Author: Alex

Ultima Thule

A few days ago, the world was introduced to this photo:

Ultima Thule

This weird snowman-shaped thing is the most distant place humanity has ever explored.

Its name is Ultima Thule. It was flown by and photographed by the New Horizons probe, which famously got us our first look at Pluto back in 2015. Over the next few years, as scientists closely examine the data it’s transmitting, we will gain a far greater understanding of how our solar system formed and what it looked like five billion years ago. Its value will be immeasurable.

I’m not here to talk about that. Some day, when we’ve actually learned those things and don’t just have initial photographs, I might. In the meantime, I want to talk about something more innocuous: its name.

There’s a lot of politics involved in the naming of astronomical objects. While scientific literature uses certain rules to convey the most important information (Kepler 22b for instance, indicates the first planet orbiting the star Kepler 22), just try asking a fifth grader to remember the name 2014 MU69. The names of the planets have stuck around since antiquity, but what about the new ones we discover? Even within our solar system, new dwarf planets get found in the Kuiper belt (where Pluto is, basically) every year. Should we name them all after Roman gods? What happens when we run out? And why are we still using names from a mythology revered only in western civilization?

Scientists have fixed the last two problems by expanding to new mythologies. Sedna, for instance, is named for the Inuit goddess of the sea. Smaller objects, asteroids and comets like Ultima Thule, are named for meaningful phrases or minor heroes in any number of languages and mythologies. But even that can be fraught. The scientists who named Ultima Thule have since come under fire for using the phrase, which has connections to Nazi ideology. To be clear, NASA didn’t intend that meaning. So why did they pick it?

Ultima Thule is originally latin, and translates to “beyond the farthest land”. Except that it isn’t. “Ultima” from the Late Latin “ultimare”, or “to come to an end”, is, but “thule” is not a word. It comes from Ancient Greek, where it is also not a word. Anecdotally, it looks Germanic. Mixtures of Latin and Germanic words aren’t uncommon in English, but the phrase “ultima thule” predates English.

To understand where the word came from, we have to go back 2000 years, to a man named Pytheas of Massalia. He was a Greek geographer who lived from around 350 to 240 BCE, hailing from a colony that would later become Marseille, France. During his lifetime, he explored the north of Europe in a voyage he later described in his work, “On the Water”.

Sadly, this manuscript has been lost to time. All we have of it are the excerpts quoted by other, later authors. But from those, we can begin to uncover his route.

His first hurdle would have been the Strait of Gibraltar, the narrow passage connecting the Mediterranean and the Atlantic Ocean. At the time, the rival nation of Carthage had closed the Strait to all ships from other nations. Historians have speculated that he began his voyage overland, journeying to the mouth of the Loire and constructing his ship there. However, it is more likely that he went through the Strait, either by running the Carthaginian blockade or by negotiating for safe passage.

From there, he travelled to Britain, likely the first Greek ever to do so (while there are older Greek artifacts in archaeological digs in the UK, it’s believed those were indirectly brought there by traders). There, he circumnavigated the British Isles, mapping the coastline and making first contact with the people there. This is where the name “Britain” comes from: it’s a transliteration of a Celtic word roughly meaning “land of the painted men”, referring to the Celtic tradition of painting their faces.

He discovered the Orkney Islands, to the north. He sailed to the Vistula River in the north of Poland, and the entire Germanic coast of the Baltic Sea, what today is Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. He is the first explorer of his people to encounter drifting sea ice. And he discovered a distant land called “Thule”.

By Pytheas’s account, Thule is an island six days’ travel north of Britain. That would put it on the coast of Norway, or possibly Iceland. It was inside the arctic circle: Pliny the Elder reported that it as having no night on the summer solstice, a phenomenon known in principle to the Greeks but never before seen in person. The people there lived on roots and grain, and it is likely their language gave him the name “Thule”.

From there, he sailed northward, but discovered nothing but frozen ocean and was forced to turn back before long. When he returned, the annals of his journeys became the Greeks’ best source of knowledge on these distant lands.

And of those lands the most distant of all was Thule.

This, then, was the source of the word, and of its mysticism: before Kepler, before Magellan, before even Rome, Thule was the last name on the map. Beyond it be dragons.

So far, this story is an tale of exploration and etymology that began and ended thousands of years ago. Where do the Nazis come in?

Today, discussion of Nazism as an ideology and ethos fixates on its genocidal xenophobia and antisemitism, but there was far more to Hitler’s platform than “kill the Jews”. And the other stuff was weird. Among Nazism’s early influences was an esoteric philosophy called “Ariosophy“. It mixed social Darwinist racial theory over the Aryan race and bizarre mysticism, even giving the movement the symbol of the Swastika.  This evolved into a widespread obsession with the occult in the highest circles of Nazi Germany, particularly in the SS. According to Eric Kurlander, a professor at Stetson University, various members of the Nazi leadership believed in everything from Satanism to the claim that the Aryan race descended from the space aliens who built Atlantis. The iconography of the SS, with its skull rings and runic logo, were built on Heinrich Himmler’s fascination with witchcraft and esoteric traditions. He even commandeered a medieval castle and remodeled it to be reminiscent of the Arthurian Grail legend. My personal favorite, however is the idea that the Aryan Race descended from superbeings that evolved from the inhabitants of icy moons that impacted Earth in antiquity like some antisemitic Kal-El, a viewpoint Hitler supported well into 1942.

From Ariosophy and the swamp of mysticism that abetted it came a group called the Thule Society. It was founded in 1918, and centered around the belief that the Aryan Race traced its origin in antiquity to the Hyperborean people, who in turn came from the island of Thule. Each new recruit had to take this pledge:

“The signer hereby swears to the best of his knowledge and belief that no Jewish or coloured blood flows in either his or in his wife’s veins, and that among their ancestors are no members of the coloured races.”

The society didn’t last long: while it’s hard to trace the actions of secret societies, it appears to have been forgotten about by the early 1920s. But late in 1918, a journalist and Thule Society member Karl Harrer persuaded his friend Anton Drexler to form the activist group Politischer Arbeiter-Zirkel, the “Political Workers’ Circle”. In January of the next year, its members decided to create a new party, the German Workers’ Party. A few months later, a young man named Adolf Hitler began attending meetings.

A year after that, the German Workers’ Party had been dissolved, replaced by the Nazi Party that would later kill a third of all Jews in existence.

There is little evidence that the Thule Society itself had any influence on Nazism: the only person involved in that story to actually be a member, Harrer, resigned the party in protest in 1920. True, it was antisemitic, but so was most of Germany at the time. Yet its role in the origins of the great evil of the 20th century has left it inextricably linked with that organization.

Which brings us back to Ultima Thule. The name does not refer to the Nazi’s use. In fact, the Thule Society was far more preoccupied with the island itself than with the ancient phrase for “beyond the known world”. Yet its members, and by extension its beliefs, did play a part in the early origins of Nazism.

On balance, I don’t think it matters. Even if you accept the counterfactual argument that Nazism would not exist without the Thule Society’s input, they are a footnote in the story of that ideology. It was merely a part of the same mystic tradition in Weimar Germany that played a role in Hitler’s rise and the iconography of his movement. So was Thor, for that matter, and we still watch The Avengers.

As I write this, “Ultima Thule” delivers 125,000,000 search results on Google. “Ultima Thule nazi” has roughly 1% as many. Whatever its connotations may have been in the past, the phrase has returned to harmony with its meaning from antiquity. It stands for exploration, for humanity’s innate desire to fill in the blank spaces on the map. It stands for the work of hundreds of scientists to build a machine that could fly 6.5 billion kilometers through the vacuum of space to fly by an object even our most powerful telescopes on Earth couldn’t see and take pictures. It invites you to wonder, if 2000 years ago the name referred to Scandinavia and today it belongs to the most distant reaches of our solar system, where Ultima Thule will be 2000 years from now.

Place your bets now.

Ben Shapiro is Really Bad with Facts and Logic

If you’ve spent any time in the political spheres of the internet, and/or read through the replies of any liberal or leftist on twitter, you’ve probably seen videos getting shared with titles like “Ben Shapiro DESTROYS Transgenderism And Pro-Abortion Arguments“. Every time he comes to talk at a liberal university, another one gets uploaded, and like clockwork, it gets over a million views. If these videos were all you saw of political discussion, you would think that the left was a pack of morons and that Ben Shapiro was every bit the feared debater his fans believe him to be. No wonder the liberal intellectuals won’t risk debating him and the academics are too scared to let him on their campus!

He’s not, by the way. He’s a mediocre political thinker who survives by debating college students who don’t recognize the blatant fallacies and rhetorical tricks he calls “facts and logic”. But he’s still worth studying, because he’s not the only person using these exact tricks to win arguments, and it’s important to know how to recognize them when they’re being thrown at your face.

I can’t go through every debate Ben Shapiro’s ever been a part of and explain how he’s bullshitting you each time. It’s too much ground to cover. I’m going to focus on one video, the one I linked earlier. It’s from the youtube channel for the Daily Wire. He’s the editor-in-chief there, so this is how he wants you to first experience his arguments. Otherwise, he wouldn’t post it. It’s got over four million views, making it one of his most-seen productions. And it conveniently covers most of the tricks he uses.

Before we go any further, if you haven’t seen the video, take a moment to watch it, so you know I’m not misrepresenting what he’s saying. Seriously. It’s only ten minutes long, and if you’re reading this blog post, you don’t have anything better to do. Don’t worry, I’ll wait.

Back?

Okay, let’s get to the good part.

Part One: Does Trans is Real?

The first question he gets is “how can you say that some people don’t have privilege, when you basically just said that trans people aren’t valid, they’re not a thing, they’re just girls pretending to be boys or boys pretending to be girls?”, but a minute later, we find out that the topic they’re discussing is whether or not trans boys should be accepted into the Boy Scouts. I think that’s also the moment where he “DESTROYS Transgenderism”, because there’s an exchange where he says that the Boy Scouts have rules for membership and you have to be a biological boy to be a part of them, and this happens:

Random college student: “Where is that written, though?”

Ben Shapiro: “In the name Boy Scout.”

I should start by pointing out that that video was posted on February 9 of last year, and the Boy Scouts of America had already been accepting trans boys for over a week at that point, so technically what he said wasn’t true, but let’s pretend otherwise. Let’s move on to the actual arguments he makes. There are several, and we’ll start with the first: “You’re 22. Why can’t you choose to identify as a 60-year-old?”

What he’s doing here is drawing a equivalence between what his opponent believes (your gender is what you feel it is), and something his opponent doesn’t believe (your age is what you feel it is). It’s like a proof by contradiction: “you argue A. If A is true, then so is B. You argue against B, so either you’re wrong about A, or B, or both”.

What he’s not doing is providing any reason why age and gender are similar. In his version of the example argument I just gave you, the critical second sentence is nowhere to be found. Without that, everything he’s saying is just an analogy, with no evidentiary value one way or the other.

Put another way: we can all agree that in this day and age, you can change your hair color pretty much any way you want. Why can’t you change your gender? It’s the exact same argument, supporting the opposite of his point.

At this point, Ben Shapiro knows what he just said is fatally flawed, and he doesn’t want you to realize it. So he phrases his argument as a question: “you’re 22, so why aren’t you 60?”

This is what we call a “loaded question”. It implicitly assumes that age and gender are related so that you can’t answer it without arguing against yourself. Any idiot could respond to “you can’t change your gender because you can’t change your age”, but now the whole auditorium is trying to figure out why this random college student isn’t 60.

Also, this is by the by, but age actually isn’t that immutable either. Ben Shapiro is 34 because it’s been 34 years since he was born if we go by the Gregorian calendar, but if we used a lunar calendar like the islamic Hijiri instead, something that wouldn’t be out of place for most of human history, he’d be 36. It’s almost as though age and how we measure it isn’t an inherent biological trait, but something we all just decided on at some point and could theoretically change if we found a better system. You know, just something to think about.

Now, let’s move on to his second argument. The woman with the microphone points out that you can legally change your gender, and he spits back this gem:

“Just because you can do something legally does not mean that they are correct biologically. Lots of things in the past that were incorrect biologically were correct legally. For a long period of time in the United States, sterilization of the mentally ill took place. That didn’t make it okay, Skinner v. Oklahoma, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the decision.”

Strictly speaking, his argument is right here: legality is a terrible way to judge if something is morally or scientifically true. Evolution was false and pi almost equaled 3 in this country, if you just go by the law. Shapiro’s point is essentially sound. But he’s still using a dishonest rhetorical trick, and it’s worth unpacking what it is and why it’s there.

The Supreme Court case Ben just cited is completely irrelevant to the greater argument. At question in Skinner v. Oklahoma were the ethical ramifications of sterilizing the mentally ill, and the implication of the Fourteenth Amendment on the subject. There was no “biological truth” being decided here. So why is Ben using it to argue that “legal” and “biologically correct” are different things?

There’s two reasons I can think of. First, as a society, we see biological truth/scientific truth as more concrete than ethical truth. The Earth is round and people who think it’s flat are wrong, but we accept that different people will have different opinions on what is morally right or wrong all the time. So by conflating ethical and biological truth here, he gets to make the vaguer and easier moral argument to prove the harder point that what he’s saying is scientifically correct.

Second, something like mandatory sterilization has a visceral impact in the audience that you can’t get from evolution or pi. There isn’t any demonstrated harm in using different pronouns for a trans person or allowing gender to be malleable (besides to the English language, which, let’s face it, has survived far worse than the singular “they”), but there was in Skinner. It doesn’t matter if the argument’s a complete tangent, because right now the auditorium is thinking “transgender people=chopping your balls off”.

Also, Oliver Wendell Holmes didn’t write the decision in Skinner. It was actually William O. Douglas. Holmes had been dead for eight years at that point. He’s mixing it up with Buck v. Bell, when Holmes actually UPHELD the sterilization of the mentally ill, famously writing “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” For the guy who coined “facts don’t care about your feelings”, Ben is proving to be pretty bad at the facts.

His third argument is kinda long, so I won’t write it all out, but the gist is that societal respect for trans people won’t make any difference for them, because a study from UCLA’s Anderson School the year before says that the suicide rate for trans people is 40%, and that number doesn’t change whether or not people recognize you as a transgender person or not.

As usual, we have to start with a caveat: UCLA’s Anderson School is for business and management, and I’m pretty sure it’s never published a study on transgenderism. This is something he ought to know, you know, since that’s where he went for undergrad, but we’ll leave that be. I think he’s referring to this study by UCLA’s Williams Institute, a think tank in their law school “dedicated to conducting rigorous, independent research on sexual orientation and gender identity law and public policy“. This seems like an odd source for Ben Shapiro to cite, so let’s dive into the numbers.

