Budget Magic: 12-Rare Simic Spellslinger Siege Mill (Standard)
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Budget Magic! I've wanted to build a deck around Glacierwood Siege ever since it was first previewed. And today, the day has finally come! The idea is simple: play Glacierwood Siege, sling a bunch of cheap cantripping spells, and mill our opponent out of the game in just a couple of turns! The best part is that the deck is super cheap to put together, costing just 12 rares on Magic Arena (with eight being dual lands) and $90 in paper! How good is Glacierwood Siege on a budget in Standard? Let's get to the video and find out!
Budget Magic: Simic Spellslinger Siege Mill
The Deck
Our deck today is all-in on Glacierwood Siege. In fact, the enchantment is the only card in our deck that can win us the game! The three-mana enchantment gives us two options, although we're always choosing the Temur mode so we can mill our opponent for four whenever we cast an instant or sorcery.
If you think about a Magic deck, you start with 60 cards, draw a seven-card opening hand, and then draw at least one additional card each turn. In practice, once we play a Glacierwood Siege, we'll need to cast, at most, 11 or 12 instants or sorceries to win the game. We can win much quicker if we ever get two Glacierwood Sieges going, with only a handful of spells.
As such, finding Glacierwood Siege is essential to our deck doing anything, so we mulligan fairly aggressively to find it. Keep this in mind if you decide to try the deck. We really, really need a Glacierwood Siege on the battlefield, or else we just spin our wheels.
Thankfully, if we don't have a Glacierwood Siege in our opening hand, we have a ton of cantrips to dig for it. These cards do double duty in our deck. In the early game, they help us find Glacierwood Siege; then, once we have a Siege, they each come with a kicker of milling our opponent for four cards, which quickly lets us empty our opponent's library. Oh yeah, it's also worth mentioning that our deck's budget is pretty hilarious. In paper, our deck costs $90 to put together, but nearly $50 of those dollars comes from our playset of Stock Up, while another $24 is due to another uncommon in Into the Flood Maw. Somehow, like 80% of our deck's cost comes from these two uncommons, which I'm pretty sure is a first for a Bugdet Magic deck.
We've also got a couple of green cantrips with upside. The floor of both Pawpatch Formation and Heritage Reclamation is two mana to draw a card (while also making a Food token or exiling a card from a graveyard), but both spells also work as removal. Heritage Reclamation can blow up Cori-Steel Cutter, Caretaker's Talent, and other powerful artifacts and enchantments, while Pawpatch Formation hits enchantments and fliers. One of the biggest challenges for our deck is that we don't really get hard removal like Doom Blade since we're Simic, but these cards help fill this gap.
The rest of our removal is bounce-based. Thankfully, we don't really need to keep our opponent from playing creatures forever. We just need to keep them from playing creatures long enough to mill them out with Glacierwood Siege, so cards like Into the Flood Maw and Into the Roil are great in our deck, slowing down our opponent's aggression while also milling some cards once we have a Glacierwood Siege. Meanwhile, I'm not sure how good Aetherize is in Standard is overall, but it is pretty solid in our deck since so many of our cards are instants, so we can leave up mana to bounce our opponent's board with Aetherize if we need to, or chain together some cantrips if not. Plus, no one—and I mean, literally no one—plays around Aetherize in Standard, which can lead to some hilarious blowouts!
Wrap-Up
Record-wise, we went 5-7 with the deck, good for a 42% match-win rate, which is fine if unexciting for a budget deck. The biggest issue we had is that aggro decks, like the Cori-Steel Cutter Prowess deck and Mono-Red, are really tough matchups. The decks are so fast that it's hard to get Glacierwood Siege going before we die, and our bounce-based removal isn't great since our opponent can deploy their threats cheaply (and they usually have haste). We lost three times to Prowess in our 12 matches.
On the other hand, the deck did really well in our non-aggro matches. Against slower decks, the plan of sticking a Glacierwood Siege and milling our opponent out over two or three turns works really well! Glacierwood Siege felt really powerful and almost unbeatable for some decks!
Perhaps the way forward is for the deck to become Bant to be able to play more aggro hate like Temporary Lockdown and hard removal, although sadly, this will increase the budget by a lot since we'll need to play way more dual lands. Jace, the Perfected Mind could also be a good backup for Glacierwood Siege, making us less reliant on finding and sticking the enchantment. We're also getting some new mill support in Final Fantasy, like the blue adventure land, which might make the deck worth revisiting in the future.
Another possible upgrade that might not add as much to the budget is mashing it together with the Simic Crab deck. We're already playing a ton of instants and sorceries to support Glacierwood Siege, which would make it easy to reduce the cost on Eddymurk Crab and Tolarian Terror. And Up the Beanstalk is a pretty busted engine. The problem with this plan is that we'd be removing instants and sorceries for creatures and enchantments, which would make our primary mill plan a bit less consistent. But having a backup plan of beating down with 5/5s is appealing.
So, should you play Simic Siege Mill in Standard? I think it depends on your goal. While being soft to aggro is a problem from a competitive perspective, the deck felt powerful and really good in other matchups. Plus, there's a lot of upgrade potential. Overall, I really enjoyed playing the list, and it felt way better than I expected. Just keep in mind that things probably won't go well if you run into Prowess a bunch of times in a row.
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today. As always, leave your thoughts, ideas, opinions, and suggestions in the comments, and you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.
