I started playing Magic right after the M15 block came out. After testing several of my friend's decks and buying a few premade ones of my own, I soon fell in love with guilds of Ravnica, especially House Dimir. The concept of milling was fun mostly because I love trolling my friends and they would get pissed off at me for making them discard their favorites rare and legendary cards before they could even draw and play them. While I do love milling, it often takes longer than I like to get a win. Through researching mill related cards, I eventually stumbled upon the idea of milling enough of my opponents deck to power up my own creatures and then swing for lethal damage. This unexpected twist caused games to end more quickly as opponents always expected me to win solely by mill.
The main combo of this deck is casting
Artful Dodge
on a powered up
Consuming Aberration
or
Wight of Precinct Six
.
Jace's Phantasm
is a nice, low-cost flyer that also powers up as my opponent's graveyard grows.
Vantress Gargoyle
is another cheap addition that will power up quickly. It has beefier stats than
Jace's Phantasm
so it's bounced less easily in the early game. The other creatures (
Mirko Vosk, Mind Drinker
and
Phenax, God of Deception
are just larger, fun cards that I throw in mostly to troll my friends. Each helps mill in their own way. I would run
Hedron Crab
but my goal is to win by swinging with unblockable damage, not by milling to death.
Lands are fairly straightforward and inexpensive.
Nephalia Drownyard
is great for its tap ability to continually mill, and
Shelldock Isle
gives me a free cast if I've happened to mill enough and haven't swung for lethal damage yet.
Drown in the Loch
and Perlpex and my counterspells. The former also doubles along with
Grisly Spectacle
to control the board and get rid of bothersome enemy creatures. While the latter is expensive mana-wise, sometimes it's nice to have the milling included, but I might replace it with
Hero's Downfall
which is currently on my sideboard (for when I know my opponent has a planeswalker) or something else as well. The milling engine is made up of
Glimpse the Unthinkable
and
Mind Funeral
. They are inexpensive (2 and 3 mana respectively) and so can be cast very early in the match, and can mill a decent amount of my opponent's deck. I also use
Pilfered Plans
and
Thought Scour
for combo card draw and mill (I prefer the combo of mill/draw to the extra card draw from Visions of the future).
Memory Erosion
makes opponents think twice before playing cards. My planeswalkers are there mostly for fun, although they are still useful in emptying my opponent's library and can also act as a decoy so that my opponent targets them instead of my own life.
My sideboard is constructed to help against agro decks, opposing burn/control, and decks that might benefit from me milling them. Since it's mostly artifacts, I threw in
Fabricate
to help retrieve those cards more consistently.
Mind Grind
is for when I play 2HG so that I can target multiple opponents at once.
Surgical Extraction
is for after I've seen my opponents deck and I know what cards they have multiple of that I can target.
My maybeboard is made of up cards that I'm either waiting for cost to drop cough cough
Cryptic Command
, or cards that I'm aware of but have not yet tested. I have yet to pay more than $8 for any single card (some cards spiked in price after I bought them) and have built this deck slowly over the course of 7 years.
Hopefully you enjoyed the deck! If you cringed while reading it, that's a win in my book as I did initially build this to troll my friends. It's a blast to play with and my record of fastest win with my combo is turn 6. Please feel free to leave comments or suggestions! I love playing around with new ideas and still tweak it here and there (the most recent tweaks came after Throne of Eldraine).
