Infinite Mill with Smeagol | Brewer's Kitchen
Well, hello there! Brewer’s Kitchen here and today we’re going to infinitely mill our opponents with Smeagol, Helpful Guide and a bunch of dead Boromirs.
The Gameplan
This deck plays around the silly rules interaction of Ratadrabik of Urborg and the “Ring Tempts You” mechanic. More specifically, Ratadrabic and Boromir, Warden of the Tower.
If you sacrifice Boromir, it will trigger Ratadrabik to create a non-legendary 2/2 token copy of him. Since he tempts us with his sacrifice ability, we can stack the triggers in a way that we can chose the new copy to become our ring bearer, making it legendary. This creates a loop of Boromir sacrificing himself and the ring tempting us as many times as we want to. The deck plays multiple pieces to turn this combo into value/victory.
Smeagol, Helpful Guide says “Whenever the Ring tempts you, target opponent reveals cards from the top of their library until they reveal a land card. Put that card onto the battlefield tapped under your control and the rest into their graveyard.” That means not only do we steal every land from our opponent’s deck, but we also just mill them out, so they die in their next draw step.
Faramir, Field Commander will create infinite 1/1 human tokens.
Prosperous Innkeeper will give us infinite life.
The Meathook Massacre will make our opponent lose all their life.
The rest of the deck is a sacrifice shell with disposable creatures like Shambling Ghast or Jadar, Ghoulcaller of Nephalia’s zombie tokens and spells to sacrifice them for value. Village Rites and Deadly Dispute draws us cards and Diabolic Intent finds our combo pieces.
Due to the various rules interactions and synergies, the deck does some silly things if the game goes long. Ratadrabik of Urborg turns extra copies of legendary creatures into non-legendary versions of them. Especially with Smeagol, Helpful Guide, this gets out of hand incredibly fast. Multiple Smeagols will all trigger off each other meaning that two copies will result in four mill triggers at the end of turn. If want to go completely nuts, cast a second copy of Ratadrabik, leaving you with two of them. This will not only create infinite Boromir’s when you combo off, but also opens up the floodgates for an army of Smeagols that will all trigger each other at the endstep.
The deck doesn’t run much removal because it’s very focused on comboing off as fast as possible. However, some deck get destroyed by our four-off Orcish Bowmasters. Not only does it create army tokens to sacrifice, it also pings away small creatures like Dragon's Rage Channeler, Llanowar Elves or Soul Warden and even bigger critters if we ambush attackers with its flash ability.
Wrap up
This deck was way more fun then expected. At first I thought, I’d just assemble the combo and call it a day, but once you get a feel for the synergies, the deck has a lot of ridiculous lines of play up its sleeves. In the end I ended up with a 53% win rate over slightly more than a hundred games, which is nothing special, but considering that I played risky and scooped some boring games for the sake of saving time, it’s certainly a deck that can fight its way through the ladder. I’d be impressed if it would make it to Mythic in a reasonable time though.
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.
