum user "plopfill".
Outlines of predecessor decks that have been written up before: version 1 "Mana Reflection" (July 2009, approximate damage: 2 -> 40 -> 23) version 2 "Soulshift" (August 2009, approximate damage: 2 -> 30 -> 36; this and the previous version were written by Kaitlyn Burnell) version 3 "Sinking Feeling" (April 2013, approximate damage: 2 -> 5 -> 113) version 4 "Cowardice" (February 2014, approximate damage: 2 -> 4 -> 263)
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Your mission, should you choose to accept it...
Start with a Vintage-legal Magic deck of exactly 60 cards. Certainly no less, of course, and if going over 60 was allowed then this challenge would simply devolve into an extremely inelegant mission to fill the deck up with as many dummy cards as you could possibly get your hands on. No cards may be brought in from outside the game either--once you count to 60, that's all you get.
Take the first turn of the game, using any 7-card hand you like. (Or fewer, if you have reason to take a mulligan. Amazingly enough, one of the ideas that came up during brainstorming really did involve a mulligan, with a purpose behind it.)
Conditions caused by randomness can be resolved in the most favorable manner you like. Even beyond the opening hand, if you can draw or otherwise utilize more cards on the first turn, those can be in any order you like. Additionally, you can win any coin flips that might come up. It's an all-out Magical Christmasland scenario: as long as there is some nonzero probability of your actions playing out, make the most of it! Just beware of the "nonzero" term. For example, if you put a card on the bottom of a non-empty library and then draw a card without using a shuffle effect first, it's guaranteed not to be the same card you just put back. (It might, however, be a duplicate copy of the card, as long as you keep the other rules about deck construction in mind.)
The opponent is a goldfish, with a deck of nothing but basic lands, so their cards (probably) can't interfere with you at all. The goldfish will never concede the game, since this could trivially disrupt any action by ending the game before a single damage could be dealt. However, if your cards invite the opponent to make any other choice, such as Trade Secrets, you'll have to assume their decision is the one that's more effective at preventing your goal. Sometimes this could end up being extremely complicated: in the case of Fact or Fiction, there are 16 possible ways to split it, and any analysis involving that card would have to involve going over all 16 and figuring out which one leaves you the worst off. In short, you probably don't want to use cards like that.
Beyond that, all standard Magic rules apply, including conditions for ending the game. For example, if you have a setup that can deal 20 damage to target player a million times in a row, the game will end after the first such ability deals damage to the opponent (unless you take further countermeasures against that), and any subsequent "potential damage" may as well not exist. Be careful.
With all those rules laid out, the goal of this exercise, and the metric on which results are judged, is to deal as much damage as you can to the opponent by the end of that first turn. Even if you can take an extra turn before your "opponent" would get one, only the first turn itself is under consideration, so those effects are useless.
Of course, there is one more proviso that needs to be added such that this doesn't become trivial. There must be a definite, finite upper bound to the damage. If, for every integer N, a line of play exists that would allow your deck to deal at least N damage within the one-turn window, subject to the previous rules, then your deck is said to contain an unlimited loop (in other words, it "goes infinite"), and does not qualify for consideration here.
I know my description of the challenge at hand involves a lot of technical jargon, but it's not going to get much better from here on. In fact, it'll likely be a good deal worse, because there will be *gasp*...NUMBERS working their way in too. Still, if you're the type of person who wonders about theoretical Magic constructs like this, and if you really do have an interest in keeping up with such wizardry, reading on will be right up your alley. There's not going to be any Tarmogoyf among the cards here...they don't bite.
Sit down. Remember, this is Magical Christmasland, so no matter how much damage you want to deal, there's always the possibility that you flip only heads and the opponent flips only tails for more than that many flips, and indeed no guarantee the spell will finish resolving in any finite amount of time.
Now you're on the right track. Doubling, as with Feral Animist's power, is such an efficient operation.
Still, that leaves plenty of cards unutilized. If you added a Gaea's Cradle to the surge, you'd be able to get a similar use from cards like Argothian Elder, but that's quite a minor change compared to the power this combo already has. It's still the same fundamental sequence of events, and the damage output achieved by Feral Animist would hardly even budge: it's still only about 2^(27 septillion). That may be far more damage than you need to win a game of Magic, but this problem is about more than just that, and you can still do better.
On a more basic level, a problem with Djinn Illuminatus is you have to commit to a number of replicates before any of them resolve, and pay them all up front, even though the subsequent resolutions of the spell will fuel a lot of mana production. It would be much more convenient if you could make copies of things on demand with something like Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker. Of course you'd have to change things around to do that, as Kiki-Jiki would go infinite in the presence of either Intruder Alarm or Seeker of Skybreak. So sometimes using less powerful cards can end up better for the combo in the long run, because it means you have room for more cards that feed off each other without reaching that critical mass of power that lets you spiral off into the boundless realms (Not the Magic 2013 One).
Now that's some feeding. Too much so, in fact.
And Now, Our Feature Presentation
The current decklist for our attempt at this challenge is here, in convenient .dec form (or in TappedOut form) if you should ever want to play it. And you almost certainly don't. Seriously, 4 lands, 53 nonland permanents, cards of all 5 colors (even though none of the lands make white mana), so many terrible cards that do almost nothing outside the contrived circumstances we've created for them here, and a very stringent tightrope that has to be traversed before it can really get going. Needless to say, outside of the Magical Chrismasland rules allowed by this scenario, it'll have a devil of a time getting anything done at all.
And yet...it stakes out a higher claim for turn-1 damage, which is the question at hand, than any other possible deck the authors are aware of. It truly exemplifies the practice of each card in turn being used to fuel the one before it (but not the one after it, or else it could go infinite--this means that each engine piece in turn will carve out a bit more space that's disallowed to subsequent cards, kind of like creating a minefield, but the explosions are much bigger). The engine has enough different sections, plus assistive cards that serve to make each section as dense as it's possibly capable of, that the 60-card limit is stuffed to the gills. With all the slightly-less-efficient cards that ended up being cut for space, there's even enough room to fill a Commander deck with this style of framework before it gets stale.
The basis of the whole thing is the combination of Doubling Season and Dual Nature. If you have X copies of one, Y copies of the other, and effects that turn both of them into creatures (since that's what Dual Nature triggers on), then playing either one of those permanents will raise its quantity beyond the greater of X or Y...no matter what those numbers are. For best results, playing them in alternation will cause both their ranks to lift each other up, at an exponential rate each time. All that's left is to see that "each time" is talking about a lot of times, and that's why we have 58 other cards. And the rest of this document, come to think of it.
The trouble is, there are still 53 cards in the library, and if we want to make use of all those cards in a single turn, we have to make them available somehow. It would be convenient to take advantage of Omniscience by using Enter the Infinite to draw the lot of them at once, but unfortunately this deck is crammed so full of interlocking parts that we don't have an available card slot to justify including it as one of the 60. Indeed, the only source of card draw we have available is Rousing of Souls, which causes each player to draw a single card. The goldfish opponent definitely has a basic land to reveal here, but our own card has a pretty good chance of not being a land, and since this is Magical Christmasland anyway, we can simply assume it's not, so parley creates a single 1/1 Spirit token. Ooh, aah.
So there went the one and only card draw spell. The good news is, we're not done with it yet. After the card draw, there are still three cards in hand. Use Mnemonic Wall to return Rousing of Souls from our graveyard to hand, and then add Cowardice and Clash of Realities. Now Rousing of Souls is the only card in hand, but if we replay it (assuming it reveals another nonland card), we'll get one more Spirit token. This time, Clash of Realities gives it a triggered ability, causing it to deal 3 damage to target non-Spirit creature, where the only legal target is Mnemonic Wall. Or it least, it'll attempt to deal 3 damage, but Cowardice will kick in first, and whisk the Wall away back to our hand, even though the incoming damage would have been just short of lethal.
You should be able to see where this is going now: Mnemonic Wall and Rousing of Souls, in turn, each have the ability to put the other one back in hand, allowing us to draw as many nonland cards as we need (to an extent--more on this later. Much later.)
Now that hand size is a non-issue, along with mana costs, we can predictably do some very crazy things. But for now we start from zero, and only a few specific cards in combination allow us to break free of the tyranny of small numbers. Start with some enchantments: Opalescence, then March of the Machines (which turns Mana Crypt into a 0/0 creature and kills it, though we no longer care about that), Dual Nature (which triggers on itself, producing a second, token copy of Dual Nature), and Doubling Season, which triggers both copies of Dual Nature. The first one wants to produce a Doubling Season token, but it gets doubled to 2 such tokens, for a total of 3 copies of Doubling Season. Next, the second trigger resolves, and its token is doubled 3 times, so we get 8 more copies for a total of 11. From now on, additional creatures will trigger both Dual Natures and their tokens will be doubled 11 times, resulting in 4096 tokens plus the original. (As a side note, with these last three all being creatures, they and their tokens alike will all get triggers from Clash of Realities, wiping out a couple of the Spirit tokens from Rousing of Souls. Goodbye, lost souls--we barely knew you.)
Now for our main producer of mana, at least colorless mana anyway: Thran Dynamo. With March of the Machines animating it, this is a creature in time to trigger both copies of Dual Nature. Unfortunately, we don't (and for best results, can't) have Vedalken Orrery yet, so we can't really intervene between those two triggers, but just letting them resolve means we get two batches of 2048 Thran Dynamo tokens each, not too bad. But they're all currently 4/4 creatures thanks to March of the Machines, and they don't have haste so tapping for mana is off limits just yet. (See? Animating artifacts isn't all sunshine and rainbows, maybe with the exception of Pentad Prism.)
The solution here is to play Rousing of Souls one more time. Now instead of creating one token, it creates 2048, and each of those tokens has a Clash of Realities trigger, with the targets all chosen at the same time. We could choose for one copy to target Mnemonic Wall again, while the other 2047 all target March of the Machines, for example. Or vice versa; they can each only be bounced once, and the rest of the Cowardice triggers will do nothing, as will the damage triggers themselves.
After the stack is clear again, we can replay Mnemonic Wall, which gets copies from Dual Nature and allows us to return not just Rousing of Souls, but Show and Tell as well--that card isn't just useful for getting Omniscience out early, it's also going to come in handy later. More importantly, we can finally, legally tap the Thran Dynamo and all of its tokens, getting a starting supply of over twelve thousand mana (or in fact, we can wait a bit longer and get a lot more mana to start out, as section 1 below will detail). It won't last long, but with it comes the key to making bigger and better things possible. Now is also a good time to play various other cards, which I'll be getting to shortly.
Section 1
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As we saw above, this deck is going to make use of a lot of enchantments. Copy Enchantment can enter the battlefield as a copy of any of these, so what's best to choose?
Well, this is a very tricky deck, so it's a bit more complicated than that. In the vast majority of cases where we play Copy Enchantment, the correct choice will be to have the original card copy nothing, just let it sit there with Opalescence animating it into a 3/3 creature.
There are a few reasons to do it like this; the first one that comes to mind is a byproduct of how copiable values work. When Dual Nature creates a token copy, it creates a token using the copiable values, which is a rules term that basically means we ignore most of the continuous effects that are acting on a permanent. For example, if someone makes a token copy of a Lumberknot that has three +1/+1 counters on it, the copy does not get those same counters. However, other copy effects, such as the one from Copy Enchantment's own optional ability, are taken into account. So if we have Dual Nature and Opalescence out, and play Copy Enchantment as a copy of Doubling Season, the tokens we get will be copies of "Copy Enchantment copying Doubling Season", which essentially just means the characteristics of Doubling Season itself--we don't get a choice in the matter.
On the other hand, if the original enchantment is not copying anything, then Dual Nature gives us tokens with the characteristics of a regular Copy Enchantment, which include a latent enters-the-battlefield copy effect that we still get an opportunity to make a choice for. In practice, what this means is that each batch, and indeed each token within a batch, can be chosen as different enchantments to make copies of.
In general, there's a simple outline we can follow for best results. When we play a blank Copy Enchantment and get several batches of tokens from Dual Natures, every batch, except the last one, should be turned into copies of Doubling Season, in their entirety. This ensures that the last batch consists of as many tokens as possible, far more than all of the previous batches combined. Then, the last batch should consist of whichever enchantment helps out the step that's coming up immediately next, such as Dual Nature.
For example, the first time we play Copy Enchantment, there are two Dual Natures to witness it, so two batches of tokens, since each trigger resolves separately. The first trigger, as has been usual up to this point, adds 2048 tokens, all of which should be made into copies of Doubling Season. Now there are 2059 Doubling Seasons in all, so instead of the second batch being the result of a single token doubled 11 times, it's doubled 2059 times...
Yeah, that's a lot. 2^2059 is a number with 620 digits. At least it isn't too obstructive, taking up only a few lines of text, so here you go.
