Largest Infinite Combo

tempoEDH
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Post by tempoEDH » 4 years ago

What is the largest amount of cards you can use to go infinite? Producing infinite of any resource, infinite damage, up to you. As long as it is an action repeatable an indefinite amount of times, it counts. Use as many unique cards as you can. Assume it is singleton, so no duplicates. Every card included must be relevant and necessary for the combo to function. Submissions welcome!
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Perrodequeso
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Post by Perrodequeso » 4 years ago

This video boils it down a bit:

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Mookie
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Post by Mookie » 4 years ago

Turing completeness makes this somewhat difficult to answer if we ignore card uniqueness. You ought to be able to write a program that can take any card and turn it into a card with the next multiverse ID, with zero waste / extra resources. And when we reach the very last card, we loop back to the first one. At which point we begin looping infinitely. Actually constructing this machine is rather infeasible, but Turing completeness means it is possible to do so. And at that point, we have our answer: the maximum number of unique cards we can use to generate an infinite combo is.... all of them.

Enforcing that every card is used exactly once makes things a lot more complicated, and depends largely on whether singleton magic is also Turing complete, but my instinct is 'yes'. This is also the sort of question that one could write a graduate-level computer science thesis on (see the cited paper re: turing completeness), so I'm not going to spend the time to construct that machine myself.

So instead, I'll chip in a related question that is somewhat more interesting (and straightforward) to answer: what is the most complicated combo that you have actually pulled off in a game?

The most complicated one I recall actually performing was 7 cards with my Sharuum deck:

Codex Shredder
Open the Vaults
Orzhov Signet and Azorius Signet
Krark-Clan Ironworks
Trading Post
Pithing Needle (or any other artifact)
SPOILER
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Codex Shredder recurs Open the Vaults, Open the Vaults recurs Shredder and any other artifacts in your graveyard. This requires 9WW, which is produced by activating the two signets and sacrificing them, KCI, Trading Post, and Pithing Needle to KCI (for a total of 8WWUB), leaving 1 mana floating on every iteration, which can be funneled into Trading Post activations.
....I vaguely recall almost pulling off a similar combo involving 12 cards, but conceding before I actually executed it (I was dead on board and spent a very, very long turn trying to find a way out, and I think I was a few mana short of actually starting the loop anyway).
SPOILER
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I'd believe it was:

Codex Shredder
Open the Vaults
Orzhov Signet and Azorius Signet
Hedron Archive
Thopter Foundry
Clock of Omens
5 other random artifacts

I'll leave the exact combo as an exercise to the reader, in case anyone wants a puzzle. :P I believe it results in infinite life and tapped thopters, but not infinite mana. But, again, took a lot of thinking to figure out whether or not it was actually infinite.

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