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A: Turn-1 Plays (4)
B: Turn-2 Plays (12)
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D: Situational Spells (12)
E: Fetchlands (8)
F: Fetch Targets (8)
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Introduction
The aim of this page is trying to determine the best Glimpse the Unthinkable -based strategy available in Modern, and design the optimal list accordingly. That is, my primer wants to get the most out of a Mill deck (which explains the label 'competitive'), with 'Mill deck' meaning a deck where targeting your opponent when casting something like Glimpse the Unthinkable is always (or quite so, actually) the best line of play.
The result provided by this analysis will be a deck that maximises the chances of attaining a turn 4 win, where we count as a win too chaining fogs (i.e. functional copies of Fog ) from turn 4 until we actually achieve victory. Test sessions and theoretical brooding have led me to every single card choice displayed here - as well as to surmise that Mill could do no better than this: THIS IS THE BEST TAKE ON THIS STRATEGY AVAILABLE IN MODERN.
I will unfurl a primer below, trying to give explanation; but if I took something inappropriately for granted, I will surely make plain upon request. Anyway, I will try to be thorough in expounding the reflections that took me to the present list.
This detailed article owns a lot to the comments it received. Such answers allowed me to clarify some points of this primer; therefore, I wish to give my thanks to every single contributor to the discussion. Grateful additional thanks are in order to a friend of mine doing the computing regarding the actual Mind Funeral 's effectiveness.
Building the decklist
Starting from perusing and sifting through the Modern pool so as to form an idea of what it can offer in order to build a Glimpse the Unthinkable -based deck focused on milling the opponent out, in this section I will rough-out this strategy's possibilities - fundamentally got at via multiple cycles of mutual adjustment between the cards which can be helpful to the strategy and the strategy itself in its many aspects, process which I am merely/mostly reporting the outcome of.
It is reasonable, before anything else, to explore and probe what a dedicated mill can accomplish when unchecked. In order to do so, I will display the viable mill-spell options, catalogued by CMC (Casting Mana Cost) and arranged by milled-cards/CMC ratio (expressing how many cards they mill for spent mana). (The cards which found a place in the decklist will have a separate comment below, so they get no coverage here.)
- 0-CMC
Chancellor of the Spires : as for the previous card, the conditions to achieve the effect of this card can be accounted for as factors in computing the average mill-power: thus the position in the list. The lesser the game lasts the stronger it is, making it very appealing in super explosive mill build - which cannot be built yet given the card pool.
Surgical Extraction : it can indeed be used as merely a mill card - even though a very ineffectual one.
- 1-CMC
Shriekhorn : since slow strategies are mostly easy match-ups, Shriekhorn is (for what it's worth) better than any Codex Shredder -like card, because the game against fast decks should not last more than 4 turns anyway (5 or more if covered by fogs). As 1-mana mill spell, it works well with a fast Crypt Incursion and it also rounds up the mill count of cards like Breaking / Entering or Mesmeric Orb so as to get an earlier Visions of Beyond or Shelldock Isle 's activation. If Shriekhorn is drawn in the first stages of the game, it's a 'mill 6 for 1 mana' spell, which is quite strong for a 1-mana mill spell; if it is drawn late, Mill generally doesn't care because it has a lot of things to play in mid- or late-game (at least against the frightening aggro decks): Mill is so slow that you will surely have mill spells to play on turn 4, and that is also why Shriekhorn taking turns to do its work is not a real problem: later in the game we will cast our expensive spells still in hand. Also it is not rare that the mana left available for our 1-mana spell is only-black: we couldn't cast Tome Scour , and that late Shriekhorn is better than a Tome Scour we couldn't cast. Though it is usually bad to spend a removal on Shriekhorn , it is a matter of consideration; on the other side, Shriekhorn don't get countered by Cursecatcher or Glen Elendra Archmage . In addition, like Hedron Crab Shriekhorn works perfectly with Set Adrift from the sideboard (turning it on early without spending two whole card - one to mill ourselves and one to mill their threat); and it is useful to have mill effects that are cheap (i.e. for milling away the card targeted by Set Adrift ) and instant (i.e. to win against Academy Ruins , in conjunction with Shelldock Isle + any mill spell or Hedron Crab + a fetchland or Archive Trap ), and this card covers both those roles. Again, like Tome Scour it's a turn 1 play (which are more important in some Mill builds like one engineered around Frayng Sanity) which smooths your toil of getting good Visions of Beyond , Crypt Incursion and Shelldock Isle and makes your Mesmeric Orb better in that you can still play Mesmeric Orb AND get early Visions of Beyond , Crypt Incursion and Shelldock Isle without giving up the late-game power (if played early) of Mesmeric Orb . But what sets it apart form Tome Scour is that Shriekhorn is good with Set Adrift , can let you draw 3 from Visions of Beyond alongside a lone Archive Trap (13+1+6=20), and mills 1 more card when needed (that is, when you play it early).
Minister of Inquiries : the issue with this card is that when it is bad (no good block/no block at all/block irrelevant/dies immediately..) it is really, really bad since it doesn't give any sort of residual advantage (the energies left are useless: following Minister of Inquiries will suffer the fate of the first) or it is too slow; all this while the ceiling is quite mediocre: best case scenario, it is as effective as one of the worse cards most mill deck could play: Shriekhorn . One should not play Minister of Inquiries unless wanting to go really deep in 1-CMC mill cards (which I do not recommended). Summing up: as a mill spell, Shriekhorn is way better; the fact Minister of Inquiries could block in a pinch is irrelevant (as with any creature we could play) since all decks wanting to attack with creatures has their way to deal with blockers (multiple attackers, trample, unblockable, removals..).
Tome Scour : unlike Shriekhorn , it is useful in late-game also. The flaws with Minister of Pain and the negligible (other reasons accounted for) difference in mill-power are the reasons why is usually better to play the fullset of Tome Scour before playing the first copy of Minister of Inquiries .
Memory Sluice : in a mill-oriented deck full of creatures and in a metagame without removals it would be good.
Merfolk Secretkeeper : for being a mere Shock at the opponent its remaining text is surprisingly good. It would probably fit in in a build with more creatures and Memory Sluice . It has no place anywhere else.
Stream of Thought : replicating it is a losing proposition. It's just a bad Memory Sluice .
- 2-CMC
Mind Sculpt : additional 2 mana mill spell if need be (and there isn't, fortunately, as Breaking / Entering is already quite bad).
Manic Scribe : it needs a lot of work to be effective: it conceivably would require you to play a humungous amount of cards in any of combination of the following: Manamorphose , Street Wraith , Mishra's Bauble , Mesmeric Orb , Jace's Phantasm , Minister of Inquiries , Death's Approach , Dead Weight . The latter two are solid removal spell which also work towards getting delirium; unfortunately, removals are quite poor in a mill strategy (more below). As for Mesmeric Orb , you have to keep in mind that Manic Scribe curves out poorly into it and vice versa: if you play the artifact on turn 2, you cannot block early creatures (losing part of the effectiveness of Manic Scribe itself); if you play the creature first, on the other hand, you mill less cards from Mesmeric Orb - and, as an important consequence, failing to prime Manic Scribe , an early triggering of which is mostly the main reason reason to run Mesmeric Orb in a Manic Scribe -list (as Mesmeric Orb requires fogs to work effectively, not defences in the form of creatures - or removals, for argument's sake): in this case, Manic Scribe is to consider a mill spell (a very bad one) with minor upside for being able to block. But Manic Scribe cannot cover an important defensive role due to the issues it shares with Jace's Phantasm or Wight of Precinct Six as creatures in this deck (note that Hedron Crab is played regardless of those consideration because of the stratospheric power level, and because it is almost exclusively a mill spell). Mishra's Bauble , aside from being an orrible top deck, is overall a card we wouldn't normally want to play. The other cyclers demands from us a lot of life-points ( Manamorphose needs you to fetch for an untapped shockland: how can you possibly afford to waste time fetching tapped lands or play a basic Forest ?!) and that would twist the main plan too much; and if you play a lot of cyclers sure, you can trim some lands, but ultimately you have to cut spells too: the remaining spells had better to be high-quality ones, and Manic Scribe is too easily foiled while if it manages to stay on the battlefield with delirium active the reward is not so appealing overall (it even needs some turns to do something better than the alternatives!). All in all, Manic Scribe is a very bad card that gets only mediocre if supported by other cards, which unfortunately are incidentally quite bad in Mill.
- 3-CMC
Ashiok, Dream Render : played on turn 3 it mills a reasonable amount of cards for a 3-mana mill card or gains life points; however, Fraying Sanity is a better play virtually in any case on turn 3, making Ashiok, Dream Render far less appealing. The static ability shuts down opposing Chord of Calling , Neoform , Eldritch Evolution , and I would play Ashiok, Dream Render only as a combo breaker against a deck revolving aroundthose cards, though such decks are generally too fast to begin with and need to be attacked from a different angle.
Sanity Grinding : in order to give loosely the same performance as Mind Funeral , the deck has to feature an average of 1 blue mana in the casting cast of each single card; if the deck contains, say, 20 lands, it's about 1,66 per single spell: this is something difficult to achieve even in a monoblue deck - and preposterous in Modern. And if you play 1-mana spells, that means that you are loaded of double- and triple- mana costs: clumps of blue costs will be more frequent, further decreasing your odds of getting a good mill with it.
- 4-CMC
Startled Awake : if Mill ever needed 4-drops, here we have one.
Driven by the milled-cards/CMC ratio and by the rule-of-thumb of trying not to end up empty-handed too quickly, it is easy to developed a nearly optimal 'straight-mill' list; the full optimization is not interesting, because it could change very little the outcome of the test. Some lone testing permits to infer that the deck is capable of winning reliably on turn 5 if uncontested (with a linear and easy gameplay: no stress involved, for what it's worth); as a side note, interestingly enough the two extreme versions too of an aggro mill deck - both built to make full use of number of cards and the mana available, but one exploiting the cards with the best milled cards/CMC ratio (demanding 20-21 lands) and one trying to hit all of its land drops up to turn 5 without flooding (24 lands total; calculations below) - win on turn 5 when uncontested. However, a turn 5 win is patently too slow for Modern. This means that some sort of protection is needed in order to compete with the metagame. In addition, there are cards that against us entail a more or less automatic loss for us if unchecked: they deserve special attention (unless you hope to just dogde them). Here's a list of the most problematic ones: Eidolon of the Great Revel , Leyline of Combustion , Thalia, Guardian of Thraben , Unsettled Mariner , Laboratory Maniac , Jace, Wielder of Mysteries , Platinum Angel , Leyline of Sanctity , Wheel of Sun and Moon , permanent land denial ( Leonin Arbiter , Aven Mindcensor , Blood Moon , Choke , Karn, the Great Creator ), Nexus of Fate , Progenitus , Emrakul, the Aeons Torn , Gaea's Blessing Struggle / Survive Loaming Shaman (searched through something like Chord of Calling ) and other effects that shuffle the graveyard back into the deck, and finally permanents that make your opponent skip her draw phase and letting her simply wait for you to deck yourself ( Colfenor's Plans , Dragon Appeasement , Molten Firebird , Null Profusion , Possessed Portal , Psychic Possession , Sundial of the Infinite : good for us they aren't playable in any present strategy!!). So, we must not only fend off their main strategy, but also concern ourselves with a way (at least with help from the sideboard) to deal with locking creatures, locking permanents and shuffle-effects present in the metagame, if we just don't plan to dodge matchups involving those cards.
The cards in the deck can be thus roughly divided into two categories, according to the different roles played (in your ususal game at least: i.e. Hedron Crab is not counted for as an emergency blocker, because it is very very rare and unreliable to use that card this way): there are the ones milling, and the ones that keep the player alive or deal with lockers or shuffle effects - which I will call very comprehensively 'defence cards'. In the following part I will provide a list of the different types of defence cards available, as well as of the most effective (for our purposes) cards in Modern comprised in those categories.
Kiora's Dismissal : bouncers only works early against a starting Leyline of Sanctity ; Kiora's Dismissal , like Echoing Truth , can deal with multiple Leyline of Sanctity , but it can also be a functional fog-effect against Aura when Leyline of Sanctity is dealt with.
Void Snare : unlike Echoing Truth it deals with only against a single Leyline of Sanctity and it is mediocre even at that. Since removing Leyline of Sanctity would be quite its only purpose, it seems bad; but 2 mana is a critical cost for Mill because most of its cards cost 2 and need to be played early, so Void Snare can indeed fulfill that role better than most other options.
Kefnet's Last Word : bad Leyline of Sanctity removal: even if you take out their Leyline of Sanctity , you are in no position to race them; unique effect for a card this cheap nonetheless.
Noxious Revival : it can be useful to get a much needed spell like Set Adrift , Darkness or Glimpse the Unthinkable depending on the situation; on this respect, they are an alternative to Snapcaster Mage that cost no mana - even if the card is acquired later, it costs life (it isn't worth it to splash for it) and it provides card disadvantage.
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Nature's Claim : the best option if splashing.
Assassin's Trophy : if the splash is affordable, it is good enough against Leyline of Sanctity with marginal applications elsewhere.
Back to Nature : the best card against Aura.
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Fragmentize : if splashing , a sorcery Nature's Claim is still one of our best options.
War Priest of Thune : vs Leyline of Sanctity ; small utility against Aura, Eidolon of the Great Revel and as a blocker.
Leave No Trace : functionally a Back to Nature .
Hide / Seek : if we can produce it surely save slots (being also an answer to a single Emrakul, the Aeons Torn ), but then the life loss from shocklands becomes huge and casting the Boros part early would still be unreliable at least.
Patrician's Scorn : it would be useful in a build featuring hybrid-mana cards, but unfortunately the only at least a a bit interesting is Beckon Apparition .
Extirpate : if you need graveyard hate not respondable to. But even against Jeskai Nahiri, the Harbinger -decks drawing cards and exiling ALL graveyard is way better, so we should rely on cards like Nihil Spellbomb . And keeping 1 mana up for this every time can be taxing too many times.
Ravenous Trap : it is superior to the hate in form of permanent ( Leyline of the Void , Rest in Piece, Tormod's Crypt , Nihil Spellbomb , Relic of Progenitus ) in that it is less disruptable (i.e. Boros Prison would often remove our piece via Nahiri, the Harbinger , Banishing Light or Wear / Tear before we ever mill Emrakul, the Aeons Torn ; Living End has got Beast Within even in the maindeck..). In addition, Ravenous Trap 's alternative casting cost's condition is quite easy to achieve, even in your opponent's turn: it is possible to do so by via Shriekhorn , Mesmeric Orb , Shelldock Isle casting any mill spell, Hedron Crab + a fetchland, even (not reliable but possible) Archive Trap . It is even possible that the opponent met the condition on its own, even during her turn, simply by playing her game (again, you should not rely on this, but it happens often enough). It is the cleanest way to deal with Emrakul, the Aeons Torn when it is played in a single copy (as it is in Boros Prison). Also helpful against Dredge (even if not necessary). However, if you are more concerned of counterspells than of artifact-removals (as against Jeskai) this card should be avoided in favor of something else. A marginal attractive feature of the card is that it allows the following scenario: you are against an Emrakul, the Aeons Torn -deck and they have dealt with your first piece of graveyard-hate, you do not have another one and still you cannot afford to wait for drawing into one; then a viable (even if desperate) course of action is to cast your mill spells anyway, and if you mill an Emrakul, the Aeons Torn and they have 20+ cards in their graveyard you can cast your Visions of Beyond s hoping to draw a Ravenous Trap to cast still with Emrakul, the Aeons Torn 's shuffle trigger on the stack. Still, it is not so good against Living End: it is unlikely to meet the condition against them with a timing that is favourable for us. Finally, if the opponent is packing Ricochet Trap (like Living End does), Ravenous Trap can easily be worse than permanent hate.
Trapmaker's Snare : it searches for Ravenous Trap ; not so useful for getting an Archive Trap , since Archive Trap already underwhelming as it is (more below); I would never play a card planning to use it often times only for getting that effect overcosted by 2 mana, if not in a superdedicated deck. I would only play Trapmaker's Snare with the purpose of getting Archive Trap against Death's Shadow -decks and Burn, but I’m not sure the upgrade to a mill card you get in those cases is worth having a bad gravehard-hate in the sideboard slots meant for those kind of card.