Earlier, I was just being pedantic about when he missed a detail, but this one really bothers me. First of all, the numbers he’s referring to are for whether other people can tell the respondent is trans when they’re walking down the street, not recognition of identity. The table is on page 9. The description of what it means is right above it. At first, that confused me, because I interpreted what Shapiro was saying to mean “it makes no difference whether or not trans people are recognized”, as in, accepted, rather than recognized as in noticed. After all, that’s what he’s been arguing about. His phrasing was vague, though, so it could go either way. It’s possible he described his argument badly in a way that happens to make this tangential datapoint sound more relevant than it is. It’s also possible he just scanned through the paper’s data tables for the factor with the smallest difference and didn’t even bother to read the titles. You’d have to ask him.

More importantly though, almost everything he said about that study was wrong. That table DID find a statistically significant difference: as much as 9%. And if you scan through the rest of the paper, you find numbers like these:

  • More than half of trans respondents who said they’d been harassed or bullied at any point in their education attempted suicide, vs. 40% on average.
  • Trans people who were discriminated against in housing had attempted suicide about 60% of the time.
  • Trans people who were discriminated against in a work environment attempted suicide more than half the time.
  • Likewise for trans people who have been discriminated against in how they received medical care.

So Ben hasn’t gotten his facts wrong so much as he’s blatantly lied about a scientific study in order to support his beliefs. Even if all he’d read from this report was the Executive Summary, he’d know that the paper said the exact opposite of what he claimed it said. So there’s another trick to watch out for: he might just be lying through his teeth.

After that, he brings in some nonsense about suicide rates by race, but it’s hard for me to care at that point, because the data already proves him wrong: Trans people who are discriminated against in various ways attempt suicide at a quantifiably higher rate. If there is a difference between that and what we see in the black community, that doesn’t mean the data is wrong, it means we need to explore what might be different between the two that could cause black people to respond to discrimination differently from trans people.

And that’s not to say there isn’t a legitimate conversation to be had about the merits of that study. It has any number of methodological flaws, many of which are mentioned in the “Limitations” section of the paper. For instance, its heavy emphasis on discrimination questions could have weighted the sample to include more people who have had negative experiences, which could have affected the overall suicide rates it reports. It only asked the binary question “have you ever attempted suicide”, which we know can result in false positives where people answer “yes” if they’ve engaged in other self-harming behavior like cutting, but haven’t reached the point of suicide. And it doesn’t provide any information on how many trans people have successfully committed suicide, because, you know, it’s hard to get a corpse to fill out a survey.

There is lots of space for legitimate, logical, and nuanced debate on the subject of trans rights and inclusion in our society.

You just won’t find it in the same room as Ben Shapiro.

Part 2: Vaginas and the Soul

There’s another five minutes in that video, which they spend talking about abortion. I’m going to skip the dumb factual argument over how many abortions Planned Parenthood performs so we can get to the part where he DESTROYS pro-abortion arguments: “I have one question and one question only on abortion: does the vagina, the vaginal canal, magically confer personhood?”

You don’t even have to watch the rest to know what happens next. The crowd shouts out some point in time where a fetus turns into a person (I hear “the first breath!” but on other nights you might  hear “when the fetus is viable outside the womb” or “the third trimester” or any number of other dates), and Ben proceeds to shoot them down with the same argument: “so if I take a baby one minute before that point, and I stab it, it’s not murder?”

This argument is the rare “two-fallacies-for-the-price-of-one” deal: we’ve got a loaded question, like his first argument about age. But we’ve also got something interesting, one that even many logicians overlook.

It’s called the “continuum fallacy”, or sometimes the “heap fallacy”. It’s the mistaken argument that if you have two different states a thing can be in, and you can’t point to a discrete line dividing the two, one must dominate. In other words:

If I put a single grain of sand on a table, do I have a pile? No. How about if I put two? Still no. Three, four, five, ten, fifteen grains of sand don’t constitute a pile. In fact, if I have n grains of sand, that aren’t a pile, and I add one more, it’s ridiculous to say that I now have a pile, just from adding a single grain of sand. Therefore, no matter how much sand I add to the table, it will never be a pile. Therefore, piles of sand don’t exist!

The problem with this argument is that, even though any specific dividing line may be flawed, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t one somewhere. It could be a continuum: I’m not six feet tall, but I’m also not five feet tall, I’m somewhere in between, and that in-between may or may not be quantifiable. It could be that there is overlap: if you boiled pots of water all over the world at different heights and atmospheric pressures, some would turn from liquid to gas while others still had a long way to go. It could be that we aren’t using the right measurement: I can’t give you a line for how massive a rock in space has to be before it becomes a planet, because its mass is only tangentially related to the definition.

Ironically enough for someone who just spent 6 minutes railing against the idea of gender as a social construct, Ben Shapiro is abusing a social construct right now: there’s no biological marker for what counts as alive and what doesn’t, or what counts as a person and what doesn’t. Philosophers have been chasing their tails over those questions for the entirety of recorded history. There’s no dividing line we can draw that isn’t in some way flawed. That doesn’t mean that the line isn’t there.

It does mean that if you ask a bunch of undergrads to give you one on the spot, they’re going to sputter and bluster and look like idiots so you can have a nice YouTube video.

The next, and thankfully final, argument he makes is about abortion in cases of rape and incest. A couple of the students try to ask how he can claim abortion is wrong even in these cases, and he turns it around on them: “so that’s an excuse, so that we can take the marginal case and then say it applies to all cases, that’s faulty thinking.”

Logically, I can’t really fault him for this one, because once you make the assumption that all fetuses are human beings starting at conception, whether or not that conception was incestuous or non-consensual doesn’t really matter. I mean, the fetus didn’t commit rape. But I will take him to task for calling the focus on those cases sloppy thinking. He opposes abortion in cases of rape and incest. He’s on the record, and even defends it in this video five seconds later. If his argument opposes abortion in those cases, an argument against just those cases is also an argument against his whole point. If we were to somehow magically prove that abortion is acceptable in cases of rape or incest, we could continue to have arguments about whether or not it’s okay the rest of the time. But Ben Shapiro’s claim, that it’s never okay, would conclusively be wrong. He’s just being petty, and I don’t like it.

Conclusion: Ben Shapiro is Bad and He Should Feel Bad

At this point, we can clearly see that Ben Shapiro does not argue in good faith when he’s debating college students at his Q&As. But what’s the big deal? It’s not like he has access to Google from that podium, he can’t fact-check everything he says. People make flawed arguments sometimes, and most thinkers on the left wouldn’t do that much better if subjected to this kind of after-the-fact nitpicking.

I wish I could give him the benefit of the doubt here, I really do. But I can’t, and it’s because of one innocuous moment in his performance: his Holmes/Douglas mix-up. Sure, he mixed up who wrote the opinions on two related Supreme Court cases he probably hasn’t looked at in a decade. Everyone does that. But look at him as he says it, listen to his tone. He is 100% certain he has the right name even as he confidently tells a room full of college students and at least a million viewers online that the wrong Justice wrote the decision. He does not for a moment entertain the possibility that he could have misremembered.

Any thinker worth her salt, in any field, will have at the back of her mind the question “what if what I’m saying is wrong?” It’s that self-interrogation, that doubt, that separates the intellectual from the ideologue. You have to be prepared to be wrong, and be wrong often, or when the time comes you won’t recognize when you are and won’t change your mind, even in the face of overwhelming evidence. It’s why we write an amendment process into our constitutions and print new history and science textbooks every year. It’s the question we must always ask ourselves before a debate, especially when the outcome of that debate could cost lives if we get it wrong.

Judging by this video and so many others like it, I see no evidence that Ben Shapiro has ever asked himself that question in his entire life. That’s why the liberal intelligencia don’t answer his challenges. They aren’t afraid of him, they’re ignoring him.

Do I think we should be blocking him from speaking on our campuses? No. Even if we dismiss the First Amendment argument, he represents a different political tradition from what most people are exposed to in our universities. In fact, according to most right-wingers today, he’s one of its philosophical shining stars. If we can give marxists tenure, we can give Ben Shapiro a Saturday afternoon.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t recognize him for what he is. Ben Shapiro is no rhetorical wunderkind. He’s the MVP of an all-white basketball league. He’s what’s left of the storied tradition of conservative intellectualism when the David Brookses, George Wills, Max Boots, and Jennifer Rubins of the world abandon ship. That’s enough to earn him his speakers’ fee, but let’s not pretend it’s anything more than a participation trophy.

 

How to deal more than Graham’s Number damage in Magic: the Gathering

Introduction

Ten years ago, a few magic players on a long-since defunct forum got together to answer a simple question: assuming you can’t go infinite, just how much damage can you deal in a game of Magic: the Gathering?

At first, they dealt damage in the hundreds, then the thousands, then the tens of thousands. Before long, they were dealing more damage than we have -illions to describe them. They even found decks which dealt so much damage that you needed powerful mathematical concepts to describe the numbers involved without breaking the universe. I’ll explain some of those concepts later, like Knuth up-arrow notation and Conway chains, but consider this a warning: the rest of this article will involve math, and a lot of it.

Unfortunately, these new decks are too complicated for anyone, even a skilled player, to understand how they work just by looking at a list. Instead, we post write-ups explaining how the damage is done, section by section. You may have seen this one before, which used the Vintage cardpool to deal 408 up-arrows worth of damage on turn 1 (we’ll get to what that means in a bit). It’s well-known on Reddit, and for three years, it was the gold standard for this challenge.

Until today.

The deck in this post deals more damage than the old vintage challenger. In fact, it deals so much damage that I can’t even tell you how many up-arrows it achieves: that number itself requires too many up-arrows to describe.

It deals more damage than Graham’s Number.

It is also Standard-legal.

Special thanks to Deedlit11 and lijil on the MtgSalvation forums for helping make this deck possible.

The Rules of the Game

I’ve taken the liberty of adapting the rules from the original vintage challenge to this one. I’ve relaxed them in some places to allow for the limited cardpool, but for the most part I’ve left them as-is.

  • Start with a Standard-legal deck of exactly 60 cards. No less, of course, and if we allowed more, you could deal arbitrary but finite damage by including as many copies of Rat Colony as you feel like, and it wouldn’t break the other rules.
  • Conditions caused by randomness can resolve any way you like. In this deck, that mostly means that every single card draw is a Demonic Tutor in disguise: you can assume that the order of your deck is exactly what you want it to be. This veers pretty heavily into magical christmasland, but if we didn’t do it this way you’d have to figure out the average amount of damage a deck could deal, which is probably impossible.
  • The opponent is a goldfish with a deck of 60 random basic lands. However, they are still playing to stop you: if you give your opponent a choice, they will pick whichever one is worse for you. The only exception is that they won’t concede the game. This is a sadistic goldfish that wants to make you play it out.
  • No going infinite. Infinite really means “arbitrary” in magic, most of the time, so we define it like this: when you make your deck, I pick a finite number, say, a million, or Graham’s Number, or four. If, no matter what number I pick, there’s a line your deck can take that will deal at least that much damage, your deck goes infinite and is disqualified.
  • This doesn’t matter to our deck, but other rules of magic apply: if I put 80,000,000 copies of Shock on the stack and target my opponent with each one, they’ll die on the tenth one, and I’ll have dealt only 20 damage. In practice, that means you’re either winning with a giant X-spell or by attacking with a lot of very big creatures.
  • In the old challenge, you had to go off on turn one. Here, that rule is relaxed, with a caveat: the fewer turns required, the better. No one is impressed that you can deal a lot of damage on turn 50, or 50 million for that matter. This deck, for instance, goes off on turn 6. You’ll need an awfully good reason to justify going later than that.

Important Terms to Know

Up-Arrow Notation

First off, let’s talk about up-arrow notation. It sounds (and looks) kinda scary, but the truth is that you’ve probably already used up-arrow notation before, when you were bored in math class and messing around with those unnecessary buttons on the side of your graphing calculator. If you’ve ever put in some small number and mashed the “10x” button, you were taking advantage of Knuth up-arrows.

Think about what you do when you add 10 to something, or multiply 10 by something, or raise 10 to some power. You know from elementary school that, in a way, each of these is the same as doing the last one over and over: 10*3 is the same as 10+(10+10). Add 10 to itself, with 3 10s. 103 is just 10*(10*10). Multiply 10 by itself, with 3 10s. That’s good enough for most numbers you’ll ever need to think about, like 30, or 1,000, or the chances you’ll win the lottery today and then get struck by lightning, or the number of atoms in the universe. But there are other numbers, like the amount of time until the inevitable heat death of the universe, or the number of different games of chess you could play, where it starts to get ugly: you have to write it like 1010120, and the exponents get smaller and higher until it’s unreadable. It would be really nice if you could have a function that works for exponents the way exponents work for multiplication. That’s what up-arrow notation is all about.

Let’s start with one up-arrow: A^B. That’s the same as exponents: A^B is the same as A*(A*(A*(A*(…(A*A))))), with B A’s in between. For instance, 2^3 is 8, 2^4 is 16, 2^5 is 32, and so on. Note the parentheses I added there, those will be important later.

Now, let’s add another arrow: A^^B. That’s the exact function we wanted earlier: A^^B is A^(A^(A^(…(A^A)))), with B A’s in between. For example, 2^^3 is (2^(2^2)), or 2^4, or 16. 2^^4 is 2^(2^(2^2), or 2^16, or 65,536. 2^^5 is 2^(2^(2^(2^2))), or 2^65,536, which has roughly 20,000 digits and is much larger than the number of atoms in the universe. 

Remember that ugly 1010120 number I had earlier, the number of possible chess games? With up-arrows, we can estimate that as “somewhere between 10^^3 and 10^^4”.

You can keep going past that, adding as many arrows as you want. 2^^^3 is 2^^(2^^2). 2^^2 is 4 (in fact, no matter how many up-arrows you put between them, if both numbers are 2, the answer is 4: the same way 2+2, 2*2, and 22 all equal 4) , so 2^^^3 is the same as 2^^4, or 65,536. 2^^^4, however, is 2^^(2^^^3), or 2^^65,536. So, instead of having 20,000 digits, 2^^^4 is a chain of 2222…, getting higher and higher… with 65,536 2s. That’s already much, MUCH bigger than any of those numbers earlier. 

That was with three arrows. The Vintage challenge had over four hundred of them. This list has… more.

