Plan: Find a Sphinx's Tutelage, then mill them with Dark Deal, Chandra, Oath of Jace, and Treasure Cruise while casting fog after fog and board clears like Chandra and Radiant Flames. You can often mill 12+ cards per turn.
The key to this deck is to drag the game out for as many draw steps as possible. Milling is secondary. I've lost many a game from digging too hard to find a buried Sphinx's and not leaving mana up for Negate or Fog.
Mulligan
Your game one mulligan should include either Dark Deal or Sphinx's and enough lands to cast that spell, generally. (Most 2-landers work out as well.) After mulling to six, consider playing hands with draw, at least one fog, and two lands. The reason we keep Dark Deal is that it's essentially a T3 mulligan with slightly better odds -- you're already 10 cards deep and get to draw another 5 or 6. I think this edges out yolo-mulligans for Spinx only.
Synergy
There are a few obvious ones. Chandra 0 + Sphinx's mills for (your entire hand +1) x2. Dark Deal with Sphinx's mills them for (your entire hand - 1) x2, and they also draw several cards as well. Getting off either with two Spinx's in play is often very close to game. Treasure Cruise takes advantage of our fetch-heavy base and self-discard to gain card advantage and mill for 6 per Sphinx.Reclaim is the main synergy card in this deck, allowing you to often draw the exact spell you want at instant-ish speed, particularly if you've already cast one of either Oath of Jace or Dark Deal. It means you can pitch Chandra early and get her back on the end step against a menacing board. It allows you to cast up to 11 fogs per game and, along with Oath of Jace, helps protect from Dromoka's Command blowing you up.
The second combo is Oath of Jace - > Reclaim. You can Oath of Jace, trigger the legendary rule to bin the Oath in play, and stack reclaim on top of the ETB trigger to stack the binned Oath of Jace on top of your library.
This actually works with any card, so you can immediately draw a fog if you need one for next turn.
Can you seriously mill against Ulamog??Ulamog is a bit of a beating G1, but we have several answers. First of all, it's possible to force them to pitch their searched-up Ulamogs and Kozlieks with Dark Deal. Other Eldrazi are very susceptible to fog. Secondly, if we have a few fogs in hand, we can cycle Reclaims from our graveyard over and over again while fogging Ulamog. This allows us to survive at ZERO cards in library indefinitely... well, so long as we have fogs, so more like two turns or so. It's important to cultivate your hand and graveyard as best you can for this situation should it arise.Another good thing against these decks is that most of their cards are green or colorless, and they pull the lands and colorless creatures out of their decks, which makes Sphinx's is a little more likely to mill for two extra cards by hitting double ramp spells.
Postboard, we also board in 3 Transgress the Mind to try and dumpster him and his buddies before they ruin our day. We also bring in Ob Nix, who is reasonable for donking 1-at-a-time Eldrazis.
Other Matchups
Atarka RedGame one is probably destruction unless we find murderous cut and plenty of fogs. G2, however, we can board out our Dark Deals for Ojutai's Commands and Clerics and try to reclaim/radiant flames them out of the game. At that point, we're running about 18 cards that gain life or prevent damage. Also, remember that Encircling Fissure has awaken, which can make a chump blocker for us.
RallyBy the time Rally comes online, we should be able to find fogs enough to avoid dying to things turning sideways. However, our Discard/Mill strategy matches up very poorly against their Rally/Drain strategy, so we're looking for Negate G1. Radiant Flames is also quite reasonable.G2, Transgress and Hallowed Moonlight come in to try to block Coco and Rally. If we can pull that off, we're heavily favored, I feel, because we can continuously reclaim our answers while we set up the mill. Chandra can come in and clean up.
Abzan Midrange or AggroFavored against any list not running four Dromoka's Commands main board. Post board, we change almost nothing, bringing in just Ob Nixilis usually. Midrange beats are too slow and get fogged down relatively quickly. They usually need running Rhinoceros to win, so play around that with your fetches.Kill Eldrazi Displacer on sight.
Jeskai Black/Mardu GreenFun match, but we're probably an underdog pre- and post-board due to the amount of raw burn they run. I would treat this matchup like burn and board in all of our lifegain. Transgress is also reasonable, but at that point we're running thin on mill cards.On the upside, Radiant Flames and Chandra for 3 wipes their entire creature base, and we blank all of their creature removal, which is often upwards of seven cards main board.
A few more notesFor fetching, we really start playing at three mana and want all of our colors immediately. That very often means fetching something like Canopy Vista, Smoldering Marsh, Island to play Sphinx or Dark Deal on 3. After that, we're looking for additional blue and red sources while holding up mana for fog, so now's the time to fetch out more basics if they're available. At six lands, I start discarding my excess lands to Oath, as we want to max out at 8 lands by the end of the game for Chandra + Fog.Make sure you're keeping a count on their deck in live games so that you know the moment that you can mill them out.Play fogs first before playing Dark Deal.I think overall, this mill deck is competitive for a mill deck, but unlikely to win anything bigger than an FNM. Thanks for feedback.