Tormod's Crypt : better than Relic of Progenitus alongside Nihil Spellbomb if the former costs too much for your list: keeping 1 mana up every time is not always affordable, since even a control deck can put up pressure in form of a clock or threatening a lock. Important note: graveyard hate in the form of permanents suffers from the same issue of Ensnaring Bridge (more below): artifact/enchantment hate is usually brought in even blindly from the sideboard just to switch them in for useless cards in the maindeck: for some, Wear / Tear in Nahiri, the Harbinger -decks, Nature's Claim in any form of ramp strategy, Dredge or Tron (in this case alongside the already-in-the-maindeck Oblivion Stone and Karn Liberated ; but graveyard hate matters there only if they play Emrakul, the Aeons Torn at least in the sideboard), Ingot Chewer and Beast Within in Living End. And you have to beware of any random Ancient Grudge or Stony Silence !! The opponent can often destroy our precious permanent (or making it useless) before it having accomplished anything (exiling a milled Emrakul, the Aeons Torn , or a heap of creatures ready to enter the battlefield from Dredge or Living End).
Nihil Spellbomb : against graveyard, better than the alternatives until Emrakul, the Aeons Torn is played alongside with counterspells. The drawing clause is the reason why this kind of card is to be preferred to e.g. Tormod's Crypt : thus we can be 'flooded' with this kind of effect without actually 'drowning', alleviating any potential lacking of mill spells.
Sentinel Totem : virtually they are the copies number 5-8 of Nihil Spellbomb when you do not really need Set Adrift , and better than any alternative until Emrakul, the Aeons Torn is played alongside with counterspells; however since Emrakul, the Aeons Torn is sometimes played alongside Chalice of the Void , we don't want to have all of our grave-hate costing 1 mana (they can deal with the first one, so we are likely to need to play another one after their Chalice of the Void on 1; and we have to save our Set Adrift for Leyline of Sanctity ). Pay attention to the attrition with Set Adrift .
Relic of Progenitus : better than Sentinel Totem in protracted games; otherwise is quite difficult to keep mana up every time.
Leyline of the Void : when we are worried only about 1-time-effect cards such as Emrakul, the Aeons Torn , its little artifact counterparts are better (unless playing multiple Emrakul, the Aeons Torn s becomes the norm, or Storm and Living End are relevant matchups). Anyway, when played together with the artifacts it opens up to undesiderable scenarios: you could keep hands with only your complementary single-use graveyard hate (like Nihil Spellbomb ) as graveyard hate, in the early game it could happen they deal with that piece or you are forced to use it, yet you need another one for their next bunch of creatures (Dredge, Living End) or because you have not exiled yet their Emrakul, the Aeons Torn ; at such point, if you drew into your Leyline of the Void your game could become quite clunky since in the worst case scenario you are going to spend the whole turn casting it: hope they don't have a clock already. The lesson is that Leyline of the Void gives its best if played as your only graveyard hate (as we are indeed doing here), since otherwise you are compromised with bad game developings which are overall not acceptable. Mind that many of your cards get worse with an online Leyline of the Void : Fraying Sanity , Surgical Extraction , Visions of Beyond in my list. Note that Leyline of the Void is not needed in every metagame. In fact, we can usually beat graveyard strategies simply overlapping the effects of our other defence cards. Probably Dredge now would be the sole reason to play Leyline of the Void (and only because of Creeping Chill ), but there's a chance we don't really need it even there and we would still expose ourselves to the risk of stumbling on their common answers (enchantment removals).
Unmoored Ego : against cards Emrakul, the Aeons Torn , especially if played in multiples, and the only clean answer against an in-deck Nexus of Fate or Progenitus ; marginal utility against combo decks in general. The drawing potentially attached is irrelevant at that point. However this kind of cards makes you spend the whole turn for casting them, when even a control deck can put up pressure in form of a clock or threatening a lock: be sure that in your plan casting it is game winning or that the opponent is usually too slow to punish you.
Bitter Ordeal : better than Unmoored Ego if you need to take away different cards (like Lightning Storm and Laboratory Maniac against Ad Nauseam); it requires cracking fetchlands. Not a good plan in any other case.
Jace's Phantasm : the role of Jace's Phantasm is certainly NOT blocking against aggro NOR attacking vs combo, since they are both losing propositions: it is to be a blocker against midrange decks, making it a value defence card: if they have the answer to your first Jace's Phantasm , maybe they haven't it for the second one which will block any creature send at us apart from Tarmogoyf and can even kill them quickly if they kept a hand with only reaction yet none directed at creatures. This is the reason why is better to play proactive cards in general instead of reactive ones, and this is why Jace's Phantasm gets better (and is good only) in multiples: if you play it, don't play it in less than 4 copies. Maxing them out also give you one of the best lines of play Mill could carry out against a combo deck: Jace's Phantasm into Jace's Phantasm into enabler ( Archive Trap , Hedron Crab , Glimpse the Unthinkable , Mind Funeral ); still it is so rare to get that you shouldn’t count on it, and it is thereof a resutl that can be disregarded. However, Jace's Phantasm turns on midrange's removals ( Hedron Crab nets value before dying, so it doesn't really count) and they always have it; even post sideboarding they could not side out all of theirs removals because of nothing better to put in, so you should always take out Jace's Phantasm for your own removals (especially against Tarmogoyf s, which Jace's Phantasm can’t block well). So it is bad even against midrange decks. Don't play it.
Vantress Gargoyle : an overpriced Jace's Phantasm with the downside of being set back by a condition in order to be able to block. Still, having access to Jace's Phantasm number 5-8 winks at us with the possibility of more turn-4 wins ( Jace's Phantasm on turn 1, enabler on turn 2, Jace's Phantasm or Vantress Gargoyle on turn 3, win on turn 4).
Wight of Precinct Six : it would be big only if your opponent plays many creatures, and in that case it would be useless both at defending your life total and attacking through that many blockers. This is a poor card.
Rotting Regisaur : probably too slow against anything you would side it against, and Aura just laugh at it.
Embodiment of Agonies : a more expensive Tarmogoyf in our deck, as a side-in against Leyline of Sanctity with the intent of milling ourselves.
Nivmagus Elemental : against Leyline of Sanctity , but too slow nonetheless.
Vampire of the Dire Moon : against Burn, but in general worse than a 1-mana removal spell. Probably a (bad) side-in against decks like Jund.
Baral, Chief of Compliance : good vs Thalia, Guardian of Thraben in that it also blocks well against decks that want her; otherwise, Baral, Chief of Compliance can't help us much since we mostly have only colored mana to pay. Worse than a 1-mana removal in most cases.
Snapcaster Mage and Jace, Vryn's Prodigy : if you ever plan to count them among the mill spells, I assume you want to cast an effective mill spell in timely fashion - i.e. a 2-CMC one like Glimpse the Unthinkable ; but since at that amount of mana we already have better options (among them, combining hefty spells left in hand), their presence in the deck is justified only by their potential defensive capabilities. So let's break them down. As for inserting Snapcaster Mage in the deck because it being a creature is part of the value that the card can add to the deck, I must point out that that part of value is irrelevant in this type of deck: the reason is that there's a common issue with creatures in this deck-type, concerning the inability to block effectively when needed most (namely, against wide-aggro decks; or, for what it's worth, against decks that combine pressure and removals, letting them use their removal with no loss in tempo); least of all to attack. Regarding the inclusion of Snapcaster Mage because the value it would add to the deck is us to be able to cast a good spell lategame - granted that the extra value makes worth having that good spell overcosted (which is often unaffordable for this deck) - then the trouble is worth if the deck can prolong the game consistently - namely, if the defence cards are good enough and in sufficient number (something very difficult to achieve in a non-dedicated deck like Mill). So, if the versatility and the fact of being a creature do not accomplish much for themselves, it has to cover a proper role in the strategy - that is to say milling or defending: if more mill spell in the deck are needed, then play more of them instead of Snapcaster Mage ; if affordable defence is needed, then it must flashback almost always a 1-mana defence spells: but a removal (even with the supporting body from Snapcaster Mage ) is not nearly sufficient, and flashbacking a fog-effect is really not the place to be: 3 mana for that kind of effect entails losing the whole turn because of mana shortness, making the spell pretty useless. And flashbacking a Visions of Beyond is very costly in terms of mana: what is the decks that allows you to do that that investiment without punishing you for that? Not even Jund is so slow. All in all, Snapcaster Mage works bad with the only route this strategy can go down (as I will argue below): employing fogs. Snapcaster Mage , Jace, Vryn's Prodigy are so inefficient that they make fogs useless because they hinder you in trying to win the game the following turn: at that amount of mana (4 mana to net game-progressing value, for each of them) I'd better be casting two mill spells. And Mill is so slow that you will surely have 2 spare mill spells to play on turn 4. Wrapping up: this deck gains nothing in playing Snapcaster Mage , whether under the 'creature' respect, or under the 'spell' respect (defensive, milling, or Visions of Beyond -esque). The high versatility of the card means nothing when none of its potential uses is effective for the deck's plan.
Spellskite : if you have some free slots in your sideboard, this is meant to be an ace against any Infect-like deck; it is also good against Aura, so that you can keep a starting hand without enchantment-removals for Leyline of Sanctity if you see this because it buys a lot of time (if not winning the game by itself). However, Spellskite does nothing against Lantern or Ad Nauseam (which sport Leyline of Sanctity from the side), so that it couldn't fully complement your enchantment-removal suite. It has (hopefully) marginal utility against Burn. A shame that vs Infect and Burn, the decks it should hose, it is not so useful: too many removals in the first case (as I'll argue, we cannot afford to back it up), too little utility in the second one. In fact, Infect has plenty of ways to deal with it: Nature's Claim which Infect can even side-in regardless (not recommended though) because of our high artifact count (especially if we play Shriekhorn ), and Dismember and Twisted Image which Infect could again side-in regardless (not recommended though) because of Hedron Crab and possible Spellskite s.
Stinkweed Imp : useful against Infect if supported by removals.
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Tarmogoyf : the best creature after Jace's Phantasm ; it can be fed even under Leyline of Sanctity milling ourselves.
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God-Pharaoh's Faithful : the better anti-Burn card. Even more than Timely Reinforcements .
Perimeter Captain : possibly with cards like Steel Wall or Wall of Runes . Walls in general are good if the field is only of little aggro decks with few creatures AND no way to go over opposing creatures (through removals, going wide.. sure, it is a non-sense).
Timely Reinforcements : one of the best way to deal with Burn, with little application anywhere else; options need to be diversified for this to be useful: with removals and Crypt Incursion or Phyrexian Unlife , perhaps.
I am considering almost only 1-mana or less because if it costs more than that we will most probably fall behind for being unable to cast our already no-impact mill spells (the most important and numerous ones cost 2+ mana).
Disfigure : it is the best cheap instant removal in UB next to Fatal Push to answer quickly and neatly annoying cards like Thalia, Guardian of Thraben , Goblin Guide , Eidolon of the Great Revel , Leonin Arbiter , Tidehollow Sculler or Aven Mindcensor ; therefore it should be played in fullset before any other functional spell ( Fatal Push aside) if going down this route. Just keep in mind that (especially against Infect) Disfigure is utterly blanked by Mutagenic Growth , which is quite catastrophic. Turn-1 lifeloss-free spot-removal are also incidentally of some utility against aggro decks; Profane Memento is comparable in this role, but it doesn't help against the above listed threats or Infect. Useful against Infect, Burn, Hatebears; can come in also against aggro decks like Merfolk, Affinity and Elves.
Darkblast : vs Infect. At its best if you can diversify the answers (like in combination with Spellskite or Immortal Coil , better if both) so to have a shot at winning defending from multiple angles; but even alone sometimes it is gamebreaking enough for the Infect player. It can certainly do wonders with Immortal Coil against Infect, but it is bad against Burn where it cannot kill anything (at least spending only 1 mana, which is fundamental) or versus Hatebears ( Thalia, Guardian of Thraben aside). It can be used in a pinch to fuel Set Adrift , but such effect is redundant if playing 1-mana mill spells. Against Affinity is not a good side-in because it is not always good even in the early stages of the game - actually, the only ones where you are supposed to use it.
Death's Approach : useful if creatures are big and decks slow with a lot of creatures in (that is, never of course). Good to get delirium for Manic Scribe .
Dead Weight : same as above, but against little creatures.
Vampiric Link : mostly against Burn: enchanting their creatures to buffer the damage, or something like Jace's Phantasm to gain a ton of life; on their Eidolon of the Great Revel is hilarious; marginal use as a pseudo-removal against other decks.
Liliana's Defeat : good against Death's Shadow -decks: it kills Death's Shadow , Tasigur, the Golden Fang , Gurmag Angler , Liliana of the Veil and Liliana, the Last Hope .
Collective Brutality : great to catch up against fast creatures decks (especially Infect and Burn) and small utility against other aggro decks. A little help as an additional pseudo-gravehate against Living End (it discards Violent Outburst and Demonic Dread ), Goryo's Vengeance -decks (it discards the namesake card, but it is no use if they play Emrakul, the Aeons Torn ), Jeskai Nahiri, the Harbinger -decks (it discards counterspells/ Wear / Tear ) and Storm (it kills Goblin Electromancer and discards something).
Drown in the Loch : terminate and counterspell in one card is surely interesting even if the card works only in the lategame. Still, as the delining of how our strategy should pan out and the matchups walkthrough highlight, they are unneeded but in the most controlling shells, which are a losing proposition to begin with.
Sickening Shoal and Force of Despair : if speed is of the utmost importance like against Infect; however, black spell usually are our best cards and we do not want to pitch them.
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Path to Exile : the best removal for us; but do not expect the opponet to search for the basic land (more below): she won't, or she will have already won. The issue is that splashing for removals (taking additional damage from your lands) clashes with adopting removals as part of the maindeck defence.
Oust : it is a sorcery Path to Exile since we mill.
Condemn : I found it underwhelming: Eidolon of the Great Revel , Hatebears, and Infect (through protection before attacking) all laugh at it.
Winds of Abandon : another way to actually force tour opponent to search. Interesting in a combo shell.
Cry of the Carnarium : same as the above card, but with an additional effect relevant against something like Kitchen Finks where the scry is not more useful.
Engineered Explosives : typical answer to fast decks and especially to Aura, but against the latter you should already play enchantment removals for Leyline of Sanctity . Good when there are almost only permanents at 0- or 1-mana (even if you can produce more than 2 colors; in that case you are aiming at a single problematic permanent).
Damnation : classic mass-removal, useful against most creature-decks and a quality card against Jund; beware of the land count of your deck before playing this: it should not go in 20-landers.
Languish : better than the previous one against non-Jundish decks if playing creatures like Jace's Phantasm or Tarmogoyf .
Yahenni's Expertise : it certainly seems strong when the first effect is good. Yet I wonder what deck it can cripple in a timely fashion.. none, i guess?
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Supreme Verdict : the to-go-card if in need of a white mass-removal or of an uncounterable one (sometimes it can be relevant, as against Merfolks).
Wrath of God : as above, if regeneration is common ( Welding Jar , Thrun, the Last Troll ..).
With 'fogs' I mean functional copies of Fog .
Immortal Coil : it is great vs both Burn and Infect: if you happen to have Mesmeric Orb too on the battlefield, they must remove it; and in a pinch, you can mill yourself with your cheap spells while pointing the big ones at the opponent. You just have to survive until turn 4, which vs Burn you can accomplish with Crypt Incursion and vs Infect with Darkness . Unfortunately, sometimes they will have a removal for Immortal Coil (they could side in removal for your artifacts regardless, even if only in fear of a Spellskite ). But it is still better than Spellskite (with a little help) because vs Burn Spellskite does too little, and of these reactive cards from Infect, only Nature's Claim is a matter of concern for Immortal Coil . A great choice against those decks if you have room in your sideboard (a single slot would be ideal I guess).
Profane Memento : playing this card early against an aggro deck can gain around 30 life over the course of the game: it is outstandingly comparable to 1/1,5 fog-effect cast in the late-game; however, it is not useful if drawn later, and the risk does not seem really rewarding to me (the opposite of Archive Trap in this respect; more below). Also versus Burn (where life gain is the priority, and this kind of effect should give its best) due to its low creature count Profane Memento is utterly useless (while Crypt Incursion is still viable thanks to the 3x multiplier). In general, it is too narrow: to be effective, your opponent have to try to win by damage (not through a combo like Elves, though) and featuring a very very high creature count in her deck. So, Profane Memento is a fog in the best case scenario and useless otherwise: you'd better play Fatal Push over it, because like Profane Memento it is a fog in the best case scenario and useless otherwise - yet it is your best defence card in some niche situations and matchups.