66,185,228,434,044,942,951,864,067,458,396,061,614,989,522,267,577,311,297,802, 947,435,570,493,724,401,440,549,267,868,490,798,926,773,634,494,383,968,047,143, 923,956,857,140,205,406,402,740,536,087,446,083,831,052,036,848,232,439,995,904, 404,992,798,007,514,718,326,043,410,570,379,830,870,463,780,085,260,619,444,417, 205,199,197,123,751,210,704,970,352,727,833,755,425,876,102,776,028,267,313,405, 809,429,548,880,554,782,040,765,277,562,828,362,884,238,325,465,448,520,348,307, 574,943,345,990,309,941,642,666,926,723,379,729,598,185,834,735,054,732,500,415, 409,883,868,361,423,159,913,770,812,218,772,711,901,772,249,553,153,402,287,759, 789,517,121,744,336,755,350,465,901,655,205,184,917,370,974,202,405,586,941,211, 065,395,540,765,567,663,193,297,173,367,254,230,313,612,244,182,941,999,500,402, 388,195,450,053,080,383,488
Okay, now wave goodbye to the big number, because it's the last time the rapidly-expanding growth rate will be expressible using numbers that can be written out in full. (For comparison, our best estimate for the total number of elementary particles in the universe only has about 80 digits, which is barely one-eighth that length when written out, and far less than one-eighth of that value. If you can imagine taking "the square root of the square root of the square root", that's about how much smaller the value is.)
By the way, all those tokens from the second batch? Let's make them all copy Dual Nature. Now the next time we manage to replay Copy Enchantment, it gets that many Dual Nature triggers, and that many waves of tokens, and of course all but one of those waves will keep copying nothing but Doubling Season. The waves which are dedicated to something other than Doubling Season are already quite sparse, and they only get sparser as we move higher and higher. The numbers certainly aren't getting any smaller: the first few batches of Doubling Season tokens were in quantities of 2, then 8, then 2,048, then 2^2059 (the big 620-digit number above). With a slight loss of precision, we can estimate the number from the fifth batch as 2^(2^2059), then 2^(2^(2^2059), and so on, with each replay just tacking a 2^ to the front of the expression. But even that notation is going to be unwieldy after a while.
Fortunately, back in the 1970s, a guy named Donald Knuth came up with an infinitely extensible solution to that mess. It's well established that all of the natural numbers can be built from a single base case (called "zero") and a "successor" operation: 1 is "the successor of 0", 2 is "the successor of the successor of 0", and so on. On top of that structure, the common operations are really just shortcuts for loops of the successor function, the ultimate recursive building block:
a + b means "take the successor of the successor of... a, b times."
a * b means "take a + a + ... + a, b times."
a ^ b means "take a * a * ... * a, b times."
Naturally, there's no reason why you couldn't continue such a pattern for deeper and deeper layers of recursion, which are the main engine that drives larger and larger numbers here. After a while, you might have trouble coming up with distinct symbols for each layer, but Knuth's idea was to simply use multiple up arrows, or carets, to represent further nesting: "a ^^ b" means "a ^ (a ^ ... (a ^ a) ...), b times.", and so on for 3, 4, and more arrows. Obviously those numbers get very big, very fast. Let's look at the first few values of 2^^b.
2 ^^ 1 has just one 2, so it's 2.
2 ^^ 2 is the same as 2^2, and also 2*2 and 2+2 before it. Of course that's 4, and in fact 2^^^2, 2^^^^2, and so on are all equal to 4 as well.
2 ^^ 3 is 2^(2^2), so 2^4, or 16. Still pretty reasonable.
2 ^^ 4 sticks a 2^ in front of the previous power, and 2^16 is 65,536. Not bad, and temporarily going up a level (but down a digit), 2 ^^^ 3 also ends up being 65,536.
2 ^^ 5 is 2^65,536. This is a very big number, with almost 20,000 digits. For sanity's sake, I won't be printing it here. Predictably, adding to the 5 makes it even more outrageous.
Since our base-case operation for blowing up the numbers during this combo is "get a batch of token copies of Doubling Season" and that takes the form of a ^ b (or really, 2 ^ b), it makes sense to say that exponents are our first layer, rather than deferring to addition and multiplication in front of it. This conveniently also allows the number of layers, and the number of carets (or arrows) in the representation, to be equal. 2059 itself lies in between 16 and 65,536, so 2^2059 (the 620-digit number) is between 2^^4 and 2^^5. To avoid overestimating at any point, I'll round down to 2^^4, and then each new batch of Doubling Seasons has the effect of adding 1 to the number on the right side.
Here's where the second advantage of our Copy Enchantment setup comes in handy. Presumably, if our plan is to keep replaying Copy Enchantment, there's going to be some effect that takes it off the battlefield, ready to be played again. Each time that happens, one of Dual Nature's other abilities will trigger: "Whenever a nontoken creature leaves the battlefield, exile all tokens with the same name as that creature." In this case, those triggers will exile all the tokens named "Copy Enchantment"...but conveniently, there are no such tokens, since they were all turned into copies of Doubling Season and other things, including the name. This is a very good thing, because Doubling Season tokens are our measure of progress, and we don't want to lose any of those at any point.
So now we have a system to achieve better-than-exponential growth, predicated on playing Copy Enchantment over and over and over. The rest of the cards, naturally, will be dedicated to helping us replay it as many times as possible. Buckle up, kids, because this thing takes off faster than any rocket ship.
Section 1 Summary
Input: Playing Copy Enchantment once Output: Lots of copies of Doubling Season and other enchantments Layer count: For each Dual Nature, for each Doubling Season...2. Total 2.
Section 2
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As an advance warning for this section, Vedalken Orrery needs to be down by the time we attempt this step, but for best results, we have to do a step out of order when setting this up for the first time--it can't be as simple as "draw it with Rousing of Souls, then play it". More on that when we get to the relevant cards.
We can play Allay basically any time we have the spare colorless mana for it. Omniscience allows us to ignore the mana cost, but not the buyback cost, so if we want to use buyback, which is virtually always, Allay still costs {3} each time. Cowardice will bounce the original target, preferably Copy Enchantment, but if that were all, we'd have a problem. Since Cowardice picks up the target out from under Allay, that leaves it on pace to fizzle, and a spell can only buy itself back if it actually resolves. Letting Allay fizzle would leave it stuck in the graveyard, defeating the whole purpose.
But that's not all: Cowardice isn't the only thing that triggers on Allay's choice of target. There are a couple other enchantments that also trigger each time--namely, Grip of Chaos and Psychic Battle. Both of those work to produce additional Cowardice triggers due to the specific template of its trigger condition: "Whenever a creature becomes the target", even if that target is just being changed from something else, possibly including a previous incarnation of itself (which is nonetheless considered a different object).
Grip of Chaos is a very unusual card. Its printed wording actually needed to be fixed by way of release-day errata: as written, it would trigger on any spell or ability at all. So something goes on the stack, which triggers Grip of Chaos, and that ability triggers itself again, and again, and the stack would fill up with a never-ending barrage of Grip of Chaos abilities. No one would even gain priority for the rest of the game! Needless to say, this behavior was undesirable.
They fixed it by introducing "intervening if-clause" technology into its text, similar to the way cards such as Battle of Wits are worded. Now Grip of Chaos can only trigger in the first place "if [the ability] has a single target", and since Grip of Chaos's own ability doesn't have any targets at all, it neatly avoids the infinite loop.
Perhaps even more unusual is Psychic Battle, which is similar to Grip of Chaos in that a cursory reading of its printed text would have you believe that it could endlessly trigger itself, and that wouldn't be good for a deck that has to keep within some sort of finite bound. They "fixed" this problem by adding errata: "Changing targets this way doesn't trigger this ability." Seems all well and good, and it does stop a single copy of Psychic Battle from looping forever, which is normally all that's necessary. But this deck is anything but normal, so go figure that there will be a ton of tokens flying around. Where Psychic Battle said "this ability", it was limited in scope--it really means "this exact ability, on this particular permanent". If there are two or more copies of Psychic Battle, they count as separate abilities, so they could endlessly bounce a target back and forth, and that's unacceptable.
All that changed on January 28, 2014, when the Born of the Gods Update Bulletin released. It was on this day, more than thirteen years after the release of Invasion, that the rules team finally revised the errata on Psychic Battle. It now reads "Changing targets this way doesn't trigger abilities of permanents named Psychic Battle," which is enough to prevent the infinite game of Hot Potato no matter how many tokens there are. Several months prior, I had alerted the team to the issue with multiple copies, and tried to lead them in the direction of the wording it ended up taking, only to be pleasantly surprised when they actually followed through on that request. Did I have some ulterior motive behind it, such as, I don't know...maybe putting the card to use in the very deck you're reading about right now? Sure. But the card undeniably works better for it, and everyone goes away pleased.
Even though Grip of Chaos has us choose the new target at random, it still has us "[re]select a target", and that's good enough that in addition to having Psychic Battle trigger on the original activation of an ability, each Psychic Battle also triggers on every single Grip of Chaos: a good indication that when we run out of Psychic Battle redirects, we should use the last Dual Nature batch to get more copies of Psychic Battle ("topping up" on it, so to speak, since the number of Battles produced that way will pull even with the batch that produces more copies of Dual Nature), to increase the number of triggers that take place as a result of the next Grip of Chaos ability. Likewise, when we run out of Grip of Chaos, it's also worth topping up on that in anticipation of the next time we play Allay, or any other targeted spell or ability. Now that we have Vedalken Orrery, we no longer care about the stack not being empty: each time one of these triggers resolves to change the target, and further causes Cowardice to trigger, it's now possible to replay Copy Enchantment in between, before the next target-change trigger resolves. As you probably guessed, this allows the target to be changed back to the very same Copy Enchantment that we just replayed, instead of a phantom enchantment that no longer exists.
Prior to the sanitization of Psychic Battle, this procedure fell back extremely heavily on the "Magical Christmasland" crutch of perfect randomness, to a far greater extent than almost any conceivable deck in the history of the game, because getting anything out of it was dependent on having every single Grip of Chaos trigger change the target exactly as needed, picking out one success from an ocean of failures. Now that Psychic Battle gives us full control over the targeting, Grip of Chaos's role diminishes to just another enabler. In fact, if you don't like the idea of depending so much on randomness, we can arrange it so that Cowardice goes away every time Grip of Chaos is about to come up, to guarantee that whatever Grip chooses is irrelevant--all it will accomplish this way is getting more Psychic Battle triggers, and then we can reintroduce Cowardice to the board again before those triggers resolve.
One minor snag about Psychic Battle is it only works if we win the "clash". Against a goldfish who clashes with nothing but 0s, all this means is we can't keep the library in an empty state, and we can't run it while the top card is a land. Mirror of Fate can easily keep this under control, filling the library from exile whenever we need it.
Annyway, I alluded at the beginning of this section to the fact that Allay needs to keep coming back to our hand, or else there's no way to play it again and keep the combo perpetuating. This can be done by waiting for all the Grip of Chaos triggers to do their thing, then reserving two Psychic Battle redirects at the end. The penultimate trigger will change the target to the nontoken Cowardice , so it bounces itself, and Dual Nature chimes in by cleaning up all the tokens named "Cowardice". Finally, the last trigger lets us pick the ending target. The first few times, the target really does have to be destroyed, but we can cut our losses by changing the target to the most expendable enchantment we have, which turns out to be a Doubling Season token. Any other target we could possibly change it to would end up being a bigger loss, and destroying something like Omniscience or Opalescence (which don't have any token copies) is an outright disaster. We get a lot more than just one new Doubling Season each time through, so don't worry too much. Pretty soon we'll be able to prevent Allay from destroying anything at all.
Section 2 Summary
Input: Three colorless mana and Allay Output: Lots of reuse of Copy Enchantment Layer count: For each Grip of Chaos, for each Psychic Battle...2. Total 4. Newly carved out space: Enchantments, sources that turn arbitrary creatures into mana
Section 3
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Of course, Thran Dynamo is what provides the colorless mana in this deck. It's a bit unfortunate that the deck also has to use a card slot on Mana Crypt with a very similar profile, which we only use once to cast the first Show and Tell and then never hear from it again, but the 0-mana cost is quite obtrusive is combination with March of the Machines, and getting it to work well without working too well can't be done in a single card slot with the existing card pool.
As we repeat section 2 over and over to spend mana in quantities of 3 at a time, we have to stop short of running the mana supply all the way down to 0, because it takes a bit of a buffer in order to perform the actions in this section, and as we get into later sections, they will require the buffer to be larger still. Specifically, it takes 9 mana to start replenishing the colorless mana in the pool. It also takes a few certain cards, of course--the whole point of this deck is that we can't have any mechanism that turns a resource into more of that same resource with no other inputs required. At this level, the scarce resource is a Thran Dynamo card in hand. We also need a few other preconditions: namely, Copy Enchantment and Cowardice both in hand, and March of the Machines, Clash of Realities, Rite of Passage, Sinking Feeling, Guilty Conscience, and at least one Spirit token from Rousing of Souls all on the battlefield. In the case of Sinking Feeling and Guilty Conscience, we just play them each on a board with no Cowardice (because Aura spells target), and after several meaningless rounds of changing the targets, have them end up targeting something that'll stick around for a while, such as that very same Spirit token. If all of that is set up properly, we proceed as follows:
Play Thran Dynamo.
March of the Machines animates artifacts, but doesn't give them any creature types. In particular, they aren't Spirits, so every single copy of Clash of Realities gives the Thran Dynamo a separate instance of "When this creature enters the battlefield, it deals 3 damage to target Spirit." Additionally, each copy of Dual Nature has its own trigger which will attempt to put a token copy of Thran Dynamo onto the battlefield, and since all of these are triggering at the same time, we can arrange them on the stack in any order we like. For best results, we want all of the Clash of Realities triggers on top, so they all resolve before any of the Dual Nature triggers. Of course, everything resolves one at a time, with plenty of opportunity to respond in between them.
