Kich867
05-25-2011, 03:07 AM
I've been quite fascinated with the card Hedron Crab ever since it was printed. I'm an enormous fan of mill, I think it's an incredibly interesting take on how to win and is usually...more often than not how I prefer to do so.
The thing that's nice about mill is it's generally combo oriented, you have to worry about what your opponent is doing to an extent but, certainly not as much as if you were trying to outright kill the opponent.
So I present 2 different styles of the same win condition. One I refer to as Land-Mill, which is a combo oriented insta-mill with Hedron Crab; the other, I refer to as Crab-Mill, which slow-rolls into the mill win as an alternate approach.
I'll start with Land-Mill:
This deck has gone through many, many incarnations and the prototype is as follows: It's a bit budgeted.
The Combo: Have a Hedron Crab on the board. Have a Manabond either in hand or on board. Cast Scouting Trek to rig all basic lands on deck, cast Treasure Hunt to draw all land in deck, play all land in one turn, insta-mill opponent.
//Creatures: 4
4x Hedron Crab
//Draw: 11
4x Brainstorm
4x Impulse
3x Treasure Hunt
//Counter: 14
4x Counterspell
4x Mental Misstep
3x Spell Snare
3x Disrupting Shoal
//Combo: 6
3x Manabond
3x Scouting Trek
//Land: 25
2x Breeding Pool
4x Misty Rainforest
4x Forest
15x Island
The deck is obviously not terribly competitive, but with some sculpting I think it'll be fun. The most glaring problem is that the deck requires 2 permanents and 2 spells in order to go off. But that's essentially what the MUC shell is for, to just hold them at bay and stop threats while you dig hard for your pieces.
But in the same vein, Elf Combo requires a similar number of things to go off and has no protection whatsoever, it's faster, certainly, but it has no means to find the answers it doesn't have if something goes wrong..
The strategy is not to try and rush this, rather, accumulate the pieces, play them safely, keep them safe, and win. I wish there were a few more impulse-style cards that I could replace Brainstorm with but, Brainstorm is certainly good. In an optimized list, Shoal being replaced by Force of Will and I think I could probably drop Brainstorm for Intuition to just instantly fetch my combo pieces.
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On to Crab-Mill. This deck argues against the idea that Mill is only good when it wins you the game. That's inherently true of any win condition. Most win conditions relying on creatures relies on your creatures being able to hit them uncontested. (*EDIT* Before this gets brought up, my intention here was to point out that, for instance, dealing damage to your opponent is only truly useful when the damage dealt to them totals at least 20; stacking counters on a Dark Steel Reactor is only useful when the 20th one lands, etc.)
While Mill may not affect the current game-state, it potentially alters the future game-state by altering your opponent's deck count. I've witnessed a single Sword of Body and Mind connection cause someone to scoop with a healthy library simply by looking at the ten cards (it was like, 10 straight bombs mind you but still, losing that 2-of or 1-of can be painful).
There lies this dichotomy within many "bad mill" decks which is that they can either mill or they can control, but they can't do both. And to me this feels fundamentally wrong, it just needs to be approached in a legitimate way. Running 4x Mind Funeral, 4x This, 4x That, huge mill bombs for cheap and essentially trying to play Mill like Burn sounds objectively stupid.
Hedron Crab is a mill-source that requires no handling. He doesn't have to ever attack
or do anything for that matter but sit there, and at such a low cost he's easy to play and defend the same turn.
So here's the list as it stands:
//Creatures: 4
4x Hedron Crab
//Draw: 8
4x Brainstorm
4x Accumulated Knowledge
//Counter: 17
3x Cryptic Command
4x Counterspell
2x Daze
2x Deprive
2x Disrupting Shoal
4x Thwart
//Bounce: 3
3x Aether Tradewinds
//Mill: 3
3x Archive Trap
//Tempo: 2
2x Sunder
//Land: 23
4x Flooded Strand
4x Misty Rainforest
15x Island
Later this week this deck will be arriving in my mailbox, as I'm missing a lot of the cards in it at the moment. It's certainly a budget list, FOW would be very nice in place of Shoal but other than that, I'm actually pretty happy with it.
Cryptic Command serves as Counter 15-17, Draw 9-11, and Bounce 4-6.
The main focus of this deck is that it recycles land drops. Daze, Deprive, Thwart (this is the card that sparked this deck idea), Sunder, and Aether Tradewinds all recycle my own land.
The biggest "thing" in the deck is whether Sunder is necessary. In my head, I view sunder as somewhat of a reset, I really like it. The idea behind it is that given I know it's coming, I'll recover from it better. Sunder is what makes me want to lean more towards Daze rather than Deprive, as I feel after a Sunder daze has more power.
On the flip side, Sunder hurts Cryptic Command and to a lesser extent Thwart (unless I Thwart a response to Sunder, which would actually just feel fantastic). Given how versatile and good Cryptic Command is, I feel like it would be bad to really hinder this in any way and I may instead look for options to slow the game down or deal with threats.
Ratchet Bomb or Energy Field both come to mind. Alternatively I'm all for more sources of indirect mill that adds up over time: Jace's Erasure. I think at least one interesting interaction is that, this enchantment would trigger 3 times off a Brainstorm. Jace Beleren himself may not be a terrible decision either--I'd prefer Big Jace but ~180$ for a 2-of or 360$ for a 4-of is way out of my price range. The only issue is that I have no real way to protect him other than bouncing/countering every creature with an attack on it, all the while having to fuel THEIR hand (which, granted, sort of mills them).