Ensnaring Bridge : this card is soft to incidental artifact/permanent hate (even maindeck, mainly because of Abrupt Decay , Assassin's Trophy , Maelstrom Pulse , Kolaghan's Command , Qasali Pridemage , Engineered Explosives , Oblivion Stone , Karn Liberated , Beast Within , Pillage , Reclamation Sage ...), and you cannot afford to lose that easily your only line of defence since (a problem in common with adopting spot removals as the main defence) it will most probably not be followed by additional defence. Hate is to be expected as heavy played especially after sideboard, when the opponent brings in a lot of marginally useful or even probably dead cards (graveyard hate, artifact- or enchantment-removal..) because they have a bunch of surely dead cards maindeck against us; Ancient Grudge is the most frequent of the brought-in, and it can even be cast from graveyard after we mill it (sure, if they get Ensnaring Bridge they won't destroy your Mesmeric Orb .. but to what end, if you cannot live long enough?). Also, it works bad with Archive Trap which can remain unused in hand; or with untimely/unlucky Visions of Beyond (even if cast in your opponent's end phase) or with land-heavy/light draw (lands/cards will remain stuck in hand). It is useful to note that more than one of these events can happen simultaneously, making the card looking silly more often than not (even with finalized and fine-grained deck-building and tight play). Finally, 0-force creatures like Noble Hierarch and little creatures in general (from Infect, Affinity.. which can buff their creatures after having attacked, or even move Cranial Plating at instant speed) can attack regardless: I understand that a Noble Hierarch will take and eternity to kill, but when Ensnaring Bridge is cast or is fully operational (turn 4-5 at least) we will have already taken a lot of damage; the potential support from a timely Crypt Incursion is not to be reckoned on: any list can almost always win with a well placed resolution of that spell, or with casting more than one defence card (hoping to not drawing too many of them). Jace's Phantasm to block the critter passing through Ensnaring Bridge is not enough: any removal pointed at any of those cards makes the other one completely useless. To make Ensnaring Bridge really work either you have you play suboptimal spells (probaly creatures like Manic Scribe or Jace's Phantasm so as to block early until you empty up your hand, and to block low-power creatures late; read below for why they are bad) or lowering your curve much more than normally appropriate - thus relying on the topdeck for multiple times: your deck has to be built to make this route viable, i.e. it must sport spells that are both cheaper than normal AND stronger than normal, unless you are sure that it won't be removed (at least for a while; but not every deck is Merfolk or Eldrazi!). That said, Ensnaring Bridge does not even help the Infect, Burn, Leyline of Sanctity - or Emrakul, the Aeons Torn -decks matchup, which are the most hard ones (preventing Emrakul, the Aeons Torn from attacking still leaves open the question of how we win). As for Aura, the matchup is nearly impossible post side even with Ensnaring Bridge . I understand that they need to draw a removal for it, but on the other hand you probably need to draw your own removal for Leyline of Sanctity meanwhile. if you plan to play Surgical Extraction on their answer to Ensnaring Bridge , you are assuming that they are not diversifying their answer, that you are milling (against a Leyline of Sanctity most certainly!!), that you mill a specific card played in few copies, that they haven't drawn it meanwhile and already destroyed your Ensnaring Bridge , all this assuming too that you drew an early Set Adrift and an early Ensnaring Bridge with sufficient lands (and a mill spell for Set Adrift ). These requirements are not realistic; at least you should concede that you cannot win against a Leyline of Sanctity even with an Ensnaring Bridge ; but such a concession means that the matchup is clearly unfavourable so that that Ensnaring Bridge is strong against Aura is but a biased argument. In general against other decks, even when the stars align and you meet the relevant conditions I just remebered, pointing Surgical Extraction at their answers to Ensnaring Bridge only works half of the time because near half of the aggro decks run Ancient Grudge , which is an instant spell.
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Fog : very good if the splash is worth it.
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Ethereal Haze and Holy Day : see Fog .
These cards are meant to be brought in only against Burn (or quite so).
Sun Droplet : good with blockers or removals, otherwise useless. Way better if played in multiple copies.
Leyline of Sanctity : vs Burn it is a real life-gainer - shielding you from burn spells. But it is unreliable, favors dead draws and must in any case be supported by removals: you would die from their creatures before you could mill them out, and you even have at least 1 card less in hand (we are talking about the case where you have it first-hand); Eidolon of the Great Revel would be still unbeatable, and they can destroy your Leyline of Sanctity at some point with Destructive Revelry .
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Phyrexian Unlife : it shares part of its problem with Leyline of Sanctity .
Chalice of the Void : since we have a hard time finding suitable 1-drops (see below) we can put them completely aside (apart from our blowout-cards: Hedron Crab and Visions of Beyond ) and play this; however Chalice of the Void suffers pretty much from the same limits of Leyline of Sanctity against Burn, which is the deck it is aimed for (what is left of the sideboard can deal what the rest of the metagame which is not a Leyline of Sanctity -deck, but there neither a Chalice of the Void would help).
Serum Powder : it would be used to maximaze the chances to see at least one enchantment-removal or a graveyard-hate post board: we really need to have them in hand at the beginning of the game. However, it is probably better to split the answers - even if doing so lowers the chances to see them compared to them together with Serum Powder - to have more impactful options in every stage of the game (especially if the first ones are dealt with, i.e. with counterspells).
Force of Negation : good for protecting you before the game even begins, or against glass-cannon strategies. You really shouldn't worry about the card disadvantage between Visions of Beyond , Shelldock Isle and Fraying Sanity .
Scheming Symmetry : the first thing that catches our eye is that we can mill the opponent's card making the effect lopsided. Unfortunately it cannot help us against Leyline of Sanctity looking for Set Adrift , since we cannot target our opponent. It can be a way to force your opponent to search number 5-8 after Field of Ruin , but that seems not optimal for every Mill deck. It is good in a combo version because your cards values are so much different in a game, but bad in an aggro version because there you only care about redundancy achieved with spells of similar power level; plus card disadvantage is bad when leaning to going aggro by being redundant. Scheming Symmetry in a turbo mill shell would be nice if it hadn't some unfortunate implications. Let's analyse such a build in order to understand if at least our best case scenario build works out. If we play Scheming Symmetry alongside Mesmeric Orb , we have resigned ourselves to have Scheming Symmetry acting merely as an enabler - meaning we are aiming at best to spend a whole card just to cast an otherwise useless card ( Archive Trap ). How can we exploit the tutor part of the card? Scheming Symmetry needs enablers on its own in order for us to do so. Acting as Scheming Symmetry enablers we have: Hedron Crab , which however acts as such only from turn 3, because if we start with Hedron Crab we usually open the game up either with Shelldock Isle , with Island or with Prismatic Vista for Island , so that we'll get only on turn 2 and Hedron Crab as an enabler only as early as turn 3. Then we get our 2-mana millers or Archive Trap searchers, yet they can be coupled with Scheming Symmetry only from turn 3 on. Finally from turn 4 we also get Mind Funeral , but that's too late since we would draw our chosen card only on the following turn, which is too late. If we adopt Surgical Extraction , we can probably enable a fast Scheming Symmetry - but it would be as if we mulliganed to 5 cards, since we would spend as many as 2 whole cards that don't advance our game plan only to put a usually replaceable cards on top. And fogging for 2 mana is not worth it because it's too expensive, even across multiple turns. I therefore expect Scheming Symmetry only to play a role in more comboish decks, or resign ourselves just to have it as an additional enabler for Archive Trap .
Claim / Fame and Unearth : they mainly reanimate Hedron Crab , which is our best mill spell by a long shot; but, though we can mill Hedron Crab with Mesmeric Orb , non-interactive decks don't kill our Hedron Crab s and against interactives ones the risk of having non-functional hands with Claim / Fame or Unearth and no Hedron Crab makes it not worth it. In the sidelines, they bring back a Snapcaster Mage for a big spell or a Jace's Phantasm .
Mission Briefing : since surveil is so much bad in a deck playing Mesmeric Orb , one of our stronger mill cards, Mission Briefing is either a Snapcaster Mage debased by lesser defensive capabilities or a super-situational Trapmaker's Snare when it copies an Archive Trap for 0 - and you don't want to play neither to begin with. As with Snapcaster Mage and Jace, Vryn's Prodigy , the flexibility does not make up for the inefficiency.
I will consider only palatable cards for a UB build; potential splashing is to be appropriately integrated.
Mystic Sanctuary : it grants you the spell you need on the following turn without turning up with card disadvantage (unlike Noxious Revival ), it works bad with Mesmeric Orb unless you fetch it after the triggers. Overall, its a super conditional Sheldock Isle without the card advantage granted by the latter, so much that we are not really interested.
Oboro, Palace in the Clouds : it is wonderful with Hedron Crab when not drawing lands, and can give double when needed (if not playing other lands). It is of no use in decks with so many lands that they are guaranteed to make all of their land drops till late in game. Excellent at getting revolt for Fatal Push . Like most of the following cards it is good against Choke .
Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth : even more than Oboro, Palace in the Clouds , it is good to squeeze colored mana out of Field of Ruins in fast games and fixing mana occasionally in general. Nonetheless, just like Oboro, Palace in the Clouds it is paradoxically good when playing few lands (as with many lands you have more choices), but then you'll have more pressing priorities like playing enough basic lands.
Sunken Ruins : later in the game it is an untapped double land. But with the full commitment to Field of Ruins and Shelldock Isle it gets very bad. The same consideration made for River of Tears apply here, with the relevant extra of fixing colors (1) from Island / Shelldock Isle for an early Glimpse the Unthinkable / Breaking / Entering / Mind Funeral + Darkness , or (2) from Swamp in order to activate Shelldock Isle (colored mana is highly stressed even lategame). This is of great help when you naturally draw the wrong lands or if you need to fetch for basics more than you would in order to be conservative with your life points. It actually saves more than a single life point over the course of a typical game.
Darkslick Shores : very strong in the early game, I suggest not play more than 1 because the second copy is ugly (you want fetches early in any case for Hedron Crab s). And if you have too many fetchlands in the deck - since you could find yourself fetching in the very first turn, which is not ideal because later fetches have less targets (and permit fewer choices) and because fetches are meant to feed Hedron Crab s. You should play it if you are not playing Crypt Incursion , Darkness or Fraying Sanity since in such case we want to make full use of our mana from turn 1 to turn 5; and we should already feature Shelldock Isle as a surely tapped land on later turns.
Sunken Hollow : good with fetches both for taking it or for playing it untapped; but we can't afford too many lands that can't cast a turn 1 Hedron Crab against fast decks.
Drowed Catacombs: like Sunken Hollow it is good with fetches since they let you play it untapped; but again we can't afford too many lands that can't cast a turn 1 Hedron Crab against fast decks.
Port Town : no Mill deck can play that many basics: it will always come into play tapped.
Lonely Sandbar , Barren Moor and Fetid Pools : the drawing part is pretty irrelevant since you will happen to manage to cycle only in half of the games (the slow ones) you play against grindy decks - and never anywhere else. And foremostly entering tapped really muder them.
Waterveil Cavern : good if we are not playing Crypt Incursion , Darkness or Fraying Sanity (in such case we want to make full use of our mana from turn 1 to turn 5) and we do not go much deep as to colored mana requirements (like if we play Shriekhorn instead of Breaking / Entering ).
River of Tears : the only and big problem is that it can't pay for Hedron Crab on turn 1, and we need a really good reason to play such a land. The reversed effect would be perfect for this deck.
Nephalia Drownyard : it is not against slow decks that we need a hand.
Ipnu Rivulet : same as above for a one-shot use in exchange of producing blue painful mana (which makes it better than Nephalia Drownyard ). In other words, we would get to activate it only against those rare slow control decks, against which we have already the edge: an additional double land (perhaps a fetch?) as an insurance against color-screw, a basic land more against random Blood Moon s or more simply another painless land are in any other case more valuable than Ipnu Rivulet .
Ghost Quarter : if mana permits (almost all of our cards need only colored mana to be cast), especially if used as part of a removal-based defence strategy (it kills manlands) or a color/land-denial tactical ingredient. Ghost Quarter is of any use only in the early stages of the game (i.e. usually not further than turn 2, because the relevant threaths can easily come down with the amount of mana available at that point, and we want the opponent to search); but then you are behind in the game by a land drop and a card just to be able to cast a card in your hand ( Archive Trap ) that is not even that good: if you activate Ghost Quarter on turn 2 and the game lasts, say, 5 turns, casting Archive Trap costs you 4 mana! It's functionally like a Startled Awake that requires a combination of 2 (otherwise dead) cards in order to be cast (even if you would already play Archive Trap regardless of the synergy) - and if the opponent doesn't search, Archive Trap is most probably bound to stay in hand for the rest of the game! I am aware that being card-conservative is not an integral part of this strategy, so it would not be a big deal to have a built-in two-cards mini-combo; but this particular plan implies an unnecessary squander of resources for a really mediocre achievement. Even if everything goes as wanted - which is something not granted at all, given the choices offered to the opponent and the incongruence with other objectives (i.e. casting spells and staying alive) - even if you succed in ghosting, extracting, pathing someting and then trapping/funeraling, you end up without cards and nothing accomplished ( Visions of Beyond or Shelldock Isle are not even ready at that point!), and you will get crushed even by an opposing Snapcaster Mage cast on turn 2. Especially considering that Ghost Quarter , Path to Exile and Surgical Extraction wouldn't have taken you any further in regards of your own plan. The wrap-up is that I would never use Ghost Quarter if I am not planning to use it as a manland-removal very often, obviously in the frame of a removal-based maindeck defence strategy - and you should not do it.
Academy Ruins : great tech: late game it retrives mill spells ( Shriekhorn , Mesmeric Orb ), defence cards ( Ensnaring Bridge , Engineered Explosives ..) or grave-hate ( Nihil Spellbomb , Relic of Progenitus , Tormod's Crypt ..); and it can recoup those items because you already used them once/they have been destroyed, because you auto-milled them with Mesmeric Orb or because you milled them with other spells (e.g. you are milling yourself as a part of an alternative plan..) - so Academy Ruins is very versatile. However, playing a colorless mana source (like Ghost Quarter ) in a deck with so few lands and too many very specific color-requirements (nearly every single spell, and Shelldock Isle s..) makes for very awkward sequences on your part: the games in which you draw it without planning to use its unique ability (very very few) see you in too bad a spot. It is thus sideboard material; but at that point you probably want an additional grave-hate (since it will be the most frequently recurred kind of card).
Gemstone Caverns : it could be sideboard material, allowing you to catch-up on mana when the opponent starts if you see it in starting hand, and if you can afford to have a quite sure dead draw in the course of the game (colorless mana ends up being pretty useless, especially the list highlighted here). All of these conditions are met if you have to draw first against aggro or combo; but sideboard slots are pretty important: so there is no room here. As if additional motivation were needed, against anything else a dead card is more liable to exert influence upon a game win/loss. Pondering alternatives routes, adopting Gemstone Caverns in the main plan can only be detrimental: since you will always want to play second, the card is of any use if you need to draw a very specific card along the course of the whole game (and not only in you first hand: if it is so, it is better to mulligan than hoping to draw it otherwise), and if neither you (without that card) or your opponent put any pressure: only this way drawing first is of any utility, i.e. when 'drawing first' means 'drawing extra' (because the card drawn is the only relevant, and after that you close the game). Said that, aside from some combo mirror or a dedicated strategy I cannot see any profitable use of Gemstone Caverns - and much less in Mill.
Now I will showcase some popular or peculiar plans I found bad, and exhibit reasons for my judgement:
Fraying Sanity build-arounds
The aim of the deck is having a reliable turn-4 kill via a Fraying Sanity , two Archive Trap (or four without a Fraying Sanity out) and a Field of Ruin / Scheming Symmetry / Winds of Abandon . Scheming Symmetry combined with Thought Scour , Noxious Revival or Surgical Extraction is a one-sided Vampiric Tutor , so that you virtually have 8 Fraying Sanity , 12 ways to force your opponent to search, and 16 Archive Trap (counting in Trapmaker's Snare and Merchant Scroll ) plus lucky synergies with spare copies of Thought Scour and Noxious Revival . Make a 4-of the 10 cards I mentioned, add 20 lands and you have a real deck capable of winning on turn 4 a very considerable amount of times (statistically speaking); it even packs a little of incidental disruption in Thought Scour (against opponent's Serum Visions starts), Noxious Revival (against Snapcaster Mage , for one), Surgical Extraction , Field of Ruin and Winds of Abandon - which is not every Mill deck can boast. Unfortunately, there is no way Glimpse the Unthinkable fits in here, so such a deck doesn't concern this page (though I suggest you to give it a try, because it is probably better than anything we can accomplish with Glimpse the Unthinkable ). However, note that despite such build gets us properly a monodimensional Archive Trap deck, we get to be very responsive against opponents' Surgical Extraction s because we can fizzle their spell with our own Noxious Revival s or Surgical Extraction s (obviously failing to find suitable cards to exile). Moving to explore different scenarios, having Fraying Sanity in a turbo-mill build including cheap mill spells is too much high variance - because if you don't stick a turn-3 Fraying Sanity your deck won't go anywhere. A way to curb such shortcoming is having Pyromancer Ascension acting as Fraying Sanity number 5-8; however, without chaining cantrips (the classical and more logical way to prime it) you are compelled to mill yourself before starting to actually mill your opponent, making wins achieved through Pyromancer Ascension demanding more turns you could afford - and often more cards you would have available anyway. Let's leave Pyromancer Ascension to cantrip-based decks, the best ones of which ironically aim to achieve victory through decking their opponents anyway ( Thought Scour - Noxious Revival - Manamorphose combo). Fraying Sanity combos out with Traumatize , though such a deck would be but a worse Ad Nauseam; in any case there Glimpse the Unthinkable would be redundant: in a build with Glimpse the Unthinkable , Archive Trap would achieve the same result as Traumatize with the perk of being more all-around.