Layers

Opal Doubling Kiki Sanctum Djinn Burst

Another important term is “layers”. A layer is essentially a combination of cards that uses up a small amount of one resource (say, copies of Priest of Titania) to make a very large amount of another resource (say, green mana). Those resources can be anything: tokens with an ability you can tap, mana, triggers on the stack, etc. What’s important is that you aren’t just converting between them, and that the amount of your output scales: you don’t just turn one Priest of Titania into one green mana, you turn it one Priest of Titania into A LOT of green mana, and the amount of green mana you make gets bigger each time you do it. 

If you’re confused, here’s an example from the very first write-up anyone ever made for this challenge, way back in 2009:

Imagine you have four copies Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker on the battlefield, along with a Mirror Gallery so they don’t die. You also have a Doubling Season, so any token-making effects you have get doubled, and an Opalescence, so all your enchantments, including Doubling Season, are creatures.

You tap the first Kiki-Jiki, targeting Doubling Season. That makes a token copy, but we have a Doubling Season out, so it actually makes two. Now, you have three Doubling Seasons.

You tap the second Kiki-Jiki, also on Doubling Season. This time, we have three of the enchantment, so the one token we make gets doubled to two, then doubled again to four, then doubled again to eight, so you wind up with 8+3=11 copies of Doubling Season.

You tap the third Kiki-Jiki the same way. Now, it gets doubled 11 times, making what I’ll just tell you is 2,048 Doubling Seasons. Combine that with the 11 you had earlier, for 2,059.

Then you tap the fourth Kiki-Jiki. It makes 22059 copies of Doubling Season. If you’re like me and you don’t know any powers of 2 past 2048, you’ll have to reach for a calculator for that one, but I’ll save you the wasted trip: your calculator can only handle numbers up to 100 digits. The number of Doubling Seasons you just made has 620.

66,185,228,434,044,942,951,864,067,458,396,061,614,989,522,267,577,311,297,802,947,435,570,493,724,401,440,549,267,868,490,798,926,773,634,494,383,968,047,143,923,956,857,140,205,406,402,740,536,087,446,083,831,052,036,848,232,439,995,904,404,992,798,007,514,718,326,043,410,570,379,830,870,463,780,085,260,619,444,417,205,199,197,123,751,210,704,970,352,727,833,755,425,876,102,776,028,267,313,405,809,429,548,880,554,782,040,765,277,562,828,362,884,238,325,465,448,520,348,307,574,943,345,990,309,941,642,666,926,723,379,729,598,185,834,735,054,732,500,415,409,883,868,361,423,159,913,770,812,218,772,711,901,772,249,553,153,402,287,759,789,517,121,744,336,755,350,465,901,655,205,184,917,370,974,202,405,586,941,211,065,395,540,765,567,663,193,297,173,367,254,230,313,612,244,182,941,999,500,402,388,195,450,053,080,385,548.

That is one layer: it turns untapped copies of Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker into an exponentially greater number of Doubling Seasons.

We can add more layers on top of that. Let’s say we had Serra’s Sanctum and Djinn Illuminatus out, too. Then, we could tap the sanctum for 2^2059 mana (not gonna write it out again), and spend it all to replicate a Burst of Energy on Kiki Jiki, untapping it each time…

That would get you to about 2^^^4 Doubling Seasons. You might remember that number from earlier as our giant tower of 2s.

Note that, even though adding extra Doubling Seasons to start would vastly improve the damage total, adding extra Kiki-Jikis instead got us a lot more bang for our buck, and adding a Burst of Energy got us even more. The same thing applies to Burst of Energy: we could add a second Burst, or we could add a Gaea’s Cradle to get us all the green mana we need, and play Fossil Find 2^^^4 times. Each copy could get back Burst of Energy again, which would let us play and replicate it even more…

That’s how the old challengers worked: they would put a lot of layers into their deck, where the output resource of one was the input resource of another. One Fossil Find turns into lots of Burst of Energy, each of which turns into lots of untapped Kiki Jikis, each of which turns into lots of Doubling Seasons. If you line them up properly, 1 layer = 1 arrow in your final damage count. It also helps you avoid infinites: as long as you make sure that each new layer uses up a new resource, one you can’t already generate lower down, you can’t set up an infinite loop.

After that, it’s just a matter of how many different resources you can cram into the 60 card limit.

How did they fit 408 layers into that few slots? The short answer is, they doubled up. They made it so that the deck could, rather than just creating lots of Doubling Season tokens, also create copies of cards which would duplicate the other layers. These could be the usual suspects, like Minion Reflector, Swarm Intelligence, and Panharmonicon, or cards you wouldn’t expect like Clash of Realities. I won’t go into too much detail, but I encourage you to read their article if you’re curious.

The key is that, by using these “engine cards” to add extra layers of triggers to several different parts of the combo, they could make it so that one card could add as many as FIFTEEN layers to the final damage total!

Once you get up to the hundreds of arrows, writing them all out in a row gets real unwieldy. Instead, we use something called Conway arrow chains. We’ll get into the more complex cases later, but the simple version of a Conway arrow chain is that a->b->c is the same as a^^^…^^^b, with c arrows in between. 2^^^4 is also 2->4->3. Note that the order of the numbers changed, so the arrows are on the right: the reason is that in Conway chains, the further to the right a number is, the bigger an impact it has. We know that adding an arrow makes a bigger number than adding one to the right-hand number, so the arrow count comes afterward.

This is important, because that way I can tell you that the Vintage deck dealt 2->20->408 damage, instead of 2^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^20.

Graham’s Number

Now that we’ve covered up-arrows and layers, what is Graham’s Number? Graham’s Number is, or was for a long time, the largest number ever cited in a mathematical journal. If you want to know what it actually represents, there’s a great Numberphile video about it here. For our purposes, we only care about the value: it’s our target.  

To get to Graham’s number, you start with a very large number: 3^^^^3. That is already so vast that, if you were to somehow visualize the entire value, every digit, in your head, your brain would spontaneously collapse into a black hole which would instantly absorb all matter in the universe. Sort of. Its event horizon would be wider around than the observable universe, but I’m not sure whether everything would immediately reach the singularity, so it really depends on your definition of “absorb”… I’m getting sidetracked. 

Anyways, take that number, 3^^^^3. Call it G(1).  G(2) is then 3^^^…^^^3, with 3^^^^3 ARROWS in between the 3s. Before we go any further, take a moment to think about what that means. We’ve gone from one arrow, to two, to three, and already we’ve reached the point where it’s hard to visualize what’s happening in our head. Then we made the jump to 408 with the Vintage combo. And now, I’m asking you to imagine more than a googolplex up-arrows. That’s what it takes to get to G(2).

G(3) is 3^^^…^^^3, with G(2) arrows. G(4) is 3^^^…^^^3, with G(3) arrows, and so on. 

Graham’s Number, the number this deck outmatches, is G(64).

Can I Get a Decklist?

You can see the full list for the deck below. Feel free to give it a whirl, though you’ll probably be disappointed with the results. 13 lands, five colors, more 4+ drops than lands, five colors, almost all singletons, it’s a mess. Outside of the exact scenario of this challenge, it will struggle to ever get anything done at all.

And yet… If everything goes right, on turn 6, it will deal more than Graham’s Number damage in a single turn, with no infinite combos.

In Standard.

Botanical Sanctum
3x Llanowar Elves
Blooming Marsh
Rashmi, Eternities Crafter
Spire of Industry
4x Aether Hub
Unclaimed Territory
Gideon, Martial Paragon
Oath of Teferi
2x Island
4x Anointed Procession
2x Sparring Mummy
Merfolk Branchwalker
Planar Bridge
Patient Rebuilding
 Ghirapur Orrery

Panharmonicon
Cogwork Assembler
Raff Capashen, Ship’s Mage
Samut, Voice of Dissent

Sea Legs
Nissa, Genesis Mage

Raging Swordtooth
Seal Away
Djeru’s Renunciation
Slinn Voda, the Rising Deep
Naru Meha, Master Wizard
Naru Meha, Master Wizard
Demystify
Deeproot Champion
Switcheroo
Unwind
Onward//Victory
Marwyn, the Nurturer
Baffling End
Thorn Lieutenant
 Teshar, Ancestor’s Apostle
Paladin of Atonement
Muldrotha, the Gravetide
Key to the City

Dynavolt Tower
Bloodwater Entity

The Antiquities War
4x Silent Gravestone
Forsake the Worldly

2x Yargle, Glutton of Urborg

Section 0: Setup

Llanowar Elves Marwyn, the Nurturer Rashmi, Eternities Crafter Nissa, Genesis Mage Ghirapur Orrery Naru Meha, Master Wizard Onward::Victory

Turn 1 starts out pretty inocuously: Botanical Sanctum, Llanowar Elves, go. So far, we’re still in the realm of sanity.

Turn 2 is similarly dull: We play Aether Hub, getting an energy, and tap out to play our Marwyn, the Nurturer.

On turn 3, we start to see the foundations of the spice in the combo: we open up with Blooming Marsh, and tap everything but Marwyn to play Rashmi, Eternities Crafter. Rashmi is an elf, so Marwyn triggers and gets a +1/+1 counter. She now taps for GG, not just G. We do so, and use one of the mana produced to play a second Llanowar Elves, getting another +1/+1 counter.

After a while, the setups for these combos tend to take a certain shape. Turns 1-3 tends to be a sequence of playing as many mana elves and rocks as possible. Turn 4 uses all that mana to dump a hand full of draw engines and planeswalkers, which in turn let us get enough mana and cards for turn 5, which draws the entire deck and dumps everything onto the battlefield, at the cost of all the available resources. Then, we untap and go off on turn 6. The same pattern plays out here.

Turn 4: tap out (besides one elf) to play Nissa, Genesis Mage. Rashmi triggers, and we reveal and cast Panharmonicon. +2 Nissa, untapping Marwyn, the tapped elves, Botanical Sanctum, and an Aether Hub. Tap an Elves to play a third Llanowar Elves, making Marwyn trigger twice and become a 5/5. Tap Marwyn and our Botanical Sanctum to play The Antiquities War, which reveals Ghirapur Orrery. We still have 2 mana floating, as well as an untapped Llanowar Elves and an Aether Hub. Spend those to play Orrery, and pass the turn, hellbent.

Turn 5: last setup turn, I promise.

First, we draw 3 cards with Ghirapur Orrery in our upkeep. Then we draw our card for the turn. Then The Antiquities War triggers, and we reveal Cogwork Assembler and put it into our hand. We have 5 cards available now, which will be enough to give us access to everything else we need in the deck.

We start by playing Spire of Industry, tapping Marwyn for 5 and the spire for W (down to 19 life), and spending all but 1 of that mana to play our second underpowered Planeswalker-deck centerpiece, Gideon, Martial Paragon. Rashmi triggers, and we reveal and cast Anointed Procession. We tap our three Llanowar Elves, giving us 4 green mana in the pool, and +2 Gideon, untapping all our creatures and giving Marwyn +1/+1 for the turn, making her tap for 6. We tap them all again for 9 mana, play Cogwork Assembler, and use the remaining 6 mana to play Planar Bridge.

Then we +2 our Nissa, Genesis Mage, untapping Marwyn, a Llanowar Elves, Spire of Industry, and Botanical Sanctum, making sure to tap the Sanctum for U before anything else. We tap everything we have, for a total of 11 mana. Oh, and make sure one of that mana is red from Spire of Industry, bringing us down to 18 life.

Then we spend 8 of that mana and activate Planar Bridge, searching out Oath of Teferi. We have it trigger Ghirapur Orrery, so only Ghirapur Orrery (which is useless for the rest of this turn) gets exiled. We can now activate both our Planeswalkers again, so we do: Gideon’s +2 untaps all three Llanowar Elves and Marwyn while pumping Marwyn up to 7/7. We tap them to add 10 more mana to the 3 we had left after activating the Bridge, giving us 13 total mana. Nissa untaps Marwyn, an Elf, and two lands, giving us another 10 mana, up to 23.

We spend the first 7 of that to activate our Cogwork Assembler, targeting Panharmonicon. This is something we’ll do a lot later on: by turning enters-the-battlefield triggers into mana, and that mana into Panharmonicons, we can turn each enters-the-battlefield trigger on our creatures into a layer resource. It’s the core engine of our deck.

In this case, we create two copies of Panharmonicon, since we have one Anointed Procession. Between them, the original, and the native trigger, we’ll get 4 triggers from any creature entering the battlefield.

The next 7 we spend copies Planar Bridge, making two tokens. The legend rule kicks in, and we immediately sacrifice the nontoken and one of the tokens, leaving us with an untapped Planar Bridge. We still have 9 mana in the pool, so we spend all but the one red we generated to tutor another permanent directly onto the battlefield: Sparring Mummy. It triggers four times, and we have all of them target Marwyn.

Each trigger lets us tap Marwyn for another 7 mana, so when they’ve all resolved, we’ll wind up with 29 total mana, counting the one red we’ve saved. That’s enough to activate Cogwork Assembler again to make two more Panharmonicons, spend another 15 to copy Planar Bridge and tap the copy to search for a second Sparring Mummy, and still have 6 G and an R in our pool. The second one triggers six times now, which will give us 42 mana, 48 if you count what we have floating.

Almost. We can do slightly better than that. If we spend 21 mana we get from the first three triggers on copying Panharmonicon immediately, before letting anything else resolve, we can get up to 11 total Panharmonicons, causing future creatures to trigger ETB abilities 12 times. Then, we can let the next two triggers resolve, giving us a total of 19 green mana and one red, with one untap trigger still on the stack.

At that point, we can spend the one red we’ve been saving and 2 of that green mana to play the last card from our hand: Onward//Victory, targeting Marwyn. If we let it resolve now, Marwyn would tap for 14 on the next trigger, but that’s not good enough for us.

Instead, we spend another 15 of our mana, leaving us with only GG in the pool, to create and activate another Planar Bridge copy. This time, we search for Naru Meha, Master Wizard. Her ability triggers 12 times, and each time copies Onward//Victory, targeting Marwyn.

The first one gives Marwyn +7/+0, giving her 14 power. The second gives her +14/+0, giving her 28. The third brings her up to 56, the fourth to 112, and so on, until the twelfth trigger resolves, leaving Marwyn a 28,672/7 creature.

Then the original Onward//Victory resolves, her power gets doubled again, leaving her a 57,344/7 creature.

We could end the game right now. After the last Mummy trigger untaps Marwyn, we could swing with her, bring our opponent down to -57,324 life, and go home. We won’t. We have greater things in mind.