Actually, before we get to any of that, there's some more pointless busywork. The targets for the Clash of Realities abilities have to be passed through Grip of Chaos and Psychic Battle, the usual suspects. Since the ability can only target Spirits, and the only Spirits available are the tokens, it doesn't matter where it gets redirected to. One of the tokens will end up being the target, and it makes no difference which one.
Now is the opportunity to play the Copy Enchantment that was purposely being held back in hand. As usual, all but the last batch of tokens should copy Doubling Season; for the last one we're going to do something new. One of the tokens should become a copy of Sinking Feeling, while the rest should become copies of Guilty Conscience. Incidentally, this is the third and final advantage to having the original Copy Enchantment enter without copying anything: it's the only way we can possibly get Dual Nature to make token copies of Auras. If we tried to play the original Copy Enchantment itself as a copy of an Aura, Dual Nature doesn't trigger at all--Opalescence specifically does not animate Auras, which is good because an Aura creature is automatically dead by rule.
Finally, the first Clash of Realities trigger can resolve, and Thran Dynamo deals 3 damage to a Spirit token. This sets off two kinds of triggers: Rite of Passage rushes to the aid of the stricken Spirit, putting a lot more than 3 counters on it in return. We actually don't care so much about this, except for having the assurance that the token will never have lethal damage. The other batch of triggers comes from all those copies of Guilty Conscience that we just dumped onto Thran Dynamo. Each of those will deal 3 damage, and this time it will cause Rite of Passage to rush to the aid of Thran Dynamo--which is the main goal of this step, pumping Thran Dynamo as much as possible.
After Thran Dynamo has a big batch of counters from the first Rite of Passage, we can proceed to activate the ability of the lone copy of Sinking Feeling at least three times, all in response to itself. It's already untapped right now, and letting any of those abilities resolve would obiously be foolish. Note that Doubling Season only applies to counters that accrue from effects, not from costs, so paying the cost for the Sinking Feeling ability still only incurs a single -1/-1 counter, which quickly erases itself alongside one of the scads of +1/+1 counters that Thran Dynamo already has.
From here, our goal is to get rid of March of the Machines. This will make Thran Dynamo stop being a creature, and make all the Auras fall off (although the abilities on the stack, such as Sinking Feeling and Rite of Passage, are still around and will still do as much as possible). More importantly, it gets rid of summoning sickness, so that we can tap it for 3 mana, allow the Sinking Feeling ability to untap it, and repeat. With three activations of Sinking Feeling, we get nine mana in all, or enough to play Allay and have 6 left over--more than the 3 it cost to produce those untaps. Then we can replay March, replay Copy Enchantment to get another Sinking Feeling token on the Thran Dynamo, and repeat. When the Dynamo's toughness gets close to death at long last, we just have to let the next Rite of Passage trigger can put more +1/+1 counters on it, or if we run out of those too, let the next Guilty Conscience trigger resolve, creating a bunch of new Rite of Passage triggers. This whole combo is going to be built like that.
Where it gets tricky is in actually getting rid of March of the Machines. Cowardice could allow that to happen, but we specifically do not have Cowardice on the board right now. Getting it is as simple as playing it, but because we also specifically have Clash of Realities, playing Cowardice is going to result in triggers that will have to target something, and because Cowardice was, by definition, around to witness it, at least one token will get bounced. Looking at all the lower-layer things Allay allows us to do each time, creating more Spirit tokens is not one of them, and there are for more iterations of those loops than we have Spirit tokens at any given time. We can't afford to run out of tokens, so somehow we have to keep them safe.
Basically, what we want to do is safely transition from a Clash of Realities board configuration to a Cowardice board configuration, and here's how we have to do that:
First off, we start with Opalescence on the board, but it must be a token Opalescence, with the real card safe in our hand.
Next, we "waste" 3 mana to play Allay, destroying the Opalescence token after several meaningless changes of the target.
With no Opalescence around, we can now play Cowardice and nothing will trigger, certainly nothing that requires targets.
Playing the Opalescence from hand will likewise result in no triggers, since a single copy doesn't animate itself.
Finally, we can replay Allay again, starting by bouncing the nontoken Clash of Realities, and hereafter the triggers are in no danger of bouncing anything. Allay can continue on doing what it normally does.
And the nice thing about this is that once we've shifted into the Cowardice configuration, we can stay there until the next batch of Thran Dynamo tokens get created. But at some point, we'll need to do the reverse: safely transition from a Cowardice configuration to a Clash of Realities configuration.
With the regular Opalescence card on the battlefield, we have to play Copy Enchantment, and this time the original card must become a copy of Opalescence. Clash of Realities is not on the board, so it won't trigger, but all the copies of Dual Nature will.
Now that the two copies of Opalescence are animating each other, we can play Allay on either one of them, which triggers both the target-changing cards and Cowardice. Choose to let the target-changing abilities resolve first, changing the target to the other Opalescence, and to Cowardice, at least once each. The second one will be bounced, then the first one stops being a creature but Cowardice has already triggered and will still succeed in bouncing it. Finally, let Allay destroy some expendable enchantment token.
When the nontoken creatures leave, Dual Nature will trigger and erase all tokens named Cowardice or Copy Enchantment.
Conveniently, we don't need to care about that erasure, because Dual Nature's other type of trigger is still waiting aroung on the stack. Those triggers will create token copies of "Copy Enchantment copying Opalescence"--this is why we had to take the unusual step of copying something with the original card, because that's the only way we can create new copies of it on a board that has no existing Opalescence to choose as the copy.
Let all the Dual Nature triggers create their tokens, then get rid of all but one token, which, as we just saw, is the precondition we want for when we finally go back the the other transition.
At last, we can play Clash of Realities, which will trigger itself and Dual Nature because the token copy of Opalescence is around to animate it. But Cowardice is not here, so the damage triggers will be harmless.
Piece of cake, huh? Each way, there's a slight bit of overhead in changing state, but thankfully those changes are rare, and they only get rarer as we go along.
Each time we replenish the mana supply, it's time to immediately go out on a spending binge again, playing through section 2 until we're back down to just enough mana to cover the overhead of the following sections. Think of it as something like a ruler: as we go across, the first and smallest mark might be for a 1/16 inch, representing our section 1 here. Then we have a 1/8 inch mark that's slighly taller (section 2), and back to a 1/16, then a 1/4 (section 3), another 1/16, and so on. That's the kind of pattern that we'll keep up throughout the rest of the combo, because it's what generates the most exorbitant growth rates: the power of "do something for each X," where the supply of X's keeps getting bigger every time you come back to start that step anew, and where the future steps of "do something new for each Y" also involve coming back to all the previous steps, just as the definition of exponents involves coming back to multiplication, which itself involves coming back to addition.
Yeah, it's kind of like this, except for the whole "stopping at 12 feet" thing. We can go a lot further.
Each time we exhaust a Dynamo, or any other permanent, to the point where it can't get any more untaps, we can generally feel free to get rid of it. Just make sure there's always at least one copy of Guilty Conscience and one copy of Sinking Feeling on the battlefield at all times, because Copy Enchantment can't produce more without drawing from a surviving specimen.
Section 3 Summary
Input: One playing of Thran Dynamo Output: Lots of colorless mana Layer count: For each Dual Nature, for each Doubling Season on a Dual Nature batch, for each Guilty Conscience, for each Rite of Passage, for each Doubling Season on Rite of Passage...5. Total 9. Newly carved out space: Colorless mana sinks, Spirits, tap-for-damage effects
Section 4
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We used Allay in the Cowardice configuration to bounce some enchantments. It stands to reason, then, that since Thran Dynamo is an artifact, we'll have something that can target and bounce it. Indeed, that something is Rust Tick, a decidedly unlikely combo piece in the grand scheme of things. But here it is.
Rust Tick doesn't just bounce Thran Dynamo; it can target any artifact, even itself. Hold on, though: In the case of Thran Dynamo, we could strategically toggle March of the Machines in and out of the battlefield, so the Dynamo would sometimes be a creature (for holding onto Auras and getting triggers), and sometimes it wouldn't (so it could tap without regard for summoning sickness). In the case of Rust Tick, it doesn't matter if we have March out or not; it's always a creature and there's no dodging that.
Mimic Vat is our answer to this conundrum, the only source of haste we have in the deck. In order to get a creature on Mimic Vat, though, we need it in the graveyard, so Cateran Overlord comes on board now. Later on, it'll serve its own purpose, but for now we merely need it as a sacrifice outlet. We can play a Mimic Vat with March of the Machines and Clash of Realities around, just to get some tokens and top up on its stats, then drop a Rust Tick, sacrifice it, and put it on Mimic Vat. Each time we replay Mimic Vat, we're only ever going to use a single token out of the whole batch, and in fact the majority of Mimic Vats are going to sit idle at any given time. But they're there, and plentiful, if we need them at all.
Something to be careful of here is that Clash of Realities, and hence Guilty Conscience, deals damage in quantities of 3 at a time. An animated Thran Dynamo is a 4/4 creature by default, so it can survive that damage and get counters from Rite of Passage to recover and then some. But an animated Mimic Vat is only 3/3, and Rust Tick is only 1/3, so either of those creatures would be killed by the first batch of damage, and the Rite of Passage trigger is too late to save it. We get around this problem by using Soul of New Phyrexia: each time we need a creature to survive Guilty Conscience damage when it's too small to do so naturally, a simple 5-mana payment to the Soul will make it, and all other permanents on the board at the time, indestructible. (This conveniently means that Allay will stop destroying the final target it gets changed to.) From then on they no longer care about damage from Guilty Conscience or indeed any other source, except insofar as that damage is the source of big, juicy Rite of Passage triggers. And before you ask...yes, we could replace Soul of New Phyrexia with Avacyn, Angel of Hope, and yes, doing it that way means we wouldn't need those constant, intermittent 5-mana payments. But due to other considerations (specifically, getting all the cards set up), Soul of New Phyrexia works out better in the long run.
Meanwhile, before doing anything with that, we can add Bloodbond March, another in our ever-growing cadre of enchantments with effects that get better in numbers. This card actually received little fanfare upon its release, though the effect was much higher-profile when it returned a few years later on Demigod of Revenge (probably because the new version had a built-in way of smashing face, and that's all the company seems to want anyone to care about nowadays).
So with Rust Tick imprinted on a Vat, and lots of Bloodbond Marches on the battlefield, we can throw down a second Rust Tick! This will get some triggers from Bloodbond March, although they wouldn't have anything to return just yet, and that's the sole reason this step isn't capable of going infinite.
Right now there's one Rust Tick on the stack, and one in exile. All the Bloodbond March triggers will have to resolve before the spell on the stack can resolve, at which point we can switch to the Cowardice configuration and use one of the token copies produced by Mimic Vat to bounce the second original card and replay it. Of course, Dual Nature will kick in at that point and erase all tokens named "Rust Tick", including the one that caused the bounce. So it makes sense to hold off on doing that until all our tokens have run themselves to exhaustion.
In addition to reusing Thran Dynamo, one of the other things Rust Tick can reuse is Rings of Brighthearth, which comes in incredibly handy. Not only can it produce multiple copies of Rust Tick's ability from a single tap, it also produces multiple untaps from a single activation and -1/-1 counter with Sinking Feeling, and it even gives us several discrete batches of tokens from a single tap of Mimic Vat. Marginally less useful is making copies of the Sinking Feeling ability on Thran Dynamo, since we pay in 2 mana to make the copy and the result of a single untap is the ability to tap it again for 3, a mere 1-mana profit. But up higher, where one instance of an ability produces a ton of Thran Dynamos and hence a ton of colorless mana, getting an additional copy for 2 mana is an absolute bargain. A key feature of Rings of Brighthearth is that the 2-mana payment is something that doesn't happen until the triggered ability actually resolves, so we don't have to save up 2001 mana in advance just to make a thousand copies of an ability. We just need 3 mana, one to pay for Rust Tick and two to pay for the first instance of Rings, and use that copied ability to get more colorless mana like it's supposed to. Then after that step runs out of steam, we just need to hold onto an additional 2 mana at the end to pay for the next copy of Rings. The further up the ladder we climb, the less and less painful a 2-mana expenditure gets, and this will be a recurring theme throughout: when we get to a certain step, the resources produced by all lower steps can be treated as plentiful.
Each step does need at least one bottleneck, of course, otherwise it quickly becomes self-propagating and infinite. Right now, the problem is that repeatedly bouncing and replaying a Rust Tick doesn't do much by itself; we need some way to get the second Tick into the graveyard to let the Bloodbond March triggers actually mean something. From its position in exile, it is tied to a single, particular copy of Mimic Vat, which has some vast but predefined limit to how big it will be able to get, and thus how many times it will be able to use its ability to create tokens of the imprinted card. It also has a clause for returning the imprinted card to the graveyard, but in order to do that, we'd need to attempt to imprint a second card on the same Vat. The imprint trigger specifically only works when a nontoken creature dies, and it has an "If you do" clause that ensures it won't give up its trophy unless it actually succeeds in taking a real card off to exile. When it changes trophies, so to speak, it does not replenish its own size at all, and we can't afford to have cards tied up in exile that way, so if we want to get the Rust Tick out of exile and into the graveyard, we'll need some other mechanism.