Scheming Symmetry for faster wins
A turbo mill deck including Scheming Symmetry has already resigned itself to have the card merely covering the role of Archive Trap enabler number 5-8 - as we have seen analyzing the card. Such a mill deck when uncontested boasts about the same turn 4 and turn 5 win percentages respectively as an unopposed turbo mill deck including Darkness (where you count as turn 4 win a game when you can cast a turn 4 Darkness and win on the following turn and so on), which is fantastically a glorious achievement for Mill strategies. Still, I'm not sold on using Scheming Symmetry this way because I find such a shell to lose many point as to Mill's win percentage against decks such as control and Jund: we used to beat them more or less easily because of redundancy (the control matchup amounting to a bye and the Jund one being almost even), which Scheming Symmetry builds give up on altogether. Any other win prospects remain unvaried, with the alarming note that Set Adrift becomes generally uncastable. Given such assumptions, I'd still stick with the redundant Darkness build at the moment. So, even if Scheming Symmetry finally allows Mill to be focused on its own plan and still be able to win games (which is a first), it makes you lose win percentage points overall. Though, it remains a strong contender.
Mana dorks:
Playing so mana-orientedly requires a lot of payoff in bigger spells than usual. We could thus choose to play 4-mana mill spells, but those are very unexciting: they are nothing better than Startled Awake and Snapcaster Mage , and both are kinda inefficient and overall weak; or we could aim at protracting the game - though it is hardly advisable since, again, Modern features too many strategies to fend off while the available answers are in the best case scenario either weak with wide applications, or too selective. So the bigger upside of mana dorks seems to be that either they help you cast Fraying Sanity on turn 2 (allowing for a more likely turn 4 win) or to get a double-mill-spell turn not only on turn 4-5, but also on turn 3. Yet getting spells on curve is hard enough that most times Birds of Paradise without an early Fraying Sanity will do nothing; and we do not have enough 3-mana spells worth playing, so that frequently the mana available from Birds of Paradise will be useless both on turn 2 and on turn 4 (since many spells will cost only 2 mana). In the end, because it relies either on a perfect hand or on an early Fraying Sanity in order to be of any use, giving up fogs (the only kind of card you could really cut from my list, since I already play too few mill spells than ideal) for Birds of Paradise do not grant you nearly enough turn 4 wins to make up for the switch.
Esnaring Bridge builds
Ensnaring Bridge itself has been already analysed in detail in its own entry in the fog list. To summarize the main concerns: it works poorly with other cards; it requires playing subotimal cards (blockers, removals, Surgical Extraction to get rid of what can deal with it hoping they play only cards with the same name as an answer to it, cards that make you lessen the number of cards in your hand like Noxious Revival or Collective Brutality which are too narrow, and perhaps even millers like Shriekhorn that are cheaper than what you would play in order to win without it!!) and adopting sometimes suboptimal lines of play (casting spells in an untimely manner, like a Surgical Extraction on an irrelevant target or a Visions of Beyond for 1) to be effective which overall end up being too much setbacking; it costs too much and comes in too late to take you ahead in tempo when thwarted; not being a catch-all answer to creatures in a meaningful way can be easy exploited by opponents (little creatures); too fragile, i.e. exposed to common and played-regardless removal spells: much like with creatures (even with in a surely lesser, but still seizable extent) you cannot afford your only line of defence to be disrupted that easily. Face the reality: in Mill Ensnaring Bridge is better than a fog only against decks particurlarly soft against it AND you are mana flooding or screwing really bad, BUT not enough to make your Ensnaring Bridge vain; fogs in Mill are way better than that. Ensnaring Bridge gives the best of itself in Mill when comprised in a shell which maximases both the chances at getting Ensnaring Bridge and defend it against aggro, AND the chances to abase combo decks milling and extracting their combo enabler. Those are the only goals which don't struggle against each other, and here Glimpse the Unthinkable helps out getting a deterministic win supporting the extraction effects with the maximum reasonable efficency. Such a way of building Mill is the only one you can find nowadays anywhere else on the internet apart from this webpage. Albeit, playing that way we still would be not that consistent against combo because of the low quantity of early millers, and we would probably lose any post-board game against fair decks because they usually can diversify very well their answers to Ensnaring Bridge , putting us in no position to stem their flood of threats or even to race them.
Delve:
I also tried to attack with creatures in games 2-3 where the main plan is undermined (namely against Emrakul, the Aeons Torn or Leyline of Sanctity ): this should dodge usual hate against a spell-based combo deck as Mill is. A starting point might feature this sideboard: 2 Tasigur, the Golden Fang , 4 Gurmag Angler , 4 Sibsig Muckdraggers , 4 Shambling Attendants (/ Tarmogoyf if -splashed), 1 Laboratory Maniac . The plan would be to mill ourself and cast those huge creatures. Because against Leyline of Sanctity we cannot mill the opponent ( Mesmeric Orb would be too slow), and against Emrakul, the Aeons Torn it would very risky (and those are the cases in which this plan would be needed most), it is no use playing Jace's Phantasm or Wight of Precinct Six . Laboratory Maniac allows for an alternative win - which, even if very hazardous, it is a welcome out when the game would be otherwise unwinnable; if it is accidentaly milled out, it can even be recurred by Sibsig Muckdraggers . The problem is that this plan is too slow: Ad Nausem can win long before letal damage, and Aura can set up a gigantic lifelink creature we could never overcome, and it also has Path to Exile for our Laboratory Maniac (even if we can win at instant speed via Visions of Beyond ). Shouldn't this be enough, Burn and Infect remain unwinnable match-ups. As for Death's Shadow , fetchlands alone are not sufficient to put it online.
Pseudo-Dredge:
Sideboarding 4 Prized Amalgam + 4 Bloodghast + 4 Haunted Dead + 3 Stitchwing Skaab : we mill ourselves, activate Haunted Dead / Stitchwing Skaab which at the same time puts possible creatures from hand into the graveyard, and attack until we win. Unfortunately, this plan has an average turn 5/6 kill, too slow against anybody. And against Aura we still cannot win mainly because of lifelink. I’ve seen adopting this as a maindeck plan for Mill, relying on a sideboard of only mill spells to beat the maindeck-plan hosers; still, it is too slow to win and therefore a bad idea.
Unburial Rites:
Otherwise, an option is featuring an ' Unburial Rites -package', with Iona, Shield of Emeria and the like: milling ourself, we can cast Unburial Rites quite reliably on turn 4. The problem is that this plan is an 'all-in' and very fragile one; also, we cannot choose which reanimation-targets go into the graveyard, unlike than via Gifts Ungiven : the wrong one will be most likely unsufficient to win (and sometimes even the 'right' one). And it is too slow most of the times.
Laboratory Maniac:
A last attemptive down this road might see roughly the following 15 cards: 4 Laboratory Maniac , 4 Jace, Wielder of Mysteries , 4 Noxious Revival , 3 Swan Song . Mill yourself, make sure to draw a game-winner (via Noxious Revival if necessary) and cast it protected with counterspells. Unfortunately, this plan is very very slow - too much to compete. Lantern, Ad Nauseam, Storm, Aura, Boros Prison are the typical decks playing Leyline of Sanctity in the 75 right now. Boros Prison, Jeskai Nahiri, Blue Moon, Goryo's Vengeance on the other hand are the decks sporting at least an Emrakul, the Aeons Torn . It seems to that each and every of them can win faster than us or disrupt our Laboratory Maniac combo: Lantern has got Assissin's Trophy and Surgical Extraction ; Ad Nauseam, Storm, Aura and Goryo's Vengeance represent fast wins (even with fewer cards than normal due to mullingans into Leyline of Sanctity ); Storm, Goryo's Vengeance and Boros Prison have got Blood Moon , to which Boros Prison adds Chalice of the Void and perhaps even a Boil ; finally Jeskai Nahiri and Blue Moon are full of counterspells. All this sometimes accompanied by reactive cards from time to time incidentally good against us: creature/artifact/permament removals, meaning that we cannot rely on that Hedron Crab or Mesmeric Orb not even post side, and more importantly if they happen to side them all out they would put them back the following game in order to kill Larboratory Maniac - so that we couldn't adopt the same plan twice against them, which is a serious problem since we wouldn't have another plan in the matchup. I would never play a transforming sideboard that can never win.
Thopter Foundry:
Thopter Foundry + Sword of the Meek : surely we can easily have some artifact for the first activation of Thopter Foundry even if we don't have a Sword of the Meek : those two in addition to Shriekhorn and Mesmeric Orb already amount to 16! We can as well mill ourselves until we get Sword of the Meek into the graveyard if we already have Thopter Foundry in play ( Mesmeric Orb even does that naturally!). This plan is a very neat and easy addition to the whole strategy. Sadly, it does not solve any of Mill's common problems; it doesn't even help against aggro: it is too slow if not supported by removals.
Madcap Experiment:
We could sideboard some Madcap Experiment , some Platinum Emperion and a Steam Vents . But Platinum Emperion doesn't really help against Leyline of Sanctity and Emrakul, the Aeons Torn ; and Burn can win at the fourth turn, and in the worst case they can draw a removal any time (they will bring in artifact removals). Because of these issues, I never really tried this route.
In this section I will expose my most important conclusions from the above analysis, from theoretical thinking and from testing. These conclusions are the foundations which the decklist is built upon. I notice nobody is arrived yet at my conclusions: this can be due to a number of factors. (1) Pro-players tend to avoid to try to enhance bad decks. (2) Mill match-ups are so skewed that if the match-up is favorable, you can win with any Mill build - while if it is unfavorable, you will lose no matter what cards or strategy you employ. The depth of my research also retains all the potential to break away from the vitious circle provocated by the information cascade Patrick Chapin talks about here: http://www.starcitygames.com/magic/fundamentals/12201_Information_Cascades_in_Magic.html ; reading my reasoning, people could just stop copying bad Mill lists from the internet: this should improve their winning consistency, though not so much because of what said just above. The data from testing, tournament results and personal experience, as Paulo Vitor Damo Da Rosa lucidly reminds us at http://www.channelfireball.com/articles/8-biases-that-are-making-you-worse-at-magic/ , should be reckoned as only loosely representative of the win-trend in the match-up and actually serve the purpose of giving out hints at what can go bad or well, and to what extent: results and experience are not meant to ratify expectations on a deck's performance but to offer hints about what happens in certain circumstances - hopefully giving raise to useful insights. If someone finds out that some of the issues I mentioned are scarcely influent overall (and consequently that my conclusions are out of place), either by appropriate arguments or data, than that is an improvement in the Mill lore in general (in the case of data, the successive and desiderable step of answering the 'how much?'-question would be resolving the 'why?'-question). Yet, especially given that Mill is hardly played at all (for all good reason; and even when it is, as I pointed out, it is misplayed), I expect any proposed data to be inappropriate; I therefore envisage only dataless arguments to play a role in our decisions on the matter. This isn’t much of an issue because data only serve the purpose of corroborating a thesis by giving out examples (possibly not covertly unappropriate): arguments can (and should) be assessed totally independently from data (which is a world apart from the greatly welcome probability calculation).
Jace's Phantasm , the most notably of them, is a defensive card that has the advantage of becoming a threat if the opponent stumbles (badly); but it is useless in far too many matchups, while where useful it is still marginal (it is a gamebreaker defence card if, again, the opponent stumbles badly). All in all, creatures either to block or to attack (even if they offer an alternative way to win) are grossly ineffectual: opposing strategies can either go wide with creatures or cast a removal after having played their relevant threat ( Tarmogoyf , Affinity/Infect/Zoo ones..) - this way they even suffer from no tempo loss, because the opportunity cost to cast a removal spell at that point is negligible: they can win with what they have on the board, and playing additional creatures would hardly affect the turn in which they threaten letal damage. Also, creature decks usually have their ways to make blocking creatures obsolete - by having huge trampling creatures (like Aura's of Suicide's ones) or unblockable/color-protected ones (like the ones from Infect, or because of Islandwalk from Merfolks). (As a little note, direct-mill spells like Breaking / Entering are obviously better than Mesmeric Orb with something like Jace's Phantasm or Wight of Precinct Six , while the artifact on the other hand reduces actively the cost for delving the likes of Gurmag Angler : there is little of a conflict here for the 'fringe mill spell' slot.) Remarkably, blockers are redundant and superfluous in the defensive role if something like Fog is reckoned on as part of the plan for staying in the game. Finally, creatures are detrimental in the control/midrange matchup (they get to keep removals even post side since they don't have much better to bring in), against which normally the plan is to take advantage of Mill's difficult-to-disrupt gameplan (i.e. it wins by means of spells); defence slots (main- or sideboard ones alike) are better used to cover up holes in the strategy, as opposed to playing creatures and then having still to deal with creature-decks post side as well as with the other common issues.
Because we tend to feature at least a little less defence cards than a reactive deck, the opponent will hold superfluos threat in hand at no cost (i.e. they would not affect the turn in which she threaten to win, even playing around potential spot-removals): this way they can play around potential mass-removals or Mesmeric Orb (because of the lands they would tap to cast the creatures). In a similar (and quite likely) scenario, a Damnation -like card is useless, since we would waste our whole turn and the opponent still could eventually cast the creatures held in hand until then. Also, there are haste or flash('ed') creatures and manlands, which make our efforts much less rewarding because we would likely be at very low life at that point; here are some: Goblin Guide , Monastery Swiftspear , Snapcaster Mage , Vendilion Clique , Spell Queller , Restoration Angel , Collected Company , Chord of Calling , Through the Breach , Aether Vial , Mutavault , Treetop Village , Raging Ravine , Hissing Quagmire , Shambling Vent , Stirring Wildwood , Celestial Colonnade .
Removal spells are bad against wide-aggro decks, and even exiling a creature for one mana with no downside (eg resolving a Path to Exile with our opponent declining to search for the land) is not useful here by any means: this deck do not care about card/value advantage, and cannot consistently/effectively follow up the removal spell with other spot-defence cards, blockers or mass-removals because of the dedication of slots a mill strategy requires. Defence cards in Modern are typically of a too wide use and little effective (like Fatal Push or even Path to Exile ) or too narrow (like Stony Silence or Phyrexian Unlife ) to produce an effective defence against the many strategies in Modern - or at least slow them down. Actually, this is something not even a dedicated control deck can accomplish; let alone Mill with only a few slot reserved to defence! And if you manage to squeeze in more slots, it would be like a Burn deck playing 12 Path to Exile -like cards - blatantly inconsistent! The alternative to comparing Mill to Burn is slowing the plan enough to make big plays (like Snapcaster Mage , or Startled Awake ); but again this is not possible. Since we cannot back up our removal spell following it up with another defence play, we actually cast that removal spell in order to gain tempo and not to control the board; and since the tempo given by a removal spell is at most one turn (because of redundancy/protection), why not playing the most efficient Time Walk Modern has to offers in fogs? In other words: we don't have space for removal because we need space for mill: we need to defend against too many things and we are not a Control deck. And if we perchance adopt fogs (as we will), if we lower the number of mill spell even fogs themselves become useless as you cannot win within the time gained (at some point you end up without cards at the very least). Please note that I am not saying that playing removals in Modern is bad. I am claiming that spot-removals are bad as main defence in a Mill deck (but sometimes they are a nice support out of the sideboard even there). Removal spells against an average deck (Zoo, Merfolk, even Burn), against which spot-removal should be meant, is good only in the first or the second turn (and, incidentally, you really cannot do it on the second turn because you have to do other things as a lot of cards we cannot avoid to play cost 2 or more). Against those decks, the 'value' (of exchanging one card - our removal spell - for an opponent's card of our choice - her most threatening creature) that can be gained in later turns means nothing if you cannot survive. Conversely, against decks with few creatures we can surely bring in spot-removals from the sideboard.
