This build is great for casual! A little slower than your average Turbo-mill, but effective.

Running Shriekhorn with Mesmeric Orb seems counter-productive as the horn untaps causing you to mill yourself 1, and your opponent 2. Why not just use Tome Scour to mill them 5 and you 1?

Mind Funeral CAN be good, but could be replaced with a more stable and less color specific Mind Sculpt. Included With the glimpses, breakings, Traps, and orbs you have more than enough mill power to chew through a deck and make room for more defense.

Take Shelldock Isle down to 1-2. A slow land has little place in the meta, and with the bulk of your spells being more than a reasonable CMC, with the exception of Trap, you don't need 4 copies of this card. Therefore, I suggest 2-3 Ghost Quarters in their place to help destroy opposing land and set up Trap for free right now mill instead of the end of the game with Shelldock.

Take out the word "/Entering" in your card list, as it is messing with your mana curve and color wheel. simply putting "breaking" in brackets will put the desired half of the card in your list.

This deck has potential. Check out my competitive mill deck Esper Salt Mill for more ideas.

Play on!

Dear TheSurgeon, I am glad to answer questions and receive new ideas; but your comment is completely off the spot about everything. I discussed very much and under every respect all the cards you mentioned, and dismissed them - discussions that you clearly did not deem worth enough to read and which nonetheless you felt so eager to rebut.

The only thing I could add is that Mind Funeral is better than Mind Sculpt against discard effects - that is where you want an additional expensive mill spell instead of some Tome Scours - and it also happens to be better overall against aggro (as you would die regardless against fast aggros or keeping bad hands, i.e. without an aggressive mill and a fog), so there is no reason for the switch.

I'm just saying, this could be so much better with less overthought.

Good day, fellow lobotomist.

Snapcaster mage, augur of bolas. Surgical extraction+extirpate( focus on nonbasic lands if you wanna keep creatures for crypt incursion. I also like damnation. I. Currently trying to fit more counter and spot creature removal. Good luck with the deck.

mrlucky131313 are those suggestions? I clearly wrote those options off in my primer (apart from Augur of Bolas, which I find hard to ponder over Manic Scribe which is already bad..).

mrlucky131313- don't give him any suggestions. He has it all figured out.

Want advice? OK. Your primer is a fucking mile long, and no one cares to read it.

I think that offensive contents are detrimental for discussions. I'll ignore the tone, and reply to the point.

I'm open to suggestions, but they have to have something to do with what we are talking about. I have provided options and arguments, and we are moving in that context; I don't see any benefit in letting someone claim to have invented the wheel when the people he is addressing are debating how to solve the pollution problem caused by cars.

So, you spend the energy to crap out this primer that is over-thought and over written, and follow up at the end with "don't play mill".

"The wheel doesn't matter, you shouldn't drive the car." is the only message there.

When your decks score like mine on the site, I'll take you seriously.

I've personally read through the whole primer and never regretted it. I've been able to apply this knowledge to my playstyle with mill in general and it increased my understanding of the logic behind it, which in turn has helped my win-rate significantly.

Peisistratos is doing god's work here, as writing something so well-thought-out requires a big amount of determination and diligence, which clearly not everyone is able to appreciate.

Not everyone prefers to rely only on cheap, janky combos. Some actually like to think every decision and move through.

I feel like Crypt Incursion just isn't enough graveyard hate maybe a few Bojuka Bogs or possible something else

DeadBoyInDrag There is no space for Bojuka Bogs mainboard. The deck runs 4 lands that enter tapped, which is already difficult to manage because mill wants to be very fast. If you take out any of the dual lands, the deck will start to have mana problems, and if you drop the basics you can run out of Watery Graves to fetch. Not to mention that running Bojuka Bog basically makes all your Crypt Incursions worse. The only reason this deck can afford to play Crypt Incursion main board is the lifegain, so running any additional GY hate mainboard will make it much much worse. The sideboard already has 8 graveyard hate cards, which should be more than enough a good majority of the time.

Whoops you're absolutely right. Maybe consider a few Extirpate or Surgical Extraction.

Never had much long term success with mill decks in modern.

What a helpful statement

Thanks for all the latest comments!

To be clear, this is more 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 at all) but also many little other things in general I am glad to know now and I think as well 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.

(DeadBoyInDrag: Considered. Thanks.)

Maybe it's been said already, but how do you feel about Ghost Quarter against Tron, and as another way to get Archive Trap off?

Whoops, sorry, I didn't see the bit you had in there about Ghost Quarter. What you said definitely makes sense.

Junknot Thanks for having a look!

Shriekhorn seems really weak, only 4 cards over two turns. Yes it is a 1-drop but it isn't worth it. If the deck is to be truly competitive, then I would recommend replacing them with a playset of Snapcaster Mage. It allows you to flashback Glimpse the Unthinkable for pure value and mill. Also, why no Tome Scour?

My mill deck is here if you want to get some inspiration.

Hjaltrohir it doesn't seem to me that your removal plan can keep you alive long enough to net the small value those inefficient value cards can give you (Snapcaster Mage, Jace, Vryn's Prodigy  ^Flip..). Also, half of the removal suit is dead against the half of aggro decks, and against some creature decks they are useless overall; not to mention combo and control decks.

And in my deck (fog-plan against aggro) Snapcaster Mage, Jace, Vryn's Prodigy  ^Flip are so ineffient 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 be better casting two mill spells. And Mill is so slow that you will surely have 2 spare mill spells to play on turn 4. (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).

The limits of any other removal suit makes turn-1 plays worthless aside from mill spells. I initially included Tome Scour for fast metagames, but then the meta slowed down and together with the great aboundance of discard spells made me want more powerful (and expensive) spells. Shriekhorn, on the other hand, is still worth it: it's a turn 1 play (which is more important that other turn-1 cards due to the previous considerations) 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. And, unlike Tome Scour, Shriekhorn is good with Set Adrift and can let you draw 3 from Visions of Beyond alongside a lone Archive Trap (13+1+6=20).

Although I have to disagree with Shriekhorn (to an extent), and Shelldock Isle to me, feels more like a liability, I really love what you did here, as you clearly put a lot of work into making this guide. It helped give me a new perspective to my own mill deck as well. I used to run Darkness myself, I don't know why I cut it, probably because i was making room for white as a splash. I personally prefer running more pro-active means of protection, but darkness is probably more effective overall. Thanks for this amazing guide!

Also, can you give some insight into the new fetachable, cycling, dual lands? It would be nice to get another perspective on it, because i'm uncertain as to how effective they are, or even if they are modern-viable.

Shriekhorn is one of the only one drops though... If you don't have hedron crab in your openening hand, it'd be like a burn deck that doesn't have a t1 play...

However I would agree that shelldock isle is pointless cause it enters tapped, and casting smtg for free isn't an asset in this deck. Instead, add two more fetches and 2 more swamps/islands to make sure you always have double fuel for hedron crab.

(sorry for comment spam)

However, I guess shelldock is big thing if you snag a archive trap... but that might not even happen.