Edit: Added some formatting. 15:13:51 GMT-0500 (Central Daylight Time)

Edit 2: More formatting. 15:28:52 GMT-0500 (Central Daylight Time)

Edit 3: It was pointed out that I missed the counter increase on Kyver. Doubling Season and Primal Vigor double counters, so there should be a 2⁸ increase in his counters every time a human ETB, or 256 counters. I've updated the spreadsheet already, and the math is being updated below. I also missed 8 of the doubling cards in the math. That's reflected below and in the spreadsheet as well.

Edit 4: Whoever said Math is Fun™ is a liar. I had my formula a bit messed up. Let's try this again... Unfortunately this was debugged in real time, so mistakes were made. Oh well! 17:32:37 GMT-0500 (Central Daylight Time)

Because Math is Fun™. (Disclaimer: It was kinda fun)

So, today I saw the MIC commander Kyler, Sigardian Emissary on the front page, and shared it with a buddy of mine. I run a Rick, Steadfast Hero commander deck, and suggested I might enjoy making a Human deck instead of a Soldier deck.

He liked the concept, and then ran down a rabbit hole asking me to figure out the math, because he didn't want to. (The lazy bum).

Anyway, here's the setup:

You cast each of these cards 4 times: [[Primal Vigor]], [[Doubling Season]], [[Annointed Procession]], [[Parallel Lives]], and then put [[Castle Ardenvale]] onto the battlefield.

Activate it's second ability. How many tokens do you get?

Formula 1 - Total Creatures

• X = Creature Tokens At End of Turn
• Y = Creature Tokens Initially Created
• Z = Number of Doubling Cards on the Battlefield

That math is simple:

X=Y*2^Z 

or

X=1*2^16

Activate Castle Ardenvale 1 time under these circumstances, and you'll get 65,536 creatures.

So, then he modified the question a bit and threw out a bunch more cards. (You cast these before activating Castle Ardenvale, for the purposes of this math problem:

4 copies of: [[Soul Warden]], [[Soul's Attendant]], [[Ajani's Welcome]], [[Suture Priest]], [[Essence Warden]], [[Cleric Class]], [[Angel of Vitality]], [[Angelic Chorus]], [[Alhammeret's Archive]]. and [[Boon Reflection]].

1 copy of [[Trostani, Selesnya's Voice]], and then one copy of [[Kyler, Sigardian Emissary]].

Kyler gets cast last.

What's your life gain the first time you use the Castle Ardenvale, and how about the second time?

Formula 2 - Life Gain

• X = Total Life Gained each Turn
• Y = Total Creature Tokens ETB
• A = Number of Cards that give you 1 life per Creature that ETB
• B = Number of cards 1 each time you gain life
• C = Number of Cards where you gain life equal to the Toughness of a creature that ETB
• D = Base Toughness
• E = Number of Cards that Double Life Gain
• F = Counters on Kyver
• G = Cards that Double Counters

The formula for this ended up looking like:

X = ((Y*A*B) (Y*C*B)*(Y*(D F)))*(2^E)

Plugging in numbers for turn 1:

X=((65,536*20*8) (65,536*5*8)*(65,536*(1 0)))*(2^8)

So

X = 43,980,475,596,800

Formula 3 - Kyver Counters

• X = Counters
• Y = Total Humans ETB this turn
• Z = Cards that Double Counters

Formula:

X = Y*2^Z

Plugging in the numbers from the first turn:

x = 65,536*2^8

So

X = 16,777,216

Turn 1, with these cards in play, you would gain 43,980,475,596,800 life. Kyler would also gain 16,777,216 1/ 1 counters. After everything is done resolving, your army of Human Tokens would have Power/Toughness of 16,777,217/16,777,217

Now on to turn 2. You activate Castle Ardenvale, and create a token. Then things start to get wiggy. Plugging in the appropriate values, we get this:

X = (65,536*20*8) (65,536*5*8)*(65,536*(1 (1*16,777,216))))*(2^8)

Just to break this down:

First Expression

• 65,536 is the number of tokens being created.
• 20 is the number of cards that give 1 life every time a creature ETB.
• 8 is the number of support cards that give us 1 life whenever we gain life.