So, if an 'all-in' defence plan of any of the kinds suggested above is not enough (as argued extensively), one could think of 'mixing' the lines of defence - that is playing a bunch of creatures, spot- and mass-removals, lifegain spells and Ensnaring Bridge . Unfortunaley, because any of those is effective enough, a lot of defence spells should be played; but this deck can afford to play a lot of defence-dedicated cards only if they guarantee to keep the player alive until she has drawn and resolved the needed mill spells (which, in this instance, have to be very scarse due to the deck's intrinsic composition); and even this kind of defence strategy cannot lead the game there - not even nearly reliably. Another solution would be to play a mix of silver-bullets, in the sense of cards so strong (particularly, defensively) against certain kinds of deck that they can win by themselves - or at least gain a ton of time. But there are only so much of such cards in Modern for our deck, and most of them are effective only with severe limitations and reserves even when they should be strong (I'm thinking of Ensnaring Bridge and Surgical Extraction ); those cards should be so strong to win the game by themselves or gaining a lot of time, but nearly none of them can do it even against the deck they are meant to be effective. "There are a ton of different answers: surely there is a combination of them that is effective to our ends" is not a argument we should heed to, as the thesis is simply false: there isn't such a combination. Take the match-up against Infect, the prototypic deck that demands from us to be really reactive (i.e. assuming the controller role) if we go down this route: even playing up to 20 removal spells plus other kinds of defence that would be played regardless of this particular matchup and are still better than other maindeck cards (like Surgical Extraction , for the example's sake) the battle is pretty unwinnable: you have roughly as many removals as your opponent has creatures (each of which is a real threat, even Noble Hierarch late in the game), and you need to play the '1for1' game while matching perfectly your removal spell with their threat ( Darkblast generates an virtually infinite source of removals, but the possibility of reiterating Darkblast comes with the price of skipping your drawings) - and you have to do this until you cast your fifth big mill spell, so that you have milled all the around 50 cards of the opponent's deck: you would have to be lucky for a very long time, because the mill spell density would be very low due to the removals' count. Finally, all of this endeavor and luck can be simply vanquished by a single copy of any of their defence cards ( Apostle's Blessing , Vines of Vastwood , Spell Pierce ..). Other fast decks are only (if any) a little slower than Infect is, but not so much that you could afford to play differently than against the latter: the traditional way of surviving here only entails losing any game against aggro decks. On the other hand, playing less defence cards of the 'mixed' kind for additional mill spells in order to win faster could be fruitful only if the defences are quite effectful on the development of the game; and none of them can do that: even mass-removals are generally too much costly to be played without support from cheaper defence cards, and Ensnaring Bridge is too frail and unreliable to be an 'all-in' kind of defence. Lastly, conterspells and discard spells don't address any of our problems (fast aggro, Emrakul, the Aeons Torn -decks, Infect, Burn, Hatebear..). Regarding us playing discard effects ( Inquisition of Kozilek , Thoughtseize ...), some of the worst enemies of the deck - i.e. aggro strategies, which defence cards are mainly meant against - are by definition extremely redundant: discarding only results in a tempo loss in your opponent's favor. As you can see, that my suggestion of going Aggro (or, in any case, running a Combo that plays like an Aggro) with mill cards is due to the fact that I am overestimating Aggro because I don't have the skills to take advantage of traditional reactive cards is obviously not a good argument: I offered proper reasons for my thinking so. Mill is super consistent in winning on turn 5, with some welcome turn 4 wins - while on the other hand trying to actually interact with our opponent makes our winnings more rarefied: I advocate we should capitalise on Mill strong points instead of trying and controlling the game more. Let me sum up. Some piece of interaction is always ineffective against something, because of a natural resistence (e.g. a removal against a spell like Ad Nauseam or Living End , or a Murderous Cut or a Dismember against an early Goblin Guide ..) or because the opponent manages to nullify your thwarting attempt (e.g. Vines of Vastwood responding to a removal..); this causes the defence you were trying to put up to crumble more often than it is acceptable (or at least more often than with the adoption of the following alternative). On the other hand (as I am about to argue) fogs can only be frustrated by counterspells and discard spells, so they are harder to disrupt; and we happen to need just that little window of extra time in order to win (i.e. manage to play our fifth turn). In the end, Mill does not have to be necessarily a control deck because it is slower than any other deck: it is actually better for it to be a super-focused proactive deck with a powerful disruption working against the part of metagame offering us the best chances to win a match of Magic - i.e. fogs in any envisionable metagame, as they always happen to be more versatile than you would think in any field.
Because of the exclusion of the alternative forms of defence/disruption, we have finally come to define the kind of defence the maindeck strategy should adopt: fog-effects. Hopefully, psychologically speaking, this preference is not to be due to an instance of the 'availability bias' (i.e. I would value the probability of a kind of defence to be effective based on the lower complexity of the situation to envisage: it is simple and immediate to imagine a situation in which a timely Fog swings the game in your favor, while it is more difficult to estimate the effectiveness over the course of the whole game of a sequence of Fatal Push into Snapcaster Mage + Fatal Push ): I believe that my assertions are compellingly motivated. Now, this kind of defence is of any effect only if the turn gained by playing the relative spell is enough to win the game; so the deck has to be very fast and mill-oriented. Mill cannot play too many fog-effects without diluting the milling plan so much that we couldn’t win not even when our opponent bricks out; diluting the milling department also makes fogs much less effective (if not completely useless): even leaving aside decks that can ignore fog-effects (like Ad Nauseam), if you play too many of them you give the opponent more time to get cards to nullify their action: it is true that fogs recycle themselves (you gain an additional draw step at least), nonetheless if you play too many fogs a deck featuring counterspells can find one of those (they counter the fog and win), while a deck with discard spells can simply target an important mill spell - making the time (and the card) gained quite irrelevant; were it not enough, if they find a Grim Lavamancer or a Scavenging Ooze your Crypt Incursion quickly becomes useless (if playing it). Ensnaring Bridge easy wins are balanced out by the fact that it cannot be operational early in a Mill deck in any realistic list; and it is expoused to way more disruption than a fog-spell is (only counterspells and discards deal with fogs), while fogs too are game winning when cast on turn 4 (exactly the time at which Ensnaring Bridge , with a bit of luck, can be operational) - because a deck built around fogs can win the very turn after it (note: an Ensnaring Bridge deck too has to be built around Ensnaring Bridge , as reminded in my comments at the card). So you don't really have to (always) chain multiple fogs in order to attain a win. As for the control matchup (if that exists), it is so good (a good reason to play this deck, actually) that what defence card you run is not relevant, since they hardly put any pressure and they cannot run a lot of counters: you can easily afford to have a bunch of dead cards (your fogs) in the matchup, and you can in any case switch them post side with better cards. A discard spells-based deck is to be fought by means of redundancy: the fog-plan is not useful (even if you need some fogs - or, better, removals - in order to survive an early Tarmogoyf ). And on the defence side of the plan, you'd better play only fogs, since it is a common play keeping hands of only mill spell and searching aggressively for a fog with Visions of Beyond and Shelldock Isle : it is better to maximize the change to make this plan successful, since it happens very very often. If you are still skeptical about fogs usefulness, and you still hold prejudices against Fog -like cards so that you can't believe in the Time Walk comparison, let's examine what the typical fog (i.e. Darkness ) does for us: for 1 mana, it draws 1 card, mills the opponent for 1 (or many more if we have Mesmeric Orb !), and most importantly ramps our mana adding 3/4 mana depending on the number of lands we have in play, thus allowing us to close the game or finally getting that Crypt Incursion , Visions of Beyond or Shelldock Isle active!! That's a lot for 1 card and 1 mana! Due to these considerations, a Mill deck must play only mill or fog spells (for our purposes, Visions of Beyond is a mill spell since it reliably draws into them). This forbid us to play Surgical Extraction main deck: as a mill spell is grossly ineffectual, while it possibly gain turns only against a very negligible number of decks which are as for now not played (and it instant-wins against an even lower amount). Since gives access only to Darkness and Crypt Incursion as catch(-almost)-all fog-effects, and you playing too many Crypt Incursion makes the later copies (almost) ineffective, we have to consider adding a third color if we need more than 6-7 fog-effects. As the matchup walkthroughs show, the real tiebreaker for playing fogs is that it makes games against Dredge, Hardened Scales, tribal decks and random aggro decks much more affordable, while we cannot make much better other matchups by adopting different options.
One of the most difficult quandaries when building a Glimpse the Unthinkable -based deck is indeed figuring out what this deck wants to do on turn 1: while the 2- and 3-mana mill spells are quite strong, the 1-mana ones are not. Still some sort of 1-mana early spell is desiderable - if only to fully utilize mana on turn 2 when playing Shelldock Isle , or Hedron Crab to 'dodge' a potential removal spell (that is to make value before it dies). Because of barring out spot-removals and Jace's Phantasm , the alternatives are: draw spells ( Thought Scour , Serum Visions , Ancestral Vision ..) and cheap mill spells (which usually have a high milled-cards/CMC ratio, but they tend to leave the hand empty too early especially if played in too many copies). The problem with drawing cards on the 'turn 1' slot is that you still have to answer your opponent's play at some point, but still you have to win the turn following your defence play: the deck really needs to maximize the chances to do that - because, again, other kinds of defence cannot keep the mill player in the game not even nearly reliably enough - and if you don't then you have to cast more fogs than needed otherwise along the course of the game. On their side, 1-mana mill spells work well with a fast Crypt Incursion and also round up the mill count of cards like Breaking / Entering or Mesmeric Orb so as to get an earlier Visions of Beyond or Shelldock Isle 's activation. 1-mana mill spells make Set Adrift a powerhouse since you could cast it very early - which is very important against Leyline of Sanctity (even if those are poor match-ups anyway..); they even make you a little better against Blood Moon (since those are usually slow games and Tome Scour and Shriekhorn are easier to cast under Blood Moon than other spells are), but they are a liability against Chalice of the Void . Unfortunately, they are bad cards even among mill cards ( Tome Scour is indeed a Shock at a player, as a simple proportion between the around 50 cards to mill and the 20 life to bring down shows) since they often count only as half card in a typical game. The benefit of not playing 1-mana mill spells is that you have better mullingans (which, very importantly, otherwise are a nightmare, since your cards individually do less than a 'normal' card - which is already bad on its own) and that it allows you to play additional lands (resulting in less mullingans overall); 1-mana mill spells also 'turn on' their graveyard too early, if they rely on it for any shenanigan (i.e. we cast turn-1 Tome Scour , they play turn-1 Polluted Delta + Gurmag Angler : winning then becomes very difficult - especially if they cover it up with discards or counters). In the end in order to maximize our chances at a turn 4 win and make our deck as consistent as possible we have to give up on the 'turn-1' slot.
Because mana dorks or creatures meant for attacking or blocking have been excluded, both Birds of Paradise and Tarmogoyf are not worth adding; and doesn't offer anything else that couldn't already. Because of ( Fatal Push , and even more so) Path to Exile not being an option in the main defence slot, because against Leyline of Sanctity we can rely on Set Adrift and foremost because there is no room for further defence cards (not even for the efficient fog-effects that can offer: Holy Day and Ethereal Haze ), there is no real gain in splashing . God-Pharaoh's Faithful and Timely Reinforcements are the better options against Burn by a mile, but they are not enough to turn the matchup around. Fragmentize is certainly wonderful, and the only reason I can actually see for a -splash; but that comes at the cost of precious sideboard slots and a maindeck splash (we can't really keep an Hallowed Fountain in the sideboard) only for gaining 1-2 sideboard cards for fringe matchups (since Set Adrift is much better). Finally, due to the fact that obvioulsy does not solve any of our problems or improve our main plan, colors other than or are therefore dismissed.
Granting that we are not aiming to win or even interact before turn 4 (since the best we can do in most situations is fogging on our turn 4 in order to get to our peak point, which is our hopefully winning turn 5), this deck is not so inconsistent after all, so that it doesn't require by any means a perfect hand in order to win (i.e. carry out an acceptable game for this deck standards). Yes, very often the plays are a lot risky and of the all-in kind, the ones which you cross your fingers for and hope to win - as it is often very fittily guessed; but it is not the case it rarely works out when such situations comes up. Additionally, when decks try to go fast they usually skimp on removals (powering-up Hedron Crab ), have strict color-requirements (more fetches means we can cast Archive Trap easier), have a low land-count (better Mind Funeral s) or attempt to go wide (entailing huge Mesmeric Orb millings); sometimes more than one of these traits are represented in the same deck, so that we have some (few) means to race them and compete. However, Mill as it stands will never be a tier deck (even if it wins consistently against big mana decks and slower combo and control decks without Emrakul, the Aeons Torn ) because it is pretty slow, so that it needs defence cards: but defence cards are not both critically effective and of wide application (even if Crypt Incursion actually tries to be that kind of card). Yet we have to run some defence but still not a great amount of it because or the risk of making our mill-power so weak that we cannot win in the time gained by our defence. Our need of defence collides with the fact that if the opponent draws a piece of countermeasure, we are straight-up dead: there is a blatant (as well as fatal) asymmetry there. You can surely put up some mental examples of the resilience and efficency of some other Modern decks based upon the probability of having certain cards. It is not a matter of luck: tier decks can execute their plan AND defend it far more consistently than we are merely able to hinder them (let alone winning faster). We cannot compete. We need defence (in addition to take further our own main plan, that is to say milling) only so that we can keep the pace with other decks' main plan; if they manage to play even one of their own defence card along the way (like Apostle's Blessing from Infect or Skullcrack from Burn) we cannot really catch up. So if everything in Magic is a gamble, playing Mill is, all in all, a bad gamble; yet don't be surprised: this thread is meant to build the best Glimpse the Unthinkable -based deck possible in Modern, and NOT to declare that mill is the best strategy in Modern. Compared to Burn (which plays a similar strategy), our cards have a lower value/CMC ratio and in addition they cannot affect the board (except for Hedron Crab which provides a body, even if this asset is marginal and almost never it will be used to block). Yet not playing Mill like a Burn deck is wrong because there aren't good defence cards for our purposes: Burn-like Mill is the best take on the Mill strategy, even if most of the times it ends up being nothing more than a much worse Burn. The key possible differences from Burn are Visions of Beyond , Shelldock Isle , Fraying Sanity , Archive Trap , Ensnaring Bridge and Surgical Extraction ; but Archive Trap , despite the appereances, is actually mediocre (even if a necessary evil because of the opportunity cost of playing it), Ensnaring Bridge and Surgical Extraction are not worth it because in Mill they are far less effective than they look (they are sideboard material at best), and only the first three are great - but not so much that it offsets the overall lower quality of the cards or of the fanciness of the plan in general: they only accomplish to add redundancy against grindy decks and consistency versus any other strategy. An advantage of playing Mill instead of Burn is that the average deck is not prepared to combat it, while almost every deck can deal with Burn with early removals and lifegain; but, again, this does not compensate for the sluggishness of the plan, and there is also tangible hate both in form of cards like Emrakul, the Aeons Torn and in form of rules, since an opponent can add sideboard cards to the maindeck without takig anything out (thus increasing their library count). Nonetheless, the rule issue is not a deal bigger than one can foreshadow; sure, Shelldock Isle gets more difficult to activate, but the late-game power of Visions of Beyond and Fraying Sanity is no joke, while Mind Funeral becomes more effective because of the lowered land-density of their deck; finally, the deck having a bunch more of cards can delay our win of a turn or more, but they get useless cards in the deck and may mulligan more because, again, of the decreased land-density. That means that good matchups remain good, and close ones are variable depending on your opponent's deck (for instance if they keep a land + Gurmag Angler you can hardly beat them). Returning to the hate in card form, consider this: if we toy with a scope big enough (that is, a 'long-term' favorable win rate, against variable/unknown metagame) Mill will lose no matter what: even if Mill became a thing to be reckoned with, everyone would just throw an Emrakul, the Aeons Torn in the sideboard, which alongside with their main game-plan (which in some cases, dishearteningly too common, is already unbeatable by Mill) would make the situation ridiculously unmanageable for the Mill player, since we would need several hate-card in the deck vs shuffle effects while still being able at the same time to fend off their strategy AND milling. Were we ever able to attain the impossible, they can still add a Nexus of Fate or a Progenitus in their sideboards, which needs different answers than the ones useful against shuffle effects (if we don't want to rely on the poor Unmoored Ego ) since they can just wait and keep their hand; Nexus of Fate is the more obnoxious of the two, since for a deck choosing to maindeck it should not be difficult to hardcast it, making our plan either to mill them out before they can play it or to ambush them with Surgical Extracion in order to lower the number of cards in their hand at least by one. And they didn't even dedicate much of a space to beat Mill (1 slot, 2 at most being pessimistic): they can still be competitive against other decks. Am I giving up? Against this scenario, yes: I cannot think of anything useful for the Mill player to do in that pinch. But let's leave aside such scenario: Mill seems, at this stage of reasoning, at most a rouge deck - a deck that can steal wins only if the field is not prepared to face it. Can Mill be successful in a tournament? Yes: it can be extremely lucky, or its pilot could simply have had an illuminating read of/premonition on the field which let her surmise that Mill were well positioned (and then build her maindeck and sideboard accordingly). I hope to have shown in my work that against an unknown metagame Mill is awful: too many decks have free-wins (or practically so) against it. Aggro is either too fast (making fogs quite useless) or packs disruption (like Merfolks, hatebears or Jund: aggro + hindrance has always been lethal for combo decks, and Mill isn't an exception). Are those good arguments for giving up fogs completely? No. I think they are still our best tool to punish aggro keeping bad hands or with small disruption overall. We would not be able to make up for their loss as to our win percentage if we chose to address other situations or parts of the metagame instead. Am I simply being disingenuous? A reason for me to write here is that I hope someone can suggest me something I missed, so that at least I can get to play the deck I love where at a first glance it is not advisable to do so. All things considered, Mill is not a very good deck, and I am persuaded that there is nothing more to be done to make this strategy better; yet it is not enough for it to be actually viable: Mill cannot even dream about the competitive scene. Anybody can prove me wrong anytime, and I'm glad to carefully reply to their arguments or to recognize that their idea engenders a real improvement on the deck. How and when can Mill be successful? It can win frequently in a format where Emrakul, the Aeons Torn , Leyline of Sanctity , Infect, Burn and (to a much lesser extent) fast/grindy aggro decks are almost absent. The problem with Emrakul, the Aeons Torn and Leyline of Sanctity is not that those cards win by themselves (in a strict sense), but because they can win before we address them (most Leyline of Sanctity -decks) or can deal too well with our countermeasures ( Nahiri, the Harbinger + Emrakul, the Aeons Torn -decks with counterspells, artifact removals and prison elements). Against any other deck (even tier ones) we win more or less easily; nonetheless the unwinnable matchups are a too great portion of the metagame for Mill to be a competitive choice. I'm not discussing matchups, since if you manage to avoid these threats wins come easily enough (yet, as you can guess, this leaves out very little of the metagame). Mill cannot be competitive in any way with the actual Modern pool.
