Hello all purveyors of finer things, and welcome to my Esper Turbo-Fog / Mill brew that aims to be built around Founding the Third Path.
This deck is designed to stall out your opponents with an emphasis on "fog" effects (primarily Kami of False Hope), along with typical modern control / permission Magic in order to facilitate a win via milling our opponent, emptying their library.
Founding the Third Path is a strong value card for mill decks, as the Read Ahead mechanic allows you to start on any of the three chapters you need at that moment, beginning on 1 for the most long-term value, 2 for immediate milling, or 3 for a clutch re-buy of a spell you need at that moment.
We run a decent mill package in the form of Ruin Crab / Hedron Crab, Codex Shredder, Stream of Thought, Maddening Cacophony, Jace's Erasure and Glimpse the Unthinkable. All of the spells are castable via Founding's first chapter, and the crabs synergies with our few Deprives, bouncing a land back to hand in order to gain more mill potency. Shredder + Erasure are continuous sources of mill that are tutorable by our Urza saga!s and Shred Memory. This is important in a stall deck like this, as racking up incidental mill on our opponent means that we can hold up more mana to interact and control the board, rather than feel the need to invest into milling each turn.
Urza's Saga is our second Saga that can put up a couple decent blockers, and can even Tutor out Codex Shredder, some sideboard hate like Pithing Needle, or even... Hex Parasite?
Okay... so Parasite may seem sketchy, but there's actually a lot of great usage here, and some really cool things you can do by triggering different chapters at instant-speed; obviously, being able to constantly poop out Construct tokens /or/ Mill 4 cards every turn is a great way to steadily work toward a win, but you can also use Founding the Third Path's first chapter to cast reactive spells for 1 mana + 2 life, such as Drown in the Loch, Dawn Charm, or Grim Harvest. Not only is this a value play in terms of Mana, but it keeps chapter 2 triggering every turn.
Speaking of Grim Harvest, we use this both as a useful way to rebuy our mill critters + snappies, but also as a stall / lock combo with Kami of False Hope. So long as you have 3WBB per rotation of the board, you can consistently play Kami, sac it to fog your opponent's turn, then pay 2B to recover Grim Harvest back to hand. Cast Grim Harvest to rebuy Kami, rinse and repeat. It's a scrubby combo, but there's other cards that synergise with Kami / Snappy, like Malakir Rebirth
, Unearth, Can't Stay Away and Serra Paragon in the sideboard. Ranger-Captain of Eos can find Kami, and Stream of Thought can shuffle them back into our deck and still apply mill pressure.
Our deck is built around milling / fogging with Founding the Third Path, so our tutor package consists of Urza saga!, Ranger-Captain of Eos, and Shred Memory.