Section 4 Summary
Input: One playing of Rust Tick Output: Lots of reuse of Thran Dynamo, Mirror of Fate, and Rings of Brighthearth Layer count: For each Clash of Realities on a new Mimic Vat, for each Guilty Conscience on Mimic Vat, for each Rite of Passage putting counters on Mimic Vat, for each Doubling Season on the Rite of Passage counters added to Mimic Vat, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Sinking Feeling's ability while it's attached to Mimic Vat, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Mimic Vat's ability, for each Clash of Realities on Rust Tick, for each Guilty Conscience on Rust Tick, for each Rite of Passage putting counters on Rust Tick, for each Doubling Season on the Rite of Passage counters added to Rust Tick, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Sinking Feeling's ability while it's attached to Rust Tick, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Rust Tick's ability, for each Grip of Chaos, for each Psychic Battle...14. Total 23. Newly carved out space: Noncreature artifact spells
Section 5
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So one of the other toys for Rust Tick to throw all over the floor is Mirror of Fate. Mark Rosewater may hate the idea of general-purpose exile retrieval, but its printing is a done deal now. Instead of trying to imprint a second creature on the same Mimic Vat, we can use Mirror of Fate directly, pulling the exiled card back into the library, along with at least one other dummy card to make sure Psychic Battle still works.
Now sure, that puts Rust Tick into the library, but where it needs to end up is the graveyard. And for that, we have Millikin, which at first appears to be nothing more than a regression from Manakin of four years earlier. -1/-0, and an additional cost just to get the mana? This is hardly a conventional deck, though, and in this case, all we really care about is that cost. In fact, we'd prefer if it didn't even have the mana production tacked on, because Rings of Brighthearth can't copy a mana ability, and it never copies cost payments in any case. But such a card--essentially, Millstone in artifact creature form--is something they still haven't printed.
Because Millikin is an artifact creature all the time, just like Rust Tick, it has to go on Mimic Vat before it can do anything. Mimic Vat is going to pull quite a lot of duty for us, and each creature we make use of this way actually needs to be imprinted on a separate copy. Each time we play a creature that goes on a Vat, we should top up on Mimic Vat just beforehand, to maximize the size capacity of the new instance. Actually, there's a bit of a trick involved here: we can target the nontoken Mimic Vat with Cowardice around, but in response to the Cowardice trigger, get rid of March of the Machines as well. That way, when Mimic Vat bounces, Dual Nature will not see a "nontoken creature leaves the battlefield", only an artifact doing so, and that's required for us to keep the existing copies of Mimic Vat which are kind of important.
Millikin is obviously an artifact, which means Rust Tick can target it to bounce it. But it has to be on the battlefield for that, while we can't make any useful tokens of it unless it's in exile with the Mimic Vat. Sure, by now we can use Mirror of Fate and a token Millikin's own ability to move it to the library and on to the graveyard. The problem is, then it would be stuck in the graveyard! Unlike Rust Tick, there is no second copy of Millikin, so we can't have one copy in the graveyard while we cast another to get Bloodbond March triggers and repeatedly return the other. And if we just cast Millikin normally, all the Bloodbond March triggers will go on the stack on top of the spell itself, and they will all necessarily be cleared from the stack by the time the spell resolves. This is good, in that it doesn't create an infinite loop. But it's also a bit disappointing, unless...
Section 5 Summary
Input: One playing of Millikin Output: Lots of reuse of the two Rust Ticks Layer count: For each Bloodbond March, for each Clash of Realities on a new Mimic Vat, for each Guilty Conscience on Mimic Vat, for each Rite of Passage putting counters on Mimic Vat, for each Doubling Season on the Rite of Passage counters added to Mimic Vat, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Sinking Feeling's ability while it's attached to Mimic Vat, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Mimic Vat's ability, for each Clash of Realities on Millikin, for each Guilty Conscience on Millikin, for each Rite of Passage putting counters on Millikin, for each Doubling Season on the Rite of Passage counters added to Millikin, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Sinking Feeling's ability while it's attached to Millikin...12. Total 35. Newly carved out space: Duplicate copies of cards
Section 6
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Up above, I mentioned the card Demigod of Revenge. Players who were around when that card was in vogue, may remember they had to be careful if they wanted to counter it. Just blindly responding to the spell at the first possible opportunity means they'd also be responding to the cast trigger, so the Demigod would be countered and then they'd return all cards named Demigod of Revenge from the graveyard...including the one that was just countered! Normally, they're supposed to wait until after that trigger has resolved, then counter it to be effective.
But that's just the outlook in conventional Magic, where countering something is synonymous with rendering it ineffective. In this deck, we have different priorities, to the point where we can make things more effective by countering our own spells. After all, Demigod of Revenge just has its own, single cast trigger, and whether we counter it in response to the trigger, or simply let it resolve, the outcome is the same: we would get one Demigod. Here, on the other hand, untold masses of Bloodbond March copies each provide a cast trigger of their own, and if we counter a spell in response to them all, each trigger can resolve and return the same card over and over.
Enter Patron Wizard, who will gladly counter spells unless their controller pays 2 mana. Sure, we're getting more and more mana as the snowball keeps rolling along, and can easily cover the payment of 2, but as I just intimated, it's better if we let it counter our own spell.
By the wording on Patron Wizard ("Tap an untapped wizard" instead of the tap symbol), it's slightly superior to other options for the same slot, such as Disruptive Student, because summoning sickness doesn't apply and even the original card can tap. Still, it's better to let it go on the Mimic Vat anyway, simply because that card is such a good mechanism for creating extra copies of the creature.
Rust Tick had the ability to target a copy of itself, and its status as a 2-of in the deck means that Bloodbond March could return the other copy, but it had no way of going from a Mimic Vat imprint to the graveyard under its own power. Likewise, Millikin could be bounced by a lower resource as soon as it showed up, and had no problems getting out of exile and into the graveyard, but with no second copy it can't take advantage of Bloodbond March without help. In the same mold, Patron Wizard can be countered by a token copy of itself, and has no problem repeatedly getting into the graveyard for Bloodbond March, but where it does have a problem is in getting back to hand for another replay. Unlike Millikin and Rust Tick, Patron Wizard isn't an artifact, so we have nothing so far that can target it. From now on, the remainder of the combo (which we have almost half the deck left to construct) is mostly going to consist of cards that can get the previous card back in hand, all snapping together in sequence like a 1-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. Then, after we bounce it, we can feed it through these same, previously established parts, resulting in one hell of a ride. Let's go.
Section 6 Summary
Input: One playing of Patron Wizard Output: Lots of reuse of Millikin Layer count: For each Bloodbond March, for each Clash of Realities on a new Mimic Vat, for each Guilty Conscience on Mimic Vat, for each Rite of Passage putting counters on Mimic Vat, for each Doubling Season on the Rite of Passage counters added to Mimic Vat, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Sinking Feeling's ability while it's attached to Mimic Vat, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Mimic Vat's ability, for each Clash of Realities on Patron Wizard, for each Guilty Conscience on Patron Wizard, for each Rite of Passage putting counters on Patron Wizard, for each Doubling Season on the Rite of Passage counters added to Patron Wizard, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Sinking Feeling's ability while it's attached to Patron Wizard...12. Total 47. Newly carved out space: Cards that return themselves from the graveyard
Section 7
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Ghosthelm Courier, as a Wizard, can make use of the "Tap an untapped Wizard you control" ability on Patron Wizard. In a totally unrelated coincidence, we're never going to use it for that.
More relevant here is the fact that it targets Wizards, and this is the mechanism by which we reuse Patron Wizard. The activation cost includes a tap symbol, so Ghosthelm Courier is going to have to go on Mimic Vat for tokens. It also includes colorless mana, which is plentiful...but also blue mana, which isn't, at least not yet. Lest there be a potential problem of running out of copies of the Courier before we running out of blue mana at any point, note that it's possible to bring back the Courier using Bloodbond March, and use a single instance of the ability to target the nontoken Courier itself, ensure that blue mana is the only bottleneck in this step, just as colorless mana is for the Allay step. We get layers by making sure everything is in a single neat and orderly line.
Each time Mimic Vat makes tokens, of course, it'll be in far larger quantities than before, so the occasions on which Ghosthelm Courier has to bounce itself to stock up on its numbers are going to be few, far between, and getting even farther between with each loop. All in all, it accounts for an almost imperceptible amount of overhead. Much like the overhead explained back in section 3, when we have to switch back and forth between Cowardice and Clash of Realities.
Section 7 Summary
Input: One blue mana, two other mana, and Ghosthelm Courier Output: Lots of reuse of Patron Wizard Layer count: For each Rings of Brighthearth, for each Grip of Chaos, for each Psychic Battle...3. Total 50. Newly carved out space: Wizards
Section 8
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It's a classic trio: Opalescence, March of the Machines, and now Nature's Revolt. Together they cost three card slots, but they combine to make all permanents (except for the decidedly combo-unfriendly planeswalkers) into creatures so that we can use good stuff like Dual Nature, Mimic Vat, and Cowardice with cards of all types. There are ways of achieving the same global mechanism in just two card slots: Opalescence + Enchanted Evening, or March of the Machines + Mycosynth Lattice, but those are unacceptable to us since they make our targeting conditions way too broad to stay under control.
So the Nature's Revolt lets us have token copies of Tropical Island, as well as make those tokens really big, and really reusable, with the help of cards like Rite of Passage and Clash of Realities. Due to the circumstances of upcoming cards, it actually makes sense for us to sacrifice Tropical Island and stick it on a Mimic Vat, something that doesn't work so well for Thran Dynamo because we have no good way to pull it back out of the graveyard or exile, and relish in the sight of even more tropical islands popping up all around us. It would make for one hell of a cruise, that's for sure.
As both an island and a forest, Tropical Island can obviously tap for either green or blue mana. As it turns out, these 60 cards have no use for green mana whatsoever, so every time we tap a Tropical Island, it's going to be for blue mana. Actually that's not quite true, there's one other purpose these lands will be put to, but it won't come until later.
Section 8 Summary
Input: Tropical Island entering the battlefield Output: Lots of blue mana Layer count: For each Clash of Realities on a new Mimic Vat, for each Guilty Conscience on Mimic Vat, for each Rite of Passage putting counters on Mimic Vat, for each Doubling Season on the Rite of Passage counters added to Mimic Vat, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Sinking Feeling's ability while it's attached to Mimic Vat, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Mimic Vat's ability, for each Clash of Realities on Tropical Island, for each Guilty Conscience on Tropical Island, for each Rite of Passage putting counters on Tropical Island, for each Doubling Season on the Rite of Passage counters added to Tropical Island, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Sinking Feeling's ability while it's attached to Tropical Island...11. Total 61. Newly carved out space: Green mana sinks, blue mana sinks
Section 9
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Despite not using green mana at all, we still have a reason why we chose Tropical Island over any number of alternatives, and that reason is Everbark Shaman. When the Tropical Island copy of Mimic Vat runs out of fuel, we can use Mirror of Fate to stick Tropical Island back in the library, and Everbark Shaman to pull it out directly from there for another appearance. We're getting the hang of how this works, right?
In addition to the tap, Everbark Shaman's ability has another cost that might sound difficult at first glance: exiling a Treefolk card from the graveyard. But as we'll soon see, that hardly amounts to an obstacle.
Section 9 Summary
Input: One playing of Everbark Shaman Output: Lots of reuse of Tropical Island Layer count: For each Bloodbond March, for each Clash of Realities on a new Mimic Vat, for each Guilty Conscience on Mimic Vat, for each Rite of Passage putting counters on Mimic Vat, for each Doubling Season on the Rite of Passage counters added to Mimic Vat, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Sinking Feeling's ability while it's attached to Mimic Vat, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Mimic Vat's ability, for each Clash of Realities on Everbark Shaman, for each Guilty Conscience on Everbark Shaman, for each Rite of Passage putting counters on Everbark Shaman, for each Doubling Season on the Rite of Passage counters added to Everbark Shaman, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Sinking Feeling's ability while it's attached to Everbark Shaman, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Everbark Shaman's ability...13. Total 74. Newly carved out space: Forests
Section 10
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Black Poplar Shaman is the first innate creature in our sequence that doesn't have a tap ability. Because of that, we don't particularly care how many copies of it we have at any given time; as long as there's at least one on the battlefield, we can use the ability. Because of this, we might as well play it once, and immediately sacrifice it to Cateran Overlord. After Dual Nature wipes out all zero token copies that exist, the other Dual Nature triggers will create some token copies that stick around, and those are all we need. The activated ability it does have, predictably, is used to target and bounce Everbark Shaman, just as long as we have black mana to use with it.
Black Poplar Shaman is a second Treefolk card, and what that means is it can be the dummy card that we repeatedly exile to pay for Everbark Shaman's ability. With Mirror of Fate to move it from exile to library, and Millikin to move it from library to graveyard, we aren't under any particular constraints this high up as far as making sure it's in the right zone at any given time, even when the battlefield is never going to be that zone.