I recommend giving up on winning against Infect and Burn, since the chances of winning post sideboarding - with any sideboard one can conceive - are far less than one third (that's a generous appraisal); and you must win 2 games in a row (pre-side you cannot really win). I would also give up on trying and improving the Hatebears matchup, which is a nightmare regardless, and Crypt Incursion (if it happens to find a place in your 75) is still the best way to win there (hoping they are slow enough that the hindrances they throw at you are less effective than they normally are). If we simply accept to lose in those matchups and we don't prospect to use them in anywhere else, removal spells lose almost all of their utility as problem-solver and can be safely cut from the list. We can still play Set Adrift in order to have a shot against slow Leyline of Sanctity decks and because it would come in very often as a fringe defence card. We can play some graveyard hate in order to have a chance against fancy Emrakul, the Aeons Torn -decks; but the real gain is that the commitment against Emrakul, the Aeons Torn incidentally entails free-wins (especially if you also adopt Crypt Incursion against aggro, which are practically completely useless against Emrakul, the Aeons Torn ) against graveyard decks like Dredge (though this was already a good matchup because of fogs) and makes better the matchups against Living End and Goryo's Vengeance -decks which are dreadful pre-side. However we cannot realistically win a mathup against an Emrakul, the Aeons Torn -deck because we should play a lot of graveyard hate (around 8), since we need to have them in first hand for 2 games in a row, each single time also minimising the effectiveness of their artifact-removals and/or counterspells: this dilutes the mill-spell department because of the consequential more mulligans and the side-ins themselves, while also crippling our sideboard room. In addition, some graveyard-hate is useless against some Emrakul, the Aeons Torn -decks: against Jeskai you want Nihil Spellbomb (since it dodges counterspells and Nahiri, the Harbinger and you only have to beware of Wear / Tear or Snapcaster Mage flashbacking it), against Boros you want Ravenous Trap (because it dodges Nahiri, the Harbinger , Banishing Light and Wear / Tear ), against decks where Emrakul, the Aeons Torn is a 4-of you want Leyline of the Void (since it avoids countermeasures like Collective Brutality or Ancient Grudge , and because Unmoored Ego and even more so Surgical Extraction doesn't really permit you to race off any opposing counter-plan). This means that the matchup is poor even with something like 10 dedicated graveyard-hate cards. Slow decks relying mostly on a combo to win or playing problematic permanents like Lantern does (it plays Leyline of Sanctity ), graveyard-decks demanding from us a little something more than what we already play maindeck (like Dredge), aggro decks and Jund-like decks are what we can beat post-sideboarding. What kinds of deck are those? Most of them are by default difficult matchups that we could win with some slot dedication: sometimes not a great chance of winning, but still better than trying to beat other strategies: this could be a good line to follow for building your sideboard (especially since if you try and improve the already good matchups you will lose no matter what to most of the field for they are too few). In general, given the efficiency and the helpfulness of the card as to the points just made, I suggest starting from a sideboard comprising 4 Set Adrift . Then a way to shore up the aggro matchup is to be considered: we have the best tool in Crypt Incursion , or in Fatal Push if you have curve concerns. The last few slots are the most metagame-dependant of all: you could, for instance, aim at improving further the aggro matchup ( Disfigure ..) or the combo matchup ( Surgical Extraction ); we could try to find a solution to graveyard issues, expressively trying to have a chance against Emrakul, the Aeons Torn -decks either if it is played as a mere single copy (we could rely for that on some number of Nihil Spellbomb / Ravenous Trap , depending on where your priority lies, in dodging artifact-removals or counterspells) or in multiple copies ( Unmoored Ego , Leyline of the Void ; I don't recommend Surgical Extraction for such purpose); or, finally, (not advisably) you could hope to have a hilarious draw and catch one of Mill's sworn enemy without answer or a bad hand, like Infect with Darkblast , Spellskite , Immortal Coil , Burn with Collective Brutality or Sun Droplet and more removals, Storm with Damping Sphere . So, until aggro decks are played, this maindeck is good (and the it is best in what it does, if you follow my arguments and calculations: so I don't recommend touching it at all!!) and you must build your sideboard aiming at improving your winning prospect in the metagame given this maindeck. This leads to the building of different decklist; but that doesn't mean than more than one is the right one: list differences are to be referred to context, that is the expected metagame and the builder's knowledge in general (perhaps even about her own capabilities).
For a quick overview, here are the only cards I would consider as for the defence part of the deck, between mainboard and sideboard:
Fogs: Darkness , Crypt Incursion .
Early removals: Fatal Push , Disfigure .
Late removals: Set Adrift .
Graveyard hate (mostly aimed at beating a single Emrakul, the Aeons Torn ): Nihil Spellbomb , Sentinel Totem , Ravenous Trap .
Graveyard hate (mostly aimed at beating multiple Emrakul, the Aeons Torn s): Leyline of the Void , Unmoored Ego , Surgical Extraction .
Random hate: Liliana's Defeat , Darkblast , Immortal Coil , Spellskite , Collective Brutality , Hurkyl's Recall , Leyline of Sanctity , Grafdigger's Cage , Damping Sphere , Ensnaring Bridge .
In this part I'll discuss the card choices in the final list.
Turn 1 plays (alongside Shelldock Isle ):
- 4 Hedron Crab : it can win the game nearly on its own if uncontested. Bonus milling when combined with fetchlands. Playing a land immediately after it has resolved (we have priority again, if it's our turn and the stack is empty) allows us to mill 3 (or more) unopposedly: this means that if the hand has a low spell count, Hedron Crab has better to be held in hand and be played on turn 2 before the land (if slowing the game is affordable: sometimes (against fast decks mostly) it is better to cast it on turn 1 and hope to draw something like a 2-mana spell the very next turn). Unlike Ensnaring Bridge , I don't care if they remove it (especially because it can net value before dying): the list is very redundant on mill spell, and here the ceiling is very high; and unlike Mesmeric Orb , which takes its time to be effective, Hedron Crab makes value even in the early stage of the game - so if they remove it, they do that instead of playing threats, resulting in a time loss in our favor. In any case, even a single Hedron Crab put us in good shape. It is the best card in the whole deck by a huge margin. In the end, Hedron Crab is not a good turn 1 play, BUT (1) mana constraints are a pressing matter, so that cantrips end up being bad since we not searching anything specific (unlike combo) and we have no mana to spare (unlike control); (2) spot removals like Fatal Push are really useless in Mill, so again they cannot cover the 1-mana slot; (3) there aren't other 1-mana Mill spells you want (or, worse, need) to play, and on the opposite the 2-mana slots are choked: so you really need to open up with Hedron Crab a lot of times (you will certainly save it for later against midrange, for example).
Turn 2 plays:
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4 Glimpse the Unthinkable : the card this deck is built around; because playing it is a principled assumption (it's the aim of the deck), technical comments or justifications are invalid: so I'll stress instead on how beautiful the picture is. ;)
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4 Mesmeric Orb : like Manic Scribe , it needs a lot of work to be effective, so it is not the best card to hope for: it works very very well with fog-effects, but sometimes it requires a fog-investiment (hoping the opponent tries to win via (many) creatures attacking) to take the game where needed (that is to 'activate' Visions of Beyond and Shelldock Isle ); if this happens, then another fog-effect is to be retrieved as soon as possible for the (probably imminent) 'moment of need'. Like Ensnaring Bridge , it is soft to incidental artifact/permanent hate; also the opponent will surely board in artifact hate in place of the many useless cards (the removal kind, or some 'value-generator'..), and in those games it may mill nothing (especially against a milled Ancient Grudge ). If played late, it is a very bad mill spell (around 5 potential mills on the last turn available?). These are the cons. The pros are that all in all it is the best-performant mill spell at 2 mana behind Glimpse the Unthinkable - and when played early it is even better! Cast in the first stages of the game against an aggro deck that would demand fog-effects anyway, or if it manages to dodge counterspells against (a no- Emrakul, the Aeons Torn -)control, it warrants us a very good position (for this deck standards at least); additionally, it really really really shines against Affinity and Elves: in general, it is very good at catching up with decks attempting to go wide. All in all, considering that it grants an easy time against some decks and that casting it later than on turn 2 (say, you start the game with two copies in hand), unless it is the last turn of the game, it is sometimes better than the next 2-CMC mill spell ( Breaking / Entering ) in a quality-scale, playing 4 Mesmeric Orb s is recommended. It gets better with 1-mana mill spells since it takes a while to mill a critical amount of cards: 1-mana mill spells get us to have earlier Visions of Beyond s, Shelldock Isle s and Crypt Incursion s so that at that point Mesmeric Orb can work at its full potential (i.e. in the late-game turns). Mesmeric Orb is certainly your worst card in fast games like the ones against Neobrand or Burn, but when you wouldn't want it you're bringing in either Crypt Incursion or Set Adrift , all of which get much better with the otherwise poor Mesmeric Orb - so much that I almost never get to cut it post boarding.
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4 Breaking / Entering : it appears here because of the exclusion of the alternatives. Not too shabby, yet never great actually. A little trick is casting the Entering side via Shelldock Isle , in order to provide a blocker or perhaps responding to Emrakul, the Aeons Torn 's trigger (this is also the only way out in this list against a Progenitus , if it will ever exist). The worst card in the deck for sure.
Turn 3 plays:
- 4 Mind Funeral : much like Mesmeric Orb , it mills a lot when needed - that's to say against fast decks (often running relatively few lands) - thus hopefully shortening the lenght of the game compared to what would happen with playing another kind of mill spell. Again like Mesmeric Orb , it is quite an unreliable mill spell (it could mill only 4 like more than 20), but overall the odds are fine - as shown by the below results, provided by a computer simulation outputting the average milled cards over 1 million casting of Mind Funeral against a deck featuring a given number of lands. Also, it is possible to sequence mill spells so as to cast Mind Funeral when there is a high percentage of the opponent's lands in the graveyard; or to cast Surgical Extraction targeting lands played in many copies: either way, a greater-than-normal milling will ensue more likely than not. However, the fact that your opponent may lower her land count by cracking fetches or because of our Path to Exile s, Ghost Quarter s or Surgical Extraction s shouldn't exert much allure, as it is not enough to make Mind Funeral much stronger - as the calculations suggest: for instance, Mind Funeral mills about 11 against a 20-land deck like Burn; if we take them to have, say, 2 lands less in the deck every single game (very realistic in normal games, especially if your deck forces in that direction by means of Path to Exile , Ghost Quarter or Surgical Extraction ), then we will mill around 12 cards: only 1 card more!!! Only note that against fast decks, even if Mind Funeral especially overperformes against them, you don't have time to cast many high drops; and that versus slower decks, Mind Funeral is quite bad due to their high land count. All in all, in most circumstances you cannot afford to set up a big-milling Mind Funeral (waiting for their 'known lands'/'known cards' to be grater than lands/cards ratio of their deck, either via natural milling or with cards such as Ghost Quarter ) as you need to cast Mind Funeral the first time you have the chance - especially for curve (i.e. speed) purpose; this, which is undeniably a drawback, incidentally entails a little benefit in that computing ratios at every change of the game-state would be really wearying (a consideration for big tournaments, of the kind already examined regarding Surgical Extraction ).
Lands__Milled Cards
16_ _ _ _14.35
17_ _ _ _13.55
18_ _ _ _12.84
19_ _ _ _12.19
20_ _ _ _11.62
21_ _ _ _11.09
22_ _ _ _10.61
23_ _ _ _10.17
24_ _ _ _9.76
25_ _ _ _9.38
26_ _ _ _9.05
27_ _ _ _8.72
- 4 Fraying Sanity : first of all, bear in mind that Fraying Sanity does not double up the mill count of Manic Scribe , Mesmeric Orb and Shelldock Isle in the turn you intend to win; it gets you additional mills you each of their sorceries, instants and whatsoever; and plays a nonbo with Leyline of the Void (sideboard wisely!). Now, on with the main topic. The Modern pool permits to assemble a Fraying Sanity -centered deck that is probably better than a traditional Mill deck, though such deck would not require Glimpse the Unthinkable at all and is therefore out of the scope of the topic. Where Fraying Sanity really shine in a turbo-mill deck is when it fits into the deck effortlessy, i.e. not altering your game plan of card choices at all. Let's break down the card for more clarity. The real gains for a turbo-mill strategy from playing Fraying Sanity are (1) almost assured turn 5 wins and (2) more actual turn 4 wins as to the ones not requiring Fraying Sanity , though almost all of those additional wins involve resolving at least a couple of 1-mana mill spells in the first two turns of the game or a turn 1 Birds of Paradise with a full curve - which makes those wins very very rare and can overall be disregarded; what's more, under such perspective adding non-milling cards to a turbo-mill Fraying Sanity -centered strategy given the present quality of mill cards is only detrimental, since Fraying Sanity is a card of the kind which demands a wide range of options as to what to play next in order to give a significant performance. Note that playing a Crypt Incursion on turn 4 doesn't garantee neither a turn 5 win - since it needs an early Hedron Crab to survive or an Archive Trap cast for 0 actual mana - nor another fog (it also makes you unlikely to cast a Visions of Beyond for 3 so early in the game). But an early Hedron Crab or a gratis Archive Trap also happen to set up quite the only turn 4 Fraying Sanity wins. So, since Fraying Sanity and Crypt Incursion do combo out with the very same cards with the very same result in almost every case, playing the fullsets of Fraying Sanity and Mind Funeral (and for curve reasons obviously 0 Crypt Incursion ) allows us to witness a real growth in consistency, since we lose less to ouselves due to bad variance and mulligans. This would not matter if fogging on turn 4 and a worse chance of winning on turn 5 would be better than simply not ever getting to turn 5; yet sometimes we would find ourselves unable to punish opponents happening to have bad gameplan-progressions - which is a consideration even in aggressive combat-based metagames. Anywhere else I wouldn't play less than the fullset; if you're worried of remaing without actual mill spells remember that that's the case only if you sacrifice redundancy for the defence department, which I don't recommend. The second copy is never bad. A double Fraying Sanity quadruplicates the efficacy of any mill spell, which means you can win with your worst card ( Breaking ) coupled up with anything else (even a Mesmeric Orb on turn 2). On the other side, with a double Fraying Sanity you can win outright with a single Archive Trap or an average Mind Funeral (based on the remaining land cards in your opponent's deck given the late state of the game). Bear in mind that in an average game you need to resolve 5 mill spells in order to win. The first copy of Fraying Sanity allows you to decrease that number to 4 (dramatically increasing your turn-4 wins), while your second copy simply counts amount those critical remaining 3 mill spells left to be cast. As it is evident, the problem with the second copy of Fraying Sanity is that you'll be casting that on turn 4 (after using all of our turn 3 to cast the first), at a time which is already a precarious position for mill - you either want to be winning on turn 4, or else preventing your opponent from being able to close the game out while however keeping progressing your own plan (lest not being able to win after deploying your necessarily unfortunately cute means of interacting): being able to accomplish either of those usually puts mill in a very strong spot. That's what fogs are meant for: allowing you to unfold your bad development in that game (e.g. we are not winning on turn 4, but merely casting another Fraying Sanity ) by giving you an high probability of gaining another turn after that one. Against combo the games develops in an utterly different way, so that traditionally suggested interaction is useless ( Ensnaring Bridge , Crypt Incursion , Fatal Push ... post side we usually adapt with Surgical Extraction and Set Adrift ), against control we have no issue at reaching the later turns of the games and against grindy decks you win mostly by means of redundancy, not by cute defence cards like Fatal Push or Crypt Incursion (even if we often swap them in for Darkness with in all honestly almost comparable results).