Section 0.5: “Drawing” our Deck

Cogwork Assembler Planar Bridge

Instead, we tap Marwyn for 57,344 green mana. Combined with Cogwork Assembler/Planar Bridge, that’s almost enough to tutor out every permanent in one commander deck… for every single color combination possible. Needless to say, it’s enough to search out all the permanents we need from our deck.  In our case, that’s three more Aether Hubs, an Unclaimed Territory which we set to Human (we MUST set it to human, or this entire combo becomes impossible), two Islands, Raff Capashen, Ship’s Mage, Deeproot Champion, Baffling End (which has no targets), Muldrotha, the Gravetide, our remaining three Anointed Processions, Key to the City, Samut, Voice of Dissent, Dynavolt Tower, and Patient Rebuilding. That subtracts a total of 255 mana from our 57,346 (remember, we also had GG floating beforehand). We can spend another 22 to make 16 more copies of Panharmonicon and tutor out our Merfolk Branchwalker, which will explore 22 times. We use that to mill Paladin of Atonement, Teshar, Ancestor’s Apostle, Slinn Voda, the Rising Deep, a second Naru Meha, Master Wizard, and Sea Legs, as well as get a lot of +1/+1 counters. Then we spend another 15 to search out Bloodwater Entity, putting Onward//Victory on top of our library. From that point, we have almost all the pieces in place to start the combo, and 57,054 green mana left in our mana pool. We just need something to do with it.

We can start by spending 57,036 of that to activate Cogwork Assembler 8,148 times, targeting Panharmonicon each time. That creates a total of 130368 copies, which, combined with the 16 we made in the last paragraph and the 5 we made earlier, gives us 130,389 Panharmonicons. Each enters the battlefield trigger will happen 130,390 times. We still have 18 mana floating, enough to make a Planar Bridge copy and use it to search out Thorn Lieutenant.

Marwyn triggers 130,390 times, getting 130,390 +1/+1 counters. Unlike the boost we gave her with Onward//Victory, these will stick around, so we’ll start next turn with a 130,395/130,395 legend.

Now, at long last, we pass the turn. We are still hellbent, and have only 13 cards left in our library: Seal Away, Djeru’s Renunciation, Demystify, Unwind, Onward//Victory, Forsake the Worldly, Switcheroo, Raging Swordtooth, three Silent Gravestones, and, of course, two Yargle, Glutton of Urborg. We’re at 18 life, and have 4 energy from our 4 Aether Hubs. All our creatures have haste, thanks to Samut, and all our historic spells have flash, thanks to Raff Capashen. All the token copies of our artifacts disappear, including our only Planar Bridge.

We are ready to begin.

Section 1: Starting up the Megacombo

Slinn Voda, the Rising Deep Naru Meha, Master Wizard UnwindMuldrotha, the Gravetide

Come turn six, both Patient Rebuilding and Ghirapur Orrery trigger. Put the Orrery trigger on top. We’re hellbent, so we draw three cards. Then, Patient Rebuilding triggers. Our opponent’s deck is all lands, so it draws us another three. In our draw step, we draw another, seventh card, so when we enter our main phase, we have a full grip of 7. At that point, The Antiquities War triggers, and its third chapter ability goes on the stack. Don’t let it resolve.

Our seven cards, by the way, should be all our instants (not Switcheroo), a Silent Gravestone, and Seal Away.

We start by casting Planar Bridge from our graveyard with Muldrotha, the Gravetide. That triggers Rashmi, revealing Switcheroo. We cast it, Dynavolt Tower triggers, and we go up to 6 energy (note: even though our opponent has no creatures at this point, we can still play it by targeting two of our own). The next few thousand words of combo will all take place with that spell still on the stack.

Immediately, we tap Marwyn for 130,395 green mana. We spend 7 of that to create 16 Panharmonicons (we need a reasonable amount of those to get us started), hold 27 in reserve, and spend the remaining 130,361 to create as many copies of Dynavolt Tower as we can: 297,968, to be precise.

Now that that’s done, we cast our instants (except Forsake the Worldly) from our hand, waiting until all the Dynavolt Tower triggers resolve each time so the stack looks like:

Djeru’s Renunciation
Demystify
Onward//Victory
Unwind (targeting Switcheroo)
Switcheroo
Planar Bridge
The Antiquities War, Chapter III

That costs us 1 life and 2 energy for the Renunciation, Demystify, and Onward//Victory, since we have no lands that innately tap for red or white, so we go down to 17 and 4 energy. Of course, we also generated 595,936 energy for each instant and sorcery we cast, so we actually have 2,383,748 of it, not 4. It also forces us to tap one of our Islands for Unwind, and spend 5 of our remaining green to pay for the generic costs. We can make up for that, though, by tapping our three Llanowar Elves for GGG, leaving us with 25 mana floating. From there, we spend 20 energy and activate four of our Dynavolt Towers to deal 12 damage to our own Nissa, killing her. Not for long, though, because after that we’ll cast her again with Muldrotha, leaving her on the stack. We also tap a second Island to play Sea Legs, leaving it, too, on the stack. We have 18 mana left.

Then, we cast Slinn Voda from our graveyard, kicked. That leaves us with 11 mana floating, and taps  both of our fastlands and a third Aether Hub (only 2,383,727 energy left!). It enters the battlefield, and its ability triggers 18 times.

We let the first one resolve, bouncing all of our creatures back to hand. Immediately, we spend 2 more mana and tap Unclaimed Territory and our final Aether Hub to play Naru Meha, Master Wizard. Her ability triggers 18 times, and we target Unwind with the top 3 and Onward//Victory with the rest.

The first Unwind copy targets Planar Bridge, which gets countered and lets us untap Unclaimed Territory and two of our Fastlands. We tap those for a W we can only use on humans, a U, and a B, then let the second trigger resolve. The next one Unwinds Nissa, untapping the same lands again. This time, we tap them for a humans-only R, and UU. The third one counters Sea Legs, and we untap our fastlands and an island, tapping them all for U. All told we have 9 G, 6 U, 1 B, and an R and W that we can only spend on humans.

Before any Onward//Victory triggers resolve, we cast Raff Capashen with a U and our W (7 green floating), and follow it by replaying Marwyn and Samut, Voice of Dissent. That leaves us with no green, but an untapped hasty Marwyn.

And 15 copies of Onward//Victory on the stack.

Each one can target Marwyn, pumping her until she becomes a 32,768/1 creature. We tap her for 32,768 mana, and spend 32,739 of that (how much we hold in reserve no longer matters, it’s just noise to us now) to create 74,832 more Panharmonicons. The next enters-the-battlefield ability we get will trigger 74,850 times.

The next Slinn Voda trigger to resolve lets us do that whole process again. We have 29 G, 5 U, and 1 B on the stack, which is enough to cast Muldrotha, Nissa, Planar Bridge, and Sea Legs, then play a Naru Meha and use the top 3 triggers to Unwind our 3 noncreatures to generate 9 land untaps, with 1 U still floating. After we cast Raff Capashen and Samut, resolve our 74,847 copies of Onward//Victory, and tap Marwyn for an amount of green mana with over 20,000 digits, we’ll be able to end with 29 G, 1 B, and 5 U, and one mana of any type a land we have can produce, as well as a 20,000-digit number of Panharmonicons. In other words, every time we resolve a Slinn Voda trigger, we get one more untap of our lands than we need, letting us stockpile colors of mana other than green. We can, of course, effectively ignore any generic or green mana costs from here on in, because Marwyn is already generating so much.

We won’t use all the Slinn Voda triggers that way. They’re much too valuable. But we will use a couple: nine, to be precise. We also won’t be playing Marwyn every time: after we generate the first 20,000-digit amount of green mana from the second Slinn Voda trigger to resolve, we’ll spend most of that to make an uncountable amount of Panharmonicons, hold enough green mana in reserve to pay for the future costs for the next few triggers to resolve (a googol should be enough), and skip playing Marwyn later on. That means we no longer have to spend a land untap on red mana for Samut each time, so every time we resolve another Slinn Voda trigger, we’ll untap 9 lands, and have to spend only 7 mana requiring us to tap a land again (2 for Raff Capashen, 2 for the UB in Muldrotha’s cost, 2 for Naru Meha, 1 for Sea Legs), so we profit 2 for every one Slinn Voda trigger. That’s good, because we’ll need 18 spare mana to go off, and we want to save our triggers here.

Section 2: Building the stack

Raging Swordtooth Djeru's Renunciation Seal Away Switcheroo Thorn Lieutenant

On the last of those triggers, we’ll do things slightly differently. First, we won’t counter Planar Bridge with Unwind, we let it resolve, casting the Silent Gravestone from our hand and countering it instead. Second, before we play Naru Meha, we’ll spend an energy and one of our untaps to play Teshar, Ancestor’s Apostle from our graveyard, as well as make a copy of Key to the City and tap the copy to discard Thorn Lieutenant, which got bounced by Slinn Voda a while back. That way, when we cast Naru Meha, we can bring the Lieutenant back to the battlefield with Teshar’s trigger. Finally, we’ll use a few more of Naru Meha’s triggers to copy our other instants: first Demystify, destroying our Baffling End and giving our opponent a 3/3 dinosaur token, then Switcheroo, exchanging that token for our Thorn Lieutenant, then a few Onward//Victory on that Lieutenant, forcing our opponent to create several more 1/1 elves, and finally two more Switcheroos, swapping some of our opponent’s creatures for our Deeproot Champion and our Merfolk Branchwalker from last turn (remember, they don’t get bounced by Slinn Voda, which doesn’t affect merfolk).

Then, we let one more Slinn Voda trigger resolve, bouncing nearly every creature, but not our opponent’s merfolk, to our hand.

At this point, we can finally activate Planar Bridge, tutoring Raging Swordtooth directly into play. Its ability triggers many, many times, putting an uncountable number of “1 damage to everything” triggers on the stack. Before any of those resolve, however, we play Naru Meha from our hand again. This one will swap Raging Swordtooth for one of the merfolk we gave our opponent, then copy Djeru’s Renunciation, tapping the Swordtooth. Now, we spend another energy/life to play Seal Away from our hand, exiling our Swordtooth.

The first 8 Swordtooth triggers will kill both Naru Meha and Slinn Voda, but not the merfolk we’ve been swapping around (Branchwalker has several thousand toughness from all the exploring it did last turn, while Deeproot Champion has grown by +3/+3 for each Slinn Voda trigger, plus another 4 from casting our instants and Switcheroo). After that, we can play Raff Capashen, Muldrotha, the Gravetide, and finally Slinn Voda. That gives us an uncountable number of bounce triggers. We let the first one resolve, replay Raff Capashen and Muldrotha, and now that Muldrotha has been reset we can play our three Unwind targets, Naru Meha from the graveyard, and continue our combo like before.

That operation costs 18 land taps, by the way, so we have to let 9 Slinn Voda triggers resolve, plus 1 to bounce everything after we generate our mana, plus 2 to generate our starting pool of green mana. We had 18 to work with, so we wind up with 6 triggers left on the stack. On top of those are an uncountable number of Raging Swordtooth triggers, and on top of those are an equal amount of Slinn Voda triggers.

We don’t stop there, either. Every time we resolve a Slinn Voda, we’ll:

  1. Spend just enough of its triggers to generate all the mana we need for the remaining steps.
  2. Spend a life/energy to reanimate the Thorn Lieutenant.
  3. Use Naru Meha and Switcheroo to give our opponent both our merfolk.
  4. Use a Naru Meha trigger to copy Demystify, killing our Seal Away, and get back Raging Swordtooth.
  5. Play Naru Meha and use it to swap the Swordtooth for a Merfolk with Switcheroo and tap it with Djeru’s Renunciation, and spend a white mana and a life to exile it under Seal Away (remember, Muldrotha lets us replay it, and we keep bouncing and replaying Muldrotha right now).

Basically, we’re using some elaborate stack tricks to bounce Raging Swordtooth between the battlefield, our opponent’s side of the board, and exile, without ever letting it go to our graveyard or hand, where we’d have to cast it. In other words, we’re giving it flash, even though it isn’t historic. Critically, however, we can’t do this infinitely: even though we can copy our various instants and sorceries with Naru Meha essentially for free, Seal Away will still cost a white mana, and we can only produce that by spending either a life or an energy.

None of these elaborate tricks, by the way, would be necessary if Wizards had just reprinted Vedalken Orrery in Kaladesh. It would open up our options for more layers later, free up deck space, and make the whole deck much easier to follow, but they couldn’t be bothered to do us a solid.

I’m not mad.

Anyway, this is also why we have two copies of Naru Meha in our deck: because we need to spend some of its triggers to kill Seal Away and get back Swordtooh, and also need to spend some of its triggers to exile Swordtooth while the dinosaur’s triggers are still on the stack, we need to play its twice without bouncing him. Fortunately, with Muldrotha getting reset constantly, we can always cast them from the graveyard and bounce them.

The only other problem is getting back our Merfolk and Thorn Lieutenant. That’s what Teshar is for: it essentially gives them haste. The Merfolk don’t get bounced by Slinn Voda, so they let us keep at least a couple creatures on our opponent’s board at all times, and Thorn Lieutenant lets us give our opponent more if they get close to running out.

We keep doing this until we run out of energy and life to pay. We spend 2 of those resources every time we play Swordtooth, and we get a batch of Swordtooth triggers and a batch of Slinn Voda triggers each time, so when all is said and done, we’ll have a giant stack of alternating batches of Slinn Voda and Raging Swordtooth triggers, each one uncountably large. There will be one of these batches for every energy/life we had to spend. We had 2,383,727 energy and 17 life, so all told, we’ll have 2,383,743 batches of triggers on the stack. Technically, we’ll only have 2,383,742, because we can only spend life/energy in batches of 2, but we can count the topmost batch of Naru Meha triggers to balance it out.

If you thought this combo was hard to follow so far, this next part might melt your brain. I don’t want that to happen, so instead of jumping right in, we need to take a break to talk about the algorithm behind this deck.

How to Make Lots Of Arrows: A Primer on Two-State Machines

Set aside for a moment all the actual cards in these decks, and imagine them not as magic brews but as very simple programs. After all, that’s basically what they are: the different resources we have (blue mana, white mana, energy, life, triggers on the stack, etc.) are the memory, and the various ways we convert those resources into other resources are the instructions.

Remember how we talked about layers, where each one takes in some small amount of one resource, and turns it into an ever-greater amount of another resource? Think of each layer as an instruction: “use up one resource I to generate a lot of resource O”. There is one instruction for each layer, and by chaining them together with their different resources, we build our megacombo.