Section 10 Summary
Input: One black mana, two other mana, and Black Poplar Shaman Output: Lots of reuse of Everbark Shaman Layer count: For each Rings of Brighthearth, for each Grip of Chaos, for each Psychic Battle...3. Total 77. Newly carved out space: Treefolk
Section 11
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Just like Tropical Island is our source of blue mana, Vault of Whispers is how we get black. Again, it's safe to put on Mimic Vat for more copying, and then the tokens have haste so there's less overhead involved in shuffling out permanents just to make an ability usable.
Vault of Whispers, of course, is an artifact, and we've already seen that Rust Tick can bounce artifacts almost at will by now. However, in addition to being an artifact, it's also a land. That means that if we bounce it, we can't just play it again--it costs a land drop, and we only get one of those, which was already used on Tropical Island. Similar to the Tropical Island flight path, Vault of Whispers will likewise dart back and forth between battlefield, exile, and library; it will absolutely never be in our hand at any point. And just as we require to avoid going infinite, there's one part of that flight path that we can't complete yet, not without help from another card.
Section 11 Summary
Input: Vault of Whispers entering the battlefield Output: Lots of black mana Layer count: For each Clash of Realities on a new Mimic Vat, for each Guilty Conscience on Mimic Vat, for each Rite of Passage putting counters on Mimic Vat, for each Doubling Season on the Rite of Passage counters added to Mimic Vat, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Sinking Feeling's ability while it's attached to Mimic Vat, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Mimic Vat's ability, for each Clash of Realities on Vault of Whispers, for each Guilty Conscience on Vault of Whispers, for each Rite of Passage putting counters on Vault of Whispers, for each Doubling Season on the Rite of Passage counters added to Vault of Whispers, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Sinking Feeling's ability while it's attached to Vault of Whispers...11. Total 88. Newly carved out space: Black mana sinks
Section 12
37
It takes two to conspire, and that holds true even in deckbuilding. We've already seen Rousing of Souls from the Conspiracy set, so naturally we have another card from that set as well: Muzzio, Visionary Architect. Its cost includes blue mana, which is plentiful from Tropical Island, as well as a tap which can be hooked into by all the fun ways we've already seen. For its ability, the X value will be 5 from Mirror of Fate, but that hardly even matters--even if X were 1, we just need to be able to find some card to put on the battlefield, which is exactly the missing transition that Vault of Whispers needed for its reuse.
Muzzio is legendary, which means things are slightly different in this step. We don't get to take every token in a batch and use them all to the fullest; only a single token from each batch will stick around to use. This is a bit less efficient, but the effect is actually not noticeable: each Mimic Vat activation will create a number of usable damage triggers "for each Clash of Realities", instead of "for each Clash of Realities TIMES Doubling Season", since all the triggers for the copies are put on the stack at the same time with no opportunity to act in between to increase the number of triggers that might be created. Now, if we take a number like 2 ^^^ 6, and multiply it by itself, the notation available at that level is sparse enough that we can't really express it much differently from 2 ^^^ 6 itself. Multiplication is just too low an operation to matter much there, kind of like adding one or two colorless mana when we've already progressed this far in the nested loops. So no big loss.
The last thing to note here is we actually want to use Muzzio's first batch of tokens as a means of pulling out some artifacts without needing to draw them. So it's actually going to come down fairly early, with little in the way of structure around it, and we can use the first couple activations to get cards like Vedalken Orrery or Rings of Brighthearth, which are key to the sequencing we use after everything starts to kick into full bloom. Interestingly, this function is why we're using Vedalken Orrery instead of Leyline of Anticipation; being able to collect it using Muzzio doesn't make much difference now, but it's going to pay a sizable dividend at the very end.
Section 12 Summary
Input: One playing of Muzzio, Visionary Architect Output: Lots of reuse of Vault of Whispers Layer count: For each Bloodbond March, for each Clash of Realities on a new Mimic Vat, for each Guilty Conscience on Mimic Vat, for each Rite of Passage putting counters on Mimic Vat, for each Doubling Season on the Rite of Passage counters added to Mimic Vat, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Sinking Feeling's ability while it's attached to Mimic Vat, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Mimic Vat's ability, for each Clash of Realities on Muzzio, for each Guilty Conscience on Muzzio, for each Rite of Passage putting counters on Muzzio, for each Doubling Season on the Rite of Passage counters added to Muzzio, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Sinking Feeling's ability while it's attached to Muzzio, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Muzzio's ability...13. Total 101. Newly carved out space: Artifact lands (the rest of the artifacts have already been staked out)
Section 13
38
Cue Empress Galina. This Empress isn't going to hand out tacky bobbleheads of Abe Lincoln for immature comedy contributions on a weekly basis, but she'll give us something much better: making much-revered legends bob up and down from the battlefield to our hand, under the innocent cover story of gaining control of something we already have! Muzzio is a legend, as is Galina herself...hold on, doesn't that mean things get way out of hand?
Thankfully, no. As the previous section demonstrated, in the absence of a Mirror Gallery, Muzzio can do its work with only a vanishingly small loss in efficiency. In particular, if Mirror Gallery was around, there would be no safe way to use Empress Galina to full effect, especially if she's going to be this high up. But in a world where we follow the rules and can only keep one copy of a legend at a time, we can actually pull this off so that Galina provides yet another large, but well-bounded, contribution.
First off, before any of the tokens arrive, the nontoken Galina could target herself except...it's a tap ability, and she obviously doesn't have haste; like all nontoken creatures in the deck, she never will. That's one crisis averted.
Second, we have to make sure that no token copy can ever target the nontoken. Clearly, both versions of Galina can't coexist on the battlefield for any length of time--if we have priority to activate an ability, then we've been forced to whittle the numbers down to one Galina already, and it had better be the one we plan on activating. The activation will set off a bunch of fun stuff like Grip of Chaos, Psychic Battle, and Rings of Brighthearth, and all of this will invariably take place on top of the next Bloodbond March trigger, so all of it has to clear from the stack before the nontoken Galina can go back to the graveyard and be returned from there. There's no danger that a Psychic Battle might be capable of changing the target to nontoken Galina. At least, not without help from an outside impetus at a higher layer, by which time we can rightfully return Galina anyway.
What's vital is that this section doesn't have a self-contained way for Galina to bounce and replay herself, and that checks out. All she can do is bounce Muzzio. A lot. Which is exactly how we want it to work, after all.
Section 13 Summary
Input: One playing of Empress Galina Output: Lots of reuse of Muzzio, Visionary Architect Layer count: For each Bloodbond March, for each Clash of Realities on a new Mimic Vat, for each Guilty Conscience on Mimic Vat, for each Rite of Passage putting counters on Mimic Vat, for each Doubling Season on the Rite of Passage counters added to Mimic Vat, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Sinking Feeling's ability while it's attached to Mimic Vat, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Mimic Vat's ability, for each Clash of Realities on Galina, for each Guilty Conscience on Galina, for each Rite of Passage putting counters on Galina, for each Doubling Season on the Rite of Passage counters added to Galina, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Sinking Feeling's ability while it's attached to Galina, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Galina's ability, for each Grip of Chaos, for each Psychic Battle...15. Total 116. Newly carved out space: Other legendary creatures
Section 14
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If Galina shows there's design space in going after legends, what might be even better? Going after the same space, twice! This is what Tsabo Tavoc is for, and with black mana already in hand from Vault of Whispers, this Phyrexian construct will gladly join the mission to overlay Dominaria with a giant bouncy castle. Who wouldn't want a world like that?
Protection from legendary creatures is a unique ability among all cards in existence. Even the token copies are incapable of targeting themselves, not that bouncing a token is useful at all. More importantly, the protection is vital to maintaining an asymmetry that keeps everything in order. Tsabo can reach "down" some layers to slap Galina, but Galina is incapable of reaching "up" those same layers to slap Tsabo. This gains several layers while consuming virtually no targeting space, so that we don't run out of stops too early with 21 card slots still remaining to be filled.
Section 14 Summary
Input: One playing of Tsabo Tavoc Output: Lots of reuse of Empress Galina Layer count: For each Bloodbond March, for each Clash of Realities on a new Mimic Vat, for each Guilty Conscience on Mimic Vat, for each Rite of Passage putting counters on Mimic Vat, for each Doubling Season on the Rite of Passage counters added to Mimic Vat, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Sinking Feeling's ability while it's attached to Mimic Vat, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Mimic Vat's ability, for each Clash of Realities on Tsabo, for each Guilty Conscience on Tsabo, for each Rite of Passage putting counters on Tsabo, for each Doubling Season on the Rite of Passage counters added to Tsabo, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Sinking Feeling's ability while it's attached to Tsabo, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Tsabo's ability, for each Grip of Chaos, for each Psychic Battle...15. Total 131. Newly carved out space: Legendary creatures
Section 15
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Correction. What's better? How about going after the same space three times. Shizo, Death's Storehouse is another card that targets legends, allowing us to squeeze even more efficiency out of this supertype that's unique in more ways than one. It also has the option to tap for black mana, but since that's already handled by the much more numerous copies of Vault of Whispers, we may as well reserve this card for the more valuable function of targeting legends, yet again. Giving them fear? How pointless.
Unlike Vault of Whispers or Tropical Island, we can't afford to put Shizo on a Mimic Vat, since we have no cards that can get it back out of the graveyard or library. Instead, when we need to refuel Shizo, we'll bring back the nontoken copy and slap it with Empress Galina. Like Vault of Whispers, this is a land, so we can't just replay it.
One other consequence of not using Mimic Vat is that Shizo will never have haste. Instead, just as we made March of the Machines disappear and reappear in the Thran Dynamo step, we're going to do the same for Nature's Revolt here. Have it out in order to get the customary triggers, and so we can have Sinking Feeling on it to activate, but then make it stop being a creature so it can actually use the untaps it's getting. There's also one other very good reason for doing it like this: Galina and Tsabo can both slap Shizo to put it back in our hand, which isn't quite sufficient for reusing it because we still need some external impetus for getting it out of that zone. But by deanimating a token, it can return the favor and slap Tsabo!
At the time cards like Empress Galina and Tsabo Tavoc were printed, legends were handled a bit differently. In addition to the rule being "only the oldest one, if any, survives" instead of the survivor being up to the player's choice, and looking across the entire battlefield for collisions instead of being per-player, they also had some odd choices of templating. When it was on a creature, they would give it "Legend" as a creature type, but for other types of permanent they put it before the type, such as "Legendary Land" or "Legendary Artifact". Tsabo Tavoc was printed with the text "Protection from Legends", so after they standardized "Legendary" into a supertype across all types of cards in 2004, that ability was translated to "Protection from legendary creatures". In particular, Tsabo does not have protection from legendary permanents that aren't creatures, and at the time Shizo uses its ability, it is necessarily just a plain old legendary land, so it doesn't fall afoul of the protection, and we can reuse Tsabo Tavoc this way.
I guess there are still cards like Progenitus that can't be targeted by any of these last three sections, but suffice it to say that card isn't going to do anything to help.
Section 15 Summary
Input: One playing of Shizo, Death's Storehouse Output: Lots of reuse of Tsabo Tavoc Layer count: For each Clash of Realities, for each Guilty Conscience, for each Rite of Passage, for each Doubling Season on the Rite of Passage counters, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Sinking Feeling's ability, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Shizo's ability, for each Grip of Chaos, for each Psychic Battle...9. Total 140. Newly carved out space: Legendary permanents
Section 16
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6
Instead of land drops, we have Show and Tell. Our previous lands had mechanisms for being pulled out of the library, but Shizo doesn't, so we finally have to call upon Show and Tell to clear the legendary land for reentry. The opponent also gets to drop a land if they want, and it will get triggers from Dual Nature and Clash of Realities, just like our triggers for Shizo. Their triggers will resolve first, and we can promptly ignore them all before moving on to other things.
Show and Tell doesn't have targets, and doesn't have buyback, so it doesn't add any layers on its own: playing Show and Tell once is equivalent to playing Shizo once, assuming we were allowed to do such a thing. However, we can get more layers by reusing Show and Tell, and that task falls to Mnemonic Wall.
Unfortunately for us, Mnemonic Wall has a triggered ability instead of an activated ability, so it's not quite as efficient as some of the other cards we've gotten used to. Even more so given that all the targets for a batch of tokens have to be chosen at once, and all the Grip of Chaos and Psychic Battle triggers will go on top of that. After one Wall has picked up the Show and Tell, then, we have no way of changing the targets for the other tokens in the batch, and they're stuck pointing at a Show and Tell that no longer exists, even if we replay the card to put it back in the graveyard. Hey, there's always the next batch of tokens...until the fuel runs out and there is no next batch. We do still have to be careful that at some fixed point, the combo is not capable of creating a next batch, as far off in the future as that may be.
Section 16 Summary
Input: One playing of Mnemonic Wall Output: Lots of reuse of Show and Tell, which allows to to drop Shizo, Death's Storehouse and other lands Layer count: For each Bloodbond March, for each Clash of Realities on a new Mimic Vat, for each Guilty Conscience on Mimic Vat, for each Rite of Passage putting counters on Mimic Vat, for each Doubling Season on the Rite of Passage counters added to Mimic Vat, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Sinking Feeling's ability while it's attached to Mimic Vat, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Mimic Vat's ability...7. Total 147. Newly carved out space: Instants, sorceries, lands that can be targeted or bounced prior to this point
Section 17
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Mnemonic Wall makes a nice reminder that it's time for Dwarven Demolition Team to enter, stage right. I don't know if any of those dwarves are actually named Gorbachev, but I do know they have a knack for tearing down walls of all shapes and sizes. They don't actually get torn down, of course...only returned to hand, but after seeing everything that's played out so far, would you expect anything less? This is actually the first step we have in which everything runs at peak theoretical efficiency. Some of the legends are close enough to peak efficiency that they match the layer count, but this time we get to see all the tokens being put to use, like a group of seven Dwarves mining up all sorts of good stuff in cartoonish harmony. Except there are a lot more than seven of them.
