How many growth spirals does it take to win a game? This deck is a non-stop trip through ramp city, millville, and value town, so buckle up!
The goal of this deck is to mill yourself to fuel escape costs for Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath. Then we use ETB effects to generate value (mostly card draw, lifegain, and ramp), continuing to draw cards and mill our deck. Eventually we mill out and can win off of Jace, Wielder of Mysteries or Thassa's Oracle.
If those wincons somehow get exiled or aren't viable, alternate wincon routes are infinite turns with Nexus of Fate once the deck is thin enough to reliably get it every turn, the Deadeye Navigator+Peregrine Drake+Venser, Shaper Savant/Words of Wind for infinite bounce and mana, or shoot them to death with Aetherflux Reservoir from lifegain. Finale of Devastation also works in a pinch if you have a bunch of creatures. Keep an eye on these pieces and try not to exile them if you don't need to.
See comments below for an in-depth explanation on how these wincons work and what specific loops are needed.
So now that we've got wincons out of the way, let's talk escape. Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath is perfect for a self-mill deck. Each time Uro ETBs, we draw cards, gain life, and play lands. But to cheat commander tax with escape, we need cards in our graveyard to exile. This is where our escape package comes in. Most of these (Hermit Druid, Life from the Loam, Drowned Secrets, etc) are all self explanatory. There are two points of note here. First is that you can use Altar of Dementia or Greater Good to sacrifice Uro before his own sacrifice trigger resolves if you didn't cast him with escape, thus milling cards and setting up for future escapes. Second, you can use Mirage Mirror to copy Mirror-Mad Phantasm to instantly mill all of your deck into your graveyard.
But how do you avoid milling out you might ask? Nexus of Fate and Seasons Past will go back into your library to prevent milling out. Abundance and Words of Wind have replacement effect which will replace the draw entirely. Perpetual Timepiece will shuffle things in graveyard back into your library if grave hate comes your way or if you need to avoid milling out.
We also have a really solid recursion package to get back key pieces, like our win cons if we happen to mill them. Crucible of Worlds, Life from the Loam, and Splendid Reclamation will recur your lands. Eternal Witness, Genesis, Perpetual Timepiece, Nostalgic Dreams, Academy Ruins, Mystic Sanctuary, Seasons Past, or Tamiyo, Collector of Tales will pretty much be able to recur everything else. A really cool synergy is that Genesis triggers work really nicely with Eternal Witness to get whatever you need from your graveyard to your hand. Finally, Riftsweeper will get back anything we want that gets exiled.
Getting extra value out of our ETB commander and other ETB effects (Guardian Project, Eternal Witness, Peregrine Drake, etc) is as simple as a flicker or bounce. Thassa, Deep-Dwelling, Crystal Shard, Sanctum of Eternity, Portal of Sanctuary, and Deadeye Navigator are all pretty much self explanatory. Lifeline and Words of Wind are a bit tricky though.
The oracle text for Lifeline reads: "Whenever a creature dies, if another creature is on the battlefield, return the first card to the battlefield under its owner's control at the beginning of the next end step." This can get a bit confusing, so lets break it down. Whenever a creature dies, Lifeline will check if another creature is still on the battlefield. If there is one, it creates a delayed trigger that basically says return the creature that just died to the battlefield at the next EOT. Even if no other creatures exist by the time the next EOT comes around, the creature will still be returned. The nuance is if a board wipe (ie. Damnation or Rout, etc) is the cause of the creature' death, no trigger will be created because all the creatures died at the same time. Also, note that Lifeline specifies "next end step," meaning the delayed triggers will take place on every player's endstep. So this let's us abuse Uro's ETB trigggers on every player's end step which is just straight up value. This also holds true for all other creatures, including your opponents', so be careful with how and when you play it - especially against ETB decks (coughYarokAndBragocoughcough) or aristocrats decks.
For Words of Wind, we cast Uro, and replace the draw ability with bouncing a permanent for each player. We choose to bounce Uro forcing everyone to bounce a permanent as well. This means we can cast Uro from hand again later and repeat this process, which can lead to a tempo loss for our opponents as well. Keep in mind that this is replacing the draw so you want some other way of drawing cards off Uro entering the battlefield (Guardian Project, The Great Henge, etc). Additionally, with infinite mana, we can bounce the boards of our opponents, including lands, using this ability thus forcing our opponents to concede due to our overwhelming advantage in having a board and lands and them being reset to turn 1.
In terms of tutors, Crop Rotation and Expedition Map fetch our most useful lands. Of particular usefulness and note are Wasteland to deal with those pesky Cabal Coffers/Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth combos or Gaea's Cradle, Glacial Chasm to stop people from attacking you, and Field of the Dead as just another utility land to make blockers or sac fodder for Altar of Dementia. Spellseeker and a transmuted Muddle the Mixture will generally get either Life from the Loam, Cyclonic Rift, or Finale of Devastation, which can pull whatever creature you need to the field at that time. The finale can also serve as a wincon in a pinch if you have a lot of mana and a decent board of creatures. An additional target for spellseeker is Crop Rotation to get chasm or one of the other utility lands at instant speed. but generally it will fetch chasm to stop combat damage.
The last bit to discuss is our other odd bits and ends that fill in a deck. So our draw, ramp, and removal package are all pretty standard stuff for simic edh. I do want to mention that Thrasios, Triton Hero, in addition to being really good ramp and card draw, makes for a relly good mana sink, and is another way to draw your deck with infinite mana to dig for one of our win cons. For removal, I like using Imprisoned in the Moon and Song of the Dryads or Oko, Thief of Crowns' elk ability on other people's commanders so they lose access to that commander's abilities. We run a small lifegain synergy package to better capitalize on the lifegain that Uro gives us, and which also feeds into Aetherflux Reservoir, one of our wincons. We also run a small counterspell package to keep people from playing things that mess us up too badly. Voidslime and Disallow are of particular note since they can also counter grave hate abilities like Bojuka Bog or counter Uro's sacrifice trigger. Muddle the Mixture can also tutor any key 2 drop in our library (Life from the Loam, Thassa's Oracle, Perpetual Timepiece, etc). Our boardwipe package is rather small consisting of just Cyclonic Rift and Curse of the Swine, but I've found that having more boardwipes isn't usually necessary. We have some other value cards that synergize well with either the deck as a whole or Uro and so they're included (ie. Panharmonicon, Alhammarret's Archive, etc). Finally, Soul-Guide Lantern is included to nuke other graveyard decks like muldrotha or meren.
Otherwise, that's pretty much it for Uro self-mill deck, hope y'all liked it and enjoyed, and leave any thoughts or suggestions below.
Happy Milling! ^_^
