I Milled My Opponent With Their Own Spells | Brewer's Kitchen
Well, hello there! Brewer’s Kitchen here. Today we’re giving our opponents a taste of their own medicine.
The Gameplan
Today’s gameplan is mimicking the opponent’s deck. To do this, we loaded up on cards that steal cards from the battlefield, their library, and even the stack.
While this is incredibly fun and (depending on the opponent’s deck) powerful, this type of gameplan has an inherent tempo disadvantage. Cards like Siphon Insight and Thief of Sanity can accumulate value and card selection from our opponent’s deck but come with an upfront cost attached to them. To upset this disadvantage, we have to make sure that we spend the early turns interacting with early threats.
Cheap removal and hand disruption take the wind out of our opponent’s sails to stop them from going off on us before we get to start stealing stuff. Once we stabilize the board, we can lean back and keep up counter spells like Archmage's Charm and Gale's Redirection which is usually the point where the opponent gives up.
The deck basically plays like a control deck with the opponent’s deck as our win-condition. If they play Burn, we burn them out; if they play control, we play control; and if they play 5-Color Goat Tribal… well, I guess we’re playing Goat Tribal. Besides beating down with Thief of Sanity and the like, we will always win with our opponent’s deck… or lose, which also happens quite a bit with a deck like this. If we don’t draw our Yahenni's Expertise, we are almost guaranteed to lose against go-wide strategies. But as always, you can’t win’em all.
To be honest, that’s pretty much all there is to say about the deck. Since every game is completely different because of the matchup, I can’t really make a detailed deck tech that goes beyond “Steal Stuff to Win the Game.”
If you’re wondering why there is a best-of-one sideboard in the list, just play long enough to run into a Karn, the Great Creator deck. While it’s usually useless to steal, I loaded the sideboard with Artifacts to tutor, just in case. Usually, we get a Torrential Gearhulk to flash back our counterspells, but once we stabilized, we can tutor up Liquimetal Coating to blow up lands or Portal to Phyrexia to completely shut the door on our opponent.
Wrap up
While there’s not much to say about the decklist itself, the games with it are amazing. You never know what deck you’re going to play with, and while the winrate was around 50%, the games, where it works are an absolute blast to play. Be warned though, most opponents will not be amused about tasting their own medicine and scoop the second the tide turns in our favor. Also, once Phyrexia: All Will Be One releases, we can switch out Entrancing Melody for Blue Sun's Twilight.
If you have questions or ideas for this or any other deck, you can reach me on Twitter @Brewers_Kitchen or at brewerskitchen@mtggoldfish.com.