Section 17 Summary
Input: One playing of Dwarven Demolition Team Output: Lots of reuse of Mnemonic Wall Layer count: For each Bloodbond March, for each Clash of Realities on a new Mimic Vat, for each Guilty Conscience on Mimic Vat, for each Rite of Passage putting counters on Mimic Vat, for each Doubling Season on the Rite of Passage counters added to Mimic Vat, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Sinking Feeling's ability while it's attached to Mimic Vat, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Mimic Vat's ability, for each Clash of Realities on Dwarven Demolition Team, for each Guilty Conscience on Dwarven Demolition Team, for each Rite of Passage putting counters on Dwarven Demolition Team, for each Doubling Season on the Rite of Passage counters added to Dwarven Demolition Team, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Sinking Feeling's ability while it's attached to Dwarven Demolition Team, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Dwarven Demolition Team's ability, for each Grip of Chaos, for each Psychic Battle...15. Total 162. Newly carved out space: Walls
Section 18
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Still, the Dwarves know when to answer to the Dwarven Lieutenant. It would have been even better if we could use Dwarven Pony, but that card requires red mana just like the Lieutenant, and we haven't come across red mana yet, so we can't make use of the full-efficiency potential of the Pony.
Oh well. If they're going to give us tools like this, we might as well use them, and "Target Dwarf" is still a rather narrow targeting clause. Colored mana, at least, is a fairly routine quota to fill.
Section 18 Summary
Input: One red mana and Dwarven Lieutenant Output: Lots of playings of Dwarven Demolition Team Layer count: For each Rings of Brighthearth, for each Grip of Chaos, for each Psychic Battle...3. Total 165. Newly carved out space: Dwarves
Section 19
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If there's one tribe associated with red mana, it's...well, Dragons, yeah. But we're not using any of those. After that, the next best choice is probably Goblins.
One option we could go to for this is Skirk Prospector, sacrificing Goblins to get mana. Or we could use the more obscure, but more efficient, Goblin Clearcutter. It's just like Orcish Lumberjack except it costs 4 mana rather than 1 (which we don't care about because of Omniscience), and it's a Goblin rather than an Orc (which we absolutely do care about, since it gives better prospects for fitting into its place in the grand puzzle.
Getting mana for a tap is much better than getting mana for a sacrifice cost, since it means there's plenty of opportunity to reuse each copy. Actually, the cost on Goblin Clearcutter is a bit more than a tap, but "sacrifice a Forest" is hardly any more intensive of a cost than a blue or green mana would be. There are lots of Tropical Island tokens lying around, all used up, waiting to be put toward some better purpose. Conveniently, sacrificing it to Goblin Clearcutter is just that purpose, and the key to getting three red mana. Because obviously, we know that there's no reason to ever produce green.
Section 19 Summary
Input: One playing of Goblin Clearcutter Output: Lots of red mana Layer count: For each Bloodbond March, for each Clash of Realities on a new Mimic Vat, for each Guilty Conscience on Mimic Vat, for each Rite of Passage putting counters on Mimic Vat, for each Doubling Season on the Rite of Passage counters added to Mimic Vat, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Sinking Feeling's ability while it's attached to Mimic Vat, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Mimic Vat's ability, for each Clash of Realities on Goblin Clearcutter, for each Guilty Conscience on Goblin Clearcutter, for each Rite of Passage putting counters on Goblin Clearcutter, for each Doubling Season on the Rite of Passage counters added to Goblin Clearcutter, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Sinking Feeling's ability while it's attached to Goblin Clearcutter...12. Total 177. Newly carved out space: Red mana sinks
Section 20
44
There are a couple different cards that target Goblins, and the one we want here specifically is Goblin Burrows. We've just picked up a source of red mana by now, so the red in the cost isn't a problem, and with repeatable access to Show and Tell, we can handle replaying Goblin Burrows if it ever ends up in hand.
The bottleneck, then (because of course we always need a bottleneck), is picking it back up into our hand in the first place. Like Shizo, Goblin Burrows can't go on a Mimic Vat safely. But unlike the other lands, Goblin Burrows isn't a Forest, or an artifact, or a legendary land. It's just a regular, nondescript, land. If we want something that will target the land for Cowardice, we need help from above, as always. Story of the deck.
Section 20 Summary
Input: Goblin Burrows entering the battlefield Output: Lots of reuse of Goblin Clearcutter Layer count: For each Clash of Realities, for each Guilty Conscience, for each Rite of Passage putting counters, for each Doubling Season on the Rite of Passage counters, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Sinking Feeling's ability, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Goblin Burrows' ability, for each Grip of Chaos, for each Psychic Battle...9. Total 186. Newly carved out space: Goblins
Section 21
45
Why would anyone want to play a card like Tidal Warrior? Indeed, I'll reveal now that we will never actually be playing Tidal Warrior in this deck. And yet there's still a deck slot for it.
That's actually just a matter of nomenclature, because we can certainly use what Tidal Warrior has to offer--to wit, targeting arbitrary lands--we just won't be playing, or casting, the card. No, that task will be delegated on to, you guessed it, another card!
As far as the actual effect that Tidal Warrior tries to bring about (if not for Cowardice repeatedly sniping it to the punch), turning a land into an island is somewhat interesting. Not useful, granted, since we already have Tropical Island for any occasion in which we might need an island. But there's something similar coming up a bit later.
Section 21 Summary
Input: Tidal Warrior entering the battlefield Output: Lots of reuse of Goblin Burrows Layer count: For each Clash of Realities on a new Mimic Vat, for each Guilty Conscience on Mimic Vat, for each Rite of Passage putting counters on Mimic Vat, for each Doubling Season on the Rite of Passage counters added to Mimic Vat, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Sinking Feeling's ability while it's attached to Mimic Vat, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Mimic Vat's ability, for each Clash of Realities on Tidal Warrior, for each Guilty Conscience on Tidal Warrior, for each Rite of Passage putting counters on Tidal Warrior, for each Doubling Season on the Rite of Passage counters added to Tidal Warrior, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Sinking Feeling's ability while it's attached to Tidal Warrior, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Tidal Warrior's ability, for each Grip of Chaos, for each Psychic Battle...14. Total 200. Newly carved out space: Lands
Section 22
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47
48
25
Compared to some of the other venerable tribes in Magic's history, Merfolk are actually pretty difficult to work with while sticking to the confines of a deck like this. Streambed Aquitects and Merfolk Sovereign both immediately go infinite by targeting themselves, and while Sygg, River Guide does exist as a method of jumping to another color, that's going to be awfully wasteful of design space. We can do better, with a little hired help in the form of...Mercenaries.
Yes, Nemesis had a three-card mini-cycle designed with the aim of--and these are the words that Wizards themselves used to hype the cards--"giving blue, green, and red each a Rebel or Mercenary to call their own" by fetching a common creature type in that color. We've already hit Goblins, eliminating any role for Moggcatcher, but more on this later. For now, we turn to Seahunter: an innate Mercenary whose role is to fetch Merfolk. Put Tidal Warrior into the library, take it back out of the library, and get out tokens.
Seahunter likewise needs to be fetched out of the library before we can run any loops, but if there's one thing Mercenaries are good at, it's the process of buying out their comrades who don't ask for as much money, or mana, or whatever. Seahunter itself costs 4, so we can't start all the way down the Mercenary pecking order, but Cateran Enforcer does specialize in fetching 4-mana Mercenaries, and it has the good sense to cost 5 itself, making it unfetchable by its own effect (in contrast, Rebels search up the mana cost line, and every creature with a Rebel-fetch ability is capable of fetching copies of itself, so all of them are out of bounds). Cateran Enforcer can in turn be fetched by Cateran Slaver who costs 6, and the top of the totem pole holds the 7-mana Cateran Overlord. Each one raises the bar by a single mana after squeezing out several layers, making this an extremely efficient allocation of targeting space.
Predictably, all this Mercenary fetching means there won't be much in the way of Bloodbond March at this level. Cateran Overlord does get to be cast from hand every time, but nothing else in this step will. Mostly because playing them would require drawing them first, and we have better things to do than drawing them.
Section 22 Summary
Input: One playing of Cateran Overlord Output: Lots of copies of each of the other Mercenaries in turn, finally culminating in Seahunter and Tidal Warrior Layer count: For each Clash of Realities on a new Mimic Vat, for each Guilty Conscience on Mimic Vat, for each Rite of Passage putting counters on Mimic Vat, for each Doubling Season on the Rite of Passage counters added to Mimic Vat, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Sinking Feeling's ability while it's attached to Mimic Vat, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Mimic Vat's ability, for each Clash of Realities on a Mercenary, for each Guilty Conscience on a Mercenary, for each Rite of Passage putting counters on a Mercenary, for each Doubling Season on the Rite of Passage counters added to a Mercenary, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Sinking Feeling's ability while it's attached to a Mercenary, for each Rings of Brighthearth on the Mercenary ability (all this is repeated 4 times), and also for each Bloodbond March on Cateran Overlord...49. Total 249. Newly carved out space: Mercenaries with converted mana cost 6 or less
Section 23
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One thing about being a card company is that Wizards of the Coast has to print out physical cards. As such, producing a set with an infinite number of distinct cards would be an ill-advised idea. Instead, they make sets with a couple hundred cards, which means they have to stop somewhere.
In the case of Mercenaries, Cateran Overlord is that stopping point. There's nothing that fetches "Mercenary cards with converted mana cost 7 or less", let alone a continuation to higher numbers like 30. If they did, one possible plan in a deck challenge like this would be to clog as much of the deck as possible with nothing but Mercenaries, and coast on their easily-interlocking nature. Boo and hiss at Wizards all you want for not letting us fall back on such a simple loop mechanism to call it a day.
So we have to try a different approach. Luckily, Mercenary Informer is a card that does exist, and it hits any Mercenary regardless of converted mana cost...including itself, but there's no need to waste activations on that (unlike Ghosthelm Courier, it doesn't tap). As is typical for permanents with an ability whose cost only involves mana, it's redundant in multiples and we don't care about Mimic Vat or anything else with it.
Once we get hold of some white mana, pay one of that (along with some more spare colorless) to activate the ability, targeting Cateran Overlord (in nontoken form, as always--actually, this ability can't target a token even if you want it to). Putting it on the bottom of its owner's library isn't very helpful, especially not from the battlefield, but this is one of the many reasons we have Cowardice. The card, not the character trait.
It sounds great, if only there was a source of white mana we could do that with. Because none of the cards in the deck have abilities to tap (or sacrifice themselves, or anything else of the sort) for white mana...
Section 25 Summary
Input: One white mana and Mercenary Informer Output: Lots of reuse of Cateran Overlord Layer count: For each Rings of Brighthearth, for each Grip of Chaos, for each Psychic Battle...3. Total 252. Newly carved out space: Mercenaries (regardless of converted mana cost)
Section 24
50
Tundra Kavu certainly seems like an odd choice to do anything sentient, let alone a specific task that plugs neatly into its place in a long, beautiful line. But with a text box like that--
Hold on, stop the presses. I just received word that there's going to be a targeting ability that actually does what it's supposed to do. See, like I just said, none of our lands produce white, and Tundra Kavu's purpose is to change that, but similar to what happened early on, it takes a lot of jockeying to make that happen.
When we're in need of white mana...well, the first time that happens, play Tundra Kavu, and get some tokens. Keep going through the motions of the previous sections, and on the final trip to section 8 before running out of fuel, with the final Tropical Island token, stop when the Clash of Realities triggers are just about to have the token start dealing damage, and when it's all suited up with a full complement of Guilty Consciences. Make sure Cowardice is gone at that point, and have Tundra Kavu tap to target that last land token, ignoring Rings of Brighthearth, Grip of Chaos, and Psychic Battle--the whole lot.
When the ability does resolve, Tropical Island turns into a Plains. It loses its innate ability to tap for blue or green, and in its place it gains the power to tap for white mana. As it turns out, this is much more helpful, picking up Mercenary Informer and reigniting the flame with a far bigger blast...of sunlight? Sure, it's a magical sun that's immune to gravitational collapse into a black hole, why the hell not.
Because the newly infused land doesn't take full advantage of its ability until after the Guilty Consciences start piling on some damage and the Rites of Passage pile on even more counters, the stack will have to clear at least down to that level before moving on with the usage of white mana. This is why we don't get to take advantage of the Rings of Brighthearth on the "Target land becomes a plains" ability. When we go to untap Tundra Kavu with Sinking Feeling, we can still feel free to use the Rings on that, because all the lower layers become nested on top of it on the stack, and will be entirely cleared by time we need to pay for Rings again.
Set aside another copy of Tropical Island for the next time we need white mana, and the rest is easy if you've been following along this far.