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4 Archive Trap : if your opponent plays a 'low' (for our purposes) number of fetchlands (say, 7 - which is very realistic in a fair Modern deck), it is not quite reliable (also because casting it at 5 mana is unaffordable if not against decks you are already heavily favoured: slow decks) and could be reckoned as having a lower average mill power (say, 4?) than the nominal one (13) - thus making it quite a bad card even for Mill and even feasible to be boarded out sometimes even against decks with (too few) fetchlands. Moreover, dangerous decks (Infect, Zoo, even Jund!) can deploy their threat with only 2 mana, often allowing them to need not to search for the entire game (not every land is a fetchland!). Weren't this enough, a lot of decks don't play fetchlands at all, and other potential searching effects (like Chord of Calling ) can be left unused until they can win right away: you should board Archive Trap out against Elves for instance. BUT overall, given the options, it is one of the most effective 'defences' against (most) fast decks, allowing us to close the game earlier: Archive Trap lets you literally race against fast decks. Regarding Archive Trap not being reliable, I want to remark that more or less randomness is part of the game - and that everything, in this game, can be calculated in terms of probability (and consistency be estimated on those bases); a Magic card in a deck should be evaluated on the influence it has on the overall winning percentage, not on the fact that it is a dead card in a given number of occasions; were this still not enough, then I point out that this is not a midrange or a control deck: we can afford to draw a dead card, because we don't really care about card or value advantage. Now, I'd like to make a comparison and eliciting a reflection: even a bad card like Fog in an aggro deck like Zoo can be game-breaking: it can make the caster win the race against another aggro; but it doesn't mean that this would be a good plan to execute, because reaching that particular situation is quite rare and difficult to achieve, and in other situations that card isn't quite of any use. In my list the card that most resembles Fog in the depicted situation is not any of the fogs themselves - because the deck is designed to make those cards quite strong (and even to require them); but Archive Trap . Nonetheless, I presume that searching is an action executed widespreadly enough to make them more worth than the Fog in the previous example is in its situation; also they are a 'necessary evil', because the opportunity cost is quite low against fast decks (there are hardly good enough replacements in that slot, even if conceived as 'defensive' ones). Still, it surely isn't a good late-game draw by any means - thus also taking a little effectiveness off Visions of Beyond if Archive Trap is drawn with it. After their turn 2 we lose quite any chance of casting Archive Trap for 0: in order to minimize the chances of drawing it late, again, adopting a turbo-mill plan that tries to win as early as possible finds here another reason for consideration.
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4 Visions of Beyond : the 'gear' of the deck: it guarantees to have fuel mid- or late-game and digs for fog-effect or lands when needed. Mind that Visions of Beyond does not fit as an aggro card. However, when the game is not about aggroing out it is great; and even against aggro it digs towards your fogs (spot removals are worthless in this case), which you can easily play on turn 4 even after Visions of Beyond . Visions of Beyond is still great even when bringing in Leyline of the Void : if you don't start with the enchantment or they destroy it early, you get a powerful card; if Leyline of the Void sticks, you get to cycle it easily. Mind that it merely cycles itself on your opponent's turn against a Narset, Parter of Veils .
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4 Darkness : our main fog-effect. We plan to cast it on turn 4 at the earliest, since we cannot win otherwise. An average play of it buys you a turn for only 1 mana - and since it is difficult to cast all of our cards against aggro, it is effectively a Time Walk ! It is useless if your opponent does not plan to attack (i.e. some combo decks); but since it is so strong against most part of the metagame, including average midrange decks and every aggro deck (barring Burn and even Infect because it is too fast), it is very well worth the risk of having it dead. Beware of discard-based decks like Grixis and Jund: they can disrupt your plan enough to make the extra turn ineffective; yet our redundancy here helps a lot; post side in such cases it is to be switched for removals like Set Adrift .
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4 Field of Ruin : THIS is a way to cast your Archive Trap s for their alternative cost: your opponent is actually forced to search! However, the tricky part is that you hardly get a discount for your Archive Trap : this deck is really color-hungry, and you really want your first 4 lands to be colored ones. The consequence is that you get to cast Archive Trap for 2+1-1=2 mana IN THE TURN YOU CRACK Field of Ruin (saving you 3 whole mana in that turn), yet in the former turns Field of Ruin will hardly help you casting anything - making your efforts way less appealing. However, it allows you for many of your more busted plays.
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4 Shelldock Isle : if considering this an aggro deck (attacking via independent spells until winning, not really caring about reacting if not for staying alive..: it could be indeed a more fitting description than it looks; note: opposedly Lantern, though it ultimately plans on winning via milling, is a control deck), this is our Mutavault : it gives mana in the early-game and cast a spell in the late-game - which could be depending on the situation a fog-effect against aggro, a Visions of Beyond against an attrition-based deck, or (the most frequent choice by lenght) a big mill spell (hopefully Archive Trap ). Really impressive, despite entering tapped and the sometimes taxing strict color requirements (, all things considered): fetch accordingly! It could even cast the 'Entering' half of Breaking / Entering - ideally responding to Emrakul, the Aeons Torn 's shuffling trigger (!), but usually for getting a large blocker or an Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger to exile what is left of their library. All in all, Shelldock Isle is a real deal: it is a land with your best spell attached. Sure, it is worse than another land under the land respect (since it enters tapped), and worse than another spell under the spell respect (since it needs to meet certain conditions in order to be cast). Yet, every part of the effect of the card is still useful, and getting to have both along the course of the same game is huge - which is something not even Snapcaster Mage can grant. For better contextualisation, you can compare this with my thoughts about Snapcaster Mage : Snapcaster Mage can do wonderful things for this deck, possibly being a mill spell or a defence card (you get only one of them though, if it is a consideration: in this deck the body will never block in a useful way, that is in a way that gives you tempo, so it do not count as a part of the defence Snapcaster Mage can grant); yet Snapcaster Mage overprices your choice in a way that is unaffordable for this deck: at least 3 mana for fogging (not really gaining an extra turn because of mana inefficency) or 4 mana for milling. With Shelldock Isle not only you get both its effects: they are very affordable too! And it circumvents the impact of any opposing Choke . All in all, Shelldock Isle despite entering tapped is astonishingly good: in order to win this deck needs to cast around 5 big mill spells - those are Glimpse the Unthinkable , Breaking / Entering , Mind Funeral , Archive Trap , an early Mesmeric Orb possibly with fogs, an early Hedron Crab which survived late. Shelldock Isle entering tapped tally with the poverty in 1 mana early spells, and it is an important gear for casting one of the late mill spells (the first 4 of the list above - that is 16 cards!) so that it actually can be counted among them (thereof having a total of 7*4=28 big mill spells, 12 of which good only early and 4 of which good only late). In conclusion, it is too much important for our aim of winning on turn 5 to be cut or to be played in less than 4. And if with Shelldock Isle you don't hit a late mill spell you could choose a fog, which is equally good against aggro, or a Visions of Beyond which, even if it is always worse than the alternative choices in such a case, sometimes is still a worth play even at 3 mana total (especially against control). Despite its harsh conditions of activation, Shelldock Isle is not a win more: with 20 cards left in the library you would need a couple of mill spells anyway. It actually grants you a sort of card advantage and it is an important piece of the mill department, even if every spell you cast through it costs . It is the perfect card for the fog plan, allowing you to fog on turn 4 and cast two mill spells on turn 5 for the win (it comes up quite a lot!!!). Ipnu Rivulet on the other hand costs the same fof getting its effects but, while not entering tapped, even when you activate it milling only 4 cards is irrelevant (Mill bites out the opponent's library using spells milling around 10, for a total of 50: there's no need to spend resources to round up the count if you can avoid it). There are certainly builds that don't want Shelldock Isle , but I don't think they are good enough. Mind that Shelldock Isle cannot let you cast its related card against Teferi, Time Raveler .
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4 Polluted Delta : 12 fetchlands total: you don't want to play games where you have an early Hedron Crab and don't play at lest 2 fetches in the course of the game. Still, it is hard to balance the need to exploiting your best card and most reliable fast win, the need of sporting enough real lands and the need of not taking to many damages from your own cards. They are also excellent at getting revolt for Fatal Push . If you ever needed more fetchland for your shocklands, it would be reasonable to split them in order to avoid potential and untimely (for us) Pithing Needle s or Surgical Extraction -effects (it happened to me).
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4 Prismatic Vista : even though it is bad when you effectively need a shockland, it is good for saving life points from shocklands; and that is the most probable scenario given the sheer amount of lands we play.
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3 Island : a few more than the bare minimum to search safely (i.e. without much splash damage) with the proposition of avoiding taking to much damage; the only caveat is not to play too many only- mana-producing lands (there is already a full playset of Shelldock Isle ).
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3 Swamp : again, a few more than the minimum to search safely (sometimes we need to cast Glimpse the Unthinkable + Darkness early), as well as than the maximum only- mana-producing lands (since the heavy blue-mana demands of the deck): in particular, a starting hand without at least one non- mana-producing lands is a sure mulligan, and we want to keep that possibility at a minimum. So many between basic- (6) and fetch-lands (12) also incidentally warrant a reliable way not to fold against Blood Moon .
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2 Watery Grave : they are 2 for raising the searchable lands to a total of 6, since they are needed in the long games against control or combo and sometimes Mesmeric Orb mills our fetch targets.
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4 Set Adrift : it is the only clean and early answer in to Leyline of Sanctity , Ivory Mask , Witchbane Orb , Monastery Siege , True Believer , Chalice of the Void , Blood Moon and other problematic permanents. It thus should be played in fullset before any other functional spell - i.e. before any bouncer, because against Leyline of Sanctity (which is the greatest concern) we cannot realistically win if we waste turn 2 on casting a bouncer (after probably having already wasted turn 1, milled ourselves (i.e. with Hedron Crab ), held spells (i.e. Tome Scour ) or reduced the cost of a removal). Also, Archive Trap is dead against Leyline of Sanctity , so we are quite slow and surely unable to win turn 4 against it anyway. Next to the 4 Set Adrift could be played some copies of 1-mana bouncers like Void Snare or Kiora's Dismissal : costing 1 mana less than usual bouncers means a much relevant turn more to mill; but those are actually mediocre if not really bad.
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4 Fatal Push : an important piece against Hatebears, Burn, Infect, Jund and aggro in general. Though this card is sweet and it is a serious improvement to what the Mill's pool was, it is not enough to make the 'removals+ Snapcaster Mage s maindeck' route viable. Fetchlands and Oboro, Palace in the Clouds are easy ways of bringing revolt about.
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4 Surgical Extraction : unfortunately, it is usually a win-more kind of card: against combo it is easy to sport already a lot of incidental hate, in the form of cards this deck needs for other purposes. A timely play targeting an opponent's key-card could buy some time - if not winning the game on the spot against certain combo decks; but such combo decks are rare now aside from the ones which are already easy matchup for us ( Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle -decks), or which represent other kinds of problems ( Lantern of Insight -decks). That is, it may happen that against random combo decks we are good enough with graveyard-hate, Set Adrift , spot-removals and fogs (the kinds of cards we should end up playing anyway), or just by milling them out. Some metagame considerations: Valakut and Tron are easy-wins (pretty much the only ones): (fast/reasonable) milling is enough, and we don't need Surgical Extraction at all; the same is true for Lantern and Ad Nauseam before they bring in Leyline of Sanctity (and if you manage to get rid of it in a reasonable time, milling them is often enough to win anyway). Vs Chord of Calling -decks removals from sideboard are overall better (perhaps together with defence cards in the maindeck). Dredge is already favourable (especially with fogs), and we only get better with any graveyard hate. And vs Living End and Reanimator too we can bring in the hate we pack for Emrakul, the Aeons Torn , even though Surgical Extraction has got a little edge there. Against Jund-like decks Mill's strengh is redundancy in quality cards: having Surgical Extraction in the deck goes against it, all for a card that is useful only when you target Tarmogoyf in your opponent's graveyard AND your opponent doesn't have already one in play AND and your opponent can't kill you fast enough with other cards (or control the game with discards and removals). In other words, Surgical Extraction is good there when your opponent is already losing, and even in such scenario any card in its place would be better; therefore, I would not recommend EVER playing Surgical Extraction against a Tarmogoyf -deck. As an answer to Emrakul, the Aeons Torn it is not the cleanest answer to it, meaning that against Emrakul, the Aeons Torn -decks Surgical Extraction is actually the weakest graveyard-hate card: for instance, vs Jeskai Nahiri, the Harbinger -decks, once you conceivably use your whole hand to get rid of Emrakul, the Aeons Torn (that is, if you manage to dodge countespells which Surgical Extraction is expoused at) it is a losing proposition to race Snapcaster Mage s, Lightning Bolt s and Celestial Colonnade s. I argue for employing other kinds of graveyard hate - at least as long Emrakul, the Aeons Torn is not not played in 4x, and even then Leyline of the Void or Lost Legacy are still arguably better than this. Additionally, Surgical Extraction is not to consider a cheap mill spell (at most it 'mills' 3 cards, even if mana-free), and extracting lands to power up any following Mind Funeral is not worth it, as the computings (see Mind Funeral entry) show that 3 lands exiled from the deck allows averagely Mind Funeral to mill only 1 more card than normal. Sure, sometimes a lucky Surgical Extraction pointed at a non-basic land played in many copies can strip the opponent of some of her resources; but lands played in a relevant amount of copies by aggressive decks especially (and in Modern in general) are very rare apart from fetchlands, which we don't want to extract in order to have a better chance at casting a late Archive Trap (as I argued, they should most often refuse to search, when they can, because of cards - ours or theirs - different from (early) fetchlands). Anyway, it is quite impossible to actually get the opponent screwed on colors or total mana if they don't have the targeted land in hand - which is very rare and we should not rely on that: we shouldn't play Surgical Extraction with this objective in mind (even if we can time its casting so as to have a greater chance to accomplish that, i.e. her draw phase). A little note regarding big events: Surgical Extraction makes some fringe decision intolerably hard: I am referring to the games where you are (or think you are going to be) at a disadvantage and you need to target any piece in their graveyard so that that action has the highest probability to slow down their play (i.e. hinder their contingent plan). This kind of situation comes up very frequently (especially if you choose to play Surgical Extraction maindeck, which I do not recommend), and happens even against decks where Surgical Extraction is usually great (so that you actually sideboard it against them) because you could not see their key cards in the first few millings: the question is not to be taken lightly (at least before some analysis). The problem is that the choice is so difficult - being the alternative very close one to another in their consequences - that it demands you a lot of mental resources and more importantly TIME: expect your opponent to start complaining (not a real problem per se, actually), especially after the first time you do it. The stress involved is a matter to consider if taking Mill to a big tournament, and your opponent complains do but make you wearier (which is the most relevant part). So why are we playing Surgical Extraction ? Because Mill is a very bad deck, and anything that can give us free wins (even if in extremely rarematchups only) is a welcome addition.
