A Rust goldfish simulator for a mono-red Godo, Bandit Warlord + Helm of the Host turbo-combo cEDH deck. It shuffles the 99-card library (plus the commander) a hundred thousand times, pilots each game toward the combo, and measures one thing: how fast this deck kills a table.
Average kill: turn 4.5. Against a 160-life four-player pod, with no help and no mercy:
| Turn | Cumulative win % |
|---|---|
| 1 | 1% |
| 2 | 7% |
| 3 | 27% |
| 4 | 55% |
| 5 | 78% |
| 6 | 89% |
| 8 | 97% |
| 12 | 99.7% |
More than one game in four ends on turn 3. By turn 4 the deck has killed in the majority of games. It effectively never fails to go off — 99.7% of games are over by turn 12. (100,000-game sweep, current list; all numbers are honest — no fantasy mana, rocks and enters-tapped lands pay their real costs.)
One creature, one Equipment, one turn:
Godo, Bandit Warlord ({5}{R}) → his ETB searches the library and puts Helm of the Host
onto the battlefield → attach it (equip {5}, Magnetic Theft for {R}, or free with Hammer
of Nazahn) → at the beginning of each combat, Helm creates a hasty, nonlegendary token copy of
Godo. The token attacks, and its own first-attack trigger grants an additional combat →
unbounded combats, lethal the same turn. Godo himself never needs haste — the Helm token does
all the attacking, which is why real Godo lists play zero haste enablers.
Because Godo's ETB is the Equipment tutor, the whole kill is effectively one card plus mana — every ritual, rock, and tutor in the 99 exists to jam him as early as possible.
Backup kill: a shimmer effect (Twinflame / Heat Shimmer / Molten Duplication)
copying Dualcaster Mage → infinite hasty 2/2 tokens → also lethal that turn, for as little as
{3}{R}{R}{R} total.
The list is fully legal under the current Commander banlist and strictly mono-red.
The engine the sim pilots — the same lines a human plays:
- Treasonous Ogre — 3 life =
{R}, on demand, from 40 life. Routinely converts 20+ life into a turn-3 Godo. The single biggest speed card in the deck. - A mountain of fast mana — Lotus Petal, Simian Spirit Guide, rituals, Mana Vault, Grim Monolith. The sim spends burst transactionally: it's held until the turn it actually buys the combo, never wasted.
- Tutors that always take the best line — every tutor grabs the fastest mana left in the library (never Helm — Godo finds that himself); Imperial Recruiter finds the Ogre.
- An untap package — Tezzeret, Voltaic Servant, and the Keys re-fire Mana Vault / Grim Monolith turn after turn.
- Wheels and card draw to dig out of the rare stuck hand, and a mulligan strategy tuned for speed over safety.
cd rust
python run.py build # cargo build --release (run.py puts cargo on PATH)
./target/release/godosim sweep # batch statsBinary: rust/target/release/godosim(.exe). Registry: godo.txt (read at runtime).
godosim sweep [--games N] [--max-turns T] [--cut "Card"] [--add "Card"] [--seed-base N]— batch sim; reports win-by-T12, mean win turn, and theP(win by turn)curve. 100k games run in under 2 seconds, and seeds are deterministic by index, so before/after sweeps are paired and directly comparable.godosim diag --seed N— verbose single-game play-by-play (land / ramp / burst / tutor / dig / CAST Godo / EQUIP / WIN).godosim dump— print the deck + parsed costs.
--cut/--add swap cards (cut → a Mountain, add → replaces a Mountain); --cut X --add Y tests
the X→Y swap at 99 cards. godo_bench.txt holds engine-wired candidates outside the current 99
(Basalt Monolith, Thran Dynamo, The One Ring, Final Fortune, …) ready to audition. Commander is
singleton — never --add a second copy of a nonbasic. Noise floor: at 50k paired games treat
|Δmean| < ~0.03 as noise; confirm keepers at 100k.
One caveat: this is a goldfish. Opponents are inert, so the sim can meaningfully A/B mana / draw / combo cards — but it cannot value counterspells or protection, so never use it to decide how much interaction to run.
build_registry.py rebuilds godo.txt from Scryfall.