It has come to my attention that most of the decks I’ve showcased in this column include green. And why not? Green is a great facilitator! It easily increases and fixes your mana so you can cast as many rhinos as you want. That said, I’m down for something different, how about something artifacty in blue?
Decklist:
Lands:
20 Island
Creatures:
4 Solemn Simulacrum
4 Phantasmal Image
2 Phyrexian Metamorph
4 Hedron Crab
2 Wing Splicer
2 Sharding Sphinx
Other Spells:
4 Mimic Vat
3 Rite of Replication
3 Dream Fracture
3 Into the Roil
3 Fabricate
2 Voltaic Key
2 Elixir of Immortality
2 Preordain
The point of this deck is to get out a Hedron Crab, then a solemn simulacrum and then clone and copy them both to get exponentially more cards from your opponent’s library into their graveyard (commonly known as “milling”). Of course this also gives you a sizable army of 2/2 robots… which is solid… Because they’re metal.
Facilitators
Preordain is there to help you get the draw you need, Fabricate will help you find your Simulacrum. Mimic vat can give you a steady stream of simulacra if any of them hits the graveyard (or if any of the clone-type critters do). Lastly Dream Fracture is there to slow down your opponent, although it can (albeit in very rare circumstances) get you the win if you’ve managed to mill your opponent down to 0.
Plan B
Of course as mentioned before, this deck also does a good job of getting you a ton of Simulacrum copies. So in case your Hedron Crabs are being shy you can always just swing in with a robot army. Wing Splicer is there to facilitate the robolution, and sharding sphinx can be a great way to amass a larger army, swing for the win (because a 4/4 is nothing to sneeze at) or, perhaps most importantly, give you something to spend all that mana on.
Alterations
By now you likely realize that a way to make this deck faster might be to add some green, both for landfall and to get the creatures you need. Fauna shaman , for example, can give you some crabs… which is weird. Also the only cards keeping this deck out of your Standard Friday Night Magic tournament are Dream Fracture, Sharding Sphinx and Fabricate so swapping those out, say for Cancel, Steel Hellkite and Steel Sabotage will probably work.
There it is, hope you guys dig the deck, and if you get a chance to play it let me know how it goes.
4 Comments
Urrrg Milling *gets nam flash backs* I once got milled for 56 cards in one turn *shudders*
56 is nothin’. Outside of an infinite combo my roommate decided to mill the Djimm deck a couple times. The Djimm deck was a little over 400 cards.
Nice deck. I think milling is my favorite win condition in Magic. I’ve been having a lot of fun lately with a creatureless mill deck that uses Grindclock and Jace’s Erasure along with lots of proliferate and card draw. It is slow but when it works, it is really fun.
I’d like to see Mill become a viable competitive strategy at some point, right now it can’t be because of Eldrazi. I suppose once ROE rotates out, it might have a shot. But then again Innistrad is supposed to have a lot of graveyard based mechanics which will probably make mill unplayable in that environment as well. I don’t think WotC likes mill as much as I do.
It’s not that they don’t like it, it’s that environments where milling is very viable can become problematic. they still sneak in a handful of effects per set.