The problem with this approach is that it’s bounded: There are only so many different resources you can model with 60 distinct magic cards, and there is a constant number of arrows a single card can be worth. In the Vintage deck, that number was about 15, meaning that ignoring everything else, the most you could ever get without adding to that number somehow would be 900, nowhere CLOSE to Graham’s number. 

The combo we’re about to implement works by fiddling with what instructions you can have your program execute.

First, we need to divide the resources we’ve used so far into two groups: true resources, and triggers. They can both be used for a layer, but there’s a critical difference: triggers, like from Minion Reflector, go on the stack, and all the rules of the stack apply: you can only spend them one at a time, and only when that specific trigger is on top of the stack. A resource, like green mana, is something you can use whenever you want.

Next, let’s actually imagine the instructions you’d use for three layers, a resource layer and two trigger layers. That would look something like:

  1. Spend one of resource I to put X copies of trigger A on the stack.
  2. Use up one trigger A from the top of the stack to put X copies of trigger B on top of the stack.
  3. Use one copy of trigger B to generate X O.

If we use our resource I one at a time, we’ll wind up with a stack that looks like this:

Trigger B
…
Trigger B
Trigger A
…
Trigger A

When you look at that stack, you can see another critical property of trigger layers, especially ones that come next to each other in your chain: once you’ve started an iteration of the trigger B layer, you’re committed: you can’t go back to the trigger A layer until all the trigger B is gone.

How much would that set above give us? We have 3 layers, so those would give us 3 arrows. For instance if we had 4 I, we’d end up with 2->4->3 O, the same as that giant tower of 2s we calculated earlier. 

The biggest difference between the new combo and the three options I’ve described above is the introduction of the “state”. The state is a technical term in computation theory, but basically it’s a variable that determines what instructions your program can actually do. In your computer, the state could include, say, whether or not Microsoft Word is running: you can’t exactly do a spell-check without starting the application. In Magic, it might be whether or not you’ve activated a certain planeswalker this turn: if one of your instructions is “activate Nissa, Genesis Mage to untap a land, and tap it for lots of mana”, you can’t do that instruction if you’ve already activated her. 

Note that not only can you only do certain instructions in certain states, performing an instruction can also change what state you’re in. In the Nissa example, once you do that instruction, you move to an “activated” state, and you can only do that instruction again if you find a way to move back, say, by bouncing Nissa.

In this new version, there are five moves:

  1. Spend one of resource I to put X copies of trigger A on the stack.
  2. If, and only if, the state is unlocked, use one copy of trigger A from the top of the stack to put X copies of trigger B on top of the stack, and lock the state.
  3. Use one copy of trigger B from the top of the stack to generate X O.
  4. Use one copy of trigger B from the  top of the stack to unlock the state.

We’ll get to 5 in a minute.

So far, it’s similar to before. Let’s say you have five of resource I. You’d spend one to get lots of copies of trigger A. Then, you’d use one of those to create lots of copies of trigger B, and lock the state. You’d use most of those copies of trigger B to create more O, but when you got to the last one, you’d use it to unlock the state, which would let you use up the next copy of trigger A, and do the same thing over again. It’s slightly less efficient than the three-instruction, one-state game, but only by a little: we give up one one trigger B from each batch, which becomes insignificant as the size of our batches grows.

5. If, and only if, the state is unlocked, use one copy of trigger A from the top of the stack to generate one of resource I, and lock the state.

How does that fifth instruction change what we can do? Well, obviously we can do the same thing as we did with 4 instructions, and spend our I one at a time. We’ll wind up with a stack that looks like this:

Trigger B
…
Trigger B
Trigger A
…
Trigger A

When we’re down to our last B, we spend that to unlock the state. Then, we spend our second A to generate an I. Sweet! But now, the state is locked. We can spend that I and get lots of triggers of A, but we don’t care about copies of A on the stack: we care about how much O we can generate, and we can’t generate any O without making those A triggers into Bs. And we can’t make any of trigger B, because the state is locked! And, since we can’t unlock the state without a trigger B, we will never be able to use the rest of our trigger A on the stack. We fizzle out. No good.

What if we used all five of our I at once? Then, we have the exact same problem, just with way more copies of trigger A on the bottom of the stack:

Trigger B
…
Trigger B
Trigger A
…
…
…
Trigger A

It’ll still fizzle. It’s starting to seem like that fifth move is completely useless.

There is, however, one more option.

We start by spending an I to create lots of trigger A, as usual. Also as usual, we use one of trigger A to create a lot of trigger B, and lock the state. This time, however, we don’t start using trigger B to generate O immediately. Instead, we spend the first trigger B to unlock the state again, and spend another I to make ANOTHER stack of trigger A, on top of our first two! Then, we use one trigger A to make more trigger B, and we repeat until we’re all out of I.

The end result will be a stack that looks something like this:

Trigger B
…
Trigger B
Trigger A
…
Trigger A
Trigger B
…
Trigger B
Trigger A
…
Trigger A

Basically, we’ll have these batches of trigger B and trigger A, one on top of another. With five of resource I, we’ll have five batches each, or ten total.

The first two batches proceed the same way we did with four instructions. We only when we get to the very last copy of trigger A in the second batch. Then, and only then, we use move 5, spend our last A to generate one more I, and lock the state.

We know what happens now. We need a trigger B to unlock the state, and we can’t make any more of trigger B now that the state is locked, so we fizzle. Right?

Wrong! This time, we have a trigger B: right below us, in the next batch down. We use one of those to unlock the state, and now we’re free to use our new resource I to make a new, much larger batch of trigger A. Now, the stack looks exactly the same as it did before, with two differences:

  1. Because we’ve made a lot more O, the top two batches of trigger A and trigger B on the stack are way bigger now than they were when we started.
  2. We have one fewer trigger B in the third batch from the top.

Do you see what’s happening? Instead of using each trigger B in the lower group to make lots of our output resource, we can use each one to make a new, much larger batch of trigger A. And when we’re almost out of that new batch, we can do the same thing again: use its last trigger, plus a trigger B below it, to run through the trigger A layer a third time. We can keep doing that until we run out of trigger B, then use a trigger A below THAT to make a new, much bigger batch. We’re feeding the same two layers into each other.

Why doesn’t this go infinite? It comes down to timing. In order to make one resource I, you need a both a trigger A to feed into step 5, and a trigger B to unlock the state with step 4. But because you need to unlock the state after generating your resource I, the trigger B has to be under the trigger A on the stack. That means they can’t come from the same source: remember, the rules of the stack make it so that once you convert one trigger A into a batch of trigger B, the B’s go on top and you can’t access that batch of A again until they’re gone.

The problem there is, that trigger B lower down on the stack has to come from somewhere. For it to be there, you have to have another batch of trigger A somewhere below it. But since you can’t add stuff in between triggers in a single batch, that means you must have spent an additional I to generate that other, lower batch.

In other words, to have the opportunity to get back one I, you must have already spent two I earlier on.

Once you’ve generated your I, you have two ways to get more. You can resolve past any remaining trigger B on the stack until you get to the next batch down of trigger A, use up the last one of those to make your second I, and use a trigger B below THAT batch to unlock the state. But then, you hit the same problem: where did that trigger B come from?

You could also spend your new I to make a new batch of trigger A, go through it like usual, and use the last one of it to make a new I and the next trigger B down to unlock the state. But then, you’re spending the resource you just got in order to generate a replacement. You can never build back up to two I that way.

It is mathematically impossible to run these instructions in a way that won’t eventually run out of I to use. We are still finitely bounded.

What does all this get us? Well, the top two layers of triggers work like the old version. But the next batch of trigger B can each regenerate the entire top two batches, so the second batch down represents a third layer. Then, the batch of trigger A below that represents a fourth. The trigger B below that trigger A can regenerate all three batches above it, and so on.

In the old version, with 4 I, we made 2->4->3 O. In this version, we make 2->3->8 O. If we added a fifth I, we’d have 2->3->10.

In this combo, each new resource I we get doesn’t add 1 to the number on the right side of our arrows. It adds TWO ARROWS.

Oh, and if that structure of alternating triggers seems familiar to you, that’s because we just spend an entire section building it out of Raging Swordtooth and Slinn Voda triggers. All in good time.

I know that all seems complicated, but you don’t have to understand everything about two-state machines to make sense of this. All you need to understand is that if we can implement those five instructions with magic cards, without allowing any corner cases, we can turn one resource I (say, white mana) into one arrow. This operation is called an “Ackermann stage”, or just a “stage” for short. For the record, I voted for calling it “The Omega Combo”, because it also implements the omega (ω) ordinal in the Fast-Growing Hierarchy, but you win some, you lose some.

It takes 17 cards for us to do it. It’s a convoluted mess of a combo that would be impossible to explain in one gulp. Instead, we’re going to walk through the combo instruction-by-instruction, breaking it down into five manageable pieces.

Section 3: The Megacombo

Now that we understand what the end goal of this combo is, let’s put the pieces together and see how we implement it.

The output resource: Green mana/Panharmonicons

Cogwork Assembler Panharmonicon Onward::Victory Marwyn, the Nurturer

You’ve already seen this at work. Once we get to the very top layer, we’ll replay Marwyn and our legends, play Naru Meha and point a bajilion Onward//Victory copies at Marwyn, and tap Marwyn for 2^X mana, where X is the number of Panharmonicons we’ve created. We spend all that to make even more Panharmonicons, and the next time we play Naru Meha, we’ll get much, much more mana for our trouble. That requires bouncing Naru Meha, which brings us to…

Trigger B: Slinn Voda, the Rising Deep

Slinn Voda, the Rising Deep Muldrotha, the Gravetide

Like when we were setting up, we can leverage each Slinn Voda trigger to bounce both Marwyn and Naru Meha, giving us another iteration of that output-generating layer. That’s not enough for our stage-combo, though: we also need that to lock the state. That’s where Muldrotha comes in. We have no way to bounce Slinn Voda, but we can kill her and replay her with Muldrotha. Once we do that, we can’t replay her anymore, until Muldrotha gets bounced and replayed. That resets our Elemental Avatar, at the cost of one Slinn Voda trigger. In other words, we can use one trigger B to unlock the state. We just need a way to kill Slinn Voda…

Trigger A: Raging Swordtooth

Raging Swordtooth Seal Away SwitcherooThorn Lieutenant

This one works the same way it did when we were building the stack: we resolve Raging Swordtooth triggers 8 at a time to kill Slinn Voda, which lets us replay the leviathan with Muldrotha and get another iteration of the upper layer. This, in turn, costs us one input resource: either life or energy. Earlier, it cost us 2, because we had to play both Seal Away and Teshar, Ancestor’s Apostle, but later on, we’ll be casting Teshar right before the Swordtooth anyway, so that won’t change the math.

I won’t go through all the Thorn Lieutenant/Switcheroo/Seal Away shenanigans again. They exist, they give Raging Swordtooth pseudo-flash, and they cost a life to go through every time, so our resource-consumption still works.

We now have four of the five operations we need to make our megacombo. Do you see the end in sight?

Putting it all Together: Paladin of Atonement

Paladin of Atonement Teshar, Ancestor's Apostle Muldrotha, the Gravetide

We can already reconstruct what this step has to do, just from what we already know of the other operations. We need to cast a creature from our graveyard, locking Muldrotha, and then immediately use some number of Raging Swordtooth triggers to kill it, and profit 1 life. The lifegain has to be a death trigger, or we could recur it with just Slinn Voda. That’s all it takes.

Paladin of Atonement is perfect here. Assuming we can pump it by 1, we can spend a life to play it from our graveyard, then use 2 Raging Swordtooth triggers to kill it, gaining 2 life back for our down payment of just 1. Then, we can use a Slinn Voda trigger to bounce Muldrotha back, spend that life to play Raging Swordtooth, and go to town. We could play the Paladin, then bounce Muldrotha with a Slinn Voda trigger to reset the state, then replay Paladin and kill it, but doing so would use up our profit from killing it: it would cost another white mana to replay the Paladin from our hand, and we can’t avoid bouncing it when we bounce Muldrotha.

Sadly, Paladin of Atonement isn’t historic, so it doesn’t have flash. It does, however, have a converted mana cost 3 or less. Instead of spending the life to play it, we can spend it to play Teshar, Ancestor’s Apostle, and use Teshar to get back not just Paladin of Atonement, but also any merfolk we need and our Thorn Lieutenant (that’s why it will only cost 1 life to play Swordtooth now, but 2 when we were building the stack: at this level, playing Teshar is already factored into the cost). Teshar also serves as our pump mechanism: when we spend the 1 life to play him, we can play one historic spell to get back Paladin of Atonement, kill the Paladin with one Swordtooth trigger to gain a life, then cast another historic to repeat the process. Teshar only has 2 toughness, so after we gain 2 life this way, Teshar will die, and we’ll have to replay it with Muldrotha to keep going. Of course, that requires resolving a Slinn Voda trigger further down…

Now, at long last, we can put it all together. Every one of the alternating batches we put on the stack two sections ago counts as its own recursive layer. We had 2,383,743 of those, so when we’ve resolved all those triggers, we’ll wind up with 2->X->2,383,743 mana in our mana pool. X, by the way, is equal to the number of Slinn Voda triggers we still had on the stack from that first time we cast it (it feels like so long ago…), plus 2 because of an oddity of how Conway Chains work. We had 6 left, so our total is 2->8->2,383,743.

It’s worth taking a step back and remembering what that expression means. That is over two million arrows. Roughly the population of Houston, and five thousand times more than the Vintage combo.

And we are nowhere close to done.

Section 4: beating Graham’s Number

Dynavolt Tower Bloodwater Entity

Once we’ve wrapped the last section, we’ll wind up with two million arrows worth of mana. This time, we won’t sink all that into Panharmonicon.

We spend it all making copies of Dynavolt Tower.

Then we cast an instant from our hand. Two million arrows worth of Dynavolt Towers trigger, giving us two million arrows worth of energy.

Then we spend our 2->8->2,383,743 energy to create another, much larger stack of alternating triggers. When they all resolve, we’ll wind up with 2->3->(2->8->2,383,743) mana.

In other words, by casting a single instant from our hand, we turned the 2->8->2,383,743 mana we generated before into the NUMBER OF ARROWS in the new output.

I hope you’re giggling in manic glee right now, because I sure am.

After we’ve spent all that energy, there’s nothing stopping us from doing it all over again: play another instant, generate another glut of energy, and when the dust settles, we’ll have a number where the number of arrows in it is itself a two-million-arrow expression.

Think back to the introduction of this article. That “X into X arrows” function is how Graham’s Number is defined: 64 iterations of that, starting with 3->3->4.