Second Expression

• 65,536 is the number of tokens being created.
• 5 is the number of cards that care about toughness.
• 8 is the number of support cards that give us 1 life whenever we gain life.

Third Expression

• 65,536 is the number of tokens being created.
• 1 is the base toughness of the creatures being created.
• 16,777,216 is the number of counters on Kyler before anything resolves, which will cause all the humans to ETB with a total of 16,777,217 toughness.
• 8 is the number of cards that double counters.

Fourth Expression

• 8 is the number of doubling life cards we have in play

Total:

X = 737,869,806,928,858,000,000

Turn 2, with these cards in play, you would gain 737,869,806,928,858,000,000 life. Kyler would gain another 16,777,216 1/ 1 counters, bringing his total to 33,554,432. You would then have 131,072 human creatures in play at that point, with power/toughness (after everything resolves) equal to 33,554,433.

Going off the Rails

So I thought I was done here, but another friend of mine suggested I throw out a full playset of [[Parallel Evolutions]], with Flashback, to see what that does to the number.

There are two ways this can play out. I'm going to do the smaller one first, and then the larger one.

If you cast all 4 parallel evolutions on the same turn, and then use their flashback abilities, your total amount of life gained is this number:

7,622,677,603,892,930,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Which is a very, very, very large number. Not to oversell it or anything.

We can't just run the same formula we have been to get there, though, because Parallel Evolution doubles ALL creature tokens each time, not just one.

So back to our first formula:

X = 131,072*(2^17)

Why 17? Because Parallel Evolutions is in play now, giving us a 17th Doubling Effect.

That gives us a value of:

X = 17,179,869,184

The rest of the problem can proceed as normal through the formula:

X =(17,179,869,184*20*8) (17,179,869,184*5*8)*(17,179,869,184*(1 (33,554,432*2^8))))*(2^8)

Let's break these numbers down again. I'm only going to talk about the numbers that changed:

Expression 1

• 17,179,869,184 is the number of creature tokens created by Parallel Evolution.
• 20 is the number of cards that give 1 life when a creature ETB
• 8 is the number of cards that give you 1 life every time you gain life.

Expression 2

• 17,179,869,184 is the number of creature tokens created by Parallel Evolution.
• 5 is the number of cards that give you life equal to a creature's toughness
• 8 is the number of cards that give you 1 life every time you gain life

Expression 3

• 17,179,869,184 is the number of creature tokens created by Parallel Evolution.
• 1 is the base toughness of the token being made
• 33,554,432 is the number of counters on Kyler
• 8 is the number of cards that double counters

Expression 4

• 8 is the number of counters that double life

This gives us the following answer:

X = 25,961,484,295,696,500,000,000,000,000,000,000

Turn 2, after casting Parallel Evolution 1 time, you'll have gained an additional 25,961,484,295,696,500,000,000,000,000,000,000 life, put an additional 17,179,869,184 creature tokens onto the battlefield, for a total of 17,180,000,256. Kyler will have 4,398,080,065,536 counters on him, which will make your token army of 17,179,869,184 creatures have a power/toughness equal to 4,398,080,065,537.

And you still have 7 more to go through!

TL;DR

If you have a playset of each of these cards:

• Primal Vigor
• Doubling Season
• Annointed Procession
• Parallel Lives
• Soul Warden
• Soul's Attendant
• Ajani's Welcome
• Suture Priest
• Essence Warden
• Cleric Class
• Angel of Vitality
• Angelic Chorus
• Alhammeret's Archive
• Boon Reflection

And a single copy of

• Castle Ardenvale
• Trostani, Selesnya's Voice
• Kyler, Sigardian Emissary

And then cast Parallel Evolution, you can crash your in-person Paper Magic game with a Real Life™ Stack Overflow error.

Edit: Here's a link to a Google Sheet with the numbers, if you're wildly curious about it.