Modern Mayhem: Dimir Mill (Modern, Magic Online)
Welcome back to Modern Mayhem fellow spell slingers! Today we're going to take a peek at a community favorite...Mill!! I've been seeing this deck pop up in tons of leagues so I wanted to see what it was all about.
Gameplan
We make the opponent put enough cards into the yard and then use cards like Surgical Extraction to lock the opponent out of the game until they can't draw a card. The best way to look at a Mill style of deck is to think of us as a Dimir burn deck and our opponent is starting at 60 life as every card in their deck is 1 life.
So far, the deck is insanely powerful when you have the Archive Trap hands or a Hedron Crab on turn 1.
The only issue is when you don't have the Traps, your Visions of Beyond are just there to cycle, and it doesn't feel great. We really need the Crabs on turn 1 as it feels like the deck heavily relies on Surgical Extraction or Extirpate to rip problematic threats from our opponents before they hit the board. This is where a lot of assessing the board and game plan comes in. This part of the game can be difficult in some matchups. For example, I got paired against Dredge. Do I extract a Conflagrate or Prized Amalgam ? There's no right answer every time as you'll have to analyze your hand and board state.
The combination of Fetch Lands and Oboro, Palace in the Clouds means crab will hit our opponent's deck quite hard to assist us in finding the right extraction targets. With that being said... this means our deck does fairly well against combo and control since they only have a small amount of threats or key pieces. But when you get paired against aggro, you get bodied pretty hard. It's hard for us to tutor for Ensnaring Bridge outside of Shelldock Isle. I added an Academy Ruins if we mill ourselves or lose any of our Mesmeric Orb or Ensnaring Bridge to artifact hate.
Things of Note
Graveyard hate can be really problematic as this locks your Visions of Beyond into one mana cyclers and makes all of our extraction effects duds in our hand. It also feels bad as we really do rely on the value of cards like Mission Briefing.
It is also worth noting that Leyline of Sanctity doesn't save the opponents from our Extraction effects as we're targeting their graveyard
Field of Ruin was amazing as this card forces our opponents to search so they can't play around Archive Trap Forever!
Conclusion
The hyper aggressive decks will be hard to beat as they can start bringing in Relic of Progenitus to hate out our Crypt Incursion, but I still want more Crypt Incursion in the 75 cards. I also feel like this list could be improved by adding either one more extraction effect as we want to have them every time against combo decks! Once we figure out how to efficiently and consistently deal with beating the early game decks, I think this deck has a ton of power. It already has a great matchup against all the Arclight Phoenix and other decks relying on a few key pieces to win a game. Our record was rough today as we went 2-3, but it was still a lot of fun to play. I definitely could've played the matches a lot tighter, and I definitely would like to play this again after I take it to the drawing board.
See you at the next one!
-TheAsianAvenger
