Turn One Mill Kill | Brewer's Kitchen
Well, hello there! Brewer’s Kitchen here and today we’re gonna trick our opponent into sealing their own fate.
The Gameplan
Today’s deck is a bit of a meme. We’re pretty much trying to mill our opponents out with Archive Trap. For five mana, it mills our opponent for 13, but if they searched their library this turn, we can cast it for zero mana. Now in theory, if we have all four copies in our opening hand and our opponent cracks a fetch land, we can mill an entire 60 card library on turn one.
In reality, we have to get a bit more creative with it. Not only is it extremely unlikely to have all our Archive Traps in our hand, our opponent might also not play fetches, or even play around the Traps.
That’s why we play a bunch of ways to get them to search their library. Field of Ruin and Scheming Symmetry force our opponent to search their library.
Sure, they’ll get to tutor any card to the top of their library with the Symmertry, but between Ruin Crab, Mesmeric Orb and the Archive Traps, that’s not a safe place for them to keep their cards anyway.
The less reliable but funnier ways to get them to search their library are Assassin's Trophy, Boseiju, Who Endures, Ghost Quarter and Wishclaw Talisman. Since they are “may” effects, they could just decline the trigger to avoid searching their decks, but most players can’t resist the temptation. Wishclaw Talisman is specifically risky since it allows them to tutor right into their hand, but on the other hand, allows us to tutor for our Trap to punish them for it.
All in all, the deck is a bit of a gimmick. There are some neat tricks like using Mission Briefing to flash back a Trap for zero mana, or a one-off Reanimate to steal some heavy hitters out of their graveyard as early as turn one if they fetched into an Archive Trap.
But in the end, I played countless of matches in the hopes of a lucky turn one win, only to get beaten up mercilessly in most of them.
Wrap up
Turns out, as expected, the deck does almost nothing if the opponent dodges the Archive Traps. While it’s very funny if they get too greedy and pay the ultimate price, it’s certainly not worth the wild cards if you don’t have the collection to play the deck. Too bad I never got the turn one kill in a ranked match, but considering it’s a 0.00718% chance to start with all four Traps in hand, only to hope for the opponent to play fetch lands seemed a little optimistic to begin with.
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.