We started with 2->8->2,383,743, which is slightly larger than 3->3->4 (G(1)). Therefore, when we generate that many arrows, the number we’ll get will be bigger than G(2). Each time we cast an instant or sorcery, we get another iteration of our stage.

If we cast 64 instants in a row, we can beat Graham’s Number.

We will cast a lot more than that.

Doing so will take a bit of thought: even if we hadn’t already spent most of our deck slots setting up this combo, we would still only have 60 spaces in our deck, and 64 is bigger than 60. That’s where Bloodwater Entity comes in. Once we run out of Swordtooth triggers at the bottom, we can let one of our instants (Onward//Victory, say) resolve, use Teshar to bring back Bloodwater Entity (we can spend a life/energy on this, even if that gives up on some iterations of the stage, we’ll make up for it soon), use the Entity to put Onward//Victory on top, use some other resource to draw it, and replay it. We’ll get our massive glut of energy, and when all those triggers resolve Onward will still be on the stack, ready for us to use in a new, much larger iteration of the combo.

All we need to do is draw 64 cards, one at a time. Well, 63. We still have this Forsake the Worldly sitting in our hand, we might as well use it.

Section 5: And the Rest is Silence

Silent Gravestone The Antiquities War Forsake the Worldly

Once we’re out of life, energy, spells in hand, everything, we don’t let everything resolve just yet. Instead, we cast the last piece of the puzzle from our graveyard: Silent Gravestone.

Silent Gravestone can tap to draw a card, at the cost of exiling itself, and can be copied as much as we want with Cogwork Assembler. That would go infinite, if not for two limiting factors: each token we make gives cards in all graveyards shroud, which means that we can’t do critical parts of our combo (like reanimating Paladin with Teshar, or tucking an instant back on top before the next draw effect resolves so we don’t deck ourselves) until every single gravestone token is gone. And, just as importantly, exiling the Gravestone is part of the effect, not the cost: if we don’t use some external force to remove all the gravestones before their abilities resolve, they will exile everything in our graveyard at the same time they draw the card.

That’s where Forsake the Worldly comes in. By casting it and copying it with Naru Meha, we can wipe out all the Gravestones, but doing so exiles them. In fact, once we’ve resolved a gravestone, we have no way of continuing without first exiling the nontoken. Our limiting factor for this layer is the number of Silent Gravestones we can cast, which will unfortunately be four. Sort of. More on that later.

This does mean we can’t let any of our critical spells land in the graveyard. Our instants and sorceries (besides Forsake, which we tucked on top at the beginning and can easily do so after it resolves later, since once it resolves all the Gravestone copies we made will be gone) can stay on the stack, under all the Gravestone activations. Slinn Voda, Paladin of Atonement, and Teshar can stay on the battlefield. Even if this costs extra energy to do, it’s worth it: we’ll get a lot more soon. The only other cards that we need out of the graveyard are our three unwind targets: Planar Bridge, Sea Legs, and Nissa, Genesis Mage. For those, we can just cast them, let them resolve, and kill them after the exile/draw trigger resolves. Planar Bridge can be legend-ruled to the graveyard for 7 mana with Cogwork Assembler and Sea Legs will fall off when the creature it’s enchanting gets bounced or killed by our combo triggers, but Nissa needs a bit more work: we have to spend 10 energy and tap two Dynavolt Towers to deal 6 damage to her. We won’t miss the lost resources: a few energy now is worth it to enable lots more later.

Brief aside: you have to feel bad for poor Nissa here. It was bad enough when we were half-summoning her billions and billions of times only to counter our own spell and leave her hanging, but now we are actually summoning her, billions and billions of times, only to immediately kill her with lightning so we can do it all again. Have you ever seen Happy Death Day? Never mind.

Where does this combo leave us? Well, we know that our first run-through of the combo got us up to 2->8->2,383,743 mana. After that, we cast a Forsake the Worldly, which gets us to 2->3->(2->8->2,383,743) (the value of the second number no longer matters and is so large it would also require a large number of arrows to express, so we’ll round down and call it 3). Each time we draw an instant and play it, we perform one more iteration of the Graham’s function, so our first draw trigger from our first Silent Gravestone will get us to 2->3->(2->3->(2->8->2,383,743)) mana, and so on.

If we feed all the mana at the end of our first iteration of the stage combo into making many copies of Silent Gravestone, we will have 2->3->(2->8->2,383,743) Separate “draw a card” triggers on the stack. We will perform a total of 2->3->(2->8->2,383,743) Consecutive iterations of our stage combo.

That number is way, way beyond what we can express with A->B->C, so it’s time to add another number to the end. Just like how up-arrow notation isn’t restricted to three arrows, Conway notation isn’t restricted to three numbers in the chain: you can have four, five, six, or more variables. For instance, the three-variable Conway chain A->B->C is equal to the chain A->B->C->1, and A->B->C->1->1, and so on.

What happens when you have a fourth number that’s more than 1? Well, think about what happens with just A->B->C. That’s the same as A^^^…^^^B, with C arrows, which we know is equal to A^^^…^^^(A^^^…^^^(A…A)), with B copies of A, and C-1 arrows between each. Therefore, A->B->C is the same as A->(A->(A->(…)->C-1)->C-1)->C-1, with B nested groups of A->(…)->C-1. Don’t worry, that’s still just a harder-to-read way of saying “A^^^….^^^B, with C arrows”.

The same thing is true with more numbers in the chain. A->B->C->2 is the same as A->B->(A->B->(A->B->(…)->1)->1)->1, which, since we can ignore the 1, becomes A->B->(A->B->(A->B->(…))), with C nested groups of A->B->(…).

In plain english, A->B->C->2 is the same as “start with A->B->*, and turn that into A->B->X, where X (the number of arrows) is equal to A->B->*. Repeat that process C times”. When the fourth number is 2, the third number corresponds to arrow multiplication, an Ackermann stage, whatever you want to call it. For instance, Graham’s Number is roughly 3->3->64->2.

For this combo, every time we cast a spell into Dynavolt Tower, we get another iteration of arrow multiplication, so if we go by the number of instants we cast, our number will be 2->3->*->2, where * is the number of times we cast something into our Dynavolt Towers.

However, after the first Silent Gravestone layer, that number will require thousands of arrows to express. After the second, it will be impossible to represent it with up-arrows at all. Fortunately, how layers interact with Conway chains doesn’t change as you add numbers: each new layer adds 1 to the last number on the chain, so our final total will be 2->X->*->3.

What do X and * represent? It might help if we expand out that chain to see what it means: 2->X->*->3 is the same as 2->X->(2->X->(2->X->(…(2->X)->2)->2)->2, where the number of times we nest a 2->X->() as the third term of the last one is equal to *. For instance, if * were 4, we’d have 2->X->(2->X->(2->X->(2->X)->2)->2)->2. We know that each time we cast Silent Gravestone, we wrap the last total we got in another 2->X->()->2, and we have 4 Silent Gravestones, which makes * equal to 5. Remember, the * also counts the lonely 2->X in the middle.

Almost. We have one other trick up our sleeve. If we counter all our instants and sorceries with Unwind, tuck them on top of our deck with Bloodwater Entity, draw them with a few spare Silent Gravestone activations, and then play our fourth Silent Gravestone but DON’T run through the combo, when The Antiquities War resolves, it will make Silent Gravestone into a creature. After that, we can make many, many noncreature copies of it, hardcast our spells again (now that it’s the main phase and the stack is clear, we can naturally play Switcheroo), put all the draw triggers on the stack, and with one Slinn Voda trigger bounce that last, animated Silent Gravestone back to our hand. Now we have another stack of draw triggers to run through, but instead of exiling a Gravestone, we’ve used up an Antiquities War trigger. We can do this precisely once, but it’s enough to pump our 5 up to 6.

X, then, represents the amount of Silent Gravestones we could make the first time we cast one. That makes our final total 2->(2->3->(2->8->2,383,743))->6->3. That number looks a bit ugly, so we can round it down to 2->3->6->3. Or 2->4->6->3. Or 2->2,147,483,647->6->3. Any number you can write down, we can use that as the second term. I’m going to use the number of layers we got from our first batch of energy, as a marker: 2->2,383,743->6->3.

Section 6: Killing our opponent

Insult to Injury
Disclaimer: card only included in the metaphorical sense.

When we’ve at long last run out of Silent Gravestones to throw, energy to spend, and triggers on the stack, we are left with nothing but a lot of mana to somehow turn into damage. We’re spoiled for choice here: Samut gives everything haste, so we can just feed all that mana into Panharmonicons, cast one last Naru Meha and have every trigger copy Onward//Victory on any creature we want, and ride that monstrosity to victory. Technically, the best option is to go through one more round with Marwyn, tap her for the maximum mana we can generate, spend it all making many Cogwork Assemblers, and swing with those, but we can’t distinguish between that strategy and any other in our total: the difference is too small.

Instead, I vote for the style win: run out a Yargle, Glutton of Urborg, shoot him with a bajillion Onward copies, and hit our opponent with the largest Frog Horror in the history of Magic: the Gathering. Our opponent has no blocks, takes 2->2,383,743->6->3 damage, and dies. Probably. Who knows, maybe they cast a really big Sanguine Sacrament or something.

Conclusion

I want to begin by saying that, despite the link at the top, this does not do more damage than the current Vintage challenger. The 408-arrow deck I’ve linked above is three years old now, and in the time since, the designers behind it have found combos that make Ackermann stages look like “mountain, bolt your face, go”.  

It does, however, blow the old Vintage deck out of the water, to a degree that I don’t think anyone thought would ever be possible in Standard. If I may brag for a moment, it took six years for the magic community to crack the Ackermann puzzle. While I got a massive head-start from their efforts, I’m still patting myself on the back for managing it in four months, in a format a tenth of the size. 

With that said, I believe I’ve been incredibly lucky. If I had tried this challenge in the last rotation, I doubt a combo like this would have been possible, and I think the same is true for most past Standard formats. There are simply too many moving parts, too many must-have effects that you can’t rely on having in a rotating format for this to be anything but a fluke. This isn’t just the most finite damage you can deal in Standard today, it may well be the most you can deal in any Standard, ever. 

The best evidence that this deck is not the norm is how devastating the upcoming rotation will be. Cogwork Assembler and Panharmonicon, the fundamental engine that allows this deck to work, will be gone. Without them, every layer we add has to have its own built-in scaling mechanism. Not only are those few and far between, but they also usually work by generating a large amount of some resource, like mana, that you can use whenever you want. Every Ackermann stage implementation we’ve found in any format requires you to work with triggers on the stack, and carefully preserve the order in which you can do the different steps to prevent going infinite. That’s impossible with only resource pools like mana or tokens, so Graham’s Number is out of the question. In fact, my rough drafts for after rotation have struggled to get past 3 arrows. 

Anyways, we’re over 11,000 words here, so I’ll leave it at that. I hope you enjoyed this deep dive into magic math and Very Big Numbers. If you want to learn more, or jump into these challenges yourself, we are currently working on the Vintage (and occasionally standard) challenge on the MTGSalvation forums here. I imagine we’ll have an updated write-up on the vintage deck some time soon.

Until then, may your combos, ogres, and onions be blessed with many layers.

How to Make a B(aj)illion Dinosaurs in Magic: the Gathering

A few months ago, when I first saw the Polyraptor/Forerunner of the Empire combo from Rivals of Ixalan, my first thought was “oh, cute, eight dinosaurs”. My second one was “wait… if you can hit Forerunner of the Empire with Appeal//Authority, you get 256 Polyraptors. And if you can do it again, you get 2^256 Polyraptors!”

I was inspired.

I’ve always been fascinated with the “most damage dealt on turn 1 without infinite combos” article that’s been floating around reddit for a while, and something about the interaction of Appeal and Polyraptor reminded me of the strategies that deck used to generate its absurd damage total. It got me thinking, could we do the same thing in standard?

After that, one thing led to another, multiple months went by, and it turns out the answer is “yes”. I give you a standard-legal decklist that, without any infinite combos, deals more damage in a single turn than any other deck I know of. Fair warning, this will involve math.

The original challenge, for anyone who hasn’t seen it, is to find a vintage-legal deck of 60 cards that, on turn 1 against a goldfish, deals the most damage possible, without using any infinite combos. Going infinite is cheating. To help you out, the deck operates in magical Christmasland: you will always draw the exact card you want, every time. You can see a writeup of their list here. Turn one in standard is uninteresting, so I’ve relaxed that requirement: instead, the goal is to just do it as quickly as possible, with the understanding that dealing lots of damage gets less impressive the more time you have to set up. All the other rules still apply. 

I’ve left the decklist printed out here, organized by the role the card plays in the deck. By all means, try it out, though I wouldn’t advise it: Only six lands, none of which can produce black, white or red despite the deck’s playing 11 cards in Mardu colors, 11 6+ drops, it’s a real mess. Outside of the specific rules of this challenge, there are trillion-to-one odds that this deck will get anything done at all.

And yet, its god draw deals more damage than any other deck I’ve been able to create. It deals more damage than there are atoms in the universe. It deals more damage than there are possible games of chess to be played. And it does so without access to any infinite combos.

In standard.

With dinosaurs.

Setup:
3x Ipnu Rivulet
1x Shore Keeper
2x Forest
1x Growing Rites of Itlimoc
2x Ornithopter
4x Vizier of Tumbling Sands
1x Tishana, Voice of Thunder
1x Evolving Wilds
1x Rashmi, Eternities Crafter
1x Sacred Excavation
1x Nissa, Genesis Mage
1x Ghirapur Orrery
1x Champion of Wits
Engine:
1x Forerunner of the Empire
1x Polyraptor
4x Swarm Intelligence
1x Anointed Procession
1x Failure//Comply
1x Cogwork Assembler
1x Panharmonicon
1x Arcane Adaptation
1x Cherished Hatchling
4x Aid from the Cowl
Layers:
1x Spontaneous Artist
1x Wildfire Eternal
1x Appeal//Authority
1x Insidious Will
1x Torrential Gearhulk
1x Merciless Javelineer
1x Hope Tender
1x Select for Inspection
1x Aetherwind Basker
1x Storm Sculptor
1x Sunscourge Champion
1x Run Aground
1x Gishath, Sun’s Avatar
1x Dive Down
1x Combat Celebrant
1x Hostage Taker
1x Baffling End
1x Ajani Unyielding
1x Naturalize
5x other irrelevant cards (let’s say, a playset of Yargle and a Voltaic Servant)

The core interaction of this deck isn’t actually Polyraptor/Forerunner at all: it’s Cogwork Assembler and Panharmonicon. By feeding all our mana into Cogwork Assembler’s ability to make more and more token copies of Panharmonicon, we can make every single enters-the-battlefield ability on our creatures trigger not just once, but as many times as we have mana to pay for it beforehand. All we have to do is to make sure that the amount of mana we can feed into the Assembler is “a lot”, and that’s what the other 58 cards, including Polyraptor and Forerunner, are for.