Section 26 Summary
Input: One playing of Tundra Kavu Output: Lots of white mana Layer count: For each Bloodbond March, for each Clash of Realities on a new Mimic Vat, for each Guilty Conscience on Mimic Vat, for each Rite of Passage putting counters on Mimic Vat, for each Doubling Season on the Rite of Passage counters added to Mimic Vat, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Sinking Feeling's ability while it's attached to Mimic Vat, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Mimic Vat's ability, for each Clash of Realities on Tundra Kavu, for each Guilty Conscience on Tundra Kavu, for each Rite of Passage putting counters on Tundra Kavu, for each Doubling Season on the Rite of Passage counters added to Tundra Kavu, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Sinking Feeling's ability while it's attached to Tundra Kavu, for each Clash of Realities on a new land altered into a Plains, for each Guilty Conscience on the land, for each Rite of Passage putting counters on the land, for each Doubling Season on the Rite of Passage counters added to the land, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Sinking Feeling's ability while it's attached to the land...17. Total 269. Newly carved out space: White mana sinks
Section 25
51
If there's one thing Tundra Kavu advertises about itself right in the name, it's that Tundra Kavu is a Kavu. (I guess it also tries to advertise that it's a Tundra, and I'd love to pull my copies out of the junk box and sell them to Star City for 125 bucks apiece, but the folks there don't seem to believe me. Maybe getting them to read this page, and gain awareness of what it can do, will change all that.)
Guess who likes seeing Kavu around? Coastal Drake. We just play that, get some copies, and it's a straightforward bounce operation. Even the Drake's own ability wants to do some bouncing in this case, but it never actually gets the chance because Cowardice scoops up the Kavu first, and does the same upon each redirection with Psychic Battle. Maybe they liked it better that way. In fact, spoiler alert: they certainly did.
Section 25 Summary
Input: One playing of Coastal Drake Output: Lots of reuse of Tundra Kavu Layer count: For each Bloodbond March, for each Clash of Realities on a new Mimic Vat, for each Guilty Conscience on Mimic Vat, for each Rite of Passage putting counters on Mimic Vat, for each Doubling Season on the Rite of Passage counters added to Mimic Vat, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Sinking Feeling's ability while it's attached to Mimic Vat, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Mimic Vat's ability, for each Clash of Realities on Coastal Drake, for each Guilty Conscience on Coastal Drake, for each Rite of Passage putting counters on Coastal Drake, for each Doubling Season on the Rite of Passage counters added to Coastal Drake, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Sinking Feeling's ability while it's attached to Coastal Drake, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Coastal Drake's ability, for each Grip of Chaos, for each Psychic Battle...15. Total 284. Newly carved out space: Kavu
Section 26
52
If there's one thing Coastal Drake advertises about itself right in the name, it's that Coastal Drake is a Drake. (And it comes from the Coast, too. Knowing them, it was probably placed into that habitat by some Wizards.)
Sadly, that brainstorming session is going to come with a lot less success this time, since there are no cards that mention "target Drake". But a common characteristic of Drakes is that they all fly, at least among the ones that aren't also Cat Rat Elephants. And if you have a problem with flyers, if no one else can help, and if you can find it under that messy, crowded battlefield of countless other cards and tokens, maybe it's time to hire Skyshroud Archer. We know how this goes: some insane character tries to build a pellet gun that just slaps -1/-1 on things, and ends up with such a powerful machine that it can cause Drakes to blot out the sky after reappearing in vast numbers. What a crazy fool.
Section 26 Summary
Input: Skyshroud Archer entering the battlefield Output: Lots of reuse of Coastal Drake Layer count: For each Clash of Realities on a new Mimic Vat, for each Guilty Conscience on Mimic Vat, for each Rite of Passage putting counters on Mimic Vat, for each Doubling Season on the Rite of Passage counters added to Mimic Vat, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Sinking Feeling's ability while it's attached to Mimic Vat, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Mimic Vat's ability, for each Clash of Realities on Skyshroud Archer, for each Guilty Conscience on Skyshroud Archer, for each Rite of Passage putting counters on Skyshroud Archer, for each Doubling Season on the Rite of Passage counters added to Skyshroud Archer, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Sinking Feeling's ability while it's attached to Skyshroud Archer, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Skyshroud Archer's ability, for each Grip of Chaos, for each Psychic Battle...14. Total 298. Newly carved out space: Creatures with flying
Section 27
53
With a weapon like that, the archer has certainly piqued the interest of Skyshroud authorities. Last we heard, the Skyshroud Poacher was in hot pursuit, trying to wrangle the Archer out of its hiding spots in exile and the library. Unfortunately for it, and fortunately for the rest of us, the Poacher can never quite arrest its quarry, and each attempt only results in more and more Archers.
I mentioned Moggcatcher earlier, and in addition to searching out Goblins which already have an outlet in Goblin Burrows, Moggcatcher is an innate Mercenary, which prevents us from using it after Seahunter and the more conventional Mercenaries came on board. Unlike those other two, though, Skyshroud Poacher was printed as a Rebel, rather than a Mercenary. We've already seen that conventional Rebels are off limits, so our next stop will have to go after some other aspect of the Poacher.
Thankfully there are only 7 more cards to get through. Why are we even here any more? Seriously. Sooner or later most readers will undoubtedly pass off the numbers as "big enough" and turn their attention somewhere else, instead of trying to trudge through all this.
Section 27 Summary
Input: One playing of Skyshroud Poacher Output: Lots of reuse of Skyshroud Archer Layer count: For each Bloodbond March, for each Clash of Realities on a new Mimic Vat, for each Guilty Conscience on Mimic Vat, for each Rite of Passage putting counters on Mimic Vat, for each Doubling Season on the Rite of Passage counters added to Mimic Vat, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Sinking Feeling's ability while it's attached to Mimic Vat, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Mimic Vat's ability, for each Clash of Realities on Skyshroud Poacher, for each Guilty Conscience on Skyshroud Poacher, for each Rite of Passage putting counters on Skyshroud Poacher, for each Doubling Season on the Rite of Passage counters added to Skyshroud Poacher, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Sinking Feeling's ability while it's attached to Skyshroud Poacher, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Skyshroud Poacher's ability...13. Total 311. Newly carved out space: Elves
Section 28
54
The good news right now is we're running out of card slots that need filling, which means we can start painting away broader swaths of design space. If we can't go after Skyshroud Poacher as a Rebel, then what else out about it? Well, it is green, and by now we should be good for cutting off the entire color in one fell swoop: King Crab is as good a card for the job as any, reminding us of the power that enemy colors used to be capable of inflicting on each other.
Section 28 Summary
Input: One playing of King Crab Output: Lots of reuse of Skyshroud Poacher Layer count: For each Bloodbond March, for each Clash of Realities on a new Mimic Vat, for each Guilty Conscience on Mimic Vat, for each Rite of Passage putting counters on Mimic Vat, for each Doubling Season on the Rite of Passage counters added to Mimic Vat, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Sinking Feeling's ability while it's attached to Mimic Vat, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Mimic Vat's ability, for each Clash of Realities on King Crab, for each Guilty Conscience on King Crab, for each Rite of Passage putting counters on King Crab, for each Doubling Season on the Rite of Passage counters added to King Crab, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Sinking Feeling's ability while it's attached to King Crab, for each Rings of Brighthearth on King Crab's ability, for each Grip of Chaos, for each Psychic Battle...15. Total 326. Newly carved out space: Green creatures
Section 29
55
And if King Crab looked like an enemy hoser, then one look at Spinal Villain...wow. They sure don't make cards like that any more, but this one has already been printed, so we can take good care of it and teach it how to slap a lot of crabs. Maybe take it to an underwater party and show it off as a neat trick, assuming everyone isn't immediately scared away by its mere sight.
Spinal Villain's creature type (after errata) happens to be Beast, which has a mild amount of tribal support. Nothing that can be used this high up and with this few card slots remaining, though.
Section 29 Summary
Input: One playing of Spinal Villain Output: Lots of reuse of King Crab Layer count: For each Bloodbond March, for each Clash of Realities on a new Mimic Vat, for each Guilty Conscience on Mimic Vat, for each Rite of Passage putting counters on Mimic Vat, for each Doubling Season on the Rite of Passage counters added to Mimic Vat, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Sinking Feeling's ability while it's attached to Mimic Vat, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Mimic Vat's ability, for each Clash of Realities on Spinal Villain, for each Guilty Conscience on Spinal Villain, for each Rite of Passage putting counters on Spinal Villain, for each Doubling Season on the Rite of Passage counters added to Spinal Villain, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Sinking Feeling's ability while it's attached to Spinal Villain, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Spinal Villain's ability, for each Grip of Chaos, for each Psychic Battle...15. Total 341. Newly carved out space: Blue creatures
Section 30
56
So we're in the color-hosing sequence, and need to go after red now to continue drawing a pentagram on the color wheel. Southern Paladin is the obvious choice that comes to mind, and there's not really much interesting to say about it. Just another card humming along at peak efficiency, all in a good day's work. Or a good Knight's work, given the Paladin's own creature type.
Section 30 Summary
Input: One playing of Southern Paladin Output: Lots of reuse of Spinal Villain Layer count: For each Bloodbond March, for each Clash of Realities on a new Mimic Vat, for each Guilty Conscience on Mimic Vat, for each Rite of Passage putting counters on Mimic Vat, for each Doubling Season on the Rite of Passage counters added to Mimic Vat, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Sinking Feeling's ability while it's attached to Mimic Vat, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Mimic Vat's ability, for each Clash of Realities on Southern Paladin, for each Guilty Conscience on Southern Paladin, for each Rite of Passage putting counters on Southern Paladin, for each Doubling Season on the Rite of Passage counters added to Southern Paladin, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Sinking Feeling's ability while it's attached to Southern Paladin, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Southern Paladin's ability, for each Grip of Chaos, for each Psychic Battle...15. Total 356. Newly carved out space: Red permanents
Section 31
57
After Southern Paladin, there are still four deck slots left, and two colors that haven't been eliminated, so we can't keep going at the rate of one color per card for the rest of the way. For now, though, we can take a step that's almost as drastic as cutting off a fourth color: Garza's Assassin, which goes after nonblack creatures, when we're already hemmed in to just white or black. This once again represents a bit of a regression in efficiency from the last few steps since Garza's Assassin uses a sacrifice cost instead of a tap cost, but one nice thing about the Assassin is it has its own built-in recursion mechanism: the recover ability.
Sacrifing creatures with all the tools at our disposal is extremely easy, so we can trigger recover pretty much whenever we want. Each usage costs half our life, so the starting 20 life allows us to pay that cost four times before going down to 1. After that, we'd better get used to playing with the "low health warning" beeps in the background, because we'll be gaining life and losing life a lot, but we're never going back to a total as high as 20. To be fair, though, neither is the opponent.
Section 31 Summary
Input: One playing of Garza's Assassin Output: Lots of reuse of Southern Paladin Layer count: For each Bloodbond March, for each Clash of Realities on a new Mimic Vat, for each Guilty Conscience on Mimic Vat, for each Rite of Passage putting counters on Mimic Vat, for each Doubling Season on the Rite of Passage counters added to Mimic Vat, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Sinking Feeling's ability while it's attached to Mimic Vat, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Mimic Vat's ability, for each Doubling Season on the tokens created by Mimic Vat, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Garza's Assassin's ability, for each Grip of Chaos, for each Psychic Battle...11. Total 367. Newly carved out space: Nonblack creatures
Section 32
58
As a refreshing change of pace, we have Tithe Drinker, a card with just two words of rules text. One of those words is Extort, which can be used as soon as the Tithe Drinker shows up. The next time we play any spell, we can throw in a black mana, drain 1 life to go to 2, and then pay back down to 1 to use recover on Garza's Assassin. This can be repeated 19 times...we certainly don't want a 20th repetition, since that would drain the opponent to 0 life and end the game prematurely, and that's bad. From then on, Extort will still trigger on every spell, but we will always ignore it.
And the other word? Lifelink. We never need to outfit Tithe Drinker with any Auras at all, just let it deal damage in blocks of 3 at a time with Clash of Realities, gain 3 life back up to 4, and that's enough to use recover two more times. There's no sense accumulating bigger chunks of life than that: from 4 life, we can recover twice and drop to 1, but if we gain another 3 life, that second batch doesn't enable any additional uses of recover: from 7, the first payment goes to 3, and the second still goes to 1. There are some places where it's good to rack up bigger and bigger numbers, but in this one instance, we're better off sticking to small ones.
Section 32 Summary
Input: One playing of Tithe Drinker Output: Lots of reuse of Garza's Assassin Layer count: For each Bloodbond March, for each Clash of Realities on a new Mimic Vat, for each Guilty Conscience on Mimic Vat, for each Rite of Passage putting counters on Mimic Vat, for each Doubling Season on the Rite of Passage counters added to Mimic Vat, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Sinking Feeling's ability while it's attached to Mimic Vat, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Mimic Vat's ability, for each Clash of Realities on Tithe Drinker...8. Total 375. Newly carved out space: Life sinks
Section 33
59
Southern Paladin, of course, was made as an offshoot of Northern Paladin from the very first set, after people had been asking for years why such a card didn't exist. Fast forward another year and a half, and Wizards of the Coast decided to complete the compass with (almost-)mirrors in black: the Wicked Paladins of the West and East. These black versions only say they target "creatures", instead of generic "permanents", not that it matters because anything we might ever want to target here has already been turned into a creature, and Cowardice only works on creatures or things that have been turned into creatures anyway. It's not quite gang warfare between the paladins, since a couple of intervening steps have set up the Western Paladin to slap Tithe Drinker with its rubber glove, but you know what they say about the enemy of our enemy of our enemy...