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3 Crypt Incursion : secondary functional fog-effect. Like Darkness , we aim to cast it on turn 4 at the earliest, since we cannot win otherwise. Like Darkness , sometimes it is useless; and, while being utterly ineffective against Infect, it has some utility against Burn. Because it exiles the cards, it produces an anti-synergy with Visions of Beyond : timing is very important, but it is easy to play around the impairment. An average play of it prolongs the game of a couple of turns - and more in a fully developed game; but since 3 mana is a lot for this deck, casting it implies fully using the first of those acquired turns only to cast it: thus the comparison with Fog is even more fitting than it seems at a first glance, and in a build with a lot of early milling it would therefore be at least on par with Darkness ; however, that entails playing very few, if at all, Fraying Sanity or Mind Funeral , and that's not where we really want to be as those cards are insanely powerful. Anyway, Crypt Incursion cannot be played in many copies because the casting second one accomplishes nothing (while drawing the first one, on the other hand, is kind of important): you can cast the second copy with the effect of gaining another turn only if you are already winning by a lot of margin. And you already have some dead cards Archive Trap (at least in the mid-/late-game), so you really want to minimize the chances of drawing useless cards in any way you can. They come in against grindy aggro decks for lands (especially Field of Ruin ) and especially against aggro where despite how many removal you could fit in your Mill deck you will never be able to set up Fraying Sanity in order to exploit it to accrue a big game for Crypt Incursion : we will need to trim Fraying Sanity for Crypt Incursion .
To summarize, the deck tries to max out the chances of attaining a turn 4 win, where we count as a win too chaining fogs from turn 4 until we actually achieve victory. Since almost every deck right now wins through combat, entertaining a fogging capability is in fact better than having a lower chance (as to win through fogging) of an actual turn 4 win or a greater chance (as to win through fogging) of having a consistent win on the following turn. (If and when 'slow' aggro decks - i.e. those trying to win on turn 4 and never before - will not exist anymore, we should give up the aggro matchup too and getting rid even of those fogs; but I do not think this is the day). How does the deck accomplish a turn 4 win? Quite only casting 2 between Hedron Crab , Archive Trap (for 0), Fraying Sanity , Darkness or Crypt Incursion along the course of the game (barring out a double Fraying Sanity or a double Crypt Incursion ). It is easy to come to such conclusion crossing forward- and backward- processes - that is starting out from your early plays or, conversely, from what you need in order to close the game on turn 4. Of great help as for the reaching of such conclusion has also been the analysis of the potential of a game featuring a 'desiderable bunch of cards' (i.e. given the decklist, it cointains the right mix of lands and spells that are well-scaled in mana cost and covers diversified roles), that however comprises only the weaker functional copies of the cards we hope to play in every single game (i.e. Glimpse the Unthinkable ): this is because if we find out we couldn't win such games, then we would have probably misbuilt our deck since we would be bound to mulligan into our best cards in any case in order to have a shot at winning; in that case, we could probably find better fillers for our deck than those weaker functional copies (perhaps even in those kind of traditional defence cards like Fatal Push ). Nonetheless, if you play Crypt Incursion in a Fraying Sanity -build you are admitting that you are aiming to cast Crypt Incursion on turn 5 in most cases - that is, unless you meet one of those Hedron Crab - or Archive Trap -games, or have a lucky hand with a turn 3 Fraying Sanity ; if you give up on casting Crypt Incursion on turn 4 in the other cases (since you wouldn't win on turn 5 anyway), you can do without 1-mana mill spells or Birds of Paradise . You get to keep your most reliable (among the 'unnatural' ones) turn 4 kill ( Darkness ) and also open up for the possibility of a turn 4 Fraying Sanity win or a turn 4 Crypt Incursion covered by Fraying Sanity (which, again, is a good start for winning in the follow up). Such are among the better outcome Mill can hope off a game. What about the better outcomes left out? There is Ensnaring Bridge , though actually we lose nothing in not playing it: summing up from above, it demands serious constraints on the deckbuilding, requiring you either to play suboptimal cards (as well as carrying out suboptimal lines of play) that will never win a game without a sticking Ensnaring Bridge or to accept to have it fully operational around turn 5 which is too late; also it is more disruptable than fogs, and though that is kind of marginal it doesn't nearly make up for the games it wins that a fog could not have. Scheming Symmetry shells entertain a speed of competitive order, but sadly they demand us to give up on redundancy which is too much given what we would gain. And since an early, double, primed, survived and actually free to attack because of the game state Jace's Phantasm / Vantress Gargoyle is obviously inconsistent to get, I think this is the best Mill can do.
The mill spells (which are the strongest ones available for an affordable mana cost) and Visions of Beyond are max out to have the best likelyhood to carry out one of our turn 4 wins the more reliably we can. 24 lands allow us to hit our 5th land on turn 5 at least half of the times (this claim is supported both by the data that can be found at http://imgur.com/a/ElUS7#1 and by the calculations made by Frank Karsten from Channel Fireball at https://www.channelfireball.com/articles/how-many-lands-do-you-need-to-consistently-hit-your-land-drops/ ), which seems optimal since we need our fifth land quite only when our fifth spell is a Fraying Sanity or a Mind Funeral . The sideboard slots have been already tackled above in the apposite paragraph, so we have everything covered at this point. You may have noticed that overall the list has many 4-ofs. Burn, Affinity, Storm (even without Pyromancer Ascension ) are all mainly composed of 4-ofs: Mill, like them, is a proactive deck (Aggro or Combo) that prioritizes synergy over quality and plays the best cards it needs for its purpose (which is proactive and because of this very restricted). Reactive strategies are the ones where 1-ofs shine because of overlapping in their helpfulness; not here. Playing lots of 4-ofs in proactive strategies is not carried out because of whim or incompetence in dekcbuilding, but because this contrivance limits the effect of variance in the deck's plays by means of the very decklist composition.
Sideoboarding is the most difficult task you will face playing this deck (or any other deck, as far as I understand). I'm currently on the following guidelines. However, be aware of your opponent game biases (aggressive, controlling..). This is more relevant to sidebording than you might think.
Infect: -4 Breaking -4 Fraying Sanity +4 Fatal Push +4 Set Adrift . Still the matchup is desperate, don't hope to win even a single game.
Burn: -4 Fraying Sanity -4 Darkness -3 Visions of Beyond +3 Crypt Incursion +4 Fatal Push +4 Set Adrift . But really, side as you want. You can't win even sideboarding 15 dedicated cards. I tested the matchup extensively with any possible combination of cards both in the mainboard and in the sideboard.
Aura: -4 Fraying Sanity +4 Set Adrift . Another impossible matchup, this time because of their fullset of Leyline of Sanctity and superfast clock.
Hatebears, Humans, Spirits: -4 Fraying Sanity -4 Darkness -3 Visions of Beyond +3 Crypt Incursion +4 Fatal Push +4 Set Adrift . Thalia, Guardian of Thraben and Unsettled Mariner are Public Enemies Number One. We can usually play around the rest, nonetheless hoping for Mill to win those matchups is more wishful thinking than one could imagine.
Hardened Scales, Elves, Goblins: -4 Fraying Sanity -3 Visions of Beyond +3 Crypt Incursion +4 Fatal Push . Just time your Darkness correctly and win on top of that as the main plan wisely prescribes. Those matchups are more or less unfavorable for us to quite even honestly, but we can snatch up many wins especially because they are very light on interaction.
Dredge: -4 Breaking -3 Fraying Sanity +3 Crypt Incursion +4 Surgical Extraction . We cannot win game 1 because of Creeping Chill . If you manage to insulate yourself from it, games 2-3 become fairly easy. Just wait for them to mill themselves or lose time while you set youself up.
Storm: -4 Fraying Sanity +4 Surgical Extraction . You cannot win game 1, but in games 2-3 if you manage to extract Past in Flames with the aim of fogging Empty the Warrens the game becomes pretty straightforward. Just hope to dodge unexpected sideboard cards if they happen to play any.
Jund: -4 Darkness +4 Fatal Push . The matchup is hard, there is no question their cards are better than ours. After thoroughly testing it, I can surmise their only ways of winning quite always involve an early unanswered Tarmogoyf , a rain of discard spells followed by a Tarmogoyf , or that same stream of discard spells followed by us flooding out. Crypt Incursion seems strong at a first glance, but we are usually forced to cast it too early because of the pressure imposed by Liliana of the Veil or Scavenging Ooze - which otherwise we can usually just disregard. What's left of their deck is often almost irrelevant.
Death's Shadow: no changes. The matchup surely is difficult, but not one that we cannot emerge victorious from.
Eldrazi Tron: -3 Fraying Sanity -4 Darkness +3 Crypt Incursion +4 Set Adrift . The matchup is almost even. If we manage to stem a chancely aggressive start, we should be able to race Karn, the Great Creator or to answer it at the very least.
NeoBrand: -4 Fraying Sanity -4 Darkness +4 Surgical Extraction +4 Set Adrift . Game 1 hinges either on us milling enough of their key pieces (notably Simian Spirit Guide ) that they fizzle while trying to combo out, or on them to win the game before us of course. Set Adrift is a must to combat Leyline of Sanctity : don't skim on them. The matchup is unfavorable because of their raw speed or Leyline of Sanctity starts.
Urza: -4 Fraying Sanity -4 Darkness +4 Surgical Extraction +4 Set Adrift . Game 1 revolves around them playing Urza, Lord High Artificer in time, game 2-3 are pretty easy for us. Set Adrift is in only for fear of Witchbane Orb . It's really hard for us to lose any game against Urza.
Control: -4 Darkness +4 Surgical Extraction . Just get rid of their counterspell or Snapcaster Mage 's targets. If they are going nuts with too many copies of Teferi, Time Raveler , Narset, Parter of Veils or Gideon of the Trials , mix in some copies of Set Adrift in quantity depending on their mix of those spells. Narset, Parter of Veils nerfs down Visions of Beyond , Teferi, Time Raveler completely neuters Shelldock Isle and Gideon of the Trials wins by itself making ourselves unable to win. Just ignore anything else. Try not to play their game going slow: make an effort to get underneath them instead, playing multiple spells in a single turn for instance. The matchup goes to unlosable to unwinnable depending on their list, but they are usually soft against a Burn deck with card advantage despite all their answers - so much that I can comfortably say it is a favorable matchup if played properly.
Tron: -4 Darkness +4 Surgical Extraction . Game 1 is pretty easy for us, and post board they can hardly win any game.
Amulet: -4 Darkness +4 Set Adrift . They usually cannot assemble the whole combo (haste+double attack) because we're milling them, we just need to get rid of Leyline of Sanctity in game 2-3 and win before they do.
Valakut: -4 Darkness +4 Set Adrift just in fear of Leyline of Sanctity . They really cannot beat us otherwise.
I think Mill is more than a single card away from being a real strategy: the best we could hope for is probably a 1-mana mill spells which mills 8+, since the other slots are pretty clogged; and not even that would be enough to make Mill a tier. Yet I don't think they will ever print new good spells, let alone mill spells; and with 'good' I mean 'good' in relation to what creature(-based spell)s do. Example of creature-based spells are Atarka's Command or planeswalkers. They could issue a different good spell from time to time, but that only for the appeasement of older players; and if they ever do it (like Fatal Push ) it will be for something a consistent portion of players need to rekindle their passion: they could print a good burn spell or a good counterspell, but never a mill spell because (a) Mill has no consideration in the competitive scene (for a good reason), (b) even at non-competitive levels Mill is scarsely played and (c) anyone who does not play Mill (or is simply on the opposite side of the table) is just annoyed by it (at least it is just boring to mill, and for some players it may even be frustrating or felt as invasive). So we have to aim to improve our deck only with better answers and better lands. It seems to me that decking is a win-con only incidentally, in that it was meant as a device not to drag the game to a point where no one could win and players have to draw the game (I catch a bit of humor here..) for reasons different from timing out. I see that it could be exploited (as it has been), but I also see why it is no more (apart from the consideration previously discussed) - as it twists the game in directions which alter the game itself, in the sense that it exploit a win-con that should't be such. In other words, we (especially now) have a game-design (and relative cards) in which decking is a limit, not a goal. Decking with one card or a combination of cards is fine in a way because it is a combo and it doesn't really matter what rule appeals to in order to make the player achieve victory, but aggroing in that direction is not. If I am right, we have to understand this (and that as a consequence we won't be supported in the future) and not be dreamers. So there is no hope for Mill in the future, unless you are willing to consider aggressive bannings as a way for us to be competitive for once!
In short
Here I try to summarize my whole line of thinking:
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a linear Mill strategy is too slow compared to tier decks since it wins reliably only as late as turn 5, so it needs defence of some sort.
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traditional defence (creatures, spot or mass-removals, counterspells, discards.. each kind for different reasons, and in any quantity or mix) is utterly ineffective in this strategy as main defence.
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we have a form of 'unconventional' defence in Ensnaring Bridge , which unfortunately doesn't actually suits our needs because in order for it to be of any use it stretches deckbuilding in a direction where you often aren't able to capitalize on your defensive lines of play.
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luckily for us, there's another form of 'unconventional' defence: Fog -effects, which Mill can capitalize on only if it is capable of winning on the very next turn.
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Mill can win the very next turn after a fog-effect only if the remainder of the deck is heavily dedicated to mill.
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the only (good enough) Fog -like cards available in not costing more than 3 mana (higher cost is unaffordable) are Darkness and Crypt Incursion , and the latter is unplayable right now for curve reasons.
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nonetheless, even adding other colors just for more fogs is not worth it, because Mill cannot play too many of those effects without diluting the milling plan - and thus making fogs themselves much less effective (if not completely useless).
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the present list tries to max out the turn 4 wins a Mill deck can accomplish (included fogging from turn 4 to the win), which almost always involves casting 2 between Hedron Crab , Archive Trap (for 0), Fraying Sanity , Darkness or Crypt Incursion along the course of the game (barring out a double Fraying Sanity or a double Crypt Incursion ).
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the deck has good play against anything that is NOT a super-fast deck (Storm, Infect, Burn, Neoform), decks combining pressure + hindrance (Hatebears, Humans, Spirits), or Emrakul, the Aeons Torn - or Leyline of Sanctity -decks that can just wait and answer our own answer to those cards. Those kinds of deck are more or less unbeatable for us, so just hope to dodge them.
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even with help from other colors, some matchups remain unwinnable: because splashing colors would not allow for card-configurations or plans that are better than the present choice, additional colors are to be rejected.
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the focus of the sideboard is into having a shot at Emrakul, the Aeons Torn strategies sporting no countermeasures (and in general graveyard-decks), slow Leyline of Sanctity -decks or monodimensional combos, and aggros. The matchup against midrange is also incidentally improved, though that carries little meaning since against Jund and the like the matchup remains quite hard for us.
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in any case the featured deck, and especially the sideboard, is a very contingent metagame call: please treat it only as an example or a guideline.
Final notes
To be clear, this is kind of an hobby research work for me: in this sense it helped me to understand not only many things about Mill (which is not a great accomplishment by any means) but also many little other things in general I am glad to know now and I think as well as worth the toil. At least under this respect the results my work yielded can be useful to others - and if someone cares or wonders about Mill a little bit, I think my work will be even more helpful. My comments are something that someone wanting to improve her Mill build could use as a mean of identifying and addressing issues.
The teaching my primer wants to purport is: DO NOT play Mill in Modern!!! And if you have played it up to now, may my analysis get you to live with the fact that it is an awful choice (if your goal is to win) and ultimately put any stubborn miller's soul (such mine was) to rest. Still, if you irreducibly enjoy emptying your opponents' libraries, I am confident to recommend this list. My work is meant to be constructive in the sense that it should speed-up the acquaintment with the strategy in order to meet the readers' needs: if a player wants to just mill while still trying to win the most he can (what I call 'play a deck competitively', which is a world apart from 'playing a competitive deck'), I think this guide provides the best way to do it; however, if a player wants to play Mill in order TO BE competitive, this guide should shun him away from such pretense. How does my guide make people want to play this strategy and find new ways of accomplishing success? It suggests that a player should play Mill ONLY if she thinks she has an illuminating read of the field and thinks that Mill wins against the most part of it (building his maindeck and sideboard accordingly, obviously); no need to say that glimpsing such a Modern field is completely Unthinkable (jokes apart, it really is.. so don't play Mill).
Comments are surely welcome. Thanks to the readers as well as to the upvoters. Upvoting will add visibility to the deck, so if you deem this analysis valuable please do it! :D
Nicola Arnetta a.k.a. Peisistratos
Last update: 20 October, 2019.
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| Top Ranked |
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| Date added | 8 years |
| Last updated | 5 years |
| Legality | This deck is Modern legal. |
| Rarity (main - side) | 42 - 4 Rares 12 - 8 Uncommons 0 - 3 Commons |
| Cards | 60 |
| Avg. CMC | 2.89 |
| Folders | Modern, Deck que pienso armarme a futuro, mill, e, idk, kEW;, Modern Decks, Liked Decks, Modern, Favs |
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