Section 0: Setting up over Turns 1-5

We start out pretty innocuously: On turn 1, we play an Ipnu Rivulet and pay a life to play Shore Keeper.

Turn 2 stays almost normal. We play a Forest and a Hope Tender, and pass.

On turn 3, we start to get a bit more spicy. We play a second Ipnu Rivulet, and tap out to play Growing Rites of Itlimoc, revealing an Ornithopter. After that, we play two Ornithopters, and pass without attacking. Growing Rites of Itlimoc transforms into Itlimoc, Cradle of the Sun on our end step. We have 2 cards in hand.

The next few turns will each be a combo to themselves. We go off and make all our Polyraptors on turn 6. On turn 5, we will play all the assorted cards we need to play in order to get our main combo going. On turn 4, we will play all the cards we need to in order to get the resources we need for turn 5.

We start by tapping Itlimoc and forest for 5 and spending 1 to exert Hope Tender, untapping both. We spend 3 of the remaining 4 to play Cogwork Assembler. We tap Itlimoc again, this time for 5 (6 total floating), and spend 4 of that and a blue from Rivulet 1 (18 life) to play Rashmi, Eternities Crafter. Spend the last card in our hand and GU (17 life) to cycle a Vizier of Tumbling Sands, untapping Hope Tender and drawing a card: a second Vizier of Tumbling Sands. Exert Hope Tender (0 green floating) to untap Rivulet and Itlimoc, and tap both, going down to 16 life and up to 6 G and a U. Note that as long as we keep drawing Viziers, we can keep spending 1 life and GGU to cycle them, drawing a new card and adding a net of 4 more green mana to our mana pool. Do so 3 more times, leaving us fresh out of Viziers, at which point we will be at 13 life, with 1 U and 18 G in the pool. Spend 6 G and U of that to play our last card: Tishana, Voice of Thunder. She immediately dies, but we still get her trigger, drawing another 6 cards. We still have 12 mana in the pool.

Screen Shot 2018-06-06 at 10.28.36 PM
The board state would look something like this

Spend all of it to play Cherished Hatchling and a pair of Aid from the Cowls, and finally play our land for the turn: Evolving Wilds, which we immediately sacrifice to find a forest. We pass the turn, and both Aid from the Cowls trigger, revealing Anointed Procession and Gishath, Sun’s Avatar. We put both on the battlefield, and move on to turn 5.

Turn 5:

We draw our card for the turn, giving us 3 cards in hand, all unknown. We start off by tapping Itlimoc, this time for 8 (since the last time we checked, we’ve gotten out both Gishath and Cherished Hatchling). We spend 7 of that playing Nissa, Genesis Mage. Rashmi triggers, and we reveal and cast Panharmonicon. We activate Nissa’s +2, untapping Itlimoc and Hope Tender. We tap Itlimoc again, and go up to 9 mana. We spend 7 of that and a U (down to 12 life) to activate Shore Keeper (from turn 1, remember?), sacrificing it to draw 3 cards. We go down to 11 life and tap our second Ipnu Rivulet to play Arcane Adaptation, naming Dinosaur. With that done, we move to combat.

We only attack with Gishath: we don’t want to deal the goldfish any more damage than we have to. They have no blocks, and take the full 7, causing Gishath to trigger and us to reveal the top 7 cards of our library. All our creatures are dinosaurs thanks to Arcane Adaptation, so any creatures we can cast with this are good hits.

And because this is magical christmasland, we reveal Combat Celebrant, Wildfire Eternal, Spontaneous Artist, Forerunner of the Empire, Merciless Javelineer, Champion of Wits, and Torrential Gearhulk. Thanks to Panharmonicon, we get 14 damage triggers from Forerunner, none of which we use, 2 energy from Spontaneous Artist, and four loots off Champion of Wits, which we just use to mill four instants into our graveyard: Select for Inspection, Failure//Comply, Run Aground, and Insidious Will.

Megacombo-Gishath
Not the worst hit, I suppose

By the way, if you read that paragraph and went “oh come on, you’re cheating out Gearhulks with Gishath, that’s absurd!”, well… I’d stop reading now. It’s only getting worse.

After that, we play our land for the turn, a third Ipnu Rivulet, and tap a Forest to exert Hope Tender, untapping another Rivulet and Itlimoc. We tap Itlimoc for 14 green mana, tap a Rivulet for U (10 life) and play Sacred Excavation (11 G floating), getting back two Viziers. We use the same pattern of spending GGU to get a free untap of one of our lands, but since Itlimoc now taps for 14 and we need blue mana more than we need green, we only target Itlimoc with it once, which is enough to get us to 23 G floating. The second time, we go down to 21 G and 7 life to get 2 untaps of Rivulet, leaving us with 21 G and U in our pool, and an untapped Rivulet. We don’t really need it.

We have 4 cards left in our hand: Swarm Intelligence, Ghirapur Orrery, and the rest of our Aid from the Cowls. We play all of them, leaving behind exactly G in our pool. We let it drain, and pass the turn. Because we sacrificed Tide Keeper a while back, all our Aid from the Cowls trigger, and we reveal: Ajani Unyielding, Baffling End (which does nothing, since our opponent has no creatures), and two more Swarm Intelligences. All our pieces are in order.

Turn 6:

Now would be a good time to buckle your seatbelt.

Section 1: Green Mana

Polyraptor Forerunner of the Empire AppealFailure

We start off by drawing 3 cards of Ghirapur Orrery. After our draw step, we wind up with 4 cards, which must be:

Aetherwind Basker
Appeal
Polyraptor
Storm Sculptor

Megacombo-Turn-6
I like the little absurdities of this board state, like the fact that we somehow played 6 red cards with only blue and green lands.

We start, as usual, by tapping Itlimoc (for 14 again) and activate Nissa’s +2 again, untapping Hope Tender and Itlimoc. Then, finally, we play Polyraptor.  This triggers Rashmi, and we reveal one more card from our library: the fourth Swarm Intelligence, which we immediately cast. Polyraptor enters the battlefield and triggers Forerunner of the Empire, which we decline to use, because it would kill Combat Celebrant and that would be a Very Bad Thing.

Note: Unfortunately, Polyraptor isn’t indestructible, so some number of them will die each time you do your damage. The way we account for this is, rather than try to factor them in, we just assume any damaged Polyraptors immediately die. Because of Anointed Procession, this rounding down means that each time we deal a damage, we double our Polyraptor Count. That’s actually the only reason Anointed Procession is in the deck: making the math neater. That’s a /lot/ of rounding down, but don’t worry, the growth rate of our Polyraptor count is so high that we won’t notice.

Now, we tap Itlimoc again, for 15 mana (bringing us up to 20 in the pool), and spend 1 of that mana to cast Appeal. All of our Swarm Intelligences trigger, and we get four copies of Appeal, which we can target as we please. We can have them target any of our creatures, but we can’t let the original cast resolve: almost the entire rest of this combo will happen while that Appeal is still on the stack. As it is, let’s say the Appeal copies go on Combat Celebrant, Hope Tender, Forerunner of the Empire, and Cogwork Assembler.

Once the copies resolve, we spend another 7 mana to activate Cogwork Assembler, targeting Torrential Gearhulk. We create two token copies, and each one’s abilities trigger twice (thanks to Panharmonicon), but we only care about one of the triggers: we have it target Insidious Will. We cast Insidious Will for free, targeting Appeal. Swarm Intelligence triggers four times, and we get four copies of Appeal, which we use to pump Spontaneous Artist, Wildfire Eternal, Merciless Javelineer, and Gishath, Sun’s Avatar. We’re going to round down in the latter case and say that all of these creatures just got pumped by +14/+14.

We can’t let Insidious Will itself resolve, though. If we do, it’ll get exiled, and we have no way to get it back from there. Instead, we spend another 7 green mana to create another Torrential Gearhulk, this time having its ability target Failure//Comply. As usual, we get 4 Swarm Intelligence triggers, and we have the copies all target either Insidious Will or our own Failure//Comply, making sure at least one copy targets each. The copies resolve, and bounce both spells back to our hand, saving them from Torrential Gearhulk’s exile (which, if you read it closely, only works if the spell goes to the graveyard).

There is one other thing we get to do now: those Torrential Gearhulk tokens created a lot of Forerunner of the Empire triggers. We let one resolve, dealing 1 damage to everything. This causes 2 things to happen:

Cherished Hatchling takes 1 damage and dies, letting us cast Dinosaur spells as if they had flash. Since all our creatures are dinosaurs thanks to Arcane Adaptation, that means every creature spell we play can be played at instant speed this turn. That might be important later, I dunno.

Polyraptor gets dealt a damage and triggers enrage. It tries to create a token copy of itself, but Anointed Procession doubles it to 2 tokens. Then, because all our important creatures have more toughness to spare, we do it again, and our 2 dinosaurs become 4. We’ve pumped all of our critical creatures with Appeal except one: Gishath, which has 6 toughness, so we can afford to do this 5 total times, each time doubling our Polyraptor count until we end up with 32 5/5 dinos.

Not bad, not bad. It’s certainly a start.

At this point, we have a problem: Both of our critical spells are stuck in hand, and we can only cast them by either paying life we can’t afford or by copying Torrential Gearhulk. This is where Merciless Javelineer comes in. By paying 4 more generic, we can discard both of our instants to put 2 -1/-1 counters on a random creature (for best results, use a damaged Polyraptor), and we’re ready to go again!

There is a problem with this line. Next time, it won’t cost just 18 mana like it did just now. We cheated this time by using the copies from our original cast of Appeal, but we can’t keep doing that. In the future, each time we want to run through the forerunner loop, we’ll need to use Torrential to cast Insidious Will THREE times: We have nine creatures we have to pump each time, and we only get four copies of Appeal with each cast. Each Appeal cast costs 18 mana (7 to copy Torrential and cast Insidious Will, 7 to copy Torrential and cast Failure, and another 4 to discard both to the Javelineer), so it will cost 54 generic mana to go through this loop next time.

What do we get for that massive mana investment? Well, when our Appeal copies resolve, all our critical creatures (including Forerunner), wind up with X extra toughness, which is roughly equal to the number of Polyraptors we’ve created so far, or our Polyraptor Count. Right now, we also have a bunch of other creatures, but our Polyraptor count will soon get so much larger that a small factor like 8 more won’t change anything. Each point of toughness on our must-live creatures lets us double our Polyraptor count, so every 54 generic mana we spend will (roughly) turn X Polyraptors into 2^X Polyraptors.

Now, before letting Appeal resolve, we spend our last remaining green mana to activate Hope Tender, untapping Itlimoc and tapping it for some mana. This time, just this once, we’ll take into account the damaged Polyraptors, to get an exact number for the mana we generate.

We’ve dealt 5 damage to our creatures, which is enough for the first, nontoken Polyraptor to die, and no others. When the damaged ones are included, each point actually triples our count, until they start dying, at which point it gets too complicated to account for. As a result, we’ve created 3^5-1 Polyraptors, or 242. Include our 9 must-live creatures (everything else has died), and the 4 Torrential Gearhulk copies we’ve made (which are all 1 point of toughness from dying), and we have 255 creatures. Itlimoc taps for 255 mana. That’s enough to run through our 54-mana loop another 4 times. The first brings our Polyraptor count up from 242 to 2^242 (it’s already a challenging problem to account for the damaged Polyraptors, so we’re done with that). 2^242 is only 73 digits long, so here you go:

7,067,388,259,113,537,318,333,190,002,971,674,063,309,935,587,502,475,832,486,424,805,170,479,104 Polyraptors. Apparently that’s about 7 trevigintillion. Did you know that names for numbers go that high? I always figured they stopped around “septillion”. 

Anyays, wave goodbye to that number, because that’s the last time we’ll be able to write out the entire Polyraptor count like that. Our second 54-mana investment takes us to 2^(2^242) Polyraptors, which is far too large to fit its digits onto every hard disk in existence combined, much less this blog post. Our third one takes us beyond even that, to 2^(2^(2^242)) creatures, and our last one adds another exponent to the end: 2^(2^(2^(2^242))).

Nesting powers like that will get real unwieldy real fast, so we’re going to switch to something called “Knuth up-arrow notation”. Basically, this mathematician Donald Knuth needed a way to describe Very Big Numbers that resulted from certain kinds of recursive functions (coincidentally, the same kind of functions we’re simulating to make all these Polyraptors), and came up with this: just like how A*B can be written as A+(A+(A+(…(A+A), with A repeated B times, A arrow B, or A^B, is A*(A*(A*(…(A*A), with A repeated B times. If you look closely, that’s the same as the definition for exponents. It gets more complicated when you add more arrows: A two-arrow B, or A^^B, is A arrow (A arrow (A arrow … (A arrow A), B times. This is exactly what we’re doing when we cast Appeal! If we round down that starting 242 to, say, 4, or 2^2, we can stop expressing our Polyraptor count as a giant chain of 2^(2^(2^(2^(…..) and express it much more neatly as 2^^X, where X is roughly the number of times we make that investment of 54 mana. In this case, we went through it 4 times, and our total at the end is 2^(2^(2^(2^(2^2)))), rounding 242 down to 2^2. That is exactly equal to 2^^6, which, if you’re curious, is a number so big that the number of digits in it is itself a 20,000 digit number. Isn’t that so much easier to wrap your brain around? No? Okay, well, just do your best, cause we’re just getting started.

We can even keep going. If we were to start adding pairs of arrows to the front, so it became 2^^(2^^6)), we could do the same thing: round down the last number to 4, and add an arrow. It would become 2^^(2^^(2^^2)), which is the same as 2^^^4. And so on, and so forth. Note that, no matter how many arrows are between them, 2^^…^^2 will always equal 4.

So there we are. We have 2^^6 Polyraptors, and we’re down to only 39 green mana in our pool: not enough to keep going.

If only we had a way to generate more…

Input: 54 generic mana
Output: lots of copies of Polyraptor
Layer count: 1 (don’t worry, you’ll get it).

Section 2: Energy

Select for Inspection Spontaneous Artist Hope Tender Itlimoc, Cradle of the Sun

We’ve already shown that we can generate a whole lot of mana by tapping and untapping Itlimoc using Hope Tender. The problem now is that both Hope Tender and Itlimoc are currently tapped, and all our ways of untapping them (Viziers and Nissa’s +2) are used up.

