5,521,397,077,432,461,029,947,804,689,821,620,361,960,881,777,736,309,244,130,019 Damage in Standard
How much damage is it possible to deal in Streets of New Capenna Standard? That's what we're going to find out today!
Discussion
So, our goal today was simple: find out how much damage we could deal in Standard. In Streets of New Capenna, Wizards gave us the perfect card to put this to the test in Devilish Valet, whose power doubles every time a creature enters the battlefield under our control. While it is possible to make a Devilish Valet pretty big just by using normal token producers, we didn't want to make Devilish Valet pretty big—we wanted to make it the biggest.
The idea of the deck is pretty simple. First, we need two copies of Devilish Valet. While we can just play two copies naturally, the easiest way to do this is to play one Devilish Valet and then use Jaxis, the Troublemaker or a flipped Fable of the Mirror-Breaker to copy it and get the second copy.
Next, we need a way to have nine creatures enter the battlefield, which will double the power of Devilish Valet nine times, making it a 256/3. For this, our main plan is to make a bunch of Treasures with Bootleggers' Stash and then turn them into creatures with Stimulus Package.
Once we get a Devilish Valet up to 256 power, the last piece of the puzzle is Tend the Pests, which we can use to sacrifice one of the Devilish Valets to make somewhere around 250 tokens. Magic Arena has a creature limit—you can only have 250 creatures on the battlefield at the same time—so even though we could make the Devilish Valet even bigger (by making more Citizen tokens) before sacrificing it to Tend the Pests, it wouldn't really do anything because of the creature limit. It's also worth pointing out that the creature limit applies to all creatures, not just tokens, which further caps the number of creatures we can make. When we sacrifice our 256-power Devilish Valet to Tend the Pests, we end up making 235 tokens because we already have 15 creatures on the battlefield, bringing our total to 250.
Devilish Valet gets incredibly huge once we get all of the Tend the Pests tokens, although sadly not as huge as it should. We learned that along with limiting the number of creatures on the battlefield to 250, Arena also limits just how big a creature can get. Our Devilish Valet stops growing at 2.1 billion power, which amounts to its power being doubled 31 times. This means more than 200 of our Pest tokens don't really do anything. I made a spreadsheet to calculate just how big Devilish Valet could be if Arena would keep doubling its power, and the number I ended up with was a number that looks something like this: 5,521,397,077,432,461,029,947,804,689,821,620,361,960,881,777,736,309,244,130,019.
Of course, this number could have been even bigger if not for Arena's creature limit. We had several Treasures left over when we cast Tend the Pests, so we easily could have doubled the first Devilish Valet's power to around 4,000 before sacrificing it to Tend the Pests, doubling the second Devilish Valet's power thousands of more times, with the end result being a googolplex of power or more. Thankfully, even though our opponent was playing a lifegain deck and had a ton of life when we went off, it turned out that 2.1 billion damage was more than enough for the win, even though it should have been much, much more in reality!
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today! What's the most damage you've ever dealt in a game of Magic (discounting infinite)? Let me know in the comments! Thanks for watching, and as always, you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive, or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.