His ultimate tends to rarely ever go off though, even with protection.
The thing that's nice about mill is it's generally combo oriented, you have to worry about what your opponent is doing to an extent but, certainly not as much as if you were trying to outright kill the opponent.
So I present 2 different styles of the same win condition. One I refer to as Land-Mill, which is a combo oriented insta-mill with Hedron Crab; the other, I refer to as Crab-Mill, which slow-rolls into the mill win as an alternate approach.
I'll start with Land-Mill:
This deck has gone through many, many incarnations and the prototype is as follows: It's a bit budgeted.
The Combo: Have a Hedron Crab on the board. Have a Manabond either in hand or on board. Cast Scouting Trek to rig all basic lands on deck, cast Treasure Hunt to draw all land in deck, play all land in one turn, insta-mill opponent.
//Creatures: 4
4x Hedron Crab
//Draw: 11
4x Brainstorm
4x Impulse
3x Treasure Hunt
//Counter: 14
4x Counterspell
4x Mental Misstep
3x Spell Snare
3x Disrupting Shoal
//Combo: 6
3x Manabond
3x Scouting Trek
//Land: 25
2x Breeding Pool
4x Misty Rainforest
4x Forest
15x Island
The deck is obviously not terribly competitive, but with some sculpting I think it'll be fun. The most glaring problem is that the deck requires 2 permanents and 2 spells in order to go off. But that's essentially what the MUC shell is for, to just hold them at bay and stop threats while you dig hard for your pieces.
But in the same vein, Elf Combo requires a similar number of things to go off and has no protection whatsoever, it's faster, certainly, but it has no means to find the answers it doesn't have if something goes wrong..
The strategy is not to try and rush this, rather, accumulate the pieces, play them safely, keep them safe, and win. I wish there were a few more impulse-style cards that I could replace Brainstorm with but, Brainstorm is certainly good. In an optimized list, Shoal being replaced by Force of Will and I think I could probably drop Brainstorm for Intuition to just instantly fetch my combo pieces.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
On to Crab-Mill. This deck argues against the idea that Mill is only good when it wins you the game. That's inherently true of any win condition. Most win conditions relying on creatures relies on your creatures being able to hit them uncontested. (*EDIT* Before this gets brought up, my intention here was to point out that, for instance, dealing damage to your opponent is only truly useful when the damage dealt to them totals at least 20; stacking counters on a Dark Steel Reactor is only useful when the 20th one lands, etc.)
While Mill may not affect the current game-state, it potentially alters the future game-state by altering your opponent's deck count. I've witnessed a single Sword of Body and Mind connection cause someone to scoop with a healthy library simply by looking at the ten cards (it was like, 10 straight bombs mind you but still, losing that 2-of or 1-of can be painful).
There lies this dichotomy within many "bad mill" decks which is that they can either mill or they can control, but they can't do both. And to me this feels fundamentally wrong, it just needs to be approached in a legitimate way. Running 4x Mind Funeral, 4x This, 4x That, huge mill bombs for cheap and essentially trying to play Mill like Burn sounds objectively stupid.
Hedron Crab is a mill-source that requires no handling. He doesn't have to ever attack
or do anything for that matter but sit there, and at such a low cost he's easy to play and defend the same turn.
So here's the list as it stands:
//Creatures: 4
4x Hedron Crab
//Draw: 8
4x Brainstorm
4x Accumulated Knowledge
//Counter: 17
3x Cryptic Command
4x Counterspell
2x Daze
2x Deprive
2x Disrupting Shoal
4x Thwart
//Bounce: 3
3x Aether Tradewinds
//Mill: 3
3x Archive Trap
//Tempo: 2
2x Sunder
//Land: 23
4x Flooded Strand
4x Misty Rainforest
15x Island
Later this week this deck will be arriving in my mailbox, as I'm missing a lot of the cards in it at the moment. It's certainly a budget list, FOW would be very nice in place of Shoal but other than that, I'm actually pretty happy with it.
Cryptic Command serves as Counter 15-17, Draw 9-11, and Bounce 4-6.
The main focus of this deck is that it recycles land drops. Daze, Deprive, Thwart (this is the card that sparked this deck idea), Sunder, and Aether Tradewinds all recycle my own land.
The biggest "thing" in the deck is whether Sunder is necessary. In my head, I view sunder as somewhat of a reset, I really like it. The idea behind it is that given I know it's coming, I'll recover from it better. Sunder is what makes me want to lean more towards Daze rather than Deprive, as I feel after a Sunder daze has more power.
On the flip side, Sunder hurts Cryptic Command and to a lesser extent Thwart (unless I Thwart a response to Sunder, which would actually just feel fantastic). Given how versatile and good Cryptic Command is, I feel like it would be bad to really hinder this in any way and I may instead look for options to slow the game down or deal with threats.
Ratchet Bomb or Energy Field both come to mind. Alternatively I'm all for more sources of indirect mill that adds up over time: Jace's Erasure. I think at least one interesting interaction is that, this enchantment would trigger 3 times off a Brainstorm. Jace Beleren himself may not be a terrible decision either--I'd prefer Big Jace but ~180$ for a 2-of or 360$ for a 4-of is way out of my price range. The only issue is that I have no real way to protect him other than bouncing/countering every creature with an attack on it, all the while having to fuel THEIR hand (which, granted, sort of mills them).
His ultimate tends to rarely ever go off though, even with protection.