We also have to be careful not to let whatever tool we use to reset Hope Tender go infinite.

Instead, we do some fun stack tricks.

Once we’re done with section 1, we use up some of our 39 mana and make another Torrential Gearhulk with Cogwork Assembler. This time, however, we don’t copy Insidious Will, we copy Select for Inspection. The stack now looks like: 

Swarm Intelligence trigger on Select for Inspection
Swarm Intelligence trigger on Select for Inspection
Swarm Intelligence trigger on Select for Inspection
Swarm Intelligence trigger on Select for Inspection
Select for Inspection (targeting Hope Tender as the only legal target)
Assorted Gearhulk/Forerunner triggers we don’t care about
Appeal//Authority

Let the first Select for Inspection resolve, bouncing our tapped Hope Tender back to our hand (and giving us a scry, which is of course irrelevant). Immediately (remember, it has flash!) we spend another 2 mana (down to 30) to play Hope Tender, and spend an energy to give it haste with Spontaneous Artist, which coincidentally is the only way to give our creatures haste. We spend another mana to activate Hope Tender, untapping Itlimoc.

Then we tap Itlimoc for 2^^6 mana.

2^^6 mana is a lot. It’s more than enough to discard Failure and Insidious Will, then replay them, this time using Failure to also bounce our original Select for Inspection, and discard the Select for Inspection itself. In fact, it’s enough mana that we can turn our 2^^6 Polyraptors into 2^(2^(2^(2^(…2) Polyraptors, with 2^^6 2s in between. That’s impossible to write out, so we collapse it: 2^^(2^^6) Polyraptors. And, like we said earlier, we can collapse that even further by adding an arrow: 2^^^4. Each time we bounce, replay, and activate Hope Tender will add 1 to the number on the right.

Of course, we can’t just keep doing this forever. Every time we replay Hope Tender, we have to give it haste, and there’s only one way to do that: Spontaneous Artist. That ability costs us an energy, and we only have 2 of that, which means that we can only untap Itlimoc twice. That will bring us up to 2^^^5, which is… big. Remember how I said we could deal more damage than the number of possible games of chess you can play? We’ve already passed that, by a lot.

And we’re only halfway into the deck.

We just need to generate a bit more energy….

Input: 1 energy
Output: lots of green mana
Layer count: 2 (You see how this is 1 less than the number of arrows in our total?)

Section 3: Creature Casts

Aetherwind Basker Cogwork Assembler Panharmonicon

It’s actually really straightforward to get energy equal to our creature count: Aetherwind Basker does that without any outside help. Its ETB trigger alone gives us another arrow: each trigger adds a 2^^^() to our expression.

But… we’re nowhere near done. You see, if you look closely, everything we’ve done so far can be done at instant speed. That means, we can do all of sections 1 and 2, in between other things resolving. Things like multiple copies of Aetherwind Basker’s ETB. We have a Panharmonicon out, so that means each Aetherwind Basker actually adds TWO copies of 2^^^() to our total.

And if we don’t use our last energy to repeat section 1 a bajillion times, and instead spend all the mana from tapping Itlimoc to repeatedly activate Cogwork Assembler, targeting Panharmonicon, until we have Panharmonicons roughly equal to our Polyraptor count…

That’s right. Each time we play Aetherwind Basker, we actually get X instances of its trigger, where X is roughly our Polyraptor count so far. Each trigger gives us X energy, and in between each trigger we can spend all that energy repeatedly bouncing, replaying, and exerting Hope Tender to get many copies of section 1, which only makes the Polyraptor count that much higher when the next trigger resolves and we get that much energy.

That’s the power of Cogwork Assembler and Panharmonicon. By giving us X copies of each enters-the-battlefield ability, we get to add 2 arrows with just 1 section.

The only problem is, we have no way to replay Aetherwind Basker. It’s not like we can just tap it and bounce it. We need something else…

Input: 1 casting of Aetherwind Basker
Output: Lots and lots of energy
Layer count: 4

Section 4: Life

Storm Sculptor Ipnu Rivulet

This section only has two cards: Storm Sculptor and Ipnu Rivulet. As long as we top up on Panharmonicons right before we cast it, we can get X copies of its bounce effect, each of which can be used to bounce Aetherwind Basker, since the ability doesn’t target. When we’re almost out of those, we can use the last one to bounce the Sculptor itself, and we’re ready to go again. That adds another arrow already.

Obviously, we still need a limiting factor to keep us from going infinite. In this case, it’s the blue mana we need to actually play the Sculptor. We have only one way to generate more blue mana in the entire deck: Ipnu Rivulet, which costs us 1 life for the luxury. If you remember, we have 7 life left, so we can add 6 more copies of 2^^^^^() to the front of our count. After that, we can round down what we had so far to 4, or rather, 2^^^^^2, and add an arrow: our count at this point is 2^^^^^^8, Remember that number, that’ll actually be important later.

Input: 1 life
Output: lots of bounces of Aetherwind Basker
Layer count: 5

Section 5: White Mana

Sunscourge Champion

This is another spot where we can double up. Once we’re down to only 1 life left, we top up on Panharmonicons, and play Sunscourge Champion. Before each trigger resolves, we run a single iteration of section 1, but point our Appeal copies at the Champion, giving it X power. The trigger resolves, we gain life equal to our Polyraptor count, and we spend it all on section 4 until all we have left is enough for the next Appeal. All told, this gives us another 2 arrows. If you’re wondering, by the way, this is what the stack would actually look like during this section of the combo, ignoring Forerunner triggers for sanity’s sake:

Polyraptor enrage trigger 1
…
Polyraptor enrage trigger 1 bajillion
(Swarm Intelligence copies of Insidious Will)
Insidious Will
(Swarm Intelligence copies of Select for Inspection)
Aetherwind Basker trigger 1
…
Aetherwind Basker trigger 1 bajillion
Storm Sculptor trigger 1
…
Storm Sculptor trigger 1 bajillion
Sunscourge Champion trigger 1
…
Sunscourge Champion trigger 1 bajillion

Each trigger from a lower batch creates another batch of the trigger above it when it resolves, and each time, the size of that batch, and every batch after it, goes up because of Panharmonicon.

The problem here, is that there’s no obvious limiting factor: if we can play Sunscourge Champion from our hand, then we can just use Storm Sculptor triggers to bounce and replay it, going infinite. We solve this by making it so we CAN’T cast Sunscourge Champion from our hand: that would take white mana, and there isn’t a single way to produce white mana in our deck. We need to find another way to play it.

Input: one playing (?) of Sunscourge Champion
Output: lots and lots of life
Layer count: 7

Section 6: Our opponent’s life total.

Gishath, Sun's Avatar Run Aground Combat Celebrant Hostage Taker Dive Down Merciless Javelineer

This section gets weird. Fair warning.

Before we get into section 5, when we’re down to just 2 life left, we need to stop and take stock of our situation. We have 2 life, of course, and a massive number of Polyraptors and Panharmonicons, as well as several creatures with size proportional to our Polyraptor count. There are also, if you’ve been keeping count, only 9 cards left in our library: Sunscourge Champion, Hostage Taker, Dive Down, Naturalize, and our five filler cards (mostly Yargles). Our hand is either empty, or has our one Storm Sculptor in it.

The first thing we do is, we go down to 1 life and tap Ipnu Rivulet for U, but instead of playing Storm Sculptor again, we sacrifice one of our other Ipnu Rivulets (we have 3 still, remember) to mill ourselves for 4 cards. This dumps our Dive Down, Naturalize, and two Yargles into our graveyard.

Then we do something I told you we’d never do: we Failure the original Appeal back to hand (so our hand will be Storm Sculptor and Appeal, since we’ll discard Failure immediately for Torrential Gearhulk shenanigans), let our entire stack of triggers resolve, and move to combat. Inconceivable!

We could attack with everything, but we’d kill our opponent, and we don’t want to do that yet. We’d lose out on all the Sunscourch Champion value, for one thing. Instead, we attack with just 3 creatures: Combat Celebrant, Wildfire Eternal, and Gishath, Sun’s Avatar (note: technically, we don’t even have to attack with Wildfire Eternal this time, but we will in the future, so let’s assume we do for now). What’s more, we exert Combat Celebrant, getting another combat phase after this one: that’s quite important.

Our opponent has no blocks, so we connect with Gishath and immediately kill our opponent because we’ve been pumping it with Appeal this whole time.

Wait, no, that’s stupid. Instead, we dedicate an Itlimoc tap to recurring Dive Down, instead of Appeal. We point every single Dive Down copy at Gishath, Combat Celebrant, and Wildfire Eternal, and divide the -1/-1 counters from Merciless Javelineer evenly between them. Their power reduces slightly with each run of this loop, while Dive Down’s toughness boosts saves them from dying to Forerunner Damage. This will obviously cost a lot of mana, but remember, we have mana to spare. If we skip a single Itlimoc tap to do this busy work, it won’t meaningfully impact our total. In fact, we could even spend an energy, or an entire Aetherwind Basker trigger on this, but we don’t have to. These creatures have been pumped by Appeal to have power/toughness roughly equal to our Polyraptor count BEFORE the last appeal loop resolved. Our Polyraptor count is already exponentially higher, so it will only take at most two taps of Itlimoc to get their powers down to 1 or 0. 

We also need to know how much to weaken each of our creatures. Combat Celebrant and Wildfire Eternal can both have 0 or negative power, but Gishath needs a full 2 power now, and will need 1 later on. With that done, our opponent has no blocks, and we bash them for 2 damage and trigger Gishath. Gishath reveals our last two combo pieces, Sunscourge Champion and Hostage Taker, and we get our Champion triggers. Piece of cake!

Except that we don’t have Appeal on the stack anymore, and can’t layer it between Champion triggers. That’s where Hostage Taker comes in. We use it to exile Sunscourge Champion, as well as Wildfire Eternal and Combat Celebrant. Hostage Taker, of course, lets us cast each of these cards without caring about color requirements, which is how we replay any of these creatures. It also lets us cast them any time we want, since they all have flash from Cherished Hatchling. That means we can play Combat Celebrant and Wildfire Eternal during the begin combat step of the additional combat phase we got from exerting the Celebrant last time. It also lets us cast Sunscourge Champion a bit later, such as after Wildfire Eternal’s combat trigger resolves and we put Appeal//Authority back onto the stack. After that, all we need to do is loop Run Aground with Torrential Gearhulk/Failure shenanigans, tuck Hostage Taker back on top of our library, and we can reveal it with Gishath on the next combat and do the whole thing over again!

That’s all well and good, but we have a problem: the only way to cast these mardu spells is through Gishath’s damage trigger, which means each time we do it, we’re taking chunks of life off our opponent. They were already at 13 from that time we clocked them with Gishath on turn 5. Our first attack this turn drops them to 11 After that, we only have room for 10 more swings before they’re dead. That alone would get us up to 2^^^^^^^^12 dinosaurs, but to go any higher we need a way to force our opponent to gain life, and in standard, those are few and far between. In fact, there is only one way to do so: Ajani Unyielding’s -2.

Section 7a: Maxing Out our Opponent’s Life Total

Ajani Unyielding Baffling End

There are a /lot/ of problems with this system. For one thing, we need to somehow make our OPPONENT have a creature to target, otherwise we’ll be the ones who gain the life. And for another, we can’t chain it. Once we move to combat for Gishath, we will no longer be able to activate Ajani Unyielding until the postcombat main phase, by which point we won’t be able to attack anymore. It’s mathematically impossible to add more layers beyond this in the current configuration.

We can, at least, solve the first issue, with Baffling End. Yeah, remember that card we played with Rashmi a billion years ago? By destroying it with our Naturalize, we can force our opponent to have a 3/3 dinosaur. Then we hit the token with an Appeal, exile it with Ajani, and boom, our opponent has X life. That in turn means we can clock them with Gishath roughly X times without killing them, giving us that critical final arrow.

Input: one activation of Ajani Unyielding
Output: many combat steps, each one giving us another cast of Sunscorch Champion
Layer count: 8

Section 7: Killing our Opponent

Insult to Injury
Disclaimer: card only included in the metaphorical sense.

The final moments of our combo are a bit different. After we hit our opponent down to 1 with Gishath, we pull Hostage Taker out and exile our creatures as usual, but when we come back around to combat, we don’t attack with Gishath: just Celebrant and Eternal. We use the same trick to play Sunscourge Champion and gain our life, but deal no damage to our opponent, for obvious reasons. Also, once the last Sunscourge Champion trigger has resolved, we’ve spent all the life playing Storm Sculptor, used up every bounce to replay Aetherwind Basker, we don’t use the energy to repeatedly give Hope Tender haste. Instead, we use it to give haste to all our Polyraptors. Now, technically you can do slightly more damage by running the energy down to 0 and using the last Itlimoc tap to activate Cogwork Assembler targeting itself many times to get huge numbers of hasty robots, but… let’s be honest. I know what you came here for, and it’s not Assembly Workers.

Now, all that’s left is to figure out just how many Polyraptors we have. That’s not a simple problem. The Ajani activation adds a 2^^^^^^^^() to our expression, but we weren’t able to do any Sunscourge Shenanigans beforehand, so the right hand side is the total we had at the end of section 4: 2^^^^^^8. Except we also had to spend a blue mana to mill the Dive Down, so it’s actually 2^^^^^^7. All told, our count is 2^^^^^^^^(2^^^^^^7). That’s pretty ugly, so let’s simplify: If we round 2^^^^^^7 down to 4, then we can express it instead as 2^^^^^^^^2, which would let us collapse the whole thing and make our damage 2^^^^^^^^^3. That is a VAST underestimate of the actual total, but since our Polyraptor count is just a rounding error compared to 2^^^^^^^^^4, it’s the closest we can get.

Section 8: Conclusion

Going into this, I did not expect to get 9 layers of recursion out of the standard cardpool. I expected this to take a day to solve, and that it would wrap up with 2, maybe 3 arrows. It’s a testament to the depth of the game that, even in such a small format, with such constrained options, life finds a way. 

Life Finds a Way
Well, there it is

Moving forward, there’s a ton of room to improve on this deck, and if you look closely at the list, you’ll see why: there are actually no Dominaria cards in this entire combo! The process of vetting a deck like this for infinite combos, not to mention actually writing up how the deck works, is so time-intensive that if I tried to update this for Dominaria, it would never be finished. That said, standard’s newest set gives us plenty of goodies, and I’m currently vetting another version of the deck that uses some Dominaria additions to get the damage total a little bit higher.

Not by too much.

Just slightly more than Graham’s Number…

See you next time!