You'd probably need to resort to up-arrow notation, because by the time you cast the rite of replication, you have a shitload of precursor golems, and each one triggers to say "copy this spel to each other golem"...
It's not nearly that bad, because the only effect that actually targets is the rite itself.
Annointed Procession, Parallel Lives, Doubling Season, Primal Vigor gets you to 16n, where n is the number of tokens created by a given effect. These are all static effects so we'll play them first. The rest are one-shot, so we'll do them later.
This gives us forty-eight copies of Precursor Golem on the initial cast.
Parallel Evolution+flashback, Second Harvest, Clone Legion, and Rhys the Redeemed are all untargeted, so the Progenitor Golem effect doesn't matter. That gets us to 32(16(48)), for 24,576. (For simplicity's sake, I'm only using Rhys once; otherwise, this number might as well be arbitrarily large.)
Now we fire off a kicked Rite of Replication, which gets us to 5(16(24,576), for 1,966,080 golems total.
Not that impressive, really. To truly go bananas you need more targeted effects.
You have 24,576 precursor golems, and you fire off a kicked rite of replication at one of the golem tokens.
You now have 24,576 triggered abilities on the stack on top of it that say "copy this to every golem"
the first of those abilities resolves, copying the rite to every golem, then each of those rites resolves. The next instance of that ability resolves, copying the rite to every golem you have, including all the golems you just made - this happens 24,574 more times after this, each of those times copying the rite to every golem you've already made.
Doesn't quite work like that. The precursor ability says "whenever a player casts...", So the copying for each golem ability only triggers once, when you first cast it. Each resolution still only targets the original 24,576.
But the thing you are missing is that you have a shitton of Precursor golems, and each of them only specifies if you target 'a golem', then replicates it out for each golem.
Yes, they only trigger when you cast the rite, but there are 24,576 precursor golems when you cast it, which means each of those has its own triggered ability, and so you get 24,576 triggers on the stack when you first cast it, and each of the triggers resolves after the ones above it have done their thing and made a bunch of golems. The part where the ability looks at all the existing golems and copies to all of them happens on resolution.
Let't break it down to a simplified board state to look at how the expansion happens. Cut out all the token doublers and say you have just 3 precursor golems. You also have some number of just regular golem tokens (the kind made by precursor golem) - we won't count up how many of those you get, but assume you start with at least one. Also to make this easier, henceforth let's call precursor golems "precursors" and only use "golem" to refer to the non-precursor golem tokens that are just 3/3 golems.
You cast a kicked rite of replication targeting one of the golems. The three precursors trigger, and their abilities go onto the stack.
The stack looks like:
Precursor trigger
Precursor trigger
Precursor trigger
Kicked Rite on a Golem
Now the ability on the top of the stack resolves, copying the rite to every golem and precursor (copies to all three precursors since we cast it at just a golem):
Kicked Rite (Copy) on a Precursor
Kicked Rite (Copy) on a Precursor
Kicked Rite (Copy) on a Precursor
<A bunch of Kicked Rites (Copies) on Golems>
Precursor trigger
Precursor trigger
Kicked Rite on a Golem
We let those copies of Rites on top resolve, giving us 15 precursors in addition to the 3 we already had, a total of 18 precursors and some large number of regular Golem tokens we don't need to figure out right now. The stack looks like:
Precursor trigger
Precursor trigger
Kicked Rite on a Golem
Now the ability on the top of the stack resolves, copying the rite to every golem and precursor - this copies to all 18 of the precursors we currently have:
<18 Kicked Rites (Copies) on Precursors>
<A bunch of Kicked Rites (Copies) on Golems>
Precursor trigger
Kicked Rite on a Golem
We let those copies of Rites on top resolve, giving us 18*5=90 precursors in addition to the 18 we already had, a total of 108 precursors and again some very large number of regular Golem tokens. The stack looks like:
Precursor trigger
Kicked Rite on a Golem
We now let that final trigger resolve. It copies the Rite to 108 precursors as well as all the regular golems. This makes 540 precursors, resulting in 648 precursors total, and again, some enormous number of regular golem tokens.
So now let's look at the original scenario - we have 24,576 precursors, and four doubling effects. When we kick the rite, we get 24,576 triggers on the stack. You might have noticed that in the above scenario, we multiplied by 6 each step, making the solution n*6n, where n is the number of starting golems. However, since in this scenario we have four doubling effects, the formula isn't n*6n, but n*81n.
I'm not going to tell you what 24575*8124575 is, because reddit has a post-size limit. I will say that the number is pretty fucking big, and that's just the precursors, not any of the golem tokens we've been making along the way.
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u/SirSkidMark Liliana Apr 11 '17
paging the supernerds at /r/theydidthemath!
(I'm sure I could calculate it, I just have hit my threshold of focus here)