So I decided to build a black/blue milling deck.
While I was down in London for a wedding, I purchased four Theros boosters from Forbidden Planet. One of the packs contained Ashiok, Nightmare Weaver, a card that from the offset looks pretty cool: a Planeswalker that can exile a target opponent’s deck, allow you to take control of said exiled creatures and has Phyrexian-level creepy artwork to boot? It would be sacrilege for me not to build a deck around this genderless, spider-clawed wonder.
When I got back, I made a preliminary deck designed around that maximised opponent deck exile alongside a couple of playful surprises, such as Switcheroo and Curse of the Swine (A.K.A. the ‘Everything is pigs’ card). After a couple of duels with my pal Graeme and with Dan’s help, I narrowed it down to a black/blue deck that focused on milling libraries and creatures buffed up by the amount of cards in peoples’ graveyard. After a little shopping and swapping with people at Geek Retreat, the final product looked like this:
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Balustrade Spy x2Consuming Abberation x1Haunter of Nightveil x1Jace’s Mindseeker x1
Ætherize x1 Aqueous Form x2 Archive Trap x1 Duress x1 |
Grisly Spectacle x2Mind Grind x1Paranoid Delusions x1Psychic Strike x2
Tome Scour x2 Traumatize x 1 Mesmeric Orb x 1 Liliana of the Dark Realms x 1 Island x10 Swamp x9 |
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Not a bad wee deck, right? I thought so, too: swiftly cast small, low-cost creatures, use milling spells and larger creature cards to fatten them up and then co-ordinate an assault combined with the mana-farming and milling abilities of Ashiok, Liliana and Jace, all the while bringing back enemy creatures from the dead to serve against their original masters and returning my library to its original size. What’s not to like? It was only after a few games with this new configuration that I’d realised I’d made a terrible, terrible mistake.
Cards such as Mirko Vosk, Mind Drinker, Szadek, Lord of Secrets and Paranoid Delusions require combat damage to be dealt to a player. As such, the inclusion of Aqueous Form, which makes a creature unblockable, was meant to make this goal easier, plus you get the added bonus of being able to scry a card with every assault.
The addition of Mesmeric Orb on the battlefield, however, threw a spanner in the works. It works by having every player on the battlefield discard a card from their library for every card they untap. For example, if they untapped two creatures and seven lands, they would discard nine cards. What I’d neglected to take into account was that the same effect applied to every player, myself included. As a result, what I noticed happening frequently was this:
I’d enchant creature with Aqueous Form, that creature attacked and did combat damage to the player.
I’d scry, either nodding with a look of approval on my face and placing it back on the top of my library or frowning and fervently shoving it into the bottom of the pile.
Opponent takes turn.
At the beginning of my upkeep, I’d untap all my tapped cards…
And because of Mesmeric Orb, immediately discard the card I’d just looked at and wanted to draw into my graveyard.
Because of the low mana costs of the two cards, I found this happening time and time again. It was an utterly useless combo and, deciding that milling was more important than scrying (it is, after all, a milling deck), I took the offending enchantments out and replaced them with two Jace’s Phantasm instead, a card more suited to the basic mechanic of the deck.
I’ve not yet had a chance to properly try out the deck with these changes, though. Who fancies getting milled?