We've already been cut off from nonblack creatures, but luckily Tithe Drinker happens to be a black creature, so that's okay. It's also a white creature, though, so this is another case where we pretty much get to double dip in carving off that piece of the pie. Mmm, pie.
Section 33 Summary
Input: One playing of Western Paladin Output: Lots of reuse of Tithe Drinker Layer count: For each Bloodbond March, for each Clash of Realities on a new Mimic Vat, for each Guilty Conscience on Mimic Vat, for each Rite of Passage putting counters on Mimic Vat, for each Doubling Season on the Rite of Passage counters added to Mimic Vat, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Sinking Feeling's ability while it's attached to Mimic Vat, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Mimic Vat's ability, for each Clash of Realities on Western Paladin, for each Guilty Conscience on Western Paladin, for each Rite of Passage putting counters on Western Paladin, for each Doubling Season on the Rite of Passage counters added to Western Paladin, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Sinking Feeling's ability while it's attached to Western Paladin, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Western Paladin's ability, for each Grip of Chaos, for each Psychic Battle...15. Total 390. Newly carved out space: White creatures
Section 34
60
Fifty-nine cards down, one to go, and true to their conniving ways, the cards so far have (just about) reduced our pickings to nothing but black creatures. What better way to keep up the trend, than by putting Minion of Leshrac so close to the top?
Like Tsabo Tavoc, Minion of Leshrac takes advantage of the "protection from itself" trick to declare a broad targeting condition--in this case, any creature or land--without falling afoul of it. It swings at the Western Paladin with a comically oversized rubber mallet, I'm sure, and the crowd goes wild. Assuming they haven't all fallen asleep by now. Or died of old age.
Believe it or not, the search space isn't entirely closed off yet, even after a wrecking ball that looks as solid as Minion of Leshrac. Devout Lightcaster could still go above it, though it would only be for 9 layers. Three cards all try to close it out: Western Paladin, Garza's Assassin, and Minion of Leshrac, but they're all black so Devout Lightcaster has protection from them all. As a Kor Cleric, nothing is shutting it down on tribal grounds, and a converted mana cost of 3 is likewise safe.
The problem with adding Devout Lightcaster is, plain and simple, that we're out of deck space. The challenge imposes a 60-card limit for a reason, and we've reached it now. Furthermore, simply cutting Lightcaster and losing 9 layers is less harsh than any other single-card cut from the current outline, considering that in some cases we'd have to rejigger the pieces of the puzzle to snap together again. But if the skeleton needed even one card less overhead, such as being able to get by with just one of the tandem of Mana Crypt or Thran Dynamo, it could be done.
Section 34 Summary
Input: One playing of Minion of Leshrac Output: Lots of reuse of Western Paladin Layer count: For each Bloodbond March, for each Clash of Realities on a new Mimic Vat, for each Guilty Conscience on Mimic Vat, for each Rite of Passage putting counters on Mimic Vat, for each Doubling Season on the Rite of Passage counters added to Mimic Vat, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Sinking Feeling's ability while it's attached to Mimic Vat, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Mimic Vat's ability, for each Clash of Realities on Minion of Leshrac, for each Guilty Conscience on Minion of Leshrac, for each Rite of Passage putting counters on Minion of Leshrac, for each Doubling Season on the Rite of Passage counters added to Minion of Leshrac, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Sinking Feeling's ability while it's attached to Minion of Leshrac, for each Rings of Brighthearth on Minion of Leshrac's ability, for each Grip of Chaos, for each Psychic Battle...15. Total 405. Newly carved out space: Other creatures
Section 36
5
--
8
So, Clash of Realities. It grants two separate triggers to creatures, depending on their types, and all this time we've been running off the ability it grants to non-Spirits, while carefully controlling some of the more delicate parts of the board to make sure it always has a legal target available.
If we can generate Spirits, though, we can start using the other ability, which targets anything else and can be used as the one mechanism that can touch Minion of Leshrac. This is the reason why Rousing of Souls shines as the card draw card, more than Enter the Infinite (which has no reuse at all), more than Yawgmoth's Bargain (which prevents us from making use of Garza's Assassin or Tithe Drinker), more than anything. In a deck fixed at 60 card slots, it achieves the impressively dense dual function of drawing cards and creating Spirits. Since Minion of Leshrac is the optimal card to be drawing each time, and it has to be in the library for that, we should have the initial Clash of Realities triggers target the next-best thing, Western Paladin, and use the redirects of the abilities to start bouncing the Minion again once we get everything resituated.
Of course, since we can refill the library at will using Mirror of Fate, this type of recursion seems difficult to keep tame. But there's the rub: In another stunning victory for information density, Rousing of Souls instructs each player to draw a card. While the opponent can have several basic lands out, and we can bounce them back to their hand almost at will, or even destroy and exile them by letting abilities resolve like Minion of Leshrac's, we have absolutely no way to put those cards back in the library. So even though this is a goldfish opponent, and it doesn't matter what they do, it is their cards that prove to be the ultimate limiting factor.
Section 36 Summary
Input: One playing of Rousing of Souls Output: Lots of reuse of Minion of Leshrac Layer count: For each Grip of Chaos, for each Psychic Battle...2. Total 407. Newly carved out space: Non-Spirit creatures, cards in libraries
Endgame
(This card is not actually included. Only the sentiment.)
These numbers are big enough that they defy description by any means other than boring, rote expressions (which are even underestimated by a good deal). But finally, after going through all 60 cards, and somehow dodging penalties for Slow Play and Stalling in the process, everything that can be done, has been.
Except for one minor little thing. So far, the Clash of Realities, as well as everyone's Guilty Conscience, has caused a good deal of friendly fire to rain down on our own creatures (which they all shrug off), but other than that, there's been exactly 0 damage dealt over the course of the combo. To help alleviate that, we have a few finishing touches. When our determined little wind-up soldiers have been wound down as much as possible, and the fuel has just about reached its limit, we can sacrifice Thran Dynamo and let it go on Mimic Vat--something we haven't done before, as now it can be our last source of colorless mana.
After we run the Allay loop a few more times as a coda to this epic symphony, when we get down to the last 6 mana, that's the cue to play Allay once more--this time without buyback. One last round trip of that, and this time its final acts should be to bounce Cowardice, change its target for the last time, respond by playing Clash of Realities to top up on it, and let Allay destroy Omniscience. Even with nothing capable of perpetuating the combo any further, there are still plenty of spare copies of Mimic Vat, so Omniscience can go on one of those. Drop down to 3 mana left and activate that copy of Mimic Vat, getting several token copies of Omniscience, each of which triggers Clash of Realities so many times. And in response to that, sacrifice Copy Enchantment, put it on a different Mimic Vat, and empty our mana pool for the last time to make a batch of Copy Enchantment tokens. All of these should copy Doubling Season except one, which becomes a Guilty Conscience attached to one of the Omniscience tokens. (Rite of Passage would normally be better, if we were responding in between each trigger. But we have no further responses, so this configuration is the best we can do.) All these hasty enchantment tokens will use Clash of Realities to repeatedly deal damage to a Spirit token, which is a pointless gesture. The only one that's not pointless is the Omniscience copy that has the Guilty Conscience on it, where damage dealt will turn into damage incoming, which turns into one final resource: a glut of +1/+1 counters from Rite of Passage that outstrips the numbers of anything else we have.
Now we can finally move to the combat phase, and swing with whatever's untapped and has haste. Essentially, this means the last batch of Mimic Vat tokens from whatever creatures don't have tap abilities and thus don't run themselves into the ground with Sinking Feeling, plus the two batches of 5/5 Doubling Seasons and 10/10 Omnisciences mentioned above. And of course, one lucky copy of Omniscience won the lottery, and gets to be a lot bigger than 10/10. The opponent may have used Show and Tell to drop some free lands, but we can sacrifice Nature's Revolt if necessary to make sure all their lands are unanimated, ineligible to block.
So how much damage is that? If you've been keeping track along with me, you'll see that my count comes to 407 nested layers of recursion. That means we're looking at a number of the form 2^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^?, where the number of arrows is 407, and ? is essentially the number of Rite of Passage copies that trigger on the final burst of damage to the all-powerful Omniscience. Of course this number is really big itself, and since writing over 400 arrows looks downright ugly, I vote that it's time to move past Mr. Knuth's notation, and on to a variation thereof developed by another mathematician, John Conway (yes, he of cellular automaton fame). Conway's system is based on right arrows instead of up arrows, and for now all you need to know about it is that the expression "a -> b -> c" means the same thing as "a ^^^^...^^^^ b, with a total of c arrows between them". (This notation can also be extended to expressions that use 3 or more right arrows, but those are beyond the scope of this page, and I doubt the system of Magic will ever be expressive enough to include the types of constructs that would call for their use, outside of cases that truly do go infinite.)
Instead of that long string of up arrows, then, we can write 2 -> ? -> 407, where ? is a number that is itself rather close (in a holistic sense) to the number of permanents; that number is also of the form 2 -> * -> 407. * is smaller than ?--it's controlled by the number of times Rousing of Souls was able to target Minion of Leshrac, creating more copies of everything else--so the best estimate I can give for * is a number of the form 2 -> # -> 405.
In any case, * is certainly bigger than 4, and since 4 can be expanded out to "2 -> 2 -> x" for any x value whatsoever, the damage potential can be expressed as something no less than 2 -> (2 -> (2 -> 2 -> 407) -> 407) -> 407. This is the Conway equivalent of the Knuth expression "2 ^^^... 2 ^^^... 2 ^^^... 2", which means we can collapse it and go up a level, expressing it as 2 -> 4 -> 408. (By the same token, it can also be expressed as 2 -> 3 -> 409, but advancing to the 409th layer is certainly unjustified at this point, and the apparent extra jump is merely a consequence of the small numbers involved at the top.)
The 408th layer consists of "for each Rousing of Souls", and here's where we have to give a closer account of the cards involved. Since Rousing of Souls causes each player to draw cards at the same rate, if we naively use it to put all our cards in hand as soon as possible, the opponent's library will be empty too, and we won't be able to use it at all after the entire structure has been put in place.
Instead, our focus should be on gaining access to as many cards in the deck as possible by means other than Rousing of Souls. A rundown of what we can do with our chosen card list:
Muzzio, Visionary Architect can extract 8 cards: both Rust Ticks, Millikin, Mirror of Fate, Soul of New Phyrexia, Vault of Whispers, Vedalken Orrery, and Rings of Brighthearth. (It can't be used for the initial extraction of Mana Crypt, Thran Dynamo, and Mimic Vat, all of which have necessary uses in getting us set up before we ever get to the point where blue mana is available for Muzzio's ability. In particular, Mimic Vat is the only way Muzzio can ever gain haste to use its ability for the first time.)
Cateran Overlord can extract 4 cards: Mercenary Informer, Cateran Slaver, Cateran Enforcer, and Seahunter.
Seahunter can in turn extract 2 cards: Tidal Warrior and Empress Galina.
Skyshroud Poacher can extract 1 card: Skyshroud Archer.
Mnemonic Wall can extract 1 card: Allay, by letting one copy of Mirror of Fate exile the library early on while we get started, then another copy puts Allay back into the library, and Millikin puts Allay into the graveyard.
In summary, that's a net of 16 cards by which we can "pull ahead" over the opponent. Rousing of Souls will naturally draw Minion of Leshrac once, getting everything up to speed, and then we get to play it 16 additional times. As above, the first copy that has the entire engine in place will reach 2 -> 4 -> 408, then the first excess copy goes to 2 -> 5 -> 408, then 2 -> 6 -> 408, and so on. The sixteenth additional copy, then, produces our final damage figure: about
2 -> 20 -> 408.
Even a googolplex, a number commonly cited as being absolutely monstrous, is nothing but a rounding error when compared to 2 -> 3 -> 4. That still doesn't make it very clear just how big 2 -> 20 -> 408 is, but it might give you a good idea how powerful and compact Conway's notation can be even at low values, and one thing's for sure. I wouldn't want to take 2 -> 20 -> 408 damage in a Magic game any time soon. Especially not on turn 1. Let's now give a moment of silence to the hapless goldfish opponent who had to suffer such a fate here.
Okay, time's up. Proceed to the combat damage step.
"Game over. User wins."
That's about all that can be done, unless future sets bring out a card that can be used to improve this result while still not going infinite. Or, who knows. Maybe there's another hidden treasure already out there, waiting for you to find it and change around the combo to do even more! My first approach to writing a deck overview in this strain, as linked up at the top, came to 113 layers. Little did I know that the technology already existed, or would soon exist, to get over three times as much recursion, and average nearly 7 full Knuth arrows for every single card in the deck! So will you get to stake your claim? You won't know until you try.
And of course, different variations on the problem are possible, such as using a 100-card deck with Commander rules, giving more deck space...
If you have any questions for the authors or ideas for improvement, current discussion is in the MTGSalvation topic here. Prior discussion was on Wizards of the Coast's own forum, but that link will stop working after 2015/10/29.
Until next time, may your multi-layer combos prove as delicious as a multi-layer cake.
